If you don't know what is deferred lighting,

Here is a very helpful tutorial : https://github.com/mattdesl/lwjgl-basics/wiki/ShaderLesson6

You can also check GIFs to see how good it is. I achieved that exact same effect but wish it didn't come with those problems

So we spent 11 hours on Deferred Lighting, a friend helped me implementing it and finally it looks pretty cool,



But it came with million problems and those problems seem very hard/impossible to fix.

• It broke the beautiful water fix I did recently
• Performance is halved
• Background tiles can't be darker than the front ones
• Editor is not even opening because tiles are drawn dynamicly one by one in Editor and I get like 3 FPS with my GTX770
• ...

... list goes on and on.

I did not like the trade-off and I don't really want to find myself fixing the bugs it brought in next couple months.

Here are two more screenshots during implementation:
http://puu.sh/oBNd5/4b71377b72.png
http://puu.sh/oBSkQ/6799631056.png

Really dig what your doing! Do you have a release timeframe yet?

I am trying my best to have it ready to 8th month(it will be 2 years there) 

[Global Rankings]

Added the Global Rankings page, I LOVE IT!

[new OST (WIP)]

Here is the new OST (WIP)

Tell me what you think!

I like the tune!    For some reason, it reminds me of a somewhat middle Eastern-ish vibe.

Is it intended to be played during game?  I could imagine it as a main menu or credits page music or perhaps tutorial level.  However, since it has a slow/medium tempo as well as some of the "glitchy" parts are quite erratic, it wouldn't really fit well with the "smooth sailing" swinging movement gameplay style.

Oh, how did you make the music?  Did you use a software or synth or something else?

Michael Pearson is making the OST, you better talk to him about technical stuff . Track sounded ancient egyptian to me. We aim for 10 tracks and I don't really know how am I gonna separate the songs. I just thought I could put them all as a list and play all of them to the end, shuffled or not shuffled. I could divide songs special for chapters but then it will loop 2-3 songs over and over again, that's not really cool in my opinion. Gameplay-Music match is a weird topic, I will test how it goes but I can't really do much about it.


Here is the new WIP theme, this theme actually got used in Journey, Shovel Knight as I saw but since it's pretty cool, I don't think that's a problem. I really loved the work Thomas created.



What do you think, that's very important for me!

[new OST (WIP)]

Haha, know  how it feels brah
I found the best way to actually get some help in advanced sections of development is to hire an artist for real money. Friends and acquittance may be not so enthuastic as the author himself. If they do, there's a high possibility they will burn out.

Yeah, learning this kind of stuff in the hard way is the most effective at remembering them I guess.

Here is the new OST (WIP)

Tell me what you think!

[Twitter]

I'll finally go for the Greenlight when I make the lighting system! Keep following the Twitter to get notified ASAP!

Here is the latest OST, EDM lovers will love!

And here is a random GIF for you!

this is sick.. in a good way 

By the way I have couple old articles hidden in my website that I wrote about how I started making this game, with feels and story 

• Hello there!
• The Grappling Hook, yaaay!
• Past 7.5 months as a timeline
• How to get into gamedev?
• Dude, you’re doing it wrong! Summary of 4.5 months

I must say this looks impressive, a lot of effort put here.

Water, particles and all flashing stuff... are they all shaders or some internal textural voodoo magic?

A little bit of thisss, a little bit of that!

[GIFs]

Hey, I can't really update you guys these days, university projects slow me down a lot but I'll work on deferred rendering when I'm back!

Here are two GIFs from around 04.08.2014 which is the first days of prototyping



GOTTA GO FAST!



Prototyping rocks and I canceled the Crank idea

[Crank]

Hello everyone,

Don't worry I work on the game almost every day! A random gameplay mechanic popped in my mind so I want to share it with you, maybe we can iterate from this.

I didn't watch the Jason Statham movie Crank but I heard about it's idea. It's like his rival has injected him with a poison that will kill him if his heart rate drops. I really want this game to be played fast, so this was the idea, Kayra carries a dragon soul inside him. And he has so much energy that being slow would kill him.

Of course it is a very dangerious design because it would be so annoying if it's badly implemented, that's why I need to improve the idea so it can help to the core idea of the game which is finishing the levels as fast as possible.

It would work differently if you really want to stop and think maybe (an animation can help about this, like he is decharging it in some way). I wonder if there are games using this already.

What are your thoughts on this, I would be so happy to hear them, have a nice day!

What about this depth approach (from front to back)?
Foreground tiles
Water
Player
Background tiles

I want the ugliest drawn level to look beautiful enough, so it needs minimal effort to make a cool level, it's fixed by depth buffer already.

Couple days I wrote about the water update, it was creating textures as masks and saving them. Creating the masks were taking too long and they were not dynamic so raising waters were not working.

