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[Zorg]

Note - I have began using only links, instead of actually embedding the images, this is due to the fact that I don't want to ruin some people's data caps, and frankly it just fills up the page. 

Just put something like "image heavy" in the thread title and go on. I guess you will get more views with images.

I'm curious how your puzzle design will look in later levels. I think your mechanic could lead to frustration pretty easily:
a) The character is standing at a rune and sees a tunnel and a hole at the ceiling: obviously he has to shapeshift into a dog to use the tunnel and bird to pass the hole in the ceiling. If it's too obvious, what the player has to do, it's boring and runes could even auto-shapeshift the character to save the player some time.
b) The character arrives at a position but obviously is in the wrong shape to continue this path, which leads to backtracking to the last rune and returning to the previous position to continue.

Following.

[TopherPirkl]

Yeah, definitely following this one too. I like the concept, interested to see where you go with it.

[Mckenon]

Note - I have began using only links, instead of actually embedding the images, this is due to the fact that I don't want to ruin some people's data caps, and frankly it just fills up the page. 

a) The character is standing at a rune and sees a tunnel and a hole at the ceiling: obviously he has to shapeshift into a dog to use the tunnel and bird to pass the hole in the ceiling. If it's too obvious, what the player has to do, it's boring and runes could even auto-shapeshift the character to save the player some time.
b) The character arrives at a position but obviously is in the wrong shape to continue this path, which leads to backtracking to the last rune and returning to the previous position to continue.

These have been urging problems for quite a while now, I've thought of possibly implementing some sort of a fast-travel system between Rune stones, still not sure if that'd make things too easy or not. 

As far as puzzle design goes, we won't only have navigating terrain as the sole-difficulty to the player. I'll be incorporating things like timed puzzles, gear puzzles, etc. later on. 

Thanks for the follow!

[slarti88]

This looks pretty interesting and I think the possibilities are pretty huge. For example you could change what the level looks like when you shift between characters and use that to create interesting puzzles. Like one of the characters could be from another dimension so he might see different things. Of course as I type this I realize its a bit similar to Guacamelee, but maybe it might give birth to interesting ideas!

[Zorg]

A rune-travelling system may be a good idea. For example: the possibility to return to the last activated rune.

Talking about timing, i think the dog could be faster. I'm really courious what you have in mind for the different shapes. I just thought about a cat as an "enemy" for example: you would simply be eaten as a bird so you have to get rid of the cat first, using the dog shape. Or you could add a button which always turns you back to your human shape. Flying as a bird, turning human, grabbing an object from the ceiling. Or a long jump as a dog, and grabbing the cliff as human. Do you plan to add runes which work only for X seconds for your timed puzzles? There are a lot of possibilities, i'm looking forward to your ideas.

[Mckenon]

A rune-travelling system may be a good idea. For example: the possibility to return to the last activated rune.

Talking about timing, i think the dog could be faster. I'm really courious what you have in mind for the different shapes. I just thought about a cat as an "enemy" for example: you would simply be eaten as a bird so you have to get rid of the cat first, using the dog shape. Or you could add a button which always turns you back to your human shape. Flying as a bird, turning human, grabbing an object from the ceiling. Or a long jump as a dog, and grabbing the cliff as human. Do you plan to add runes which work only for X seconds for your timed puzzles? There are a lot of possibilities, i'm looking forward to your ideas.

Hrm, I hadn't thought of only travelling to the last activated rune... yeah. That'll be a lot easier. 

As far as movement speeds and such, I plan on having a private alpha test to help fine-tune things like that, through player testing.

I'm not sure if you know what the animals in the game are, so on the off chance that you don't:

• Human
• Dog
• Bird
• Monkey
• Bull

Also thought I'd drop in and show you guys some of the code concept for the level editor, along with some of the new art changes. 

