I'm liking the visuals so far.

'it's got a yoshi's island title screen'

hnnnngh <3

Now if only I could spin around some textures in C2 the same way they do for Yoshi's Island. D:

Having worked with it, I knew that Construct 2 was "limited", but thought that I'd be able to create something like this:




I only got so far:

Actually, Z-sorting seems to be possible (parenting objects) but the rotating texture for the ground (as in the island) would need a lot more coding though. However, if you only wanted to do a solid ground with simple "ground pattern" sprites, then that should be doable similarly to the trees.

I also wonder about the black color for the void.  In Teleglitch it seems to work because there is a good contrast between the floor color and the black.  But in your game, the brownish background doesn't provide enough contrast and can make it harder to read/see the black void.  Especially, in tense moments when you have to look out for the attacking enemy ships as well.  Perhaps, adding something to the edge of the void (e.g. "shimmering sparkles") could make it look more obvious.

[The inspiration guessing game!]

The inspiration guessing game!

I thought of a game we can play in the meantime while I'm more focused on school finals than Space Bard. One point to the first person to guess which movie/book/comic/song/current event/whatever inspired each of these fictional bands that may or may not appear in U.T.A.H.:

• Mystyk Spyryl
• Hungry for Apples
• Mutant Patriarchy
• Acid Reasoning <--- (Hint: This only makes sense if you listen to a certain song's lyrics incorrectly)
• Pyrosis
• Quadrimom
• Vlad and the Not-My-Presidents
• Nancy Alpha Tango
• RM Taxi
• 20-minutes Adventure
• The Soft Hugs
• Pickle Jar Hero
• Every Girl a Goddess
• Fruit Sex
• Ahoy, Smexi
• Fudge Bourbon McQueen

No need to guess them all at once. Some are fictional bands directly from other fictional universes. The same inspiration source might be the answer to multiple of the band names, so you have to explain why and how it applies.

P.S. I had one of my longest friends take a look at the band name guessing game, and he was supremely puzzled. So yeah it must be pretty hard.

When you say that it's related to "movie/book/comic/song/current event/whatever" is similar to this game:
I thought of a number. It's between 1 and 1,000,000.   Can you guess it?

Improv Comedy shows start with asking for specific things (location, people, motivation, etc).
Crossword puzzles also have a much more narrowed down connection between hints and words.
Perhaps, it's not impossible but for most it's better to set the bar a little "lower" by adding the specific categories next to each.

Looks like the Antigrid devlog is heading in a similar direction.

Looks like you are heading in a similar direction as the Apple and Worm: Patching Holes In Spacetime devlog.

Those are either some really tall fences ... or it's a small orc.   (To me those look like the hip height type fences)

But overall, I do agree that those props do add a lot to the scene. 

Regarding placing fences, depending on how you set things up, it should be possible to write scripts to set those up automatically.

Haven't commented in a while but it's great pleasure to watch the animations.  Given the amount of animations you've done, it'd be very easy to turn it into an animated movie or series.

I have some issues with the sfx though.
1) When there are a lot of attacks, the large amount of sfx in a short amount of time doesn't sound "realistic" i.e. I haven't seen a fight scene where a person released so many attack sounds.  Or it might be related to issue #2.
2) There seems to be a "pitch difference" between certain attack sounds.  Some are high, others are quite low.  I guess, it is possible that a person would sound like that, but it still sounds a bit strange.
3) I know certain things will be refined, but compared to other games, I might (at least sometimes) prefer a "voiceless" version - i.e. only environmental sfx.  So having that as a toggleable option would be great.  Or perhaps not completely silent, so an even better option would be to, much like music and sfx, adjust volume with a slider.

The new star one looks very nice!

EDIT: I just had a silly thought: if this game takes off, instead of the HD remakes one typically sees, you could do a "60FPS graphics update" in a few years

Agreed, the ice wand is looking good.

Technically speaking though, to stay true to ASCII characters and grid-like character locations, would it even be possible to update the current animations to 60FPS?  It wouldn't be as simple as moving current characters due to location constraints.

I like the low poly visuals.

What engine are you using?

Also, if you don't mind (or it's not a "super secret" ) how did you solve the "air walk" issues?

Thanks!
Yes - so we're using Unity as mentioned earlier.
For the air walk issue we went to the store! We try to solve most of our own problems (1 we like to keep control over 100% of the code 2 it saves us money because we can barely pay for electricity) BUT we used "Final IK". (dirty secret?)

At a high level, navmesh dictates rotation, and we use root motion for translations (for dinos), with Final IK helping air walk issue.

Yeah, sometimes it's fine to use assets from the store as long as it actually work for you and doesn't cause issues.  We won't tell!

Some ideas for the Air wand.

The top one looks really good. However, the bottom one is confusing.  The front part seems similar to the top, but I'm not sure what the back part is supposed to be.

Not sure if it'd work, but have you tried "fade-out sparks"at the end?
e.g.:  . * x +

Really like the visuals. In part it's the lo-fi nostalgia of Commodore 64 8bit visuals mixed with some of the 3d visuals I would've liked to see in games.

Having done various pseudo 2d/3d games, I'd say if your approach can handle your requirements then it's "good enough".  But having moved to Unity makes working with the 3d aspects so much easier.  It may not be able to handle every aspect, but at first I thought you created the game visuals with voxels.

Also, after reading the title, the visuals reminded me of Total Recall (the one with Arnie, not the recent remake).  

Thanks! I've been thinking about my approach a lot and it's a bit nuts, as you could easily do this kind of style in 3D in a lot more efficient way. But as I've always had a hard time wrapping my head around actual 3D programming, this is as close as I'll get.

