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[Ishi]

Merry nearly-Christmas!

I've been working hard recently and finished the rope/snail level to a pretty much complete state. This has involved some big features as well as a lot of smaller polishing work.

Here's the list of recent changes that have gone towards this level (from the last 15 days), to give some idea of where the game is at and how progress is going. Some of the changes you will see in the gif / video below!

- Added secret areas hidden behind scenery, with cutout circle around Leilani.
- Added snail enemy to go inside the snail shell.
- Enemies can be spawned at will. So they could be put inside blocks but this is used to spawn a snail from a snail shell.
- Lots of tweaks to behaviour / interaction between the snail shell and other objects.
- Some extra sounds e.g. alert sound when snail sees you.
- Added optional path for the camera so it changes height as Leilani moves horizontally.
- Added optional camera offset per section of level, to give more view below Leilani in vertical areas.
- New fossil cave backdrop for underground beach areas.
- Levels can support two backdrops and switch between them at certain points (for moving from above-ground beach into the cave).
- Various other bug fixes

Watch a 60fps version on Youtube!

Sorry there's no sound on the video, it was a last minute thing really just to provide something better than the gif.

Enjoy and have a good christmas!

[TobiasW]

I just saw your post on Twitter, and wow, does this look charming and fun! And I love how the ropes behave. I hope this feels as good as it looks, haha.

[SolarLune]

Yeah, this is looking great, as usual! I think the diagonal flaming drop could benefit from a jump when it hits the ground, juice-wise? I don't think it'd be fun to miss a jump because Leilani "skips" when she hits the ground, though.

Oh, also, I was thinking, maybe you could have a special kind of sand that requires the player to keep jumping to stay on top of? Just an additional "mechanic" to add some variety to the gameplay. Nice work, anyway!

[Xonatron]

Your rope physics/animation is very well done. Overall a fan of the artwork too!

[Rebusmind]

Wow, this looks so adorable! Maybe soon would be the time to make use of that contact I gave you a while ago?

[Jerom]

I just notice that she has several outfits: nice touch!
Are they collectibles and/or linked to extra-powers?

[Ishi]

Thanks all!

Yeah, this is looking great, as usual! I think the diagonal flaming drop could benefit from a jump when it hits the ground, juice-wise? I don't think it'd be fun to miss a jump because Leilani "skips" when she hits the ground, though.

I did have that in the game a while ago, but it did feel like too much of a loss of control, especially when the fireball can feel a bit hard to control already. The fireball is due for a gameplay / effects pass so I will try to find ways to improve how it looks and feels!

Oh, also, I was thinking, maybe you could have a special kind of sand that requires the player to keep jumping to stay on top of? Just an additional "mechanic" to add some variety to the gameplay. Nice work, anyway!

Ooh or it could be sand that Leilani digs through by rolling? That's something to think about as I'm always after new mechanics that work with the rolling somehow. Thanks for the inspiration!

I just notice that she has several outfits: nice touch!
Are they collectibles and/or linked to extra-powers?

Yep, there's tiny, normal, and fire versions at the moment. Tiny and normal are mostly the same except tiny Leilani can't break bigger blocks. Fire Leilani has the fireball power as seen above! I wrote a bit more about fire Leilani here: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=46289.msg1115934#msg1115934

I may add another powerup alongside the fire one, but I'm not sure yet.

[brantkings]

Dude you're a hero! I'm loving this a lot, thanks for sharing the development.

I specially like how many emergent details you put on the mechanics, like the yellow snail thing destroying spikes and it becoming the green enemy when it leaves. You will have fun on the level design, haha! I can't criticize anything really, so keep up the good work!  

[flipswitchx]

excellent, keep up the good work  ^_^

[Ishi]

Happy new year!

I've had a productive christmas break. I've rewritten a huge amount of the underlying engine code.

