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[vivavolt]

I sincerely doubt anyone will run into the same bug, but if you are using Flashpunk on a Mac with AIR the maximum width for Spritemap objects that you attempt to flip is 8192 pixels. I think this is Adobe's fault, but who knows.

At some stage I'll be writing about how the animation system in Proof works, but it's nothing revolutionary really!

In fact, I'd like to talk about a lot of the technical aspects at some stage. We have an in-house Entity-Component system that I'm pretty proud of.

[iammonshushu]

Hey guys! We've been working hard on the game, lots of implementing level designs, bug-testing, programming new gameplay mechanics. Here's one of the things we've been working on:

Oh no! How will I cross this hole?


Perfect fit!

We have just started making the Area Two levels in earnest, so soon I should have plenty of Area One stuff to show off! At the moment it ahhh.... its a little buggy... More soon! 

[vivavolt]

When attempting to post this, I was warned that the topic had not been updated in more than 120 days  . That hurts.

Despite how it may seem, the game is not dead! We have just been incredibly bad at keeping everyone posted lately, exam time at uni caused us to break our habit.

With a game like Proof, it's tough to find the right things to share since it's very story driven, and we don't want to give anything away. However, I'll be trying to share what we're working on much more frequently from now on.

Today, I drew some trees that the player uses as a bridge in one level. Not that exciting, but it's something! I've been working hard on some of the major art pieces for the game lately, but I can't share any of those because of spoilers.

I'll also chuck some gif's in from a while back that we never posted (apparently!):

I'm spending some time tidying up rough visuals in the second area at the moment, after that we have some very complicated puzzle mechanics coming up, so hopefully I'll have lots to share about that!

I appreciate everyone's understanding about our radio silence 

[vivavolt]

Continuing the work on polishing the second area visually, this level got some loving today:

You can clearly see the concrete block tiles there need some work still, but it's coming along from the initial rough tiles we had here.

Not too much else to report, spent the day looking at places to live (which in 36 degree heat, is pretty draining  ).

[vivavolt]

Totally different part of the game to show you today, I'm at one of those points in the development cycle where every room I look at feels like it needs to be totally redone  .

It's pretty hard to balance the art and programming jobs it turns out, who would have thought?

[vivavolt]

I'm attempting to add some more depth to the levels by including an intermediate parallax layer in the background:

Apparently I can't stop moving further away from our original, minimal style.

I know you can't see too much of it, but any comments would be appreciated. I'm struggling to think of good background elements to add visual interest with (other than giant rocks) for this area.

[vivavolt]

Sorry for the silence again, I've been busy moving house (so no internet) and Ricky's out of the city at the moment. I've been working on a whole load of gameplay mechanics and elements lately, but once again, we can't really show you.



I'm going to be working on decorating this next area properly and finalising the ideas thematically. It's tough work, the scenery is very different to the rest of the game so far.

[vivavolt]

We've started working on some of the new gameplay mechanics in this new area, here's the first one which has non-temp graphics.

This is a little security "camera", which tracks targets that it detects and triggers an alarm system (which is definitely not a good thing). The camera will spot moving objects that pass underneath, so the player will have to get creative to avoid them. This ties in to a larger system of machines that can be used together.

The camera's laser is a simple raycast that terminates when it either hits a generic collision objects or something of interest. When it spots something interesting, it triggers an alarm and places an "Interest Marker" at the location it last saw an object. So if something comes along to check the marker out, the object may no longer be there but it has a good place to start a search. These markers expire after a certain amount of time, letting the player slink off and try again.

We've decided to maybe bit a little more forthcoming with some gameplay details, still not planning on giving away the story or anything but maybe a little more insight into what we're doing.

[vivavolt]

Just a little update today, putting some nicer visual touches on these hanging baskets you can use to reach higher areas. Sorry that the image is so dark, but, well, the area of the game this is from is very dark.

I just added the spinning cog today, to imply that the cable isn't entirely magic.


As an aside, if anyone is familiar with AIR, occasionally adl will crash on my machine, giving no error messages. It also seems to be impossible to reproduce, so I'm skeptical it's actually the game code. I have some suspicions it's due to a memory leak, but I can't really find any relationship to confirm that.

