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[UmutD]

A Night at the Races
(old "berry game")


Steam Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1082000/A_Night_at_the_Races/

New Trailer:









Original Post:

Welcome to "Bones" devlog (the name will change)

This is the devlog for a game I intend to finish in 1-2 several months.

It's a game about fast paced movement (you are always moving), jumping through walls, clearing floors and acquiring stuff.

I've no idea about the high-concept or how it will turn out, but I like that I have an early prototype in 2 days. Lately I started a lot of demanding & ambitious concepts but I realized they tend to advance slowly and making it hard to share something about them.

Also I've never kept a devlog before. Let's see how it works.

[UmutD]

My first "ahhh I see, you have some boxes" gif:

[UmutD]

- Added some crates & stones (one will be indestructable), right now they're just randomly lining up on walls.
- Will add some resources to collect tonight to see how it feels, should be easy enough.

[UmutD]

Another day, another update. Fixed a lot of bugs and inconsistent behaviours.

I am not experienced in writing platformers, I don't know if it always goes like this but I happen to find a lot of little quirks that make you write special case code all over the place.

Also, at this point I'm mostly trying different ideas (and breaking stuff all the time).

So far, things that seem to be working:

- Soft wall jumping: Mostly by chance, I made the wall-jump feel soft (like bouncing on bed), thus entering into walls a bit more before turning direction. It can seem a bit weird in gif's, but gameplay-wise it felt great to me. It's like a monkey moving free-style among palm trees. Have no idea how I will represent it visually in the final version.

Things that didn't work:

- Ceiling behaviour, when you hit your head to some platforms. Not only limited free movement feeling, but also messed up the other behaviours of platforms (landing or wall jumping from sides) no matter how much special case code I've written (mostly because of soft wall jumping, it means your character still collides with walls few more frames after it made the initial contact and it can cause different type of collisions trigger at once). Solution: Using destructable crates feels much better whenever I want to limit vertical movement to some degree, in other cases I will not try to limit vertical movement at all.

- Indestructable square stones. Same problem above. Solution: I'm not using them.

[NotionGames]

keep up the great work. looking forward to seeing progress

[UmutD]

Thanks! Good to know someone is watching.  

Early update for today, more engine refinement and spawning some resources to experiment with.



Now I think I'll try to focus more on enemy interactions (and extra abilites). Beside that, I'm thinking about how I can make the environment seem more natural instead of boring parallel walls, in standart tile based games it should be easier but this soft jumping physics really limits how I can use blocks / tiles. It will also affect the possible depth of levels' design.

[dlarocque91]

nice style, looks fun!

[and]

What are you using to make it?

[UmutD]

@dlarocque91, thanks!

@and, I'm using Flash since I feel comfortable in it. But game won't be played online, I'm planning to wrap it into an EXE or AIR file in the end. I'm trying to make a small PC game where the design allows more replayability (in a RL-like fashion) compared to my previous games, which feel mostly casual.

Probably something like GameMaker might have been more sensible in this case but I was hesitant to dive into a new tool for the small amount of time I have.

[ragnor]

I like those bone like particle thingies. They make the game look more alive.

[UmutD]

Thanks Ragnor, I hope it'll look much better when visuals come.

I added dashing and it felt great, but still a bit buggy. I'm starting to think that adding such upgrades might take too much time for the scope of this project (also I'm kind of stuck for ideas for upgrades that can make the game interesting compared to a standart runner type game).

I was planning to go for procedural generation for levels and spice it by different upgrades everytime, but now I'm more inclined to design compact levels, where you need to figure out how and when to use dash and jumps to pass them. This frees my time from finding & coding new interesting upgrades, but that time will possibly go to level design (and a level editor?), which still doesn't guarantee to make it better.

So, next updates can take a while longer until I figure out all these stuff.

[UmutD]

My humble level editor is done. I can load & save levels and transfer them to game. In case I want to return to proc. gen. levels, I can also turn it on from the code but if level based design serves well as I think, that won't be necessary.

[Gargoyle440]

Man, this is really fresh and interesting concept.
I really like the soft jump, leaning into the wall thing you mentioned.  Maybe the game could be night/sleep/dream themed and the walls could be pillows?

What if instead of having blocks that you just can't pass through, what if you could pass through them once, then they became impassable terrain?

And tbh, it almost looks like you could port this to iOS and Android without too much difficulty.
Like have the tilt control direction and tap to jump.

[fingerman]

Hi Umutd,

your project lookst interesting. You mentioned there is allways movement, so what does that entail?
What are the controls? It looks as though there is gravity.

