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[Dr. Cooldude]

I really dig the visual art style in this! Especially the character designs makes me feel very nostagic, as they remind me of some of the MS-DOS games I played as a kid. I'm following this.

[joeyspacerocks]

So a little update - I've pretty much finished level 2 of my first demo set of levels.

Aim was to give the player some space to get used to jumping whilst introducing the idea that electricity hurts. Nothing too exciting or revolutionary so I may go back to it later after I have some real enemies sorted.



At this resolution the whole thing just looks like a load of white lines - later levels will start to break this up as at the start you're still in the lab complex before you descend to the more outlandish depths ...

Moving on to the next bit now where I'll introduce some enemies and the first power-ups. Specifically the heart which will give you strength to push stuff around, but the downside that if you over-exert things will start to look a little crazy ...

[joeyspacerocks]

Finally got a website (well, page) up for Spooky Pooky at http://fistfulofsquid.com/spookypooky.

Still need to add presskit() and some vids. Oh, and finish the game. Yes, mustn't forget to finish the game.

[joeyspacerocks]

I took my eye off the ball for one second and .. bamm! Six weeks flash by.

Still here, still plugging away. Got distracted by setting up an 'identity' and a new website plus some distracting business in so-called real-life.

Here's the scoop. I've started fleshing out level 4 for my 'vertical slice' as the cool kids seem to be calling it these days.

This level introduces water which gave me cause to examine my appalling stop-gap physics code that was pretending to implement buoyancy. Fixing that then led to a closer look at my stop-gap code for collision response. And so on. Obviously if I was some sort of UnRealIty engine 2/3/4 I wouldn't be messing about with this kind of stuff. But where would my self-respect be then, eh? I'd actually have to get on with gameplay and the like. Shudder.

Look here's a large GIF with some floaty, nudgey kind of stuff:



Luckily I rediscovered Chris Hecker's 18 year old physics series (http://chrishecker.com/Rigid_Body_Dynamics) or I'd still be embedded in a wall.

Next up is ensuring that an animated skeleton realistically sinks in water until he gets his lungs, whereupon he can swim n' stuff. Unfortunately he can then also drown. I'm going to get some gameplay out of this thing if it kills me.

[Slader16]

Wow, this looks amazing! Posting to follow

[oldblood]

Glad to see an update. Cool idea on him not being able to swim till he has his lungs...

[joeyspacerocks]

Wow, this looks amazing! Posting to follow

Glad to see an update. Cool idea on him not being able to swim till he has his lungs...

Thank you both. Apologies that this update is similar to the last but I finally got the momentum stuff working properly. Thought it was before but ... y'know, bugs and things.



The funny thing about doing physics for platformers is that you end up with a mixture of 'real' modelling (e.g. momentum, buoyancy and other force equations) and 'hacks'. In this case when something is resting on something else (like the player on a moving platform, or a block sitting on a floating block) I do what many people do and 'attach' it.

The thing doing the sitting (A) gets a handle to the thing being sat on (B). When (B) moves it artificially updates the positions of all the things (A's) sitting on it by the same amount. This avoids a whole load of niggly problems like dealing with friction and resting contacts and the like.

But it's a right old fudge, so when you then stick some 'real' physics in there you need to accommodate these things. In this case it means making sure that you when A re-collides with B next tick you only apply the momentum transfer if B wasn't already the 'ground' for A.

Fixing that then means that things sitting on other things don't generate any push downwards, so things don't sink in water from the weight of something on top. So add a little fix to make sure that force is artificially added.

TLDR; Hackety hack can stop bouncy bounce. Sad face.

[joeyspacerocks]

Greetings. Wow, has it been that long?

I've been distracted by some non-gamedev things for the past couple of months but have kept picking away at Spooky Pooky in the meantime.

Here's an embryonic water level with some killer fish. Dumb but dangerous.





I've also been cleaning up some of the triggers so that levels can include single-use buttons and timed buttons/triggers that turn themselves off a short while after being activated.

Additionally I changed the logic when you hit something. Colliding with something bad costs you a life, much like many other platformers. I've kept the damage-o-meter so that I can use it once you've got some other power-ups.

Lurking over the page of my todo list are the big things - namely a PC port and audio.

To sort the port out I'm looking at using SDL 2 to wrap my init code and get hold of an OpenGL surface. I'll dualboot my Mac so I can dev/test under windows but naively I don't see too many problems.

Seems to me that the best way to get some kind of demo out into the hands of anyone who fancies a play is to go PC - iOS is just too much of a barrier to getting it out there.

[joeyspacerocks]

Been a sparse few weeks for gamedev what with one thing and another, however I've been trying to get some tiny things done here and there.

Finally added tile animations. Another little feature that took a little longer than it should have.



Tiled has some support for tile animations, allowing you to specify a sequence of tiles from the set and the delays between them. So I added support for loading external tilesets (tsx) files and associated animations, plus some simple in-game code for rendering them.

