|
Title: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 22, 2013, 06:28:48 AM Jack Move is a cyberpunk Japanese style RPG. Set in a gritty hi-bit pixel art world and featuring an intriguing story & exciting tactical cyberspace battles.
Play the new demo during the Steam Game Festival, 16th-22nd June! (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/) They whisper her name on the streets: Solares. A mysterious veteran of the Data Wars, she keeps the fight against the Corporations alive as a vigilante hacker-for-hire, empowering the downtrodden and undermining those with power. When she receives an emergency message from her estranged father - the eccentric Dr. Abner Solares, whose wife's death spurred him to become the leading researcher of 'digital reanimation' - Noa is thrust into a world of murder, kidnapping, dark research, and the corporation that would steal it for their own ends: Monomind. What starts as fight to save your father will become a fight for the future of mankind itself...
Game design + background art by me (Edd Parris). Character design and animation by Joe Williamson. Writing by Amalie Kae. Music by Fracture. Sound Design by Adam Hay. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yOLVvhsJFw (https://www.dropbox.com/s/hroqehd2hcpwqqv/2020-02-22%20battle_hardwire_shocking.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/2crn7fo0q4z7v0x/2020-02-22%20slums_battle_pounce.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/3otqxgvecr83bps/2020-02-22_battle_vertex_mess_with_the_best.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/6eunpovgtjbr7mu/2020-06-01%20remember_the_plan.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/0qdzods02azme3a/2020-05-21_jack_move_steam.gif?raw=1) :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Craig Stern on June 22, 2013, 09:00:54 AM Ooh! Consider me intrigued. ;D
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: YellowLime on June 22, 2013, 09:14:39 AM Looks cool :)
It would be interesting that there was no actual art in the whole game (but that might get tiring in an hour or two) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: DrunkDevs on June 22, 2013, 10:19:04 AM Reminds me of playing the Hacker class in Forumwarz. Looks very cool. Will be following this. :beer:
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Dinsfire on June 22, 2013, 11:36:49 AM I would seriously love to do the music for this project, if you plan on having any at all. If you already have someone or don't plan on having music, that's fine, just offering a friendly hand of help to a neat project I'd like to be a part of :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 22, 2013, 03:48:18 PM Thanks for the support folks, mighty kind of you.
Dinsfire, unfortunately I already have someone lined up for the music, currently in discussion over how to work it. Thanks for the offer though, I'll keep you in mind if it falls through. Thought I'd post some more pics of bits and peices. Here's the editor (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/editor_01.png) And here's the world in debug mode (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/game_debug_01.png) And with debug turned off (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/game_01.png) All looking pretty crappy, but I'm just trying to get the main functionality working. Those big red boxes in the debug image are the collision objects. Collision detection is being handled by the Farseer physics engine, it's pretty good, better than I could code by hand. Today I've been messing about with lights. Trying to get something half decent working just using additive blending. That's what those weird blobs and triangles are. I think it'll work out ok and could look pretty good with some good art and imaginative use. I was also working on portals/doors. I now have a secondary position on them defined, so when you arrive at a portal you will automatically walk to that position rather than just popping into the level :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 27, 2013, 12:15:25 PM Hooray. Over the last week I've been working on getting some NPC's into the game. I've not had as much time as I'd wanted due to other stuff (like going to a local dev event to mess about with oculus rift etc).
But today I got some npcs on screen, they dont do a whole lot but they have 'collision' detection on them so I can start giving them events and things. The next thing on the list is to try and order all characters by their Y axis, so that they get drawn in the correct order and we don't get any z fighting. That should be pretty trivial so after that I'll start looking at some interaction. Had a great lunch with my writer today too. Got some really good ideas for the beginning of the story and, gave me a good idea of what we'll need for the first mini demo we're working towards. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Alex Higgins on June 27, 2013, 03:03:13 PM Seems like there's a lot of original stuff you can do gameplay-wise with a turn-based battle system in such an abstract setting. You don't have to resort to the usual weapons-armor-skills-etc that most JRPGs use. This could be super cool.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 28, 2013, 04:10:00 AM Seems like there's a lot of original stuff you can do gameplay-wise with a turn-based battle system in such an abstract setting. You don't have to resort to the usual weapons-armor-skills-etc that most JRPGs use. This could be super cool. Thanks! Hopefully it should work out pretty good. The battle stuff is based on what "software" you have installed. The amount you can have at at any one time depends on how much ram you have etc. You can see in the picture in my previous post that some of the slots are greyed out. There will also be passive software, these won't be actual move's you can execute but will buff you or perhaps automatically perform a counter attack. I think there's an interesting balance there, between moves you can actually execute and buffs. For example you might have only one move installed, but along side that have 4 other passive softwares that buff your attack and defense to counter the lack of moves. I'm still working out how to balance it all though. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on July 06, 2013, 03:49:29 PM Managed to get some work done on the dialog system today. Still needs a bunch of work, but you can have multiple conversations with npcs and it'll loop the last one when they run out of things to say. Pretty happy with that.
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/dialog_01.png) Also fixed a couple of bugs with swapping maps and some movement issues. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Pemanent on July 06, 2013, 04:05:17 PM Seems like there's a lot of original stuff you can do gameplay-wise with a turn-based battle system in such an abstract setting. You don't have to resort to the usual weapons-armor-skills-etc that most JRPGs use. This could be super cool. I agree with this. It seems like there is a lot of potential if you don't rely entirely on the typical JRPG formula. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 28, 2014, 12:49:00 PM So, been a while since I posted anything about this project.
I've been busy rewriting my own engine in monogame/xna, which I have then thrown out as I've realised that writing the whole engine and editor is just a pain, I learnt a lot from it but realized i'll just end up writing engine stuff all the time, not the game. So I've switched to Unity now that it has 2d support built in. Now I just have to learn how to use Unity :o I've also been working on some art myself as Marcelo who has been helping out has been snowed under with real work and things, and I wanted to start moving things on with it. I find it hard to make stuff and stay motivated with just placeholder art. Although I wanted to avoid pixel art, it is the only sort of art I can realistically get done myself. To combat the sameiness of the pixel art I've been experimenting with using two tone backgrounds, different colours depending on the environment. The character sprites will be in colour to make them readable. I think they could look quite good with some nice dynamic lighting, particles and tricks. Hopefully the perspective will make sense in these shots, it's top-down/front-on. It's easier to understand when you are navigating a sprite through the environments. Of course, any feedback would be appreciated. Dark alley (click for full size): (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/alley_contrast.png) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/alley_contrast.png) Seedy dive bar: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/bar_contrast.png) (possibly the main) Character: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_jumpsuit.png) Another dude: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/merc.png) Ive' been using the excellent Pyxel Edit (http://pyxeledit.com) for the pixel art. It's a great tool, definitely the best modern pixel editor I've come across over the years. Anyway, hope you enjoy! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 02, 2014, 11:05:49 AM Heres a screenshot of what i've been working on this weekend
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/alley_lit_01.png) Been messing about in unity trying to get some nice looking lighting, it's starting to look quite nice I think. I opted to use this volumetric type thing (https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/#/content/3787) as opposed to something pixelated/dithered because it just became too noisy. After experimenting I found this to work quite well. I really like the shadows cast by the wall corners, it really adds to the depth of what is essentially just one big flat texture, although I'm still not sure about the lamposts standing out so much, they look weird when they have the light texture blended. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Alex Higgins on March 04, 2014, 08:04:55 PM Gradient-esque lighting mixed with dithering is an interesting choice. I'm kind of surprised how well it works, actually. Diggin' the character art by the way.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 06, 2014, 03:00:14 PM I really love this style, this screenshot especially! The lighting really sells the mood. Is the title "Jack Move" a reference to William Gibson's book Pattern Recognition? Thanks guys! Good to know i'm on the right track. Yeah, the title is a reference to William Gibson, I think he has that saying in all his books (or a lot of them at least). The one where it really stuck in my brain all those years ago was from pattern recognition though. I chose it because of what happens in the story, and also that it works in a cyberpunk context of "jacking in" :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: dancing_dead on March 06, 2014, 03:09:39 PM I was sold when I saw "Ono Sendai" written there. I wonder if you can even do that, but it got my attention ^^
also, that 2d lighting solution seems very nice, indeed. having made something similar in xna (not from the grounds up, mind you), I take my hat off to whoever made that, looks great! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 06, 2014, 03:12:47 PM I was sold when I saw "Ono Sendai" written there. I wonder if you can even do that, but it got my attention ^^ also, that 2d lighting solution seems very nice, indeed. having made something similar in xna (not from the grounds up, mind you), I take my hat off to whoever made that, looks great! Ha! Yeah, don't think I'll be able to get away with Ono Sendai in the final game ;) The lighting I'm using is http://u3d.as/content/reverie-interactive/2d-volumetric-lights/36x it's not 100% perfect, I had to mess with the shaders and bits to get it to my liking. Saved me a ton of time though, so i'm happy! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Nuprahtor on March 07, 2014, 03:29:05 PM That sounds and looks really cool, subbed.
Quote (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/alley_lit_01.png) This screenshot is awesome, but these non-pixelated lights spoils the entire look of the game for me.Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 08, 2014, 04:02:30 AM It's a tricky one, I tried some pixelated light stuff but couldn't find anything I was happy with. It's hard to find a balance of looking decent and not taking to long to implement.
I'm limiting the palette i'm using for backgrounds to two colours for similar reasons, my pixel art isn't great so introducing constraints that allow me to actually make the game and get things done, rather than spending a million hours on art etc is really important. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Tazi on March 08, 2014, 04:44:10 AM Your pixel art is pretty cool, but I have to agree with the others, for a "two color" style, that light fx is quiet unfitting. I think there must be a good solution for this. Would you please post a non-lighted version of that screenshot? I'd like to try something with the lights if you wouldn't mind.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 08, 2014, 06:03:59 AM Sure, there is a copy in the thread on the first page
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg989042#msg989042 ...just realised that that version is double pixel size. Here's the actual asset https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/alley_contrast_Background.png Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Tazi on March 08, 2014, 09:11:15 AM Ah, okay I tried out a few things like dither, and fewer colors on the lights, none of them seemed to work well. :'(
I think one thing that could work nice is something like the lights/shadows in Thomas Was Alone, with just one transparent color: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDaa3Cq6c7M (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YDaa3Cq6c7M) But I might be wrong, and of course, it's your game to decide what you like. ;) But myself, I'd enjoy the bare pixel art more, without the lights. One more little nitpick, I think the big snagging objects, like that barrel should have somewhat different color. Like you could use the black for the blue tones instead, it looks a lot better that way, and gives more of a 3D shape. :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 08, 2014, 02:49:11 PM Ha! yeah, it's pretty difficult. I think I'll settle with what I've got for the moment. Thanks for trying though :)
As for the evnironmental objects, I definitely need to do something to make them stand out a little more Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: beetleking22 on March 09, 2014, 05:49:13 AM I really dont see any problem with that... It looks even more beautiful with that lightining.. Imo you should keep it... It give more atmoshpere feeling.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 09, 2014, 11:36:25 AM Thanks beetleking22! Having looked at a bunch of other games over the last couple of days that also have similar lighting, I think I'm happy with it.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 09, 2014, 11:40:01 AM And here's some more WIP. I've mostly been working on camera stuff, map portals and looking into Unity's 2d animation
I need to work on this rats behaviour, he's a bit twitchy at the moment. just need to spend some time tweaking the playmaker fsm though (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/jamckmove_rat.gif) And here's some camera/portal stuff (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/jackmove_gif.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 13, 2014, 01:46:17 PM Been working on some player animation when I've found time this week. Here's some rough WIP, obviously she won't be bald and the colours are just for blocking at the moment. It's maybe a little more bouncy than I'd prefer, but it's a good start
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_sprite_06_small.gif)(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_sprite_06.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 14, 2014, 02:57:25 PM Here's a slightly more cleaned up version :) I'd appreciate any feedback, my spriting is still in it's early days
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_sprite_07.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 14, 2014, 03:35:53 PM Thanks! I've studied (well, watched) a lot of animation and love frame-by-framing the old disney stuff. I have a few good books on the subject (richard williams animators survival kit and the frank thomas and ollie johnston illusion of life) so I have the basic understanding of animation, I've just never really put it into practice.
And yes, the legs are a little crazy, definitely need to reign those in :) Thanks for the feedback though, much appreciated. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Tazi on March 15, 2014, 01:31:38 AM Honestly, the movement is nice and fluid, but it looks quiet like jumpstyle-dance.
Maybe his trunk should move less vertically, and the whole anim should be less jumpy by the character styling less in the air... dunno. Another thing is, that you might already aware of: If you want to keep the graphics simple for advancing fast with the project, you should really make one naked human first, with all the needed movements, and you could use it as a template for editing out all the characters from it. I think that could save a lot of time. I bet what I'm saying is obvious, tho. Good luck with this game! :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 15, 2014, 03:12:07 AM Aaah, I not though of doing a template human, I just jumped in with my player character without much thought. That is a great Idea though, perhaps I'll spend some time today working on that :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Tazi on March 15, 2014, 05:17:09 AM Well, no effort lost, you can still create the template out from the finished human sprites. ;)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 17, 2014, 06:05:40 AM Here's some nearly finished player sprites, I've still yet to do the diagonals but am going to save those for a bit as I want to get these ones in game first :)
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_sprite_down_01.gif)(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_sprite_up_01.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_sprite_right_02.gif)(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_sprite_left_01.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 24, 2014, 03:06:52 AM Over last week I managed to get the new player animations into the game. They are looking pretty good and Unity's animation stuff is pretty easy to work with. I've still got some weird twitchy issues when switching animation, although I think this is due to the animation blending.
I overhauled some of the foreground art and compiled it to individual objects. This helps order everything in the z axis so you can actually walk behind stuff now which makes it look a ton better. Part of that overhaul meant redrawing the oil drum in the middle of the level, I forgot how big the player is, so it's ended up as a giant 5ft tall drum. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshot_2014-03-23%2022.06.23.png) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 27, 2014, 03:47:47 AM Hey there!
So here's a mac and windows build of what I have so far. Arrow keys to run around, esc to exit. https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/jack_move.app_0.0.1.zip https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/jack_move_win_0.0.1.zip There's not really anything to do but run around, but this version mostly proves out the art direction and my approach to structuring/saving/loading levels as well as messing with unity's 2d animation and some other bits. There are some janky bit's here and there (the run up and down animations need to be redrawn as they look bonkers and there's some jitter on the oil drum that i think is a floating point issue) but other than that it's feeling like a good start. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: jonbro on April 01, 2014, 10:23:07 AM hey man! this is looking pretty great! I like the direction this is going. Looking forward to seeing out the game bit of it comes together of course :D
I agree with what other people are saying about the lights, they are adding a bunch of atmosphere, but I don't think they are working quite yet. I think there are a few issues in place, and maybe a few quick fixes. - there are multiple light sources. Like the light on the barrel is coming from the right, but it is clear the light in the scene is behind it. I don't think there is a quick fix for this without redrawing your assets to match the light, or drawing your assets with hand done normal maps. - the color temperature of the light might be off? see this chart for temps (http://www.venturelighting.com/techcenter/lamps/color_of_light.htm). You probably want high pressure sodium, but that will wash out everything else. Will get a hella dope inner city tower block feeling though. - the resolution of the lights doesn't match the resolution of everything else. I don't know a good way to fix this unless you are running unity pro... I have some bad ideas of how to fix it tho, like pre building all your lightmaps into dynamic textures. Or hand painting them. :D Terrible terrible ideas. - the ambient lighting (the pixels that don't have light hitting them) are a strange color. If it is late at night, they would be darker (or full black). I think the temp you have there is suggesting that it is just at dawn (kinda blueish, but light...) if that is true, you could push it harder by using the lighting chart above. all the above should probably be ignored though, just make the game, and figure out the graphics later. It sure is fun to bullshit about graphics tho, isn't it :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: jonbro on April 01, 2014, 10:26:59 AM wait a second, looking at the asset store thing you are using, it seems like it is using a texture to build the light, and then chopping out stuff for shadows. You could totally just swap in the correct resolution texture, and set it to point scale, and it would fix all your resolution issues! doooo it!!!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on April 06, 2014, 09:51:50 AM Hey Jon!
Thanks for all the feedback, that's super useful. There are definitely tons of issues with the lighting stuff, I'm still experimenting, but without wanting to sound lazy, I'm trying to get maximum effect from as little work as possible. Having to code and do art is a lot of work, so stuff like hand drawing normal maps for everything is kinda out of the question at the moment. While that would look awesome, it would also take forever, so I'm kinda defaulting to 'everything has light baked in from the top right', at least for the moment, I'm super intrigued to see what it would look like with normals. As for colour, that kinda tricky, a) being colour blind, and b) it's hard to find a balance between dark enough and readable. It's pretty easy to change those values though, the ambient light is just based off the render settings. eg: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshot%202014-04-06%2018.38.30.png) Aaaaaaand the lights... yes I could replace the texture, the problem is that the light texture gets stretched to fill the variable size of the light, so I would have to pre-bake a bunch of different sizes. I'm thinking of experimenting with a dithered alpha texture over the top, that would break up the smoothness a bit, I need to work out how to do that though (also hard to explain what i mean). So yeah, lots to try and experiment with, I need to see how this will look with different environments too, like the bar I put in a previous post. Other than that I've been working on getting the battle system up and running, lots of gui work. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/Screenshot%202014-04-06%2016.47.55.png) That's looking a little too "smooth" at the moment, I'd like it to have chunkier pixels, but it's kinda placeholder stuff just to get something in there :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: bustaballs on April 06, 2014, 10:07:11 AM Wow, I'm all over this. It looks amazing already. Keep up the good work!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Bluefish88 on April 06, 2014, 10:12:00 AM looks interesting!
is this JRPG? turn battle? Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on April 06, 2014, 10:24:01 AM Yup, turn based, maybe ATB. I've spent a lot of time thinking about the mechanics of it this week, scribbling down notes and things. Perhaps I'll do a big brain dump sometime soon of what it will entail. I'm trying to do something a little different from the classic melee, ranged, white mage, black mage thing.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 17, 2015, 06:36:32 AM Sooo, not updated this in a while!!
The game has undergone a pretty big change in look, a whole rewrite and there is almost a game there now!! Here's a few screenshots: Some fancy automatic doors: (http://giant.gfycat.com/OptimisticGoldenAnnelida.gif) A few enemy designs: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshot%202014-12-23%2019.01.14.png) Player run cycle: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_run.gif) Mid attack in battle: (http://eddy.parr.is/assets/images/jackmove/jack_move_screenshot_20150111-03.png) Some cutscene + battle starting: (http://giant.gfycat.com/WhisperedNecessaryKangaroo.gif) I should probably update that first post :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Neeko on February 17, 2015, 08:47:04 AM Major improvements! Yes, I would update that first post :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: HopelessComposer on February 17, 2015, 10:11:34 AM This is starting to look pretty good!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 17, 2015, 11:09:15 AM Thanks folks. Updated that first post, wow, it really has come a long way huh?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on April 21, 2015, 12:57:48 AM Not a whole lot of progress over the last couple of month due to day job etc, but...
I have been trying to grok shaders a little better so wrote my own glitch shader, I think it's way better than what I had: (http://giant.gfycat.com/ForsakenDelectableAmericanblackvulture.gif) I also added a sneak mechanic so you can avoid getting into random battles... apparently some people hate random battles :o you are penalised with a slower movement speed whilst sneaking though: (http://giant.gfycat.com/PeacefulPinkIbadanmalimbe.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 13, 2015, 02:32:04 AM Here's some new animations.
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/scientist_a_idle.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/scientist_a_run.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/scientist_a_attack.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/shinkiro_walk_down_right.gif)(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/shinkiro_walk_down.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_battle_health_01.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 14, 2015, 05:43:45 AM Finally had some time to put some more work in on Jack Move. Got a new environment nearly finished along with some new npcs, and have put a ton of work in to the post battle screen and process of levelling up.
Here's a screenshot of the new alley environment. I've been experimenting with some post fx (after upgrading to unity 5), trying to keep it subtle though. The upper pic is the one with the bloom ;) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshots/alley_bloom.png) ...it's a little dark, think i need to re-calibrate my monitor.. also being colour blind doesnt help :O Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Alex Higgins on August 14, 2015, 10:53:20 AM I haven't been on Tigource in a year (oops), but I'm pleased to see that you're still working on this! It's looking really slick.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 31, 2015, 02:18:02 PM Been a busy bank holiday here! I've mostly spent it tidying up stuff, finishing off the level up screen, working on some new battle FX (although those need tightening up) and refactoring a ton of old code.
I also spent some time to grab a ton of gifs of the games current state. You can see most of the major systems in place: dialog, battles, leveling up, cutscenes etc. (The first post has been updated with a bunch of these too). Hope you like em :) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_01.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_02.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_03.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_04.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_05.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_06.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_07.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_08.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_09.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_10.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_11.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_12.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_13.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_14.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_15.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_16.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Moth on August 31, 2015, 02:56:21 PM Love the lighting and the battle transition! Also the way the rain kind of fades out as you go in the building, very slick.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: goob256 on August 31, 2015, 06:55:48 PM This is looking good! I love the animation of the characters, very.. animated. Following this one.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: The_Otherworld_Agency on August 31, 2015, 07:21:27 PM Oh man, you should have showed this at Brighton's Develop conference! 8)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 01, 2015, 03:51:57 AM Thanks folks, that's super encouraging! :)
Anyone got any questions? I never know what would be interesting to write about with these updates :s Oh man, you should have showed this at Brighton's Develop conference! 8) I'd love to submit to the develop indie showcase but I'm usually too busy organising the Games by the Sea party ;) ...which is part of the reason I got so little done on the game in the 6 months prior to this years party :( Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Jasmine on September 01, 2015, 04:59:25 AM A neon stripper sign? Now I'm intrigued. :eyebrows:
The game is looking really neat! My spidey sense always flair up when I see JRPGs. It's something about those consonants in that order.. Not sure if I'm digging too deep, but what's the story about? I played a p-n-c game recently that had a lot to do with hacking in (though it was mainly other people's minds). I REALLY enjoyed the concept/story, though, and am curious to see how it is going to work in the story of an rpg! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: grandslam on September 01, 2015, 05:52:44 AM Looks pretty sick. Can you get party members in this game?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: archgame on September 01, 2015, 06:48:11 AM Cyberpunk JRPG Tight! I really like the recent posts about the game, it looks like it could be really interesting. The animations look really clean and I especially like the atmospheric ones like the lighting glitch and the rain. I agree with M4uesviecr and I'd love to know what the story is about.
One simple thing I think could make your game pop even more and give it that extra polish is the color in your art direction. If you look at quintessential cyberpunk visual media you'll notice it is composed of a lot of dark shadowy blue tones with contrasting neon greeble (Here's an example from Blade Runner) (http://www.kinopitheque.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Blade-runner-souk-de-Chinatown-.jpg). Hopefully you've had a chance to check out The Last Night (http://33.media.tumblr.com/d07fe7cab009ab15c44a68a7ba12271c/tumblr_inline_ndyef9N4DF1sm9nnd.gif), their art contains this use of the grime with neon tech. I recently did a post (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45587.msg1173340#msg1173340) for our game on how we generate our color pallets. Your neon sign made me think of this holographic dancer (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/70/40/66/7040664af5dcc1c9fe637f331cc9e324.gif), I wonder if you could incorporate your glitch shader into street signs as well? We've been experimenting with plant shaders in Unity 5.0, but we are just now jumping into neon sign/glitch/digital shaders, yours looks really cool, keep it up! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: sidbarnhoorn on September 01, 2015, 07:47:03 AM This looks excellent! Good luck with the development. Looking forward to seeing more. :-)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 01, 2015, 08:50:45 AM Thanks for the questions! :)
Not sure if I'm digging too deep, but what's the story about? I played a p-n-c game recently that had a lot to do with hacking in (though it was mainly other people's minds). I REALLY enjoyed the concept/story, though, and am curious to see how it is going to work in the story of an rpg! Cyberpunk JRPG Tight! I really like the recent posts about the game, it looks like it could be really interesting. The animations look really clean and I especially like the atmospheric ones like the lighting glitch and the rain. I agree with M4uesviecr and I'd love to know what the story is about. I'm still working on the story (it's not my strong point but have some good help from friends). At the start of the game you are set up whilst on a job, it's then time to pull some jack moves, find out who the culprit was and get your revenge. One simple thing I think could make your game pop even more and give it that extra polish is the color in your art direction. If you look at quintessential cyberpunk visual media you'll notice it is composed of a lot of dark shadowy blue tones with contrasting neon greeble (Here's an example from Blade Runner) (http://www.kinopitheque.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Blade-runner-souk-de-Chinatown-.jpg). Hopefully you've had a chance to check out The Last Night (http://33.media.tumblr.com/d07fe7cab009ab15c44a68a7ba12271c/tumblr_inline_ndyef9N4DF1sm9nnd.gif), their art contains this use of the grime with neon tech. I recently did a post (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=45587.msg1173340#msg1173340) for our game on how we generate our color pallets. Your neon sign made me think of this holographic dancer (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/70/40/66/7040664af5dcc1c9fe637f331cc9e324.gif), I wonder if you could incorporate your glitch shader into street signs as well? We've been experimenting with plant shaders in Unity 5.0, but we are just now jumping into neon sign/glitch/digital shaders, yours looks really cool, keep it up! I need to go back and redo a couple of those environments. There is a bunch of placeholder there, just to get something to run around in and be able to implement mechanics, I'm pretty happy with the "alley" though. Thanks for the tips with palettes, that's super helpful. As for glitching out the neon... I'm more into the 80's/analogue kind cyberpunk so kind of like the plain neon but it might be a cool effect to apply in other places :) Looks pretty sick. Can you get party members in this game? Nope, there's only the main character i'm afraid. This is mostly down to me trying to limit the scope in any way possible as it's only me working on the game. If I start adding more features like that I'd never finish it!! It's also a nice limitation to try and design around ;) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 06, 2015, 02:14:04 PM Been working on a bunch of bits this weekend.
First up, screeeeen shaaaaake! This makes battles feel way less stale. Refactoring the clunky deal-damage code was also a nice by product (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/battle%20shake.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/battle%20shake_2.gif) Started on a replacement for the office/lab tileset as it kinda sucked (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshots/Screenshot%202015-09-06%2019.53.48.png) I also reworked how scrolling text for dialog boxes works, something that has been annoying me for months. Previously I just looped over the characters in the text, but this wouldn't wrap on to new lines nicely. You can see that here (on the "yeah sure keep it down though..." line): (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/august/jack_move_august_03.gif) ...I realised that you could just use the rich text property of unity's text ui element, setting the full text to transparent and then incrementally setting the colour of each letter to the correct colour. This is a lot tidier. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/new_dialog_2.gif) Next on the list is reworking how key-card doors work so I can get some nicer art and animation for the new lab environment. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: cykboy on September 06, 2015, 08:12:02 PM That sounds and looks really cool, subbed. Quote (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/alley_lit_01.png) This screenshot is awesome, but these non-pixelated lights spoils the entire look of the game for me.Agree here, per vertex lighting works best for pixel art imo. Looking good though, early days! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 07, 2015, 12:43:31 AM Agree here, per vertex lighting works best for pixel art imo. Looking good though, early days! Think you might have missed a few updates. The game is looking very different now ;) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: cykboy on September 07, 2015, 05:07:59 AM Agree here, per vertex lighting works best for pixel art imo. Looking good though, early days! Think you might have missed a few updates. The game is looking very different now ;) You are very much correct, I didn't see the page numbers.. my bad :) Looking beautiful! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 07, 2015, 07:57:38 AM Haha, thanks! Much appreciated :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 12, 2015, 03:47:24 PM Hey there!
