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[jctwood]

Really love the glooby glob stuff that drops in in order to exit the level! Great to see this come along.

[CaLooch]

Update 8 - Void design

Along with the null, the void was one of the first designs I put in the game.  I wanted it to be a down time between the action so as a result I wrapped it up in the context of this eerie story to still try and maintain some tension even though the player wasn't fighting anything.  Its actually a difficult thing to get people excited about and show in 5-10 second gifs because its really not a very flashy element.  Its more so something you have to try out for yourself to find it interesting.



The way it works is that its basically like the area from Asteroids.  When a player reaches the end of the screen, they warp to the other side and keep on going.  There are two significant things that I do differently that give it a completely different feel:

1.  The camera is always following the player
2.  The graphics on the edge are continued from the other side of the area

The result is that the player doesn't realize that they just warped to the other side of the area.  It all comes off as very seemless.

I actually prototyped this idea a long time ago (without thinking I was prototyping).  I made a small flash game you can check out here:

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/571258
**FOR THE LOVE OF GOD IF YOU CHECK IT OUT, JUST MUTE YOUR SPEAKERS.  seriously, the music is really annoying and there is no mute button.

I learned a couple things from making that game, and seeing some player feedback:

1.  The wrapping mechanic was "too" seamless. 
Players didn't realize that they were staying all within a finite area and running over the same parts of the area multiple times.  Even when I play, I don't think about it. Which leads into the second point..

2. There need to be significant landmarks
I really want there to be a solid "Ahh hah" moment when the player realizes that they just walked in a circle. The way to do this is to have very identifiable landmarks that the player can have stored in their memory the first time they see it so they instantly recognize it when they pass it again for the first time. With a serious need for something like this, I added the next element.

The center map


It may not look like much but that was what I was going for.  I wanted to make it look like someone was writing on the ground and not some big out of place billboard.  Its the first thing you see when you enter the void and it serves as your home base.   As you open up tears and find other things in the void, they'll be marked on the map for you.  If you can find your way back to the map then you can have some relative sense of where you need to go next. 

I can say from testing that its really easy to get completely lost in the void if you dont have any land marks to go off of.  The larger it is, (and it will get larger as you progress through the game)  the more difficult it is to find your way around. 

The map wont be the only marker as Im progressively adding things like this that will server as other recognizable points.




Getting out

The thing I've been working on the past couple days has been the getting out part.  On the map up there are two markers.  One that says where you are and another vague hint at where to get out.  These are there at the start to lead the player into helping them recognize the goal.  I wanted to keep pushing the under the hood feeling of the void so I decided to do this for the end area (nothing pretty, just a basic implementation)



Admittedly, it isn't flashy, but what's going on seems like a fun idea to play around with.  It takes a small section in the void and expands it into a larger area (that can be whatever size I want) and transitions smoothly out the other side back to the void. Its hard to tell in the gif, but the red area is only taking up a tiny amount of space in the void (about the width and height of the character).  The point of the white mist taking over the screen is because I wanted it to feel like the player is walking into a dense cloud and then it opens up into this area.  Graphically, there is a bunch that needs to be done, but its functional in the code.

The plan is to have some sort of broken up object in this end warp that you would have to piece back together.  Most of these pieces would be scattered through the null.

[jctwood]

The landmark thing seems incredibly important and could be altered slightly later on to really mess with the player. Really nice little design posts though, thanks for sharing : )

[CaLooch]

The landmark thing seems incredibly important and could be altered slightly later on to really mess with the player.

its funny that you mention that because I was thinking of doing something like that a long time ago and forgot about it up until you mentioned it.  I was thinking about something like sprites/images/textures/whatever changing as you spend more time in the void. Something like a body slowly decomposing or things like that.  I hadn't thought about "messing" w/ ppl tho.  That might just open a whole new can of worms of evil ideas.

fwiw I really appreciate all the feedback youre throwing out

[jctwood]

Well glad I brought back some old ideas! I hate forgetting little concepts I have. And no problem about the feedback, it is great to see some deep design posts and I find it hard not to chime in on these things.

[CaLooch]

Update 9 - Controller support

I added support for controllers between yesterday and today in prep for a little demo night Im throwing at my house this weekend with some friends.  The controls for the game were all iterated through for the purpose of being able to transfer over to a controller easily.  I have never made a game that could use a controller before so I was surprised at how easy it was to put in. 

When everything was up and running, the game played SOOO much nicer.  Imagine the difference between playing a game like Dark souls/DMC with a keyboard and then switching to a controller.  Its definitely how the game was meant to be played.  Not that it feels terrible with the keyboard, but overall the combat feels a lot better now. 

Someone other than me will finally be trying out the game this week so I'll report back on that soon.

