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zomboko
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« Reply #120 on: July 29, 2014, 07:59:45 AM »

Looks pretty, i like this Smiley
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pnch
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« Reply #121 on: July 29, 2014, 11:54:15 AM »

@zomboko: Thank you!

Update#19: Nebulas WIP IV

Did the first test with multilayered GPU stuff + new parallax methods, yet to add the mentioned features to the shader, but I love how it´s turning out! This is from the purple level over which I´m trying most stuff lately:



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Mr. Virus
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« Reply #122 on: July 29, 2014, 12:55:52 PM »

@Mr. Virus: I haven´t even started checking out Unity´s sound functions yet! It´s on the near future TO-DO list, though.
I have two opposite directions in mind, one that helps boosting the abstract UI, constantly giving audio cues that are helpful/needed/tightly binded with gameplay, and another that heavily emphasizes atmosphere. Since the first one is a bit risky (but may end up being more interesting if done right), I´d have to playtest it before deciding.

Update#18: Nebulas WIP III


I´m having LOTS of fun in shader-land!
Managed to fuse a hueshift, noise, treshold, parallax and pixelate shaders together,  adding a lot of variables in the way. This, in theory, allows me to generate endless procedural scrolling of different continuous mediums in the GPU(at least asteroid fields, nebulae clouds and star fields are possible and looking nice) with the same shader and different values. These two, in retrospect, looks quite uniform, and I´ve yet to add support for color and alpha banding + evolution.


It´s not practical to manage the variables and keep consistence with the multiplane setting I was using, so I rewrote that after making these gifs. Amazing how shorter the code became with this iteration, I´ve sure learnt a lot these months! Now the multiplanes are setup in the unity editor, have support as many layers of shader-based content as your GPU can handle, and also have easier support for any gameobject you´d like to add (hello, stranded ships and structures on the background!).

Gifs showing that last bit hopefully coming soon, can´t wait to test it all Smiley

As always, looking forward to your c&c!

Ah ha, sounds like a plan! Both ideas should be doable though Smiley. If you get desperate gimme a shout and I can try help!

Unity 4's audio stuff is not the best sadly Sad. Usable but a bit limited, we've kinda hacked our way around it for a lot of the stuff we have going on in Monstrum. 5 is leaps ahead with mixers alone! Have you looked at any middleware stuff too? Unity implementation's getting there!
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YM
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« Reply #123 on: July 30, 2014, 04:08:54 AM »


OH HELL YES.

That's looking so much cooler already.
What's that big black sphere in the background?!?

On nebulae:
One thing I see a lot of artists getting wrong about nebulas is how blotchy and boring they make them. Nebulae often have strong filaments running through them a quick google will show you how you get threads running through them (crab nebula as an excellent example).
The dark patches are either where you can see through the nebula, or if they're dark filaments, they're dust that's close to us than the nebula blocking out the light.

To use a photoshop analogy: don't think filter>render>clouds think filter>render>clouds then filter>render>difference clouds

Anyway, regardless of what direction you take things, it's looking awesome :D
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pnch
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« Reply #124 on: July 31, 2014, 08:42:59 AM »

@Mr. Virus: Haven´t even checked the limitations yet. Of course, I´ll shout once desperate, thanks!

@YM:
OH HELL YES.
That´s some positive feedback Smiley, thanks! I think it helps a lot, especially in the purple level, where there´s only a small structure in the center. Adding this level of background detail in more restricted spaces gets confusing quickly, though, so there´s still room for the previously shown minimal backgrounds.
The blue sphere is a planet, in fact, you´re not the first to ask about them. Adding rim lighting would make them more recognizable, but also more distracting...

About nebulae, thanks, I get it! But they´re always seen from far away in the pictures, I Just wanted to add a gaseous feeling to the atmosphere as if you were into one (and ended up using colors from old japanese illustrations along the way, so...).