Greedy meshing, essentially making it so that the map's collision isn't 2500+ collision boxes.(which equates to around 10,000 individual vertices), which is optimized to detect edging and such, so for instance if you have a map that is 10x10, and fill it:

Code:

oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo
oooooooooooooooooooo

It has 400 individual vertices, however once ran through the collision optimization system, it now only has 4 vertices, and looks like this:

Code:

o                  o








o                   o

Anyways, here's the doc:


Along with this, some changes to the art are being made, due to feedback from others, and just general changes. This picture shows a few of the changes.

[Mckenon]

I hadn't factored Finals. Sorry about that, I'll have an update in a few days. 

[Mckenon]

Whew, been a busy week, (finals), however I atleast finished the first half of both the finals and the editor.

Changelog:
Ported the Pixel Perfect camera system to the map editor
Added dynamic tiles(ie. tiles change texture depending on surroundings.)
Added a working layer system
Added tile deletion
Added an effect for the layer system(Makes tiles on other layers visible, but transparent.)
   Along with this I made it so that sprites on the selected layer render above the others, regardless of layer order.
Optimizations:
   Made it so that tiles on other layers aside from the selected layer won't update.
   Made it so that tiles don't constantly update, but only update when interacted with(or within a 1 tile vicinity.).
   Made it so that on initial load of the editor, tiles load in randomly(between 0.0s and 0.6s), to reduce initial lag.



Todo:
   Add tile variant support
   Add Entity placement
   Add light placement(should probably just be filed with entity placement)
   Add Saving
   Add Loading
   Add other things that I haven't thought of yet but will probably be necessary.

[Mckenon]

Welp, it's been a busy night.  

My colleague has posted his second development log for Remnant.

I added a few things, all displayed in this GIF:

Changelog:

Code:

Added Tile variations
Added Shift Tile variations(Holding shift whilst scrolling allows for changing variants quickly)
Made in-editor tiles dependent on the Map, instead of relying on a copy of their tile.
Added a 'preview' mode, that allows the player/person/editor to view the map as it would be in-game(render-order wise, atleast.)
Added the new textures into the editor
Re-worked the delay in between spawns of the tiles to be a bit more random
Allowed the camera's zoom to go out a little farther.

Todo:

Code:

Add prefab placement
Add lighting placement
Add entity placement
Add light preview in preview mode
Add Saving/loading
Add in-game loading
Possible editor UI redesign

Thanks for reading! I'll be updating this either when I have enough to post about, or on the forthcoming Thursday.

[Mckenon]

Hi, again. This week I've been working on the map editor(surprise, surprise.). I've added a few things over this week.
(side note- I'm also including the changelog from the previous post, as that work files into this week as well.)

Changelog:

Code:

Added Tile variations
Added Shift Tile variations(Holding shift whilst scrolling allows for changing variants quickly)
Made in-editor tiles dependent on the Map, instead of relying on a copy of their tile.
Added a 'preview' mode, that allows the player/person/editor to view the map as it would be in-game(render-order wise, atleast.)
Added the new textures into the editor
Re-worked the delay in between spawns of the tiles to be a bit more random
Allowed the camera's zoom to go out a little farther.

Now, onto what I did for the rest of the week.
Changelog:

Code:

Added a file saving and loading system(more on this below the changelog)
Fixed a bug where when changing layers the system would delete the contents of the previous layer.
Fixed a bug that made tiles not update until being moused over.

The saving and loading system
The system I have set up for saving and loading is pretty simple.
When making the system, I heavily used BinaryWriter and BinaryReader, which allowed me to simply write a variable to a file, then call it back to another variable later, given that I read the bytes of the file in the same order as they were written.
As far as file types go, I went with a generic .map, which stores byte data(This means that it's a little bit more difficult for someone to steal someone else's map, and change the author property(which I still need to add).

Thanks for reading! I'll be updating this either when I have enough to post about, or on the forthcoming Thursday.

[Mckenon]

Recently I was notified that another game developer had been creating a game called Remnant(My intended name), since Feb. 2015(According to a TIGSource Devlog), given that this person is already greenlit and has a kickstarter, I'm going to assume that they would like to keep the name(I have sent them emails regarding a change though.). Due to this, I have made this pastebin in efforts of deciding on a new name.