[jctwood]

Hope everything with your friends goes well! Must be exciting to have someone else give their reaCtions and everything. You whould run some speed run challenges for thto compete a little.

[CaLooch]

Update 10

I finally got around to switching out the placeholder UI for a first draft, with soft coding for the description windows.  I didn't do anything about the life/energy bars yet, still have to figure out something that looks nice with how the code works.

[CaLooch]

Update 11 - Popping the Demo Cherry

I had a scary realization a couple weeks ago.  Noone had tried this game yet.  I've been working on it long enough that it really worried me so I spent the last week or so polishing up and putting together a little demo to show to some friends. Finally last night, I got some people to play and here's the little report.

Some Stats

• 4 playtesters
• 8 attempts at the game (2 per player)
• Average attempt time: ~7.5 minutes
• 7/8 attempts ended due to death
• 1/8 found all of the 5 end pieces scattered around the game
• 2/8 found the glyph + glyph room
• 1/8 found the slums (havent talked about this too much, but its like a shop area

Positive Notes

• The dogs showing tears was very clear and easy to read.  Player C specifically was following murphy's movement at one point because he wanted to find a slum/glyph tear (murphy leads to the those tears, stella leads to null tears)
• Combat seems to have a good, responsive feel to it
• The glyph room is an easy to understand design.  Nobody had a problem with it when they came across it
• Group participation.  I didn't expect it, but when one was playing the other 3 were sitting by yelling "GO THERE!"  "NO, HIT THAT OVER THERE!"  "YOU NEED TO FIND X".  It was really fun to sit back and watch that.
  
• Player D realized the importance of the center map on the final playthrough.  I assume he started paying attention to it because he knew that he needed to find one more tear.  He said at one point, when looking at it, "This HAS to mean something," while player C chimed in that it was acting like a map.
• Player D made it to the end on the 8th playthrough.  I attribute this to finding the skill Dash Bolt (turns your dash into a light attack).

Negatives

• The UI is a mess.  I iterated through it a second time last week because I knew I was going to be doing this demo. Its awful and needs a lot of work.  Luckily, I'm already brainstorming on possible changes that seem to work better (in my head atleast).
• The center map was being ignored at the start of the playthrough. The players weren't realizing that it was a sort of landmark you could go off of.  Player D did figure it out in the end so this might not be such a bad thing
• The use of individual items isn't clear.  I havent talked at all about the items but the ones in the demo mostly served as buffs. You would apply them from the skill bar.  No one really understood how they worked.  I think that it was mostly due to there not being enough graphical feedback as to what was going on.  The tooltips for each item are vague too so maybe the wordage isn't clear.
  
• Some players were skipping tears that murphy was showing them to.  I'm not sure if it was on purpose or they just didn't see the dog moving to the spot)
• Design flaw in how the tears show themselves.  I'll just write about this one more in a different post, but tears that are damaged but not entered, keep their damaged texture.  The player ends up not realizing that they still need to go into that one.
• Various bugs of things that broke the game.

[CaLooch]

Update 12

I spent the night drawing faces.

[CaLooch]

Update 13

There have been a ridiculous amount of changes going on since I had my little demo night last week.  Its funny how much easier it is to see the flaws in your game when you're physically watching someone else play.

The first thing I got to work on was the UI.  Its been a problem since the start.  I've known it the whole time so I kept on iterating and iterating trying to come up with a way to make everything understandable.  The initial idea was that the player would have and inventory full of all their items and skills that they picked up so there needed to be this whole selection screen where you would choose a skill and bind it to a key then close out the menu.  There just wasn't a clean way to pull it off (that I could figure out).

I decided to just rework the way the whole system worked.  There are still the 4 skill types (Light, Heavy, Special, Passive) but now you can only have one equipped at a time.  Passives were the only ones you couldnt activate with a key, so that opened up the 4th action button.  Now I'm using it as an "event" key for whatever customized purpose I need it for (it actually solved about 3 other messy design problems I was having).




The next thing that I started working on was sparked by watching two awesome talks about game feel:



and



There were  a whole lot of ideas I got from those that I hadn't even thought of.  So I've been going overboard with a bunch of juicy effects.  A bunch of it will probably be scaled back hard, or not even used, but I'm just having some fun with it in the mean time.

[CaLooch]

Update 14

Hey TIG.  I spent the past day or two adding in this binary puzzle sort of thing.  I wouldn't exactly call it a puzzle.  It's supposed to be a variation of these glyph key rooms that I showed earlier. They aren't difficult to solve, you just need to come across the proper info/item somewhere else in the level (which is a recurring theme with how the game plays).



