next »

[DangerMomentum]

Video Footage:







What is Isolation?
Isolation is my take on the Metroid formula. I think too many indie games that sell themselves as Metroidvanias don't really understand the Metroid part. There's a lot more to the design and progression of the game than "Sidescroller with interconnected rooms," and I intend to faithfully recapture that design while keeping the core game original and innovative.

Newest updates in most recent posts

Original Post:

Hey guys, I figured I'd start a devlog for my game, Isolation. It'll keep me motivated and give me a place to record progress as I go. Isolation is a pet project of mine that I've started and restarted over and over for almost eight years now. It's a Super Metroid inspired exploration game that focuses on nonlinearity and atmosphere. After numerous prototypes, I've decided to scale the technical aspects of the game back to give me more room to focus on gameplay and content creation. As such, the game will be tile based and run at a relatively low resolution, which will later be scaled up using a screen filtering algorithm not unlike many emulators. This first post will show some very early alpha screenshots and go over the gameplay elements I've implemented thus far. You can read my old thread for a more technically advanced version of Isolation here.


This is just a basic in-game screenshot that shows a few things- sprites are shaded and outlined using HLSL, which takes some of the art burden off my shoulders. Tiles are placeholders for now.


This shows ledge climbing working. I want to focus on mobility here, and this is just one ability that facilitates that. You can't hang off ledges indefinitely. Instead, you scramble up them as you grab. You can also vault over 1 tile high ledges to maintain your momentum. Grabbing / vaulting is done with the grab key- I'll get into controls in a bit. Moving quickly and deftly is very important in Isolation, as there are many times where you may have to run instead of fight. More on that later.


Lastly, this shows the very start of combat being implemented. In this game, you'll basically have two modes- mobility and combat. You switch between them by drawing or holstering your weapon. When you're in combat mode, your jump becomes a dodge and you walk more slowly. In mobility mode, your attack is limited to a basic melee strike. Its hard to show all of this with screens, especially with placeholder art, but videos / a demo will come soon.

To facilitate this, I spent some time making a map editor specifically tailored for this game. Here are a few screens:





Rooms are made up of chunks, which in turn are made up of individual tiles. You draw out the actual layout of the map in the editor, then edit the linked rooms individually.

Anyway, I'll have more interesting posts soon- just thought I'd sum up what I've done thus far, and from here out I can post as I add more stuff. Thanks for taking the time to read, and feel free to ask any questions!

[DangerMomentum]

Small update- you can now shoot! The part you don't see here is that entities can now be created and destroyed in-engine, and I now have a resource management system so that multiple entities that share share sprites won't have individual copies of their sprites. Next up, things to shoot and collision between them.

[DangerMomentum]

Added some bouncing balls as test enemies. Collision between objects works, you can shoot them down, and the player will take damage upon touching them. Added a basic HUD, design will surely change as I progress. Next up, room backgrounds, parallaxing, and actually drawing the minimap over the little map background.

[DangerMomentum]

So I got the background stuff done and played around with some different placeholder tiles. On the left is the game without any shaders active, and on the right is the game through its HLSL filter. I'm really happy with the difference it makes, even with some fairly crappy tiles it pops and smooths the edges really well. Definitely looking forward to getting some real art in there :D On a side note, if the image above looks out really artifacted, it's because I uploaded from my phone and it tried to reduce bandwidth. I can't tell if it did or not from this connection. If its messed up, I'll reupload it later.

EDIT: Map is working!



Kind of basic, later I'll make it actually show what kind of edges each room has, but at least the basics are working.

[SolarLune]

Looks awesome - very Metroid-like. Keep going!

[DangerMomentum]

Decided to to tile autoshading- it gives the rooms a lot more depth and brings focus to the action. I'm really happy with how it came out :D Thanks for the feedback! Next up will be some actual enemies and a test area more accurate to the real game.

