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[devi ever]

Not sure if you have posted about this or not, but I'd LOVE to hear more, maybe see a devlog vlog about how you achieve your realistic looking animations!

 

[JLJac]

If people are interested, I could go into more detail. The very basics of it is very... basic. You only need two functions: one to determine the distance between two points and one to give the direction as a vector from one point to another. With that you can emulate "chains", i.e. points moving about freely but being stuck to other points at certain distances.

So in my game, the player consists of two such points (upper/lower body) and the lizard consists of 3. Then I attatch to that additional points for limbs and so on. For example the tails of the creatures are several such points chained together.

On top of this stuff I draw the creatures, using simple sprite mechanics such as rotation. For example, the arm of a creature is drawn at the shoulder and then rotated towards the location of the hand point.

This is the reason why the creatures are one, solid color. In fact they consist of several sprites overlapping each other in awkward ways, and if there was any kind of shading on the sprites this would be visible. If I worked in a more reasonable software I could compile the whole body of the creature to one picture and then shade it, but I'm not, so the flat colors are staying. Instead I've tried to adapt my style so that it'll look ok.

When it comes to the more specific movement of limbs and so on it's a great deal of faking going on. The lizards for example do not grab on to stuff and pull themselves forward. Instead they move about with a magical force pushing them in whatever direction they are going. When a limb is too far behind the body it goes into a "search mode", looking for possible grasps in front of the lizard. Such a thing might be a wall, a pole, a platform or whatever. When it finds one, the limb connects to it, and then passively stays there until it's left behind by the body again. The magical propulsion force of the body is dependent on how many limbs are currently connected to terrain, making the speed of movement uneven and synced to the movement of the limbs (few limbs grasping - slow movement of the body).

If there is demand, I could make a more in-depth technical tutorial.

[devi ever]

First of all thank you for the in-depth reply...

... and I understand if my lone request isn't enough to warrant creating a tutorial, but if for some reason you feel there ultimately isn't enough to demand, I'd gladly pay a reasonable fee to learn more about your techniques!  They are very interesting and if you are open to them being available to the public, I think many could benefit from such information.

 

[yui_jegnan]

Jesus christ I love the suspicious and creepy atmosphere that's going on in the game! The fluid animation really adds to that as well.

[by MSLF]

come on. keep it coming, bro.

[nikolail]

We miss you!

[jonbro]

I would happily take a more technical tutorial! that is awesome that you wrote up what you have already though, and it works somewhat like I suspected it did! Kinda sorta IK implementation. One question that pops to mind though, if you have a propulsion force that is based on the number of limbs down, but that is unpredictable, are all of the character speeds in the game unpredictable? Or is there some other driving force at a higher level? Also, are these the same systems that drive the player characters in the game?

[JLJac]

I'm sorry this thread has been hibernating a while now - I'm going home in a few days, and because I've needed to finish a lot of stuff up before that date I've been very busy. Once I'm home the situation will be very different though (lots of time for development). You'll see the next update some time next week, when I've gotten home and settled down after 7 months of africa.

I would happily take a more technical tutorial! that is awesome that you wrote up what you have already though, and it works somewhat like I suspected it did! Kinda sorta IK implementation. One question that pops to mind though, if you have a propulsion force that is based on the number of limbs down, but that is unpredictable, are all of the character speeds in the game unpredictable? Or is there some other driving force at a higher level? Also, are these the same systems that drive the player characters in the game?

I'll write one up for you!
The variable movement speed is only for the lizards, the player has a constant speed and the movement of the limbs is purely cosmetic. For the lizards though, the answer is yes, the speed is unpredictable. However they do have a weak propulsion force even when no limbs are connecting at all, to not get stuck.

[ghoulkid86]

Holy fuck am I hyped for this!
Can't wait to see further development.

[JLJac]

Update 149
We're still stuck in UI hell, but at least something's happening. Because I don't seem to be able to create the design, I thought I'd skip ahead to the raw functionality, and that has been working better. Here's the "den screen", i.e. the screen you look at between levels:



What's going on here is this -
Up left is the calendar, showing all the days you need to survive. The marked days are the days when there's a paus in the rain, hunting days. The player is just coming in from his fifth hunt. Down in the corner is the pile of bugs. As you can see, the pile starts at seven, that's the excess from the fourth hunt.

The player has caught 9 flies, these are added to the pile. Then the calendar starts to move, and 7 days pass. Each day one fly is removed from the pile (eaten or digested or whatever). Finally we arrive at the sixth hunt, with 9 flies still in the stock pile.