Today I rewrote my door code after a bunch of refactoring for interactable items in general, also added a popup kind of notification for incidental text (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/automatic_doors.gif) I also worked on some more items for the new labs, and tried to get that laid out a bit more. Finding it hard to get the lighting balanced nicely though (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshots/Screenshot%202015-09-13%2000.03.35.png) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Alec S. on September 12, 2015, 03:53:47 PM This is looking great, plus I always think there should be more under 10-hour RPGs. I really like the aesthetic of those battle screens.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: archgame on September 12, 2015, 04:01:47 PM I agree with Alec S. The battle arena screens look really great. Also the door animation and movement also look good, not so sure about the text though, but I don't have a great alternative.
What do you mean it's hard to get the lighting balanced? Maybe some screens showing alternatives? Also I wonder if the atmosphere could get a bump if the green screens in the computer lab were giving off a subtle glow to the surrounding area? Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 13, 2015, 03:36:48 AM I'm finding it hard to light the environment so the items in the room aren't as dark, but without washing out the rest of the room. Maybe that's ok though as it should be a bit gloomy :s
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 01, 2015, 06:57:09 AM Been a while since I posted an update, so here some WIP for the first boss
(http://) Detail: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/brain_boss_wip_03.png) Initial pass at animation, I kinda like how he is thrashing about a bit: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/brain_boss_wip_02.gif) :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: neko.works on October 01, 2015, 11:49:43 AM Looks great ;) Following 8)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: gunswordfist on October 01, 2015, 12:21:51 PM I'm following as well. :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: mzn528 on October 01, 2015, 08:03:13 PM Damn this looks really cool! I love the artstyle and game mechanics!
Keep up the great work! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 02, 2015, 12:46:04 AM Thanks folks, always great to hear some encouraging words ;D
Did some work on the game over screen last night (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/jack_move_gameover.gif) Needs some work on the arrangement but I wanted to get some code hooked up. I've been thinking a lot recently about the penalty for failure and wasn't sure how to handle it. After picking up Ni No Kuni again this weekend I decided I quite like their take on it. When you die in NNK, it costs 5% of your currency, I found this pretty trivial as you are always farming currency from enemies. I decided to do something similar but cost the player 25% of their current XP progression. You will always stay on the level you are at, but lose XP earned towards the next level. I think this feels a bit more consequential. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Pizzamakesgames on October 02, 2015, 01:20:06 AM Looking pretty unique and well made, nice! What's it made in, not Haxeflixel, perhaps?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 02, 2015, 07:26:11 AM Looking pretty unique and well made, nice! What's it made in, not Haxeflixel, perhaps? Thanks! I use Unity + Pyxel Edit, with my own hand rolled importer for Pyxel Edit tilemaps. I actually use this technique stolen from Sebastien Dubois and the amazing guys over at Amplitude https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPQOHX9hiL0 3d with forced perspective = 2d :) It means lighting sits correctly against surfaces (mostly), it has a few drawbacks (such as weird z scaling) but it works pretty well. You can see how that looks in the editor in this old screengrab: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshot%202015-02-14%2020.42.22.png) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 12, 2015, 05:17:00 AM Changed the brain boss quite a lot, made it float up and down (not gonna lie, animating side to side was a pain! couldnt get it to feel right) and gave it some kind of armour/arms things that I think will make quite good defence or attacks.
Here's some wip: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/brain_boss_wip_04.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: MereMonkey on October 12, 2015, 10:09:37 AM This is looking awesome, very atmospheric!!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 18, 2015, 02:13:43 PM Hallo again!
Spent most of the weekend working on battle system stuff. I changed the software select menu to be more inline with the other menus in the game. I also got the mecha brain boss into the game, i think it's going to be pretty cool once i add some more attacks and things. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/brain_boss_battle_01.gif) ...the only downside of of adding in the boss is that I've realized the battle system is a bit limited in some ways. I thought I had prepared for enemies made of multiple parts, for example the mecha brain consists of two attackable parts, the main brain and the arms. however as I've not touched that part of the system in a rather long time it had suffered some entropy and is super fiddly to get some thing to work (the mecha brain is a huge hack job). So at some point I really need to go back and refactor a bunch of stuff to make it easier to work with and more flexible. The other thing i noticed from having a multiple part enemy is that my enemy selection is all messed up. To select the arms, underneath the brain, you have to press right, rather than down :| so i'll add an enemy select menu at some point. All in all, some good work done and some good lessons learnt :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 19, 2015, 09:30:28 AM Being on holiday is great!! I have a few days free before I go to disneyland (:D) for a few days, so I'm spending it catching up on sleep and continuing getting work done on the game.
Today I tidied up some of the hacks I made to get the mecha brain working and refactored the AI behaviour to make it a bit more flexible. This means I can now fire animations on all elements of an enemy more cleanly, and also do some more fancy bits :) I also ironed out that enemy selection stuff mentioned in yesterdays post. I thought it was going to be a lot of work, but it turns out it slotted in quite nicely with my original code once I had set up the UI and attached the event handlers I think it's a lot clearer now: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/battle%20enemy%20selection%202.png) The other thing I worked on was getting the missed hit + dodge animation (just tweening atm). It's starting to look pretty good, although I need to add some more animations to the player and each enemy. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/battle%20dodge.gif) This evenings fun will probably involve refactoring the cutscene editor! :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: goob256 on October 19, 2015, 09:41:12 AM Looking good!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 18, 2015, 07:45:57 AM Not posted in a while as I was on the previously mentioned holiday and work has been pretty hectic since I got back, so have not had much of a chance to work on the game.
One of the last things I got done was allowing multiple idle states in battle. So when a player or enemy is below a certain percentage of health, their idle animation will switch to their "tired" version. So here's some WIP of that: The player when tired (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_idle_dizzy.gif) Decided against this version as it looks a bit lewd (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/player_idle_dizzy_too_much.gif) And this guy (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/arcology_guard_tired.gif) Also started on the inventory and menu screens, not much to show there yet though :) Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 27, 2016, 08:58:59 AM Blimey, been a while since my last post.
I've been super busy getting a build ready for submission to the rezzed leftifield collection. This has involved fixing a ton of bugs, adding a new menu+equip system, adding audio fx + music, a bunch more animation and tons more little bits. It's starting to feel pretty solid, although lacking in enough content for a good demo at the moment. Here's a couple of (incomplete) menu screens: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-01/Screenshot%202015-12-29%2012.59.23.png) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-01/Screenshot%202016-01-13%2022.18.45.png) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 28, 2016, 02:26:37 PM Hi there!
Today I spent my morning knocking up a unity script that will transform the scene view objects to the same proportions as when the game is running. As the game uses an orthographic camera with a 3D scene, normally it would look all squashed and foreshortened, so we stretch out the Y+Z axis' to pull it back together. Now I can actually see what I'm actually working with. This is something I should have done aaaages ago because it has sped up my workflow significantly today. Here you can see the map as it normally is in the editor, all squashed when viewing from the same camera angle as in game: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshot%202016-05-28%2011.38.28.png) And here it is with my new editor extension, looks how it would in game: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/Screenshot%202016-05-28%2011.38.39.png) I've also been reworking a lot of maps, to extend the intro of the game as it was running a bit shorter than I'd liked, and also to make them a bit more coherent. Here's a couple of gifs of recents bits: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/flashy_thing_2016-05-22.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/arcology_level_5_servers.gif) Bank holiday this weekend, so hoping to get lots more done! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 19, 2016, 01:18:27 PM Been a while since this thread got an update but I've been working hard on getting a decent demo together and polished, which looks like it's worked out well because Jack Move got accepted into the Leftfield Collection at EGX (https://www.egx.net/egx/2016/show-floor#leftfield-collection) this weekend!! If you're there, swing by and come and say hi :)
Here's a couple of new gifs of updated bits (I've updated the first post too) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/pitch/02_battle.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/pitch/04_battle.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/pitch/05_alley.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 20, 2016, 04:16:30 AM I forgot, I made a trailer too!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1OrUmxJPU0 Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 25, 2016, 07:20:00 PM Big update today as I've been working fulltime on Jack Move for the past 3 weeks or so and have made some really good progress! I've been concentrating on getting the battle system up to scratch as I feel this is where the game is currently lacking the most.
So far I've implemented... Status effects!
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_10_jack_move_haste.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_10_jack_move_haste.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_16_jack_move_slow.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_16_jack_move_slow.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_17_small_jack_move_portscan.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_17_small_jack_move_portscan.gif) You can also see in those gifs that there is now a turn queue that pops up when taking your turn. This makes using Overclock/Underclock more strategic as you can time which enemy to attack. I first saw this feature in Grandia and have always really enjoyed that aspect of JRPG's that feature it. I've also been reworking how your Cyberspace Deck works. Battles revolve around your deck and the software you have installed. Each piece of software you have is essentially a "magic spell" that you load into your deck. The deck can only contain a certain amount of software depending on how much RAM you have available, and as you control only one character, managing which software you have installed at any one time is a core part of the battle system. You can change what software is installed during a battle, but that will cost you a turn. The deck now has 3 "software presets" to make management and swapping between installed software easier during battle. For example you might have one preset for offensive software, once preset for defensive/buffing software and one preset for debuffing. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_22_jack_move_install_software.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_22_jack_move_install_software.gif) To counteract part of the cost of changing software loadout in battle I've added a system similar to Final Fantasy's limit break/trance/overdrive. Once you have dished out or received a certain amount of damage and your JACK MOVE meter is full, you get to use any of your available software, whether it is installed or not. The software will not cost any data/mana to use and will have 2x the effect. So you could use your best offensive software to deal 2x damage, or in a pinch use some healing software to heal yourself for 2x the HP. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_18_jack_move_jack_move.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_18_jack_move_jack_move.gif) Oh, as part of the Jack Move system I had to refactor how progress bars work, which gave me the added bonus of being able to easily animate them. So that's nice :) Lastly I've been working on the Hardware or "equipment" system. As you progress through the game you will open up 3 "expansion slots" on your Deck in which you can fit hardware mods. You will find new mods throughout the world and each one can boost your stats, increase the amount of RAM in your deck or give you new abilities. Abilities may be passive, such as lowering certain elemental damage taken, or active such as counter attacking an enemy after they attack you. Ive' still yet to implement the hardware abilities in battle, but as they are very similar to the status effect system it shouldn't take too long. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_25_jack_move_install_hardware.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_11_25_jack_move_install_hardware.gif) Still a million more things to do. I think the plan for next week is to finish the hardware abilities, refactor enemy selection in the battle system so you can select more than one target and a few bugs and fixes that have been bothering me. Busy busy!! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: kkairos on November 25, 2016, 10:38:41 PM I'm really liking this game's unique visual style. The battles remind me a little bit of the (old? old.) Golden Sun games on GBA, in a good way.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 26, 2016, 08:04:29 AM OH MAN! I had totally forgot about those games, I think I only played the first Golden Sun, but it was great. Definitely going to dig out my GBA and dive in for a refresher asap!! Thanks for the reminder :D
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on December 02, 2016, 05:52:03 PM Hey there. A few bits to show off this week...
Firstly, I got "active" abilities working, these are status effects that can perform an action after each turn depending on the logic. The most basic example of this is counter attack. If an enemy attacks you, you get to take a free swipe at them. Other abilities will be stuff like auto-potion. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_12_01_jack_move_counter_attack.gif) I also did some more work on other status effects along with getting "elemental" types of software working. There are 3 elements (not sure what the in world term will be, "meta type"?) that act like paper/scissor/stone. It always seemed odd to me that there are usually 4 elements in jrpgs and I can never remember what counteracts what, so just going to stick with the three. The types are Cyber > Electronic > Wetware, kinda corny, so maybe the names will change. So now it's now possible to have elemental software and then buff/debuff against that element. It might not be super clear in this gif, but the guard is debuffed against the electronic element. You can see he has a status icon showing the little microchip + broken shield icon. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_12_02_jack_move_elemental_debuff.gif) A lot of the week was spent refactoring the battle system to account of attacking multiple targets. For some dumb reason I neglected to factor this in when I initially wrote the system (eep, nearly two years ago!!), or I had some other plans that really aren't possible now. So after that looong and slightly painful process you can know target multiple folks if the software allows. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-11/2016_12_01_jack_move_multiattack.gif) Lastly I've been trying to tidy up a lot of the software actions, although there isn't a lot to show for this. The actions are what executes when running a piece of software, so run forward, do x animation, spawn y damage sprite etc. There is still a ton of work to do here, it's all a bit messy. I think next week will have a bunch of general planning/estimating and probably some more action refactoring, and maybe some more work on the story and environments. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on December 10, 2016, 04:40:39 AM Hi there!
Not really anything to show this week. I travelled back to the UK from a month in Taiwan last sunday, so spent a few days jetlagged and finally playing a bunch of FFXV (which is equal parts weird and amazing), and then did a bunch of under the hood stuff. When I first started on Jack Move in Unity, I didn't really know the "unity way" of doing things. Coming from a web server engineering background, I naturally wanted to make the game as data driven as possible, and my assumption was that I should store everything in json files and then load them in as needed. This has worked well for a while but I'm hitting the limitations of whats possible and easy to do. The solution to this is to move everything over to unity's scriptable objects, this includes all character info for the player and enemies, their equipment and software, and the cutscene system. So far I've gotten character sheets and equipment ported over. The easy bit was as simple as slapping ScriptableObject or Serializable on to a bunch of classes, but then I need nice interfaces to edit all the data, so that's where most of the work has been. So kinda boring, but very necessary work :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on December 18, 2016, 03:02:20 AM Again, nothing much to show this week. It's been more behind the scenes work on rewriting the cutscene engine.
Here's a shot of the new version (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-12/Screenshot%202016-12-18%2010.29.59.png) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2016-12/Screenshot%202016-12-18%2010.29.59.png) Some technical details... all the cutscene data is stored as a series of game objects, frames run sequentially, and each frame has actions that all trigger at the same time. Each action is just a monobehaviour. I'm just using simple coroutines to sit and wait for stuff to do it's job before moving on to the next frame. I made a nice fancy editor window for editing the cutscenes, which has taken most of my time this week, getting the cutscenes running was actually pretty simple :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 08, 2017, 10:01:38 AM Hey there!
After a good christmas break I've been busy this past week, working on story bits in preparation for an artist starting next week (pretty excited about that!!), and some new maps and tile sets. Secret hacker hideout: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_08_jack_move_hideout.gif) Secret hacker hideout exterior: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_08_jack_move_hideout_exterior.gif) Town: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_08_jack_move_town_east.gif) I spent a lot of today trying to get the rain to look better than just using sprites. It's hard to make nice tiling animation that don't end up looking like weird repeating noise. So I've tried to use particles, which looks way better, but has it's own drawbacks, my main gripe at the moment is that they are not pixel perfect, ie rain can end up being off the pixel grid which i'd rather avoid. So I think I will end up writing my own particle system just spawning and pooling unity sprites. The last thing I need to fix with the rain is clipping any rain that's drawn over the cameras background, when there is no level geometry behind it. I've got a shader that get's halfway there but it's not quite perfect. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017-01-08%20rain%20issue%20screenshot.png) As you can see in this image, the blend mode darkens the rain in the black area at the bottom of the screen, but it's still drawing it. This is shown in the lightened area on the bottom left hand side. I would like to not draw those pixels at all. I'd love to know if anyone has any ideas how I can achieve this? I'm using shader forge but am happy to get my hands dirty with shader code (although might take me a while to wrap my head round any suggestions). Here's my current shader: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017-01-08%20rain%20shader.png) Cheers! :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: jctwood on January 08, 2017, 10:47:28 AM The music happening in the trailer is just wonderful! Not sure how you could tackle the rain rendering issue, hope you are able to figure something out!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 08, 2017, 02:14:38 PM Thanks! The music is by Fracture, you can find more of his music (although not game related) here http://astrophonica.co.uk/ I'm super hype to have him involved in the project :D
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 10, 2017, 03:06:08 PM Quick midweek update as i'm pretty stoked to have got this rain working!
Ended up with a couple of shaders, one that stencils out the geometry and then another for the rain particles that uses the stencil to only draw over the geometry. There were some tricky bits with the depth sorting, but got there in the end. Still need to tweak the colours, but just happy it's working for the minute :D (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_10_jack_move_town_south_rain_mask.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 15, 2017, 01:33:14 PM Hey, what's up!
Finally finished with this town map for the time being! Just need populating with some npcs, I'll get to that in a few weeks. It took way longer than i was hoping, but the results are worth it I think. I have a ton of fairly generic props now, so new maps should start taking me less time as I go. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_15_jack_move_town_south_01.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_15_jack_move_town_south_02.gif) updated the first post in this thread too :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 28, 2017, 03:50:31 AM Hi there!
Been a busy couple of weeks since my last update, but also troubled by some RL stuff which meant i've not gotten as much done as I'd like. Still, onwards and upwards! I've mostly been working on a new scrap yard environment which will be one of the dungeons early on in the game. My current challenge is to create dungeons that are interesting to look at, run around and interact with, and also have some interesting puzzles. I've just been laying out the maps and chaining them together, but hopefully my next update I'll be able to show some of the puzzles in action :) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_25_jack_move_scrap_yard_01.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_25_jack_move_scrap_yard_02.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-01/2017_01_25_jack_move_scrap_yard_generator.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 04, 2017, 03:55:39 AM Hey there
Another week with some real life stuff getting in the way, but I still managed to get a few new maps done. Nearly finished the scrap yard dungeon now, with just 3 or 4 maps left to do over the next week. Here's that big generator puzzle in action. I forgot to turn the rain on before I made the gifs, but at least they're a bit clearer to see what's happening better. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_02_jack_move_scrap_yard_crusher_puzzle_01.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_02_jack_move_scrap_yard_crusher_puzzle_02.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_02_jack_move_scrap_yard_crusher_puzzle_03.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_02_jack_move_scrap_yard_crusher_puzzle_04.gif) I realise these updates are a bit boring at the moment, just a bunch of gifs of the maps i'm working on. So is there anything people would like to know about the game, or any suggestions for things I should post, technical details of stuff etc? CHEERS! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 20, 2017, 01:55:31 PM Hi there!!
Didn't have time for an update last weekend or this weekend... but better late than never eh :) I've finished up the first pass on all the current maps for the demo i'm working on. Here's the final few I was working on: City! (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_20_jack_move_city_main.gif) Run down area/scrapyard entrance! (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_20_jack_move_town_west.gif) City penthouse! (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_14_jack_move_city_penthouse_city_lights.gif) You might notice that the player sprite keeps switching to a different looking sprite... well, that's because I've been testing out some bits from the amazing Gary Lucken (aka Army of Trolls)! He's been doing a few days work on some player and enemy sprites :D Here's a better look at the player sprite... (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_20_noa_tests.png) So now those maps are mostly complete, it's time to tie them all together and turn them into a game! My focus over the next week or two will be filling them with cutscenes and npcs and things... which leads me onto what I've been working on today, a super quick and dirty npc waypoint system: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_20_jack_move_pather_02.gif) Still got a few bits to finish on it, but it's mostly there :D Cheers, and have a good week everyone! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 28, 2017, 12:14:33 PM Hallo!
As I posted in my last post, I've been working on cutscenes and bringing the world of Jack Move to life! This has in practice just lead to me improving my cutscene tools as I come across new functionality I need, like duplicating common actions, setting light colours, fixing my movement code and opening and closing doors! I also worked on some code to help generate default character animation states, as you can see with my fancy blue box pal... (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-02/2017_02_28_jack_move_penthouse_cutscene.gif) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 11, 2017, 07:53:31 AM Hallo!
Moar tools and some other bits and pieces this week, but mostly trying not to get distracted by zelda! I've updated my sprite animation generator to create default battle characters. This is super handy, as I'm setting up all the character sheets, attacks and ai for this current slice, ready for when their animations are ready. Speaking of which... Gary has been refining the style of the characters in battle, we've got some really cute (and mean!) folks now. I'm super hype to see them starting to get animated and in-engine: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-03/2017-03-11-ALL-TOGETHER.png) Here's a new battle action. Spawning new enemy reinforcements. Blink and you'll miss it... as there no animation in place, it all happens a bit quickly: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-03/2017-03-11-battle_spawn.gif) I also proof-of-concepted adding footsteps when you're running about in the rain. It works pretty well, but needs refining. Might be a bit hard to see in this gif, those other rain splashes are a bit big, so maybe I'll change those: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-03/2017-03-02-rain_footsteps.gif) This next week will probably spent adding some more cutscenes and then play testing what I have in place at the moment :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: mysteriosum on March 11, 2017, 09:05:38 AM This game looks totally rad. Right up my alley! Amazing to see the progress you've made since page 1. Keep up the good work.
I skimmed most of your updates and didn't see much about the story. I want to know more! What's the evil mega-corp? What are their plans? Will you post a pre-alpha build at some point? Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: MPPlantOfficial on March 11, 2017, 09:57:46 AM Oh wow. That looks amazing. Reminds me of Shadowrun Dragonfall.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 12, 2017, 03:28:49 AM Thanks folks!
This game looks totally rad. Right up my alley! Amazing to see the progress you've made since page 1. Keep up the good work. I skimmed most of your updates and didn't see much about the story. I want to know more! What's the evil mega-corp? What are their plans? Will you post a pre-alpha build at some point? It still amazes me how janky those first few screens I posted are. What was I even thinking? The story is still in the process of being fleshed out and written, I might try and spend some more time on that this week, it's not my strongest skill. As for a build, I'll have to see. I probably will at some point. Maybe like an invite-only/sign-up thing to get some feedback. Oh wow. That looks amazing. Reminds me of Shadowrun Dragonfall. Thanks :) I've spent a bunch of time in Taipei over the last year, so that has really influenced the look and feel of the level design. Cheers Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 18, 2017, 07:20:12 AM Hey there!
Completely didn't do anything I said I was going to do last week, this week. This week I got some of Gary's character art in to the game, they are starting to look really good. Even if they're not animated yet, it's great to see how they feel in game. (Looks the same as last weeks image, but that was just a mockup!) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-03/2017-03-18%20Folks%20in%20battle.png) I mentioned this in my last update... in order to get all the characters set up I'd built some unity editor tool to create new animations and such. I spent most of the week expanding these tools to create a whole prefab for the enemy. This tool will:
(https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-03/2017-03-18%20Battle%20actor%20tool.png) It may have taken a few days to write but it's probably paid for itself already! The other tool I wrote was to import character sheet stat values from a google doc. I'm rewriting a lot of the underlying damage formulas and things, so this has come in super handy for tweaking things, as well as being able to compare all the enemy stats much more easily. I'll create a clone of this for enemy software (ie, magic spells) sometime during the week too. This week will definitely be rewriting those formulas and tweaking balance :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: foofter on March 18, 2017, 07:25:38 AM Battle screens look awesome, and so does the swanky-cute arm-swinging run!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 18, 2017, 07:27:50 AM Haha, thanks! That run cycle is super janky, it will be replaced by a real artists animation soon :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Gazillion on March 18, 2017, 08:44:05 AM Janky but super charming! This is getting more and more interesting all the time.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on April 15, 2017, 10:45:30 AM Hey folks
Missed a few weeks due to a week of illness and then not having much to report except bug fixes, but today I have some new fancy gifs... Behold! (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-04/2017-04-15-attack_demo_01.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-04/2017-04-15-attack_demo_02.gif) (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-04/2017-04-15-attack_demo_03.gif) My amazing artists/animators Gary (https://twitter.com/armyoftrolls) and Joe (https://twitter.com/joecreates) have been hard at work, making this magic wiz biz happen! I'm super excited about their progress so far! It's been really good to get their animation in game and really see it come to life, as well as have some fresh eyes on it to help point out any wrinkles. For example, it was suggested that we replace the run forward and run back animations with simple single frames. This makes the game much snappier, reduces the amount of animation work needed and still looks great. Lot's still to do! Whilst Gary and Joe concentrate on battle stuff over the next week, I'll be fixing a few battle engine bits and then shifting my attention back to level design bits. I need to tweak some maps and bits, and then do some estimate on how long the inventory/item system is going to take, and whether it's feasible for this target build. Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on April 24, 2017, 09:29:26 PM Heya
Late update this week as I've been travelling and things. Gary and Joe have been cracking on with some more awesome animation. Everytime I stick the new stuff in Unity the game feels more and more alive :D Latest things to show are... the new battle player sprite. Getting rid of the placeholder player has been incredibly cathartic!!! (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-04/2017-04-25-idles.gif) You can also see that the perspective on the grid has changed a bunch too. This is to aid the perceived scaling of the player against the enemies. It gave me a chance to finally render the grid programatically, something I've been thinking about how to do for a while. After messing about in photoshop for a couple of hours yesterday (and some poking from Joe) it became clear that it was probably going to be easiest to do it Unity somehow. That somehow is with an editor script that creates a bunch of objects that each have a line renderer on. These are then rendered to a render texture, that is then aligned and displayed with a simple ugui image. My main worry was that the line renderers would be anti aliased, luckily they aren't, so look perfect when rendered to the small render texture and blown up :) The grid also has a bit of a gradient added (this was also in the last update, but it's a bit more obvious now), this gives the battles a bit more depth. Enemies also get dimmed a bit when they are on the back line, then brighten as they take their turn. Next, I added a quick little intro animation. It's not much, but helps make the battles feel less static (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-04/2017-04-25-intro_and_new_grid.gif) This week is going to involve some map edits and tinkering, and adding more battle animations as they come in! I'll probably be unable to resist tweaking battle timing stuff too :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Gazillion on April 25, 2017, 06:38:19 AM It's crazy how sexy this is starting to look. Love the new perspective lines too!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: b∀ kkusa on April 25, 2017, 06:58:42 AM the new battle player sprite is just fantastic :handthumbsupR:
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: jctwood on April 25, 2017, 10:01:54 AM this is just cybertastic!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 08, 2017, 11:19:28 PM the new battle player sprite is just fantastic :handthumbsupR: Thanks! Joe's work is excellent!! Both Joe and Gary have been blowing me away with their work over the last couple of weeks :D this is just cybertastic! Hehe, thanks! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 09, 2017, 12:12:05 AM Heya
Let's just kick off with this shall we (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-05/2017-05-09-noa_magic.gif) I've said it before, but I will say it again... I'm so so soooo super stoked with Gary and Joe's animation!! Joe has done the player animation and Gary has done the boss (big mech guy) animation in this gif. We're still missing a few bits, like the player move frames and most of the spell/action effects, but I'm sure you'll agree that it's looking wicked :D The idea behind the boss is that he rams the player (causing damage) and then hides inside his mech until his next turn, making it hard to do damage to him. He's weak to electronic damage though, so using this "Hardwire" lightning attack will mess him up! You might have also noticed the UI has had a bit of an overhaul. After taking a while to nail down what scale/resolution the game will be, I've finally gotten round to shrinking the UI to fit the smallest resolution (320x240). Now everything looks a lot better, and there's no mismatch between the game and UI. So far I've only shrunked the battle UI, the world UI is next on my task list. (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-05/2017-05-08-shrunk_ui.png) Getting everything shrunk down to such a small resolution has been a real challenge, especially fitting text in. Whilst looking for some bitmap font solutions for Unity I stumbled upon Fontstruct (https://fontstruct.com), a super handy site for designing your own fonts. It supports designing pixel fonts right out the gate and is super easy to use. For Jack Move I designed a 4px font and an 8px font for special bits (it's a bit unreadable for large stretches of text, but nice for headings and things). 4px (sorry the preview is a bit blurry): (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-05/2017-05-09-font_4.png) 8px: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-05/2017-05-09-font-8.png) Here they are in action: (https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/5946684/jackmove/2017-05/2017-05-09-ui_fonts.png) I'm still not super happy with the layout of the top area of this screen, so I'll have to revisit it soon. I think that's about it for the moment. Tasks for this week are to finish the UI refactor and do another pass over the world, I've been slowly adding more cyber-y/futuristic stuff :) Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 14, 2017, 07:17:24 PM Hey folks!
