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[diegzumillo]

haha Thanks stringkiller :D

[diegzumillo]

Retrospective and plans for 2016

Didn't do much. Intend to do just as much next year. OK, that was easy.

All right, a few more words then. As another painful semester ends and the stress reduces to normal levels, I find myself struggling to get back to work on this. I opened Unity, then I updated Unity, then I opened Unity again after the update. Nothing was broken, the project didn't even have warning messages. Then I stared at the screen for 15 minutes and closed Unity.

It's pretty hard to get back on a project after so long away. One needs to set an objective and make a plan, not just opening a file and staring at it. So I'll talk about what's on my mind about the current state of the game design.

Pacing. Usually a concern on more ambitious games and usually games where story plays a big role, because of the analogy with movies people notice pacing a lot more. But it didn't cross my mind that pacing is actually relevant in pretty much any game. A puzzle game could get away without pacing, since one can play a few levels to scratch that brain itch and stop playing, come back another time. These games are usually (wrongfully, in my opinion) dismissed as boring, and that it gets old fast. A puzzle game with a puzzle after the other until the very end is like an action movie that starts, ends and the middle is filled with explosions. Or a horror movie that tries to startle the viewer every 5 minutes. It' boring, if you want the game to be playable continuously. But sometimes the game wasn't meant to be played continuously.

This is a choice the developer needs to make. For no good reason I'm inclined to make a game people want to keep playing, thus I have to think of pacing. That leads to the need of adding more elements to juxtapose the puzzle levels, like give the players some mindless fun action every now and then. Initially the project was to not have enemies, projectiles, life meters and anything of the sorts, but I might need to bring some of these common elements into play, make some traditional action platforming in a curved space. Or think of something new entirely. Maybe some kind of snow sled level, with collectibles.

I guess my plans for 2016 is to implement some action mechanics and see what comes out of it. This is the extreme opposite of ambition, let's add some more stuff! I will also make more levels! YEAH! and... and... and more sprites for the underground world! And at least one bonus content for finding the thinkers. All right! I think now I have enough plans to disappoint myself a year from now.

Happy new year, everybody. Long live applelivers and wormettes! 

[diegzumillo]

Hi everyone. Here are a few tests of the new mechanic in action. Let's start with some big fat gifs, then I'll explain them.







What is happening, you ask? Here is my idea: I wanted to introduce some more action in the gameplay. So I made another puzzle element. YAY FOR ADHD! But wait! all is not lost. The seed-spit (that's what I'm calling that projectile) can and will be used in a more traditional manner, to shoot things that want a piece of the apple.

I'm still not explaining the gifs, aren't I? (yay adhd) OK, what the seed does is link the object to the apple. So that when the apple goes through a curve, the linked object will rotate together. When you spit again you lose the link and the object goes back to its previous gravity state. There, now you know what is going on in the gifs.

Thoughts on this new mechanic. I'm still trying new things with it. I tried having the object retain the new orientation once unlinked but I did not like the result. This way I can at least see some interesting uses, like putting enemies and obstacles that tempt the player to spit a seed when he does not want to unlink a certain object. That bridge on the third gif, could be such an object. The player has to keep the bridge down while going through some section of the map in order to walk on it. Another use, illustrated on gif 2, is to give the player that instantaneous gravity change on the object that is only possible if it returns to its original state once unlinked. Then you could use it to get objects out of pits and stuff like that.

Possible future tweaks: holding more than one object at the same time. Different mechanism to link/unlink, like time or environment-based (a timer or a button/lever, respectively). Or maybe make the seed a pickable thing. But I kinda like the way it is for now.

Now to code some basic enemies to see how that interacts with the rest of the game. Any ideas? suggestions? I'm thinking about making the seed interact with them in a different way rather than just spit poof disintegration. Like change their movement trajectory, make them friendly, turn them into platforms etc. Aaaaand here I am thinking about more puzzles! 

[marcgfx]

after your explanation, I rewatched the first gif. looks like the first box is falling in the wrong direction
but no matter, the idea is great imho! resizing + gravity manipulation for multiple objects should enable tons of puzzles. maybe you should not spit a seed, but send out the worm to manipulate the other object? after all it's apple and worm, but I have never actually seen worm... if you go with the seed, you should also start planting trees

[diegzumillo]

Thanks I dropped the resizing mechanic a while ago though. And the box is falling where it should! it's slightly less intuitive than I thought apparently lol it doesn't match its gravity exactly, it rotates with you. So if it was falling up while you were falling down, when you rotate 180 degrees it will fall down while you fall up.

I just noticed this damn Minus image cloud service is breaking all my devlog images. I'm going to have to back them up when it's back online and save them elsewhere. I'm using Imgur now, do you have a better suggestion? 

