Finally optimized my light system, I prerender it when loading the level, which takes a bit long but it doesn't kill the during-gameplay FPS now.

Every non-solid tile is a light emitter so it gets dark into the walls and stuff.



What do you think about this kind of a light system? I am not really a fan of dynamic lightning. Maybe thats because there is only one library for SFML, Let There Be Light and it's not that stable & reliable as I remember aaaaaand also Box2D & Tiled, not sure tho.

Before this tile-based lightning, I was drawing big rectangles that represents circle light sprites. And cover rooms with those but since I have a level editor, that might be too messy and since they are circles, its really boring to cover all the level with those and make sure its looking fine.

This tile-based one is full-automatic, it was real-time updating but now it's getting created at the map load as I said, like an array of 512x512 textures are getting ready at start and I draw the ones which are inside the screen, pretty efficient, except the load time.

I would like to know more about these light stuff, maybe different techniques, I just wanna know your thoughts about this, since that was my purpose of creating the devlog here. Thanks a lot for the interest, have a nice day!

FXAA is the poor-mans antialiasing and pointless for 2D games imo. just use hardware AA or brute force supersampling imo.

Hardware AA does not work because I render into a rendertexture, but I will try supersampling, thanks!

Yeah, I think the FXAA screenshots lose a lot of detail; it looks much crisper in its original form imo

Exactly so

Those lasery beams are looking really good!!

Oh thank you!





I am working on making that static lightning/shadow system more efficient by pre-rendering it at level creation so it can run on any computer.

[Bloom]

Today I tried a couple post-processing effects such as Bloom and FXAA.

I didn't like any of them, however this is maybe because my graphics are placeholders. I just commented out the code so I can try them later. I put images as links because they are full-screen shots.  

Here are the side-by-side comparisons:

• Without Bloom : http://puu.sh/kOMH8/ac8e12e16c.png
• With Bloom : http://puu.sh/kOMD9/ae38710c71.png

It just looks like high-brightness, nothing special to me, even uglier. I thought it's because there isn't any light system so I turned on my unefficient light system code to check how it looks. And also played with variables of the bloom a little bit...

• Without Bloom : http://puu.sh/kONwA/bfdae2c011.png
• With slight Bloom : http://puu.sh/kONuM/773fd12251.png

Turns out it still looks terrible. I also tried FXAA,

• Without FXAA : http://puu.sh/kOQ4k/43c6a41ade.png
• With FXAA : http://puu.sh/kOPYJ/fb9d40c4da.png

[Updates:]

I'm having a bit of trouble parsing what is going on with the water, is it 100% reflective? The red beam, that goes into the water, appears to continue along that line, but the reflection of that beam is more vivid. How come we can see the rest of the red beam that's submerged, but the platforms and the rest of the level is completely obscured by the water? If there was no warping/distortion effect, would the water plane effectively be a mirror? I wonder if it'd look more watery with some transparency, and perhaps only the top part of the water reflecting anything?

Well we need to ignore all the physics here to get a beautiful look It is a little bit transparent so Red beam continues through the water(irl there would be a little bit bending I guess but yeah screw physics) and it is also mirrors the top of itself in Y axis so red beam gets reflected on the water. I know reflection should be only on the surface but it looks better this way! Water goes darker to the deep by the way, so does the reflection.

Updates:

• Beautified checkpoint image and size.
• Rendering everything smoother now.
• Added water visuals.
• Added RGB split effect on death.
• Fixed camera was scrolling to the checkpoint after death, now its instant.

Here is the RGB split effect on death moment :

[Update:]

Update:
I finally managed to make the water effect and it looks pretty good in my option. Thanks to alwex for his water tutorial, that helped a lot.

I put so many stuff in a little place to show them all, sorry for the mess!
Screenshot:


GIF (low quality):


What do you think?

[Tikotep Adventure's water visuals]

Grapple Hook trail is a great effect. Animations are top notch as well. Great job!

Looks cool as fuck. Keep it up.

Thanks a lot!

I am simply amazed by the Tikotep Adventure's water visuals and he has a tutorial for it. So I am following that, but that is looking 3D and mine must look more like 2D with reflection(I know it does not make any sense). But yeah I keep improving it for last two days. It might finish tomorrow and then I will put visuals here.

