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[lokijki]

Hey there! Been forever since I posted here!

Anyways, A Place in Space is a game I made for Ludum Dare back in December, and I've been toying with ways to expand on it since then. You can play the original here.

The original was made in Construct 2, but I pretty early on decided to move over to Unity for a couple different reasons (a big one being that I need some more Unity portfolio pieces), and I've been figuring out where exactly I wanted to go with it for a while now. I started out just planning on doing a straightforward port and then expanding on it, then scoped it up way too high into some sort of crazy top-down Metroidvania, and then scoped it way down into a single room arena shooter, and now I'm planning on doing something a bit closer to the original, but... fancier, I guess.

So, here's what it looks like now (with a ragdoll spawning thrown in, for fun):


I have a feeling the style I'm going with might be a bit divisive, but this kinda old-meets-new thing has always been really interesting to me. Hopefully I can keep it from being too much of an eye-strain to people. Up until today I was using an orthagraphic camera to go for way more of a faux-2D style, but I kinda fell in love with how it looked with a perspective camera today; we'll see where I end up on this.

That's about it for now; it's still incredibly early, but hopefully I can keep this up to date. I haven't kept dev-logs in the past, but I'm hoping the more public development will help keep me a bit more accountable for keeping up with the project.

[lokijki]

Added shooting! Finally!

That's not actually most of what I worked on today; I spent most of the time playing around with different color palettes. I really love the look I'm getting from the current palette (which is the ZX Spectrum palette), but I'm concerned about how limiting it'll be. It's essential 7 colors and then slightly darker versions of them, and black. It'll be pretty difficult to make different level sets not feel samey with such a small palette.

On the other hand, applying palettes with more color variation loses a lot of the flatness that I like from the spectrum palette. I tried a few, but nothing stood out to me as great (although I did kinda like DawnBringer's 16 color palette). With more colors, it starts looking more like a PS1 game.

I'm considering just swapping out colors on the palette to add some variation to different level sets.

Also, come to think of it, it probably would have been better to get some pictures of the different palettes. Ah well.

[SafetySnail]

Wow, the graphical styling in this is so unique and it looks amazing man, following this for sure!

[doobieshrum]

Interested in seeing what the game looks like without the pixel-y filter thing haha.

Looking great though man, really interesting, cool art style!

[lokijki]

Thanks! And here's what it looks like, doobieshrum:



Part of the reason I like the pixelation is 'cus it helps obscure my lackluster modelling and animation skills.

[Christian]

The pixelation really gives it a cool distinct look.

[Mightymcc21]

Really loving the look! I'm excited to see how it progresses.

[lokijki]

Added a little slug enemy, who at the moment is an immortal bloodbag. A few problems I need to address with this: 1) Need to figure out the best way to deal with enemies that are low to the ground. Right now it just has a really high hitbox, which doesn't look great. 2) Blood doesn't receive shadows right now, because with the standard shader, it's either dark enough that it just get's set to entirely black, or bright enough that it's always read. I think a cutout variant of the Unity toon-shader would probably fix this, given the right light ramp.

Besides that, I've been trying to figure out how I want to generate levels. I implemented the first chunk of a pretty simple dungeon generator, but looking back on the original game, a part of it was that the dungeon was always changing, and I've been thinking of ways to get that on a bigger scale, while also making sure the player can always make somewhat informed choices.

One idea that I was briefly thinking about was having the dungeon act like a giant Rubik's cube, but that might be stupid. Is that stupid?

[Zorg]

I like the style!

You could use forward raycasts from the player's gun and feet. If the gun raycast does not "see" an enemy but the lower raycast does, point the projectiles down at the small enemy. (Or better point at the closest enemy from multiple raycasts.)

I'd like to see a different blood color than red.

[Christian]

Added a little slug enemy, who at the moment is an immortal bloodbag. A few problems I need to address with this: 1) Need to figure out the best way to deal with enemies that are low to the ground. Right now it just has a really high hitbox, which doesn't look great. 2) Blood doesn't receive shadows right now, because with the standard shader, it's either dark enough that it just get's set to entirely black, or bright enough that it's always read. I think a cutout variant of the Unity toon-shader would probably fix this, given the right light ramp.

Besides that, I've been trying to figure out how I want to generate levels. I implemented the first chunk of a pretty simple dungeon generator, but looking back on the original game, a part of it was that the dungeon was always changing, and I've been thinking of ways to get that on a bigger scale, while also making sure the player can always make somewhat informed choices.

One idea that I was briefly thinking about was having the dungeon act like a giant Rubik's cube, but that might be stupid. Is that stupid?

So like the rooms would shift around or something? Dont think its stupid, just need more details on what you mean

[lokijki]

Oh, yeah, so, since the original jam game, I've pictured the whole dungeon as being a big cube in space, with different environments on each level of the cube, but there's no way anyone but me would no that at this point, obviously. Sorry about that. xP

But yeah, I was thinking about having sections of the cube actually rotate around, like an actual Rubik's cube, which would mean environments from lower in the cube could be brought up to the surface, and eventually the entire thing would be a ridiculous chaotic mess. :D

A less extreme version of this could be more like one of those sliding panel puzzles, where there are empty spaces that blocks can slide into, and blocks from below have a chance of sliding up, too.


Also, thanks for the suggestion, zorg! I ended up using a single spherecast, and here's some different colored blood, predator style (and a floating worm to test out the aiming):

[lokijki]

Spent today trying out dungeon generators and then discarding them.

Eventually switched something else for the moment, with room transitions, which I'm pretty happy with for now:


All that's there for spawning the rooms now is a grid that fills randomly with rooms.

