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pnch
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« Reply #160 on: November 28, 2014, 07:59:36 AM »

#34: A bit more power.

During all these game shows, I noticed people were mostly able to figure the game by their own despite the lack of any kind of hints (+ figuring stuff out is way more enjoyable than pesky hints). The fuel mechanic, however, is yet too cryptic for my liking. I ended up explaining to every player, after they run out of fuel for the first time (so as not to overwhelm them with stuff right after they pick up the controller), that they have to grind the chargers for fuel.

I´m now looking for ways to make it more intuitive. As much as I don´t want to get started on effects and whatever´s not strictly involved in gameplay yet, I decided to add a bit of extra visual feedback on fuel charging. To that end, now, when grinding a charger, rays of static may appear.

Actually, I´ve mapped the velocity you´re grinding the charger with to the probability of a ray spawning, therefore, the faster you grind it, the more power you´re getting, and the more frequently rays may appear. I think since it relates clearly to static in the real world, and since it´s a bit of eye candy in a rather minimalist environment, it´s a subtle but clear way to encourage grinding the chargers.

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« Reply #161 on: November 28, 2014, 10:41:58 AM »

It seems like getting the idea of grinding the charger in the first place may be elusive, you could add a simple pulse of static running along the chargers every now and then. To catch the eye. Looking beautiful as ever though!
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pnch
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« Reply #162 on: November 28, 2014, 02:37:01 PM »

@JctWood: ATM a big white bar in an almost completely black level piques the player curiosity, and since it´s the easier way of interacting with it, they tend to touch it. While, as you said, it´s not screaming "touch me" yet, since it switches to your own color when touched, you get that something is happening. I believe the actual problem is in communicating what´s actually happening without having the classical "power bar filling", so, yes, as you said an extra feedback element is due. On the other hand, I think seeing lightning when you´re grinding it makes for an "empowering" feeling, while seeing something else emitting lightning translates as a menacing element at first sight. Plus, the game designs makes for a tense gameplay with players struggling to stay alive a couple extra seconds, they rarely get a feeling of "I´m uber powerful!", so they´re not likely to take chances touching something that looks even remotely menacing on purpose.
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jctwood
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« Reply #163 on: November 28, 2014, 04:45:50 PM »

That is extremely true. How about a soft glow?
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pnch
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« Reply #164 on: November 30, 2014, 01:06:26 PM »

@JctWood: Minimalism has it´s own challenges! There´s no soft glows to be seen in the game yet. If I added one in a single element, then I should also use it whenever a glow is traditionally seen too (explosions, lasers, lights, etc...) or it would feel "off". Here´s an essay about aesthetic coherence that gets a bit more wordy on the subject (and about the work of it´s writer, which is a great artist BTW): http://files.davidoreilly.com/downloads/BasicAnimationAesthetics.pdf. In short, I can´t thread lightly with these kind of decisions, since they´re the sort of thing eager to propagate itself everywhere in the game, and therefore change the general look and feel. Besides, I think there´s already too much glowing stuff going on in games already Smiley. Of course, if I end up not finding anything that suits the purpose better, glows it´ll be!

#35: Mayday!


When ejecting from your ship, if there´s something blocking the way in front of you, instead of not ejecting at all, you´ll now eject backwards. Added this since often, when subject to a strong force of gravity or magnetism, you´ll get the front of your ship stuck to something, without enough engine power to set yourself free. This way, you get a small window of opportunity to escape the field in question. Besides, you´ll see it´s way easier to re-enter your ship if you eject this way, and I´m sure this too will find have it´s use cases later on.
« Last Edit: December 03, 2014, 06:51:36 AM by pnch » Logged

pnch
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« Reply #165 on: December 01, 2014, 01:30:20 PM »

#36: Space doors rev 2

Maybe someone will remember I had automatic doors in the menu but, until the Centrifuge level, there were no doors in any actual level.

Doors, as dull as they sound, makes for a very useful gameplay element. Not knowing what´s behind them adds a strategic layer to the gameplay (will someone be waiting for me on the other side, guns loaded? Should I open the door by throwing a decoy just in case?  - That´s supported, BTW Smiley- Should I be doing the ambush? )

So, why were there 0 doors in the actual levels? Laziness, of course, but there´s a bit more to that:
In the playable menu, the only moving physical objects are the players themselves. Since the doors open when players get close, everything is fine. In a typical deathmatch level, there´s potentially thousands of physical objects moving all the time, and if one of them gets in the way of the door, there would be a problem (usually, that object would magically teleport away from the colliders if stuck). To solve that, now every door does a little physics test right in front of them while closing, to ensure nothing gets stuck. If it finds something, it will stop moving (I think I´ll switch it to an elevator-door like logic later on, where if it finds something, it will go to full open and try again). With that in place, I started populating a test level with doors, and a few extra possibilities opened up:

If the context doesn´t scream "that´s a door", they automatically become secret doors.