[oahda]

Can't believe people suddenly stopped replying to this after your come-back. Did all the original fans flee? Where are the new ones? Hey, I'm here! This is looking really nice. You guys need to add a percentage icon (if you can figure out an estimate of how far this project has come so far)! c:

[vivavolt]

@Prinsessa Haha, people are still reading the thread, just not a lot to respond to maybe? Thanks for replying though, nice to know people still care. I need to get Ricky to update the devlog percentage, I can't do it since I didn't start the thread etc.

I've got a few things to share today, first up I've been playing around with the new gameplay features, maybe to excess.

This is basically just visual, but I do enjoy how it looks to have several beams tracking the player. (Orange beams are only triggered by humans, red beams are triggered by anything).



Next up is climbing on boulders. This was already a gameplay feature, but I hadn't tackled the animation yet, I've only roughed it out for now but it definitely gets the vibe across. I've been constantly challenged by this project, I've never really been much of an animator so I've had to grow a lot (which you might be able to see from the rest of the devlog). Anyway, I was worried about this one so I'm glad I have a good start:

And to finish up, it's not the most exciting entry but it's a vital component of the game... The player can die!

Once again, not a final animation, looks a bit dodgy as a watch it now.

I'm focusing on a lot of art and polish details at the moment, since Ricky is busy we haven't had too many new levels to implement. So expect more gifs  .

[vivavolt]

Today, I decided it was finally time to rewrite the notes menu. Ricky and I had decided this was going to happen ages ago, it was just a matter of time. The new flow is much nicer, and the code is far more maintainable.

The whole thing wouldn't have been possible without the use (and improvement) of our FlashPunk utilities library. Which is available at https://github.com/volticgames/volticpunk.

So, I'll run you through what I did:

This is the first part of the menu system I worked out, it's got a container around those icons at the top, that allows them all to be repositioned as one. The icon strip is a view to a NoteCollection model, which in turn holds many Note models. When the collection is updated, the view rerenders itself to display the current state.

The large note below is simply a regular entity who's graphic is swapped out depending on the selected note.

This sort of design pattern is much more obvious to me now, having several years more web development experience under my belt compared to the start of this project.

Next up, I made the level above this. This wouldn't be my normal approach, however I had forgotten we had two distinct note menus to worry about. Luckily the modular system I used allowed me to instantiate two of the icon strip views and switch between them as needed.

I also coded up a little cursor object as you can see there. Not sure if we'll keep that style.

Finally I added the ability to drill down a level further and examine the notes once you've selected them from the icon strip. Here's a gif demonstrating the full menu flow from highest to lowest level:

A lot of people definitely underestimate how useful it is to program across multiple fields. Game development is typically far more challenging logically than web development, but the lessons I've learned about reusability, modularity and layout from web development are invaluable. Plus learning more languages is always fun.

That's all for today, as my brain is pretty fried. Time to have a beer and enjoy a sweltering Australian afternoon.

[iammonshushu]

Bit of a special post today... It's been two years since the devlog went up!         

Happy Birthday Proof!
This marks two years of having more than just a vague idea, but an actual game. As well as being the biggest project we've ever attempted, Proof is the longest (continuous) running project we've worked on (although we've taken a couple of weeks off to work on a little flash game, about to be released). Today, I'd like to show off a cinematic effect we've been working on for one of the cutscenes: the 3D scene. Here's an example (better version on GfyCat):

The scene is drawn in multiple layers, which then move in parallax, so the layering is more clear. Not that hard to do! The tricky part is drawing the scenes. This one was put together fairly quickly, but the others took far longer, being more complex and frankly, better quality.

We'd like to thank everyone for their ongoing support of Proof, our friends and family for pretending to be impressed when we talk about the game, and to everyone who has posted on the devlog or emailed us; your kind words mean a lot. Looking ahead, the next year will hold the final push to completion, and with any luck we will be Greenlighting the game in the coming months! Thanks again everyone, and watch this space!

