Wow, this is cool, JWK. Really interesting idea for the design of a GUI!

^ You can take screenshots with the print screen key on your keyboard, and you can scale images when you post them here by using the "width=blah" property in the image tag. For example:

[img width=700]path/to/image/online.png[/img ]  // < Take out that space, of course.

Wow, that's a really excellent illustration. Very colorful and interesting. Love the lighting on the green on the stick!

Hey, this looks cool.

- I think the charged jump could benefit from a few frames where the character's crouched, to give it a real "oomph" that isn't there for the normal jump.

- I think the text boxes shouldn't move off the screen so that you never accidentally move away from an NPC and miss their ending dialog.

Keep it up!

Yo!

I downloaded the game and loaded it up through Wine, but it didn't display correctly, which is fine; it's just a pre-alpha, so no need to worry about porting to different platforms for now. Focus instead on getting the game working the way you want it.

I like the usability changes you mentioned in the post on the 24th. Instead of arrows, though, perhaps you could guide the player more subtly, like with a checkered path? Something the player will follow intuitively without feeling like they're being told to go there. However, since it's the tutorial / main menu area, it's OK if you tell them outright where to go or how to play; just something to keep in mind for the future, perhaps.

As for people not leaving their thoughts, perhaps you could focus on polishing the game to visually make it more intriguing and "crunchy". Something to make people really excited to play it. Or not - it's a demo, so it's OK that it's focusing on the gameplay concepts.

Yo! Thanks, guys!

@rj - I appreciate that, but I'm not using the BGE anymore, haha. I'm using another Blender-integrated game engine, BDX.

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So, I'm GEARing up (haha) to put this sucker up on Steam Greenlight soon, so we'll see how that goes. I'm finishing up basically enough to get a trailer out (which means some boss mechanics and some NPC stuff, I think). I've been thinking about working on just the stuff I need to finish the game at this point, rather than being distracted by feature creep - I wanted to add one more zone, but maybe I won't have time??? I'll have to figure it out - I wanted to be done by the end of July, I think. Now I'd like to be done by end of August.

_____

I've also been doing stuff to work on my website, since that's something I proooooobably should do something about. The previous site I had was made using a program called OpenElement, and it's one I would advise you to use if you're doing some website work and wanna try it out on Windows. Since I moved to Linux, I looked around at the alternatives for website design and found that there aren't really any, for some reason. So, I decided to just go the manual route - I downloaded Atom, grabbed a couple of plug-ins to do some live HTML reloading, and started learning HTML and CSS. It's just a programming language, so it's pretty easy to learn - I think I like web design, haha. Kinda wish I had started writing sites in HTML earlier, I guess.

Anyway, thanks for watching reading! I'll upload a video showing my progress soon.

@matwek - Deeeelicious. The back walls could be desaturated, darker, or possibly blue (but blue and orange are such a really well-done combo it might be best to try to switch it up a bit).

Thanks, everyone! Welp, it's been awhile since the last update, so here's a music devlog video, and a SoundCloud link, as well.

Whoa, this is a blast from the past. Glad you liked it, haha! I'm using the same pathfinding approach even now, years later, with a certain enemy on my current project, Gearend. I'll have to get back to this again soon!

@gunswordfist - No problem!

Here's something I did a long time ago. It's a pixel version of the face in some picture I had kicking around.
(It ended up coming out more creepy than humorous.)

Thanks for that!

Oh, here's a switch for Gearend.



EDIT:

Castle Monster

That's sick! Super readable, even with such few characters!

Or (and I know you already did the sprites and everything, so this'd be a bit of a waste), you could have it be some sort of an animal. You could also alter the scheme to make it look more like Leilani, to kind of hint to the player that it's not a bad creature.

I've got another new type of robot enemy today, I call these Carryboxes.

Looks pretty cool! Have you thought of having them be able to carry Leilani?

Whoa, looks pretty sweet. Nice work on the graphics and gameplay; seems like you guys have put a lot of emphasis on gameplay and mechanics, which is great. I wonder about the lighting shader; something more cartoony, or just less "stock"-looking might be nice. For example, boosting up the sun's level to brighten things up a tad, and perhaps altering the lighting shader to just have less smooth shading (more toon shader-like).

And from those rocks, a wall tile, and a bit of time came this subterranean tileset for my project!

Firstly, the rocks in the outer areas distract the eye; just putting them either on the walkable areas or the impassable areas will help to make the walkable areas obvious. Oh, or darkening those rocks and the impassable areas; that'd work, too.

Secondly, maybe I'm misreading your post, but did you copy ConkrMich's tiles to create your own?

Kick his head back a tad, separate the legs a bit more, and draw the other tail, and you've got a pretty good sprite. Unless it's Tails' lesser-known-cousin-from-across-the-pond, Kilometers.

@beetleking22 - Sweet little sprites. That white outline really makes 'em pop, even at a small scale.

Yeah, nice and interesting art style so far. Cool animations!

Cool time slowdown effect. The engine I'm working on uses a fixed 60 FPS timestep; I wonder if there's a way to implement a global speed value to speed up or slow down physics and updating...

Anyway, the game's looking pretty cool!

Really like the way this game's shaping up in the video! It really looks interesting and fast-paced, and I love third-person perspective in games compared to first-person.

I like the way those lasers look, and I really like the idea of the level reconfiguring itself mid-play; did you have plans to expand that (i.e. constructing buildings and areas like that), or is it just random?

The level shown in the video looks less abstract and more rooted in urban landscape (flooded apartment buildings, etc), which can be really interesting to explore. Have you thought of doing levels focused on a style like that (a single level, set in the floors of a skyscraper or something)? Or are you focusing more-so on abstract / geometric levels, and you just have one or a few "urban" levels?

I like the idea of water rising to keep the player moving, but is the goal to collect a certain amount of pollen, or does the level simply end when the water rises high enough or the goal is reached? If you've answered this before, I apologize; I must've missed it.

P.S. Many moons ago, I made a little demo that looked a bit like this, haha. Didn't get anywhere with it, though. Keep going!

Yo!

I've been working a lot on the game, but not a lot to show. Optimization has been done by merging static geometry together at runtime. This has lowered the CPU workload dramatically, as there are many, many less objects, which makes physics and raycasting a lot less complex. I also have been working on the water zone, which means water physics, buoyancy code, and a water shader!





Here's a devlog video. Thanks!

Really nice little rabbits! Are they evil / dangerous, or are they just "mobs"?