As you can see, this means that there's no need to go out hunting the sixth hunt, because there are only seven days until the next opportunity. This is true, and the game allows you to just go straight back in the den if you want to. I think I like the ability to hoard flies like that, it creates more freedom for the player to play with their own style. When you reach the very end of the campaign, your flies stockpile will be your high score.

[Juan Raigada]

If people are interested, I could go into more detail. The very basics of it is very... basic. You only need two functions: one to determine the distance between two points and one to give the direction as a vector from one point to another. With that you can emulate "chains", i.e. points moving about freely but being stuck to other points at certain distances.

So in my game, the player consists of two such points (upper/lower body) and the lizard consists of 3. Then I attatch to that additional points for limbs and so on. For example the tails of the creatures are several such points chained together.

On top of this stuff I draw the creatures, using simple sprite mechanics such as rotation. For example, the arm of a creature is drawn at the shoulder and then rotated towards the location of the hand point.

This is the reason why the creatures are one, solid color. In fact they consist of several sprites overlapping each other in awkward ways, and if there was any kind of shading on the sprites this would be visible. If I worked in a more reasonable software I could compile the whole body of the creature to one picture and then shade it, but I'm not, so the flat colors are staying. Instead I've tried to adapt my style so that it'll look ok.

When it comes to the more specific movement of limbs and so on it's a great deal of faking going on. The lizards for example do not grab on to stuff and pull themselves forward. Instead they move about with a magical force pushing them in whatever direction they are going. When a limb is too far behind the body it goes into a "search mode", looking for possible grasps in front of the lizard. Such a thing might be a wall, a pole, a platform or whatever. When it finds one, the limb connects to it, and then passively stays there until it's left behind by the body again. The magical propulsion force of the body is dependent on how many limbs are currently connected to terrain, making the speed of movement uneven and synced to the movement of the limbs (few limbs grasping - slow movement of the body).

If there is demand, I could make a more in-depth technical tutorial.

This is genius, specially the limb system. I love this kind of faking, and playing to software's strengths (or against it's weaknesses)

This is a beautiful project! I wish you the best of lucks!

[jamesprimate]

whoa, are you back home JLJac?

[tchassin]

Hang in there, you're doing wonders with that screeen!

[eigenbom]

keep it up dude

[jonbro]

urrgh, ui hell, tell me about it. My least favorite thing to do, I always just end up adding new features to the main game instead. That screen looks nice from a functional perspective tho, so you are probably on the right track!

[JLJac]

Yeah, I'm finally back in Sweden again! The reverse culture shock is kind of freaking me out  

Thank you all for supporting me, and bothering to read this despite me only posting boring UI stuff. Believe me, I too wish this was done so I could wrap up the game world and release this thing. Not too far away though.

As a thanks, here's a .gif showing me trying to keep a couple of lizards at bay by throwing rocks at them.


Update 150
Created a placeholder "end of custom game" screen, which seems to be working OK. Also made the level editor save, and the game load, a menu color for each level - that way the shade of the pause menu looks nice together with the overall palette of that specific level.

[Graham]

Hello JLJac! Now that you're back from Sweden, would you be interested in doing some press around the game? My name is Graham Smith and I edit PC Gamer. We'd love to cover it either in the magazine or on PCGamer.com, if we could interview you or get our hands on a build?

Let me know! Feel free to respond here, or email me at [email protected].

Cheers,

Graham

[ghoulkid86]

This thing will revolutionize "simple" 2d game graphics for real. So amazingly beautiful!
Please tell me there will be a mac build.

[JLJac]

Hi Graham!
I'd love to do a short interview, and if you need me to provide any material I'll do that too

However, for any press stuff, I want it to be crystal clear that this is not a cool new game in development, but a guy goofing around on his laptop and making some glitchy mess that could potentially be interesting from a theoretical perspective.

I think that what hype always does is making 75 feel like -25, because you were expecting 100. That might make sense if you're selling something and need the hype, but I'm not, so I prefer to keep expectations low. However, I'm always flattered when someone shows interest in the project

I'll shoot you an email!

This thing will revolutionize "simple" 2d game graphics for real. So amazingly beautiful!
Please tell me there will be a mac build.

Sorry, not unless some deus ex machina descends and offers to code the thing for me :/ Don't worry though, as a game the thing is kind of frustrating, it might very well be that the best way of enjoying Rain World is through gifs 

Edit: Oh, hehehe, just saw this.... I'm not back from sweden, but I'm back in sweden. Hope that doesn't mean trouble - if it does your interest is still noted and added to my energy meter!

[jamesprimate]

^ joar, you MAY be just too close to it to know how fun it is for someone playing it for enjoyment rather than to debug its one of the most viscerally exciting (and terrifying) games i've played in a long time!

but one can definitely appreciate the old mr. scott wisdom of "under promise, over deliver"