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[Sixmorphugus]

Hi! For the time being, I've stopped updating this topic. This is mainly because everything I am currently doing is technical, and I have nothing cool to show you. Later on, this'll reopen.

Thirteen days.
Twenty-one hours.
Thirty-six minutes.
And twenty-two seconds.
That is when the world will end.












(always the newest images)

Super Alchemist is a game where you manipulate the world around you to succeed - writing your own "spells" with the game's block programming language:

(WIP)

You play as Plug - a sheltered city-boy who speaks only in lowercase. Living as the adopted son of a chairman in the world's only university (and being surrounded by the newest technological innovations of a fairytale world as a result) has given Plug a difficult choice in how to live his life - to spend it furthering new technology and writing the programs that will help thousands, or studying the world itself, and, in doing so, finally discovering its true origin.

What Plug doesn't know is that he won't have to choose.





I've been working on a lot of music for the game. The soundtrack is mostly made using Nintendo synths and 8 bit
instruments, but is also heavy on orchestral stuff.

Soundtrack samples:
Savepoint
Broke His Crown
Ambush
Duel
Man In The Corner
BONES
Wild Rouge



Sitatop is Super Alchemist's art guy, working on all of our art and character animations. Check it out:



Be aware that most of the stuff you see here won't make sense yet.



Super Alchemist runs in the MAGE RPG engine, my custom built engine made specifically for top down perspective RPG shooters. It's got some cool features:

Code:

- seamless pixel perfect graphical scaling
- controller support (Xbox)
- keybinds (and controller binds)
- mouse/keyboard hybrid menu systems
- prefab-based object system for saving/loading and creation of levels
- multilayered tile based worlds with dynamic shadows and "lighting"
- custom shader support
- "physics"
- very cool developers

[Sixmorphugus]

We've been working on the shadowing code and the map tilesets. Here's some new stuff!


As you can see, the shadows aren't perfect yet (perfection with shadows is kind of a feat in 2D) but they're in a state where we're pretty happy to keep moving.

Hopefully, we'll soon have a full dungeon to show you...

[Sixmorphugus]

Some work has been done on the engine's dialog/text display code to make character dialog and menus much more interesting.

Here is what we have so far; in this test, we took a bunch of text from homestuck (page 3) and enhanced it with the engine text styles.

(click for full size)

Keep in mind that this looks smoother in the actual game, as with most gifs these days ):

[greay]

This has definitely whetted my interest. I'm looking forward to seeing more!

minor questions on the engine: is OS X a possibility? also PS4 controller support?

[Sixmorphugus]

This has definitely whetted my interest. I'm looking forward to seeing more!

minor questions on the engine: is OS X a possibility? also PS4 controller support?

Engine is multiplatform (and currently supports both windows and linux), so sure! As for PS4 controllers, I'm not entirely sure how to do them but I can look into it further into development.

[Sixmorphugus]

After finishing a new song for the game's soundtrack, I've decided to link to a few (i.e. more than one) in the main post.

In other news, we're doing an art overhaul of the levels again - this is partly because level shadows have been removed (and thus everything needs clearly defined edges again) but also because I personally want there to be a few less colors in the game's sprites.

At the moment, things seem to be a little hit and miss in terms of sprites:



Certain features of this level look very cool, and others seem very generic and washed out. Is this just me?

We've already tried some other styles, as shown in this even older screenshot. Keep in mind these are zoomed in because the camera was at the time, and cropped to fit the tigsource page size.


Maybe I've been looking at my own game for too long. I've found a few devlogs where all the game art uses a specific palette, and, after seeing how good it looks, I want to try a similar style. I feel that a bit of limitation might make assets both easier to make and better looking in the long run.

[Sixmorphugus]

Here's some stuff that, in my opinion, looks a lot closer to how we eventually want the game to look.
This is the WIP desert temple outdoor tileset:




Note that:
Plug's actually looking at you now.
If you move up, then stop, Plug will face backwards unless you have a gun out.

[Sixmorphugus]

LICEcap is cooperating! GIFs galore!

I'm only going to post one for spam reasons, but I've added three to the OP now.

[Sixmorphugus]

Note: this knight's slit effect happens when the game is actually run at 800x600 right now - I record at this size to make sure footage fits on Tig, but the game runs at a higher resolution where this doesn't happen.

[TheArtistJiii]

I take it this is a story focused game? What are the elements of gameplay? Combat? Exploration? Creating/crafting?

[j-swan]

I like the limited palette. Curious to see the enemies next.

[tankorsmash]

How are you doing the text effects? I've thought about doing stuff like this and could never come up with a good way of doing it without going through each character and doing all kinds of work on it.