Spent most of last week finishing off the UI refactor. It was a chore, but everything is looking much more coherent now. I also took the time to add a new "Execute" menu screen, this allows you to use software (magic) outside of battle, so you can use your healing software etc. Get hype for some UI screenshots!! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qvqflbkj0m9egay/2017-05-15-menu_01_main.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/y533ngd00tqkuy7/2017-05-15-menu_02_execute.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/rw4f3lmjhj6h5ua/2017-05-15-menu_03_software.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ryanrjeu97jsbsk/2017-05-15-menu_04_hardware.png?dl=1) As a quick treat to myself after all that dull UI work, I reworked the battle transition. My original version was written before Unity enabled post effects in the free version, so I had this real hacky workaround where I took a screenshot, stuck it in a texture, and then used that in a gui element and did some weird shader stuff to it. This has worked ok, but has some downsides such as UI being present in the transition. I wasn't too happy with the glitchy effect anyway, so wanted to have another play with that. Old version: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/irf27xe9lddxx1e/jack_move_03.gif?dl=1) New version: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/lv71kpbnanf40m2/2017-05-11-new_battle_glitch.gif?dl=1) I've been a bit cheeky and used this excellent open source shader (https://github.com/keijiro/KinoGlitch), rather than write me own this time. I think the effect is much better than I'd have been able to come up with on my own. I combined it with the stock Unity fisheye effect to give it a bit of movement, cranking the parameters right up so it does some wacky stuff. This week is mostly going to be looking at more world stuff, tightening up textures, look and feel, item placement etc. Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Ungrateful Dead on May 14, 2017, 07:41:56 PM I've seen this on my twitter feed a few times. It looks amazing everytime I see it, but going through this thread and looking at how much it's evolved since the beginning is simply mind blowing. The new animation work is phenomenal. Just excellent stuff all around.
Like you mentioned a few posts back, the 4px font can be a bit difficult to read at times, and I think it's mostly because you added breaks in the actual lettering. I think trying to stylize font that small is just going to be difficult in general. It looks good on the 8px version of the font though. I think that's my only criticism about the UI though. It's very aesthetically pleasing in general. That overworld to battle transition is simply gorgeous by the way and I love everything about it. Nice work! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 14, 2017, 08:25:31 PM I've seen this on my twitter feed a few times. It looks amazing everytime I see it, but going through this thread and looking at how much it's evolved since the beginning is simply mind blowing. The new animation work is phenomenal. Just excellent stuff all around. Thanks!! It's been quite a journey :) Like you mentioned a few posts back, the 4px font can be a bit difficult to read at times, and I think it's mostly because you added breaks in the actual lettering. I think trying to stylize font that small is just going to be difficult in general. It looks good on the 8px version of the font though. I think that's my only criticism about the UI though. It's very aesthetically pleasing in general. Thanks for the feedback. I think I will roll back on the breaks in the 4px font, it might be a bit much. Although I've only used it for real words in a very few places, due to my concerns about translating that stuff in the future. I'm worried about finding a 4px font for anything other than a roman character set. I'll leave it for a few days and see how it feels after actually using it in earnest. That overworld to battle transition is simply gorgeous by the way and I love everything about it. Nice work! Thanks! It's certainly way slicker than the last one :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: SolarLune on May 14, 2017, 10:56:40 PM Yo, the progress you've made on this looks pretty incredible. Really nice work, man!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 15, 2017, 02:22:56 AM Yo, the progress you've made on this looks pretty incredible. Really nice work, man! Thanks SolarLune, that's really appreciated :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Fat Pug Studio on May 15, 2017, 02:55:47 AM It's looking fantastic now. I used Fonstruct for designing font for my game too, neat little site indeed. I also use Kinoglitch for some stuff in game (being hit by EMP), Keijiro made a great script.
Looking forward to this, i really enjoy yout devlogs :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 15, 2017, 10:03:41 PM It's looking fantastic now. I used Fonstruct for designing font for my game too, neat little site indeed. I also use Kinoglitch for some stuff in game (being hit by EMP), Keijiro made a great script. Yeah fontstruct is aces, highly recommended for anyone else that needs to quickly and easily create a nice pixel font :) Kinoglitch is aces too! I made a small modification to the original source to allow the jitter effect to have chunky lines that would match my game resolution (i'm not rendering to a texture and then scaling up). My changes are up here: https://github.com/empika/KinoGlitch (specific commit https://github.com/empika/KinoGlitch/commit/b44d2dbcea87598ebe864e677ee53ca175df7ccb) Looking forward to this, i really enjoy yout devlogs :) I always wonder if they are kinda boring or not, so I'm glad you enjoy them. Thanks! :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Fat Pug Studio on May 16, 2017, 12:49:28 AM Nice modification! :handclap:
They're not boring, they are meaningful and interesting, keep them coming :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 21, 2017, 09:31:55 PM Hey! What's good, everyone
Not a whole lot to show this week. The main things that got crossed off the todo list were: Find a bunch of old megadrive sound effects to use as placeholders and pop those in game (this is still ongoing). I really like the old FM sound effects on the Megadrive/Genesis. Refactor the way that items work. Previously I'd only pseudo coded items, so you could receive them from chests but they wouldn't actually do anything. I was hoping to avoid actually implementing items just yet as it's a bunch more work and maybe not necessary for this vertical slice. However, after doing a bunch of play testing it felt like the demo would be better for it, it's hard to get through without needing more data/mana. I did have some "vending machines" set up that instantly refill your health and data, but they felt really clunky, plus you can't use them in battle. So now we have a new menu option to use items outside of battle, and a new option in battle to use items (although this battle code needs a big refactor, it's piggybacking o the magic system and is just really gross and hacky). Here's another super exciting UI screenshot: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/9f9eqrcwq9gnsoz/2017-05-22-patch_menu.png?dl=1) The next big task I took on this week was a refactor of the rendering system. Having refactored the UI to render nicely on tiny screens and look good when scaled up, it seemed like a good thing to do. You wouldn't be able to tell the game is actually rendered at native size and scaled using the cameras orthographic size, unless you look closely (not too closely) at the lighting. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/95vzxzwvmij6w7j/2017-05-19-rendering_smooth.png?dl=1) If you look at this screenshot, you can see that the lighting is super smooth, and is being rendered at much higher resolution than the artwork. I've seen quite a few tutorials on how to get pixel perfect gameplay but I went for my own weird approach as none of them really fit how Jack Move is set up. Here's a brief overview of how I've got it set up. I have a bootstrap scene that sets up a bunch of stuff. The main object is the World Controller that handles input, loading new maps, showing the gui etc. The World Controller is a singleton and sticks around between scene loads. Nested under the World Controller I have a new "Render Stuff" object, this has new camera and ui canvas underneath it. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/y1yrb7w98pe9uzy/2017-05-22-rendering_01.png?dl=1) The canvas has a RawImage object on it. This is what we'll be rendering to using a simple material. The important thing here is the PixelRenderer component. This sets up rendering on every scene load or when the resolution is changed. Here's the code: https://gist.github.com/empika/61bf4939635783c7e133c587465bd429 The main part of the code is the UpdateEverything function (a lot of things could all do with better names :P). Here we do a bunch of stuff... ...when I say source resolution, i mean the tiny version. Eg, the source resolution for 1280x720 might be 427x240. * Get the camera we'll be rendering to (Just using GameObject.Find. It doesn't happen very often so we should be ok to do that here) * Work out the source resolution (small res) we'll be rendering at (see below), and the scale we'll then be rendering that at. * Create a new rendertexture and set it up * Most importantly here is setting the resolution and setting the filter mode to FilterMode.Point. * Set the orthographic size of the camera we are rendering to (this should be 1/2 your source resolution.) * Setting the main texture of the RawImage's material to the rendertexture we just created. * Set the size of our RawImage to our source resolution * Set the scale of our RawImage to our calculated scale Most of the other stuff in this class is related to turning off the ui when a battle starts and other jack move specific bits. I guess the only other important thing is caching the screen width and height at the end of UpdateEverything. We can check against these cached values in update, if either one has changed then we update everything again to accommodate the new resolution. Here's the result, note the chunky lighting as it now matches the resolution of the assets. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ob3o9u7u67n8vo/2017-05-19-rendering_chunky.png?dl=1) So, about calculating resolution and scale... I have a simple formula. Given a screens height and a target height we can work out the scale, and then the source resolution (our small one that we'll then scale up). To work with the example I gave above, 1280x720... I have designed the UI around 320x240. To get our scale we take the height of the screen, 720 and divide it by 240, which neatly divides by 3, otherwise we would round down. Another example, 1920x1080, 1080 / 240 = 4.5, which we round down to 4. That gives us our scale, which we can then use to workout the source resolution. 1280x720 @ 3x scale = 427x240. 1280x1024 @ 4x scale = 480x270. Once we have our scales and target resolutions, we can set the rendering camera to use that orthographic height, recreate our rendertexture with the new size, set our UI image to the new size and then scale it up. I think the main advantage of this approach is that there are never any cropping, we're always rendering at the same aspect ratio as our screen. And using the UI we don't have to mess around with planes and matching their scale to camera size and vice-versa. As long as we set our UI image to the same size as our render texture we can scale it up and down to fit the screen. That's probably not the greatest explanation of all that, so let me know if you have any questions! Oh, and this morning I already moved some of the in world UI to the gui layer. This means that it wont get smooshed into any fullscreen effects such as bloom or the battle transition. I think the only thing affected by this is the portals that link maps. I just had to recreate the direction arrow sprite as a UI element and then update it's screen position to track the in world position. They get placed as world objects so I can easily position them within the collider. You can see how the arrow is placed in world on the left. At runtime the renderer component gets switched off so only the UI version is displayed: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/t56zzrecr8at6c3/2017-05-22-portal_ui.png?dl=1) This week will mostly involve finishing up adding placeholder sound, a whole bunch of playtesting/qa and fixing all the stuff that comes out of that. Wow, big update this week! Ok, think that's it! Cheers Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on May 25, 2017, 10:56:17 PM Heya
Early update this week as it's a public holiday here in taiwan on monday and tuesday, so I'm not sure how much work I'll be getting done. Here's a pro tip... use a material for your UI element colours. Otherwise, when you need to change them, you'll have to go through every single UI element in order to to so! That's how I spent my entire day yesterday :'( This came about because I did some testing on a TV to see how it looks. The TV I used isn't super great though, so the colours are not quite as good as the monitor I use. The light and the dark greens I use in the UI are not contrasting enough, so it was really hard to tell when something was highlighted on or not. Thankfully, now I've moved everything over to using materials I can tweak the values and have it apply across the whole UI. Other stuff I've done this week is:
Nothing super exciting i'm afraid! Still got a tons of bugs from testing to fix, so that's the plan for the coming week. Cheers Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 05, 2017, 11:29:56 AM Hey everyone!
Back from Taiwan last night and feeling super jetlagged, so how about a ton of fancy battle gifs to start off with?! Basic damage! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/xif2amu7vy8lgwk/2017-06-05-01_blood_fx.gif?dl=1) Heal!! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/nhzix9mabfvkkm6/2017-06-05-02_heal_fx.gif?dl=1) Portscan!!! (Reveal details about an enemy, hp, strengths/weaknesses etc) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/bz1jq43z28roh5u/2017-06-05-04_scan_fx.gif?dl=1) Summon a new enemy!!!! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/yl6gs9yabiz4t6d/2017-06-05-03_spawn_fx.gif?dl=1) Attack up!!!!! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4vyngnpkc6jwpl2/2017-06-05-06_attack_up_fx.gif?dl=1) Electronic fireball!!!!!! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/zy97zbbkjjmk0vj/2017-06-05-05_electonifireball_fx.gif?dl=1) I had Joe (https://twitter.com/joecreates) working again this week, and he got all these fx finished. I spent most of the day today popping those in to the game :) There's probably a few of Gary's (https://twitter.com/armyoftrolls) character animations that I've not shown before too. The whistling call of the cyber-doggie summon and cyber doggies vicious bite! Gary has been working on a bunch of Noa's in-world animations too, though we're still tweaking and finishing those so perhaps I'll show them in the next update. Other than that, this past week has been playtesting, fixing bugs, adding missing soundfx etc. Oh! I also started on writing my own texture packing program. This was mainly procrastination from fixing bugs, but also because there are a few features I'd really like in TexturePacker and my needs are pretty simple. Mainly, I mostly work with just rectangular sprites and I'd like the ability to just set a cell size, and be able to anchor the sprites either center/top/bottom/left/right etc, and also give them an offset. I started off using electron to create a cross platform app using javascript, I'll see how far I get. It's not high on my list of priorities so will probs sit on the back burner for a while. Think that's about it :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 12, 2017, 11:34:53 AM Hey folks,
Not a whole lot to show this week. I've mostly been fixing bugs and getting a build ready to send to some friends. It's gotten to the point where I think it's getting good, but need some more eyeballs on it! This morning I worked up a quick flash effect. I wanted some way to add a bit more impact to damage hits and things. The first version was a bit intense: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/xr91k7ypufm3b3l/2017-06-12-battle_flash.gif?dl=1) This version using just a screen border is much nicer, although the amount of flashes and colour needs to be experimented with :) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/sqx8w4pfghrnn5o/2017-06-12-battle_flash_02.gif?dl=1) Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 25, 2017, 10:22:36 AM Hey everyone,
I've been super busy over the last couple of week, both with the game and organising an event that I run called Games by the Sea. It's a fun party with drinks and multiplayer/party games, held each year whilst the Develop conference is on in my home town of Brighton. So if you're attending Develop, you should come along! We have a bunch of free tickets, with the next batch going up on Friday! (https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/games-by-the-sea-2017-tickets-35452987841) As for Jack Move, lots has been going on. I've got a ton of new npc and player animations from Gary (https://twitter.com/armyoftrolls) and Joe (https://twitter.com/joecreates). The world is starting to feel a bit more alive with all these npcs. On the code side of things, I made a neat little cutscene action so that you can give an actor a target and they will face the correct direction, ie, have the correct idle or talking animation play. This has also been added to the Dialog action, which means I don't really have to manually set the talk and post-dialog idle each time unless it specifically needs it. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/k5fugkq06xqjq4b/2017-06-25-noa_alex_talk.gif?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/2qysde5fe11s1dq/2017-06-25-noa_goth_talk.gif?dl=1) I've tweaked a ton of stuff like battle timing and screenshake amounts. These things (especially screenshake) could be tweaked forever, so I'll have to stop at some point. I've also been implementing tweaks and fixes from a bunch of feedback I've got after I sent out a build a couple of weeks ago. Some of this is pretty mundane like spelling mistakes and things not getting triggered correctly in cutscenes. But other stuff has had a major impact on the game, my favourite being the Cache move that is available in battle... Previously the Cache move acted as a basic defend. Once activated you would take 25% (with a random chance of 30%) less damage. However, some feedback that I got was that it was quite difficult to balance changing up your loadout (more about loadout and software in this previous post (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1299769#msg1299769)) and not getting massacred by enemies. This is something that I've actually been thinking about for a long time. With only one party member it can be quite difficult to time your loadout swap if you don't also have enough ram to keep your regenerative software. The playtesters suggestion was that Cache should do as it's name suggests (and what they expected in the first place) and delay you current turn so that next time you get two turns in a row. I thought it was going to be super hard to implement in my battle engine, but turns out it only took twenty minutes :D The outcome is actually really good, with a nice bit of risk and reward. Using the turn order list you can time when you want to Cache, usually when only one or two enemies will attack between now and your next turn, you still take the damage but are still defending so you'll take a bit less. Then next turn, you can swap out your software and use it within what is essentially one go, with no wait in between. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wnsgs7v3sn6ahb0/2017-06-25-cache.gif?dl=1) Not sure if that's a great description, but it definitely solves the problem :D Still more tweaks and fixing to do this week, onwards and upwards! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: SolarLune on June 26, 2017, 09:18:11 AM Very cool! I really like the art style, again. It all seems to be coming together well.
Cache sounds like a nice ability that has a few strategic uses, so good work on that front, too. I was thinking that in regards to your NPC animations, you might be able to get more bang for your buck, so to speak, by having the NPCs be less "static". Like, less frames of animation with more interesting poses > more frames of animation in less interesting poses. Having characters seated, leaning against the wall, crouching, playing with objects - you could add more to the atmosphere with characters, even with fewer actual animation frames, rather than having a larger number of characters with more frames all moving in the same way (bobbing up and down). Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 27, 2017, 03:26:29 AM Very cool! I really like the art style, again. It all seems to be coming together well. Cache sounds like a nice ability that has a few strategic uses, so good work on that front, too. Thanks! I was thinking that in regards to your NPC animations, you might be able to get more bang for your buck, so to speak, by having the NPCs be less "static". Like, less frames of animation with more interesting poses > more frames of animation in less interesting poses. Having characters seated, leaning against the wall, crouching, playing with objects - you could add more to the atmosphere with characters, even with fewer actual animation frames, rather than having a larger number of characters with more frames all moving in the same way (bobbing up and down). Thanks for the feedback, that's really useful. I think once we get more time we'll revisit these animations to give them a bit more character. For the moment I just wanted to get something in the game that's not just a single static frame but wouldn't take a huge amount of time to produce. Bobbing up and down is a lot easier than an idle with a complicated pose or more subtle animation. For example, as Uncle Guin is a main character I chose to put more effort into getting him animated. His animations are much more naturalistic, no bobbing up and down, smoking a cigarette, swirling his drink etc. I hope to bring this level of animation to all the npcs in the future, sadly I just don't have the budget at the moment. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mp95dt1zrya6kgu/2017-06-27-uncle_guin_intro.gif?dl=1) Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on July 06, 2017, 05:04:41 AM Hey champs!
Been busy working on getting Jack Move ready to show to people during the Develop conference next week (as well as organising the Games by the Sea party), it's been a super busy couple of weeks of getting the last bits of art in to the demo, fixing bugs and making a new trailer... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur7uaBYdHl8 Also, I finally got round to updating the first post of this thread :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Xorglord on July 06, 2017, 07:55:09 AM This game looks so awesome. The art / animations & world all look incredibly smooth. Great work!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Jasmine on July 06, 2017, 01:59:19 PM Man, this game has come a long way, and it looks faaaantastic!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: xix on July 06, 2017, 03:06:01 PM The animations are looking fantastic!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: zede05 on July 06, 2017, 09:12:15 PM So good! Really nice progress!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: justincavenagh on July 09, 2017, 03:56:23 AM Hey champs! Been busy working on getting Jack Move ready to show to people during the Develop conference next week (as well as organising the Games by the Sea party), it's been a super busy couple of weeks of getting the last bits of art in to the demo, fixing bugs and making a new trailer... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur7uaBYdHl8 Also, I finally got round to updating the first post of this thread :) Wow! great work, really dig the overall aesthetic. The music in the trailers is really well done as well. Whos the composer for that one? Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on July 13, 2017, 01:03:16 AM Thanks everyone :)
Wow! great work, really dig the overall aesthetic. The music in the trailers is really well done as well. Whos the composer for that one? The music for the trailer is by Fracture (https://soundcloud.com/fracture-official), who I'm pleased to say will be doing all the music for the game :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on July 22, 2017, 08:04:33 AM Hey folks,
Been a hectic couple of weeks, what with Develop etc. But slowly getting back into the swing of development. Did some playtesting and bits so I've been fixing some of the issue that have come up from feedback. Firstly, I've added input device independent icons to a bunch of dialog to make tutorials a bit easier to understand: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/r5poze92hus6g83/2017-07-22-inline_keys.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4famkbr4xd9q3oy/2017-07-22-inline_pad.png?dl=1) I used the excellent TextPic in the UI-Extensions project https://bitbucket.org/UnityUIExtensions/unity-ui-extensions/wiki/Controls/TextPic. I had to change a bunch of stuff to get it to swap out images at runtime, but it seems to be working well :) I also added a context sensitive thing to show what inputs are available. At some point I'll add an option to turn this on or off. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/6np1hfkn7czgxcc/2017-07-20-input_help.png?dl=1) Lastly, people were having trouble understanding what they needed to do. Lot's of people just skip past any dialog stuff and then miss what their goal is. So I added a little objective system that tells you exactly what you need to do. It pops up a little thing when you receive the objective, and they are all viewable in the menu too. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/l7kbzy4lp2tc7gv/2017-07-22-objective_popup.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/22usscl40lyldpx/2017-07-22-objective_menu.png?dl=1) This next week I'll be concentrating on making a tutorial for the battles, hopefully this will be quite simple. I'd really rather not over tutorialise things, but if I can reduce the friction some players are encountering then it will be better for everyone :) Till next time, x Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 15, 2017, 08:37:13 AM Hey folks, been a while!
I've mostly spent the last few weeks working on pitch and budget stuff, which has been fun, if not a challenge as they're not my strongest skills. I've also been working on a lot of small fixes and improvements, a battle simple tutorial (as promised!) and making cutscene skippable. A nice little touch I've added is a slight scroll-in when battles start (after Joe suggested it). It's quite subtle, but gives the battle a bit more depth: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/o933e16obzi03ig/2017-07-20-battle_intro.gif?dl=1) Other small things I've worked on include adding a button prompt to dialog boxes, making all the air-con units more 3d (rather than a flat sprite) and general tweaks to maps and lighting and things. The next big thing was the battle tutorial. This is pretty simple and just presents the player with a bunch of dialogs to explain things. I might revisit this at some point to include a turn by turn tutorial but that would involve some battle code refactoring that I don't have time for at the moment. I'm hoping this should be enough. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/io187uimlcez7sx/Screenshot%202017-08-15%2017.16.07.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5yesdnqfv4mjvu8/Screenshot%202017-08-15%2017.16.25.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/uculnk8oeddf514/Screenshot%202017-08-15%2017.16.45.png?dl=1) Lastly I worked on skipping cutscenes, this wasn't as tricky as I had thought, but will mean a bit more content work in the future. Cutscenes a comprised of a list of frames, and each frame has a list of actions, these are stored as just a hierarchy of game objects. The cutscene controller steps through each frame, plays all of that frames actions, waits for them to complete and then steps to the next frame. Skipping a cutscene halfway through could leave things in a weird state if control was handed back to the player immediately. The first thing I did was add a "cancel cutscene" hook to each action that would require it. Then I added a second list of frames and a little bit of scripting to put the original frames under their own object so we're not mixing normal frames and skip frames together. Now when the cutscene is canceled we fade out and run the skip frames, then fade back in. Super simple! The end result is that anything like a moving character can have it's action cancelled, and a skip frame and accompanying action that sets the character to it's final position and sets the correct (usual idle) animation, so everything is set up for control to be handed back to the player. This might sound super simple, and the initial implementation was. However, things like dialogs and UI dependant actions caused a lot more pain than I was expecting. Luckily this was a good time to tidy up some of that code :) That's about it. Till next time... Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: thefoolishbrave on August 15, 2017, 09:13:22 AM come a long way man, and looking great! :D
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: FriendLight on August 15, 2017, 09:28:26 AM That battle transition looks sweet! I also really like the color palette on the combat view - the character sprites contrast nicely against 80's hacker grid.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 16, 2017, 10:40:59 AM come a long way man, and looking great! :D That battle transition looks sweet! I also really like the color palette on the combat view - the character sprites contrast nicely against 80's hacker grid. Thanks! Means a lot :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: bombjack on August 16, 2017, 11:17:50 AM The art direction is very impressive.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 23, 2017, 07:07:53 AM Hey there!
Been working on some new environments over the past week. Sadly I've been a bit ill too, so not got as much done as I'd have liked. Here is Deck Lord, the electronics and hacking store and den: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/janm421sy1dlbeu/2017-08-19-deck_lord_interior.gif?dl=1) And here's Monomart, the local convenience store for all your health/regen needs: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/2b1f7c1venu38xa/2017-08-21-monomart_interior.gif?dl=1) I've been trying to get faster at creating maps, both of these took around one day each. You might also notice (although maybe not) that I've swapped out the effects stack for Unity's new post processing stack. Specifically the beta of version 2 stack as this fixes an issue I was having where the bloom filter would flash and blink when turned up even a tiny bit. I also just discovered ambient occlusion, which looks pretty good, give everything just a little more depth. I'm not sure if I'll keep it, as the effect flickers a little when small objects are close together, perhaps this is a small price to pay for a general overall improvement though. Till next time :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: FranCarmona on August 23, 2017, 07:35:42 AM I never get tired of cyberpunk games. This looks great! Just a question. Probably someone asked before on this thread but, which game engine do you use?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 23, 2017, 08:58:32 AM I never get tired of cyberpunk games. This looks great! Just a question. Probably someone asked before on this thread but, which game engine do you use? Thanks :) Jack Move is built in Unity. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: RadicalBradical on August 23, 2017, 10:09:38 AM Hey champs! Been busy working on getting Jack Move ready to show to people during the Develop conference next week (as well as organising the Games by the Sea party), it's been a super busy couple of weeks of getting the last bits of art in to the demo, fixing bugs and making a new trailer... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ur7uaBYdHl8 Also, I finally got round to updating the first post of this thread :) I LOVE the battle animations -- especially the lightning/thunder spell animation! Keep up the great work! Looking forward to seeing more. :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 23, 2017, 02:17:57 PM Thanks RadicalBradical! :D (Great username there ;))
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: RizeoftheSummonds on August 23, 2017, 07:00:27 PM This game looks incredibly awesome. Great art direction. I have to ask, how many times did you have to change your art direction before you reached this one? :lol:
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 24, 2017, 04:15:15 AM This game looks incredibly awesome. Great art direction. I have to ask, how many times did you have to change your art direction before you reached this one? :lol: Hey. Thanks! :) Code-wise the game has been through a ton of iterations, starting with ImpactJS, XNA and then finally Unity once the 2D stuff came out. The art has reflected those changes too. But since moving to Unity it's only really been through two iterations, the original 2 colour backgrounds that didn't really work (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1007983#msg1007983) and then the move to the 3D-forced-perspective look (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1111787#msg1111787). The 3D-forced-perspective look has had a couple of iterations, but only in terms of content. Once I got it working it's pretty much looked the same and I've just incrementally improved my process and lighting techniques etc. For example, rather than using single sprites for objects now, I'll often split them into a front face and a top face, which allows them to be lit better. You can see how levels are built in this post: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1185230#msg1185230 It also links to the Unite talk by Sebastien Dubois about the technique they used on Dungeon of the Endless that I stole/borrowed for Jack Move. Once I saw this I knew it would be perfect for what I had in mind. I think I've managed to expand and improve on it in my own way to make it unique enough :) Hope that explains things :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 07, 2017, 07:40:08 AM Hey folks,
Last week or so has been all about building more UI! Hooray, everybody's favourite! My main focus has been on building the shop systems, so you can now buy items, software and hardware. It's mostly done, but needs a bunch more testing to make sure' I've not missed any edge cases as there a ton of different conditions on whether an item is purchasable or not.I still need to tweak some of the text to make things a little more obvious too. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/loes6d298ymejxa/2017-09-05-shop_demo.gif?dl=1) :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Sustrato on September 07, 2017, 09:02:13 PM This is looking really good!
