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[oahda]

Most of the time i have no clue what you're talking about
but it's still fascinating to read whenever this is updated.

Aww. Well. Hopefully I'll be getting back to some more game progress soon again. I've just been so excited to learn more about modern C++ these last few days and fix up a bunch of engine flaws.

the submarine is really cute when in motion.

Not sure how fitting that is given the intended mood of the game. I do like the submarine myself too tho.

You could very well have a future as a professor of game design somewhere...

Don't know how conventional my ideas are since I've only ever been doing game development individually, but at least it all works in a way that I am personally really happy with!

[oahda]

UPDATE 66

Progress instead of boring code!

Complete chain and magnet mechanics redux deluxe~

Started the other day by doing something rather drastic: I deleted all of the contents of the files making up the chain and magnet functionality!

Design decision

Having a free-moving chain was purdy durn cool. It was, however, also rather bug-prone; a million ways in which it could potentially tunnel through other objects, and still the movement was a bit jaggy.

So I turned to the Zelda games. I figured there is probably good reason the hookshot — and for that matter the rope with which treasure is hauled up in Wind Waker — briefly locks the movement of Link (or the boat in the latter case).

Well, I had in fact considered this even before I set out and made the old version of the chain and magnet you've seen before, but decided to try the more ambitious method back then. But extensive testing by two people has now lead to the decision against that method, after all.

New design

So the mechanics for launching the chain or more slowly reeling it down to haul things up have now been completely redone.

Besides destroying all those bug opportunities, it also made the code a thousand times cleaner and shorter. It was also programmed directly using systems that didn't exist back in the first version: the input system I've been describing in my last two posts and even the sequencer system recently shown off for cutscenes. Both of these new systems made it so much smoother to work with.

And here it is in action:



Above you see the following mechanically:

• Submarine stopping dead (all other buttons et c. locked) whenever chain is launched or reeled out.
• Submarine immediately regaining control as soon as the chain is back.
• Submarine rotating to face straight left or right before reeling out the chain.
• Chain always getting automatically retracted; it never stays hanging behind the sub now!

Also, not seen above:

• Quickly press launch button again to abort and reel the chain in again immediately.
• Reeling using trigger button which may be able to control speed by how hard it's being pushed.

Visual details and the like:

• Submarine getting a nudge when shooting and retracting. There is also slight gamepad rumble!
• Magnet getting properly rolled out to / in from the 270° angle when getting reeled and not just shifting 90° directly.

Works more or less exactly like Zelda's hookshot and Wind Waker's reeling rope.

I have yet to reïmplement claw and magnet, tho magnetism toggle is there again.

I also remapped the buttons for this. On gamepad, right shoulder shoots, right trigger reels, left shoulder toggles magnetism and left trigger grips with claw. One of the four buttons takes magnet out and back in again.


BUGZ!!!

Got this gem along the way. Looks like Lucky Luke spinning his revolver or something. Very elegant.




Proper screenshot

Forgot to add the pretty normal mapped stone wall back in, tho.




(same update on Patreon)

[bornander]

Where has Princessa gone?
It has been way too long since this Dev log was updated.

[oahda]

Oops. I missed this message. Hello, bornander!

I've been pretty down in the dumps. Summer heat isn't helping either. I think it might be getting better soon now, tho.

Definitely feels motivating to have someone actually ask for me, at least, so thanks a bunch. I think I needed that.

I know exactly what I need to do next. I just need to find the energy.

[oldblood]

Sorry to hear you've been feeling down a bit. Happens to the best of us, I know I take serious morale hits periodically and we all have different ways of dealing with the bullshit of life. Take your time and recover, Vatnsmyrkr will be waiting... (and so will I).

[ProgramGamer]

Hey, I just read through your devlog and I'm glad you're working on this again! Forget what I said in delete everything, I'm following this game! I especially like how cold the game feels, almost like real deep sea. I can't wait for you to release this!

[oahda]

Thanks again. I don't really know how to put my appreciation into words, but it really does mean a lot.

Girlfriend and I will be doing Ludum Dare by the end of August at least, which is either going to wear me out completely or kindle my fire again, I guess. But it's going to be great to have her back home after like a month and a half too, so I think that's going to help as well. I suppose we'll be working together on our other game again too. But hopefully I'll be getting back to this as well.

I hope I'll be able to capture more of a sea feel when I put more stuff and fancy effects in there. Only water and little particles so far.

[oahda]

I suppose I can post as an intermediate update the last thing I was working on before The Great Decline™: making waves break against walls and not bleed into other rooms and stuff. Haven't tuned the bubbles and stuff yet but at least the system is working:

[bornander]

Oops. I missed this message. Hello, bornander!

I've been pretty down in the dumps. Summer heat isn't helping either. I think it might be getting better soon now, tho.

Definitely feels motivating to have someone actually ask for me, at least, so thanks a bunch. I think I needed that.

I know exactly what I need to do next. I just need to find the energy.

Sorry to hear you haven't been feeling great, glad to hear you're feeling better.

Exactly what you need to do next is to get to a point where you feel well.

It's good to have you back.

[oahda]

Exactly what you need to do next is to get to a point where you feel well.

True, true.

It's good to have you back.

Well, I didn't really know I was missing! Thanks.

[oahda]

All right, so I ended up playing around for a couple of hours tonight with other stuff than what I claimed to know I needed to do.

Played around with temporary graphics (royalty-free textures and stuff) just to try and capture more of the intended feel and a sense of depth (background is parallax), adding some backgrounds and some moonlight and some fog above the water. Had to code up some additions to the particle system and some other stuff.