I added some ideas into my "Things to implement" list,

• Collapsing floors
• Moving Walls that's about to squash the player
• Teleporter? Not sure about this.
• Really fun to interact with, enemies which you can "DASH" onto them to kick them around, I am thinking of some mid-air combos like grab/carry, hit/throw him to the air, hook him in air, pull yourself to him, hit again, kick one more time in air to make sure he is overkilled. Yeah I tried these kind of stuff before, you can find more info in my blogpost but here is a very old GIF from 23.01.2015,

[/list]

[terrible placeholders]

That's a really interesting question! And one that's super-important when it comes to a movement-focused game like this one. I'm not sure there's a set answer to it, but I feel like getting a decent number of playtesters moving about the game, is going to a very good start. Once you can observe what people are really having fun with, or maybe more importantly, what is frustrating them, then you have some things that you can tweak.

Yeah, playtesting definitely would help, will do it in future. Thanks!

Just wanted to jump in and say this is pretty awesome. Looking forward to following your progress.

One tiny critique, the running animation is gorgeous but seeing the player run across the game looks (IMO) really sluggish. I think this may be because the design of the character running with the leaning forward and dust kicking creates this impression of moving at a very accelerated rate and then seeing the actual movement speed, it seems to not blend with the animations which look so "quick". I'm sure a lot is placeholder at this stage, but just throwing that out there.

Best of luck on the development, will be following.

Thanks for the kind words! That sluggish look is caused by not having a "transition animation" between standing and running at top speed, I guess. There will be more animations so it will get fixed. Also, there isn't any speed limit so that's you see there is like the minimum running speed which you get by just holding right or left. Hook adds like 3x-4x more to that

I am super excited about this, especially the n-style speed-based leaderboards with replays. I really, really like that.

Are you planning to release a demo soon? I would be very interested in doing in-depth playtesting for a game like this.

You motivate me, thanks for that! It's nice to see people who like this kind of fast-paced and skill-based games. I am planning to make a demo, yeah but currently I haven't got tutorial levels and world graphics are still terrible placeholders so I will probably wait a bit more to get the real ones.

I just !LOVE! the graphics of this game, specially the water visuals. Tutorial for waters helped me a lot in my game, I am tweaking it in an unique way now. But it needed/will need hours and hours to make it "ok". Because there are tons of stuff like, I change my water's size like I only draw the part of it which is inside the camera so size changes all the time and that water shader works with 0..1 instead of 0..SizeInPixels, thats why it behaves differently for every size, which makes it weird But yeah I know at the end I will make it all "OK"!

I really like your project, saw your effort and the improvement of the game over time, keep going!

I am definitely following this since I am a Quake player, looks fantastic!

Played it a bit on Steam and it is really skill-based which I like, I can feel that as I play more, I start playing better.

Here are some stuff that I thought they might improve the gameplay:

• You might wanna add late jump tolerance when falling from the ground.
• Shooting/kicking should automaticly disable the ball mode and do the action.
• She currently kicks where the model is looking at, instead it should kick to the direction player is aiming at.
• Carrying multiple weapons at the same time? I really would like to rocket jump and railgun some enemies

[Update:]

I am fixing stuff more than adding new stuff, I don't know if it's a good thing but yeah...

I am spending some time still on game design/juice/feel whatever you call it. So I am open to advices about these topics because I know they make the game, a game.

Update:

• Fixed hook-pull while accelerating hook-band was doing some weird stuff.
• Fixed hook-band was dragging the character even through walls.
• Changed the dash mechanic to old style, which boosts only to left or right because it seems to be more consistent.
• Increased ambient volume.
• Fixed character was going through walls at very high speed (Almost impossible to reach without accelerator/jump-pad).
• Fixed character was going through walls while swinging and hitting to some wall in a rare way.
• Fixed arm/hand positions were coming from a frame behind.

[Update:]

MOMENTUM!! I don't know if you're good at Quake but if you are, you obviously like the momentum, that's me! Thanks for the great wishes!

Ok, now this is kind of a nerd moment...
This is on my skin:
(looks cleaner irl - its on my back and hard to make a pic, had it done in BAli '09 - full moon mushroom*cough*)

Rocket Launcher icon is coming to my trigger hand next =D

That game thought me most of what I knew to get started in game-dev ... and robbed like 4 years of my youth. RocketArena3 !