Sounds strange that you'd have a hard time  with 3d programming given what you could manage so far.  Sure, certain aspects might be more complex but not necessarily more complicated.  Is there something in particular?

Also, there's something about retro-inspired graphics and sci-fi themes that really resonates with me, probably because I grew up with movies like Star Wars and Total Recall.

Yeah, those were great movies to grow up with.

I was also going to mention The Martian.  To me it was interesting that based on the space exploration of the last few decaded (especially, having landed on Mars), I had this strange feeling of switching between watching fiction and watching a documentary.

Looks and sounds intriguing. I especially like the story, very current topic

Haha, thanks. I gotta admit, though, the story is the part of this project I'm the most anxious about. So far none of my games had an intriguing story (more a background for the gameplay), so I'm not the most confident about my writing abilities. But I have a lot of loose ideas so far, let's see if I can come up with a nice narrative with them.

That's funny because that's pretty much how I approached the "story" for my games so far.  There are a few more that don't really need a very deep story but eventually I'd like to do at least a few games with a decent story.  It doesn't seem that hard.  Just follow the tried and true formulas.  I'm looking forward to what you come up with.

Worked on a new scene today. It's a station of MARSec, the police in the colony. I'm not a big fan of the colors (I always have a hard time finding colors that go well together), so I'm likely to do another pass soon. So far I'm happy with the layout, though. What do you think?

In general, if you haven't done so, you could look into color theory.  Complimentary colors is a good place to start for selecting colors that work well together. 

In terms of the image you posted, my first impression is that here's too much bright colors (the light green) in that location compared to other images that tend to have darker colors for the floor and brighter/lighter colors for the walls or other vertical surfaces.

https://twitter.com/EitrTheGame/status/912824516841230336
Sep 26
-Eitr was finally cancelled, right?
-Er...nope.

Other than that, nothing definite ... neither on the Steam forums: http://steamcommunity.com/app/350050/discussions/

I quite like the idea of saving out replays automatically as then people won't be conscious that they're being watched

Yeah, that can be a valid reason for some people no to record.  That, or not even having recording software/system/etc. 

Not sure if it was mentioned, nut even those people would likely provide various feedback (bugs, questions about certain things) so it's good to have an easily accessible way to provide feedback.  Either an on-screen button or "Press X button to provide feedback" type message.  It's also good to keep it on screen or perhaps in the Pause Menu if the game screen is small and you don't want to have it crowded.

With the addition of terrain height changes required us to solve the problem of our Dino feet not sticking to the ground. Designated mesh now keep our Dino feet planted, mostly stopping the "air walk" if a hill or ravine is encountered. This is working in tandem with the animation of the walk cycle, and so far we haven't seen too much fighting between the two 

I like the low poly visuals.

What engine are you using?

Also, if you don't mind (or it's not a "super secret" ) how did you solve the "air walk" issues?

Have consoles been also ruled out?

Really like the visuals. In part it's the lo-fi nostalgia of Commodore 64 8bit visuals mixed with some of the 3d visuals I would've liked to see in games.

Having done various pseudo 2d/3d games, I'd say if your approach can handle your requirements then it's "good enough".  But having moved to Unity makes working with the 3d aspects so much easier.  It may not be able to handle every aspect, but at first I thought you created the game visuals with voxels.

Also, after reading the title, the visuals reminded me of Total Recall (the one with Arnie, not the recent remake).  

Almost forgot to show base of the first enemy in the game. It's a sprite for a regular host - human that carries parasitic being. It's still wip and has no details. And i wanna make his head animation a little bit more "uncanny".

Regular Host base

That looks like a "weird wobbly walk" ... in a very fitting way!

That's fair enough. I suppose that I think of a summary more like an abstract--or like those aforementioned literary descriptions: a short retelling of the contents. Either way, I think that it can serve much the same purpose--the above summary is only a few lines. Granted that bullet-points are likely more efficient for that, but I just feel that this way has a bit more personality, and is a bit more "me".

Ultimately, it depends on your blog-reading target audience.  Similar to what @Grhyll mentioned, to me even a long sentence looks like a wall-of-text that I'm less likely to read.  But if there are bullet points, then I can easily scan and see if I find something interesting.  It'd be similar to having to listed to a "long" audio recording that you can't skip vs seeing a few images (almost) instantanously.

and is a bit more "me".

There's plenty of room in the rest of your posts.


p.s. That's what I had in mind when I started my devlog but still ended up with wall-of-texts.  Just to get things rolling but I'll go back and edit them when I get the time to continue the devlog.

But I do agree that there's something off with the leg animation.  Almost seems like quick a "double tap" of the feet that might indicate the frames aren't in correct order.

Could you post all the frames next to one another?

Sure. It will be a huge help if someone what's wrong.

OLD

NEW

Thanks for the samples.  It looks like that frame 4 in both animations is off because the back leg has already passed its vertical position, but it shouldn't have yet.  Basically, it moved more than it should and in the next frame it moves very little.  Likely, the back leg in nearby frames (perhaps at least #3) might need to be adjusted, e.g. moved forward a bit.  It might be easier to see if you create a very basic stickman like animation for the legs.


Also, since you are using a perspective where the character is rotated toward the viewer, I wonder if the back foot should move back as much as the front foot.

Regarding recording time, other than finding out gameplay, there is another benefit.  If selected, Unity can collect user data.  One of the uses is creating usage heatmaps that can be used to track player progress.  That way, you can find out if many/significant number of players spend time (or may get stuck and give up) at a certain location without them having to report directly.