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[d]

I made this engine myself, but I'm completely insane so I don't recommend it.

When you need to make your own engine that's usually a good sign you're making an interesting game.

[Bandreus]

I completely love the behavior of shadows vs. the real platform crumbling: it makes the whole world feel more alive and helps to sell the idea of 'the shadow world being a separate and very different entity'.

Bravo! 

[Claw]

#screenshotsaturday random image dump of things I've been doing this week:







Re-wrote my lighting code, been having fun with that.

[Claw]

Today was my last day of employment - from now on my full time job will be making Chroma.

I'm also now going to be working with someone developing the audio for the game, expanding it into some pretty cool directions - I look forward to seeing what people think of what we do with it.

There's a lot of underlying stuff I've been working on recently and will need to continue working on for the next couple of months, meaning I have little in the way of interesting updates to show and ask for feedback on. I'm laying groundwork in the form of puzzles, the world shape and coding mechanics, but leaving most of the visuals for later.

Anyway pretty crazy time at the moment, exciting, scary. Also, time for some Antichamber YEAAAAH!

[devMidgard]

Today was my last day of employment - from now on my full time job will be making Chroma.

I'm also now going to be working with someone developing the audio for the game, expanding it into some pretty cool directions - I look forward to seeing what people think of what we do with it.

There's a lot of underlying stuff I've been working on recently and will need to continue working on for the next couple of months, meaning I have little in the way of interesting updates to show and ask for feedback on. I'm laying groundwork in the form of puzzles, the world shape and coding mechanics, but leaving most of the visuals for later.

Anyway pretty crazy time at the moment, exciting, scary. Also, time for some Antichamber YEAAAAH!

Antichamber hahaha it does look nice.

I'm glad to see u posting again! We'll see how this is progressing now :D

Best of luck,
Midgard.

[Martin 2BAM]

This game looks awesome, when the black dude walked over a shadow it was amazing!

Check the link on the "video thumbnail" image at the first post because it's broken (says the video is private).

[rivon]

I love the looks and the idea but I hope that the whole game won't be just these "catacombs" or caves or whatever

[Claw]

The whole game is underground

Obviously separate areas are visually different which is what I think you mean(?), so no worries there. Although like I said in the last post, art is on a back burner to flesh out the actual game.

[jmcmorris]

Today was my last day of employment - from now on my full time job will be making Chroma.

Congrats on moving to fulltime indie dev. Be sure to go outside every few days! I'm really looking forward to seeing what you can do with Chroma fulltime.

[jO]

Yeah, congratulations!

[melos]

Good luck m'boy 

[R.D.]

Gratz Looking forward to Chroma. Seems like a nice platformer which could offer some mind breaking puzzles (I want one with shadow boxes!).

[Claw]

First week has been okay overall, weird not really knowing what day it is since usually its work broken by a weekend.

I re-factored some of the shadow rendering for different depths because there was some funky stuff going on with different layers, but there's probably still a bit more tweaking to do here.

Started getting an idea of what I wanted the aesthetics for certain areas to be and polished some bits up a little, here's a few shots from one area:








I need to find a balance between things being too busy and too plain visually, and getting the foreground and background contrasts right, could probably do with some improvement. I'm trying to mostly focus on puzzle prototyping and expanding the world at the moment but polishing is a fun break once in a while.

[tchassin]

Those screenshots look really, really rad! I think the current balance between plain and busy is quite good, however I kinda miss the plants on the previous screenshots... I understand that the use of color may be used for special places only, but I think some (glowing ?) mushrooms or slightly colored objects could be nice.

[devMidgard]

As I said on Twitter it's looking, well, AMAZING. And I get more and more hype everytime you post a new screenshot.

Also (as I said too) I wish you the best of luck in your try to be an Indie Game Developer in your life, working in your projects all the day, it's beautiful to see someone trying to do this, and I wish you the best of luck!

Looking forward to see more!
Mid.

[Claw]

Those screenshots look really, really rad! I think the current balance between plain and busy is quite good, however I kinda miss the plants on the previous screenshots... I understand that the use of color may be used for special places only, but I think some (glowing ?) mushrooms or slightly colored objects could be nice.

Cheers for the feedback, you're right, it could do with some accented colour like the plants in the previous area. There are bits in this area that have strong colours used for glowing things on moving objects but I'll think about how I can add more static colour to the area too.

As I said on Twitter it's looking, well, AMAZING. And I get more and more hype everytime you post a new screenshot.

Also (as I said too) I wish you the best of luck in your try to be an Indie Game Developer in your life, working in your projects all the day, it's beautiful to see someone trying to do this, and I wish you the best of luck!

Looking forward to see more!
Mid.

Cheers!

[Claw]

Technical fun time/RANT TIME

Been trying to optimise rendering with multiple light sources and stuff as it was getting a bit laggy in full screen which wouldn't do. Also it just wouldn't work properly on my mac, eventually got it running at a snails pace even when I didn't have other lights in the scene which was odd.

It turns out you can't loop using a uniform variable in GLSL (can't do dynamic loops). I knew this but it ended up working on my desktop machine so I thought "screw it if it 'aint broke...", turns out it was broke.

So we know we can't do this:

Code:

uniform int NoOfLights;
...
for ( int i = 0; i < NoOfLights; i++ )
{
  AddLight();
}

After fucking around with it for a while I found that you can't get around it by doing this:

Code:

uniform int NoOfLights;
...
for ( int i = 0; i < 10; i++ )
{
  if ( i < NoOfLights )
  {
     AddLight();
  }
}

But I discovered it CAN do this:

Code:

uniform int NoOfLights;
...
int i = 0
if ( i < NoOfLights )
  AddLight();
i++;
if ( i < NoOfLights )
  AddLight();
i++;
if ( i < NoOfLights )
  AddLight();
i++;
...
etc

I know GLSL unwinds loops on compilation, but surely the middle example unwinds to my last example?

Seems pretty dumb to me that it doesn't do that. On the plus side it's working nicely at a solid 60FPS and I've got the engine locked properly now (I think) so it doesn't go mental outside of the 60FPS range.

[Claw]

I took a break from making puzzles and base-level world building (which is pretty mentally taxing/draining) and spent yesterday and half of today building the game intro phase properly.

Finally made use of a lightning bolt tutorial someone posted earlier in this thread (I think) which was super useful so thanks for that!

I'm very happy with how the intro plays out now, probably some tweaks to do later down the line but I've played through it about a hundred+ times for testing etc and I still love it, lightning + lighting + normals = fun.

I won't post any lightningy shots as they'd look so-so un-animated and be more fun to see in action, but here's a shot at the end phase of the intro as you gain the shadow/light power (calm after the storm):




I'd say the basic map is now around 50% done for the first iteration - takes time but I'm getting there. Might have some actual sexy audio soon for the intro + ambience instead of my own temp stuff, can't wait to see/hear the intro section with proper audio.

SO MUCH TO DO

[Ant]

SO MUCH TO DO

i know that feel

keep it up champ, that lighting looks rad

[PypeBros]

SO MUCH TO DO

But don't forget the #1 rule of game development:
RELEASE.

It looks to me that at this point, you've gathered a large amount of ideas and prototype them. Way enough, as far as I can tell, for a "shareware" episode of limited size that can tickle the players and bring focus to your development.

Hope that will help. The gameplay idea is just wonderful.