Previously I was using an engine called Pixie for the creation of the window, keyboard input, and graphics. I originally used that engine for a few Ludum Dare entries as the simplicity and limitations of software rendering appealed to me. The code for Leilani used my last Ludum Dare entry as a foundation, so it was natural to keep using Pixie.

Now I've replaced it with SDL 2.0 and OpenGL 2.1. SDL creates the window and handles various other things like input. OpenGL is used for the actual rendering. There's no real visible difference - and I won't be suddenly adding rotating, scaling, transparent sprites to the game. I want to stick to the game's existing style.

There are plenty of advantages to the switch! It's a big step towards making the game more easily portable / cross platform. Full-screen mode behaves more nicely now - it doesn't involve any resolution switching so it's pretty quick and doesn't move your other windows around. The game's graphics are in 32-bit rather than 16-bit colour, so that may alter some of the colours very slightly though shouldn't make a lot of difference. I'm also just more comfortable now that the game's code base is all my own work!

There are a couple of other new features that the new engine has allowed me to add.

Joypad Support



The game now supports generic Windows joypads/joysticks as well as Xbox controllers. It's nice to be able to use non-Xbox joypads without having to resort to Joy2Key!

SDL also has the concept of "game controllers", which uses a database of known devices to map the buttons of a joypad to an Xbox-style button layout, if that type of joypad is in the database. I haven't fully looked into this yet but I may include support for it in the game. The main advantage of it is that it's easier to provide a sensible default button mapping for a joypad if you have an idea of the layout, rather than just a list of numbered buttons.

Improved Screen Scaling

Now that I have more control over exactly how things are drawn to the screen, I have added an optional stretch-to-fit screen scaling mode.

Normally the graphics are scaled up by exact sizes only. For example, on a 1920x1080 screen, the game would be drawn at 1600x960 with black borders (4x scale). I like this option when sitting close to the monitor as it keeps everything looking sharp.

The new stretch-to-fit option allows the game to fill more of the screen without becoming a blurry mess. Using 1920x1080 as the example again, it still performs a pixel-perfect 4x scale up to 1600x960. But then this scaled image is smoothly scaled up to fill the remainder of the screen space. There are still black borders on the left and right due to the aspect ratio of the game not being 16:9.



The effect isn't great when viewed this close but you can see how the game's original pixels are still visible. When you look at this on a high dpi monitor or if you're playing on a TV then it looks pretty nice.

Here's a full 1920x1080 screenshot using the new scale option.

http://ishisoft.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/2016-01-03-1080p.png

[mirrorfish]

Very nice man! Charming feel and animations and I too love the rope bending stuff. Looks great. I like the gameplay concept of using the spiked enemies to clear obstacles, that seems like a lot of fun. Keep it up!

[NoLocality]

Saw this a few times and it looks like it's gearing up to be a good one.

The visuals are clean/cute/all-around-nice but IMO the greatest strength I'm seeing is how this appears to 'feel',  it looks like it's just plain ol' fun to have Leilani roll around, grind vines, toss a fireball or queball-ram an enemy.

I'd wager this one is fun to playtest. 

Cheers and good luck sir.

[KaiTheSpy]

I like devlogs where the devs go into the technical bits The games lookin great so far and if you're ever looking for someone to test it I'd be happy to (or not if you don't want to do that)

[Ishi]

Aloha!

UI / Input Improvements

The focus this week has been on improving the game's menus. Whenever I'm in the mood to work on the user interface I just go for it - typically it's something that could be left until later but I don't want to be stuck with loads of UI to do at the end of development.

The big change is that I've added mouse support. This is really handy when you plug in a joypad and the controls aren't properly mapped yet! You can click through to the control settings screen to view the controls and change them.

I've also changed the input system so it'll instantly switch between keyboard / joypad / Xbox Controller when you press a button on that device. So if you're navigating the menu with the keyboard and pick up your joypad instead then it'll update all the button prompts / control settings to show the joypad's buttons.