I know you're already overwhelmed, but the detailed real-world, combined with dynamic lighting, really makes the plain green grid of cyberspace rather lackluster. Adding the car/shipping crate in with the damage flashes was a nice touch, though. I'll try to keep an eye on this one! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 08, 2017, 07:36:41 AM This is looking really good! I know you're already overwhelmed, but the detailed real-world, combined with dynamic lighting, really makes the plain green grid of cyberspace rather lackluster. Adding the car/shipping crate in with the damage flashes was a nice touch, though. I'll try to keep an eye on this one! Thanks! The battles will actually have proper backgrounds. I've just not been able to get them in game yet. Depending on how it works out, I might have some props in the background too. I need to experiment with that and work out the best way to swap different props in and out, and then see if it actually looks good or not. Thanks for the feedback though, I'll think of some more ways I can make the battles look a bit more interesting! Last night I got annoyed by my terrible water tiles, so went an made a quick shader to do a bit of texture warp on the tiles, to save me actually having to animate them by hand. Modifying the Unity standard shader is a right pain, but I eventually got it working. It consists of a simple sin warp and then wrapping the uv values so that they stay inside the tile bounds. It's super simple, but as I only touch shaders about once ever six months I find myself having to relearn everything over again. So this was a nice little challenge for me :) (It's a bit harder to see when it's not better lit) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/n6jcgcnfgm829ps/2017-09-08-sewer_water_02.gif?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/f020p8odfh5ock9/2017-09-08-sewer_water_03.gif?dl=1) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 18, 2017, 03:40:52 AM Hey folks,
Lot's of under the hood fixes over the last week. Making long lists of menu items scroll nicely, making enemies drop money after defeat and fixing an issue with sprite offsets. That last thing has been something I've been meaning to do since I created my own tile slicing editor. Unity's own tile slicer is a bit of a pain, to give a sprite an offset you have to specify it in values between 0 and 1, which is not ideal, as you have to manually calculate that when dealing with pixel art. So originally I had just not bothered with setting exact offsets in the tile slicer and instead made a quick component that I attached to all the battle characters that would calculate their positions using an offset. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/7poqye32k49ba3s/2017-09-18-actor_offset.png?dl=1) The yellow line at the bottom of the sprite shows the offset. So, to cut a long story short. Using my own tile slicer that I added the ability to set offsets using pixels, I had to go and reslice all my actors spritesheets and set their offset correctly. As well as removing the offset component from all their prefabs. Not hard work, but certainly boring. Lastly this week I've been working on a new environment. This one is a bit different though. In the game you will be able o "dive in" to a software construct, so I wanted it to look kinda like the matrix, cyberspacey, circuitry kinda thing. I wasn't sure if what I had in my head was going to work, but I think I'm getting somewhere close to it. Here's my first attempt at a shader to get that effect. (Also, I learnt how to put stickers on my gifs haha) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qti248y2j2wu95r/2017-09-15-glitchy_textures.gif?dl=1) The floor looks kinda cool, but I only wanted the sinewavey highlight to appear on the grid in the background. The floor is just a grid and then transparent pixels. I wanted something more like this... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/bkj3g1qecyu1m8k/2017-09-15-glitchy_textures_02.gif?dl=1) The problem here is that the rest of the background has been cutout. After lots of banging my head I consulted a friend (Tom @ Big Robot) about how they would approach it, he suggested using multiple textures and other things that were a bit tricky for me to do easily. Unity works with sprites in a bit of an odd way, if you're set up like me (well not odd, but a bit of a hassle). If you use the standard shader to render your sprites, and you use multiple textures, the second texture needs to match the tiles of the first. So I would have to have another tilemap that would overlay on to my existing one. The pipeline for creating this would be a pain, so I wanted to do this all in-shader. So Tom suggested that as my construct world would be all green, I could use another colour channel to denote where I wanted the effect to occur. This worked great! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/htzrsbhx07ke0j3/2017-09-18-construct_test_02.gif?dl=1) I need to work on the textures and the blend of how much effect to show, but I'm happy for this first experiment. Lastly, I've been working on hooking up some reworked maps in to the game. Here's the new hideout. There was a lot of wasted space in the original, I wanted to make it feel smaller and more cluttered. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qeaspztoe69ai1e/2017-09-14-new_hideout_intro.gif?dl=1) Going to the EGX show in Birmingham, UK on thursday to show a build to some folks there, so will be preparing for that most of the week :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: ionside on September 18, 2017, 04:55:54 AM Hey looking forward to see this progress. I miss the 80's... I had a lot more hair back then.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Rarykos on September 18, 2017, 05:41:06 AM Finally! Been waiting for your update for sooo long...
So happy your game is moving forward! This moment for me is like a ray of awesome sunshine between the shit clouds that are indie games. Good luck! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 18, 2017, 06:15:55 AM Finally! Been waiting for your update for sooo long... So happy your game is moving forward! This moment for me is like a ray of awesome sunshine between the shit clouds that are indie games. Good luck! Haha, thanks, means a lot! I'll try and update at least once a week, it's hard when there's not a lot to show though, I'm not sure if updates about fixing bugs are that exciting :s Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Zaeche on September 20, 2017, 10:38:01 PM ./execute.py instructions={follow thread}
((Loving the visuals and direction! I like how the gameplay reminds of Golden Sun weirdly, save it's cyberpunk but hey, it's looking sharp :) ) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 22, 2017, 07:11:22 AM ./execute.py instructions={follow thread} ((Loving the visuals and direction! I like how the gameplay reminds of Golden Sun weirdly, save it's cyberpunk but hey, it's looking sharp :) ) Haha, thanks!! Yes, Golden Sun is one of my favourite jrpg's. It's been a while since I played it properly, but I've fired it up a few times to check out bits of battle design etc. I love the pseudo 3d look the battles have, kinda what I was going for in the first gif here https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1348560#msg1348560 Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: archgame on September 22, 2017, 09:26:08 PM Just seeing this game again after awhile. I feel like the environments have come a long way, I still remember in the beginning they seemed a bit flat and now I really get a sense of depth, texture, and lighting with them. :toastR:
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 23, 2017, 10:08:43 AM Just seeing this game again after awhile. I feel like the environments have come a long way, I still remember in the beginning they seemed a bit flat and now I really get a sense of depth, texture, and lighting with them. :toastR: Cheers :toastL: I've been working hard on improving my pixeling for the background stuff (still got a long way to go). Turning on FSAO has certainly helped give everything a bit more depth though :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 26, 2017, 09:27:04 AM Hey there folks!
I've been messing round with particles a bit today and yesterday because I wanted to try and make a fancy fountain. On thing that has always scuppered me is getting particles to look pixel perfect in Unity. I've gotten close just by fudging numbers by they've never been "perfect". I'm happy to say that I solved that today, so here's how... First, a demo... Here's the not-perfect version I was messing with yesterday. You can see that it looks ok, but not "perfect", a bunch of the pixels look like 2px clumps etc. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/68ju5lgeakr10xo/2017-09-25-fountain_test.gif?dl=1) And here's the pixel perfect version: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/jc8mfqf084rqtxb/2017-09-26-fountain_test.gif?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/c01c70is7g9bvyh/2017-09-26-pixel_perfect_particles_01.png?dl=1) You can see in this static shot that the pixel of the particles match the pixel grid of the rest of the game. So how do we achieve that result? Firstly, make sure you have your pixel perfect camera set up, this is super complicated in itself but here's a real quick rundown of how I do it: * Import all your textures at 1 pixel per unit. * Create a render texture the size you would like to render at (in my case 320x240). * Point your main camera at your render texture (Target texture). * Set your main camera to orthographic. * Set you main camera orthorgraphic size to half your target resolution (in my case 120). (Ortho size is half the screen size). * Create a UI canvas. * Se the canvas to "Screen space - overlay". * Add a raw image element to the canvas. * Set the image to be centered and have the same dimensions as your target resolution (anchors all 0.5, position 0, size 320x240). * Create a new material. * Use the "Unlit/Texture" shader. * Set the render texture as the base image on the material. Errr, that should do it. My set up is a bit more complicated than that as I dynamically set the orthographic size depending on the size of the actual window we're rendering in, and also find the next camera when we change scenes etc. There are a million posts and articles on pixel perfect cameras out there so worth checking those out if you have problems. The major way mine differs is using a canvas and raw image to display our render texture, seems better than positioning/sizing it ourselfs. As it's a raw image it shouldn't have any performance overheads. Shout if you have any questions though. Ok, on to particles! I'm not going to go through the particle system bits in top down order. So let's start at the bottom in the renderer section: * Render mode: Mesh. This was the big revelation for me, we now have a predictable thing we're working with. * Mesh: Quad * Material: Create your material with your particle in it. I'm just using the Sprites-Default shader. Main particle system section: * Start size: 32 (in my case). This is the size of your sprites in pixels (as we already set our sprites to use 1ppu). * 3D start rotation: Yup * x: -90, y: 0, z:0. I had to set x to -90 to get the particles to face the camera rather than face up. * Simulation space: local * Scaling mode: Hierarchy. I had to set this as I scale my whole world, without setting this, particles would not get scaled along with that. That's about it! The important things are using mesh renderers and setting the start size to the size of your sprites. I have no idea how performant using meshes is vs using billboards, but it's fine for my purposes of 20-30 particles. Don't forget you can use the Texture Sheet Animation module too. My spritesheet (set in the material) is 4x4 32px sprites so the module is set to use... * Tiles x: 4, y: 4 * Animation: Whole sheet. ...so even though the texture being used is 128x128px, each sprite being chopped out for the animation is 32px and this so is my start size. I hope that helps some folks. It's not really that difficult, just took a bit of poking at unity and experimenting with stuff that I'm often not certain of. Apologies if my technical writing is a bit all over the place, I'm open to feedback :) Thanks! :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 04, 2017, 07:15:21 AM Hey folks,
First of all here is a great guide on how to set up a pixel perfect camera in basically the same way I described (badly) in my last post: http://www.returnofthebrain.co.uk/pixel-perfect-virtual-camera-unity3d/ I've been up to lot's this week. I had some great feedback from a couple of people so am slowly working my way through that. The first big thing I worked on was getting dialog portraits working. Here's a little test: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qw1l4t4tbivenpe/2017-09-30-portrait_test.gif?dl=1) Even just using stick men placeholders it adds a whole bunch of depth to conversations. I've shied away from wanting to implement this previously as it add a whole load more assets to the pile. But having looked at how other games have done it in the past, I've come to the compromise of ignoring portraits for npc's unless they are important. The upside, way fewer portraits to get done. The downside is that it might give away which characters are important later on, although I can tweak this as I go I think, only revealing portraits when necessary. My initial implementation uses a bunch of scriptable objects with lists of sprites & expressions. However, I'm going to rewrite this and use a single image with a Unity mecanim animator on it, then I can just reference animation trigger names in my dialog. This will be much cleaner code and also give me the added benefit of being able to do a lot more with the portraits such as animating them (of course!) and adding effects or overlays for different situations. The next big chunk of work has been another big UI overhaul. I've been trying to block out the feedback that the UI is way too green and hard to understand. I'm kinda sad that I was unable to stick to my guns on this one, purely because old green computer interfaces look rad, but those are all 30 years old and a lot weren't great then. I think the result is better for it though :) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/tdzv2yr6ptdeg4v/Screenshot%202017-10-04%2016.10.14.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ljy0d68dlk8ntnh/Screenshot%202017-10-04%2016.10.33.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5gyoocu14qhwg7p/Screenshot%202017-10-04%2016.10.42.png?dl=1) You'll notice a few more colours to break things up a bit, and a bit of texture in the background. New fonts! I needed to replace the main font I was using anyway (from an old website, and I was unable to find the author to ask permission to use it) so created a new one. I also replace the teeny tiny 4px font, increasing it to the much more legible 5px! I've also tightened up a lot of the spacing and making everything much more consistent across the board. Let me know if there's any other improvements you think might be good :) I've been reworking a bunch of the script too, giving our heroine a bit more motivation etc. My previous dialog was pretty goofy and didn't set the tone very well. Lot's more to crack on with, a few more bits of UI work, more script stuff, and the overhaul of the dialog portraits :) Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 07, 2017, 08:03:48 AM Hey folks!
Been trying to work out a better way of how to show which "preset" is currently active. Presets are different loadouts of software your have loaded in your cyberspace deck, they are useful for switching "jobs" quickly during battle. Here's my first attempt at something better: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/lk3xgq14kq2suzq/Screenshot%202017-10-07%2016.34.48.png?dl=1) And here's another revision: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/u3ecsy7w5sagnie/Screenshot%202017-10-07%2016.43.21.png?dl=1) Previously I had a little star next to the currently active preset (you can see in the previous post), but this wasn't particularly indicative of being the current preset. I also tried changing the active preset button to white, but this wasn't great either, I think it was too much of a colour change from the rest. I think the new version is a lot better and removes any ambiguity, whilst retaining the ability to see which preset is active at a glance. You might notice that I also updated the RAM icons. This was to show how much RAM it is possible to have, and also helps fill up that area as it was feeling a bit empty :) I'm not a UI/UX expert but try to approach these problems with a sense of what problems the user might have with an interface and what information is important. If anyone has any thoughts for improvement, I'd love to hear them :) Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 08, 2017, 09:47:41 AM Here's yet another revision!
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/tsruv4cpqvppzoj/Screenshot%202017-10-08%2018.41.24.png?dl=1) A friend suggested moving the "active preset" text inline with the buttons. I'd tried this yesterday but didn't like the result, it looked a bit weird with the joining line out on it's own (I didn't manage to get a screengrab of that unfortunately). My friend also suggested that I could remove the "preset" text from the buttons themselves, I then I realised I could then just shrink them right down and move them up next to the RAM. It's a little more cramped but I think it's actually a little cleaner and give more room for the main thing, the list of software. :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: flex$ on October 08, 2017, 02:32:08 PM all of the interfaces shown here look incredibly tight and polished. the atmosphere of this entire project is set very well. keep at it.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Jovu on October 08, 2017, 03:16:49 PM Yo, I don't know how I haven't seen this earlier. But I def agree with flex that the atmosphere shown here is top-notch. :gentleman:
Cyberpunk is my favorite genre. And while I'm mostly meh on JRPGs, any potentially good cyberpunk story will get me intrigued. So that's where you've grabbed my attention and interest in this game. Please make it as gritty as possible, and don't pull any punches. This looks super fun. Not sure if there ever has been a cyberpunk JRPG before, and now that those two things have been said I can't get them out of my head. I will for sure follow this project closely. Good luck! :beer: Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 09, 2017, 02:21:25 AM all of the interfaces shown here look incredibly tight and polished. the atmosphere of this entire project is set very well. keep at it. Thanks! Yo, I don't know how I haven't seen this earlier. But I def agree with flex that the atmosphere shown here is top-notch. :gentleman: Cyberpunk is my favorite genre. And while I'm mostly meh on JRPGs, any potentially good cyberpunk story will get me intrigued. So that's where you've grabbed my attention and interest in this game. Please make it as gritty as possible, and don't pull any punches. This looks super fun. Not sure if there ever has been a cyberpunk JRPG before, and now that those two things have been said I can't get them out of my head. I will for sure follow this project closely. Good luck! :beer: Thanks a lot!! Some people would say that Final Fantasy 7 is cyberpunk, not sure I wholeheartedly agree though :) Last (I hope) revision of this software install screen. Another friend suggested that I use a dotted line for the active preset. I think it works quite well. I wasn't sure if Unity would do a tiled + sliced image, but it does it handles the slicing just fine when you set the image type to tiled :) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mp37emfow0tzvsr/Screenshot%202017-10-09%2011.15.05.png?dl=1) :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 14, 2017, 06:11:10 AM Hey folks,
This week I finished of that UI stuff which is good, then I went and saw Blade Runner 2049, two days in a row. I am absolutely in love with that film. The look, the feel, the story *chefs kiss*! It's not without it's issues though. How women are treated and it's lack of racial diversity to name a couple... but then again maybe that's commentary on the current climate (although that theory is a bit of a stretch). Despite those flaws it is a mesmerising piece of film, go and see it!! The best thing is that it has really invigorated and inspired me. Sooo, I spent a lot of the week doing an art pass on a lot of my tiles. Firstly simplifying them, there were too many colours, they were too busy and in a bunch of places this was really inconsistent (eg, I've stripped all that ceramic tiling down to just two colours). So I went through, redrew a lot of them and also create a bunch more in order to make things a bit more sci-fi. I wish I had before and after shots. (Also they're a bit dark :s) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/9hqkc38xwdt7p3z/Screenshot%202017-10-14%2014.45.16.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mhyk26xxj8xekjm/Screenshot%202017-10-14%2014.45.51.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/xtotrkrvh9fv3iy/Screenshot%202017-10-14%2014.46.45.png?dl=1) I've also been working with Gary to get some dialog portraits. He's been feeling out the style but we're not quite there yet, so I'm not ready to show those bits yet, hopefully soon though :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Ishi on October 15, 2017, 07:23:49 AM Fantastic progress! Battles especially look incredible compared to what I remember of the original screens/gifs. Good job and keep it up :coffee:
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 16, 2017, 03:47:06 AM Fantastic progress! Battles especially look incredible compared to what I remember of the original screens/gifs. Good job and keep it up :coffee: Thanks dude! Progress feels a bit slow at the moment, but looking back at these devlogs is a good reminder that things are getting done :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 16, 2017, 04:02:01 AM Oh, I should probably say what I'm gonna do this week. (Writing it down helps me actually do stuff, rather than just do whatever is the most fun hehe).
So this week I'm concentrating on rewriting a bunch of dialog, getting it up to speed with the revised version of the story. Once that's done I'll go in an reimport all the strings and rework the cutscenes to add or remove dialog and actions as needed. I've had some fantastic help with the story from an old colleague, Ed Fear (https://twitter.com/edfear), which has been great. Ed has really helped shape the plot and characters, their motivations , why stuff happens etc, and asking some really hard questions making me actually think about things properly rather than just blindly writing junk. We've got the basic outline down, I think it's now a case of going in and filling in the gaps and fleshing it out. Once it's in a bit better shape I'll share a synopsis :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 03, 2017, 06:23:17 AM Hey folks!
Been a couple of weeks since I last updated. I had a week off in sunny (rainy) Cornwall, spent some time with my family and got some well needed fresh sea air! Since the last update I've been working more on that art pass, trying to get things a bit more consistent. I won't show a ton of things, but the thing I'm most happy with is the cars in the scrapyard. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/875qyiytnjrz84g/2017-10-17_old%20cars.png?dl=1)(https://www.dropbox.com/s/06lv0vd9ax93x7y/2017-10-17_new%20cars.png?dl=1) And here they are in game... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/7sk920ue4w1ju39/2017-10-17_new%20cars%20in%20world.png?dl=1) You can see the silver car still looks crappy there. The sprites are too noisy, that dither doesn't look great and doesn't match the rest of the game. The other big thing I've worked on is adding distortion maps to the rain drops on the ground. It's a simple effect but looks really cool. Here is my first attempt. It looks ok but the rain pools are super dark and the animation isn't great: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ytq4uk9n18wz9f/2017-10-31_rain%20normalmap%2002.gif?dl=1) Here's the revised version. I added a brightness control to the shader and reworked the animation to make the pools a bit smaller. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/9vx2fvd625tndx5/2017-11-01_rain%20normalmap%2001.gif?dl=1) There's not much to distort in the city, so heres a gif of the town where you can see it better on the tiled roof and around the yellow lines on the road... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/znm75nyxusm4xyp/2017-11-01_rain%20normalmap%2002.gif?dl=1) I used the same shader I used for the heat distortion on the burning barrels. It was created by the excellent Minions Art (https://www.patreon.com/posts/quick-game-art-8172058). Other bit's I've been working on include a screenshot button (much easier to grab a proper shot from within the unity editor window now), some dialog, reworking the battle tutorial text and refactoring my rain particles just to use unity's default particle system stuff now that I figured out how to do pixel perfect particles (still fun to say!).. see this post for more details on that. (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1355657#msg1355657) I also did a little play testing at the local indie dev meetup I help run on Wednesday. I got some super useful feedback and found some good bugs so will be trying to implement/fix those bits over the next week. Have a good weekend everyone! :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 12, 2017, 05:55:23 AM Hey everyone, time for another update!
This week was a bit of a funny one. Last Sunday I sat down with a friend to work out why I was getting a little frame hitching and she helped walk me through the unity profiler and frame debugger, which was super useful. I kinda knew how to use them, but didn't exactly know what I was looking at and what the numbers should be doing. Another reason for wanting to do this was because I'd like to know how easy it would be to port the game to consoles. Soooo, I've been a long optimisation journey, trying to get the damn thing running on my phone at a decent framerate. I'll go over the issues I had and the steps that I've taken to get that kinda working, specifically with regard to drawcalls and garbage collection. Apologies for the wall of text! Firstly garbage collection. Here are some things you shouldn't be doing every frame: Concatenating strings in any way! In Jack Move I store calculate the direction the player is facing and store that in an enum that I then convert into a string/trigger for use with the animation system. For whatever dumb reason this was happening every frame, so I fixed that code to only fire if the animation state should change. I also pre-cached all the animation triggers in a big list that I could then use to lookup via the enum and get the actual trigger string, no more concatenation. StartCoroutine also creates garbage, so don't do that a whole bunch. I had some really old code for flickering lights that does this, where the code should really just be in the coroutine itself. Drawcalls were my main concern, initially I was somewhere around 3000 calls in a well lit area. The main things I've done to combat this are turning off SSAO :(, baking the lighting, converting all my tiles to meshes rather than SpriteRenderers, and then batching them myself. I think I'll be able to turn SSAO back on at some point with a few more tweaks. Each of these things is not the greatest on it's own, but when combined has given me a huge boost. I'm down to 380 calls in a well lit place (without SSAO), and that's without having lightmapped and batched all the scenery objects yet :) Lightmapping should be a pretty easy one, you turn it on, mark some stuff to be lightmapped and set your lights to be baked, then press the button and unity generates a bunch of textures that get overlaid over everything, instead of having to calculate the effect of lights in realtime. For example, a single tile with 2 lights would generate 3 drawcalls for realtime lights. 1 for the tile and then 1 for each light. Using lightmapping would result in just a single drawcall! So I have a million lights and a million tiles which results in a lot of drawcalls, lightmapping is going to save me a ton of work here. However, we have a problem, the sprite renderer I use for my tiles does not support lightmaps. Well, kinda, the stuff for lightmaps is there, it's just not exposed for easy use. Some kinda soul has figured this out though, and posted it up on github (https://github.com/lassade/Sprite2DBakedLighting). This worked super great, although I had one issue where the textures would disappear in the editor, but this was quickly fixed (https://github.com/lassade/Sprite2DBakedLighting/issues/2). So next up is batching all the tiles. Unity can be good at batching drawcalls dynamically, but it can also be pretty bad. So for every tile I had displayed unity was not batching them, resulting in many more calls than necessary. I wrote a little thing that took the meshes lassade's Sprite2DBakedLighting generates and combined them in to chunks of up to 16 (4x4) for each layer of floors or walls. The only problem I had here is that I'm still using materials in the same way as sprite renderers do, using a MaterialPropertyBlock to set the texture on a material used in multiple places. This would result in textures disappearing in play mode. So I just added a bit of code to my tilemap importer to reset the texture on the MaterialPropertyBlock at Start. Oh, the other main gotcha I had with combining meshes for use with lightmaps is that you need to call Unwrapping.GenerateSecondaryUVSet(mesh) on the new mesh after you create it, otherwise the lightmap looks bonkers. Turning off SSAO should be pretty obvious, fullscreen effects can be pretty intensive. If I turn it on now it brings my calls in that lit scene up to about 740, around double than without it. Which leads me to the last thing I need to do... optimise all the scenery items in the scene. All my objects are just made of multiple 32px tiles, eg a lampost is 3 tiles stacked on top of each other. These can all be way more optimised if I split the sprites into 1 big 32x96px sprite for example, but that's just a pain, I like to work with a grid of 32px as it's easy to slice them and work with (even if the tools in unity are there to slice them a bit nicer). So instead I'm going to take the mesh batching approach and to the same thing I did with tiles. Once an object is created and finalised, I'll just bake it into a single mesh, then it too can be nicely lightmapped and use fewer draw calls :) I'm by no means an expert in this stuff, but feel I've got a pretty good handle now on doing wacky stuff with unity 2d it wasn't really designed for, so happy to answer any questions. This coming week Joe is back on the project to finish the character portraits that Gary has started. Hopefully I'll be able to share those next week :D Cheers Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 17, 2017, 04:40:25 AM Hey folks,
It's been another busy week on Jack Move. Some more optimisation stuff and some cool new bits to show. It's a big post! :D On the optimisation side, I knocked up a script that builds meshes for items and then combines and saves them. Here's a bunch of code for that, you might have to edit a bunch of stuff to get it working and I've not had time to clean it up. Hopefully it's self evident what everything does though. https://gist.github.com/empika/f1ec6735b1959738e79c30c6d88088ae After combining a ton of objects in my test scene I've managed to get the draw calls down from ~3000 to about 150 or 330 with ambient occlusion turned on, which is pretty awesome. I've had Jack Move running on my iphone 5s at a pretty solid 30fps :D Gary has been doing a few days on and off over the past month, working on some dialog portraits. This past week Joe had some free time to finish those off with all the expressions needed. They've turned out suuuuuper good <3 <3 <3 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/0ud0fs17n0p14wi/2017-11-17%20portraits_cleanup.png?dl=1) It's been really fun getting them in game and deciding which portrait to use for each line of dialog. I have a certain tone of voice in my head when I write stuff, but given a limited amount of emotes to accent the lines with has made me change the way I thought certain lines read. I'll be expanding the amount of portraits in the future, so can hopefully cover all eventualities :) Here's an in game gif: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/6wmyzwko03kgwxn/2017-11-14%20portraits.gif?dl=1) Lastly I've been working on setting stuff up ready for Joe to do some work on the battle backgrounds. Originally I was just going to remove the top section of the grid and replace it with a static image (https://www.dropbox.com/s/hv75zghvs4fna9y/2017-11-17%20normal%20battle.png?dl=1) A few months ago Joe had suggested doing something a little fancier involving adding some items around to give the battles a bit more depth. He brought this up again earlier this week and sent over a quick mockup. So I spent a bunch of time working out how to translate that mockup in to an actual workable system :) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/t79olwcgjwqn7ed/20017-11-14%20battle%20mockup.png?dl=1) Uh huh. That UI is awesome, but no time for that right now! Hopefully in the future ;) The main issue with something like this is that I have to deal with varying screen widths, from tiny 320x240 (smallest) to super wide 688x310 (biggest). The obvious answer is to anchor things in the UI to certain percentages across the screen. This is something I already do with the player and enemy positions, so that was what I tried for my first attempt. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/z86ss33qqlmtcep/2017-11-14%20layer_experiment_02%20%40%20480x270.png?dl=1) It looks pretty good, but it was quite difficult to easily see how this would look at different resolutions, bar iterations of playing the game and adjusting things little by little. So I rolled up my sleeves and got to work on some tools that would allow me to do that. Battle scenes are composed from a number of layers: * The backdrop, which is a worldspace canvas. This allows me to place things on screen using RectTransforms, rather than just normal transforms, and still shakes everything with any screenshake. * The world. Noa, our player character and the enemies. * UI, a screenspace canvas. (There's actually a bunch of other stuff for rendering the background grid floating in the scene too. This is just a ton of animated line renderers and some cameras that render to render textures.) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/s76ydd8oinuton9/2017-11-17%20battle_scene%20editor.png?dl=1) (Ignore the "no cameras rendering", I just turned off the main fullscreen rendering UI (which takes the 1x size output and displays it at the full display resolution) so it didn't get in the way). The main problem with testing within this set up is that the worldspace canvas just has an arbitrary size. In order for it to layout correctly we need to set the same size as the UI screenspace canvas that gets automatically updated when you change the size of the game window. Surprisingly the way to do this is not call Screen.width/height from your editor script (because that obviously returns the width/height of your inspector window!!), but to call Camera.pixelWidth and Camera.pixelHeight on our main camera. Once this was figured out, setting the canvas size was pretty trivial and I could set the anchors of background elements and preview them pretty easily. The next "problem" I hit was that I wanted to be able to see the player and enemies in position also, this lead me down a long and wacky path of being able to do this in game too. Here the issue was that whilst it was pretty easy to be able to reset positions of the actors when they are stationary, it's not so easy when they are halfway through an attack or are in the process of moving in or out of an action. The answer was to put everyone inside an anchoring container. The anchor container would be the one that would get repositioned, and the actor would rest at a local position of 0,0,0. As I never anticipated this kind of thing, a lot of my movement code uses world position to work out where to move to. This now needed to be translated up and down from local to world and back to local positions. Not too bad once I figured where the issue lie. The only bug I have left is that I use DoTween for movement, it's a fantastic library but once you set and play a sequence you cant change it's values, which results in actors ending up in weird places if the resolution is changed mid move. This isn't so bad when moving towards the target as they'll end up somewhere in the right direction, but moving back means they'll be in completely the wrong place when they come to rest. My quick fix here was just to check if the local position is 0,0,0 when they're done, and if not then just force them to that location. In reality I don't think you'd really notice too much. Here you can see the elements as they would look at 320x240 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/hrqxx7koy09q2m5/2017-11-17%20positioning_enemies_320x240.png?dl=1) ...and at 688x310 (https://www.dropbox.com/s/15e6dftvj7z2p9b/2017-11-17%20positioning_enemies_688x310.png?dl=1) Notice how they are anchored to a certain percentage of the screen width. So the wider the screen, the more of the element gets shown :) The last piece of the puzzle was just hooking up some data objects to hold references to the images for a "backdrop set", which then gets set on a random encounter area and then passed into the battle scene to be set up :D I can't wait to properly set the proportions of all the elements and get some proper art work in there, as it give the battles so much more depth. I hope that was interesting and that I'm not teaching people how to suck eggs! Till next week :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: NowSayPillow on November 17, 2017, 04:52:03 AM This game look sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick. Can't wait to try it.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 17, 2017, 05:01:03 AM This game look sliiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiick. Can't wait to try it. Thanks! :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: tchassin on November 17, 2017, 05:56:28 AM I love those portraits, they have a lot of personality!
