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[Pehesse]

It's been a very busy week for me, so I unfortunately had little time to work on Pacha - I only managed to finish the Acrobat, and start on the Warrior, so there's not enough for a proper compilation gif. But I still have something significant for today: an AWESOME fanart by Jeinu!



Jeinu's the artist behing Miamaska and Trial of the Sun, and you can find their otherwise assorted work here: https://jeinu.tumblr.com/. Be sure to check it out!

Fanart is always such a pleasure to see, and this one is beyond fantastic, so it pretty much made my day :-D Hopefully it'll do the same for you!

[Pehesse]

It's saturday, so you know what's coming: that's right, it's a compilation gif, featuring (surprise!) colored animations for the Warrior!



And that's, uh, about it for now. I'll hopefully have more concrete news to share in the coming days/weeks about some stuff that's bubbling in the background, but I'll wait until it's more concrete. So for now, it's just this!

[Pehesse]

A very short update for today to reflect on lots of stuff happening in the background! I'm in talks with an executive producer to handle the more "business-like" aspects of the project, and with some Quechua friends as part of a "cultural consultancy" process to make sure I properly depict... well, everything, really. One important change to come out of this already is an update to the game's title, from Pachacuti to Pachakutiq, to use the Quechua spelling (and also the added benefit for being a lot more SAO friendly, since it's going to become eventually important for... you know... crowdfunding campaigns and the likes...)

That's it for now, though there might be some other changes in the days/weeks to come. Overall though, I'm still on track to have fully colored the Warrior by the end of the months, despite some speed bumps along the way. Stay tuned!

[Pehesse]

Small saturday gif update!



The more important piece of news is that the talks are mentioned earlier are about done, and we're hammering out details for future plans for just about everything related to media sharing and promotion. In short: I may need to occasionally go "radio silent" for a while, to better prepare some cool surprises and break some of the monotony of the current posting schedule.
As far as the color marathon goes, I've hit a few speedbumps lately as I've had to work on other material for some upcoming deadlines (still very important and required for the game, of course, just not some I expected to work on *right now*, such as concept screens for other levels in the game). The marathon is still on, however, and I hope I'll hit my end of month target. We'll see!

[Pehesse]

Nothing very new this week - worked on the some concept screens again, so this gif is only about a half week worth of animation coloring. Still the marathon is steadily coming to an end!

[seooesboard]

Nice project.

[Pehesse]

Nice project.

Many thanks :-D

I'm FINALLY reaching the end of this animation marathon!



Afterwards, as always, will be integration and some testing to make sure it all plays nice, before finally, finally, starting to make some actual level design to play with all of that.

The next target will be a vertical slice, for presentation and test purposes, which means I'll build a "representative" level aimed at showcasing the intended pacing and main mechanics of the game in a short amount of time. Before that happens, though, I'll take a short breather, these marathons are a bit draining, so weekly updates might stop for a little while, and resume when I have something new to share and show :-D Stay tuned!

[alaNintendo]

awesome stuff man! Are you working on this by yourself? 

[Pehesse]

awesome stuff man! Are you working on this by yourself? 

Thanks :-)
There are actually a fair number of people working on the project now! I'm still the only one full-time (for all design, base programming and art). Additonally, Mad Spy is the extra/real programmer, Morusque is in charge of all audio direction, David Elahee is the executive producer, Sandra Espinoza is the voice actress portraying Inti, and Emilie Parthouneau is doing enemy concepts!

[Voltz.Supreme]

Fantastic art and animations as usual! 

[Pehesse]

Fantastic art and animations as usual! 