Add a bunch of these, and you can make for a whole hidden corridor, plus you get the stair like effect for free.

Offset the sensor from the door, and if the architecture helps, you get single-direction doors!

The last one is a very interesting thing I got for free, game-design wise. Having a one-direction door has a lot of gameplay implications, like forcing the way a level is navigated, adding whole secret sections that are harder to reach and require some sort of mental mapping effort from the players, etc. Since I´m aiming for as much emergent gameplay as I can get, it´s always nice to get extra features from very simple stuff!
« Last Edit: December 03, 2014, 06:51:59 AM by pnch » Logged

pnch
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« Reply #166 on: December 09, 2014, 12:18:33 PM »

#37: Getting bigger

The vision that I originally compressed onto what´s now Negspace is ENORMOUS (I won´t go into it, but it goes along the lines of the usual delirious moonshot utterly impractical to realize as a first project from a one man dev team). From what I´ve read and experienced in other artistic disciplines, that´s business as usual for anyone getting started. Knowing that beforehand, I decided to, at first, limit my vision to a party game. "Limit" should be read as "focus and actually make it happen". Had I gone any other way, I´m sure this devlog wouldn´t exist.

I´m very happy to be able to say that, right before starting with the stream of game shows (VJ14 / EVA / Museum Nights / Meet The Game), I reached that milestone. Negspace is right now a game with an hyper fast gameplay, featuring "real" space physics based deathmatch (+ space football and racing on top for a bonus), suitable for a party environment given a bunch of competent and competitive gamers. It´s stable, playable, and, as playtesting on the game shows went, tense and enjoyable.
What´s more important, it exists and (at least to me) feels different to any other game I´ve played - One of the devs that tried it even sent me a small prototype he made borrowing a couple of the game´s mechanics (Kiss thanks)!
Of course, more stuff could and should be added on top in order to wrap it, be it ships, physics twists, rule bends, levels, fine-tuning the difficulty curve, general polish, etc... but adding more of something is relatively trivial vs making the first one of these, not only conceptually, most of the time from a developer´s perspective as well (of course, they are time consuming processes nonetheless).

That means that, now that the first round of game shows settled down, I have to decide which way to go from there. I'm still sketching what my "new limits" will be, in the meanwhile, I´m not taking the road leading to a wrap and a cash grab (not that´s anything wrong with that  Hand Money Left Who, Me? Hand Money Right). Instead, I´m sort of flirting with the early moonshot vision by developing one extra tech toy at a time (remember procedural level building and AI?). At worst, I know I already have a fully functional game, and that road is still there if/when real life issues call for it. Besides, I´m getting a bit better at the craft every day, which will hopefully make for a more touching experience in the future.

To that end, I re-opened the innards of the game logic, and introduced events.
What are events? Imagine the following situation:
A player dies, so he tells the death counter to advance, the spawner to respawn the ship, the targeter to stop targeting it, and so on.
A player dies, he says "I´m dead!" aloud. Whoever cares, notices that (without the need to actively check for that message every cycle) and acts accordingly.
The first sentence represents how the game used to work. The second, how it works now. Effectively, that makes experimenting with relatively large scale game design decisions WAY more manageable.

Back to doing just that, thanks everyone for reading!


Also, now that bigger scale design issues are back in the drawing board, it would be an ideal time to hear your ideas!
I know most of you aren´t registered here, feel welcome to join the discussion via Facebook or Twitter.
They´re both doing pretty heavy timeline manipulations lately, so join the newsletter if you don´t want to miss important updates.
« Last Edit: December 10, 2014, 12:13:34 PM by pnch » Logged

pnch
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« Reply #167 on: December 10, 2014, 11:39:07 AM »

#38: Line of sight logic

Now, ships won´t aim at you if something blocks their line of sight. See how I´m trying to hide from the enemy behind the container (without much success). For debugging purposes, I´m switching the color of the enemy whenever he´s seeing me (Blue- he sees me, Red- he´s not seeing me).