I also like your solution to handle a range of resolutions without compromising the pixel art or resorting to letter boxing. It's pretty cool! I just think the health and data values are very small and a bit hard to read. They should pop out a little more since they're pretty important. (https://i.imgur.com/l4AjKBG.png) Maybe something like this? Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 17, 2017, 07:43:08 AM I love those portraits, they have a lot of personality! Thanks! Gary (http://www.twitter.com/armyoftrolls) and Joe (http://www.twitter.com/joecreates) are the best! Quote I also like your solution to handle a range of resolutions without compromising the pixel art or resorting to letter boxing. It's pretty cool! Yeah, I really want to avoid letterboxing. There's no real need to do it, but it does mean that all the artwork has to support those resolutions. I've taken the resolutions from the Steam hardware survey to work out what the range is, then I can work out what those will be when scaled and end up with the smallest res i need to work to, and the biggest. Quote I just think the health and data values are very small and a bit hard to read. They should pop out a little more since they're pretty important. (https://i.imgur.com/l4AjKBG.png) Maybe something like this? Thanks for the feedback. Eventually I'll get round to redoing some more of the UI, as mentioned. When it's zoomed up and at 720p or 1080p (3 or 4x) it's actually much more legible, especially after the last round of UI changes (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1357026#msg1357026) where I bumped the smallest font size up by 1px :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 18, 2017, 09:49:45 AM Took a little time yesterday to implement some of the UI that Joe had mocked up the other day...
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/l10xiuvyg56nzjm/2017-11-18%20UI_mockup.png?dl=1) We'll do another UI pass in the near future I hope :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Fridgecrisis on November 18, 2017, 11:01:16 AM Man, this is looking amazing! The battle animations are very impressive. Nice stuff!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 19, 2017, 04:35:59 AM Man, this is looking amazing! The battle animations are very impressive. Nice stuff! Thanks!! :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Fridgecrisis on November 19, 2017, 10:34:34 AM Forgive me if this has been answered already, but I'm curious about your team. How many people do you have working on this, and how did you originally meet or approach them to work on Jack Move?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 20, 2017, 04:02:24 AM Forgive me if this has been answered already, but I'm curious about your team. How many people do you have working on this, and how did you originally meet or approach them to work on Jack Move? Currently it's just me working on Jack Move fulltime, but I've been working with freelancers etc... ...Gary Lucken (https://twitter.com/armyoftrolls) and Joe Williamson (https://twitter.com/joecreates) on and off. They have done all the character design and animation. I was introduced to Gary by some friends, and Joe I found after seeing some of his work show up on my twitter timeline. Music is by Fracture (http://astrophonica.co.uk/?filter_band=3252362420), I've known Charlie for years, back from when I used to make music myself! Sound design will be covered by (bafta award winning :P) Adam Hay (https://twitter.com/unusualcadence), who I met through the local Brighton games scene. I've also been working with Ed Fear (https://twitter.com/edfear) on story stuff, who I used to work with at Mediatonic :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Fridgecrisis on November 20, 2017, 11:27:39 PM Cool! Sounds like you found people from all over, just from being involved in things. That's awesome.
So are they working on a commission basis where you keep creative control, or is this a group effort type of thing where they'll benefit from the end product? I guess I'm curious because I'm wondering how I want to proceed with my project. Programming and music are not my strong points, so I feel like I'll need help with those, but I don't have money to hire anyone and I don't know if it's realistic to expect anyone to work for revenue share without having a pretty big hand in the creative decision-making. I'm open to sharing control but it would have to be with the right partners, you know? Is Jack Move a personal passion project for you, or something you feel comfortable changing for the sake of your collaborators? Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 21, 2017, 07:53:15 AM Cool! Sounds like you found people from all over, just from being involved in things. That's awesome. So are they working on a commission basis where you keep creative control, or is this a group effort type of thing where they'll benefit from the end product? I guess I'm curious because I'm wondering how I want to proceed with my project. Programming and music are not my strong points, so I feel like I'll need help with those, but I don't have money to hire anyone and I don't know if it's realistic to expect anyone to work for revenue share without having a pretty big hand in the creative decision-making. I'm open to sharing control but it would have to be with the right partners, you know? Is Jack Move a personal passion project for you, or something you feel comfortable changing for the sake of your collaborators? I pay folks for their time as and when needed, but hopefully I'll be getting people onboard for longer stretches soon, I'm not sure what deal we'll work out in that case. This means that I currently retain full creative control, however I'm always open to suggestions. A lot of the way that battles are animated etc is down to Joe suggesting ways of taking effective shortcuts to cut down on animation etc whilst still retaining a good feel etc. For example, rather than the player/enemies running towards their target they just have a single "scoot" frame. As the scoot is quite a dynamic pose it still gives a nice sense of movement whilst keeping the amount of work down. I'm not sure what I would suggest in your situation. Is this a business venture you will be collaborating on, is this just for fun? are you expecting to make money? Each comes with different levels of expectation for both you and any potential partners, and require different commitments. My personal opinion is that if it is a commercial project, and unless everything is split down the middle 50/50 (ie, you are both/all investing an equal amount of money), you should be paying people. If it's not a commercial thing, then it's probably gonna be hard to get people to actually do any work, even if they do get on board etc. It sometimes works, but often life can just get in the way. Sorry if that sounds cynical. Hope that's useful :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Fridgecrisis on November 21, 2017, 08:17:59 AM No worries, that's not cynical at all! That's also been my experience in the past. I believe people should get paid for the work they do, and if they're not getting paid, then they deserve to make what they love instead of just following direction.
I guess in my case, I think I'll need to do as much work as possible on my own until I save up enough money to commission the things I need. Maybe a Kickstarter once it gets to a point where I have something to really show off. (Speaking of Kickstarter, do you have plans for a crowdfunding campaign?) Thanks for sharing all of that. It's really encouraging to talk with someone on the same path I want to be on. :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 21, 2017, 09:37:32 AM Cool, glad that was encouraging. I worked on Jack Move for a few years (first post in this thread is 2013 :'() before I had enough savings etc to quit my day job and be able to contract people to help.
I've not got any plans for a crowdfunding campaign just yet, I'm looking at some other sources of funding to finish the game at the moment though :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: orzlab on November 22, 2017, 07:16:25 PM This game looks unbelievably awesome :o
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 23, 2017, 10:30:15 AM Thanks orzlab! :D
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: 2ndStudio on November 24, 2017, 02:37:04 AM This game... It tickles all my nerd senses :wtf: Keep it up.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 24, 2017, 07:26:08 AM This game... It tickles all my nerd senses :wtf: Keep it up. Hehe, thanks!! Loads of bug fixes done this week, and some more work on those UI tweaks :) The best bug I've squashed this week was one that's been annoying me for a while. When the camera follows objects in cutscenes, they tend to jitter a bit (https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ji8qd0b41yqz0j/2017-11-24%20camera%20follow%20jitter.gif?dl=1) After checking over all my code I determined that this happens in cutscenes and not during gameplay for a couple of reasons. Firstly because the movement speed of the object is usually slower which causes the camera to catch up with the object quicker. And secondly because of a rounding error, this is the main culprit. What is happening is that the player moves a pixel and it apparently takes the camera a frame to catch up. Here you can see it in slowmo... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wfkto6te5leke3w/2017-11-24%20camera%20follow%20jitter%20slowmo.gif?dl=1) At higher speeds this isn't really noticeable as the amount that player moves between frames causes the camera to always move too. But at lower speeds the rounding issue comes in to play. We round both the position of the player and the camera to whole numbers so that we render all nice and pixel perfect-y. But sometimes the camera position does not get rounded in the same direction as the object it's following, so it can be a pixel behind. Here's our simple code: Code: Vector3 virtualCameraPosition = Vector3.SmoothDamp(CameraTransform.position, targetTransform.position, ref Velocity, Speed, MaxSpeed, Time.smoothDeltaTime); CameraTransform.position = new Vector3( Mathf.Round(virtualCameraPosition.x), Mathf.Round(virtualCameraPosition.y), Mathf.Round(virtualCameraPosition.z) ); We can improve this by caching our previous camera position and then working out if we should round up or round down, depending on which direction we're going Code: Vector3 virtualCameraPosition = Vector3.SmoothDamp(CameraTransform.position, targetTransform.position, ref Velocity, Speed, MaxSpeed, Time.smoothDeltaTime); CameraTransform.position = new Vector3( virtualCameraPosition.x > cachedCameraPosition.x ? Mathf.Ceil(virtualCameraPosition.x) : Mathf.Floor(virtualCameraPosition.x), virtualCameraPosition.y > cachedCameraPosition.y ? Mathf.Ceil(virtualCameraPosition.y) : Mathf.Floor(virtualCameraPosition.y), virtualCameraPosition.z > cachedCameraPosition.z ? Mathf.Ceil(virtualCameraPosition.z) : Mathf.Floor(virtualCameraPosition.z) ); cachedCameraPosition = virtualCameraPosition; (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mexc5wv4mbla58s/2017-11-24%20camera%20follow%20smoother%20predictive.gif?dl=1) This is much smoother, but still not perfect. So if you have any tips to improve it further I'd love to hear them! To finish up, here's a couple of screenshots of new UI bits, not super exciting i'm afraid: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/14qgsqmqxeilkj5/2017-11-24%20new%20ui%20player.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/jnuydord3rwc498/2017-11-24%20new%20ui%20software5.png?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/tawr8ubl8da42os/2017-11-24%20new%20ui%20battle.png?dl=1) I've unified the header with the player info, and the footer with the button help across all screens. As well as updating all the sliders to look a bit fancier :) These next few days are going to be all about testing the build and fixing bugs as I've introduced a bunch of stuff in the last few weeks that I've not tested all the way through (portraits, new ui, battle backdrop stuff etc). Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: tchassin on November 24, 2017, 02:21:57 PM I think the new UI bits looks great! Good job!
Also thanks for the camera script! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 25, 2017, 09:20:18 AM I think the new UI bits looks great! Good job! Also thanks for the camera script! Thanks :) The script isn't much, but hopefully it can help some folks that might be hitting the same problems with pixel perfect games as I have been. Another method of snapping everything to the pixel grid that I might experiment with is detailed in this blog post https://ocias.com/blog/unity-pixel-art-camera/ (https://ocias.com/blog/unity-pixel-art-camera/), Alex snaps all the geometry in a shader. A friend has been having some good results with this, so it sounds promising. I'm still not sure it can be 100% fixed though, just due to the nature of follow cams and loose lerping :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: bithead on November 29, 2017, 03:22:09 PM I think for the camera issue you should store, and work with the "actual" camera position with full float precision, and use that when doing your SmoothDamp. Only round it only when you actually assign it to the display camera position.
EDIT: just looking at your code again, seems like you could just swap the first param of SmoothDamp to cachedCameraPosition instead of CameraTransform.position. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 29, 2017, 03:24:25 PM I think for the camera issue you should store, and work with the "actual" camera position with full float precision, and use that when doing your SmoothDamp. Only round it only when you actually assign it to the display camera position. Yup, that's what the virtualCameraPosition is :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: HiddenNatureDsn on November 29, 2017, 10:57:29 PM Loving the aesthetic of the battle scenes especially. Very cool stuff.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: bithead on November 30, 2017, 12:39:29 AM Quote Yup, that's what the virtualCameraPosition is Yes, that was actually clear, sorry. I was hasty in my explanation because I was leaving work. Regardless, after studying your GIFs a bit, I realized what's actually causing the jitter. Seems obvious to say, but it's due to allowing a non-integer offset between the camera, and the player/target. The continuous smoothing virtually ensures it's always fractional. If that's not clear, consider just the delta X between camera and target. It's probably fluctuating somewhat, but let's say it stabilizes at some non-integer distance. When the target's X position transitions over an integer/pixel boundary, it will likely happen during a different frame than the camera's X position, which will appear as though it's jumping ahead 1 pixel. Then the camera eventually transitions over the boundary, and the target will appear to jitter back into place. Easiest fix is to just lock the camera to the target position, obviously. You can still transition the camera smoothly between targets (using an ease in/out curve over a fixed amount of time). Just don't smooth the camera while following the target. Another idea would be to have the camera smooth-follow the target like you have now, but at a significantly slower speed than the target so it drags behind, constrained to some maximum non-fractional radius. Once it stabilizes at the radius, so long as the fractional portion of the camera and target positions remain identical, and you shouldn't see jitter. Anyway, hope that spurs some ideas. Love the progress you're making. Always gets me excited to see new Jack Move devlog updates :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 30, 2017, 09:18:19 AM Thanks bithead.
Yeah, that's pretty much the issue. The problem now is that the camera smoothly follows fast moving objects, and lags behind nicely. But if the object is slow moving, then the issue rears it's head. This is particularly the case in cutscenes. Your idea about constraining by some non-fractional radius is a good suggestion, but complicated in that the radius will need to be adjusted by the speed... which I can pull from the smoothdamp so may not be too big a deal. I'll keep playing and see if I can figure something out. At least I have a better understanding of the problem now :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: katastrophic88 on November 30, 2017, 10:48:07 AM This looks amazing. I can't wait to play it! Thanks for sharing Jack Move's journey with us. :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on December 01, 2017, 03:47:14 AM This looks amazing. I can't wait to play it! Thanks for sharing Jack Move's journey with us. :) Loving the aesthetic of the battle scenes especially. Very cool stuff. Thanks, you two! It really means a lot :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on December 01, 2017, 03:59:21 AM Hey again everyone!
This has been a good week. Got loads of stuff done :D The new battle backgrounds came back from Joe, they are looking excellent! In the end Joe decided that it would be best not to anchor the planes to each side of the screen as at super wide resolutions it would mess with the perspective too much. Instead, everything is just centred, which makes sure everything will always look good, with the added bonus that the focus is more in the middle of the screen when rendered super wide. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/kdwubrrtjcr8w0v/2017-12-01%20battle%20background.gif?dl=1) I also took the time to quickly rework Uncle Guin's apartment. It was a little too sparse before and I never felt it was quite right. He's redecorated by replacing everything with a nice hardwood finish :) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wn5v9zwum6a1zvr/2017-11-28%20guin%20apartment.png?dl=1) Other than that it's been playtesting, bug fixing and adding some little bits that should have been in ages ago, like a tick sound when text scrolls and xp+levelup sfx :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on December 01, 2017, 09:21:39 AM I had lunch with my good pal Adam Hay (https://twitter.com/unusualcadence) (bafta award winning sfx guy, fantastic game maker and super cool dude) today and we were banging heads over this pixel perfect camera following stuff, and I think we finally have an answer.
Adam said that he'd just given up on clamping anything, and as he's rendering his stuff at tiny resolution and then blowing it back up to native screen resolution that any rounding get's taken care of in the initial tiny render. So I turned off all the clamping, which gave me this result... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/50wj4klizch5kdh/2017-12-01%20smooth%20follow%20jitter%20stop.gif?dl=1) This is preeeeetttttty good. The follow is super smooth and the actor has no jitter when moving. However, when she comes to a stop and the camera is still catching up, there is some slight jitter. So what if we just clamp the character position, but only when they are not moving? (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4kqlermje3fkz4r/2017-12-01%20smooth%20follow%20clamped%20stop.gif?dl=1) WOOOOO! I think that is finally solved! :) (until another weird edge case pops up that I'd not foreseen haha) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on December 08, 2017, 04:05:19 AM Hellooo there!
Lots more bug fixing this week, mixed with some business stuff and some good old game design. The biggest visible change this week is that I worked out how to do nicer blob shadows! Of course I should have just googled that in the first place because this biz is just built into unity! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/2up6anqeb2w5uhp/2017-12-04%20soft%20shadows.png?dl=1) This uses a projector to stick the shadow on to a surface. I had to mask off just the floor tiles otherwise I got in to some wacky stuff where the shadow would appear up the walls and things. I think it's looking pretty good though :) Other than that I've been working on some of the enemy mechanics. I really there to be a separation between "world" enemies and those you encounter within computer systems. Thinking about classic JRPG's they always have such a mishmash of designs, pulling from lots of different influences like japanese mythology and such. So I've been doing a bunch of research on traditional english folklore and legendary creatures, trying to find things that will a) look cool b) have interesting mechanics based on their traditional role/story. For example, here's Fat Lips (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fat_Lips): Quote Fat Lips (or Fatlips) is the name given to a legendary spirit dwelling in Dryburgh Abbey in Berwickshire, Scotland. The spirit was associated with a hermit woman who took up residence in a vault among the ruins of the abbey some time after the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion. The woman claimed that the spirit tidied the room whilst she was away, and kept the cell she lived in dry by stamping moisture away from the ground with his heavy iron boots. The name Fat Lips instantly conjures up something cool and weird, and big stampy boots sounds like it could be a cool attack :) Still lots more to research but there's some super weird and wacky stuff out there so hopefully these will look and feel quite distinct and bring something interesting to the game. Don't worry though, they'll all have a distinctly cyberpunk twist to them ;) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on December 15, 2017, 01:29:33 AM Hey folks,
No huge update this week I'm afraid I've been super busy with some life admin and things so not gotten much done on the game. I'm away for a week from sunday and then it's christmas, so there probably won't be any updates until the new year. Happy christmas, and thanks for all your support over this last year, it really does mean a lot! Edd Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 12, 2018, 08:07:30 AM HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!
I hope you all had a fantastic christmas and new year (if that's your thing ;))! I certainly did :) I had a nice couple of weeks off, had a little trip to Germany and Switzerland to visit some christmas markets and castles, and spent some lovely time with my family. Now that's all done, I've been getting back up to speed with work on Jack Move (hard after a couple of weeks off), but I've got some cool things to show. I've been working on some new areas, namely Noa's apartment, which has turned out really nicely. I've been trying to get a bit more dynamic with the map geometry to make it a bit more interesting. This has started to work really well I think, and I'm please with how stuff has turned out... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/pumoxtqw5nk29mg/2018-01-12%20noa_exterior.gif?dl=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/co8rpmtynk4xxar/2018-01-12%20noa_interior.gif?dl=1) A product of trying to make stuff a bit more interesting is that I've finally worked out how to do stairs properly. This might sound a bit dumb, but I've attempted to make stairs a few times and every time they've never worked how I would like. Adding gravity complicates things a little more for a start, I'd have to add floor colliders everywhere (not a huge deal in itself) and get the movement working properly. My approach each time I've attempted this is to use ramps (angled box colliders), but due to the way the map gets stretched (in order to force the perspective), this has proved fiddly and I've never gotten the angles and movement to work properly. The other issue was how to draw the geometry. I use flat planes, flat planes that were angled along with the ramp, but these never looked right. I've avoided steps to far by just putting elevators everywhere, so you never even come across steps! However, I wanted to make the entrance to Noa's apartment more interesting so added some steps. Like actual steps. Hand placed, rather than using big tiles. Knowing that I couldn't work out how to use steps, I just blocked them off and didn't allow the player to actually move the player over them. Then, this morning in the shower it hit me... just make steps with steps! If I put a collider on each step and then turn up the gravity, the unity character controller will just handle the steps! How did I not realise this before is beyond me :s TADA! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/owcujy82nenxswo/2018-01-12%20noa_interior_stairs.gif?dl=1) It doesn't look like much but I'm super happy! It means that I can drastically increase the complexity of maps now (this is either a blessing or a curse) :lol: Here's a view of how they look in the editor (https://www.dropbox.com/s/x246svwko5xyaid/2018-01-12%20stairs_in_editor.png?dl=1) Other than that I've been working on story stuff. I'm currently looking for a freelance female writer to join the team for a few weeks to help shape the story up. So if that sounds like fun the get in touch! (I'm looking for a lady specifically because a) noa the protagonist is female and I'd like some better perspective on her story and b) the rest of the team is all white dudes. Till next time... x Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Ishi on January 13, 2018, 01:08:19 AM It's one small step for Noa, one giant leap for empika :) Steps are great, multi-levelled environments with lots of steps are my favourite! Hope you can make good use of this new feature!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 13, 2018, 07:58:04 AM It's one small step for Noa, one giant leap for empika :) Steps are great, multi-levelled environments with lots of steps are my favourite! Hope you can make good use of this new feature! Haha! I've already got a ton of ideas. Just trying to resist the temptation to go back and retro fit a bunch in existing maps :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 19, 2018, 03:24:55 AM Hey champs!
Been working on new maps for Noa's Dad's house, but am still yet to finish the interior. I've been trying to improve my foliage, think I'm getting there. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/f5jxgvwm0k9jcmm/2018-01-15%20solares_house_01.gif?dl=1) Other bits have included fixing bugs. Rebuilding all the maps so they have floor collision (so Noa doesn't fly off into the ground) and implementing some bits from a friends play test last week (like killing minions when you defeat a boss). I've also been working on a bunch of business stuff. I'm looking for funding to get the game finished so have been working on pitches, gathering footage for a highlight reel, nice high-res screenshots etc. I'll be at the London Games Forum this coming week, give me a shout if you're there :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on January 26, 2018, 08:11:16 AM Hey there!
No new stuff to show this week. I was at the afore mentioned Games Forum London this week so was getting prepped for that, fixing bugs and things. I got a good response from the publishers I showed it to whilst there, so fingers crossed for the future :) The UK Games Fund has opened applications again, so the next few weeks I'll be busy getting ready to apply for that. It's busy business time at the moment it seems! :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 13, 2018, 08:13:58 AM Hey there!
Been super busy getting my UK Games Fund submission ready and pondering level creation. My current map creating technique is getting very unwieldy now that I have the ability to use multiple layers and move between them... So I've built my own tile mapper in Unity! (https://thumbs.gfycat.com/DearGloomyAfricancivet-size_restricted.gif) I can now use multiple tile sets in one map which is handy too :) I looked at unity's new 2d tools but they didn't quite work how I'd like. I also wanted to experiment with actually editing the tiles themselves in unity, but this was a bit of a failed experiment. Unity just isnt as responsive as I'd like (possibly due to my laptop?) and to build out enough features to match PyxelEdit would have taken forever. I did manage to get pixel editing, flood fill and line drawing working though. It was a fund experiment :) Unfortunately I forgot to grab any gifs of the other tool modes. (https://thumbs.gfycat.com/CourageousSlightAlpinegoat-size_restricted.gif) Got some big bits coming up on the todo list: * map system * action inputs when you do a special move (kinda QTE thing, mario rpg style) * cutscenes within battles Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Ishi on February 13, 2018, 09:58:45 AM Excellent, looks like it'll be a super useful tool. Does it support stairs? :D
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 13, 2018, 12:45:45 PM Haha! Not intrinsically, but means I can create different levels easier :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: MegaTiny on February 13, 2018, 04:33:14 PM Completely forgot to follow this when I first saw it ages ago. Still looking great :beer:
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 14, 2018, 10:34:49 AM Completely forgot to follow this when I first saw it ages ago. Still looking great :beer: Thanks! :D Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 22, 2018, 10:58:28 PM Hey folks!