Thanks a ton :-D

I'm finally back to working with the prototype proper! The first step was to integrate the animations from the latest marathon, and I'm happy to report it all went without a hitch:



Next was tweaking some mechanics based on tester feedback and some ideas I had during the marathon, chief among which were air momentum (to add a feeling of weight to Inti's jump - complete air control played fine, but felt actually a bit strange in retrospect due to the transition animations. Now, with just a slight added horizontal momentum during jumps, the characters still feels reactive (definitely enough to do mid air turns and adjust landing trajectory) but the jump itself feels more "floaty", which makes for a more satisfactory platforming experience.
I've also added a possibility to switch mid backdash - since the character disappears completely between evasion and reappearance and both forms use the same method of reentry, it seemed appropriate, and makes for a nice mid-battle switch possibility.
The other "big" addition is the warrior's counter: the block initially was a bit limited, but it now allows to perform "counter" moves if a player attacks with the right timing during a block, allowing for stronger retaliation, and I'm getting a "parry" to work as well, where blocking an attack with precise timing (at the moment of impact) will slow down the environment a bit and allow a player to reposition or initiate another combo more safely. All in all: play options! :-D

In parallel to all this, I've been working on communication materials for the upcoming Gamescom. It's unlikely I'll personally attend, but David, the executive producer, should be showing the prototype to a few people, and we need a presentation to go along with it. So here's one illustration example of material that'll hopefully catch a publisher or investor's eye:



Along with some "animation in the making" gifs to showcase a bit of the process of making those. You've seen plenty in this thread already, but I find the recap fun to watch still :-D



The next objective will be to greybox the start of an actual demonstrative level... FINALLY!

[Zorg]

In parallel to all this, I've been working on communication materials for the upcoming Gamescom.

Did you by any chance work on a logo? Just curious.

[Pehesse]

In parallel to all this, I've been working on communication materials for the upcoming Gamescom.

Did you by any chance work on a logo? Just curious.

Indeed I have - but only because I had to! I'm awful at graphic design, and logos are some of the things I dislike working on most. This is what I have at the moment, but it's SUPER placeholder, and bound to change sooner or later (mostly depending on whether I find a competent graphic designer at some point :-D)

[Pehesse]

Screeenshoooot Saaaturdaaaayyy!




I’m currently in the process of blocking out an early “intention” level aimed to be demonstrative of supposed “final” pace of the game. I’m putting a lot of quotes here, as with most things in this project, many things are subject to change over the course of development, but for now it’s a solid step towards having a vertical slice to demonstrate the game to hopefully interested potential investors, starting with Gamescom at the end of the month!

All those colored boxes in the gifs will of course be hidden by actual graphics when the time comes, including some foreground elements to allow focusing the reading area and hiding some elements (such as secret paths, hehe). The current level is 4.5 layouts long out of 8 planned, and takes about 4 to 5 minutes to play through when speedrunning, and anywhere from 10 to 20 when playing blind depending on experience and familiarity with platformers.

Currently, to block out a level, I use the Construct 2 editor itself, there's no separate level editor. This allows for rapid iteration, as I can place a few logic blocks, rapid test the game to check their placement, fix as necessary, and repeat.

The main design intentions for now are to have a multiple path depth, allowing both newcomers to platformers and experienced players to traverse levels with different challenges. The "newcomer" path teaches individual mechanics progressively by showcasing them in increasingly threatening scenarios, while the "challenging" path often makes use of several abilities in conjunction and rapid succession. I also try to have additional paths that allow for singular-form playthroughs, and also take into account individual section length for overall speedrunning purposes. In short, that makes each level a bit tricky to design as they all need to have a multi-layered approach, but we'll see during testing if it worked out!

The main difference between those block versions of levels and their final iterations, apart from the obvious addition of graphics, will be the hiding of connective logic markers. Many events and actions are triggered when going through such markers, and being able to tell where they are obviously affects how a player approaches a level. In final levels, those markers will be absent from view, making it easier to focus on the path forward, and making the module changes feel slightly more organic... hopefully!

Once all layouts are blocked out, I’ll add enemies (many of those planned don’t even exist yet so I’ll have to make them separately and make sure they work before putting them in levels willy-nilly), after which a round of patron testing will occur… and we’ll finally see if the game plays how it should! It’s about time 

[Pehesse]

Here we are! Since the last update, I finally managed to complete all 8 base layouts for the intended test level mentioned previously, and I've been focusing on adding the missing mechanics for a "complete demonstrative play experience", namely the enemies, checkpoints, and arenas.



