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







Steam page is still there, so please give it a wishlist. We also released a free prologue called I.C.E. 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

The visuals in this game are top notch. Excellent work

Thanks Andy! 

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.



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.



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/

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

Thanks MayRoyal and jay3sh! :D

I read about you using InControl. Do you find it better than Unity's new Input System package?

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

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

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 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

Ta-da!



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!












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

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

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!

Hey folks

Been a busy week or so getting ready for this steam games festival, 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!

We were also fortunate enough to have our brand new trailer featured in the Escapist big indie showcase stream.





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.



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.



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.





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.



After some initial thought it was decided we should focus the input in the middle so that the players eye isn't too distracted



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)



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.



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.



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.



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.



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:



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



Here's a still of the final effect so you can see the highlights more clearly.



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:



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!

Lovely update, as ever!!

I'm sure you have it in mind already, but statistics systems like that are also great for achievments, both in game and for steam etc 

Apologies for the delay, I've been suuuuper busy the past few months.

First, the big news!! We're partnering with Hypetrain Digital 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 next week and BitSummit Gaiden  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





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 The "spook" and "lab tech" below are by Tyriq and Clair, the hazmat guy above was initially animated by Tom.



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!



So yeah, been very very busy!

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 for more news!

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!

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 

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

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.



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.



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.



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.




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!




There are a bit more WIP





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!!   

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!

Punch anim is 

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

Haha, sadly yes (((

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)




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





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:



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!





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 :/



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!

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:

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.





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.



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.



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.





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 
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!

Thanks for the feedback Ichi! Hows this?



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  

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...





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?



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!



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 

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

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

Cheers, have a great weekend!

Thanks Ishi! I'm stoked to be back working on it full time