Working on hints in The Mission:

Started working on non-gameplay stuff like cutscenes, hints, etc. Here's intro cutscene:





Pretty simple, but I plan to make a cool transition between main menu and this. Main menu is to be done, in fact an entire UI is to be done...

Also, I would like to announce that "The Mission" demo is coming soon
Most of the planned things are done, bugs are fixed. The game went a long way and it's
time to release a playable demo and find out if it was worth it...

This weekend was dedicated to bugfixing and improvements. Here's a short summary of what was done:
* Spider web can no longer be shot down, that prevents silly scenarios, because shooting it down is generally useless and looks strange
* Fixed a bug in spider web where it collapsed into a single segment
* Spider web can no loner be attached to steep slopes, that prevents "wall climb" cheating
* Player jump logic was changed, it changes slightly on steep slopes, it also prevents "wall climb" cheating
* Player is no longer considered "grounded" when standing on gibs and debris, prevents "infinite" jumping cheat
* Spider web is now automatically torn when player stabilization forces become too high, prevents bugs that allowed player to climb steep slopes
* Improved jump air control, jumping now feels better
* Spider web is now torned when under strong forces, prevents gears from jamming
* Player can now be killed by strong forces, e.g. gears, presses, etc.
* And the most important, I've finally fixed the nastiest bug, I even gave it a name - "cripple". It happened quite frequently when strong forces were applied to characters with physics, their joints were screwing up:





Left part is before, right is after. The fix is to detect the "cripple" and fix it very fast during few frames, it happens fast, so player doesn't notice it (the video is 10x slower than actual gameplay).

So, almost all bugs are now fixed, there're however some left, just look at this guy:





Fortunately, this is quite easy to fix, as well as the others.

New boss attacks in The Mission:

Small update here:





I made this fireball attack today. The import thing here is that it's the last thing I wanted to make for this boss, sure there's much tweaking to do, adding more attack patterns, etc, but in general I've done what was planned for this boss, finally!

Sinister and unique just how i like em

Continually impressive-looking!

Thanks

Thanks

but I was wondering if there was something else you could do for the reaction of the enemy when you hit them. I feel like you have this great overlay for the player character and then when you hit the enemy they just turn white. Obviously a very small thing, but I just thought I would leave it there.

Yes, 100% agree that hitting needs more feedback, there's lots of stuff to be done actually and it all takes time. Right now I'm focused on game mechanics and overall visual style. Once I'm done with all that I'll start polishing stuff, it needs a lot of polishing: more particle effects, damage feedback, fine details in animations and character presentation, etc.
There's much work to do, but I'm always open to suggestions and criticism, like someone said "No two words are more harmful than 'Good Job'"

Another update is here.

So I've made some gameplay with boss's extended limbs:





The cool thing about this is that it's done entirely in Spine. After all the work I did on integrating Spine with game physics I can finally do such stuff easily. This is just the beginning though, but I think I'll make a little break here, I've got tired of working on this particular scene, I just want to move on. So I think I'll leave it as it is for now, make the rest of the planned stuff and come back to it later.

Thanks Ye, the stuff looks dangerous, so I bet the player would never do any of this, but it's just a test anyway. I'm planning to make the player attach to boss's legs some other way, like making a hint or something, m.b making standing on the floor really dangerous, so that the player will be forced to grab onto something...
I'm using Box2D, but IMO the true power comes from combination of Box2D + R.U.B.E Box2D editor (which is super cool) + Spine Pro (which is also extremely useful). I bet physics engine is not even that important here, it could've been Chipmunk physics, I'm pretty sure it would work out fine too

Another update is here...





It turned out that last time I didn't implement those extending limbs properly, it worked fine while in the air, but physics was very jittery when the limb was standing still on the ground. So I managed to fix that and I hope that my next update is finally going to be about an actual gameplay. Stay tuned!

I'm here with another small update. So I decided to make something interesting out of boss phase 2, so I though that it would be cool to have extendable limbs. Here's what I did, first, I've modified boss's legs in Spine, added some paths/constraints and stuff. It took a bit to figure out how to scale those, it's not obvious at all and requires some tricks, but finally, I managed to do this:



Then, I did some bone follower modifications so that it could scale physics fixtures and recreate joints when needed (since Box2D's joint anchors cannot be moved), here's an in-game slowmo demo of this:



And finally, I mixed all this with body segment follower that uses motor joints to get body movement + leg extend effect:



This is just a demo though, next step is to make some gameplay with it. I'll also need to implement one more component that'll detect leg-ground hit and stop IK target bone from moving further, that way I'll get the desired effect of the boss stomping the ground + the power of Spine animation I might be able to implement some nice phase 2 battle But I guess I'll leave this for tomorrow.

Another update is here, I started working on new boss attacks for phase 2, here's the first one:





Basically this is just laser attack from phase 2 intro scene:





It's just that laser comes from boss's mouth ) I'm also planning to make more variety of course, right now it just starts the laser on one of the platform sides and the laser goes up to the other side of the platform.

P.S. (not related to gamedev exactly): I'm getting pretty tired of working on this game recently, I have a dayjob as a programmer and lately I work on really complicated stuff at work and I spend working on the game almost all weekends. It's really hard to keep up the pace, I started to loose motivation and this game sometimes looks like shit to me (this may be true of course ). I wonder how other devs handle these situations... I feel like m.b. I need a break from this...

New boss attacks in The Mission:

Painterly shader sure looks interesting, good job!

One more small update, I've added motion blur + slowmo:





It's only in this scene for now, but m.b. I'll be able to use it later for something else as well

Wow, this looks really awesome. Good luck with the dev!

Thanks

Sure looks nice, but the manual work is truly laborious. To me it looks like a case for a Voronoi Diagram

Yes, I also though about automatic break down of things, but then I realized that the problem is deeper. e.g.:



Here we can break down the physics body of the cog automatically, but then we need to handle the visual part. Like for pieces from inside the cog it's simple, one has to generate the concrete border on all sides. But for side pieces it's harder because concrete border is only needed on some sides and it all depends on how the art was drawn and how physics body is placed. And the problem gets harder for more complicated stuff like platforms which are made of different kinds of art pieces. So after thinking about this for a while I decided to just make all the stuff manually and be 100% sure that it'll look correct.

I made proper (I hope so) destructible terrain

I know that feeling... finger's crossed!

Ye, always unsure if stuff is good enough or not)

Progress update is here I made proper (I hope so) destructible terrain, so now it doesn't look like it's just some texture being cut in pieces:





Whenever part of the platform is removed the surroundings are filled with white concrete-like substance. And here's
how it's implemented:



It's all pretty straightforward actually, stuff is just pre-broken and concrete mesh is always there and behind actual piece. All the rest is handled by the engine. It was extremely tedious to make all those pre-broken parts, but IMO it worth it. I also thought about automatic terrain destruction which is done entirely in engine, but there are some cases that would be really hard to handle automatically, like that cog for example, how do you "guess" how to break it nicely, how do you generate proper concrete structure at the edges of the cog, etc. So for now I decided to go with manual approach.