[Thirteen]

The game is looking pretty already, keep it up!

[Sixmorphugus]

The game is looking pretty already, keep it up!

I like the limited palette. Curious to see the enemies next.

Thanks for your support, guys!

I take it this is a story focused game? What are the elements of gameplay? Combat? Exploration? Creating/crafting?

Super Alchemist's main mechanic is not in a showable state yet. It involves the gun that can aim but currently doesn't shoot. I remember I put up a description of the concept but it ended up being too convoluted to fit into the OP, so I took it down. I might put up some pictures later.

This is also why our subtitle is currently a bunch of question marks - I don't feel ready to introduce our mechanic until I can show it working in the game.

Exploration does play a big part - for most of the game, you'll be looking around small towns, large dungeons, or sprawling wilderness. However, it won't exactly be freeform - we don't have the time or the manpower to make an exceptionally huge world. Think Undertale's size - a place that feels large but turns out to be fairly straightforward.

How are you doing the text effects? I've thought about doing stuff like this and could never come up with a good way of doing it without going through each character and doing all kinds of work on it.

The code to start the cutscene looks like this:

Code:

// start a test cutscene
cutscene::data::segment seg;
std::vector<cutscene::data::segment> dataVec;

seg.displayedText = "* [a:jitter]This is test speach.[a:none] It will probably[c:ff0000] NOT [c:ffffff]appear anywhere in the game.";
seg.portraitTexture = "ui_portrait_bones";
dataVec.push_back(seg);

seg.displayedText = "* Notice how the camera moved up just now? That's because of cutscene settings!";
seg.displayAtTop = true;
seg.portraitTexture = "ui_portrait_bones";
seg.focusOffset = sf::Vector2i(0, -256);
dataVec.push_back(seg);

seg.displayedText = "* It's all very clever!";
seg.displayAtTop = false;
seg.portraitTexture = "ui_portrait_bones";
seg.focusOffset = sf::Vector2i(0, 0);
dataVec.push_back(seg);

seg.displayedText = "* You can even display text that accepts itself, if you want...";
seg.portraitTexture = "ui_portrait_bones";
seg.waitTime = 4.f;
dataVec.push_back(seg);

seg.displayedText = "* Closing in 3";
seg.portraitTexture = "";
seg.waitTime = 1.f;
seg.textSpeed = -1.f;
dataVec.push_back(seg);

seg.displayedText = "* Closing in 2";
seg.portraitTexture = "";
seg.waitTime = 1.f;
seg.textSpeed = -1.f;
dataVec.push_back(seg);

seg.displayedText = "* Closing in 1";
seg.portraitTexture = "";
seg.waitTime = 1.f;
seg.textSpeed = -1.f;
dataVec.push_back(seg);

cutscene::data cd;
cd.segments = dataVec;

// call func
startCutscene(cd);

And yes, we're going through every letter.

[Sixmorphugus]

Menus are now magicText, meaning you can do stuff like this:


Also:

[Sixmorphugus]

I've overhauled the look of the cutscene system. Also, controls are now displayed onscreen. I literally had to draw every key on the keyboard for this to work.

[Sixmorphugus]

We have scaffolding now

[Sixmorphugus]

Okay, so what I've done now is added the beginnings of a physics system used mainly in combat situations. You can see that, while I can't shift the boxes by simply walking into them, if I add X velocity to the character (i.e. press DELETE) he'll be thrown animationlessly to the left.

The rules are simple: hitting a non-physics object will nullify your velocity in the direction you're blocked, and hitting a physics object will devide your velocity between it and you, causing both you and the thing you hit to move at that speed. This applies to every other physics object that hits something or is hit by something, and the relationship is coded to work intelligently so that it won't happen "backwards" for any reason. This leads to some interesting and even "newton's cradle" situations when I spawn about 100 crates and throw my character into them repeatedly:

(warning, long gif!)


The "impact" routine is derivable, meaning I'll be able to do things like make the character take damage when this happens. Also notable is that the inventory has been redesigned for 800x600 displays and will now use single-menu format when the resolution is below a certain threshold.

I might put out videos soon, because the game, believe it or not, now has sound; and you can't hear it that in a GIF.

[Oscar Blomqvist]

While the game looks good in general, I have to say that I really like your UI. Those hearts, as well as the menu with its transition animation looks great.

[Sixmorphugus]

While the game looks good in general, I have to say that I really like your UI. Those hearts, as well as the menu with its transition animation looks great.

Thanks! I've agonised over the UI so this is very encouraging. 



Different physics objects have weight and drag now: