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[DustyDrake]

Older Sub-Terra screens, when we were going for the black and white look.





Sub-Terra DX

Sub-Terra is a Metroid-esque optional co-op game.
You are sent to find the reason why the earthquakes shaking the planet are gaining intensity and frequency, as the rest of the world is evacuating
You have are fighting against time itself to find the cause, and hopefully a solution, before the last evac ship leaves.
While doing so you have the option to enlist under REAPER or EDEN, both companies that want you to do some research while you're in the bowels of the planet.
We're hoping to have multiple endings to the game as well.

[DustyDrake]

Dare to compare






For now I can use the old sub-terra's level editor to make/load maps

[DustyDrake]

God this is annoying.
Why are the up/down inputs for the client flipped?
Hngh.

[DustyDrake]

Nothing much today, just teaching a friend how to use the level editor (He made this map, but I had to clean it up some.)
Having someone else use the editor really helped me realize that I do need to make it a bit more user friendly even if there's going to be very few people using it if I don't release it.


Also who could this fellow-without-any-ai-yet be?
He's a placeable entity in the editor, but I hadn't coded the main game to recognize him yet. I did so when my friend placed some in the maps.


Also I synced up enemies and firing so now the game is kinda playable in multiplayer!
(Second player got hit here, hence the red tint)

[cragwind]

I'm guessing there's a bug infestation .. Is that part of the plot?

At a quick glance, it's hard for me to distinguish the floors/ceilings from the background wall.

[DustyDrake]

Well those are the only enemy coded in right now, so I tend to over use them right now.
The terrain graphics are only temporary as well.

[DustyDrake]

:S
Trying to get the game to work with multiple depths of terrain is hard.


Or not really.

[DustyDrake]

See it in motion, but don't stare at the bugs!

[Yanko]

I liked the camera movement, but how will you handle it along different rooms? Will all rooms be visible at all times, or will you occlude them based on the player's sight?

[DustyDrake]

It'll behave a bit like CaveStory, where you simply move from one room file to another.
When a player enters a door, there'll be a brief period where everything stops, and the game zooms in on whoever is entering the door.

[DustyDrake]

This is not how lighting works.
I don't know jack about normals.
Weeeeeeee~

[DustyDrake]

Look it's the outside!

I LIED

The important bit to note is that this is all controlled through the entity's meta-data, so all those blocks are more or less the same object. Makes my life a little easier, as I don't have to supply specific tile ID's and whoever ends up making maps will be able to choose a texture for each side of the block

[DustyDrake]

Room transitioning, moon-walking, and seeing the matrix or some other clever phrase to describe a glitch

[DustyDrake]

Kinda spoilers ahead, be warned.

So I have a bit of a conundrum here.
There's a secret company in Sub-Terra that you can align with called NEMESIS which allows you to stay neutral.
This company when I originally wrote the name down two years ago was either a Cave Story reference, or a reference to an old character from a project I was working on four years ago. Since then I've forgotten, but decided to go with the Cave Story reference since the game is kinda like Cave Story, and we're recycling some old weapon ideas from yet a third project, which was called (surprise!) Cave Story: Online and was supposed to be the Mimiga War, but playable. So I decided to use the armor design for that as the NEMESIS armor in Sub-Terra. Which is yet ANOTHER problem because the armor design isn't even mine!

But I love the armor design, so I don't want to scrap it. But I also might want to try selling Sub-Terra if the interest in it ever picks up.

What in the hell do I do?

Here are the sprites, with the Sub-Terran versions, CS:O versions and Q/C from Cave Story.
Player One's design looked so much like Quote that I had to change the torso and legs completely, but Player Two's looked different enough due to the change from Red-to-Blue and White-to-Purple that I kept it.

The image where I got the CS:O armor from (Also a link to the author's website:

[DustyDrake]

Having to go through and do some draw code optimizations, I tried making a "small" room, with the minimum amount of detail I'd like to be in a normal level, and the game is lagging quite a bit.

[DustyDrake]

(Pulled the camera back a bit)
So I got the level to run at 30 fps again, and I saw some issues with z-fighting.
Of course, I was confused, I had just moved that code out of the draw event into an alarm, and now it wasn't working?

Well, it's kinda working.
Weird.

But if you look at my old screenshot for the outside textures

Seems like it didn't work completely in the first place.

[DustyDrake]

Leaving the poor culling issue alone for now, I got some initial workings into drop in/out co-op