I wasn't able to upload stuff to Imgur, so you'll have to go here (Photobucket I just set up) and hover over the picture and click the magnifying glass to see it in HD.

Fog is a particle system so it moves around. Moonlight is static. Background is parallax.

Things started to slow down a bit but I managed to get the above look while actually turning lighting off entirely for all these new elements and it still holds up, so that's good. Also apparently all those black blocks had light calculations going on so removing that from all of them sped things up too. But I need to do a lot more optimisations, and generally tile stuff a bunch.

So yeah, this is pretty much a colour sketch of sorts using online stock images and some light beams and fog particles I made quickly in GIMP. Won't look like this in the end, of course, but I like the atmosphere.

[oldblood]

That looks amazing. I keep saying this game is going to look so gorgeous once the art starts coming together. I'm already on the hype train...

[oahda]

Thanks!


Did some more stuff other than I'm supposed to be doing today, but at least I'm having fun and doing progress of some sort. Probably need to do a couple of chores throughout the rest of the evening, so I'll just post now and call it a night programming-wise.


Added some depth to the body of water, a bit inspired by Rain World:

And a bit of tinkering with the water shader in general, with colours and so on, primarily increasing the difference in colour and light between above water and below.

Also found some mistakenly clumsy parts in the shader controlling the spotlight and moved stuff to the right place, making it a lot faster and the lag I had problems with yesterday disappeared (basically it calculated normal mapping and some other stuff several more times every frame than it was supposed to because I had forgotten to break a loop).


Messing with the stuff related to said normal mapping, I also made the light cone brighter at the base, which seemed natural. Also decreased the self-light of the submarine.

[oahda]

Welp, I ended up doing no chores at all, but I did add one more little detail to the game. Added support for different water depths (talking about depth into the 3rd dimension here, of course, not depth as in deep water) in different places, so that the body of water in the big room reaches farther back than the one in the small, enclosed room with the wall closer to the submarine:

[oahda]

Messed with the water a bit more. As the line in the background is a bit far away it didn't really make sense that the waves would spread all the way to the back, so I've been playing around with making it not do that to try and sell the 3D effect a bit better.

[sidbarnhoorn]

Hi Ava, this looks great! Have been reading through your thread and the progress. I love the atmosphere you've created! I look forward to seeing it develop further. Keep it up and good luck! :-)

[oahda]

Oh, my. :$ Thanks!


Lack of updates recently. I have been doing a bunch of work lately, actually, but it has mostly been engine stuff and not really any game stuff.

Increased performance a bunch in various ways, reworked some systems to allow for more easy spontaneous editing of individual objects (work on materials) and shaders, and I finally made the engine/game detect when a gamepad is connected or disconnected; previously it would only do so on startup and if anything was connected after that it would not be detected (especially annoying if a controller decides to randomly turn off in the middle of testing).


But I have admittedly also been playing a bunch of Banjo, Zelda and baking cakes (okay, I didn't bake them; girlfriend did, but I helped a little). And still trying to find paid work (employment)...

Been doing a bit of work on PUSE as well tho not enough to update that thread either.


And I (we!) did Ludum Dare, of course!

As I shamelessly advertised my LD game here last time, I might as well do so this time as well.

Blog post: http://ludumdare.com/compo/2015/08/24/turn-on-the-light/

Entry: http://ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-33/?action=preview&uid=6155






EDIT:
Oh, and forgot this little gem from Twitter: Marte made the submarine in Scribblenauts: Unlimited!

[oahda]

Spent some more days with technical stuff, but I thought I might drop this GIF of the jellyfish tentacles finally smoothly following the movements of the submarine. It was a bit buggy and completely lacked interpolation before, but I never got around to fixing it.



Otherwise I've kept going with my refactoring and optimisation of the rendering pipeline and so on. Like I've said before, I don't do premature optimisations, but it was indeed time for some mature ones.

Particle system was next.

Figured out how to render to texture in OpenGL and so the particle system now does that and then applies the heavy shaders (lighting, water) onto the one rendered image instead of each individual particle, which gave a nice boost in performance.

I also introduced a system of tiling/repetition to the particle systems, so that the particles scattered across the water, floating around, are really only rendered on a ninth of the screen (width and height divided by three), seamlessly repeating at the edges (which it already did before but for the whole screen) and then this texture is repeated to cover the entire screen. 7 particles thus look like 63 in the end, or even more when the camera is zoomed out. Worked out nicely for these particles and did indeed increase performance another bit.

[eigenbom]

Great submarine design I'm not sure about the normal mapping, or maybe it just needs to be toned down a lot. Anyway, good luck with the game.

[oahda]

Yeah, I haven't touched it at all yet. I just implemented the functionality with a non-tiling texture with a premade normal map I got off a tutorial just to test it.

It's not made for the game and I haven't messed with the settings much, so it won't look like that in the end. Going to make something custom, of course.

All graphics are currently placeholders, really, possibly including even the submarine, because I'm no longer working with the artist who drew it so I'll probably end up having to change stuff around with a different artist (perhaps my girlfriend if she wants to) eventually.

Plus of course there's going to be mapping all over the place and not just on the wall, to make the lighting pseudo-dynamic, so stuff is going to be more consistent.

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Happy you like the submarine design, tho! I can take full credit for that one, at least.

And in general the submarine is going to be a bit more dynamic when moving, not just the tentacles. The bell of the jellyfish is of course going to pulsate more when the sub is in motion, and the "pectoral fins" are going to be turning when the submarine is.

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Thanks for the luck-wishing!