So, another update is here. It's a small one though, just more boss animations were updated:





But it's still important, because now I'm done with boss phase 1 update and will start working on polishing phase 2,
which includes some interesting challenges More details later

And then at some point you get the ricochet upgrade that lets them bounce around for even more impressive trick shots :p

Yet another great idea I've been thinking about upgrades, one thing I though about is vehicles, like the player finds a tank or a submarine or whatever and uses its weapons and abilities. Upgrading the player itself is also cool, only proper "context" is needed, like for what reason it gets upgraded, cause I don't want to put classic powerups and pickups in the game, like this should be some kind of "mutation" that is somehow tied to a story... Guess I'll have to decide later on in the development

This looks really awesome, I love the art direction and the gameplay looks quite entertaining.
The only thing that feels out of place to me is the lack of real physics on projectiles.
Applying some force/gravity to avoid having "space shoot-em-up bullets" might work better.

Cheers

Thanks) You know, that's a good idea! I always felt that something needs to be done with projectiles, especially player's projectiles. I'll certainly give this a try, this might also improve gameplay experience, since targeting stuff will be trickier, one will have to aim taking physics into account

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

I'm very excited myself to see where it all goes. And regarding levels, right now there's one level, it's more
of an into. It looks like this in general:



When you kill the centipede boss its body will go down back to the hole from where it came and you'll
ride it into the depths of this planet to the next level. I have lots of plans really, but I think that second level
will mostly contain liquids like water, toxic slime/lava or something like that. I always wanted to play around with buoyancy, now I'll get my chance. There're lots of interesting scenarios one can do with water and stuff, player
will of course use spider web to bypass hazards, solve new types of puzzles, fight new enemies that'll emerge from
water or slime or whatever. Needless to say that liquids give tons of ideas for new bossfight

I assume this will require tons of experimentation and will take time, which I don't have, so... There's a looooong way to go

What a coïncidence—the logo for my engine is a koala too!

Wow, a coincidence indeed They even look pretty much alike)

Thank you! Hadn't come across your game before, but it looks really neat as well.

Up to this point I've just been juggling a bunch of JSON files (but I've been able to copy positions on the greybox world from Blender so I haven't had to guess completely). Not the nicest thing, but they're mostly human-readable and I still don't have a lot of objects to keep track of~

But soon enough I'm going to want something barebones to place objects visually. I'll probably just code something up myself since it doesn't need to be all that complicated and I can put ImGui and Im3d to good use. c: It'll just output more JSON that I can keep hand-editing for now if I have to. Will also experiment with some autogeneration for houses and foliage and stuff.

Overall, I'm thinking tooling will have to evolve along with the game as things are needed, just like the engine itself (which is still lacking in certain features that I haven't gotten around to implementing for the game yet, like lighting and audio), or I'll get stuck working prematurely on stuff instead of progressing on the game itself.

Oh, I see, so the plan is to use own tooling in the long run. Good luck with that and other stuff, I'll be watching your progress, m.b. you'll end up with a generic engine that others will use, you do have a logo already, the most important thing is in place already Oh, you'll need to name it as well)

Looks interesting and it's all built on your own engine, pretty cool! I'm also fond of going with my own stuff. Wondering how do you build levels right now, do you have your own in-game level editor ? For me personally level editors were always something that I didn't want to do, so I use third-party software for that, even if that software is not meant for level editing. Like it's sometimes easier to adapt to existing stuff than implementing your own from scratch.

One more update for this weekend, it turned out to be quite productive. What was done:
* I've finally solved stability problems for centipede boss. It turned out that his legs were causing them, so I just moved them to separate physics body under the hood. Visually it changes nothing, but the character is really stable now, I've been playing with him for hours and not even single thing went wrong. Rules of thumb - keep your physics model as simple as possible if you want it to be stable
* I've also tweaked charge attack a bit and added head animation to it, this looks better IMO
* Spit animation done
* Saw animation done, now those saws don't just appear out of boss's head, they come out of his mouth, so
now their appearance is reasonable
* Changed saw logic to take surface slope into account while moving, now they don't get stuck, which happened before
on more or less flat surfaces. I've also redrawed the saw itself and added some sparks on collision
* Tons of other small fixes
So hopefully I'm done with this section for now, time to move on to the next...

Another progress update, this time it's new boss attack:





At first, I wanted it to catch the player with its mouth, raise him into the air and spit him out. After implementing this partially I realized it doesn't look very good, the player is too small comparing to the centipede, so he's hardly can be seen inside the mouth and generally it looked more like a bug than a gameplay element. So I decided to just make the boss headbutt the player. I'll leave it for now, m.b. tweak later.

So, Spine is definitely helping me making more complex stuff with the boss, but there're still some problems that
are related more to physics itself. One problem is that physics constraints for legs sometimes break and legs turn
"inside out", the same happens for player sometimes, it's a general problem, but I think I'll be able to fix it a bit later. Another issue is that from time to time I see that motor joint forces are not strong enough, i.e. the boss deviates from animation trajectory a bit, I then tweak forces. The fact that there might be some instability in the character unless I test it thoroughly sure makes me sad, I would like to think of an approach that would guarantee that stuff is stable all the time, but for now, I just keep tweaking things.