Today "jagoly" from SFML community teached me how to use depth buffer. We managed to make it! It fixed so many issues because it's working dynamicly:

Changed water masking implementation to Depth Buffer instead of creating static sf::Textures.
Water masking now also works with raising water.
Editor: Water masking also works in editor now.
Loading time got a lot shorter because water masking does not create sf::Textures.
Water masking is now pixel perfect, not leaving any pixel transparent.
Fixed creating of sf::Textures with sf::RenderTexture::create() were causing flicker during the loading.
Fixed tiles in middle of the water were cropping the water wave in a very ugly way.

[decldev]

You have something here with your gameplay! Very quick and empowering! Just watched your trailer. It seems to work extremely well! I am interested in where this takes the level design. Best of luck with this project!

Cheers!

I have two incredibly talented platformer player buddies who love to design levels, so I've to say I am pretty lucky about level design topic. They are helping a lot, most of the levels are done by them, decldev and deltis!

[Water]

Okay, this is amazing... I figured out how to fix my water problem, which was like

Water has to be behind of the Tiles,
Tiles have to be behind of the Player,
Player has to be behind of the Water.

There occurs a loop and I had no solution for it. My water objects are simply rectangles which gets drawn by a shader. Shader also creates a reflection on top of the water so everything should be drawn before water. World tiles should be in front of the water so I have to draw them after water, but then player should be drawn after world tiles because hook beam should be in front  of the tiles while swinging. It is a paradox.

If I draw the water in front of everything, only problem is the bad look of the water, just because it's a rectangle, you can see it in the gameplay video.



The solution I came up with is, creating a water pool sized, pure white texture. Then drawing tiles full black on it. And then using this black and white texture in the shader to mask where water should be and where not, pixel by pixel.

And I did it! Water is drawn after everything else in this screenshot, yet there isn't any watered pixels on top of earth tiles.




This is the first time I used an alpha mask, I am sure there are places you will find it useful in your game too!

[sacrifice]

This post is a special souvenir for myself, about Remnants of Naezith. I will smile when I read this later!

So I was playing Knight Online, game is pretty addictive. I got a quest bow +0, randomly upgraded it up to +7 (its like very very very low chance to get there and it worth a lot), it was amazing but then I realized the game consumes so much time that my game development slowed down too much... And then I removed the item and quit. It was a sacrifice for Remnants of Naezith.

http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=656787006

party party yeah!! 

[Did today:]

I work a lot on the in-game Level Editor, need to make sure it's comfortable enough.

Did today:
Editor: Added Rotate Object shortcut(R)
Lowered the levitating particle count.
Fixed the Main Menu background problems.
Editor: Ambient sound is muted in dev-mode.
Fixed default level editor level was too small.
Fixed Dash Sparks were being in weird positions when character teleports.
Editor: Now is using a non-smoothing camera.
Fixed a small bug about the darkness.

[Here are the stuff I've done today:]

If you aren't worried about dashing on the ground, you could just give a flat rule for how many actions you can take in the air similarly to Dustforce. Maybe you allow two jumps/dashes in mid air and clearly explain that in the tutorial. This doesn't look good visually, but in my opinion it plays well.

The other thing I wanted to ask was if you would consider making the ranks for beating levels based on time rather than overall position. This would allow you to make achievements that would be achievable by everyone. If I had to have top 10 in every level in Dustforce I wouldn't have gotten Double S+.

Sorry I talk about Dustforce so much. It does everything well that I want in a platformer. I am extremely excited about your game and how it looks so far. 

Yeah Dustforce is a perfect game in my opinion. I learn a lot from it. Ranks are not about your performance in the level, those ranks are Global ranks which are sum of your whole game data. If you are #1 in every level, then you're the best globally. It's like a merged representation of your global position/performance. So if you have some very epic rank, and you suck at a level, and become the last guy, your rank logo will stay same there even if you're the worst because you're good globally. Aaaand it's so good because like you make a custom level, people play it and you can actually see what rank they are.

I am happy with my current dash gameplay mechanic, I just wanted to improve the visuality of it. Don't hesisate to advice more, I like it.

Here are the stuff I've done today:
Added multiple monitor support.
Level is always centered in middle screen if level size is too small for the resolution.
Editor: Removed the minimal level size limit, which was 90 tiles before. Now it's possible to have levels with locked camera like if width is like 20 tiles, then it's probably smaller than the screen resolution and camera does not need to move at all so it will only scroll in Y axis.
Outside of the level borders are now full black.
Polished the hook's dust particles when it hits to wall.
Editor: Character now spawns at middle of the level when user creates a new level.
Polished the main-menu background.
Optimized the laser particles.
Added laser particles.