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[CodeSquares]

Be careful with managers, before you know it you're down the dark path of ManagerManager. :D

[pnch]

@CodeSquares: Yes, I read Singletons are mostly considered a BAD THING, but objects getting passed to each other by themselves were becoming hard to track, and since I was already using GameObject.Find to find the same manager on most objects  on startup, which is also a BAD THING for performance...

As you can see, I´m learning as I go along, I got it easier to debug for now, working faster, and if I happen to stumble upon a better coding practice to apply (what will likely happen), It will now be easier to adopt. Atm, this allowed me to reach an inmediate goal (dynamically change the splitscreen setup) so it´s OK until I hit the next wall with my head and learn from the hit (surely soon enough ).

So, thanks for your advice, it´s more than welcome!

[pnch]

Update #15: Playable menu rev2

Streamlined the playable menu a little bit, removed the first curve so you can read the title screen easier, made openings between rooms wider to be new-player-friendly and added team selection to the football docking room.

Added support for setting the z position of layers directly from Tiled, making for faster iteration on level design.

Docks are now slightly magnetized, preventing a ship from drifting out of contact due to inertia.

Added an AbstractPlayer class to track the score, team and Id of each player. Now if player 2 has to leave, player 1 and 3 can start a new match and fight each other without switching controls and with a properly formatted split-screen. It´s not a great deal, but if some are playing on a keyboard and some on joysticks it´s nice.

Finished untangling the most dreaded piece of code I had, it´s now looking like a friendly smurf  . It was nice because I could prototype a lot of things quickly, but became way too confusing as features got added.

Back to gamedev, thanks for reading!

[simondevlpr]

this looks uber cool.
nice effects!

[BomberTREE]

Good job implementing the z axis from Tiled, that'll definitely help you bust out some crazy background details.
KEEP IT UP, and remember that if you're ever needing to test an online server from yourself to california.. I'm always here to help Pnch 

[pnch]

@simondevlpr: Thanks! I hope to beef it up quite a bit on the effects side yet, as long as it stays simple.
@kitheif: Thanks! Lag would kill the precise controls needed, so I´ll stay away from that, but note taken! Count me in  for playtesting your game too !

[BomberTREE]

@pnch
Haha I know what you mean, I worked on a flat art styled multiplayer fps and moved people with the raw coordinates received from the server..
OUCH.
Also for sure man! (as soon as my summer classes end and I can work on it more )

[pnch]

Update #16: Bits of polish across the board

Team spawning done! Now in football mode you´ll spawn close to your goal and to your team companion if there is one.
Also I added a way of debugging any sort of input into a new match (e.g. I want to check for errors if player 4 is in team 1 alone vs players 1 and 3 on team 2), boring but useful.

Camera shake was shared between all players, now I have a way to adding camera shake to a specific player as well. Thrusting now adds the same camera shake, but only to the player that´s thrusting. Explosions add shake to all cameras as always.

Added fade values and methods to the cameras, now they do smooth fades on starting a match, respawn, etc.

Last week´s refactoring allowed me to do most of these things easily :D.

I´m commenting the big ships as "Behemoths" in the code, so I guess I´ll start using that name here too. Yes, it´s also an homage to The Behemoth games.
I fixed an error in the Behemoth´s death, made it´s engines 50% more environment friendly, reduced its shield duration (I think I forgot to mention I gave them a shield in the first place, it´s the classic arcade-y short burst of invulnerability after being hit but not killed). Made the shield sprite more minimal. Explosions, can now randomly appear on top or behind of the exploding object, giving the effect a bit more depth.

Thanks for reading and have a nice week!

[pnch]

Update #17: Procedural nebulas WIP

The purple level looked a bit plain to me in the last gif, and the bright side of doing the game out of my own pocket is that I can try the weirdest low-priority feature when I feel like it .

I wanted to be able to procedurally generate background nebula-like detail, so I started looking for dungeon generation algorithms as a starting point(it´s fairly common in games and there´s a lot of snippets around).

Rev.1: Cellular automata with gameobject output.
I found this one to be simple enough to quickly hack it and try the results. The first iteration was hacking it to output gameobjects, but since Unity can´t do proper 2D pixel sampling (sometimes it shows lines between objects) and I wanted to have semi-transparent objects (so you can´t hide the lines overlapping objects a bit) I discarded this approach, at least for the moment.

Rev 2:Cellular automata with texture output.
Hacked it to write pixels in a texture instead, to avoid sampling troubles.
Pros: It works  ! And it´s compatible with the shader I´m using all around.  
Cons: It´s still a baked texture, you can see noticeable seams (I´m riding over one of them on the gif), the scale is resolution-dependent (so it eventually ends). I´ve tried using a rather large image but it wasn´t large enough for this level (wasn´t too CPU intensive either, but I wouldn´t want to load it with this).