Take care,
fingerman

[UmutD]

Man, this is really fresh and interesting concept.
I really like the soft jump, leaning into the wall thing you mentioned.  Maybe the game could be night/sleep/dream themed and the walls could be pillows?

What if instead of having blocks that you just can't pass through, what if you could pass through them once, then they became impassable terrain?

And tbh, it almost looks like you could port this to iOS and Android without too much difficulty.
Like have the tilt control direction and tap to jump.

Hey thanks, that's encouraging to hear! At the beginning I was thinking more grim stuff (bones, skeletons) but as coding progresses, I also find myself wanting to draw more softer stuff (no pun intended). Pillow walls & night theme can be very fun, both to draw and play in Though, whether it's a pillow or something else, I have still no idea how I will choose to animate those stuff, like bending the wall at the impact point without dropping performance. At the end, I might have to go with just animating a very fluid animated character and puffy effects at impact point.

Once passable-then impassable block is also a very neat idea, it completely suits the new path the prototype is going: Twitch-play based short levels where you need to understand patterns and avoid too many mistakes to pass them.

For mobile, I need to talk with my more experienced friends, to ensure if it will work with enough performance. Regarding controls, right now there is also dash besides jump & moving and I intend to keep it. I can activate dash only after making the jump but not yet sure about those details. I guess all will wait until I nail the gameplay feel with all elements in place.

Thanks for the detailed comment!  

[UmutD]

Hi Umutd,

your project lookst interesting. You mentioned there is allways movement, so what does that entail?
What are the controls? It looks as though there is gravity.

Take care,
fingerman

Hey, thanks for your interest! It means that our character is always running, but we can change the direction (with left & right buttons), jump and dash. It currently feels like a platformer where you have a nice amount of control over your character, but also has the fast paced feeling of a runner, where decisions need to be made in a smaller timeframe.

I'm still trying to figure out what this game can be (mostly by throwing things at it), I really like fast paced games with flowing controls (little friction as possible), but I sure don't want to make another standart runner clone.

Thanks again!

[and]

@dlarocque91, thanks!

@and, I'm using Flash since I feel comfortable in it. But game won't be played online, I'm planning to wrap it into an EXE or AIR file in the end. I'm trying to make a small PC game where the design allows more replayability (in a RL-like fashion) compared to my previous games, which feel mostly casual.

Probably something like GameMaker might have been more sensible in this case but I was hesitant to dive into a new tool for the small amount of time I have.

Flash is cool. Flashpunk with Flashdevelop was my goto for a few years but I would 100% recommend GameMaker as that's what I use now - if you decide to make the transition let me know so I can give you a heads up on all the stuff that I got stuck on moving from Flash to GM!

[UmutD]

Wow, that's very kind of you And! Though I wouldn't want to nag you before checking web all over if I decide to make the jump

I half-heartedly searched about GM and Unity several times (some friends constantly said GM has problems in modern systems like Win8 and Unity can do everything it can do and just better, though I was more inclined towards GM because of its simpler interface)... Once upon a time I even acquired a GM license which allowed free win/mac builds and stuff in a weekend deal, but back then I couldn't even understand if I activated my license correctly, yoyogames site & application's license interface was really awkward.

But aside from these superficial excuses, the main reason is that I'm really comfortable with how I am used to work now, and don't have much time, money and energy these days to invest in learning a new engine and making the games at the same time. In the future, may be?

I am trying to circumvent potential flash performance issues by choosing concepts carefully (like avoiding situations when a lot of stuff is updated at the same time, or when the whole screen updates -as in parallax scrolling for eg.-), or just by keeping resolution low if I can't do any better.

Thanks again

[UmutD]

For last several days, I'm in one of those phases when you feel the game isn't fun enough as it is supposed to be. I'm tweaking things, adding new environmental features, trying different enemy types, but couldn't find the rhythm I'm looking for in gameplay yet. On a positive note, the editor has become much more usable and it is also easier to export/import levels now, without breaking the flow.

So, I took some time yesterday and decide to join 4 hour jam to entertain myself a bit. Before this, I participated in 2 private 4hr jams, it's mostly fun because it ends in one night and doesn't drain you as in 48 hr ones.

This time I made a simple Amiga tribute game (though visuals are anamorphic (2:1 pixels) as mostly seen in some C64 games). In case you want to check it out, click on the picture:

[UmutD]

Finally, I created THAT level.

After 2 weeks, I finally managed to create a level that is both fun and has the feeling of a promising game, compared to my previous experiments which felt more like directionless toys or boring random challenges. During this stage, a lot of enemies and ideas didn't work, but now I have a better understanding on what's working.