next »

[JLJac]

Glad you liked it!

Update 63
Today I worked a bit on the level editor again. Added another effect, old electrical cords. They come in 1px, 2px and 3px thickness. Also note how the new shadow palette blends the cast shadow with the self shadowing on the tiles.



There's a little fog going on as well right now, I'm debating with myself wether or not to keep it. It seems cleaner with flat color surfaces, but it looks a little better with gradients, maybe? It adds a little deptht to the image.

[JLJac]

Update 64
Improved the way creatures are displayed when moving in shortcuts. Now they are also visible against "back walls", meaning that you won't lose track of your character for a few frames the way you used to.

[JLJac]

Update 65
Added another layer of background, to create more depth and sense of place in the levels. The process was surprisingly painless.



This doesn't in any way affect the game itself, which still just loads a two-dimensional image and has no idea about how it was rendered or what it looks like.

[Oddball]

That last video is awesome. I could watch those crocs prowling around all day. Can't say I'm a fan of the flashing heads though.

[JLJac]

The flashing heads are odd, but I still consider keping them. As the world starts to take shape they will hopefully make more sense style-wise.

Update 66
Graphical baby steps... Some work with the palettes and fog code.



The third layer is almost faded away here, which I'm happy with, but the light on the second layer is too sharp. Also I think the palette is still a bit too saturated, I want it to appear more black-and-whitish than colored, but while maintaining some of the juicyness that a little bit of color gives it. It's a hard balance. The palettes will of course differ between levels, but I'm trying to set up a general set of rules for how they'll work.

[Joshua]

Perhaps the flashing colors is a way to indicate to the player that the object/creature is dangerous? But that might get overwhelming if the majority of the screen is flashing. 

I do like your color selection and the atmosphere is getting better each screenshot.

Keep up the great work! I can't wait for another playable version! 

[DrDerekDoctors]

Just watched the videos on Youtube. Holy cow that's impressive stuff! I'm replying basically just so I can see updates on the thread.

[Kyle O]

This is really impressive! The overall style is just plain hip, and getting captured by those lizards looks absolutely horrifying! I would be afraid to play this game.

[JLJac]

Thank you!

Update 67
More playing around with palettes. I made a palette to be used for underground areas, with the main difference being that instead of close objects being darker and faraway ones being light it's the other way around.



I also added a system for having a little blur effects going on, but it'll be used rather sparesly as I don't want to stray too far from the pixel art style.

I'm hesitating to start making actual levels for the game, as I suddenly find myself doubting whether the game layout I had imagined would be the best one possible. The idea was that there would be a small hub world in which you could move freely, and that you'd visit the different levels from there. Moving around freely is always fun, but the question is how much it actually adds. If I make the game linear I can do a lot more interesting things such as changing light and weather conditions, and in the end show off more of my world. In an open world where you can move back and forth as you please it's very weird if one area always is during the sunset, while the neighbouring place has broad daylight. Instead the whole world would have to have more or less the same conditions, as there's no way I could render all the levels during all the light conditions times all the weather conditions....

So, moving around freely in a more bland world, or play a linear game in a more interesting and diverse one? Hmm...

[Franklin's Ghost]

So, moving around freely in a more bland world, or play a linear game in a more interesting and diverse one? Hmm...

Think linear game would work well, but I'm sure you could make both work somehow.

That last screenshot with the new light effect looks amazing, love it Such eerie atmosphere.

Also can't wait for the next game version. How much do you think you'll be charging when you release the final version (or haven't you thought about it yet)? I'll definitely be getting it as soon as it's released. One of my favourite devlogs to follow

[JLJac]

The idea has always been that the game will be free of charge. I might open a donation account though.

Update 68
A lot of progress on the level editor today, all invisible. I made the light tracer bigger than the level, so that light can fall in on the level from outside of it.

The tile editor had some work done on it as well, mostly stuff that made it work better with the new three-layer geometry. Now you can also force place a tile in a position where it's actually illegal, by holding F. This messes stuff up, but when creating levels you might sometimes want to place a solid tile halfway out in the air for one or another reason, and this lets you do that.

In order to give you some visuals, here are some chains:



Note how the sky has a little blurred light going on. That's an option you can turn on and off (or which will be automatically triggered by certain palettes). The other option is that lit surfaces glow like this, like in the last screenshot i posted.

Still haven't really decided on the linear/open world thing, but am leaning towards linear.

[JLJac]

Update 69
Managed to implement the correct formula for hanging wires and chains, so that their arcs are actually accurate to what a real rope hanging in constant gravity looks like. The difference is not really visible, but it brings peace of mind.

[JLJac]

Gah... I'm actually stuck. The next step would be to start making levels, and then further development of the level editor and creation of graphical assets would depend on the demand of the levels created. However, the layout of the levels are dependent on what kind of overall game layout I'm going with, which I can't decide on.

Here are the options in more detail:

Hub world layout:
The game is set up around a lair where the bear(s) hide out during bad weather. Around this lair is a small inter-connected hub world (3x3 levels) in which you can move freely. Surrounding this hub world are seven "levels", which contain hives.

The game is consisting of seven "hunts". A hunt is a short persiod of clear weather, during which the bears go out in the world, find their way to a level, and hunt some flies. As a level is once hunted on the swarm stops, and the next hunt you'll have to go somewhere else. This means that you have to go further and further, making for increasing difficulty, maybe even with less and less time at your disposal. Still there is some possibility for variation, as you can take different routes and visit the levels in different orders.