Hotlinking the gif we´re talking about, and since it´s a big leap art-wise, would love some more feedback, be it good or bad! What do you think?

« Last Edit: August 28, 2015, 08:18:56 AM by pnch » Logged

jctwood
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« Reply #125 on: July 31, 2014, 10:43:40 AM »

The shadows in this are beautiful!
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pnch
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« Reply #126 on: August 01, 2014, 02:00:35 PM »

@JctWood: Thanks! I wrote about the tech details in an old update, in case you missed it.

Update #20: Matches have an ending! + Score room

Until now, matches were endless, with levels becoming flooded with ship parts. Now, whenever a player gets to it´s 10th frag or space-foot-goal, this happens:


The huge explosion on last kill is a slow-motion related bug, but it´s fine by me Smiley
Of course, decorating the score room + extra fanfare / transition are points in the TODO list.
You´re also taken to the scoreboard whenever you press "Esc" during a match. Once a new match starts, the scores resets. The scoreboard is a room in the playable menu, located right next to the deathmatch/football docking area, so you can start another match quickly.

Added light patterns on the ship that tell you how many frags you´ve got (once you get the gist of reading them):


They light up whenever you frag someone or respawn, and they blink as many times as points you´ve got before dissapearing. Even if you can´t easily read the exact score of every player at first, they help you quickly see  who´s winning most of the time (more white -> better and more black ->worse). While they read better than this without antialias, they´re still not readable enough, so the horrible white numbers are still with us.

As always, thanks for reading and looking forward to your c&c!

PS: I´ll be in San Francisco next week, not a lot of free time, but if there´s any indie dev meeting / something  it would be nice to know! Even if it´s the bigger ever there´s a chance I haven´t heard about it, don´t hesitate to drop me a tweet or PM!
« Last Edit: August 01, 2014, 02:05:44 PM by pnch » Logged

suny
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« Reply #127 on: August 02, 2014, 01:06:57 AM »

I really like the art style, and the parallax works really great.
Once again, it shows that simple shapes, good color scheme and the power of the brain can do miracles Smiley
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BomberTREE
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« Reply #128 on: August 02, 2014, 01:18:03 AM »

Looking good pnch!
 Smiley
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pnch
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« Reply #129 on: August 02, 2014, 12:57:36 PM »

@suny: Glad you like it! Keeping the shapes simple is proving to be a challenge in itself (still squeezing my brain about displaying readable scores in 8 pixels  Crazy).
@kitheif: Thanks!
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pnch
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« Reply #130 on: August 04, 2014, 11:38:58 AM »

Will be mainly off the grid for 10 days, thanks for all your support so far, and looking forward to keep the ball rolling once I´m back! See you then! Toast Right
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pnch
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« Reply #131 on: August 18, 2014, 07:26:14 PM »

I´m back! Jetlagged, but happy to get some gamedev done again!

Also, finally able to show a bit of what gave me the itch to do GPU based parallaxing shader stuff (besides it being cool by itself Smiley):

Update #21: Racing!


A while ago, I did these buoys, willing to prototype some racing gameplay, but at the time, no texture was big enough to support the kind of high-speed parallaxing I had in mind without ending or tiling (ugly!).
The action shown in the gif is rather small, but at HIGH speed, everything just zips away, with no texture being able to hold (or, at any rate, I didn´t want that to become a limitation).
That´s where I started wondering about getting "infinite size" images via procedural methods, and the need for these shaders was born. Now that the shaders are mostly ready, I´ve put together a quick chunk of logic that allows me to select a sequence of buoys and keep track of whether you´ve hit the following buoy or/and completed a lap, and how many laps you´ve done.

I´m also experimenting with having the buoys flash in the color of the player who touches them, and then slowly fading back, giving a quick hint of who was the last one to get to buoy (and how long ago). There´s still lots of work to be done to have functional "user-ready" racing, but it´s ready enough to playtest it  with friends and an eye on the console Wink.