Only half a week this week as I've been travelling back to Taiwan and it's been Chinese New Year. So happy new year everyone!! The last couple of days I've been working on getting those timed action inputs working, as mentioned in my last update ;D (https://www.dropbox.com/s/bqwkqvapniko90z/2018-02-22%20battle_qte_03.gif?raw=1) The idea is to make your "JACK MOVE" actions a bit more impactful. They are a mix between Final Fantasy VII's Limit Breaks and summons, a super powerful attack that you get to use once in a while. If you time the button presses properly then the attack will crit and do bonus damage! If you wiff it then... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/d5bu60c8vmp96fj/2018-02-22%20battle_qte_04.gif?raw=1) ...it will just do normal damage (still a lot as it's a powerful attack). I'm not sure about the effects yet, still some work to do. Any suggestions for making them more impactful etc would be greatly appreciated, can't quite see the forest for the trees atm. (The final attack will have new casting + damage fx at some point too). I don't want these to be super hard, just something to keep you on your toes. I'm not sure if each different type will just a different combination of buttons, or maybe one will use random buttons, one will use buttons and another directional inputs, still lots to think about :) Next on the todo list is scripted battles. Gonna be a bit tough with the current systems, so gonna have to do a bunch of prep and refactoring to get it right :concerned: Till next time, hope you all have a good weekend! :-* Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 01, 2018, 11:30:15 PM Hey folks
Been a pretty good week on Jack Move this week :D I've got the basics of in-battle cutscenes working, initially just showing dialog windows and I'll add other actions as and when I need them. The system I went with is slightly different the in-world cutscenes, although it shaders some similarities. Both consist of a set of frames, each frame has a set of actions. We loop through the frames and play the actions for each one, we then wait for the actions to complete before moving on to the next frame. Battle frames have an added conditional element which means they might get passed over or not depending on if the condition is met. How many turns a character has taken, how many turns the battle has taken in total, a characters health/health percent etc. Here's the inspector for a basic cutscene: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/edhy5go48oveomv/2018-03-02%20battle%20cutscene%20frames.png?raw=1) I've started using Odin (http://sirenix.net/odininspector/) which is awesome! It's made editing these complicated data structure way easier then writing my own inspectors for them :D I highly recommend it if you're using Unity! And here's the dialog in engine (https://www.dropbox.com/s/m658gebi0b0ueyp/2018-03-02%20battle%20cutscene%20dialog.gif?raw=1) The other thing I've been looking at this week has been using ProBuilder (now that it's free and part of Unity!) to create some more complicated and interesting geometry, it's been something I've been thinking about for a while and just not had a chance yet. So far I've been constrained to flat surfaces, but with ProBuilder I can now do some fancier things like curved surfaces etc, like this fancy curved wall (which doesn't look like much, but is just a test)... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/i1a4c7zgd6m6iw3/2018-03-02%20fancy%20geometry.png?raw=1) However this does introduce some issues... or reintroduce them, rather. In order to stop the textures from swimming, I need to clamp the camera position... which brings me back to the problem I was having a while ago, jitter in characters when following them at slow speeds (https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34307.msg1363868#msg1363868). One thing I mentioned when I last looked at this was a post I found about snapping verts in a shader (https://ocias.com/blog/unity-pixel-art-camera/), similar to Unity's Pixel Snap option in their sprite shaders. This doesn't quite work for me though as I need to snap those verts in 3D, rather than just 2D. But if I could apply this technique to my new fancy geometry in 3D then I think this would solve the issue and would allow me to unsnap the camera again. Sadly my shader skills aren't quite up to that level. So if any shader lords know how I could snap the verts of an object in relation to my orthographic + forced perspective camera then please give me a shout!! I believe it can be done, kinda the inverse of snapping the camera position(?). And yes, I appreciate that my setup is pretty unique and I've probably failed to explain the issue particularly well :s You can see the swimming issue here. I snap the camera to whole pixels about halfway through, which stops the swimming. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/i671ri1kufz5aqe/2018-03-02%20fancy%20geometry%20swimming.gif?raw=1) I also upgraded to Unity 2017.3, so I'll probably be spending some time fixing any bugs that arise from that over the next few days. Then I'll be moving on to building some kind of map system :D Cheers, and have a great weekend! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: PetSkull on March 02, 2018, 03:26:06 AM The dropbox images for your last entry doesn't load for me.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 02, 2018, 07:27:04 AM The dropbox images for your last entry doesn't load for me. Thanks for the heads up, hopefully those are fixed now. Looks like I should have been using ?raw=1 on the end instead of ?dl=1. The more you know! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 09, 2018, 12:40:49 AM Hey folks, happy friday!
Mostly been a good week this week... apart from getting stuck on a small island on Monday due to fog and all the planes in and out being cancelled. Whilst stuck at the airport I managed to fix that jittery sprite business though, so thats good! Turns out I needed to add the fractional difference between the camera and the target it's following to the camera. That way they camera and target stay in sync as they cross pixel boundaries and we can safely snap the camera position. The only gotcha is that you don't have to do this unless the target is moving, otherwise the camera isn't very smooth. Sorry, no gifs of this fix yet I'm afraid. I'll get another post up during the next week with some more specifics :) Lots of other stuff done this week too! I built the basics of a save and load system, which is something I should have done a long time ago because it was a bit of a pain, although I'm still not entirely sure what I could have changed to have made it easier. All my data (player character sheet, software, hardware) is stored in Unity ScriptableObjects, this makes it really easy to reference other Unity objects, as well as add logic and create fancy/nice editors. Due to the references, it's not that easy to serialise this data down to disk (json or whatever ou save file format is). So I have to build a bunch of proxy objects that I can serialize out and then rebuild after deserialisation. Not too difficult, but certainly a bit of a pain. At least the data footprint will be smallish, due to only saving whats needed. For example, the player object stores a list of Objectives. An objective has a localised text description and a checkbox to say if it's complete or not. When serialising I only need to store the guid of the objective and it's completed status. Then when deserialising I grab the guid and load the coresponsing ScriptableObject, then just set the completed bit, or not. So far I've built two backends for the save system. Production, that writes out bson, and a debug one that writes out json. The last bit I've been working on is an improved quest/objective log. My previous one was thrown together just to get something in there. So having time to actually make it nice has been nice :) It's been inspired by the adventure log in breath of the wild, which I found to be really effective. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qc8ok6sxgaqndt4/2018-03-09%20new%20objective%20screen.png?raw=1) I also created a new text component for the list items, which I've been meaning to do for a long time. It will add an ellipses to any text that doesn't fit. Here's the code https://gist.github.com/empika/0b34d84fe2f7c4319bd9b6cc545dce3f I've only tested lightly, and only with single line text fields, so YMMV :) That's about it. Till next week, have a good weekend everyone! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 15, 2018, 11:27:48 PM Hey champs,
It's been another busy week here! I've concentrated on a bunch of housework that I've been putting off for a long time. Mostly this has been to do with localisation, but I managed to squeeze some fun with shaders in too :) Not much of a visually exciting post this week I'm afraid. I wrote my localisation system a long time ago, and it works pretty good, there are two things that I've been meaning to do for a long time though. Firstly, create a nice field attribute that I can stick on my scriptable objects and have the inspector render a nice editor field for them. And secondly, create a behaviour that I can throw on GUI text and get that translated. Currently, everywhere I render a localised string editor field I've been copy and pasting a bunch of annoying code... annoying, due to the way unity's popup fields only work by gicing you back an int. For example, to select something out of a big list you have to do something like Code: string[] idsArray = ["id1", "id2", "id3"]; string currentId = property.stringValue; int selectedIndex = Math.Max(0, Array.IndexOf(idsArray, currentId)); int newSelectedIndex = EditorGUI.Popup(popupPosition, label.text, selectedIndex, stringsArray); property.stringValue = idsArray[newSelectedIndex]; So I finally got round to creating an Attribute+PropertyDrawer that will do this on any field I stick it on. It's super nice to tidy up a bunch of junk code like this :D Now it's much easier to translate stuff I've been going through and translating a ton of item fields and gui bits. Other bits I've done this week... * Tidy all the c# project warnings, there were about 200 of them as I've been toooo lazy to fix them as I go :s * Improving some item creating bits, automatically adding arrows to map portals for example * Adding a thing to show the name of important map locations when you load in, this was buried in the menus and people tend to get a bit lost when they first start playing so I figure this will help there * Rebalance the screenshakes in battle as some of them were a bit too much or a bit lacklustre * Reviewing some story stuff I've gotten back from a new editor The last thing I've worked on this week was porting the old Unity fisheye fullscreen effect and the excellent Kino Glitch (https://github.com/keijiro/KinoGlitch) over to the new unity post processing stack. Now all my effects operate in the same way and are a bit easier to manage :) Perhaps I'll stick those up on github or something if people are interested? I also took a stab at getting some other effects working (twirl and zoom blur), but have put those on the back burner for the minute. I'm hoping to randomise the battle transition effects a bit once they're done :) This next week I'm going to try and concentrate on testing and bugs as I've introduced a ton of new features recently that haven't been thouroughly tested yet. Lastly, I'm wondering how I can get the word out about Jack Move a bit more. I'm really bad at self promotion, so if anyone has any good tips, I'd love to hear them. Otherwise, if you like the look of Jack Move, please do let your freinds, familys, loved ones and anyone else you think might like it know about it too! :handthumbsupR: :handthumbsupL: Thaaanks, till next week :-* :-* :-* Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 22, 2018, 11:51:41 PM Hey champs!
Only a few little bits to show this week as most of the week has been spent playtesting, bug fixing and setting up a bunch of maps for light baking. All I've got to show are some incremental improvements. First up, I've been tweaking the fountain particles to make them a bit fancier. A bit more bubbly, a bit more splooshy! (I also fixed an issue where particles were scaled weirdly, oops!) Old: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/jc8mfqf084rqtxb/2017-09-26-fountain_test.gif?raw=1) New: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/srcyetrzcfmfkbh/2018-03-23%20improved%20fountains.gif?raw=1) Secondly, whilst baking stuff I've been experimenting with normal mapping a few more things. Nothing too crazy, but it the object is simple then it's not too much hassle to do it. I'm worried that I'd end up sticking normal maps on everything and doubling my work load! Old container: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/7b7a8zgegve5lkb/2018-03-23%20container_pre_normal_map.png?raw=1) You can see the top on this one has a little bump to it: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/x6ts56n30imhunm/2018-03-23%20container_normal_map.png?raw=1) Much better, dont you think!? :) Oh! I mentioned last week that I made some more post fx, I did some experiments with creating new battle transitions but I'm not super happy with them so have abandonned that for the moment. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/b9fbnkozcydmqqi/2018-03-19%20zoom%20whirl%20glitch.gif?raw=1) Other than that, it's been bugs, balancing screenshake again, balancing rain brightness and a ton of under the hood stuff. Till next week, have a good weekend!! :D ps, I promise I'll start working on some new content again soon. Just waiting for some story stuff and things before I commit myself to any new larger scale assets ;) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 29, 2018, 09:33:46 PM Hey folks,
Another busy week but again not a whole lot to show because... I got through to round two of the UK Games Fund application! :D I've spent most of my week on the next part of the application. Writing stuff is hard! So fingers crossed for my written application :) I spent the rest of my time this week still setting up maps for light baking. As I convert prefabs this should get quicker, as they are used elsewhere. In the process I've been normal mapping some more of those containers. Having experimented with converting greyscale images to normal maps I decided that they weren't quite good enough, I think this is due to the super low resolution of the textures. So the alternative is to pain my own normal maps! I came across this thread on Polycount (http://polycount.com/discussion/115173/tip-handpaint-normal-maps-with-less-effort) that had a really useful palette (http://www.30lives.com/junkdrawer/normalmap_pallette3.jpg) to use (just ignore the argument over whether you should or shouldn't be doing this!). (https://www.dropbox.com/s/jy1gncabvyv0gj7/2018-03-30%20containers.png?raw=1) Much better :) I want to take a look at mapping some of the crushed cars, but will leave that till I get a little more time. Probably no update next week as I'll be away for a few days. Thanks! :-* Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 18, 2018, 04:39:01 PM Hey folks!
It's been a while since I posted, but wanted to let you know that Jack Move isn't dead. I've had a lot of life stuff going on, I'm in the middle of moving countries, taking on freelance work to pay the bills etc. I think I'm in a good place to start working on the game again though :D I'll be doing a couple of hours work each morning. I've also set up a discord server, so come and say hi if you'd like to chat about the game and see a bunch of more wip stuff :) https://discord.gg/47zYENN Cheers! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: bacon on September 18, 2018, 07:42:24 PM Just discovering this and wanted to say it looks really cool! What sort of options are you giving the player in the city outside of combat?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 18, 2018, 08:24:59 PM Just discovering this and wanted to say it looks really cool! What sort of options are you giving the player in the city outside of combat? Hey there, thanks! As the game is quite short (compared to most jrpg's) there will be a handful of sidequests, I'm hoping to add some minigames too. Every good jrpg needs a fishing game, right?! :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 27, 2018, 09:41:38 PM Hey folks,
I've been working on a new slums area this week. It's where a lot of bad guys hang out, but also where the protagonists father lives in seclusion, you need to venture in to this dangerous territory to pay him a visit! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/928zgyhvgln1lx7/Screenshot%202018-09-28%2010.31.51.png?raw=1) (ignore the light... just there to test the mood ;)) I had some issue getting the decoration on the house to look good when using just flat tiles, so I've pulled that out into it's own layer to give it a bit more depth. Still a way to go on this area, but slowly getting there :) I've started streaming some of my work sessions, which has been fun. So far it's been only been for an hour or so each morning (UTC+7, from about 9am). I'll probably stream next on Monday morning :) Don't forget to hop in the discord and say hi if you think Jack Move looks interesting! https://discord.gg/47zYENN Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Schrompf on September 27, 2018, 10:24:25 PM This looks good! I think the normal maps really make a difference. Unfortunately that's also an additional burden on your workflow.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: bryku on September 28, 2018, 12:42:46 AM The graphics look amazing. Lightning and normal maps are surely adding a lot; great job!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: TonyManfredonia on September 28, 2018, 03:27:28 AM Wow. These visuals are stunning! Reminds me a bit of a point-and-click atmosphere, so the fact that it's a JRPG is really neat! Keep it up!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on September 28, 2018, 06:59:38 AM Thanks guys!
I don't think I'll do to much normal mapped stuff, probably just bigger items that will benefit from it :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: NajibSG on September 28, 2018, 07:34:23 AM The effects in your game look great :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on October 01, 2018, 10:22:02 PM Thanks NajibSG!
I've been working on this run down kinda derelict area some more. Doing some more work on the front of the house and also testing out how bricks are going to look when their walls are falling down. I was a bit worried the tops would look a bit weird and I'd have to add an extra quad for each level of bricks, tilting them over 90 degrees so they lay flat. I think I can get away with having them on the same texture as the front face though. What do you folks think? (https://www.dropbox.com/s/n29r09hglkq4s4j/Screenshot%202018-10-02%2011.50.39.png?raw=1) Thanks! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: TonyManfredonia on October 02, 2018, 12:09:17 PM Having the bricks a little off-kilter would be a great addition.
One other thought might be having two different textures for the boarded up window for the sake of variety. Or a slightly collapsed window? Just food for thought :) Looking great! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 02, 2018, 12:08:41 AM Hey folks,
It's been a few weeks since I last posted. I've been busy with freelance stuff, but have had a couple of week off working on Jack Move again! I've been reworking the scrapyard area from my current demo, this is for a couple of reasons. It's the part of the demo I'm least happy with, I've switched to using a proper palette rather than just pulling colours out my butt (shouts to Adigun Polack and his Splendor 128 palette (https://lospec.com/palette-list/aap-splendor128), I'm actually colourblind so using someone else's palette has been really helpful. And lastly, and the best reason to rework this area is that I'll be showing Jack Move at the Indies Festa B2B days at the Taipei Game Show in January! For the show I'm removing all the cruft and exposition from the demo, it will just be the scrapyard dungeon crawl bookended by a couple of cutscenes. I'm hoping that keeping it tight and focused will show the game in the best light. I'm not entirely sure the scrapyard is the best section of the game to actually demo and sell people on, but the only enemies I have ready and animated are for the scrapyard area so I have to make the best of the situation. I kinda wish I hadn't made that descision all that time ago, but hey, you live and learn ;) It feels like I've spent most of my time making cars and then smashing them up. You can see a big twitter thread of inspiration for the cars right here, (https://twitter.com/empika/status/1057533235868192769) 70's and 80's concept cars are the best, I had a great time! I think it's really starting to come together and feel a whole lot more cohesive and consistent than the previous version. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/jxhbnfifoqf75tw/2018-10-29%20scrapyard_tour_02.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/9xqansayb1ot96u/2018-11-02%20car_maze.gif?raw=1) Here's most of the cars (it's missing the camper van) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/azyne3ycecgas70/Screenshot%202018-11-02%2016.18.52.png?raw=1) Another little feature I've worked on is dynamic cables. Rather than hand drawing cables that dangle from stuff I've always wanted a quick way of creating cables by just specifying start and end points, length and thickness and have a tool that generates a nicely draped cable. Inspired by Tiani Pixel I thought it would be nice if they could sway in the wind a bit too (https://twitter.com/TianiPixel/status/1055412629727010816 (https://twitter.com/TianiPixel/status/1055412629727010816)). First I tried using a variety of unity physics joints but I just couldn't get them to act how I wanted. Through a bunch of googling I eventually ended up finding this github repo that did dangly ropes using verlet integration (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verlet_integration). Although there is no collision using this method, the result is very smooth, just how I wanted! In order to simulate the wind I employed a super simple hack... every x seconds I just adjust the length of the cable by a small amount which makes is sway a bit. Perfect! You can grab the code for the main cable stuff here. Thanks David G. Miguel! https://github.com/NoxWings/Cable-Component (https://www.dropbox.com/s/odiw1dukth3j0w0/2018-11-02%20cables%2002.gif?raw=1) I also spent some time reevaluating what Jack Move is, what it's doing and where I want to take it. This was after having watched Zak McClendon's (of Bioshock 2/Doublefine fame) talk "Welcome to the Yard Sale: A Practical Framework for Holistic Design Iteration" (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkZoGDKy_L4). For the longest time all this stuff has just been in my head or in various text documents, which has not been super helpful as it's just never visible. The result is this cork board of postit notes which should hopefully contain all the creative, design, technology, aesthetic, and cultural tenets of Jack Move. I've pushed some things around since taking this photo, removed a couple of things and added some others but it feels good to have a big physical thing I can look over at and remind myself what I'm making :) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/nupsl9nihlqo7er/2018-10-24%20garage%20sale.jpg?raw=1) This process has really helped cement what the game is, what it's core features are and what I should be concentrating on for this demo! Has anyone else used something similar to help ground their design and process? Phew! Big update there, I hope folks found it interesting. Ooh, don't forget, I have a Jack Move Discord server (https://discord.gg/AJjb56h) where I've been posting a bunch more WIP bits and talking through some of my design process etc :) And if you're going to be at the Taipei Game Show in Jan then give me a shout! :D Have a great weekend ;) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Lorenze on November 02, 2018, 12:29:31 PM DAMN this looks dope as hell. Love the aesthetics and gameplay you've shown off, seems pretty special.
Keep it up! Can't wait to see the final result. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on November 02, 2018, 06:32:20 PM DAMN this looks dope as hell. Love the aesthetics and gameplay you've shown off, seems pretty special. Keep it up! Can't wait to see the final result. Aaah, thanks Lorenze! That means a lot :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 14, 2019, 09:07:11 PM Hey everyone!
Apologies for the huge gap in between updates, it's been a verrrry busy few months. I got married in December, then moved to Taiwan permanently a week later, then I was super busy preparing the demo for Taipei Game Show (more on this below). The good new is that things have calmed down a lot now so I have more time to work on Jack Move when not on contract stuff :D Taipei Game Show went really well. I was only there for the two business days and met tons of cool folks from all over. I had a few good meetings with publishers who might be interested in publishing in Japan and Asia, so that's good, keep those fingers crossed :handthumbsupR: :handthumbsupR: :handthumbsupR: The new demo seemed to go over well and I think it shows the game in a much better light, so I'm really happy with that. Here's the new version of the car crusher, complete with squishable car! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wa5w8x6fpro0rqm/2019-01-11%20scrapyard%20crusher.gif?raw=1) The things I have planned for the next few weeks are mostly housework for the time being. I'm having a big tidy up of the project. It's been 4 years since I started this project in Unity and I still have junk materials, textures shaders and scripts lying around that I really should get rid of. That also means taking a big long look at my current materials and shaders in preparation for when the new lightweight render pipeline stuff is production ready. I've just grabbed the Amplify Shader Editor and have been rebuilding a bunch of my existing frankenstein shaders, so hopefully when i switch to the new pipeline stuff it will be easier to port the shaders. One added benefit of this is that it's much easier for me to build new shaders and understand what's actually going on! My first one is a player silhouette for when you're behind objects. I'm pretty please how this has turned out, there's an extra shader for scenery so that I can only have the silhouette show when behind certain scenery. Under the hood it uses stencils to write the scenery to the stencil buffer if the player is behind it, then in an extra pass on top of the player sprite it reads the scenery and draws to those pixels :D (https://www.dropbox.com/s/mlyi7akp30zyld2/2019-02-13%20player%20silhouette.gif?raw=1) Other bits on the todo list are refactoring some data stuff to use the new addressables system rather than Resources.Load as the current method is not the best way to do it. I also need to move my UI over to using Text Mesh Pro and resizing a whole bunch of text fields, having done a bunch more research, the smallest pixel size I can use for asian fonts is 11x11px and TMP will help with generating font files and things. Now that the smallest resolution I'm targeting is 720p, it shouldn't affect the UI spacing too much (I hope!) I'll be going to Bitsummit in Kyoto in June so want to give myself another deadline to get another chunk of the game done. So whilst all this housework stuff is going on I'll be planning the next bunch of content (probably the part of the game story before the current demo). Perhaps I'll post some more game designy/art designy stuff, would that be of interest? Oh, something that folks might find interesting... I did a big twitter thread of influences the other day. It has a bunch of movies, music, anime etc https://twitter.com/empika/status/1094950699488534530 As ever, the Discord is there if people want to come and chat about the game. I usually post a lot more WIP stuff in there :) https://discord.gg/DA9PkQ7 Cheers, Edd Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Beastboy on February 15, 2019, 01:27:27 AM Character art is a bit to clean for a cyberpunk theme, some cyber arms and armours and scifi weapons would be nice.
Good luck, seems promising Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 15, 2019, 03:28:22 AM Character art is a bit to clean for a cyberpunk theme, some cyber arms and armours and scifi weapons would be nice. Good luck, seems promising Thanks! :D I'm going for less of an augmented body thing than a lot of cyberpunk. Like if someone has a mechanical arm, it'll be janky as hell, and look more like Short Circuit than a real arm! As for weapons and armour, there will be some cool stuff, but the guys I've shown so far are just street punks so they can't afford the cool stuff ;) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Beastboy on February 15, 2019, 04:30:28 AM Will main character visual change if he equips stuff?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 15, 2019, 11:20:53 PM Will main character visual change if he equips stuff? No she won’t I’m afraid, that would be a lot of extra work at this point. :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on February 21, 2019, 08:16:40 PM Hey champs!