Also added sort of an "awareness meter" to the AI enemies:
Each enemy now waits a second or two between the first time they notice you and when they start shooting.
If you slip past them or hide by blocking their view with something, their reaction time will take a while to reset, meaning that if you re-engage combat a couple of seconds later, they will stay alert.
That´s meant to simulate the player´s behavior, the first time you see an enemy, it catches you by surprise and you take a bit of time to think how to shoot at him, if you lose sight of him, you´ll stay alert for a while, therefore your reactions will be faster if he comes back.

The line of sight logic also covers decoys now. If there´s no decoy in sight, an enemy will chase you instead, keeping they "alert" level, so they are now a bit harder to use.

Of course, you can still kick ass with them if you launch them right:

(reduced palette)
« Last Edit: December 10, 2014, 12:15:06 PM by pnch » Logged

pnch
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« Reply #168 on: December 11, 2014, 12:33:11 PM »

#39: Getting bigger, now literally

With the announcement of Unity 4.6 and it´s new UI tools, I gave it a try.
To my surprise, this time the game ran almost right, and included many 2d physics parameters that were previously constants, which I already wanted to tweak for a while.

What didn´t work was the general scale of the game, resulting in some colliders being ignored by the physics engine. Two days were spent multiplying every number representing position, speed, position, and offsets by 12.5, adding scale properties to the procedural shaders, tweaking the values of every physics property where the math wasn´t so straight forward, editing procedural levels generations, the Tiled level parser and camera configurations.


Many glitchy screenshots later, now each tile is 1 unit wide! Coming from 4.3, that gives me access to whatever the unity devs have been doing these months and future-proofs the game (a bit longer).


Fear not, I´m showing only the glitches, but everything is working smoother than ever, the resize even solved a known but tricky bug for free: occasional weird collisions while wall-grinding automagically dissappeared!
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pnch
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« Reply #169 on: December 16, 2014, 11:01:25 AM »

#40: Rami's visit + camera rotations

Everyone reading this already knows Vlambeer, RIGHT?
Well, Rami (half of it, Jan, you'll be welcome next time!) tweeted he was coming for a flash trip to the far away lands of Buenos Aires. A meeting was quickly arranged and part of the local gamedev scene reunited to give him a taste of the customary "asado". On his part, he very generously stood sleep deprived until his next flight, playing our games while giving us feedback.

Right to the point, as soon as he got into Negspace, he pointed to a kink in the camera rotations:


Notice the click between two rotation behaviors? I was using a threshold to prevent the ship from pointing down in screen space, by forcing the camera to rotate faster once it was met.

He then suggested changes on the feeling of the base ship´s cannon, said very nice things about the visual style, managed to joyously board a behemoth ship, and it was the turn of Okhlos already (DO check it out)!

A night's sleep and 8 smoothing logic variations later, here´s the new camera:


<Technobabble>
I'm now interpolating between the camera orientation and the ship's accumulated rotations using a variable step, composed of a minimum arbitrary constant + a mapped amount coming from the difference in orientation between the camera and the ship + another mapped amount coming from the angular velocity.
</Technobabble>

Looking forward to have it loved or hated by the next distinguished visitor / playtester. So much new stuff to get into the next build... getting back to that!  Coffee

PS: My official "translator" (I suffer from hearing loss, and the noisy bar setting didn't help) was @danielben... this devlog feels like indiedev's Vogue today!
« Last Edit: December 16, 2014, 11:10:13 AM by pnch » Logged

JustRadek
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« Reply #170 on: December 16, 2014, 11:39:18 AM »

Top-down world rotation! Cool, haven't seen that since

and the map-views of older FPS games.
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pnch
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« Reply #171 on: December 18, 2014, 12:41:51 PM »

@JustRadek: Glad you like it! It´s there to bring a

to 2d gameplay, plus it forces more careful navigation of the levels.
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pnch
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« Reply #172 on: January 13, 2015, 12:32:49 PM »

Hey everyone! It seems the devlog got a heavy case of new year´s slowing down syndrome, sorry! I can assure you it's only temporal. I've been stuck with some of the large-scale design decisions I mentioned earlier, looking forward to untangle the mess soon and write about that!
Also:
Negspace was featured as a contender to best shooter of 2015!!   Kiss
Of course, I'm not sure it'll be the best, shooter, or even 2015, but for sure it's a great surprise!
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pnch
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« Reply #173 on: January 16, 2015, 05:53:00 AM »

A sum up of the last 11 updates is on indiedb's front page right now! It might come handy for those of you trying to catch up.
http://www.indiedb.com/games/negspace/news/negspace-11-updates-later
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pnch
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« Reply #174 on: January 21, 2015, 01:37:51 PM »

#41: Boardable, beam-armed turret.

