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[jctwood]

This is really awesome! Neon pixels and lots of space blood.

[lokijki]

Thanks! I'm glad people seem to like the style so far; I thought more people would be put off by it but everyone I've show it too so far seems to dig it.

Tonight I did a tiny bit of work towards dungeon generation:


As you can see, I'm just throwing rooms in front of the player and cleaning them up behind him. I'm curious how much I can do in that instant without having any noticeable performance impact.

The other thing I worked on is object pooling. It isn't something I'd done before, as most of my previous Unity projects were pretty tiny, but I figured it'd be worthwhile in this instance. I ended up just grabbing the code from Unity Patterns, which was dead simple to implement. So now all my bullets and rooms are being recycled, which is neat!

Still got a ton of work to do on the dungeon generator coming up; first thing I think I'm gonna try is generating layouts for the rooms to see if that's viable to do on the fly.

[lokijki]

Another kinda slow day, but I've got a few things to talk about, namely: doors! (currently in Gameboy-vision in honor of the upcoming Gameboy Jam. )



So yeah, there are doors now, that open when all the enemies have been murdered to death. Besides that, I re-added a couple of things to work with the on-the-fly dungeon building. So enemies spawn, and long rooms are back in.

I noticed when I was making the original jam game that the game really came to life when the big rooms were added in. Going back to an old room and finding a totally different room was kinda cool. It was a lot more noticeable in the original, since you were constantly walking in a clockwise circle, but having them in here definitely gives me a better sense of how this'll feel when all the parts are in place.

Another thing I was thinking about: since the way I'm adding new rooms right now is just by lining up the exits (I spawn a new room, pick a random exit, and align that with the exit the player just walked through), I can add diagonal rooms now. I hadn't considered those before, since I was only thinking about grid-based dungeon generation, but they'd be pretty trivial to throw in now, and it actually isn't something you see all that often.

Also, between the Gameboy colors I threw in for fun, and playing a bit of Joylancer last night, I realized how much people have done with just 4 colors, so I should probably be fine working with 8-16.

[Crabby]

This is really cool. I love the art style.

[lokijki]

So all I really got done today was swapping walls with doors, so when you enter a new room, not all the exits will be available. Already feels a lot more maze-like.

I also got my brother's first pass at some dynamic music tracks, so I spent a bunch of time messing with an asset to try and get that in, and ran into a big pile of issues with that.

Most importantly, though, this has been driving me way too crazy:


I went back through all the GIFs I've posted and realized it's always been like that, but I have no clue why. It's going to drive me insane.

[DarkSoul520]

Everything about this looks excellent.  Love the art style!

Keep up the good work!

[lokijki]

Just a quick update tonight (with no GIFs, unfortunately):

Spent most of my time today getting more familiar with coroutines in Unity (something I've been ignoring for way too long) and using that to work on my enemy AI. I only had the most basic behavior in before (face player, move forward ) and I want something that'll be easy to modify and get lots of variety out of for different enemy types.

I've also been going over whether or not I need pathfinding, or if I can get away with just using steering behaviors or something. That's really up to how my room layouts end up looking, so I may task-switch tomorrow and see if I can start to get that sorted out.

I also modeled a new enemy, but I'm not totally happy with it, so I'm gonna hold off on posting any pictures.

[lokijki]

Threw in some enemy types. Pretty standard stuff at the moment, redder and faster or bigger and stronger/slower. I'd like to have a big pool of random traits to mix and match. Also has some improved AI that I'm still working.

There are also doors in the GIF, so that's cool.

[Zorg]

The yellow monster reminds me of pikachu.

[lokijki]

Ugh, I've gone too long without an update, which upsets me. I've been on the job search and it's taken up a bunch of my time last week, plus I'm trying to get back into a normal sleep schedule which is resulting in my just not getting any sleeping and being tired all the time.

So, basically all I managed to do this past week is play around with some shaders for some glitch effects. Here's a really over the top one I found:


At some point, I need to just figure out shaders, it's an area I've ignored for way too long. I'd love to figure out how to get ZX Spectrum style attribute clashing in here, but I don't know where to start with that.

Hopefully this week I can get myself to finish a few things I've been putting off. The AI works for the worms, but a lot of the settings for the AI script aren't implemented yet. I also want to finally get room layouts in (as in, walls and obstacles within the rooms), but I still haven't decided how exactly I want to do that, procedurally or premade layouts.

[WarriorGeneral]

Wow, the shader effects are really cool.  Did you go into it with the CGA shader effect being the plan all along, or did it sort of just fall into place?

[lokijki]

Thanks! For the original game, I can't remember why I ended up going with that specific look, but I like working with a limited palette, and ended up going with the ZX Spectrum palette (I think I used the Spectrum's resolution, too). Then that just sort of carried over into this version of the game. I've always liked mixing old limitations with newer technology, so it's been a lot of fun to play around with.

Now, for today's progress, instead of doing all that important crap I said I'd work on, I spent a bunch of time fussing around with Unity's projectors to get projected blood stains in that I'll probably just take back out at some point, but at least for now you can get blood on the walls: