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[JLJac]

Update 368

The little blinking number is back:



Together with a whole bunch of other stuff. We're working on a somewhat playable alpha, so I got some introduction screens in, as well as the game recognizing when you've died, displaying a message and restarting if you hit enter. There's also a win condition that's as simple as can be - return to the starting room with a certain number of flies eaten.

Also, flies + rock/spear collision finally in, that was a long time coming! Still don't have it so they can be impaled on the spear, but there are so many little details like that so it doesn't really feel smart to get caught up in them. Game relevant mechanics first, then details.

[gimymblert]

He looks puzzle: "why there is a number over my head!" 

[yanimstudio]

These procedural animations are really impressive!
Really like the characters and world you've create here. Awesome, keep the good work!

[JLJac]

Update 369
Messing about with the lizards for most of the day, just trying some stuff and fixing little details. Then I moved on to drawing some sketches of a new creature (!) but I still don't feel ready to start implementing it. However, I do feel ready to start implementing leeches in the water, because I basically know what I want them to be like - so I got started on that. No gifs yet as they still just look like red swimming boxes, but maybe tomorrow I'll have something fun to show you

The next area James is moving on to is one with some water stuff going on, so I might do a few water related things now for a couple of days to give him the tools to play with that.

[Christian]

Are leeches new? I don't recall reading about them earlier in the devlog

[JLJac]

Yeah, the idea of leeches came up when James and I discussed the implications of the recently added water. We really liked swimming around, but we wanted the water to be an exception from ordinary gameplay - we didn't want the game to become a Swimming Game. So we decided to add some creature that is in most of the water, and makes it a bit uncomfortable and dangerous to be there.

Update 370

Swimming just became a whole lot less comfortable 



I originally planned to make them more as a fish/leech hybrid, with a bit of a head, but when I got the triangle mesh for the body in I liked the leechy softness of it so much that I went with a more conventional leech. Too boring? I could spice them up a bit with some more alien element as well.

They're not entirely done, but pretty much so. I want to have them crawl along floors if they end up out of the water, and they should air-drown after a little while as well. Also they need to respond to the rain cycle, and they need to forget targets that have been out of the water for a little while. They should also probably give up on a target that has been dead and leeched for a while, or one single dead creature will make an entire body of water safe for ever.

Aaaand the big, boring thing - I need to write some kind of framework for "a thing being stuck to another thing" in order to have these leeches follow you between rooms. That same framework would then be applied to make bats stick on spears, and then it'd probably make sense to throw out the old "spear stuck in creature" hack and use this new thing instead.

I thought I could make a special case for only spears, but I've come to realize that the game has quite a lot of things being stuck on other things, so the engine probably needs to be able to handle that.

Back to the leeches - they don't actually hurt you themselves, they just weight you down. If enough of them attach you'll drown. On one hand I like this, because it creates a very visual "health" system where you can see how many of them are attached - 4 or 5 is usually enough to do you in. Once you get out of the water your "health" is reset by the leeches detaching themselves. The problem with this system is that 1 or 2 can never be an actual threat, only an annoyance as they impede your movement a bit.

Maybe that's not too big of a problem though. Especially as I imagine a situation with 1 or 2 of them as being pretty rare, in most cases I imagine a body of water as either having leeches or not, and if it has them they'll appear in schools of 10-20 or the like.

Catch ya later, I'm off to feed some lizards to the leeches 

[oahda]

Eyes and gills, perhaps. Not that leeches have those. But why not?

[Chromanoid]

I really like the way they look like. Everything looks so alive. You are a genius.

[JLJac]

Update 371



Leech land behavior is in now, though very simple. This creature really has no AI, it just works on some very simple rules and has some swarming behavior going on. On land it moves either left or right, hoping to fall back in the water. If it hits a wall it'll reverse its direction. After a while it'll dry out and die.

In the gif you can kind of see how I'm having trouble getting out of the water. This is the main danger of the leeches, they'll weight you down. The effect gets a bit of a bonus in water, but is also present when you've gotten out - jumps are a little weaker, you glide down poles, etc.

[gimymblert]

The current visual is spot on, it's ominous as hell 

As for 2 of them, you can have them to keep the tension and teach the player about leech without punishing them at first. Ideally if you want to keep them ominous, present the swarm first to the player in a tense, spectacular but safe scenario (aka easy to get out) to impact the player and imprint the danger, then teach them properly the leach in situation with two of them, and maybe always have scenario of two not too far from swarmy scenario so it works as forewarning and build anticipation to the player. Would be fun if bat and leech can interact

[JLJac]

That sounds like a good setup!

Hahahaha yeah, the bats sometimes play at the water surface, and several times I've seen the leeches get them  
It's really funny, because the bat will try to fly a little bit but the leech is way too heavy. I should probably add a weak "afraid" relationship between then bat and leech.

Edit: Gif! Added the little afraid relationship, as you can see by the first bat which almost gets caught and then freaks out and gets out of there.

[jamesprimate]

OH MY GOD. leeches eating bats. this is amazing.

[Torchkas]

This game's kinaesthetics look truly amazing. It looks like you've put a lot of work into making the game feel good!
I really like what I'm seeing, it seems like a very promising title!

[Caspar2000]

OH MY GOD. leeches eating bats. this is amazing.

Everyone eats poor bats, but what do the bats eat? Sunlight? Raindrops? Ex-lizard-prey leftoves?
By the way I really like how they seem to gain a playfullness and sense of togetherness and family when they form a bat chain.

[Vovosunt]

I don't know how you do it man, but I've never seen a game more alive!
As always, great job 

[eigenbom]

This is looking tight.

[chriswearly]

Ok, well now I envision, alongside whatever NEW creature you have in store Joar, is an underwater Lizard. Gills and all.
Swims well, but could have only front ligaments.
But it hides in deep-water caves.
A harder creature, obviously, but they perhaps protect/are in the way of some (also new) high-energy cave bugs.

[ArsCreativa]

Everytime I enter this thread I leave it with my mouth wide open in awesomeness! O_O

[JLJac]

Thanks

Update 372

Waterfalls! Note, work in progress ~ I could still be happier with how it looks under the water line. Things are becoming tricky, as I have like 4 different shaders colliding and overlapping here. The dark bubbles under the surface would be a lighter color if I could choose freely, but I have to draw them in the default sprite layer, and then they'll also get the default underwater color. I'll try to mess around with it some more in the future, but this seems good enough as a place holder to get James started with the new watery area.



The left one is a standard waterfall, as I imagine most of them will look. The right one is a weaker one that's a bit broken up, I want this for cosmetic purposes. The standard one looks very square, so the weaker one can be used to make a room look more alive. Both of them could use some more work though! Let me know if you have any tips

Right now the waterfall affects you while you're in the water - if you're close to the surface it'll pull you in and push you down, further down it will push you down and away. Above water it's purely cosmetic, you don't collide with it but move "in front of it". I'm contemplating making it so that the waterfall hits creatures above water as well, and pushes them down. There are a few things to consider here though. First of all, could I make the creature/water interaction look good enough to be happy with it? It'd want some kind of water splatter, and that seems very difficult to implement in a way that looks good. Also the waterfall should probably be affected somehow. This could probably be accomplished by breaking the sprite up in two where the creature breaks the waterfall, and use the weak shader (right in the images above) below that point. But there are also gameplay implications. Waterfalls generally cut rooms up horizontally, and if they are (somewhat) an obstacle, rooms might feel claustrophobic as you'll find yourself locked into little cells without freedom of movement. This might be okay for the player, but lighter creatures such as bats will get pushed around more by the waterfalls, and be even more limited as a consequence. Bat movement might be incredibly limited if the room is cut up by vertical barriers that the player can move through but the bats can't. So, still thinking about that one. Will consult with James and get back!

In shader news, you might notice a some water glimmer on the walls. Adds some atmosphere according to me! I'm really going crazy with the shaders here, but this one is actually not baked into the main shader, it's just a sprite that's placed on top of everything. So some graphics options can easily be implemented where that sprite is simply not created, and the GPU can be spared some pain and suffering. The effect is not for an entire room, but only above water surfaces and extending a few hundred pixels upwards.

And yeah, I made the leeches red!



An artistic decision I guess. Almost every creature is black already, and it felt nice to spice the leeches up a bit. I really like the contrast between the red leeches and this green water here - it feels a bit more fun and unexpected than just black. Also, the leeches spend most of their time deep under water, where you won't see their color, so it becomes a bit of a surprise when they get closer to the surface.

When they're out of the water for a while they slowly turn black before dying of dehydration.

We were talking about perhaps having both black leeches and red leeches, and giving them slightly different properties, and that's not entirely out of the question, but probably a later issue.

[Caspar2000]

The waterfall look amazing, grafically.

I dont see waterfalls going on full power during the dry seasons: water should always be threatening and like this they are only cosmetic. I think they just should just dripple a littlebit usually, and when the rain comes closer they grow and start to become a real threat. In this situation it would be ok to make them a real threat to all creatures. Then the bats would also be free to move around most of the time.

Making water look good is really hard, especially if you stick to the no foam policy you have been following so far, but you managed grand with all the other situations (Waves, splashes, water-color, swimming-behaviour, water-inhabitants).