I started thinking of moving back to how it worked in the original games, with rooms being put together on the fly as you moved through the dungeon, but this time with some branching paths, and some sort of system in place to determine when certain important rooms appear (item rooms, boss rooms, etc).

[Christian]

Oh, yeah, so, since the original jam game, I've pictured the whole dungeon as being a big cube in space, with different environments on each level of the cube, but there's no way anyone but me would no that at this point, obviously. Sorry about that. xP

But yeah, I was thinking about having sections of the cube actually rotate around, like an actual Rubik's cube, which would mean environments from lower in the cube could be brought up to the surface, and eventually the entire thing would be a ridiculous chaotic mess. :D

A less extreme version of this could be more like one of those sliding panel puzzles, where there are empty spaces that blocks can slide into, and blocks from below have a chance of sliding up, too.

Go watch Cube like immediately. That sounds cool, and could be really neat in-game

[lokijki]

Haha, I have seen Cube! That came to mind immediately when I was thinking of how to rearrange the dungeon.

The issue I'm having is that I can't think of a way to do in a way that the player can understand what's happening; if it's rooms sliding to new places every so often, that could end up being totally inconsequential, and the player wouldn't even notice. If it's whole sections being totally rearranged, it may appear as totally random to the player.

[Christian]

Haha, I have seen Cube! That came to mind immediately when I was thinking of how to rearrange the dungeon.

The issue I'm having is that I can't think of a way to do in a way that the player can understand what's happening; if it's rooms sliding to new places every so often, that could end up being totally inconsequential, and the player wouldn't even notice. If it's whole sections being totally rearranged, it may appear as totally random to the player.

What if there were windows or openings where the player could see gears turning or rooms shifting and rotating outside? Not sure how feasible that would be

Perhaps the effects could be 1) through actions or different routes, the player could have some choice over the rooms that appear, like some gear provides x% chance that more loot rooms appear

or 2) defeating a boss or completing a challenge adds new rooms into the mix. Kind of how in Hand of Fate, finishing quests and defeating bosses added new encounter cards into your deck.

Another example to look at would be God of War 3's Labyrinth

[lokijki]

I like the idea of having gears and mechanisms visible on the outside of the dungeon! And Hand of Fate is definitely is something I should play soon, seems like a good example of dynamic dungeons.

I also just read through this paper, which is about generating dungeons with adaptive difficulty, which is a super interesting idea. Basically, in the game in the paper, when a certain object is held, a "misfortune" level rises, causing the game to generate more challenging levels. Longer dungeons, narrower rooms, more enemies (and specifically, more of the enemies that gave you trouble in previous levels). I'd love to try my hand at something like that.

Finally, just to end tonight with a GIF, here's some work I did on the camera, so that it follows you when you're in larger rooms:


EDIT: One other thing I'm unsure about is whether or not I want hand designed room layouts, or do those randomly, too. I'd like to do them randomly, but only if I can get them to not suck.

[ohaiguy]

Yeah! I think randomly generating what you've got seems like a great approach for the game moving forward. Hand of Fate seems like a good fit for the style of room that you have now. Maybe mix a bit of Crawl in there as far as style goes and you might have something quite cool.

Looking forward to seeing where this goes

[lokijki]

A couple of things before I have to work on not-game-stuff today; last night I added some particles for when bullets hit stuff, as shown here:




And then this morning, I added some super basic enemy spawning + enemy death and ragdolls:




Also added in one of my favorite effects, chromatic aberration on screen shake. I learned from my last game that a lot of people don't like this, so I'll definitely throw in an option to disable it at some point.

[lokijki]

Not sure how much work I'll be able to do on the game this week, but here's a few changes I managed to get in last night:



Mostly pretty subtle stuff; I spent another big chunk of time trying to figure out what to do with the color palette, and trying to identify what I like about the current one. I think it's basically the super high, harsh contrast; colors are either bright or absent, leading to lots of dark spaces, which suits the game. A lot of the more varied palettes (especially if they have a good range of grays) can color those spaces.

I did actually end up switching to a CGA palette. It's got a few advantages for me over the Spectrum palette I was using, mainly more distance between the light and dark colors, and less saturated bright colors.

The other thing I added was a film grain overlay to the main camera (the camera that captures the game before it get's pixelated), which created a pretty cool dithering effect in transitions between colors. I having it animated might be a bit much, so I might switch from animated film grain to a static noise image, but I like having a more interesting transition between colors than a smooth line.

Last thing I did was make the pixels a bit bigger, because go big or go home, am I right?

[lokijki]

Not much new that I can actually show right now, but here's a GIF of shells being ejected as I shoot, because I felt the screen wasn't cluttered enough as it is. Putting that in actually reminded me of an older game I did (Astrovoid) where there was a power up that caused ejected shells to act as explosives that could damage enemies. That'd be a cool pickup to do here, and by cool I mean absolute chaos.


Besides that, I cut the little space dude's head off so that I could swap out helmets. I think helmets are either going to be a pickup in the game with various effects, or different characters you can pick from the start, depending on how varied I can make them look. I'd like to have kinda transformative powerups (like Binding of Isaac), but I need to make sure I have a good place for them on the character. Right now, I just threw in a dome style helmet.

Other than that, I've been taking a look into what it'd take to have dynamic music in the game. It's not something I've ever worked with, but I'd like to give it a shot. My brother is going to be doing the music (I should have some tracks posted here at some point), so this is passed off to him for the moment.

That stuffs really just been me putting off figuring out how I'm gonna handle dungeon generation, so I should be digging into that more soon.