Arenas are a locked-room-combat situation where enemies will spawn in according to a script, giving the player less room than usual to manoeuver. There are two ways out of an arena: either clear a set number of enemies (usually "all of them", but sometimes just a few is enough), or whack the locking totems long and hard enough for them to open, immediately putting an end to the current encounter. That's the easy and faster way out, assuming you're not harassed by enemies behind your back, so in the end, doing things the right way ends up being often much more appropriate :-D

The prototype with all of this is available for Patrons here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/21118214 and I'll now be working on fixing the bugs found by testers for a while, before moving on to adding layers of graphics to all of this!

[Pehesse]

Phew! It's been quite a while, but I finally have something new to show. Admittedly, I've been very busy these past few weeks with other work, and progress on Pacha has been a bit slow as a result.

Since last time, I've received some excellent feedback from testers, which allowed some quick tinkering with the prototype to adjust level design and some slight mechanic fixes - but the biggest change is this one:



The Warrior is now able to edgegrab, though as with everything she does, it'll double as attacks! It's still a very quick port job from the Acrobat for now, meaning there's lots of stuff going wrong still, as the Warrior wasn't originally intended to be able to do that, so I'll have to review her entire movement code to make sure it doesn't break anything else. Still, this should expand her moveset quite a bit and give her much more platforming versatility, making her a more viable simple traversal option.

Next objective for me (beyond cleaning this latest addition) will be to add graphics to everything in the prototype, mainly enemies and backgrounds. Meaning, yes, lots more assets production coming, whenever I get the time to do it! Stay tuned!

[chegr]

I follow you both here ant on Twitter, but I'd like to ask here.
Why have you decided to add Q recently at the end? I remember it without it, the name is still Pachakuti in earlier posts.
The second one — sky blue rectangle seem to mark respawn point and changes it's position from time to time. Can you tell in details how do you define these save points?
And yeah, it all looks and feels gorgeous!

[Pehesse]

I follow you both here ant on Twitter, but I'd like to ask here.
Why have you decided to add Q recently at the end? I remember it without it, the name is still Pachakuti in earlier posts.
The second one — sky blue rectangle seem to mark respawn point and changes it's position from time to time. Can you tell in details how do you define these save points?
And yeah, it all looks and feels gorgeous!

Hey there :-) Thanks for your questions!

The updated spelling (Pachakutiq vs Pachacuti) is, as I understand it, the actual Quechua spelling for the cyclical time/rebirth of the world concept the title of the game refers to. "Pachacuti" is the westernized spelling, and covers a broader range of meanings, including some of the later Inca, which is not what the title is meant to evoke, so the spelling has been changed both in an effort to both be truer to the original inspiration and clearer in its meaning!

As for the blue sky rectangle, it's not a respawn point (respawn points in the game aren't dynamic at all, they're at fixed locations in every level). The blue sky rectangle is the ceiling clearance marker, which is used after every landing/situation where the character might end up ender a low ceiling area, since movement carries a little momentum during landings/some movement abilities and attacks. I need to make sure what kind of headspace the character recovers to, so this marker is placed at the right spot whenever needed (above the character whenever it lands/crouches/does anything that might have any interaction with low ceilings), then left behind since it's never checked again until it's actually needed. Since the logic layer isn't rendered in normal play circumstances, it being "there" rather than constantly destroyed/recreated doesn't impact performance in any meaningful way, and it fact helps prevent scenarios where it might fail to spawn/be destroyed for any reason, which could lead to the character being able to stand up in tunnels... something that usually ends up softlocking the game one way or another :-D

[badru]

This is beautiful! Just replying to follow for now, will dig in later

[CDLegasse]

I hate you and your ability to animate! Lmao #totallyjealous