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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

Personally, I prefer the lowpoly look to the realistic one, but I'm just a fan of lowpoly in general. d:

Not much new that I can actually show right now, but here's a GIF of shells being ejected as I shoot, because I felt the screen wasn't cluttered enough as it is. Putting that in actually reminded me of an older game I did (Astrovoid) where there was a power up that caused ejected shells to act as explosives that could damage enemies. That'd be a cool pickup to do here, and by cool I mean absolute chaos.


Besides that, I cut the little space dude's head off so that I could swap out helmets. I think helmets are either going to be a pickup in the game with various effects, or different characters you can pick from the start, depending on how varied I can make them look. I'd like to have kinda transformative powerups (like Binding of Isaac), but I need to make sure I have a good place for them on the character. Right now, I just threw in a dome style helmet.

Other than that, I've been taking a look into what it'd take to have dynamic music in the game. It's not something I've ever worked with, but I'd like to give it a shot. My brother is going to be doing the music (I should have some tracks posted here at some point), so this is passed off to him for the moment.

That stuffs really just been me putting off figuring out how I'm gonna handle dungeon generation, so I should be digging into that more soon.

Not sure how much work I'll be able to do on the game this week, but here's a few changes I managed to get in last night:



Mostly pretty subtle stuff; I spent another big chunk of time trying to figure out what to do with the color palette, and trying to identify what I like about the current one. I think it's basically the super high, harsh contrast; colors are either bright or absent, leading to lots of dark spaces, which suits the game. A lot of the more varied palettes (especially if they have a good range of grays) can color those spaces.

I did actually end up switching to a CGA palette. It's got a few advantages for me over the Spectrum palette I was using, mainly more distance between the light and dark colors, and less saturated bright colors.

The other thing I added was a film grain overlay to the main camera (the camera that captures the game before it get's pixelated), which created a pretty cool dithering effect in transitions between colors. I having it animated might be a bit much, so I might switch from animated film grain to a static noise image, but I like having a more interesting transition between colors than a smooth line.

Last thing I did was make the pixels a bit bigger, because go big or go home, am I right?

A couple of things before I have to work on not-game-stuff today; last night I added some particles for when bullets hit stuff, as shown here:




And then this morning, I added some super basic enemy spawning + enemy death and ragdolls:




Also added in one of my favorite effects, chromatic aberration on screen shake. I learned from my last game that a lot of people don't like this, so I'll definitely throw in an option to disable it at some point.

I like the idea of having gears and mechanisms visible on the outside of the dungeon! And Hand of Fate is definitely is something I should play soon, seems like a good example of dynamic dungeons.

I also just read through this paper, which is about generating dungeons with adaptive difficulty, which is a super interesting idea. Basically, in the game in the paper, when a certain object is held, a "misfortune" level rises, causing the game to generate more challenging levels. Longer dungeons, narrower rooms, more enemies (and specifically, more of the enemies that gave you trouble in previous levels). I'd love to try my hand at something like that.

Finally, just to end tonight with a GIF, here's some work I did on the camera, so that it follows you when you're in larger rooms:


EDIT: One other thing I'm unsure about is whether or not I want hand designed room layouts, or do those randomly, too. I'd like to do them randomly, but only if I can get them to not suck.

Haha, I have seen Cube! That came to mind immediately when I was thinking of how to rearrange the dungeon.

The issue I'm having is that I can't think of a way to do in a way that the player can understand what's happening; if it's rooms sliding to new places every so often, that could end up being totally inconsequential, and the player wouldn't even notice. If it's whole sections being totally rearranged, it may appear as totally random to the player.

Spent today trying out dungeon generators and then discarding them.

Eventually switched something else for the moment, with room transitions, which I'm pretty happy with for now:


All that's there for spawning the rooms now is a grid that fills randomly with rooms.

