Just a heads up.  Your link to indieDB in your first post is broken

thx fixed

Long day of struggle. I was happy, a few hours, to get the damage decals working, then of course I wanted to break a ship in half. I recall messing with a mesh splitter for unity some time ago so I started playing w it. It didn't work at all for planes/quads. Found TurboSplitter on the asset store and thought I would try it. It does do what it says but I was a bit ahead of myself in thinking through using a splitter to 1/2 a sprite. It does work but is entirely impractical in my game for a few reasons. First there is this use case, along a diagonal:



add some decals on edges right? not so much. first issue is you can't generate colliders from the split parts as the colliders are 2d and generate w the material not the mesh (material stays the same, so even refreshing collider each part gets full mesh collider). then there is the issue where only two objects are created, two clones of the orig object but each w 1/2 the mesh and ALL the attached scripts.... ugh ugly... would need to really plan for using that And notice the little bits that really need to be separate meshes (anything now floating not connected in space).

So I ditched that idea entirely and decided to go with pre-planned break away. At first I thought I'd hate having pre-planned but in action it makes the most sense and can be tightly controlled to be relevant to what ship system will no longer function if getting 'blown off'. Here is the first example of loosing part of the krex. Loosing this will take out two systems, the smasher weapon (needs both wings on the nose to generate a forward pulse) and the turning thruster for that side.

So I've spent the day getting the zapper script a lot more flexible and added some cool stuff to it. Changes:

- forked lighting w/ ability to set max# recursive branches
- single pulse w/ fadeout

example(note I forgot the destination light):


- stream of awesome while holding down fire (note the lighting on target :


example of same script pulling off a more standard pulsed beam weapon by setting 0 branching and only two nodes (source/target) and then a funky material on a really fat no branching one w lots of nodes and high amplitude in the background:

So I finished up for the day -- pretty pleased with the Benev (race in the game) weapon script I made. I am trying to make all weapons in the game extremely customizable so I can get several in-game upgrades at a minimum, maybe even the same script customized to be weapons for several different ships without looking/feeling reused or general. I think I will be able to use this one for several types of laser weapons, lightning, tractor beam, scanning beams, etc just by using different materials and settings for it. I recorded a video showing me toy a little with it. Note the benev ship will use three of these or more but in the video I have only one enabled so you can easily see the customization.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2VpPn5e8k1o&feature=youtu.be

After toying w it a while, I thought one bolt coming off of each nose prong looked good -- a whiter/fatter bolt in the middle and two thinner ones on each side. I think this will be the config used for the Benev primary weapon but hopefully from the video you can see some settings that would look good for other ships without feeling generically reused.

Dear lord, that looks awesome! Both of them!

thx!


I've been adding more ships and tweaking the engine system. Here is the Benev race ship w/ propulsion:



Next up, I've been working on weapon systems I can tweak heavily to use between multiple ship types while maintaining each ship feeling extremely different. The zapper weapon on the Benev ship (gif below) is an example. This one weapon script will be able to make lightning type weapons, lazer weapons, tractor beans, and more that look very different by tweaking setup and material used:

StarDiver is progressing... This week, added more ships and ship systems. Here are two added this week:



Pushing enemy through the sun was a bit tongue and cheek since I don't have the fruit ninja ship splitting in half code done yet there will only be one race in the game that can stardive and it will be epic

ok... finally some hard work paid off. All the time I spent making a flexible engine propulsion system allowed me to make some pretty cool engines for the Lipoc and now the Salrith. Now I REALLY can't wait to get the damage system in there and watch the salrith ship punch through the middle of a ship and split it in half. Gif (note pushing enemy through the sun was a bit tongue and cheek... there will only be one race in the game that can stardive and it will be epic


full video here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80_AUrt4U5c&feature=youtu.be

I worked on the Lipoc ship today so felt like grabbing a gif. It has the refined art and new propulsion system.



gif is a big choppy, video here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJF-h4qrDms&feature=youtu.be

Next thing I'll be adding is the damage system so there are fires, venting air, people getting sucked out, damage decals left behind etc. I REALLY look forward to hooking up the fruit-ninja-like object slicing so I can have a laser ship cut an enemy in half and watch the two parts float apart

no changes to the lighting/shadows, likely just the higher detailing tricking the eye

Still hard at work this last week on things. The majority of the work has been in code restructuring some things that were becoming unmanageable -- I know not not fun AND not much visual to show off for all the hard work.