It's been a big week in the shader department... The first thing I worked on was a water shader. This is something that I've wanted to do for a while but never had the time, so thought I would give it a crack whilst I was rebuilding the other shaders. The things I wanted out of it were some nice dynamic movement, and edge foam. My previous water shader wasn't specifically made for water, but was a general wobble effect, pushing a texture round with sine waves. I wanted something that would look a bit more natural, perhaps using some kind of normal map or something, but still cartoony, kinda like Windwaker. After doing a big old google I found this great blog post https://roystan.net/articles/toon-water.html I got most of the way there with the basics but was completely stumped when it came to the foam. The depth texture wasn't quite right when using the orthographic camera... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/zqumje4fuzgevok/Screenshot%202019-02-19%2010.23.33.png?raw=1) You can see that when using the perspective camera the mapped depth texture is linear across the surface. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/bes10qmnugyknu7/Screenshot%202019-02-19%2010.23.08.png?raw=1) ...but when using the orthographic camera the depth is mapped incorrectly and darkens as the plane it's on recedes in the Z axis. This completely stumped me. I could see what the issue was but had no idea how to fix it. Trying to add/subtract the obvious parameters of the plane's vertex didn't work. The excellent folks over on the official Unity discord (https://discord.gg/exJta3a) helped me out, particularly Matt Dean (https://twitter.com/MatthewDean3D). This was super lucky as I had been looking at Matt's toon shader (https://github.com/Kink3d/ToonShading) which includes a great water shader that works in orthographic, I just couldn't figure out how what he was doing different. Turns out I needed to subtract the Surface Depth/Eye Depth (-UnityObjectToViewPos( v.vertex.xyz ).z). This did the trick and I was then able to implement the foam and depth stuff correctly! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/iist9cyv41vo5aq/2019-02-22%20water%20shader.gif?raw=1) I'm really happy with the result and think it's going to look great once I get it in to some actual game environments. The above gif looks a bit funny as the mesh underneath the water isn't a great shape.. you get the gist though :D The next shader to rebuild in Amplify was the original wobble shader I was previously using for water and some other effects. This was pretty simple to get done :) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/m35sttytsunbuyd/2019-02-20%20wobbly.gif?raw=1) My last task for the week was to rewrite a bunch of localisation stuff. For some reason I thought it would be good to store every string in it's own separate scriptable object :wtf: so I wanted to rewrite this to store all the strings in a big string database object for each language. This was simple enough but I also wanted to move away from loading that data with Unity's Resources.Load after having done a lot more research for some contract work. Turns out that using Resources can be real bad and you should probably be using AssetBundles. AssetBundles are a right pain though so I wanted to find out exactly why Resources is bad. From the unity docs on the subject (https://unity3d.com/learn/tutorials/topics/best-practices/resources-folder): Best Practices for the Resources System: Don't use it. Theres no real explanation of why this is the case though. Just that it will increase build and app load times... but why and by how much? Luckily one of my bestest pals and Brighton Indies (http://brightonindies.com/) co-organiser, Kerry, works at unity and has super in-depth knowledge of this stuff! Quote Everything in any Resources folder gets built into your binary every time you build. This takes time! Also it's very easy to end up with unnecessary files here, bloating size and build times. On startup, a table of everything in Resources is created and this table remains in memory throughout application lifetime. If you have a lot of resources and you're on a lower end device, this can be non-trivial in terms of CPU time and memory. Finally, because the files become part of the binary and are not deterministic or byte-aligned, using Resources is VERY BAD NEWS for differential-based patching (i.e. consoles). I hope that helps a few people out. Kerry answered my question on Twitter, so you can see the whole thread here: https://twitter.com/empika/status/1098249043979849728 I'll probably have 10 or less language files and they'll all be like 10mb. So using Resources for the time being is probably safe enough. If I need to load any other data at runtime in the future i'll move over to assetbundles, but for now I'll continue using the resources folder for this :) I do have a ton of other files in the resources folder. All the item, magic equipment data etc. This is all there so that I can grab their ID's in the debug menu and created them etc. As these are already in the build, I'm just going to make a big inventory Asset that has a reference to them all for the moment. So that's been my fun week! This next week I have a couple more shaders to port. These are the glitchy one that I sue on the main title screen etc. This one should be fun to build and improve upon! I also need to take another look at how I'm composing the camera, currently I just use screen overlay but have hit some funny issues with pixel perfect so might take a look at rendering it out to a texture and then compositing that over the gameplay, this should allow me to do some cool effects on the UI too. If you'd like to watch me scream in to the void about getting shaders to work then come join the Discord! I'm most active during the mornings (UTC+8) but hang out in there all day :) https://discord.gg/DA9PkQ7 Hope you all have a great weekend. Peace out girl scouts! x Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 01, 2019, 01:54:14 AM Hey folks,
Not a huge update this week. Lots more housework... Last weekend I was on a panel at the local Taipei indie game meetup IGDShare, you should be able to rewatch the twitch stream here https://www.twitch.tv/videos/385849066 among the topics was open development and I was encouraged to be more open and get the game out there, so my primary tasks at the moment are getting the demo I have and things in to a state where I can release it. The demo is in pretty good shape I think, but I still need to tidy up my website, itch page etc. Part of this process has been transitioning my tasks to a public Trello board, that way you can see what I've been working on, what I have coming up short term and bigger design ideas. You can see all this here: https://trello.com/b/axnkM5bZ/jack-move-public-tracker I'll be adding more features, software/magic, hardware/equipment and enemy ideas over time, I've never really had them anywhere except in notebooks so it will be useful to go through them and formalise a bunch of stuff. I've also added Trello and Bitbucket integration to the Discord server so you can see when stuff happening... though it's a bit spammy at the moment so I think I might need to transition to something a bit more custom that filters messages. Other than that I've been fixing a bunch of bugs and issues to get the build ready. The biggest one (and one that's plagued me for a while) was an issue where you were able to get in to the Execute/spells menu if you didn't have enough mana. This was caused by all magic actions being added and removed on the player as monobehaviours, occasionally it wouldn't add the correct items back and the check for if you had enough mana to use any spells would return incorrectly, then the game was soft locked as you were in a menu you were unable to back out of. I think I need to move over to using pure ScriptableObjects for spells (their data is already backed by scriptable objects), but that will involve a big refactor for another time. One for the backlog. Hop on the Discord over here, I'll be posting the link to the demo there first!: http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord Cheers, hope you all have a lovely weekend! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on March 08, 2019, 10:34:25 PM Hey champs,
Exciting news!! The Jack Move demo is available for you to play right now!! Head on over to https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move to grab it! Or if you want to grab a key to keep the game updated in the itch.io launcher then head over to the discord! http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord I spent most of the week prepping for the launch, getting all the store assets ready, updating the store page, updating my main site etc. Lots of work! I also released the demo to the folks on Discord early so that we could hammer it for bugs and things. There are still a few left but I think these are just cosmetic. The Trello board (https://trello.com/b/axnkM5bZ/jack-move-public-tracker) has been updated with a bunch of feedback, so if you play it please let me know your thoughts below and I can add that too! Really looking forward to hearing what you folks think! Cheers, and hope you all have a great weekend! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: beetleking22 on March 09, 2019, 04:07:17 AM Holy crap that water looks amazing.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on March 14, 2019, 06:44:06 PM Holy crap that water looks amazing. Thanks man! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on March 14, 2019, 07:53:21 PM Hey folks,
It's been about a week since I launched the demo of Jack Move so I thought I'd try and do a bit of a post mortem of things that went well, things that didn't and things I learnt! So I only had a very vague plan of what I wanted to do. a) Make the demo public, b) Tweet a bunch, c) Post here, d) Post on the itch.io announcements board, e) post an itch devlog, f) post on a few sub-reddits. This was kind-of ok, until I realised that maybe I should contact some press and things. So, things that went well: Releasing the demo to folks on my Discord early was great, this helped me catch some bugs that I wouldn't have gotten otherwise, and got people hyped for helping spread the word when the demo went public. Itch.io featured the game on the front page, this was awesome and got the game a lot more exposure that I think it would have done otherwise. Looking at the analytics, this is where the bulk of people got to the game page. One thing that I think really helped was changing the main store image. Originally it was just the title, green text on a black background but I changed it to an in-battle gif with the title overlaid. I think this helps to show people what to expect. I've no idea if this helped in the long run, but I'm guessing it did a little. I should have kept track of the analytics, though it probably wasn't the time to be doing crazy A/B testing! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/58mr70nvlpp2n5n/title_630x500.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/cqbh7ly30xncila/2019-03-11%20title_battle.gif?raw=1) So far there have been 6 let's plays posted up on Youtube, this has been really exciting to see, and a bit of a surprise to be honest (though maybe it shouldn't be this day in age). I'm not sure what kind of impact these have had as they've been from quite small channels. Still, it's super useful to be able to watch people playing and see what they enjoy, where the pain points are etc. Any play testing where I don't have to stand behind someone cringing is great! Here they are: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugWh8_Vvr20 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPZXMSnvOE8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdzLHFIy6L0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-hy0TtfZ-c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGrHEV4Ok18 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8BrcpSoMldI I had a write up on Rock Paper Shotgun (https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2019/03/11/jack-move-is-a-light-cyberpunk-jrpg-with-a-demo-out-now/) which was really nice. The writer really got and understood what I was going for with the game. It's really useful to have someone else understand and describe your game, it shows where I could improve on the way I describe it myself. Things that could have gone better: I should have prepared and sent the demo out to press earlier than the release to give them time. I've contacted about 10 outlets, from big sites like PC Gamer to small fan run rpg sites and so far only had the RPS writeup. Though I'm hoping more articles will show up in the next week or so as folks get round to taking a look at the demo, I'm not holding my breath. I should have tested on more devices, or at least asked the Discord server to send me some gameplay recordings. Unfortunately my other laptop with windows on it only arrived in Taiwan this week so I've been unable to test on windows. IKR! I should have tested on windows... but it's unity right?! You just press the button and a perfectly formed windows build pops out ;D People that were helping test in the discord let me know about some obvious bugs early on, but there were things that only I would have been able to spot. For example, battle transitions and ambient occlusion just weren't working on windows at all. The former was fixed super quickly once I was able to see logs and things, the latter is a unity bug so gotta wait on that one. The problem was that people just didn't know what should be occurring, there was no graphical glitch or anything, just the absence of the effect :shrug2: I only spotted these once people started posting Let's Plays. Hopefully I'll be able to avoid some of these issues in the future now that I have a windows machine to test on. I was hoping the response from reddit would have been bigger. I posted about the game there about six months ago and got great reaction, so was hoping for similar this time round. Perhaps because it wasn't quite as new and exciting people weren't that fussed? I think that about covers it! You can grab the demo here: https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move Join the discord here: http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord Hope everyone has a great weekend! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on April 01, 2019, 08:24:54 PM Hey folks,
Bit of a delayed update as I've been super busy with contact work. Not a whole lot to report though, I've just been steadily fixing bugs... The biggest bug fix has been save file loading. This was due to a combination of test procedure and unity! Firstly, do not use unity's Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll to get all your resources of a type. This only returns items in memory. I actually had a TODO next to this line of code telling me to fix it from a year ago too :'( I was trying to load the template session data that I would then copy the values from the save file to. When I was testing, I would start a game, quit and then try and continue which would work fine because that dummy save file was already in memory * Fix issue using the perspective preview editor when playing * Flatten and smooth actor normal map * Spawned enemy timers should be at the back of the queue * Speed up battles - reducing movement time, pauses etc The new build is already up on itch: https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move The other thing I've been slowly doing is creating a trello board for all the content in the game. So one list for each area that then lists all the maps, enemies, npcs, cutscenes etc that need to be created, most of this info is in various sketchbooks and notebooks, so it will good to get it all in one places and organised! Think that's about it! As ever, come join the discord if you'd like to chat about the game etc http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord CHEERS! X Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on September 19, 2019, 11:37:14 PM Hey everyone!
It's been so long! I'm so sorry! The game isn't dead though! Far from it! I've been super busy with a lot of contract work, but have been doing small bits and pieces in my spare time, but now my contract stuff is finished, I have time to work on Jack Move full time again! Hooray! Some other great news Joe (https://twitter.com/joecreates) back on characters animation again! I've also been able to add a new writer to the team! Amalie (https://www.amaliekae.com/) is super good and she has been punching my story in to shape, giving the characters more depth and generally making it an excellent story rather than a mediocre one! The next big news is that we finally have a Steam page! Like, subscribe and wishlist!! (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/) Even more huge news is that Jack Move is coming to Switch! I was lucky enough to get my hands on a dev kit in July and was able to port the game pretty quickly. I was able to show the game at Taipei Summer Game Show on Switch and it went down really well :D (https://www.dropbox.com/s/r8m7j99ldo9j25h/IMG_9624.JPG?raw=1) There's been a huge chunk of changes over the last few months too. UI: I Changed the default rendering resolution from 480x270 to 640x360. This is because i was originally targeting Vita (christ, how long ago was that!), but it makes more sense to target the Switches native resolution which is double 640x480 and will also bump up nicer to 1080 too. Having bumped the resolution, this gave me a lot more screen real estate, so I overhauled most of the UI too. This was all actually kicked off by realising that I need to increase font size in order to accommodate anything other than roman stuff. The smallest you can get away with for chinese/japanese etc is about 12 pixels tall. So having swapped to the excellent Silver font by Poppy Works (https://poppyworks.itch.io/silver), i then needed to bump the resolution in order to fit everything in! Optimisation: I did a bunch of optimisation to get stuff running at 60fps on Switch. I can't remember if I've been over this before? I did a bunch of optimisation work last year in the hopes that one day I'd be able to get it running on Switch one day. Well that day came, and all the work came in real handy. Most of it involved baking all my maps and items, both in terms of reducing the amount of meshes being drawn as well as then baking the light in to them. I'd be happy to to do a more detailed post on optimisation if anyone would like? Fishing! Yes! According to Yoko Taro (https://twitter.com/yokotaro/status/879148440818561024?lang=en), JRPG needs fishing. So I knocked up a quick prototype for a fishing minigame. It's not super polished yet, but hopefully you'll get the idea. I'm not sure if it will actually end up in the final game, but hopefully will be a few different fishing spots and you'll be able to get extra rods and things! (not show in the gif below is the rhythm mini game to reel the fish in) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/cal6utrs9pcsbsf/2019-08-11%20fishing%2003.gif?raw=1) New Noa: Joe has tweaked the main player sprite for Noa based on Gary's (https://twitter.com/armyoftrolls) original design. Now she's all bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, Fun, fun, fun, fun, fun! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/e765vpgidiok7w9/2019-09-20_noa_demo.gif?raw=1) Bits: I've squashed a ton of bugs, done a ton of production planning stuff and started on a new area for the Town... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/nokj65kvm9a14my/Screenshot%202019-09-20%20at%2015.34.15.png?raw=1) Rebuilt my glitchy UI shader as a proper fullscreen effect, adding some nice noise and scanlines that give it a bit more texture (https://www.dropbox.com/s/o86036b6y1pbi84/2019-09-20%20glitch.gif?raw=1) I'll be back to posting weekly devlogs from now on, so look forward to those. With more folks on the project, I should have more great work to show too! You can grab the demo here: https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move (https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move) Wishlist this wiz biz here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/ (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/) And come join the discord, see more work in progress gifs and images and chat about the game (and how good Links Awakening is!): http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord (http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord) CHEERS! Have a great Links Aweekending everyone! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: Ishi on September 20, 2019, 09:27:43 AM Great news about the Switch port! Congrats on the continued progress. A happy Links Aweekending to you, too.
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on September 21, 2019, 05:28:22 AM Thanks Ishi! I'm stoked to be back working on it full time :-*
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on September 26, 2019, 11:11:29 PM Hey folks. Back for another update!
This week I've been working on a new slums/skid-row dungeon. This is suuuper work-in-progress, but it feels like it's coming together... (https://www.dropbox.com/s/s6op8dhfcjjupfv/Screenshot%202019-09-27%20at%2014.52.32.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/sry4722fh1qs3g3/Screenshot%202019-09-27%20at%2014.52.47.png?raw=1) I've particularly enjoyed making the graffiti, it's fun coming up with cool tags and those chunk block letters :D The glitchy shader I showed last week looked cool on the titles and things, so I isolated the noise and put that on the UI, I think it looks pretty good, though still not quite sure if it's just distracting or not? (https://www.dropbox.com/s/su8pxijim29v4j9/2019-09-27%20ui_noise.gif?raw=1) I've had to crank the effect on the UI up here otherwise the gif compression just rinses it out, it's much subtler in game. Among other bits, Joe has been working on this cool gangster enemy that you'll be fighting in the slums! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/djlb06lhoxazm1n/combat_sprite_gangster2.gif?raw=1) He also started on a new background for the slums, but it's a bit to rough to show at the moment. Trust me though, it's gonna look amazing! And Amalie has been busy exploring some more character and story stuff, I don't want to spoil stuff, but the direction she's been pushing is really interesting, making the game a lot more "cyberpunk" in it's exploration of themes that was originally intended :handthumbsupL: :handthumbsupR: Other than that I've been slowly refining my continuous integration setup with TeamCity and getting Switch builds available for testing easily :D Think that's about it! Here's the usual promo bits... Grab the demo here: https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move (https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move) Wishlist this wiz biz on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/ (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/) And come join the discord, see more work in progress gifs and images and chat about the game: http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord (http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord) Cheers, have a great weekend! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: Ishi on September 27, 2019, 10:18:14 AM The glitchy shader I showed last week looked cool on the titles and things, so I isolated the noise and put that on the UI, I think it looks pretty good, though still not quite sure if it's just distracting or not? (https://www.dropbox.com/s/su8pxijim29v4j9/2019-09-27%20ui_noise.gif?raw=1) I've had to crank the effect on the UI up here otherwise the gif compression just rinses it out, it's much subtler in game. I think it looks great, especially if it's actually more subtle than it is here. Maybe an option to turn it off would be appreciated as an accessibility setting? One other comment on this screen, due to the large horizontal gap between the stat name and its value, I find it hard at a glance to read which value corresponds to which stat. Some kind of visual guide such as a different background colour for every other row may help. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on September 28, 2019, 03:13:10 AM Thanks for the feedback Ichi! Hows this?
(https://www.dropbox.com/s/cgoksa73njge1dw/Screenshot%202019-09-28%20at%2014.10.09.png?raw=1) I think it looks much better, though still room for improvement. I need to go through a couple more menus and do something similar now! Still, lots of UI work left to do anyway ;) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: Ishi on September 29, 2019, 10:58:47 AM I think it looks much better, though still room for improvement. I need to go through a couple more menus and do something similar now! Still, lots of UI work left to do anyway ;) Looks great! I think it really helps with quick readability. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on October 24, 2019, 09:15:19 PM EEP! I thought I only missed two weeks of updates. Oops! Well the good news is that mean I've got more to show :D
I've finished two more slums maps and started on the main town area. Writing for the main story of the game is progressing nicely, we sent it to a bunch of freinds for feedback and it's mostly been positive and all the critisicm will only serve to make it that much stronger :) SLUMS! This has been going really well, i'm real happy with the vibe, it's really crunchy and dirty. Here's some progress shots up until the final version of the entrance: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ii9bmkks9i6kb9x/Screenshot%202019-09-25%20at%2016.38.42.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/2rxnknkqwu3m4nz/Screenshot%202019-09-27%20at%2012.49.58.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/cficgemvb70hd4l/Screenshot%202019-10-02%20at%2009.50.53.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/g7gd40yguwiswzf/Screenshot%202019-10-03%20at%2017.02.30.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/g7gd40yguwiswzf/Screenshot%202019-10-03%20at%2017.02.30.png?raw=1) And here's the second area... I'm going for a kinda snakey level design, so you'll pass through this area from which you can see the lower path. This will link to a U-turn map that links back on to the lower path. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/zt19x98z9yqadlt/Screenshot%202019-10-25%20at%2009.32.35.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/zt19x98z9yqadlt/Screenshot%202019-10-25%20at%2009.32.35.png?raw=1) Joe has also finished up the battle backdrop for the slums area to and it is just gorgeous. He added an extra couple of layers that we didn't already have which gives it tons of depth. I really like how up close the foreground is too, makes it really feel like you're in the streets. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wshibmbqh9rha1o/2019-10-25%20slums_battle.gif?raw=1) One thing I've added to the backlog at Joes suggestion is giving it more depth by hue shifting to bluer colours as they get darker. Currently I've just applied a different material to each layer as they receed but this would be better done in a shader, working off the lightness. This would give the shadows in the foreground a nice tint too. The other thing you might notice in that gif is a rework of the turn order icons in battle. Another Joe suggestion, placing the icons on a background and highlighting the players icon so it's easier to pick out when it's your turn at a glance. We've also moved to using an arrow to indicate the selected target rather than highlighting them with colour, again this makes it more readable. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/aqjmkj9ncghm0bn/Screenshot%202019-10-22%20at%2018.56.48.png?raw=1) The main town area is coming along. It's a lot brighter and colourful than other areas so far which is fun :) Still tons of work to do but the layout is settling down. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1tex2d7a5r45m8c/Screenshot%202019-10-25%20at%2012.53.25.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1tex2d7a5r45m8c/Screenshot%202019-10-25%20at%2012.53.25.png?raw=1) It's been a good few weeks! There's a bunch of enemies in progress, more music is on the boil, story is nearly finalised, I just need to pull my finger out and speed up my map making workflow (though it's always getting quicker with the more props/decoration i make). One thing I've started doing over the last few weeks is getting better at social media stuff (if not getting better at posting devlogs :-[ ). I think this is a really useful tip for other indies... It's always good to post gifs on Twitter etc. I've stuggled with this in the past, only posting stuff when I have something new to show. But I've started to realise that it doesn't really matter, the main thing is just posting anything at all. Each time you post something you'll get some new eyeballs and thats what matters, eventually this should build up with your posts getting shared more and gaining wider reach as you build your audience. After a conversation with a freind about promotion and things I've noticed a bunch of other indies I following doing this too. So! The other week I created a bunch of social media ready gifs and started to schedule them up in Tweet Deck. I scheduled one tweet a day to go out at 7pm gmt (~1am asia time, ~midday US time), hopefully that covers most of europe and the states, I'll then retweet myself the next morning when I wake up so that folks oer this way in asia get to see it (and hopefully it's not annoying for eu/us folks). Now I just need to go back and update a bunch of the gifs with the new battle UI stuff ;D Also, don't forget to tag stuff on special days such as #screenshotsaturday, #madewithunity on fridays and #indiedevhour on wedensdays at 7pm gmt :) Here's the usual promo bits... Grab the demo here: https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move Wishlist this wiz biz on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/ And come join the discord, see more work in progress gifs and images and chat about the game: http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord I've also started streaming some dev stuff once a week. I'm aiming for 10am gmt on Thursdays: https://www.twitch.tv/empika And of course, the afrorementioned Twitter where you can see all those gifs: https://twitter.com/empika Cheers, have a great weekend! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on November 14, 2019, 11:06:54 PM Hey folks!
Been a busy couple of weeks, as ever. I've got a couple more maps finished, wrestled with unity's asset bundles, Amalie has been busy nailing down the last parts of the main story and Joe has been making a bunch more enemies and battle FX! Here's a couple of maps I've been working on. The first is a set of streets, after which you'll hit a switchback that will take you to the middle part of it. I like maps where you get to see another part of it before you get there proper. This is a pretty simple version as it's always more fun to lock that stuff off somehow, with locked doors etc. (Click for big versions) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/p7cw4a53ngyw69u/2019-11-15_slums_streets.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/p7cw4a53ngyw69u/2019-11-15_slums_streets.png?raw=1) The next one is quite fun, a derelict building you have to naviagte up, round and through. Though it's quite simple, I do like that it gives some elevation. This then leads to the bottom part of previous streets :) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/a6vtq2b1sxc988s/2019-11-15_slums_derelict.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/a6vtq2b1sxc988s/2019-11-15_slums_derelict.png?raw=1) Joe's been finishing up a bunch of enemies he's been working on. First up, these suave gangsters and their boss. They fire cool guns, but the hit FX aren't finished quite yet: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/384fgqmu3d02i88/2019-10-30%20gangster_guzzle.gif?raw=1) And some cool drone enemies. There's one for each elemental type (physical, electro, cyber and wetware), each with a corresponding attack type. Plus there's a big beefy boy that can do all 4 attack types, plus inflict slow on the play with a cool net launcher. Again, the hit FX aren't finished yet, so you'll just have to imagine how rad they are! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4uxyq8j8rz8nm5p/2019-11-15%20drones.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/kkwn2ip5rsge4wu/2019-11-15%20drones_02.gif?raw=1) You may have also noticed we added a subtle reflection of the player and enemies in battle. It was really simple to do, grounds the actors and I think gives it just and extra great pop of polish :) Also, you probably noticed a couple of weird glitches in those gifs. I have no idea why unity on this mac does that. It seems to only be in the editor :/ (https://www.dropbox.com/s/wbsku7pncce2zkc/2019-11-15%20unity_glitch.gif?raw=1) Amalie has made some fantastic progress on a huge edit of the script. We now have a solid main story and she's now busy filling out a bunch of secondary dialog, world building and niknaks :) The other big thing I've been working on is asset packing, which has been... fun? For patching reasons, it's best to pack all your assets in what Unity likes to call Asset Bundles. Unity has a nice new way of doing this called Addressables, which packs all your assets nicely and should remove the need for you to have to resolve dependency issues manually (though this is actually backed by asset bundles, unity just does some of the heavy lifting for you now). However, once I had implemented this (it was surprisingly easy) I went to build on switch and there was nothing but purple shaders. So I build for mac and the damn thing won't even run, segmentation faults straight after launching. The log doesn't even get in to my code, so something was definitely weird. After deliberating if it was worth the hassle of sticking with and figuring out what was wrong, or just implement the old manual asset bundle way of doing things, I decded to go with the latter. I roll back all that code and build a quick content manage system to access the asset bundles. Build for mac, everything works great... build for switch. Same issue as before, purple shaders. After looking at the logs a bit closer this time it looks like none of my shaders are compatible, so something is suuuuper weird. After lots and lots of searching, it turns out there's an issue with unity not compiling shaders correctly in 2019.2.5+. I'd apparently never tested a build after upgrading to 2019.2.9 to try and fix the afore mentioned editor glitches. It seems related to this ios issue https://issuetracker.unity3d.com/issues/ios The solution is to remove any shaders you have set in preloaded & always-included in the graphics settings, quit unity, delete the library, restart, reinstate the graphics settings and then build. So perhaps addressables will work afterall and the mac crash was something else? I'm not sure I have the energy to give them another go just yet. I think the lesson here is to always thouroughly test after doing an upgrade!! I'd be interested to hear from anyone that's implemented addressables and how they got on with them, especially if you've previously used asset bundles in comparrison. I've also been trying to tune the player movement, adding a little acceleration and trying to smooth out the diagonal speed. I'd love to hear if anyone has any tips for making topdown movement feel good :) Here's the usual promo bits... Grab the demo here: https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move Wishlist this wiz biz on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/ And come join the discord, see more work in progress gifs and images and chat about the game: http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord I've also started streaming development once a week. I'm aiming for 9am gmt on Thursdays (but will be streaming today from about 9am gmt): https://www.twitch.tv/empika And of course, the afrorementioned Twitter where you can see all those gifs: https://twitter.com/empika Cheers, have a great weekend! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: cynicalsandel on November 16, 2019, 01:20:54 PM Quote Also, you probably noticed a couple of weird glitches in those gifs. I have no idea why unity on this mac does that. It seems to only be in the editor :/ you could make the argument that they fit thematically :noir: Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on November 19, 2019, 09:25:46 PM Quote Also, you probably noticed a couple of weird glitches in those gifs. I have no idea why unity on this mac does that. It seems to only be in the editor :/ you could make the argument that they fit thematically :noir: Haha, sadly yes :(((( Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on December 12, 2019, 11:49:37 PM Hey folks! Time for a new Jack Move devlog update!
I've finished off the slums dungeon, wrapping up the last screen and setting up all the enemy encounters etc. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/nbsnacurzjfisvy/2019-12-13_slums_corner.png?raw=1) I've spent most of the last week doing small tasks that have been on the back log for ages, rather than dive in to a big chunk of work before christ,as. I spent some time polishing up some little UI bits that have bothering me for ages. In particular, animting the turn order icons a little, to help signify the direction of time. I'm still not sure how to handle enemies dieing as the icons get quite a big shakeup. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/3mwhtdr6iaan552/2019-12-13%20turn_order.gif?raw=1) At Joes request I built a shader for UI/battle stuff that tints textures better. Rather than just tinting a greyscale image with colour, this takes the lightness and applies that amount of hue to the pixel. It also has a nice little hue shifting function so that the battle background get a bit more depth, shifting slightly to blue. aaaaand, something i've been meaning to do for months is rebuild the Software Install menu. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/406qamkvuw2za1k/2019-12-10%20new_install_menu.gif?raw=1) Hopefully it's a little clearer than before (though maybe not in gif form). Previously I had a bunch of presets that you could change, people found this confusing so I've removed those in favour of just a single loadout. The interface is now similar to Final Fantasy VII's materia menu, where you can slot and remove software in to graphically represented RAM, which i think it helps with understanding the system of having limited "points" to spend. I won't really know until I get some user testing done, but it feels better to me. I need to think about how to handle editing in battles though. Will people want to revert back to the loadout they had before a battle, or should it save your loadout if you change it during a battle? I think this will have to be a toggle in the menu somewhere as it feels like different folks would prefer the different setting. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/sso7gc69ozdhdtd/2019-12-13_colour_shader.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/di5rq0crjmo0ocf/2019-12-13_colour_shader_graph.png?raw=1) Joe has been super busy himself, working on a variety of new enemies, in particular some spooky and weird cyber enemies you'll encounter on the grid! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/zrx95taa0j8jdem/compublobattackwip.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/awm4jhq70bpv19i/compublob_damagetest.gif?raw=1) There are a bit more WIP (https://www.dropbox.com/s/n2sjlpc30g4hars/spook.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/fbja9lr90iyea9l/trappedsoul2_idle.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/drumwr2xt2owvlh/trappedsoul2_attack_partial.gif?raw=1) And of course, Amalie has been working wonders with the script. It's had a huge edit after Ben Ward of Size5 adventure game fame (go wishlist Lair of the Clockwork God, it's going to be aces! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1060600/Lair_of_the_Clockwork_God/) took a look and helped trim it in to shape. It's looking great and I can't wait to start getting chunks of it in game :D There's been a bunch of organising and production going on too for the next chunk of work, we've got some really cool stuff lined up. I'm super excited! Happy Christmas everyone, and here's to a great new year!! :toastR: :toastL: Here's the usual promo bits... Grab the demo here: https://soromantic.itch.io/jack-move Wishlist this wiz biz on Steam here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/ And come join the discord, see more work in progress gifs and images and chat about the game: http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord I've been a bit lax on streaming recently but will pick it up again after christmas :) And of course, the afrorementioned Twitter where you can see all those gifs: https://twitter.com/empika Cheers, have a great weekend, unless you're in the UK, in which case, have a big hug from me and look after yourself! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: Ishi on December 13, 2019, 02:45:50 PM A great update, those enemy animations in particular are amazing!
