next »

[electrolyte]

I started this a few months ago but seem to have run out of steam / busy with other projects but thought I'd post this here to see if there's any feedback.

What is it?
It's a flick screen adventure platform game, along the lines of another world. The idea was to have story / NPC driven puzzles to progress through classes of society aboard an unknown flying city. You begin in the very bowls of the craft, the maintenance class. Your memory is hazy and must piece together information. What is the city? Where did it come from? Whats it for? and more importantly why are you there?

It's been developed to run on tablet based devices so the flick screen, tile based, platform engine was suitable for this and the main drive is the story.

Anyway, here's some screens and there is also a demo video showing some game play. Any feedback is welcomed  









Old early engine demo footage:

[FlukeXP]

The artwork is amazing and I love the setting.  I could see Another World/Flashback right away when I watched the video.

I hope you continue working away at it!

I've been lurking for months and decided to register just so I could give you some props...well done!

[electrolyte]

Thank you, and welcome to the forum! I should put up some newer screens as I added a new lighting system and kind of like dust floating in the air.

couple more images



And here is how scenes start as a drawing

[horsman]

Looks really cool.

[Tranicos]

Not quite yet enough to see which direction your vision is heading, but will be interesting to see!

The pixels in your previous project were really lovely. Hoping at a future date you might return to it! I find sometimes it takes years for the design problems in an idea to get sorted out while processing in the back of your head.

Do love the mashup + Wild West theme, however.

--Tyler

[Kian]

I would say for you to edit or close this with an RIP icon. Make a new one with the Wild West. Confused about the double project in here.

Shame you had to lose that magnificent artwork in the OP though.

[electrolyte]

Thanks for the comments, yes I need to sort this thread out so it's not confusing people! Will start a new one ... 

I think with regards to the platform game, that's 'parked' but I will defiantly re-visit it at some point.

[Number]

Looks fun.

[electrolyte]

It's been a while, getting back on the pixel band wagon and resurrecting this 

[electrolyte]

So flagging a taxi down to reality street I've realised this has become a much more complex task. Moving from Flash to Unity and learning C# coupled with thinking about how to construct a grid based platform game is leaving me drained.

As it stands I have a character walking around (tick) and also jumping up and down (tick) but I'm overthinking each move terrified of spaghetti code. My current problem is I'm using a StateMachine to drive all the actions but at times events misfire causing the player to fall through the ground.

Umph.

[electrolyte]

So the falling through platforms bug returned, and whats worse it only happened when I unplugged the power supply from the laptop. After spending a week in faffing around coding despair a work colleague used three lines of coding magic to force the Unity State machine to work in sync with the game updates only!

Great, Tick, now everything is synced.

Issue, still messes up on the laptop when unplugged.

SOLUTION: UPDATE GRAPHICS DRIVERS = WORKS!!

So happy, to celebrate I added a new Long jump and grab onto platform action. :D

[Bernie]

Was that related to the framerate? Collision code in Unity's Update() function needs to take into account low framerates, otherwise the character may move too far into a wall before the collision check can react because of a high deltaTime. This has been a thing in my platformer attempts in Unity. There's a bunch of approaches to make the collision code failsafe, tho.

You can always try and run your game at forced low framerates and see if something messes up to find bugs related to the framerate.

Anyway! It's good you sorted it out now.

[electrolyte]

Yeah I also added a function in the lateUpdate call to set position as I realised that using the root motion overrides any transform.position in the update.

[electrolyte]

Things are moving along a little more smoothly now, I'm 'fairly' confident the ground bug is now fixed and have now updated the project to 2018. This opens up things like the CinieMachine and also the new Pixel Camera pre-release that with some fiddling is working. My aim is to put together a very short, simple level that covers:

- General locomotion (Walking, pulling up, jumping etc)
- Things to pick up
- Doors to push open
- Switches to open doors
- Switches to spin scenery
- Traps

It's starting to sound like a Rick Dangerous game (not many will remember this old Amiga game reference  )

Here's a grab from within Unity laying out pixels. I'm being quite loose as I've been moving into this style for a while.

[electrolyte]

Been really digging into the Unity 2D pipeline using the Pixel Camera and tile sets. The more I learn the more comfortable it's becoming in a familiar 2D framework. I've added a new 'Stealth' move set which allows the player to crouch down and move around. My aim is to eventually add a noise cost so things can hear you coming ... unless you're in  a stealth move set.

As a side note, GIZMO's are now my fav thing in the Unity editor and making your own to make things more readable 

[electrolyte]

I was watching a YouTube clip of Flashback the other day, and it dawned on me that vertical jumps in their game simply allows the player to pull up to the next platform vertically. My solution was to pull the player up and to a direction, meaning on reflection that you always had to be travelling horizontally (see the last posted gif).

Now that’s all fine and dandy, however from a level design perspective it might become a pain. So after some thought I’ve changed the vertical jumps to adopt a purely vertical movement. That threw out a good few days work of when I was working out the movement from before.

All good learnings :D

[catsgonehome]

This looks promising!
A little recommendation...when the dialogue is running, you could display an avatar for each character. Such dialogue would be easier to follow.

[electrolyte]

Thanks for the feedback. Those YouTube videos are quite old now and I'm considering not having any dialogue boxes. I'll have to see how that works out in practice and story telling though.

Main focus at the moment is creating small systems such as switches, doors, NPC behaviours etc. So far I've got guards patrolling and reacting to noise. I'm starting to draw parallels with boardgame moves as each player moves on a fixed grid.

Here's a simple patrolling guard.

[electrolyte]

Things are moving along ... slowly. Lots of pixels are being sorted and more movement code being added.

Another key movement is to be able to move in the Z depth. An example of this can be seen when climbing stairs.



After trying various themes and locations including a mash between medieval and future tech, I finally fell back to a distant future city based in huge sprawling towers. Each of these towers have their own purpose such as habitation, industrial, public records and some built solely for the purpose of the corps that built them. Each tower is connected to the next via a transport system.

[FlukeXP]

It's amazing you updated this.  New design looks very cool.