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[Thotep]

• fast-paced strategy
• randomized
• emphasis on mechanics
• short and replayable

It looks like this:

So, I'm working on a game that is both strategic and real-time, but isn't an RTS in a traditional sense (like Starcraft). A single playthrough will take you about 15 minutes, if you're good. But the next one will be different. And anoter one as well.


--- EDIT:
Prophour23 is available now!

Launch trailer:


Humble Widget (comes with a Steam key!): http://prophour23.com
Steam: http://store.steampowered.com/app/317610/

Here's the browser build (rather outdated, but if you're curious...):


Play (WebGL, Chrome recommended)


I created the game's site:
Game site

And a trailer (with gameplay!) as well:




Vote on Greenlight It's greenlit already, thanks!

[Thotep]

Here's a small animation from the game:

[Voley]

Here's a small animation from the game:

Animation looks nice.
What is this game about?
What is happening on the screen?

[Thotep]

Prophour23 plays on a single screen. There's an "organism" consisting of various organs (circular shapes with red/blue bars). You grow these organs, move them on the screen and connect to make use of them (e.g. you connect muscle organ to a stomach organ to make it work).
There's a constant threat - insects wanting to destroy your organism; so you need to defend yourself as well.

[Thotep]

Another animation: the heart.

[skittlefuck]

This looks really cool!

[Ticebilla]

Aaaaand I'm sold.

This sounds super interesting.

[SafetySnail]

Digging that old biology diagram look! This seems super interesting, keen to see where you go with it.

[Rahrahrah]

I really really love the look of everything.  Nice Arts!

[Thotep]

I created the game's site this weekend:
Game site

And a trailer (with gameplay!) as well:




The trailer was a bit of a hassle. I had a few gameplay movies and music, all I needed to do was to cut it up and splice together in an interesting way. I never edited any videos, so I had no idea what program should I use. I tried a few (free ones) on Windows and Linux, almost did it in Pitivi. Unfortunately, for some reason Pitivi crashed when I tried to render the output movie. I was suggested (half-jokingly) by a gamedev friend that Blender has a video editor as well. Guess what - I made the trailer in Blender, despite having no Blender experience whatsoever. And it took me 2 hours! (including learning, which took about 20 mins) It worked so well (comparing to all the other editors I tried) that I'm eager to learn more about Blender.

[Thotep]

As a part of ongoing polish work I wanted to animate bugs' death somehow. Here's how it looked like recently:



It just disappears. Not very cool!
I just got an idea how I want it to look like and I implemented it this weekend.



The effect actually consists of 4 parts:
1. A dying insect breaks down into a few parts.
2. There's a simple particle effect on top.
3. A stain is created underneath. It is animated, so it "spills" from the insect.
4. The dead parts attract other small insects, which feed on such carcasses.

The 4th part needs a little bit more work, but I'm quite satisfied how it all turned out.

[Code_Assassin]

saw a gif of this in another thread. Really reminds me of looking under a microscope.

[collider]

This looks really great! I saw on your website this is PC/Mac/Linux... this looks perfect for iPad - any reason you're not considering that? (or are you?)
What are you programming this in? (just curious)

[Thotep]

collider--> I'm using libgdx (so, Java). I plan to start with desktop platforms, although I don't plan to stop there. I'm heavily considering tablets as the next platform.

[Impmaster]

o this looks cool im following it

[Thotep]

The stain below a dying insect is barely visible, but I had a lot of fun putting it together.



Here's a breakdown of the stain effect:

1. A stain is actually a triangle fan. I start with a fan of 30 triangles and radius=1. The positioning and scaling are done in the vertex shader. Scale is animated, so the fan appears small and then grows a little (I colored triangles with different shades of grey, hope they're noticeable).




2. I needed to deform it somehow. So I made a simple, tileable 256x256 noise texture in GIMP (there's a checkbox in the noise rendering filter to make it tileable):



Then, every stain picks randomly one row of pixels from this image. I read the pixel's color value in the vertex shader (before applying scale) and deform the vertex' position using this value. It was pretty good, but I wanted the circle to deform gradually - so I multiply the noise color value by a displacement factor (which is animated from 0 to 1). So:

+ =


Note that there is no jagged edge between the first and last triangle (black and white ones). That's why I generated a tileable noise texture.

Shader code:

Code:

//read pixel from noise texture. u_displacement_row is the row chosen for stain (random 0 -> 1)
vec4 displacement = texture2D(u_noise, vec2(v_texCoords.x, u_displacement_row));

//color values are between 0 and 1, I want it to be between -1 and 1
float displ = (displacement.x - 0.5) * 2.0;

//deform the mesh. u_displacement_factor means how much I want to deform, 0 gives a regular circle
v_position.xy += (v_position.xy * (displ * u_displacement_factor));

3. Then I just added a texture in the fragment shader and voilà!

[Thotep]

Cutting connections between organs. Like enemies, the deleted connections just disappeared:



I wanted it to look like the vein was being cut. Considered making a separate rope-like structure and calculate the physics using box2d, but (as with many other effects) I went for something that looks "good enough" despite being entirely faked. I made a separate shader to render the vein parts after the cut, but it's still the same single-row triangle strip that I used for the vein before.

[and]

This looks awesome and really unique! I'll be keeping an eye on this

[Thotep]

I managed to get the WebGL build working, so... enjoy!


Play the latest build (WebGL, Chrome recommended)

[Thotep]

Started adding sounds as well. I coded a simple sound system using scraps of code from old prototypes. I wanted to use http://freesound.org as my source of sounds, but someone on Twitter posted about http://www.universalsoundfx.com. That's a pack of 3000+ sounds for $20, with free updates and additions. I liked the demo, so I purchased it right away and put a few sounds in the game.