Taking a break from bigger picture design, figured there´s no way I´m launching a space game without turrets you can actually use.


The first player-controlled turret

When I wrote the ship controller´s code, I tried to keep it flexible enough to possibly support other sort of machines.
It turns out, messy as it is, it worked just fine, and implementing the turrets was trivial, I only had to add snippets to bolt them in place and to deploy each turret´s base. That meant that in a couple of hours everything was working fine, and they even supported boarding and ejection.


Managing power with boarding athletics

The turrets fully recharge your escape pod each time you board them (ordinary ships transfer power from their battery, but turrets have unlimited power), therefore, boarding and ejecting a turret is now an alternative to friction chargers for escape pods.


Shiny new beams

Being bolted to the ground makes you feel like a sitting duck. To compensate, I decided to add beams, which instantly hit your target (if you aim right). The Weapon class also behaved nicely, and I soon got beams working just by copy-pasting snippets from my existing codebase (color-shifting jagged rays from the friction chargers, raycasting from the enemy´s AI, damaging from the old laser bullet).

Making them able to instantly hit someone else makes the turrets less predictable and harder to outmaneuver. Also, the beams are very long range. If the level design allows for it, the typical player will be hitting its opponents by looking at their screens rather than his own.


Beam-armed spaceship (just a test)

Once they were ready, I was even able to arm any ship with beams with a single drag and drop. After toying with this for a while, it was evident that, for many reasons, seeing the trajectory of the lasers feels much more satisfying than instantly hitting or missing your target while on a ship.


All together now

So, what do you think? As usual, c&c welcome.  Coffee
I want to refresh the gifs from the first page, welcoming suggestions about that too! (what are your favorite gifs to date?)
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pnch
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« Reply #175 on: January 30, 2015, 05:39:17 PM »

WOW, now OVER 25k READS!
Thanks everyone so much for your support, seriously, being a solo dev makes this kind of feedback even more valuable.

I´m also logging in to let you know I´m leaving for holidays. I´ll be off the grid and will change my dev tools to pencil and paper, but I´m already looking forward to come back with a fresh mind, renewed energies, and a bunch of new ideas to test! (A bit of a workaholic?) In short, thanks again, and see you in a couple of weeks.  Kiss
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pnch
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« Reply #176 on: February 25, 2015, 08:15:27 AM »

I´m back!
Spent the first post-holidays day warming up by doing catlikecoding´s editor tutorials.
 For those of you that are starting to feel comfortable with Unity´s interface and already managed to produce playable stuff, I´d strongly recommend these. Being able to do something as simple as grouping different kind of parameters together can really speed up your workflow. Can't wait to apply the newly acquired knowledge to the game!

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« Reply #177 on: February 25, 2015, 01:08:59 PM »

I´m back!
Spent the first post-holidays day warming up by doing catlikecoding´s editor tutorials.
 For those of you that are starting to feel comfortable with Unity´s interface and already managed to produce playable stuff, I´d strongly recommend these. Being able to do something as simple as grouping different kind of parameters together can really speed up your workflow. Can't wait to apply the newly acquired knowledge to the game!



Awesome, I love your devlog, keep it up! Im excited to see what is next
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« Reply #178 on: February 25, 2015, 01:50:56 PM »

Just caught up on this devlog, game is looking awesome. Really has a cool vibe that reminds me of Teleglitch meets Descent.

After checking out a few pages of this and the background depth that you have, it nearly makes me wish that you could move your ship to different vertical planes (As there is so much cool depth implied in your background). Easier said than done of course, but I think the gameplay is looking really fun so far.

Looking forward to more updates.
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pnch
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« Reply #179 on: February 26, 2015, 12:17:37 PM »

@DMoon: Thanks for your encouragement!
@Oroboros: Glad to hear someone caught the Descent vibe Smiley
I´ve been tempted more than once to try different vertical planes as "bridges", but since knowing whether two ships see each other would become very counter-intuitive, I managed to leave that pandora´s box closed to date.
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