When you start moving the mouse, Leilani's hand, which normally hovers over the currently selected button, becomes the mouse pointer instead, and the back button appears in the bottom left corner.

I've added new icons for the various options, added the screen scaling option, and generally made things a bit more consistent and more nicely laid out.

I want to put a background underneath the title text for the screen - but I've spent a week on UI which is enough! That's a job for the future.

The pause screen also looks a little nicer now.



Soil Blocks

All this polish is important to me as I think the framework for the gameplay can have a big impact on how the quality and feel of the game is perceived. But I need some gameplay to go inside the wrapper so this week I'm trying out a new mechanic - soil blocks. The idea is that when you roll into them, instead of rebounding, Leilani will stick to it and take a short time to dig through it.

It's partly inspired by Drill Dozer (a GBA game that just came out on the WiiU eShop in Europe - it's amazing!!!), and also the digging-through-sand idea that came up on this devlog a page or two ago. I'm planning on the soil blocks being diggable from the side or the top but not the bottom.

[and]

Yeah I always find UI and menu coding to be one of the least rewarding parts of gamedev; I'm usually just desperate to get it out of the way but that just ends up meaning I revisit it several times to get it done!

The menu's and UI seem to look pretty great to me though - they really match the overall look and feel of the visuals you've got so far.

What are your longer term plans for the game? Do you have a rough idea when I can give you some money?

[Excy]

I come back to Tigsource and find this. What a warm welcoming. Many people have already said this but the look and feel of it just seem so polished and precise. You're doing a really good job.

[Ishi]

Thank you both

What are your longer term plans for the game? Do you have a rough idea when I can give you some money?

My current plan is:
- Get the gameplay and 3 or 4 levels to a point I'm happy with
- Finish off any technical bits (e.g. error handling, debug logging, packing resource files together)
- Give to some people for private playtesting to get initial feedback and iron out any obvious technical issues
- Release a public demo!
- Finish the game (all the levels, boss fights, map screen, more music, etc)
- Sell game (itch.io? steam? etc?)

I can't give a timeline for any of it unfortunately as I don't know how long any of it will take! And it's all subject to change of course depending on my circumstances. I've been making really good progress recently but inevitably have to balance progress on the game with other life stuff. We'll just have to see how it goes Thanks for the support!

[and]

Ah yeah all that pesky life stuff will inevitably get in the way at some point!

Good luck with everything and I look forward to the public demo. Unless you're still looking for private playtesters? In which case I'd be happy to help out - I've recently got hold of some screen recording hardware to do the trailer for Mable, so I can always record my play throughs too, which might be helpful?

Anyway, drop me a private message if I can help out at all

[Hoj]

Great project, amazing animations - looking forward to exploring the island and finding out what the machines are... posting to follow

[Ishi]

Hey everyone!

I had a productive week although was slowed down by getting a cold towards the end. Still got a nice new feature to show off:

Soil blocks

I added the diggable soil blocks that I mentioned last week. Here they are:



I think it feels pretty nice to dig through them, especially when they're in mid-air and you can boost through multiple ones. I should be able to make some nice light traversal puzzles from that.

There are some awkward things that I will iron out over time, like the exact rules for deciding which soil block Leilani will dig if there are multiple around her (e.g. one underneath and one in front), and what happens if an enemy walks into Leilani while she's digging. It's a good first pass though.

I've also changed the behaviour when rolling into walls - as you can see a little bit in the gif Leilani will now slide down the wall rather than bouncing off it immediately. It makes wall-jumping a lot easier and allows Leilani to slide down the wall into diggable blocks.

----

I've started keeping to-do lists for everything I need to work on ready for a playable demo. There are a lot of little bugs and UI tasks, plus some larger scale features. It's useful to know what I need to work on though so I can focus my efforts! The biggest bullet point is "4 playable levels" which really needs to be split up. I'll spend some time planning exactly what gameplay features and graphics I need to add so I know how much is left to do.

Thanks for reading!