[diegzumillo]

Also, I didn't consider using the worm. That's a neat idea! if most of my images weren't offline I would show you the worm. All I did so far is animate it popping in and out of the apple.

I was imagining something a bit nonsensical with the seeds. Every object hit with it stamps that apple smile. Doesn't matter if it's an inanimate object or an animal. I don't know, just the idea of having a bridge with that stupid smile makes me giggle.

[Zorg]

To make things easier to understand you could limit the gravitation changes to 90 degree intervals. The boxes which have a negative gravitation are pretty confusing, at the moment. Maybe it will work better when the camera is rotating with the player. Another option would be locking the rotation of the boxes completely and adding some 'this side up' notes (as local gravitation indicators). Pushing/carrying boxes could offer additionally possibilities for puzzles, but you should try to work with as few mechanics as possible, first. The old demo already offered a cool experience.

It looks very cool, i like the changes!

Edit:

[diegzumillo]

To make things easier to understand you could limit the gravitation changes to 90 degree intervals. The boxes which have a negative gravitation are pretty confusing, at the moment. Maybe it will work better when the camera is rotating with the player. Another option would be locking the rotation of the boxes completely and adding some 'this side up' notes (as local gravitation indicators). Pushing/carrying boxes could offer additionally possibilities for puzzles, but you should try to work with as few mechanics as possible, first. The old demo already offered a cool experience.

It looks very cool, i like the changes!

Thanks for the feedback

About the number of mechanics, you really think so? I feel the player will completely explore all it can do in 5 minutes, but I also consider the possibility of me being way too familiar with the mechanics. And a common dev problem is to underestimate the complexity of the game and levels.

[Zorg]

About the number of mechanics, you really think so? [...]

In my opinion you should have few mechanics with simple rules and explore/combine them in all possible ways instead of introducing too many mechanics.

[diegzumillo]

I understand that, it's much more elegant that way. But some mechanics are too shallow, unfortunately. Currently, the main mechanic of this game is a regular platformer, with no ememies, just jumping, in a curved space, which creates mind bending mazes. Once the player figures out even the most complex level is just a maze the possibilities will have been thoroughly explored. (Think of the levels as a 3D maze, with the 3rd dimension being the angle).

I'm trying to be careful not to bloat the game with extra mechanics just for the sake of having more stuff, so this new mechanic has to tie well with the main one. It has to be something that wouldn't make sense in a game without curved space. And, hopefully, it has to be enough to add enough depth to the game on its own, without the need to put even more stuff in it! otherwise I'll change the plans of the game just make it into a shorter and more casual game.

But I totally understand what you meant. As some writer once said "the book is not perfect once you can't add more stuff. It's perfect once you can't remove anything else!" or something like that.

[Zorg]

I'm trying to be careful not to bloat the game with extra mechanics just for the sake of having more stuff, so this new mechanic has to tie well with the main one. It has to be something that wouldn't make sense in a game without curved space.

Sounds good. Dropping the resizing idea was a good move, in my eyes. There should be enough possibilities around gravity alone.

---

That being said, i'm still thinking that grabbing objects could be an interesting mechanic. 



Run fast (or slow) carrying an object with a horizontal gravity direction, jump far (or be unable to jump forward). Jump high or fall quick (mostly useless, may be useful in combination with timed puzzles, which i don't like very much, personally). Push buttons on walls or ceilings. Create your own platforms at walls. Maybe even fly, grabbing enough balloons or ride on a bigger box.

[diegzumillo]

That's a great idea. These things are possible without grabbing, by letting the objects push you, but grabbing makes it look much simpler. Simple is good!

Thanks for that and for the illustration!

[diegzumillo]

I'm on an artistic impulse lately. So I made a few drawings of possible level variations: a desert and a forest temple thing.

[diegzumillo]

Remaking the character controller

Up until now the character controller was being constructed with a hammer, basically. The code was quite big and it grew organically as I needed more features. The result was functional but full of bugs, and remaking it was inevitable. The day or remaking finally came when Unity's process of slowly stop supporting java script finally reached me, as I have no syntax highlight or auto completion on monodevelop anymore. Two birds in one hit then, new controller, all in c#. That was motivation enough to get to work.

Knowing what the final product looks like, the new controller is now done much quicker, works almost the same way only much more reliable, with cleaner and smaller code. It doesn't seem to get stuck on anything and works well on any kind of terrain. The biggest difference is that jump height is no longer controllable by pressing jump longer. That's a side effect of using forces on a rigidbody instead of altering its velocity; a decision I made after observing altering speed was the culprit to some of the jerkiness of the previous version. The new scheme allows for very consistent jumping height, with an error of 0.01, but I decided to sacrifice controllable jump in favor of this consistency. This is not a problem for puzzle platformers, but I would feel better if it were a conscious decision from the start. And it's not like it would be impossible to get both features, but it would be impractical to code it, as this is the defining characteristic of using physics to control characters; you lose reliability. In fact, this problem made me ask myself...