The premiss also states that a bear needs one fly in its belly for each day it's going to hibernate, and the clear weather is more and more sparse as the wet season continues. This means that during early hunts you might only need two or three flies to win, but in the later ones you might need a lot more.

The game is about surviving one wet season, the highscore consists of how many extra flies you've caught, and how little time you've managed to do so in.

Pros: Open world, feels free and makes it feel more like an actual little world, not just a series of levels. Replayability! Once you've played it once it might be fun to try different approaches, different routes and orders and so on, in order to catch extra flies and break the highscore. "What if I take the faraway level first, then the closest one..." Many many possible ways to complete a game, making the game last longer when you for example want to play co-operative.

Cons: Visual blandness, if you can move freely, all the levels should have about the same light and weather conditions. Technical difficulties, the game should probably keep track of crocs on levels you've just left, or maybe even allow crocs to move between levels. Same goes for flies. A bit of difficulty when two players are moving around, which level will it go to if both players jump into different exits? Boring parts where you are too far away from the lair with too little time, and already know you're going to die but still have to wait it out.

Story layout
Basically the game premiss is the same, but it's "faked" rather than incorporated into actual gameplay. First there's one or a few platform levels that are about getting to the hunting ground, then there's the hunting and then maybe there's a getting back. The next hunt is a similar scenario, but with other levels.

There are also "custom levels" such as those you make yourself, which are like the ones in the alpha, short, one-level scenarios you play against your own highscore or against a friend. These you can also make yourself with the level editor.

Pros: Much more possibilities visually. I can show what the world looks like during sunset, day, night, thunder, have some levels that are just there to set the mood. I can create more cineastic events such as ~ I dunno, fleeing in a pipe with drain water chasing you, some part of the terrain falling over, customly scripted stuff like that. Halway through the game the lair might be flooded and the bears need to find another one - a lot of custom scenarios decided by me.

Cons: A linear platformer... have we seen it before, maybe? It's done to death. Replayability plummets, once you've gone through a campaign like that you're done with it. These two are very serious cons.



In conclusion, I can either make a fairly simple and bland little world, but it is actually a little world that works in and of itself, or I can show off a more grand, complicated world with many different things happening in it, but it's fake and pre-destined. This is the common mainstream approach today, I guess.

A game like pac-man or tetris is a very simple world, but everything that is said to be possible to happen in the world can actually happen in the world, even if it's only units moving around. A game like.. say, gears of war has a lot of things that are said to be able to happen, such as building collapsing and the like, that are not actually able to happen inside of the functionality of the game, but are artificially added to make the experience more exciting.

I wanted to go with the old-school approach of a self-contained world, but am now thinking about going more towards the modern movie/game kind of style.

This decision is not easy.

[JLJac]

Hi there!
Contrary to what you're all probably thinking by now neither I nor the project is dead. Things have actually happened, even!

Yesterday the above decision was made final by me implementing the framework for moving between levels, and setting up two different game types, "custom" and "world". This means we have a hub world layout.

Pretty much every game these days do the kind of cop-out I was thinking about, where they promise something dynamic and interesting, only to cut all the corners and provide a linear movie-game. I don't wanna do the same.

Things that have happened, just the few at the top of my head:
1-lizard AI of course.
2-Graphics for the A creature, and additional behaviour
3-Started to implement sound(which I'm not very good at)
4-framrate stuff
5-level editor stuff
6-connecting levels so that you can move between them
7-endless tinkering with the palettes
And quite a lot of other things that had to be done but are not very interesting. There's more stuff, but instead of listing it all it'll be nice surprises for you when you notice it. Think of it as "free progress" you didn't think it was happening, but it was~

I hope I'll be able to get back to regular updates shortly.
Thank you for having patience!

[JLJac]

Update 70

Today I successfully connected a couple of placeholder levels together to a hub world.




You can move freely between the levels, and there's consistensy in which entrance leads where, and if you go back you'll appear out of the same entrance you left through. Hopefully.

Soon, I'll start to actually build the world. I do have a map of what levels connect where, but will improvise the layout of the actual levels.

[HarrisonJK]

Lookin good!

[Franklin's Ghost]

Looking forward to seeing how you've implemented the moving freely between levels.

[JLJac]

Today I once again struggled with making camstudio, divx codec and windows 7 work together. After two hours I had gotten nowhere, and messed up my computer horribly. Now I'm working on restoring it. I guess there won't be videos, simply. :/

[JLJac]

Update 71
Ok, so the world is divided into hub rooms and hive rooms or whatever you want to call them, rooms you pass through and rooms where the flies are. I don't really want to include a map, but I still need to somehow lead the player towards a hive room that is currently swarming, as you won't have time to go check them all.

What I've started working on today is that when you enter a hub room, you'll see a fly dissappearing into one of the exits leading to another room. If you follow it, it will eventually lead you to the closest swarming hive room.

This has required some work, becuase there needs to be a little bit of inter-level path finding going on. It has been managable though, as I don't really want flies actually moving around through the world. Instead I can do this inter-level pathing stuff just once when loading a new room and then spawn one single fly that is very close to the exit. The idea is that you shouldn't be able to catch it, just see where it goes.

[DrDerekDoctors]

What if the player isn't very observant? Could the fly perhaps buzz around until you get close to it, and then have it disappear? That way you know the player's made a conscious decision to go towards that exit and has therefore seen the fly.