Tried to get a better gif showing how multiplayer racing feels like... Failed horribly at controlling more than one ship at once.

What do you think?
« Last Edit: August 18, 2014, 07:33:11 PM by pnch » Logged

SnowHydra
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« Reply #132 on: August 18, 2014, 09:32:18 PM »

Wow, great job!
I don't know anything about the lowish level GPU stuff you're doing in regards to parallax, but I will say that it looks totally ace.
The buoys that flash looks really good to me - you can even have it have a slight glow effect if you want to make it even more apparent, though that might clash with the utterly excellent visual style you have going on.
Be sure to record some good multiplayer racing gameplay! Really looking forward to seeing that in action. It looks like it'll be very frantic and skill-based.
How do you think you'll do the camera? Split-screen? Networked multi?
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pnch
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« Reply #133 on: August 19, 2014, 06:27:58 AM »

Thanks SnowHydra!
The camera is split-screen, and networking isn´t planned (guessing the slightest hint of lag would break the experience, since it´s focused on quick reactions and precise controls).
Will come back with actual multiplayer racing footage once I get it Wink
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pnch
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« Reply #134 on: August 22, 2014, 01:36:33 PM »

Update #22: Sound, already!

You may have noticed that even after a couple of months, great reception, 101 tweets, 22 updates, 13k devlog reads, deathmatch, racing, even football modes sort of working, the game was still COMPLETELY silent. I´ve been cheating myself skipping sound on the to-do list long enough. Now it´s the only thing that would be clearly missing from the game if I were to show it somewhere right now (the last public playtesting session featured a live band!), so I finally forced myself to stop adding gameplay features to focus on this.

So, sound in unity 101: Started searching for a way to generate sound procedurally, before knowing how to play a basic sound file... Found this, but couldn´t get it to mix with the remaining sounds yet (would be nice for thrusters and grinding).

Back to basic sounds, then:
Lasers, thrusters (yet to be optimized), explosions , ship impacts, wall grinding and racing buoys are already bleeping and blooping.
Most sounds have around 5 very slight variations so they feel more organic, and the game fires them at random each time.
Buoys and lasers shift in pitch according to the player ID.
Impacts and grinding sound volumes are mapped to actual impact forces / friction.
Impacts also get a ranged random pitch each time.
(Today I proceeded to hit and grind every wall with deep satisfaction  Kiss)

It´s crazy how much I miss the sounds when looking at the gifs right now, looking forward to setting up a youtube or something soon so I can share that last bit of progress with you, since there´s lots to be done yet on the sound department.

Here´s some visual relief after all that text, new color scheme for the track:

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Thuby
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« Reply #135 on: August 22, 2014, 02:17:40 PM »

Looking really awesome! Waaagh!
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pnch
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« Reply #136 on: August 25, 2014, 11:52:30 AM »

@Oliver A. Thunaes: Thank you!

Also, wanted to use the excuse of having reached 200, to thank every Twitter follower so far!
Due to the exponential nature of these things, each early follower that spreads the word is a HUGE help, I´m humbled by the support you´ve been showing! (I created my account just some updates ago)

Update#23: 16,30s

Race mode now features a classic "ready, set, go" sequence, lap counters and timers.
Getting there involved adding a way to inhibit player input so they stay still until the "GO" message is displayed, adding an inmediate mode for the letter display (it used scramble random letters for a bit before displaying any desired message).

After many iterations I decided to keep a three line display which shows the "ready, set, go" messages, the lap you´re currently doing (replaces the "go" message once you do the first lap), your current lap time (with a 2 seconds freeze after each lap so you can see what time you did), and who did and how long the fastest lap yet took (displayed on the line that´s grayed out in the gif, since no one completed a lap yet, then it tints itself with the color of the player who did the fastest lap, and displays the time).