A list of the possible new names is as follows:

The Necklace
The Gem
The Final Fragment
Final Fragment
Forgotten Relic
Memento
The Remnant
The Final Remnant
Artifact
Lost Artifact
Remnant of The Past
Vestige

Along with this if you have another name that you would like to suggest, please let me know.

EDIT -- We are strongly considering using the name Runed

On to the devlog:
I've been working on a new system for the map editor, called the circuit system   , What this will do, is allow people who are editing maps to create connections between entities(ie. a button and a door).
For this I'm going to use a GUI that's as basic as it gets; a line drawn between the two objects.

On to the actual changelog!

Made it so that tiles update thier surroundings when a variant is added/removed.
Started concept for a 'circuit' system in the map editor
Added an input and output array to each tile object for in game computing
Integrated circuitry system per tile into the file saving/loading code
Added a line rendering display of connections between objects
Optimized the layer system so that all layer objects aren't on at the same time, but only a transparent display of the two surrounding layers.
Made it so that all layers aside from the currently selected layer aren't constantly updated.

[Mckenon]

New Entity System
During the past couple of days, I've been working on adding a new system to the level editor for Remnant. I added an Entity system to the editor which will allow for people to place things like lights and enemies.
The way I accomplished this, was having all tiletypes >100 be entity types, and adding a custom class called EntityType.
With this system I can easily do something like this:

Code:

public class EntityType_Light : EntityType
{
    public EntityType_Light()
    {
        propertyHandlers.Add("Range");
        propertyHandlers.Add("Intensity");
        propertyHandlers.Add("Color_R");
        propertyHandlers.Add("Color_G");
        propertyHandlers.Add("Color_B");

        foreach (string s in propertyHandlers)
        {
            properties.Add("");
        }
    }
}

And then in another script:

Code:

myTile.entityType = new EntityType_Light();

Along with this I added a UI for editing the properties of an entity, as seen in this gif:


Well, that's all I have for now.
The next thing that I will be adding is a preview of the color when editing the rgb values, and also a preview of lighting when in the editor's "preview" mode.  

[Mckenon]

Well, I've managed to add a light color preview, and fixed saving and loading to support entities 

Gif:

[Mckenon]

I've added a tileset selector UI, along with an interface for changing what variant a tile uses(this can also be accomplished by holding shift and scrolling on the tile.)

Here's a gif of it in action! 


Along with this, I've got some progress on a possible logo, share your opinions on it, if you will!

[Mckenon]

Lights... Lights everywhere! 

[Mckenon]

Slime AI, Camera FX, and a bunch of other stuff added.

[Mckenon]

Imported in some new animations for the slime, including a walk animation and a bounce animation. 

Also added a new form of AI for hostile entities(showcased after the pause in the gif.)

[Mckenon]

I've just merged the level editor with the game!

The system previously consisted of two separate programs(Runed_Game, Runed_Editor), and thus two different projects to open etc.
This also meant that to load up/test a map that had been created the user had to do the following:

• Save the map
• Exit the editor
• Move the file from the /maps/ folder inside of the editor's data folder to the game's /maps/ folder
• Start the game
• Select the map
• Test the level

Now the system is:

• Save the map
• Go to main menu
• Select the map
• Test the level

This doesn't guarantee user-made maps, but it does mean that the likelihood of them has been significantly increased. 

 

[Mckenon]

I decided to make a GIF of the quick creation of a small level, to showcase testing maps, and switching from game to editor. 

[Mckenon]

The more I work on this game, the closer I am to completing it it. It was recently brought to my attention that I should begin building a community around my game, which is something that I haven't really attempted to do.

Today I'm going to change that. I've created two new pages devoted to Runed:
A Facebook page, and a Subreddit.


I'm going to put a large piece of text here to draw the attention of whomever is browsing through for images as well, just in-case they didn't notice the text. 
New social links:
Facebook page
Subreddit