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.

...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

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:

This looks cool!

Always nice to see more ambitious jrpgs from small teams on tigsource! either i'm doing something ok, or we're all crazy!

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

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:

Thanks folks, always great to hear some encouraging words 

Did some work on the game over screen last night

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.

Been a while since I posted an update, so here some WIP for the first boss

Detail:


Initial pass at animation, I kinda like how he is thrashing about a bit:

I love this!!! Good luck!

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

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

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

Rad! gorillas.bas was awesome, great to see a modern take on it!!

Haha, thanks! Much appreciated

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

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

Started on a replacement for the office/lab tileset as it kinda sucked

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):

...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.

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.

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). Hopefully you've had a chance to check out The Last Night, their art contains this use of the grime with neon tech. I recently did a post for our game on how we generate our color pallets.

Your neon sign made me think of this holographic dancer, 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

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!  

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

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

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

...it's a little dark, think i need to re-calibrate my monitor.. also being colour blind doesnt help :O

Here's some new animations.

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:

I also added a sneak mechanic so you can avoid getting into random battles... apparently some people hate random battles you are penalised with a slower movement speed whilst sneaking though:

Thanks folks. Updated that first post, wow, it really has come a long way huh?