I also kept tweaking the color scheme of this level, and this level' s colors follow a different logic, dunno if anyone can see that, but I like how that turned out  Grin


For example, in the following example you can read that the red player did the fastest lap, at 20,32s, while green just completed it's second lap at 20,34s (close but no dice), and pink hasn' t moved since the beginning, a minute and a half ago.
Note that, despite the elements seeming to be "into the environment", I'm actually showing different elements to each player.


Since I´ve already made the race track accessible from the playable menu, I revised it a bit:
Changed the typography used by the light displays. Letters are now smaller, allowing for tighter corridors. Is it readable enough?


Added a "marquesine" mode for basic letter displays, this is now also used to convey the controls to the players, and a couple more marquesines are thrown around for extra eye-candy, planning to use one of them for a long list of tips starting at random (e.g. "use decoys to evade missiles").


I´ve been juggling a lot of design decisions, and not sure I´ve made the right choices yet, but making any kind of choice is needed to keep things rolling Wink. For example, what if instead of going down the classic race logic route I went with Micro-Machines racing? Lots of these kind of questions popped these days, which is also nice, since it means the game is growing, but also a bit terrifying, since I can take it in any direction I want to. In short, I´d love to hear any c&c you have in mind after seeing all this.

Incidentally, my fastest lap yet on this track is 16,30s. Hopefully it´s not long until you can beat me Smiley.
Back to gamedev!
« Last Edit: August 26, 2014, 05:55:42 AM by pnch » Logged

pnch
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« Reply #137 on: August 29, 2014, 06:50:17 AM »

Update#24: Fireworks, god rays, scoreboard redesign

After getting a #6 rank on indieDB for a few hours following a development sum-up that got front-paged, and reaching the 250 facebook followers milestone, I felt an urge to celebrate! -Starts programming fireworks.
Then I remembered that the football mode scoring could more emphasis:


Kept thinking on alternatives for the score room, now replaced by this display/dock, where you spawn after finishing a match, and last match´s score is displayed. Showing it just for devlog´s sake, but I hope it gets replaced with something more handsome soon.
Ideally it would accomodate interesting info about last match depending on the game mode (e.g, lap times, goals sequence, number of frags), and allow for a quick rematch, removing the need to navigate to the docks again just for that.


Plus, added simple godrays. Noticed the two of them crossing on the last gif? They are purely decorative, react to parallax, appear rarely and at random angles / positions. Seeing two of them at the same time as shown is rare enough.

PS: Random gif of a fireworks launcher strapped to a decoy  Hand Metal Right!


And if you click these words you can get a glimpse of full-screen deathmatch gameplay, featuring a successfull use of an escape pod.
« Last Edit: August 29, 2014, 06:58:21 AM by pnch » Logged

pnch
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« Reply #138 on: September 01, 2014, 01:09:49 PM »

Update#25: Cloudier clouds.




The GPU parallax shader now supports evolution! (Pay attention to the internal movement in the clouds, that´s it!)
Now constantly getting hypnotized with all that fluffy stuff, but also added color banding, will come back with gifs showing that last bit too.

Included tiles for a lot more ASCII characters (lowercase letters and a few symbols), both to be "already supported" in case I manage to get some modding in someday, and because symbols allow for more concise messages ("lap 1/5" is both easier to read and shorter than "lap 1 of 5").

Also, after seeing that they gifs pretty well, I´m also on Pinterest since right now!
Check out the ever expanding NEGSPACE GIF LIBRARY (Yet to add lots of them, they will eventually get there Wink, plus, there´s a desktop background thrown in.)

It´s been quiet around here lately! What do you think?
As always, looking forward to your comments and crits!
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YM
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« Reply #139 on: September 02, 2014, 04:45:06 PM »

Ooooohhhhh that cloudy smushing is nice.

With those fireworks (I have no idea how temporary that is) And all the other colours creeping in you're losing the sense of colour palette unification that you started with. I saw an intersting article ages ago that resurfaced this week, maybe it could be helpful to you?
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