I started thinking of moving back to how it worked in the original games, with rooms being put together on the fly as you moved through the dungeon, but this time with some branching paths, and some sort of system in place to determine when certain important rooms appear (item rooms, boss rooms, etc).

Oh, yeah, so, since the original jam game, I've pictured the whole dungeon as being a big cube in space, with different environments on each level of the cube, but there's no way anyone but me would no that at this point, obviously. Sorry about that. xP

But yeah, I was thinking about having sections of the cube actually rotate around, like an actual Rubik's cube, which would mean environments from lower in the cube could be brought up to the surface, and eventually the entire thing would be a ridiculous chaotic mess. :D

A less extreme version of this could be more like one of those sliding panel puzzles, where there are empty spaces that blocks can slide into, and blocks from below have a chance of sliding up, too.


Also, thanks for the suggestion, zorg! I ended up using a single spherecast, and here's some different colored blood, predator style (and a floating worm to test out the aiming):

Added a little slug enemy, who at the moment is an immortal bloodbag. A few problems I need to address with this: 1) Need to figure out the best way to deal with enemies that are low to the ground. Right now it just has a really high hitbox, which doesn't look great. 2) Blood doesn't receive shadows right now, because with the standard shader, it's either dark enough that it just get's set to entirely black, or bright enough that it's always read. I think a cutout variant of the Unity toon-shader would probably fix this, given the right light ramp.

Besides that, I've been trying to figure out how I want to generate levels. I implemented the first chunk of a pretty simple dungeon generator, but looking back on the original game, a part of it was that the dungeon was always changing, and I've been thinking of ways to get that on a bigger scale, while also making sure the player can always make somewhat informed choices.

One idea that I was briefly thinking about was having the dungeon act like a giant Rubik's cube, but that might be stupid. Is that stupid?

Thanks! And here's what it looks like, doobieshrum:



Part of the reason I like the pixelation is 'cus it helps obscure my lackluster modelling and animation skills.

Added shooting with flashy lights.

Added shooting! Finally!

That's not actually most of what I worked on today; I spent most of the time playing around with different color palettes. I really love the look I'm getting from the current palette (which is the ZX Spectrum palette), but I'm concerned about how limiting it'll be. It's essential 7 colors and then slightly darker versions of them, and black. It'll be pretty difficult to make different level sets not feel samey with such a small palette.

On the other hand, applying palettes with more color variation loses a lot of the flatness that I like from the spectrum palette. I tried a few, but nothing stood out to me as great (although I did kinda like DawnBringer's 16 color palette). With more colors, it starts looking more like a PS1 game.

I'm considering just swapping out colors on the palette to add some variation to different level sets.

Also, come to think of it, it probably would have been better to get some pictures of the different palettes. Ah well.

Hey there! Been forever since I posted here!

Anyways, A Place in Space is a game I made for Ludum Dare back in December, and I've been toying with ways to expand on it since then. You can play the original here.

The original was made in Construct 2, but I pretty early on decided to move over to Unity for a couple different reasons (a big one being that I need some more Unity portfolio pieces), and I've been figuring out where exactly I wanted to go with it for a while now. I started out just planning on doing a straightforward port and then expanding on it, then scoped it up way too high into some sort of crazy top-down Metroidvania, and then scoped it way down into a single room arena shooter, and now I'm planning on doing something a bit closer to the original, but... fancier, I guess.

So, here's what it looks like now (with a ragdoll spawning thrown in, for fun):


I have a feeling the style I'm going with might be a bit divisive, but this kinda old-meets-new thing has always been really interesting to me. Hopefully I can keep it from being too much of an eye-strain to people. Up until today I was using an orthagraphic camera to go for way more of a faux-2D style, but I kinda fell in love with how it looked with a perspective camera today; we'll see where I end up on this.

That's about it for now; it's still incredibly early, but hopefully I can keep this up to date. I haven't kept dev-logs in the past, but I'm hoping the more public development will help keep me a bit more accountable for keeping up with the project.