We did added some more visual detail to a few of our ships though:

Are you doing Facebook?  We don't post often and we don't have a huge number of followers, but a surprising amount of our KS backers came from there.

I've tried using facebook for previous game projects and it seemed to be very very ineffective -- handful of followers, virtually no comments on posts etc. I'm not quite sure how to get the right people looking at it on facebook. I think a lot of people use facebook like I do, basically just a method of keeping it touch w family/friends so I am a good example of a person that wouldn't really use facebook for monitoring a game in dev. I know some people have success w fb, but it seems a mystery to me on how they accomplished it.

Animated the Veelow race:

I think most devs would love to see greenlight change for the better.... you know better as in 'whatever gets MY game in'

Hi guys. I keep hearing how important it is to get the word out about your game as early as possible and long prior to doing a kickstart or greenlight. Easier said than done of course. I'd like to hear what others have found effective. Here is my list of places places in rough order of results:

my project is fairly early but getting fairly close to ks/gl.

1. reddit (effective but I find it very hit/miss). The most traffic spikes I've received to our site is from reddit but of my posts or link posts 1 in 10 seem effective. I'm a reddit newb for sure.

2. IndieDB. I like the ranking system but it is near realtime so reasonable exposure but for very short amount of time.

3. Forums... TIG, Gaf, etc.

4. Twitter.... I must really suck w social media.

Looking forward to hearing what others find effective and at what stage of dev they started getting the word out about what they are working on.

Added fog/clouds to the Khaodra scene/animation. Added a lot of depth I think.

video here: http://gravityride.com/?p=533

still:

Started playing w another of our aliens in the new rig/animation system. I'm impressed w the new workflow. Not perfect, but a lot less tedious. The biggest plus is less cutups are needed. For example in this sample, only the one tentacle that is on top of the body is a cutup. The rest of the body and tentacles are a single image.

We were using smoothmoves in unity for animation of our 2D aliens. It worked but the workflow was very slow. example of an idle animation using it:



The results were workable but it took a lot of art tweaking to cut up the characters just right to not notice the seams when animating. Also because of only being able to scale or rotate each body part, we were very limited w amount of movement before seams were obvious. I picked up puppet2D for unity and it supports bones/IK and mesh deformation. Great I thought... well after two days of messing with it I just couldn't get it to do what I really wanted, which was to speed up my workflow. I spent forever with a single rig trying to get the IK system to work right w more than two bones and then when I got that sorted I spent forever manually setting per vertex bone weights. The end result... a bit more funky than what I already had but just in different ways. I was about ready to go back to smoothmoves but saw uni2D... so tried it and within 10 minutes or so of rigging I had something I liked a lot. It will also speed up the workflow a lot since we won't need to cutup anything that doesn't overlap another sprite. It has a great system to make a mesh sprite and auto grid the mesh w #vert/horiz points. then you can simply click some bones on top and it morphs the mesh very well.

This is an exaggerated example of a quick animation so you can see how it warps the mesh feeling very organic. We couldn't have moved the neck/arms/face nearly as much with the old system without seams showing. 

I like your solution to putting them all in one screen.

Also, PeaZIP is a open source superior alternative to WinRAR. Just so you know.

but I can't do without Winrar pc without winrar would be.... wrong... just wrong

Feeling good!!!! We have hit a major milestone for StarDiver. We now have 20 alien races and 20 alien ships designed and art assets ready for animation and implementation. Now for the fun part -- getting them all in-game and FUN! I suspect we will add another 5-10 alien races and ships along the way, but it feels great to have hit our target minimum needed to fill out of universe and story arc.

Pardon the small images, click image for larger:

Yep, we have our dialogue system mostly sorted out. Just need to finish up the story arc and start getting the trees all filled out.