[Superb Joe]

In this game, you'll basically have two modes- mobility and combat. You switch between them by drawing or holstering your weapon. When you're in combat mode, your jump becomes a dodge and you walk more slowly. In mobility mode, your attack is limited to a basic melee strike. Its hard to show all of this with screens, especially with placeholder art, but videos / a demo will come soon.

i tooled around for a while trying to engineer ways for re style aiming to be useful and fun in a 2d space. it's hard. it sounds like you've done a lot of thinking about this and i like your ideas, but my advice would be to put a lot of effort into designing your enemies, and how to fight them, and then don't feel lashed to the mast about your preconceived ideas if it just doesn't feel fun or right.

[DangerMomentum]

Yeah, I'm definitely being very careful with it- I feel like it's a necessary trade for full 360 degree movement. With full mouse aim, you no longer need to put yourself in harm's way to align your shots with the enemy, so it reduces the difficulty level of combat drastically. I'm hoping that this will be an effective compromise- you get better and more precise aiming, but the player himself can no longer move as deftly. Now you're putting yourself in danger while attacking another way- instead of having to get closer to the enemy to shoot, now you have to be sure you have enough safe time to fire a few shots before you need to move. I really like the way it feels so far, and some effective enemies designed around this mechanic are definitely a must for testing.

[DangerMomentum]

I've been working on designing upgrades and abilities and I'm excited to prototype them. I'm not going to actually start programming them until I have the core gameplay 100% done- basically everything you could encounter when you first start the game. I want to make sure basic movement and combat is fun on its own. I also think that I will have a minimal number of lock / key style upgrades. Instead, I'd rather make most of the barriers be movement and navigation based- I want my environments to take creative thinking to navigate. There will still be a definite order of progression, but the player will have the freedom to break that if they please (if they're up for the challenge, that is).

[DangerMomentum]

Here's the first video I've captured of gameplay footage, showing off what I've got so far. It's still really clunky looking, but at least it's actually playable. You can see the beginning of my first enemy design, along with climbing / vaulting and map navigation. Next up is finishing the enemy's design and implementation, and then making a playable demo to test combat and general controls. Thanks for looking!

[SolarLune]

Nice. I like how smoothly it transitions from room to room, as well as the widely differing environments that you're dealing with. Good job!

[AaronLee]

Neat concept, I'm interested in seeing where this goes.

[Franklin's Ghost]

Video is looking good.

Nice. I like how smoothly it transitions from room to room, as well as the widely differing environments that you're dealing with. Good job!

And agree with this 

[DangerMomentum]

More gameplay footage! This time it's showing off a few little enemies I've made. Note that there are a lot of effects and animations missing- I'm saving all of that stuff for later. I'm getting behavior and basic implementation done first. After that, I'll go back and make it all pretty. Check it out!





(The music in this is in no way representative of the final product. Just me having some fun with cheesy sounds, haha)

[Franklin's Ghost]

Like the little legs enemy 

[baconman]

That's pretty kickin' so far. I kinda like the direction this is going in, although moving + jumping/items + mouse-shooting is a pain to do more often than not.

[Birdorf]

My attention has been grabbed.

[DangerMomentum]

Thanks for the responses!

That's pretty kickin' so far. I kinda like the direction this is going in, although moving + jumping/items + mouse-shooting is a pain to do more often than not.

Can you elaborate on this a bit? I want to make sure the combat is really tight, and any feedback on this is appreciated.

[DangerMomentum]

Fartbug is goooo!

Alright, so that's 3 basic enemy types done. These are all passive- I want two trap style enemies and at least one or two that directly engage the player in combat, then I'll probably polish it up and release a basic mechanics demo to get some feedback and figure out what the gameplay needs.

[baconman]

What I meant is a control scheme that demands hand placement in 3 positions, like (movement keys) + (jumping/manuevering keys) + (mouse for firing), that sort of thing. Until a couple options were sorted out (which included classic Metroid-style controls for pure keyboard play, except where periodic mouse-aiming was tactically wise), that sort of thing bogged down Gentrieve as well.