...Why am I using a rigidbody to create this controller?

Everything in this project suggests a traditional method is ideal. I'm sure the answer is in this very devlog, several pages ago. And it probably has to do with the physics system being too irresistible with its collision system ready out of the box. But besides me being lazy, I can't think of any good reason to use rigidbody. No, I will not remake the character controller again. This one is working nicely and that's good enough. But, if I ever do need to remake it, I'll look into making it physics free.

(Edit) What else changed to the character controller and why
There were conscious changes as well. I made the apple slower and the jump shorter. The reason is that this allows me to make the level more compact in scale, allowing the player to see more of the level layout inside the screen. This is very important for puzzle-like games, as I can rely less on camera pans to give information to the player. I also added a little bit of momentum, mainly because it feels good to control the apple with it, in my opinion. Call it kinesthetics if you like, but it does feel like the character has some weight in it, in a good way.]

The downside is that I broke the demo. Oh well, but I have no intention of updating it anymore. What's there is a good enough representation of the game.
(End of edit)

Some extra animations and effects

I also made a turning animation and added dust effects (because no devlog post is complete without a big ass gif). I think I implemented these dust effects the most impractical way possible. Instead of baking it in the apple animation sheet itself they are separate gameobjects that get called by the controller. Jeez, I just finished the new character controller and I'm already hitting it with a hammer it again.



That was a good spring break. Stepping away from my studies to work on my hobby, and close the week with a long detailed devlog post. Have a good one, everyone 

[diegzumillo]

Spent a few days thinking about how to do intro sequences in a clear and fun way. In-game is the way to go in most cases but I was having difficulty telling the little story with just ingame graphics. So I set out to define some way to do these very few cutscenes I might need. I think I have a winner. "Traditional" 2D animation. I don't know how traditional it is since I'm on a computer but there you have it. Here's my first attempt:



This would be the apple and worm going through their first wormhole. There will be a spinning background later, of course.

I was concerned about time to produce these short little animations but it turns out it's feasible. It screams amateur from a mile away but I'm still quite happy with this result. I'm ok with things not looking made by a professional, because I'm a realist and I'm not a professional. What matters is I like it and it was done in 4 hours. Perfectly acceptable!

I'm using a software called CACANi. It's new, lacking basic features and overflowing with bugs. But it has my favorite feature in the whole world: automated inbetweening. If you're not into animation, inbetweening is the task of creating all frames between the key frames, and it's the biggest time sink of traditional animation. The automation doesn't do the animation for you, of course, and at first it looks like shit, so I had to manually tweak every single frame. But still, tweaking every single frame is orders of magnitude faster than making each inbetween by hand! To me this is a game changer; it makes traditional animation practical for a one-(non-professional)-man project.

[marcgfx]

nice work diegzumillo
the animation looks really fun, but I was kind of wondering where the apples legs have gone you do have two very different depictions of the apple/worm now. In game you have an apple with legs and no worm, in the animation you have pure apple and worm...

[diegzumillo]

Thanks

I completely forgot the legs haha. But the worm is in the game! it pops in and out whenever it wants to make remarks about something. I could have sworn I had a gif showing it but I couldn't find it. It's probably lost in the big minus crash. I'll make a new one.

Other than the missing legs and no worm, do you think the animated version still looks different from game version? Translating pixel art to full res involves a lot of interpretation and I'm not too happy with it yet. I mean, for this particular animation, with all the deformation involved, I don't really mind. But eventually there will be clearer depictions.

[Quicksand-T]

Good work! How will it transition from this sort of thing back into the regular game-play, though?

[diegzumillo]

Thanks I still don't know how to even make a video play on unity. Depending on how that goes it could be instantly from one to the other or it might require a fade to black between one and the other. As seamless as possible would be ideal, of course. Specially because these are not going to be full fledged scenes with deep stories. Just quick and fast cuts of parts that are difficult to do with ingame graphics.

[exit]

finally had a chance to take a look through this. i really like the animation you've done for transitions by the way. i think the style actually adds to it and doesn't seem amateur or out of place to me. you may want to include some extra shading on the base of the apple though to keep it closer to the pixel art render. as for whether you should fade to black or cut immediately, i think you could use the worm's open mouth as a way to cut to black and then from there, cut to opening the level however you wish.