MAybe you'd like some aspects of my game too then

Seriously, you have something cool going on if you play it right! I'd be ready to support you with audio/visual stuff if you need some backup! (Almost done with my game so I'll have some time soon)

Wow, coincidence? I spent many years to Quake aswell but zero regrets.



Update:
Made the hook algorithm work with the new sweep collision check. Other objects are left such as player v other tile types, player v rockets, lasers, moving blades... stuff like that.

[Update:]

The trail effects on those grappling hooks, combined with the spinning when they're not in use, look fantastic. I think this'll be a very interesting game to speed-run.

I am glad you liked the juice! Yeah since there isn't anything fixed/limited, there are tons of variety in the movement so everyone will have a different "time score or/and replay" even in a pretty basic hook level. Every replay worths watching!

Love the visual FX Level-art is a placeholder?

Haha yeah I only pimped out the character yet, tell me if you have some other nice effects/animations, I will add them! Rest of the graphics are just placeholders, yes.

Looking good! 

Wish you all the best and a smooth development! Looking forward to this, sins it looks like it has the feeling that I like - momentum!

MOMENTUM!! I don't know if you're good at Quake but if you are, you obviously like the momentum, that's me! Thanks for the great wishes!


Update:
I had a temporary speed limit which is "a big enough number not to penetrate walls" for the character. Game runs at 125 update ticks per second so that number is pretty big but I really want to give what I promised, "NO SPEED-LIMIT"! So I am doing surgery on my movement and collision check/resolve code to make it real.

Sweep algorithm works against the tilemap now, worked on that today. But it does not check it against objects or different tile types yet. Also hook code makes him go into walls with the new sweep check, need to figure that out too.

Yeah, great idea to make the grapplehook look that way. seems really fun to use
If you probably make the rest of the world with those bright colors like the character someday, it might look really good
I'm always in for some good platformers..

Noted your suggestion since we did not start making the world graphics yet, thanks a lot, hope it will be one of the good platformers.

This is absolutely stunning, and seriously impressive that you're building this from the ground up in SDL at your age. Looking forward to seeing more!

Haha, you just gave me a motivation boost, thanks for the kind words!

11.10.2015

-> 15:12

• Removed frame-rate limiting for now, will experiment more in future.
• Fixed wall-sliding to air frame was not properly changing when hook is active.

-> 23:58

• Editor: Stick of the moving blades are now clickable in any way
• Editor: Added object moving (Hold M + Click and Drag) for some objects(Turrets, Lasers and Moving Blades)

Area-based objects like checkpoints, end-level, water that kind of stuff are not moveable yet tho but this update still makes some stuff a lot easier I am trying my best to make the level editor feel very comfortable to work with.

Wow that's some of the best grappling hook mechanics I've seen in a while  . The character and animations looks amazing although I don't know how those intense lights will look when the background it's done. They may make the character hard to follow or distract you too much.

Thanks a lot! Yeah I will adjust the lights depending on the background but you're right it might look weird if background is also bright.

Looks really good! the effect on the grapple is awesome!

Cant wait to see more of this

Thanks for the kind words!

I love the spinning animation! makes it look so dynamic.

I made a grappling game prototype a long time ago. Coincidentally the rope was also made with blinky particles and there were pads you step onto to change the grapple. But all in 3D. I made a few videos of it then never worked on it again

That instantly reminded me the game Electro Hook. I would like to see the videos of yours too tho!

[Available on Steam!]

Available on Steam!

Pre-TIGSource dev posts

       

We just published the Steam Store Page, you can now wishlist it!

Feel the acceleration in this fast-paced grappling hook platformer, Remnants of Naezith. It focuses on having freedom of movement, solid character control and not having any speed limitations. The fun of swinging with grappling hooks and the amazing feel of acceleration makes a great combination in this game. You play as Kayra, a human who shares his body with the soul of the ancient thunder dragon, Naezith! With the powers granted to him by the dragon, Kayra will destroy the Remnants of Naezith, enchanted fragments of the dragon's body, to prevent anyone from exploiting their power for evil.

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Ask me anything and also I am open for any recommendation, ideas. Just tell me what do you think and have a nice day!