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[flipswitchx]

Omulus is to be like Zelda in terms of environmental puzzle mechanics and endearing subplot/characters. Metroid in a sense of exploration, upgrades, and secrets, and Castlevania in terms of thoughtful action/enemy interaction.












Demo of earlier versions at: http://www.invincibletime.com/p/omulus_7.html

The Devlog: http://www.omulus.tumblr.com/  

[flipswitchx]

DEMO of the controls and several enemies and mechanics.
http://www.invincibletime.com/p/omulus_7.html
No sound yet other than some background ambience.

[VDZ]

Doubletap up for spinblade feels very counterintuitive - for an attack I'd expect to press a button, perhaps combined with a direction. Perhaps up+Z would be a better way of doing it? Otherwise perhaps Z+X? You could also do it like the Super Smash Bros. series, where a quick tilt in a direction is a different input than holding that direction.

The flight controls also feel uncomfortable, having to hold the button for as long as you're in the air. I prefer Kirby-style flight, where pressing up or the jump button makes you ascend and not pressing them makes you descend. Or if you want to make it possible to float at a fixed height, you could say that once you press up while jumping/falling you go into flight mode, and pressing any direction keeps you afloat while in flight mode.

Other than that, it looks promising. The controls and abilities seem great for a rush-through-levels-while-kicking-ass game like Kirby (though knockback would be essential to make that really work - rushing forward while attacking isn't very useful if it makes you bump into enemies and lose HP). I guess the most important part now is good level design to utilize this potential, as that generally makes or breaks games like these...though judging from Walker this won't be a problem.

Looking forward to it!

[makallenz]

Not to be confrontational but I feel like tapping Up twice to do the spincut move feels pretty ok. It's unconventional sure but it's not too hard to get used to. When tapping up twice on the ground you also get a special wave that comes out of the ground that travels forward. If you had to jump and use a direction + attack it would be a lot harder to pull that off I suspect. Also the barrier to entry for using the move is very low as it's only using one button instead of jumping then using two buttons. Furthermore because the shooting mechanic allows for firing upward it would conflict with the spincut move if it were performed with UP+Attack.

Anyway I'm just basing this on the little bit of play time I have had with it so far.

As for the flying, well yeah I think there could be a more satisfying way to pull this ability off. Also by satisfying I mean "does it feel good to use the move?" Like for example it feels really good to fly in Super Mario World by using that left to right motion to maintain height as well as being able to ascend higher by dive bombing and pulling back. Unfortunately right now Omulus' flight feels a bit static because you only can move in sharp directions. It feels a bit weird and stiff. However I suspect the choice for how you control flight is based on the fact that you can shoot while flying. Furthermore with this style of control aiming and shooting while flying allows for pretty accurate results.

Another thing that I'm having issues with is dashing. It's not that bad per say but I don't like how choppy it is. In addition when you are dashing forward the camera follows you exactly so that means the choppiness is not only in the movement but it's also effecting the camera. I'd like for dashing to give you a longer boost and to maintain that boost speed for a little longer.

Also here is a list of moves I found in this demo


Tap Up twice on the ground and you can Spincut with purple wave traveling forward
Tap Up twice in the air and you just use Spincut with no special wave
Tap Forward(or backward) twice to dash in the direction of your tap
Tap Forward(or backward) twice and you can shoot out a saw blade projectile
Hold X to charge your shots
Shoot a bullet then tap X again to take control of the bullet now you can use the directional keys to sharply change it's direction at least until it fades away. This can also be done with the charge shot bullet.
Hold jump until apex to fly or tap jump twice to fly
While jumping/flying tap down twice to shoot a lighting bolt downward

That's all I can find so far.

[flipswitchx]

Thanks for the feedback! I agree about the flying and dashing. Gotta make those less stiff/more intuitive. Having an setting for how to spincut is an option.

[flipswitchx]

Another Demo of the first incarnation of  m u l u s  is up at http://www.invincibletime.com/p/omulus_7.html

For your consideration =)

[melos]

commenting so i dont forget to try it l8r

[Udderdude]

Ditto.

Edit: Well it's obviously an alpha, but it already has some variety in there.  I think if any enemy needs changing it's those swarming bugs.  They get stuck inside you, and it's really hard to kill them after that.