Rev 3: Trash that code and do it on the GPU!

I found this solution for Shader-based noise, and extended it to offset, posterize and pixelate according to Unity variables. I have yet to add HSL + Alpha manipulation support to be able to use this everywhere, and check support on more modest videocards, but if it and when it all works, atmospheric effects are bound to get way more interesting. Also, having infinite scrolling was the real aim, since it allows for some new gameplay elements...

On the PR side:

Negspace is now in IndieDB!



I´m new there, so please tell me if something feels odd!

Back to shaderland, thanks for reading!

[Orun]

Really loving the teleglitch style walls and all the paralaxing.  Makes the levels come alive.  Can't wait to see more

[Mr. Virus]

Ah, that first GIF is so pretty :3. Love your use of colour in this game!

[pnch]

@Orun: Thanks! More on the way!
@Mr. Virus: Thank you! This environment is still lacking color contrast, stay tuned

Was off the grid but had to turn the PC back on after a friend noticed: Negspace is now ranked 70/18000 on IndieDB!

So, to anyone reading this, thanks A LOT for your continuing support  .

[BomberTREE]

Congrats on


Your shader looks like it's coming through well! Good luck on pumping out the infinite scrolling

[SolarLune]

Very cool! I think the explosions could spread out and fade a bit more smoothly (seems like they're single sprites at the moment), but it's looking nice. I was thinking that the logo for the game could be more in the background, perhaps with a larger path in between the opening area and the "menu" room to really make it feel "intense".

[pnch]

@kitheif: thank you! It climbed all the way up to #42!!!
Now the damage is done, I want to get back up there!:handanykey:

@solarlune: Thanks for the feedback! It´s a nice idea, I´ll try it once I get to extend the multiplane object to allow it and report back . Also, since you were here on the beginning, have you noticed your name (and many others) were featured on the gif shown by Rock Paper Shotgun?

Mountain of work heading my way, I guess progress will be slow for some days!

[SolarLune]

Oh, wow, nah, I didn't see that! Haha, wow, cool. Thanks for putting my name in there. And congrats on getting mentioned / more popular!

[pnch]

@SolarLune: You´re welcome! I had a couple of crazy days after that, now it´s back to work as usual!

Update#18: Nebulas WIP II

Infinite procedural parallaxing in the GPU works nicely!

I´ve still got to add all the features mentioned in the last update, so it´s not looking nearly as nice as usual, but getting there!

As a side note, and here in small letters so most of you won´t notice it yet, I´ve just got a mailing list working, you´ll notice a new box on my webpage waiting for your email, welcome!

[pnch]

Somehow, this devlog grew over 10.000 reads!
Granted, it´s not such a big number when it comes to videogames, but it also happens to be the number of people a town needs to become a city. Here´s a satellite view of a 10k people city. See?  I´m ABSOLUTELY AMAZED by it!

So, here I am, humbly wanting to say thanks to every one of you who helped made of this the smallest of cities.
You´ll have to help me with your imagination this time, every container holds 10 "Thank you" each, get yours.

If you wish to keep building over this, join me over and spread the word about Twitter, Facebook, and now indieDB!. Also, there´s now a newsletter! Sign-up, you wouldn´t want to miss the (far away in the future ) launch.

Thanks again, and stay tuned for more proper gamedev!

[Mr. Virus]

Can't recall if you've mentioned it before but what are your plans for music/sound design? Always curious to see what other people get up to with it .

[pnch]

@Mr. Virus: I haven´t even started checking out Unity´s sound functions yet! It´s on the near future TO-DO list, though.
I have two opposite directions in mind, one that helps boosting the abstract UI, constantly giving audio cues that are helpful/needed/tightly binded with gameplay, and another that heavily emphasizes atmosphere. Since the first one is a bit risky (but may end up being more interesting if done right), I´d have to playtest it before deciding.

Update#18: Nebulas WIP III

I´m having LOTS of fun in shader-land!
Managed to fuse a hueshift, noise, treshold, parallax and pixelate shaders together,  adding a lot of variables in the way. This, in theory, allows me to generate endless procedural scrolling of different continuous mediums in the GPU(at least asteroid fields, nebulae clouds and star fields are possible and looking nice) with the same shader and different values. These two, in retrospect, looks quite uniform, and I´ve yet to add support for color and alpha banding + evolution.

It´s not practical to manage the variables and keep consistence with the multiplane setting I was using, so I rewrote that after making these gifs. Amazing how shorter the code became with this iteration, I´ve sure learnt a lot these months! Now the multiplanes are setup in the unity editor, have support as many layers of shader-based content as your GPU can handle, and also have easier support for any gameobject you´d like to add (hello, stranded ships and structures on the background!).

Gifs showing that last bit hopefully coming soon, can´t wait to test it all

As always, looking forward to your c&c!