Also in other news, a couple weeks ago I snagged an exhibition space at a local gaming convention this November.  Gameacon 

Its the first time I've shown a game at a convention before so it should be exciting.

[CaLooch]

Well it's been a while since I've posted here.

I needed to take a break from this game back in August.  I was working for about 8 months straight on this and was having trouble being able to see my own game.  I hit a bunch of walls in some of the things I was trying to figure out and just needed to take a break.

About 2 weeks ago, I got an email from my school about Brick City Game Expo which is a game expo for students as a part of Minicon. It sounded like a great low-pressure opportunity to show off some of the stuff I've done so I jumped right on it. 

I'm back into the swing of things with working on this project. As soon as I got started again, I got past some of those mental road blocks. Funny how that works.

Ill post a game update soon, just wanted to let ppl know this project isn't dead.

[Jalapenosbud]

Breaks are always a good thing, especially if doing it for a week or longer, because imo it gives a better perspective of the game when you return to it. Like you had some distance from it and then you're able to see the flaws better, and what works and what doesnt

[CaLooch]

Minicon update

I just got back from showing at Minicon yesterday. It was a small comic convention in Newark, NJ that had an indie game expo as part of it.  This was my first convention ever, let alone my first time showing off one of my games. I had a blast. I met a bunch of other devs and tried their games while hanging out too. There were a bunch of people who tested my game and pretty much all of the feedback was positive.

Pros

• Positive feedback
• People were managing to figure out most of the things in the demo. I didn't have to step in and give any hints
• Seeing the expressions/body language of players when they figured something out. They looked so relieved that it put a smile on my face every time
• Saw a bunch of little improvements that I can keep making
• Made a sign in about 30 minutes the night before with art stuff laying around. Got some compliments on that
• The game didn't crash once in the 8 hours I left it up and running

Cons

• I didn't print any business cards. Rookie mistake
• Really wish I had set up a website to direct people to for more info. A twitter handle wasn't good enough
• There wasn't a way to get back to the main menu from the game. If someone walked away, I had to take the controller and kill myself to reset

There were a few playtesters that were a lot of fun to watch. One guy sat and played for about 30 minutes. He died once, restarted and played it again until the end. He really worked for it too. I saw him trying to figure out all the little puzzles that the game has. Afterwards the comment I remember him making was "finish the game".

The other one that was funny, was a little 5yo kid running around in a deadpool costume. He was walking around with his dad and sat down to play. I had forgot how dark/morbid the game actually is so as I'm talking the dad explaining to him that the game is kind of like those cartoons for kids with adult jokes underneath. The dad was cool and understood. Luckily the kid was too young to read. Mini deadpool was having so much fun picking stuff up and finding the dogs. His dad had to pull him away even tho the kid wanted to still play after dying once. I'm pretty sure the dad was a little concerned about the mature content. But a point to make about that is that I guess the game is designed well enough that a 5yo can understand whats going on. +1 in my book.


All and all, I think it went really well. I do think a change of description is in order tho. I didn't realize it until yesterday but this game is actually a puzzle game with some combat, not the other way around. People definitely liked the combat, but it was the puzzle aspect of the game that was holding their attention. I realized that I need to start describing it more in that way.

[CaLooch]

Update 15(?)

I finally got around to working on the other character animations. I was running with Poe for so long because I wanted to be 100% sure about how many animations each character would need.




Lumen's first draft for his attack came didn't come out quite right

[CaLooch]

Update 16

I've been working on a bunch of different things for the past couple weeks.

I went back through the Null environments and finalized how I wanted to do those. I posted awhile ago about there being pits that you could fall into. Originally, that didn't tie into the objective too well. So I sat on that idea for awhile until I got it to where it is now. All the sections are still randomly generated but now they have layers where the environment falls back more as it goes down. It all makes the area have a very 3D feel.

The other thing that I tweeked pretty hard was the combat. I added a basic implementation of a combo bar so that players could have a visual for the timing. It makes it all a lot less button-mashing and more controlled. I tied it into the dash as well so you can pull off larger chains. Right now, a 3 chain combo launches an extra effect for the skills. There's a lot of potential for making different skills work together with that.

[CaLooch]

Update 17

Just a small update today. Here are some screenshots of some more narrative elements.

One of the first thing the player runs into. Our heroes being partially digested.



The Man in the Box has a really dark and in depth story to figure out...




... but he's a bit bitter.

[CaLooch]

Well this devlog got really dusty.

I still come back and work on this thing every now and then so I finally posted a build online. Go ahead and check it out here https://thecalooch.itch.io/null-and-void-demo

[quantumpotato]

I'm no graphic designer but adding texture to the text or maybe a shadow(?), or maybe slanting it more would make it look "written on the ground"