[Pixel Noise]

New to devlogs (and TIG forums in general) - and stumbled upon this gem! This looks awesome - really looking forward to seeing what you guys do with it in the coming year. Keep it up!

[Nico May]

OOhhhh finally noticed that tig keeps a list of my subscribed topics even when I missed the emails (always thought it was stupid it didn't, but it did) and re-found this Gem, game is looking so awesome I hope you keep it up:D

[iammonshushu]

Hey everyone! Sorry we haven't been updating here. There are two reasons (the game is not dead!)

Firstly, almost everything we've been working on is either super-duper top secret or very, very early stages (maybe not even ending up in the game), so its really difficult to give you guys anything!

The second reason is that we took a couple of weeks hiatus from the game (not a total hiatus, just a significant cut to the hours) to work on another project:

It's Hard To Be A Cube:

You might see something about it in a few days if you browse /r/gamedev but the long and short of it is that we wanted to take a step back and examine how Proof was going with new eyes. It's been a long time working on the game, and we wanted to make sure we weren't compromising or deviating from the game we wanted to make. It's easy to get distracted, and we want the whole game to flow nicely, and minimise any jarring from pacing changes as the game goes on.

If you're interested in our other project, It's Hard To Be A Cube (IHTBAC), you can check it out on itch.io where its currently on sale. We set the price at $3+ pay what you want, and it's currently on 50% off for the first week, but we appreciate how you guys on TIGSource have supported and encouraged us, so just PM us (myself or Ben aka vivavolt) for a FREE DOWNLOAD KEY. If you'd like to give us any money, all proceeds will go towards not starving to death while we make Proof 

We should be back with interesting news about Proof in the next few weeks. We apologise for this brief interruption.

[vivavolt]

Back from the dead, once again. I've just finished another semester at University, so I have time off. We're getting back into the swing of things again, and I've got a few things to show you guys:

The room I'm working on right now, just for a nice ambient shot.

This might not look like much, but this is the basis of an entire framework for operating computers within the game.

Finally, here's something very different. We've got loads of different documents scattered throughout the game, so make of this what you will.

Hopefully we'll be updated frequently for a while now. I've missed you guys..! 

[iammonshushu]

Hello again! After a few hours work, we have the computer system working like a charm!

Computer system is live:


Menu Structure


Trying a slightly different casing:

We're going for a super primitive computer system, although some features might be a little anachronistic for gameplay reasons. We still need to tweak the interface, since the computer interface can't get in the way of the game itself - there is no point making a realistically frustrating experience! There is a good chance that Ben (vivavolt) will do a write up about how the computer system works at some stage.

More soon! 

[iammonshushu]

Hello again! Another image heavy post - we've been working on the computer design a little.

First upgrade: we've replaced the monotonous grey casing with an retro case inspired by some of those old PCs like Apple II.

Top Menu:


Messages:


An example message:

I really like this change, but the bright green test was a little glaring so we've changed to a slightly different shade. This might be a little too yellow, haven't decided yet! Click on any of the pictures for a larger version.

Top Menu


Messages:


An example Message:


Journal Screen:


Another message type:

The consoles are almost finished now, so we can start to involve them in the level design! The next step is fiddling with them in actual levels to see if they are jarring or janky or need any tweaks. It'll be fun! 

[vivavolt]

Big day today, I rewrote the item menu from scratch.  The original menu was one of the first things I wrote in the game, and I've learned a lot about programming and maintainability since then. I'm planning to do a full technical writeup of how the menu system(s) work in Proof over the next week, but let's just say this attempt is a lot better.

While writing this post, I've realised we never showed you guys the old menu properly anyway! So here it is:

Basically, you build an item from up to three other items. This design was fine, and I do still like it because I'm so familiar with it.

I started off with a change from the old menu, I replaced the grid style selector with a circular one. This would allow us to make an arbitrary number of items available to the player, instead of being stuck with all 8:

From here, I decided to try a two-tier rotational menu system out... And I liked it (though, this is a little buggy):

Finally, I got the system working as intended:

From here, I had to port the actual menu functionality over. This took a while, and we played around with some visual things, but all in all a good days work.

Here's a gfycat of the final system (click to open!):