My implementation was knocked up in a distracted hour or so and isn't what you might call elegant. I store a list of tile animations for the level (each specified as a collection of tile + delay structs), and a lookup table containing an entry for each tile id.

Each game loop I update the current tile for an animation (if past the delay time) and change the entry in the lookup table. Similar to how an indexed colour palette is implemented.

Like I say, not exactly elegant but fast at render time.

[joeyspacerocks]

Just decided - Spooky Pooky is morphing into a Metroidvania game.

I've been leaning towards this for a while now as I've felt that it better fits the organ / power-up mechanism and story-wise it just makes sense for Horatio's quest to be restored to his human self to take place in a single large world, rather than broken into levels.

Technically it's not a massive change to what I have at the moment. I'm going to spend a little time knocking the story into shape and planning how the exploration of the world will take place.

[siskavard]

I like this idea

I like it a lot

(Spooky Pooky)

[joeyspacerocks]

Cross-platform is starting to become more of a reality now. Finally got my terrible rendering code running on a Mac.



The game runs at 480x272 and plays really nicely full screen.

Next up is to add controller support and then I'll tackle the real issue of metroidvania-ing the level loading.

[joeyspacerocks]

Thanks to GLFW (great tip-off from dek) I got an XBox 360 controller working very nicely with the game.

Owing to how GLFW works I had to replace my lovely Mac-specific application launch code with a much simpler (and cross-platform) C file that uses GLFW to create the window + OpenGL context so that I could hook into it's input functions.

Much nicer now plus there's the added bonus that more of it should work cross-platform now.

I'm not quite sure how reliable the controller joystick and button mapping will be for different controllers - only got the one so not an easy thing to test right now.

[joeyspacerocks]

I've been busy porting the current build of Spooky Pooky to the PC - currently got it running more-or-less fine under Windows 8, thanks to it being written in C and using fairly standard OpenGL - i.e. no fancy extensions.

So it's currently running on iOS, PC and Mac without too much trouble. Except for controllers of course. I've only got a wired XBox 360 controller so I've been testing with that and am now wondering how people deal with mapping all those buttons on different platforms. Crazy!

In an attempt to avoid tackling the hard problems (i.e. story, levels, gameplay), I've successfully distracted myself with some ho-hum fiery particle effects.



It was actually super-quick to add in the fire - just a slightly tweaked particle emitter with some crude flame sprite animation and Robert's your father's brother.

At the moment I've no collision detection going on between particles and other entities, so I've got to decide how best to handle that - i.e. add it between individual particles or a single hit area that roughly covers the fire area. I prefer the former as it would allow for more accurate collisions, plus I can then add some more interesting interactions (like swirling smoke / steam particles when you run through them).

Oh, I've also spent a bit of time with Reaper trying to make music. Obviously going to need to spend a little more time practising that ... say 3 or 4 years.

[oahda]

Oooh, that's pretty. Really nice with the underwater wobble in a pixel game too.

Great kudos for going through the hassle of changing underlying stuff just to add gamepad support. It increases my likelihood of playing a game from 0 to 1, pretty much.

Haven't watched this game for many months now. Wow. So much has happened. Good stuff.

[joeyspacerocks]

Thank you! Well I figure I'm in this game for the long haul and once I made the decision to target desktop I felt that controller support was really worth it.

Having played games like Axiom Verge with and without a controller it does make a massive difference, plus playing my game with one makes me feel like a 'real' game developer

[oahda]

Thank you! Well I figure I'm in this game for the long haul and once I made the decision to target desktop I felt that controller support was really worth it.

I actually thought this was a PC game all along, heh.

Having played games like Axiom Verge with and without a controller it does make a massive difference, plus playing my game with one makes me feel like a 'real' game developer

Exactly how I felt when I finally started adding gamepad support to my stuff! Now they're REAL GAMES.

[joeyspacerocks]

So then, this week I've been continuing the elemental theme and have been crafting an electrical demon. Or something.



It's using the same approach I took with the titles but I've made it generic now.

Any sprite (including sprites in animations) can have an associated point-cloud (simply an array of vectors) indicating non-blank pixels.

At render time I can then use the algorithm I'm using with the titles to generate electrical sparks between random points in the sprite, within a threshold distance. The sparks hang about for a bit and fade out.

Nice thing about this is I can also do other things with the point-cloud, like emit particles:



The actual sprite I'm using for this is just for testing, but due to the nature of the rendering can be extremely crude:



I think you'll agree that that is just a doggone work of art. You can see now why I have to prop up the art with effects ...

[siskavard]

The effects are amazing!

I love the dancing!

[joeyspacerocks]

Thanks! Great thing is I don't need to be able to animate that chap because the particles just tween for me.

So I've been messing about with guns a bit.

Some bang-bang explodey action ...



An annoying blob gun ...



I'm having too much fun messing about those - it's distracting me.

Still can't decide if I'm going to let you shoot back or not. I didn't set out to make a shooter, but it just seems pretty unfair not to be able to defend yourself ...