[flipswitchx]

We now have a dev log at Omulus.tumblr.com !

The characters are now going to be hand drawn and animated,

and the backgrounds painted.

[makallenz]

New piece of art hooray! Also this image represents what the actual in game art will look like.

Also I jumped on as co-developer for Omulus. I'll be handling art/design and a bit of code. Truthfully @Flipswitchx and I have very similar roles.

We are working our finger tips to the bone so that we can show off an actual game screen. We promise it will be absolutely gorgeous :D

If you like this please let other people know. Follow us up on the twitters @JetpackLover and @FlipswitchX and if you can check out our tumblr http://omulus.tumblr.com/ we will be using that as our primary homebase for all Omulus updates. However I know some people don't like tumblr so we will be cross posting here. As well as checking in on the comments as they come.

Thanks everybody! More updates will follow shortly

[makallenz]

Cross posting from http://omulus.tumblr.com/ (it's hard to keep track of everything  )

Ok first off I typed up a huge post about mine and @flipswitch 's process for lineart for Omulus which you can see here http://tmblr.co/Z6B16tfx2VjO I would post the content here but holy heck it would take up many pages. It's chock full of blunders and how we learned from them. Here is a quick summary.

From this



To this (and even this is just the line art)



and finally to this (I'm going to go over the color process in part 2 of my write up)



Also as an aside I would like to say that this size of art is murder on memory. We are using MMF2 to develop Omulus. Furthermore if anyone has any tips for optimizing and compressing art so that it doesn't balloon the size and memory of the project that would be great.

If you have any tips in general about MMF2 and making an HD game please come forward :D

Ok so next on the agenda is this



Blake has begun doing some rudimentary animation tests for the main character Omulus. It's a little rough and the timing could use some work but it's definitely a step in a direction I would very much like to acquaintance myself with currently at this time presently.



And finally we have this work in progress in game screenshot of the beginnings of East Forest(Original name)



If you like what you see please follow us the tumblrs, and twitter. Thanks! We'll be updating this thread as frequently as we have new stuff to post.

[edit] here is a huge gif at 30fps

[Leon Fook]

instant like with that style, and maybe that eye monster. I love eye monster. Might try the game later.

Gotta keep an    on this.

[moi]

I would dig a game that would take place entirely in the second level from altered beast.

[ROCKYIII]

Whoa, Blake! It's looking AWESOME. Great job :D

[Steven87]

Keep it up 

[makallenz]

Made a small gif of Omulus' early movement



Art/Animation/code for Omulus character is done by @flipswitchx (blake)

temp tile art by me

Controlling Omulus feels really good and we have only just started!

[eyeliner]

The eye has personality , but for some reason I dislike the shooting. The animation is great, but the shots seem like out of place, maybe because the eye is more towards the physical in my view.

Even the lightsaber kind of thing is cool. Just the shooting...

[flipswitchx]

The eye has personality , but for some reason I dislike the shooting. The animation is great, but the shots seem like out of place, maybe because the eye is more towards the physical in my view.

Even the lightsaber kind of thing is cool. Just the shooting...

The animation is missing a couple frames inbetween and stretch, and an effect. It'll be cooler and more, um, shooty. Splashy. Poppy. Energized. More animated heh.

If you mean he is too physical of a character to be shooting energy bullets I don't know what to say. I mean like, what about Goku? What about Mega- okay well Megaman is robot but what about Ryu from street fighter, um, yu yu hakusho, and a million other anime characters?

[Leon Fook]

The eye has personality , but for some reason I dislike the shooting. The animation is great, but the shots seem like out of place, maybe because the eye is more towards the physical in my view.

Even the lightsaber kind of thing is cool. Just the shooting...

for me is the light saber thing though. Shooting lazer out of the eye is pretty normal, think Cyclops from X-men, or any version of cyclops that can shoot lazer. But that light saber spin just look painful.

[Versigtig]

The game is looking great so far! Will definitely be following this devlog.

In response to your question for preserving memory and compressing images:
I'm not sure how MMF2 loads and displays objects, but if you cut the big images down in to "tiles" (say 4 across and 4 down for that big house image) and you place them as tiles, the game wouldn't have to load that whole big image at once and could instead display it in pieces when needed.
As I said, this is pure conjecture, as I'm not sure how MMF2 handles these things.

But goodluck!