Hopefully it's a little clearer than before (though maybe not in gif form). Previously I had a bunch of presets that you could change, people found this confusing so I've removed those in favour of just a single loadout. The interface is now similar to Final Fantasy VII's materia menu, where you can slot and remove software in to graphically represented RAM, which i think it helps with understanding the system of having limited "points" to spend. I won't really know until I get some user testing done, but it feels better to me. I need to think about how to handle editing in battles though. Will people want to revert back to the loadout they had before a battle, or should it save your loadout if you change it during a battle? I think this will have to be a toggle in the menu somewhere as it feels like different folks would prefer the different setting. Would it be too intrusive to ask the player at the end of a battle, if there are changes, whether they'd like to keep or revert them? I don't know the game of course but it feels like something that would be a case-by-case decision rather than always wanting to keep or discard the changes. (Or, there could be three options, Always keep, Always revert and Ask.) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/406qamkvuw2za1k/2019-12-10%20new_install_menu.gif?raw=1) I think this is looking good! The blocks in the RAM bar are coloured; do the colours represent the type of software, similar to materia (e.g. green was magic, red was summon)? If so it seems like the right-hand list of software should also display these colours to help players quickly identify the software, especially when the list gets full. Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on December 13, 2019, 11:17:51 PM A great update, those enemy animations in particular are amazing! Thanks! Yeah, Joe just constantly blows me away. I give him the worst reference, like "it's a weird ghost, but a computer ghost" and he always seems to know exactly what I mean :handthumbsupL: :handthumbsupR: Would it be too intrusive to ask the player at the end of a battle, if there are changes, whether they'd like to keep or revert them? I don't know the game of course but it feels like something that would be a case-by-case decision rather than always wanting to keep or discard the changes. (Or, there could be three options, Always keep, Always revert and Ask.) Having an option to ask is a great idea! I think this is looking good! The blocks in the RAM bar are coloured; do the colours represent the type of software, similar to materia (e.g. green was magic, red was summon)? If so it seems like the right-hand list of software should also display these colours to help players quickly identify the software, especially when the list gets full. Yup, the colours represent the different elements (red: physical, green: cyber, purple: wetware, blue: electro, white: misc/buffs/utility). I think I might keep the list item colour to keep it consistent across the game, but I will tint the icons to match. I'll see if that's better, then can always tint the whole list item to match... just gotta thing of a nice way to do it as the select/deselect/disabled animations all swap out materials and I don't have an easy way to do that programatically at the moment... though could probably code it up pretty easily as it's just a blink :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: Beastboy on May 14, 2020, 12:16:20 AM Is this project stil alive?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on May 14, 2020, 12:29:30 AM Is this project stil alive? It certainly is! Apologies for the lack of posts, I've been super hard at work on it. I've been posting bits and pieces on my Twitter and the discord server (https://twitter.com/empika / http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord) if you want smaller updates, I'll find some time in the next couple of weeks to post a bigger update on the work we've been doing! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: Beastboy on June 05, 2020, 01:55:41 AM Is this project stil alive? It certainly is! Apologies for the lack of posts, I've been super hard at work on it. I've been posting bits and pieces on my Twitter and the discord server (https://twitter.com/empika / http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord) if you want smaller updates, I'll find some time in the next couple of weeks to post a bigger update on the work we've been doing! That is good to hear because i love the feels of your project Thank you for invites but i mostly like to chek this forums to see indie games getting developed from the ground up I appreciate any updates you put here Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: vdapps on June 05, 2020, 12:15:48 PM Looks brutally solid! And that art, reminds me 640x480 16 colors. Totally awww. That's best on indie games. Out of the box gfx. ;)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG - Demo now available! Post by: empika on June 06, 2020, 03:12:44 AM Apologies for the delay, I've been suuuuper busy the past few months.
First, the big news!! We're partnering with Hypetrain Digital (https://store.steampowered.com/publisher/HypeTrainDigital) to publish Jack Move! That means ew now have the support and resources to actually finish and release the game! Secondly, we've been preparing a brand new demo for both the Steam Games Festival (https://store.steampowered.com/sale/gamefestival) next week and BitSummit Gaiden (http://bitsummit.org/en/) :handthumbsupL: :handthumbsupR: We were really hoping to have been able to show the game at BitSummit proper at the beginning of May, but obviously that has not been possible. BitSummit Gaiden should still be really fun, they're hoping to cpature some of the fun of a convention using Discord and Twitch etc. I'm not even sure where to start on new stuff as there's been so much! We've got a brand new dungeon filled with a bunch of new enemies (https://www.dropbox.com/s/1jnk27asncozik5/Screenshot%202020-02-18%20at%2019.34.53.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/waufabx9k8142ps/2020-03-17%20poison.gif?raw=1) We had Tom Waterhouse join us briefly as well as Clairvoir and Tyriq Plummer joining us for the last month to help out with getting a few more enemies in game. It's been super fun to have a few more folks involved and bring their own ideas to the characters ;D The "spook" and "lab tech" below are by Tyriq and Clair, the hazmat guy above was initially animated by Tom. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/ewgvohuf6m9439l/2020-05-20%20new_enemies.gif?raw=1) We have all new level 1 software moves, a brand new "jack move" special move (kinda like a limit break/overdrive) that we worked super hard on, though we're gonna keep that under our hats till the demo is out ;) and a million small tweaks and things. New icons, word highlighting in dialogs as well as the ui and battle interfaces to help indicate what type of software something has or is being exectuted etc. OHH! One of our biggest new things is fancy shadows (though not that fancy under the hood... just a lot of overlaid transparent sprites). This makes the world pop and make the lighting even nicer. We had something similar with screen space ambient occlusion in the past but had some issues with framerate on Switch and even just running it with different hardware on windows. So this is our more manual but more stylised answer... a huge thanks to Joe for pushing me in to it, as I was a bit hesitant about the extra overhead, but it's turned out to be more than worth it. Hope you agree! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9xak1kwaeb888l/Screenshot%202020-06-06%20at%2018.48.49.png?raw=1) So yeah, been very very busy! ;D Looks like the Steam Games Festival has been delayed by a week so we'll need to figure out when to reschedule our livestream and q&a, keep an eye on the steam page (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/) for more news! Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 16, 2020, 09:23:13 PM Hey folks
Been a busy week or so getting ready for this steam games festival (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/), which is going on right now, until the 22nd June. So if you want to check out the new demo, then please check it out and let us know what you think! (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/) We were also fortunate enough to have our brand new trailer featured in the Escapist big indie showcase stream. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yOLVvhsJFw At the end of the trailer we reveal our big new JACK MOVE. These are like Overdrive or Limit Breaks in Final Fantasy, a super powerful move. There will be one for each element. We've actually improved on this even further since the trailer was made, and I hope you agree, it's looking pretty fancy now with improved cloud sprites and some fancy backlighting. I though it would be fun (and hopefully interesting) to break down the effect and process we took to create it. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/oor905ur8tzyzdc/2020-06-11%20jack%20move%20electro.gif?raw=1) The idea behind the move is that while Noa and the enemies are already battling in cyberspace, Noa pulls out her cyberspace deck, coding an incantation that opens up a door in the very fabric of cyberspace, becoming one with it for a brief moment and allowing her to unleash this powerful attack. It's a bit meta but I think it works quite nicely and gives the whole thing a lot of room to breath. Joe worked on an initial storyboard gif, that I took and tried to emulate as close as possible. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qyouw3jtrhqse7p/jm_electro_test.gif?raw=1) He had the idea of Noa getting sucked further in to cyberspace and knocked out a quick animation that he then itterated on until he came to the wider glyph/incantation which represents the type of element the attack is for, in this case it is an Electroware attack, so it's blue and has lightning motifs. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/sysnp4iwd4hr57g/jackmovetest2.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/lqgrzaynm5si0f7/jackmovetest3.gif?raw=1) The whole move it timed to the music.. which I appreciate doesn't really work in gif form. This is so that the reveal, input minigame and actual move all flow seamlessly and allows the player to see as much of the animation and move as possible without being distracted by the minigame. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4mdxvrx868seg1g/jackmovetest3quicktime.gif?raw=1) After some initial thought it was decided we should focus the input in the middle so that the players eye isn't too distracted (https://www.dropbox.com/s/17zmodb0tkpp5dv/jackmovetest3quicktime2.gif?raw=1) We knew that we wanted to zoom in on Noa at this point to really focus the action, so that also mean bumping up pixel size of all the ui elements used so that the pixel density matched the world and stayed consistent. Normally I hate this kind of thing, where the pixels are not multiplied by whole numbers, it can look horrible if it happens all the time. I think in this case it's ok as it's is a quick zoom in to double the scale, and then a quick zoom out again. The camera isn't still long enough for you to notice any warped pixels. Here's a really early version of most of the major parts working together (ignore the screenshake on input.. was just testing it out and it didn't quite work) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/dlyfpmud527x5me/2020-03-20%20jack_move_electro_01.gif?raw=1) There's some nice bits going on here. We fade out the background in order to place the move in it's own space, allowing the clouds to come in and not look weird. We also mask out the ground/grid texture and fade it back in around the lightning strikes, which gives them a much better sense of place and dimensionality, though at this point the highlights aren't scaling properly. We really wanted the part when Noa slams cable of her deck in to the socket of the glyph to be really impactful. Joe's ideas was to have a big ripple to show this. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/3xautbjz6pf920j/2020-04-03%20jack_move_slam_03.gif?raw=1) My initial experiments with this were not great, due to some miscommunication I thought that he wanted the ripple to eminate out after she disappears, which just looks a bit odd. The ripple effect itself is also much more of a pond ripple, not quite what he had in mind. The ripple is a post-processed shader effect, so after some international tinkering between us (mostly Joe!) on shadertoy, Joe was able to create exactly what he envisioned. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/suiqsw4dua98urz/2020-04-07%20jack_move_05.gif?raw=1) Now we're getting somewhere, a nice single big ripple! I tweaked it further to work at the correct pixel density when zoomed in. Here's the code for that: https://gist.github.com/empika/68d6adb5d3c0c6ead1c9803e279d322d We really wanted the move and minigame timing to be really succinct, with the whole thing taking not much longer than it takes for Noa to summon the glyph and slam her deck in to the socket. So I went back over the timing and tightened everything up so there is very little waiting time. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/q1m11wn5yenh2rj/2020-04-18%20jack%20move%20timing.gif?raw=1) The last thing to do was the clouds. There are 4 layers, two coming in from each side which took a lot of tweaking to get their speed, timing and easing down. The major challenge was to get the highlights and backlights looking nice. An intial exploration showed that the majority of work could be done using a ton of masking. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/fge1rewkypraksm/2020-04-25%20jack%20move%20highlights.gif?raw=1) It looked a bit weird though due to the speed of the clouds, the highlights staying static and there being no real blending on the highlights. After some tweaking of the cloud speed and easing, we looked in to the blending. Some more shader work later we ended up with a relatively decent sprite "overlay" blend for the front highlights. The backlights ended up as just straight textures, the time they are visible is a lot shorter than the inital experiment which combined with the cloud speed and alpha blending on the sides, gets rid of the weird crawling effect. Here's the amplify shader editor node graph for that, as it's surprisingly hard to find reference for the various blends alogrithms online: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/0rx5cwa7kroew8z/Screenshot%202020-06-15%20at%2018.02.35.png?raw=1) Pro tip... as masks only cut out hard edges, you can use an inner sprite with an alpha channel blend to fade stuff out. The solide white texture is our mask, inside of which we place the texture with an alpha channel (on the left) that lets stuff through. This example texture was used for the lightning strikes on the ground (https://www.dropbox.com/s/4dbq5osnhcq0cjm/Screenshot%202020-06-17%20at%2013.11.40.png?raw=1) Here's a still of the final effect so you can see the highlights more clearly. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/zxa5uh8esymisi2/Screenshot%202020-06-16%20at%2022.58.05.png?raw=1) That's about it I think! I think it's turned out super good and I'm really happy with it, though I think we still have some more tweaking to do with timings and the position of the lightning and things! Here's the final effect again: (https://www.dropbox.com/s/oor905ur8tzyzdc/2020-06-11%20jack%20move%20electro.gif?raw=1) I think I'll cover the input system in another post as this one is already getting quite long :) Come join the discord if you'd like to see more work in progress gifs and images and chat about the game! We're doign a developer Q&A on saturday at 12pm CST if you'd like to join us http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord And grab the new demo from steam right now! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/ Thanks! Title: Re: [New demo!] Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Ishi on June 17, 2020, 07:48:17 AM Wow, great to see all the work that went into this one move. It looks super satisfying :coffee:
What happens if the player fails the input minigame? Title: Re: [New demo!] Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 23, 2020, 01:29:48 AM Hey Ishi, sorry for the late reply!
If the player fails the minigame, the attack will do 1x damage.. so still a lot. For every input you get correct you get some extra power, up to a maximum of 1 (1 divided by the number of inputs). So if you get every input correct you'll do double damage :handthumbsupR: I'm hoping to share some thoughts on having the game in the Steam Game Festival this week, so will hopefully have that posted by Friday. Still decompressing a bit after quite a hectic weekend, being in asia does not suit trying to stream to US/EU folks :'( Cheers! Title: Re: [New demo!] Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: ashtonmorris on June 23, 2020, 04:17:05 AM The trailer music fits amazingly well!
Title: Re: [New demo!] Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on July 19, 2020, 02:47:35 AM Hey folks!
Busy as ever! Steam games festival went pretty well i think, followed by BitSummit which was also fun, followed by Virtual Indie Showcase which was also a rad time :handthumbsupR: The last week or so I've been mostly concentrating on the options menu, which was non-existant before. So now we got some nice volume controls (hooray! I no longer have to remember to unmute the unity mixer before builds... because christ knows why you can't do that programatically!), you can change language (not that there are any other complete language files yet) and most importantly, you can remap the controls! The input stuff was obviously the most work, and InConrol (http://www.gallantgames.com/pages/incontrol-introduction) actually made it mostly pain free. You just ask to listen for input and then handle it how you want once a control has been fired. The biggest issue was swapping an already bound control, though turns out it was pretty easy and that my UI code was not getting updated with the new bindings so I thought it was brokwn for way longer than I should have done :-[ Along with the rebind screen I revamped all the icons, creating a new set for keyboard and all the current console gamepads, they still need a bit of polish but happy with them so far. It then wasn't too much work to refactor my existing button prompt code to grab the icon by current device AND binding, not just a hard coded device + button as it was previously :handthumbsupR: Ta-da! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/vhr2h5tc9o3h39a/2020-07-19%20options.gif?raw=1) Next on the list is adding these options to the in-game menu, and adding the session/game specific options like encounter rate (big one!) and whether any software loaded in battle should be kept or if it should be rolled back to the pre-battle state. I also got a drawing screen tablet thing this week, so looking forward to using that some more and getting used to it. I'm hoping it will speed up my work (in time) and improve the general quality of things... as well as save my mouse finger and arm from all that carpal tunnel! I got a Huion Kamvas 16, seems pretty good for the price :) Here's a bunch more gifs from the recent demo too, as I've been making some for twitter! (https://www.dropbox.com/s/b51otmj78yul7q8/2020-07-17%20krall_fly.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/p7gvwj9kjq23bhd/2020-07-17%20quadir_intro.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/m05qhjjfdeklmqm/2020-07-17%20the_bomb.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/qmsppgtnh87g2b0/2020-07-17%20spider.gif?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/eza5sfcniefk2u2/2020-07-17%20qadir_bounce.gif?raw=1) Come join the discord for move inprogress gifs, screeshots and discussion http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord And please wishlist Jack Move on steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/ Thanks! ...until next time! X Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Jayesh on July 19, 2020, 10:30:40 AM Your progress looks really cool. I love the animations. They are full of life. I read about you using InControl. Do you find it better than Unity's new Input System package (https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/10/14/introducing-the-new-input-system/)?
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: MayRoyal on July 19, 2020, 03:00:52 PM There is so much detail going on in these backgrounds and animations. And I like how we get the perspective of the character's back during combat. It's very unique in style and I think you've really succeeded in your aesthetic goals. Can't wait to see more!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on July 19, 2020, 07:41:02 PM Thanks MayRoyal and jay3sh! :D
I read about you using InControl. Do you find it better than Unity's new Input System package (https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/10/14/introducing-the-new-input-system/)? I've not used unity's new stuff as I have been using incontrol for many years so it would take a lot of work to replace it at the moment. Unity's system looks very similar to incontrol though, based on actions, action sets and devices that bind to those actions. I would definitely take a look at it for the next project though :) Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: UnfoldGames on July 19, 2020, 09:44:20 PM Really digging the aesthetics, looks promising!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Earworm on July 20, 2020, 07:21:00 AM Wow, this is great work man. Wishlisted on Steam. Can't wait to check the demo out when I get home!
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on July 20, 2020, 07:52:56 AM Wow, this is great work man. Wishlisted on Steam. Can't wait to check the demo out when I get home! Ahh, thanks!! But sorry, the demo was only up during the steam festival the other week, so it's not available any more :'( Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: Islet Sound on July 24, 2020, 01:50:42 AM Looks and sounds great! Wishlisted on steam :)
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 01, 2020, 12:12:58 AM Hey everyone!
Hope you all had a great week. Feeling a bit funny this week, so not as much got done as I'd have liked, but onwards and upwards! I've started on a new city area, so have been feeling out how it should look and the "rules" around it. It's a very different area from the stuff that I've made so far. Those have all been in various states of being very lived in, and I want to contrast that with having a very clean city, almost sterile. It's the home of Monomind, the big bad corporation, so I want it to feel oppressive and a bit bleak. Here's some very work in progress shots. They're lacking most of decoration and wandering npcs. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/lqv617ztknhququ/Screenshot%202020-08-01%20at%2016.11.00.png?raw=1) I tried to show the pathway for the player using the blue highlights on the floor. Joe pointed out that I should take this further by also showing what is actually traversable. For example, in the shot above, I had originally used blue flooring under the center building, but now the pillars are ringed in blue to show that you can go underneath. (https://www.dropbox.com/s/6uu8q8ca6ljuyd6/Screenshot%202020-08-01%20at%2016.10.51.png?raw=1) As mentioned above, I really wanted to have the city be very clean, but currently it's looking a bit too bland and not actually lived in, so this coming week I'll go back in and add some grime and dirt and a few bit's of foliage and things. The big screen in the middle is a rendertexture with some UI projected on it. Eventually I'll add some nice sprites and animations for the UI elements and things, but for now I just wanted to check it would work as I was expecting. I've also done a bunch of work on the custom tile mapper, fixing some stuff and adding a couple of new features to help with the workflow. Firstly, I've been meaning to add flood fill for a long time. I just added a simple recusive thing to swap the sprite out for the clicked on tile, and then check the tiles north, south, east and west and if they match the original then swap their sprite too, then call the same thing on each of those. It doens't handle filling empty tiles yet, but I'll get to that soon :) The next feature I wanted was to be able to ctrl+click on a tile and select the layer that tile is on. Pretty simple but it has sped up my workflow loads! I also discovered a much better way of selecting tiles using a built in unity function (HandleUtility.PickGameObject) which has cascaded out and improved a couple of other tools too (eg right click to select the tile sprite underneath the cursor). Previously I was calculating the grid coordinate of where the mouse clicks, then figuring out which tile to then filter out and select. Silly me! Consuming mouse clicks has been a bit of a pain, so here's a simple boilerplate you can use to build your own sceneview tools. Hopefully the comments are self explanatory! https://gist.github.com/empika/dc5b650fb8516c2f9489eae50aac4c1b Code: using System.Collections.Generic; using UnityEditor; using UnityEditor.SceneManagement; using UnityEngine; using UnityEngine.SceneManagement; public class SceneViewEditorBoilerplate : ScriptableObject { public const string SVE_IS_ENABLED = "SVE_IS_ENABLED"; private bool isLeftMouseDragging = false; private bool isRightMouseDragging = false; private bool isMiddleMouseDragging = false; private List<Vector2> mousePositions = new List<Vector2>(); private GUIStyle layerLabelStyle; // Some singleton business so that we only ever have one editor tool initialised at once public static SceneViewEditorBoilerplate Instance { get { if(instance == null) { SceneViewEditorBoilerplate[] editor = Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll<SceneViewEditorBoilerplate>(); if(editor != null && editor.Length > 0) { instance = editor[0]; for(int i = 1; i < editor.Length; i++) { GameObject.DestroyImmediate(editor[i]); } } } return instance; } set { instance = value; } } private static SceneViewEditorBoilerplate instance; [MenuItem("Tools/My Scene View Editor %#o", false, 2005)] public static void InitTool() { if (instance == null) { EditorPrefs.SetBool(SVE_IS_ENABLED, true); instance = ScriptableObject.CreateInstance<SceneViewEditorBoilerplate>(); instance.hideFlags = HideFlags.DontSave; EditorApplication.delayCall += instance.Initialize; } else { CloseTool(); } SceneView.RepaintAll(); } public static void CloseTool() { foreach(SceneViewEditorBoilerplate editor in Resources.FindObjectsOfTypeAll<SceneViewEditorBoilerplate>()) editor.Close(); Tools.current = Tool.Move; } public void Close() { removeListeners(); EditorPrefs.SetBool(SVE_IS_ENABLED, false); DestroyImmediate(this); } public void Initialize() { Debug.Log("Initializing SceneViewEditor"); // Set up all our callbacks SceneView.duringSceneGui -= OnSceneGUI; SceneView.duringSceneGui += OnSceneGUI; EditorApplication.update -= Update; EditorApplication.update += Update; Undo.undoRedoPerformed -= RepaintSceneView; Undo.undoRedoPerformed += RepaintSceneView; EditorApplication.playModeStateChanged -= playmodeStateChanged; EditorApplication.playModeStateChanged += playmodeStateChanged; EditorSceneManager.sceneClosing -= sceneClosing; EditorSceneManager.sceneClosing += sceneClosing; EditorSceneManager.sceneOpened -= sceneOpened; EditorSceneManager.sceneOpened += sceneOpened; layerLabelStyle = new GUIStyle(); layerLabelStyle.alignment = TextAnchor.LowerCenter; layerLabelStyle.fontSize = 18; layerLabelStyle.normal.textColor = Color.green; // Set our tool to None... this is only a visual thing in the toolbar // See the click handling below on how to actually bypass unity's tools Tools.current = Tool.None; instance = this; Update(); RepaintSceneView(); } private void OnDestroy() { removeListeners(); } private void removeListeners() { SceneView.duringSceneGui -= OnSceneGUI; EditorApplication.update -= Update; Undo.undoRedoPerformed -= RepaintSceneView; EditorSceneManager.sceneClosing -= sceneClosing; EditorSceneManager.sceneOpened -= sceneOpened; } private void playmodeStateChanged(PlayModeStateChange state) { if (state == PlayModeStateChange.EnteredEditMode) { // Do some stuff here. For example I have a bunch of objects in the sceneview that I set to hidden (tile brush etc) // I need to respawn those when we are editing Update(); RepaintSceneView(); } else if (state == PlayModeStateChange.ExitingEditMode) { // Do some stuff here. For example I have a bunch of objects in the sceneview that I set to hidden (tile brush etc) // I need to remove those when we are playing } } private void sceneClosing(Scene scene, bool removingScene) { OnDestroy(); } private void sceneOpened(Scene scene, OpenSceneMode mode) { Initialize(); } void RepaintSceneView() { SceneView.RepaintAll(); } public void Update() { if (EditorApplication.isPlaying) { return; } // Do some updating stuff here if you need to } public void OnSceneGUI(SceneView sceneView) { if (EditorApplication.isPlaying) { return; } bool isCurrentView = sceneView == SceneView.lastActiveSceneView; if (isCurrentView) { Handles.BeginGUI(); DrawSceneGUI(); Handles.EndGUI(); } HandleUtility.Repaint(); } public void DrawSceneGUI() { Rect screenRect = SceneView.lastActiveSceneView.position; GUI.Label(new Rect(screenRect.width / 2, 10, 200, 40), "Scene View Editor", layerLabelStyle); // This is kinda like the update in the normal monobehaviours, but for the sceneview // The mouse handling gets quite complicated so we just handle them all, all the time handleClick(screenRect); handleRightClick(); } private void handleClick(Rect screenRect) { Event e = Event.current; if (screenRect.Contains(e.mousePosition)) { // This control id stuff is pretty confusing and i still don't 100% understand it // We get a control id from unity, to say we're doing something // Don't know why we check GUIUtility.hotControl != 0, but if it is then we want to tell it our int controlId = GUIUtility.GetControlID (FocusType.Passive); if (e.type == EventType.MouseDown && Event.current.button == 0 && GUIUtility.hotControl != 0) { GUIUtility.hotControl = controlId; // This is the start of the drag, for whatever reason unity's EventType.MouseDrag doesnt quite work // how you'd expect so we want to track this ourselves isLeftMouseDragging = true; } else if (e.type == EventType.MouseUp && Event.current.button == 0 && GUIUtility.hotControl == controlId) { if (mousePositions.Count == 0) { // We got a click! We're not dragging or anything so just do something normal! // ... // or we can check for modifiers first... if (e.control) { // we got a ctrl click } else { // just a normal click } // We need to set the hotcontrol to 0 to let unity know we're all done GUIUtility.hotControl = 0; } // We're no longer dragging isLeftMouseDragging = false; mousePositions.Clear(); // This is where we consume the mouse click, so that unity doesnt do it's normal stuff with selecting or moving etc e.Use(); RepaintSceneView(); } else if (e.type == EventType.MouseDrag && Event.current.button == 0 && GUIUtility.hotControl == controlId) { // Are we dragging... like we set earlier if (isLeftMouseDragging) { // Yes we are, so add this mouse position to the list mousePositions.Add(e.mousePosition); // We're dragging so we can do stuff here. In my tile map, I create a tile here based on the position. // clear those mouse positions mousePositions.Clear(); // This is where we consume the mouse drag, so that unity doesnt do it's normal stuff with selecting or moving etc e.Use(); RepaintSceneView(); } } } } private void handleRightClick() { Event e = Event.current; if (e.type == EventType.MouseDown && Event.current.button == 1) { isRightMouseDragging = false; } else if (e.type == EventType.MouseDrag && Event.current.button == 1 && e.command ) { isRightMouseDragging = true; // Note that here the command key is pressed and we are dragging, I don't consume the event with e.Use(). // This is so that can do the normal camera orbit in the scene view, but it requires the command key to be pressed, // I want a right click to select the tile in the tile map without affecting the camera at all } else if (e.type == EventType.MouseDrag && Event.current.button == 1) { isRightMouseDragging = true; // This is where we consume the mouse drag, so that unity doesnt do it's normal stuff with selecting or moving etc e.Use(); } else if (e.type == EventType.MouseUp && Event.current.button == 1) { if (isRightMouseDragging == false) { // This is just a normal right click } isRightMouseDragging = false; } } } I had some issues using middle click, so no idea what's up with that. Hope that helps someone! Let me know if you have any questions, comments, improvements etc. Come join the discord for more gifs, screeshots and discussion http://www.soromantic.co.uk/discord ..and please wishlist Jack Move on steam! https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/ Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: andy wolff on August 01, 2020, 11:06:46 AM The visuals in this game are top notch. Excellent work
Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on August 02, 2020, 04:16:00 AM The visuals in this game are top notch. Excellent work Thanks Andy! :-* Title: Re: Jack Move. A cyberpunk JRPG Post by: empika on June 21, 2022, 08:03:17 PM Welp, it's been 9 years since the start of this thread and I'm increadibly happy to say that Jack Move will be out this year!!
It's taken a ridiculous amount of effort to get to this point but I think I'm happy with the result, and I really hope everyone else is too! Apologies for the lack of updates over the last few years, but as a very small team we've just had our heads down trying to get this thing finished and ready! Here's some newer screenshots (https://www.dropbox.com/s/18wciaa6i2gapqn/jm_01_shady_district.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/d2dvhgc1woy3pxd/Jack%20Move%20Screenshot%20-%202021-04%20-%2000003.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/19ad5qavd7l164n/Jack%20Move%20Screenshot%20-%202021-04%20-%2000012.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/5ozp86fo8y2sr8l/Jack%20Move%20Screenshot%20-%202021-04%20-%2000007.png?raw=1) (https://www.dropbox.com/s/a4qssszvtk9p9d7/Jack%20Move%20Screenshot%20-%202021-04%20-%2000006.png?raw=1) Steam page is still there, so please give it a wishlist (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1099640/Jack_Move/). We also released a free prologue called I.C.E. Breaker (https://store.steampowered.com/app/1813150/Jack_Move_ICE_Breaker/) (geddit!?!) a few weeks ago that introduces the game, so give that a whirl if you like! Thanks for all the support over the years! X |