So finally, I managed to apply spine to my boss:





The boss is animated in 4 separate animation tracks:

* head
* segments
* legs
* backbone

Here's an example animation for head:



Animation of each track is applied differently to the boss:

* head animation is the simplest and applied as is, it's just a decoration, it doesn't play with physics
* segments and backbone animations are applied together via motor joints, I wrote a component that takes spine
  animations and a set of physics bodies and pulls physics bodies to bones via motor joints. it's of course trickier
  than it sounds, because certain measures must be taken in order not to form a loop when physics affects the
  skeleton position and then skeleton affects the physics, etc. I solved it by fixing the skeleton position when the
  boss doesn't move in or out of his hole
* legs animations are applied via linear and angular impulses, motor joints won't work here because better precision
  is required, so I wrote another component for cases like boss's legs

And putting it all together, we can now control all aspects of this pretty complex creature via extremely powerful
Spine editor using WYSIWYG approach (well, almost ). I'm really looking forward to recreate boss's attacks using
this new technique, I bet now I'll able to make much more interesting gameplay scenarios

Hey, this looks cool, I'll be following this

So I finally managed to make Spine play nice with physics Here I did 3 animations: idle and legs retract/extend:





Generally it works like this: most of the time it's just physics as before, but when the player stops we gradually blend physics to Spine idle animation + IK. When player starts to move idle animation and IK gradually blends back to physics. I'm pretty satisfied with the result for now. Of course I shouldn't have gone through all that Spine integration burden just to make these simple player animations, my next step is to use this on boss.

Amazing game! I like how "the king of the world" moves his arms during level intros and music and basically all the other stuff

Nice and proper environmental design for a nocturnal creature. Congrats! I wonder how they sense the world, and I hate spiders.

Thanks) Right now there's no navmesh in the game (though I've experimented with it), so all creatures use physics to find and attack the player. Stuff like raycasts, seeing if the player is on the same surface, left/right to the attacker, etc. It works well enough for now, IMO the only case where navmesh is much better is with aerial enemies (and underwater, which are planned), so I'll probably include it at some point.

Oh, and you might want to come up with a different name. "The Mission" sounds like an 80's Rambo movie.

Yeah, I'm very bad at naming things actually. Originally I named it "the mission" after this game ("the last mission"):





This old DOS game was the first source of inspiration, I wanted to make a remake where I have a spider bot
instead of this flying thing and more different vehicles and stuff, but it gradually transformed into this game
btw I still plan vehicles and stuff later on )

After reading ~700 pages of "Rain World" devlog I, too, suggest you stick to physics simulation. It doesn't have to be real "legs push spidy around" physics, more in the style of Rain World: move the character reliably, calculate the legs purely decorational. I intend to do the same in my next game, but it's way too early for anything productive, so I shall inhale your experiences instead

Glad you like it Yeah, originally I also wanted to have physics simulation only game, however, there're some cases where physics alone is not enough. One good example is that I have this boss - giant centipede, though it moves pretty well right now I'm having hard times making it attack the player in some interesting ways, even its first attack where it sort of rises out of its hole, twists and starts to spit
those (placeholders for now) bullets is done by manually placing dummy objects in the level and making motor joints at runtime which dynamically change forces and torques. Such a pain in the ass really... What I really want is just drag the boss around manually, sort of record it all and then playback in the game, but without breaking physics.
Right now I really hope that Spine will be my silver bullet, i.e. I'll run physics simulation most of the time, but when something smartass is needed Spine will sort of kick in, take control of some bodies, do its stuff and release it all back to physics. That's all in my head for now, but I'll keep experimenting, I also have some good results which I didn't publish, because it's in my other prototype that I abandoned, so it seems like it should be possible...

[edit] And I appreciate it very much that you're aiming for person-made levels instead of procgen. Replayability never really convinced me, most procgen games lack any sense of playing it even once. A nice person-made story and setup suits my taste better, especially since I have a fulltime job, a wife and a child. I prefer to enjoy it once and then be done with it and move on. But that's just my personal grief with current time's indie devs.

Almost same here, I'm quite busy too with stuff, so when I play games I prefer them to be like < 4 hours long and "play and forget" type. To me a game is like a movie or book, I don't read books or watch the same movie twice even if it's good, like what's the point, I already know the story and the ending.

I did Spine integration this weekend. What was done:
* Ability to export game's physics models into Spine with possibility of later update, without breaking changes that
were made in Spine itself. In Spine itself it's possible to add new bones, meshes, paths, IK, i.e. all kinds of stuff.
* Did a spider export, added some IKs to its legs
* Implemented import from Spine into the game engine, did a Spine skeleton renderer and an ability to easily manipulare bones, animation state, etc.





And the I tried the following: replaced spider's physical bone simulation with Spine's IK, the results are below (left - before, right - after):





Well, it got worse The movement now is less realistic, pure physical simulation looks better, that's probably
because IK is way too deterministic. My original plan was to replace bone physics simulation with IK and then
just animate all other stuff, i.e. do idle animation, leg retraction animation, etc. But it turns out it's not gonna be that easy.

I'll probably need to use pure physics most of the time and blend into Spine on idle animation, retraction animation, etc. I'll continue experimenting with that.

So in general, time wasn't totally wasted, Spine's a cool thing, I bet there're a lot of places in the game where I
can use it.

I spent quite some time trying to make a transition between cave area and outside area, but something wasn't right about it. Then I realized I need to implement smooth parallax transition, so here it is:

Reworking cogs section in The Mission:

So, another progress update here, I'm currently making a new section of the level:





It's sort of a "use your web, don't fall down, shoot enemies, get to the other side" thing.

Thanks)

Yes, I do agree that blaster needs work, I'm planning to work on it later, I even considered removing it entirely, i.e. leaving the spider web only.

Regarding exploration, I'm sticking to linear/scripted gameplay with checkpoints (similar to games like limbo), i.e. it'll only make sense to playthrough once, but I'll definitely include secrets!