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[empika]

Hallo!

Moar tools and some other bits and pieces this week, but mostly trying not to get distracted by zelda!

I've updated my sprite animation generator to create default battle characters. This is super handy, as I'm setting up all the character sheets, attacks and ai for this current slice, ready for when their animations are ready. Speaking of which...

Gary has been refining the style of the characters in battle, we've got some really cute (and mean!) folks now. I'm super hype to see them starting to get animated and in-engine:



Here's a new battle action. Spawning new enemy reinforcements. Blink and you'll miss it... as there no animation in place, it all happens a bit quickly:



I also proof-of-concepted adding footsteps when you're running about in the rain. It works pretty well, but needs refining. Might be a bit hard to see in this gif, those other rain splashes are a bit big, so maybe I'll change those:



This next week will probably spent adding some more cutscenes and then play testing what I have in place at the moment

[mysteriosum]

This game looks totally rad. Right up my alley! Amazing to see the progress you've made since page 1. Keep up the good work.

I skimmed most of your updates and didn't see much about the story. I want to know more! What's the evil mega-corp? What are their plans?

Will you post a pre-alpha build at some point?

[MPPlantOfficial]

Oh wow. That looks amazing. Reminds me of Shadowrun Dragonfall.

[empika]

Thanks folks!

This game looks totally rad. Right up my alley! Amazing to see the progress you've made since page 1. Keep up the good work.

I skimmed most of your updates and didn't see much about the story. I want to know more! What's the evil mega-corp? What are their plans?

Will you post a pre-alpha build at some point?

It still amazes me how janky those first few screens I posted are. What was I even thinking?

The story is still in the process of being fleshed out and written, I might try and spend some more time on that this week, it's not my strongest skill.

As for a build, I'll have to see. I probably will at some point. Maybe like an invite-only/sign-up thing to get some feedback.

Oh wow. That looks amazing. Reminds me of Shadowrun Dragonfall.

Thanks I've spent a bunch of time in Taipei over the last year, so that has really influenced the look and feel of the level design.

Cheers

[empika]

Hey there!

Completely didn't do anything I said I was going to do last week, this week. This week I got some of Gary's character art in to the game, they are starting to look really good. Even if they're not animated yet, it's great to see how they feel in game. (Looks the same as last weeks image, but that was just a mockup!)



I mentioned this in my last update... in order to get all the characters set up I'd built some unity editor tool to create new animations and such. I spent most of the week expanding these tools to create a whole prefab for the enemy. This tool will:

• Create the prefab
• Add the enemy components, including the assigned enemy AI
• Create a character sheet if one isn't assigned
• Create the animation clips and triggers for any selected from the defaults, as well as create any custom ones
• Create child gameobjects that control position offset, status display position, select icon position and where stat numbers spawn from
• Tie all the component together with references etc

It may have taken a few days to write but it's probably paid for itself already!

The other tool I wrote was to import character sheet stat values from a google doc. I'm rewriting a lot of the underlying damage formulas and things, so this has come in super handy for tweaking things, as well as being able to compare all the enemy stats much more easily. I'll create a clone of this for enemy software (ie, magic spells) sometime during the week too.

This week will definitely be rewriting those formulas and tweaking balance

[foofter]

Battle screens look awesome, and so does the swanky-cute arm-swinging run!

[empika]

Haha, thanks! That run cycle is super janky, it will be replaced by a real artists animation soon

[Gazillion]

Janky but super charming! This is getting more and more interesting all the time.

[empika]

Hey folks

Missed a few weeks due to a week of illness and then not having much to report except bug fixes, but today I have some new fancy gifs... Behold!







My amazing artists/animators Gary and Joe have been hard at work, making this magic wiz biz happen! I'm super excited about their progress so far!

It's been really good to get their animation in game and really see it come to life, as well as have some fresh eyes on it to help point out any wrinkles. For example, it was suggested that we replace the run forward and run back animations with simple single frames. This makes the game much snappier, reduces the amount of animation work needed and still looks great.

Lot's still to do! Whilst Gary and Joe concentrate on battle stuff over the next week, I'll be fixing a few battle engine bits and then shifting my attention back to level design bits. I need to tweak some maps and bits, and then do some estimate on how long the inventory/item system is going to take, and whether it's feasible for this target build.

Cheers!

[empika]

Heya

Late update this week as I've been travelling and things.

Gary and Joe have been cracking on with some more awesome animation. Everytime I stick the new stuff in Unity the game feels more and more alive :D

Latest things to show are... the new battle player sprite. Getting rid of the placeholder player has been incredibly cathartic!!!



You can also see that the perspective on the grid has changed a bunch too. This is to aid the perceived scaling of the player against the enemies. It gave me a chance to finally render the grid programatically, something I've been thinking about how to do for a while. After messing about in photoshop for a couple of hours yesterday (and some poking from Joe) it became clear that it was probably going to be easiest to do it Unity somehow. That somehow is with an editor script that creates a bunch of objects that each have a line renderer on. These are then rendered to a render texture, that is then aligned and displayed with a simple ugui image. My main worry was that the line renderers would be anti aliased, luckily they aren't, so look perfect when rendered to the small render texture and blown up

The grid also has a bit of a gradient added (this was also in the last update, but it's a bit more obvious now), this gives the battles a bit more depth. Enemies also get dimmed a bit when they are on the back line, then brighten as they take their turn.

Next, I added a quick little intro animation. It's not much, but helps make the battles feel less static



This week is going to involve some map edits and tinkering, and adding more battle animations as they come in! I'll probably be unable to resist tweaking battle timing stuff too

[Gazillion]

It's crazy how sexy this is starting to look. Love the new perspective lines too!

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

the new battle player sprite is just fantastic 

[jctwood]

this is just cybertastic!

[empika]

the new battle player sprite is just fantastic 

Thanks! Joe's work is excellent!! Both Joe and Gary have been blowing me away with their work over the last couple of weeks :D

this is just cybertastic!

Hehe, thanks!

[empika]

Heya

Let's just kick off with this shall we



I've said it before, but I will say it again... I'm so so soooo super stoked with Gary and Joe's animation!! Joe has done the player animation and Gary has done the boss (big mech guy) animation in this gif. We're still missing a few bits, like the player move frames and most of the spell/action effects, but I'm sure you'll agree that it's looking wicked :D

The idea behind the boss is that he rams the player (causing damage) and then hides inside his mech until his next turn, making it hard to do damage to him. He's weak to electronic damage though, so using this "Hardwire" lightning attack will mess him up!

You might have also noticed the UI has had a bit of an overhaul. After taking a while to nail down what scale/resolution the game will be, I've finally gotten round to shrinking the UI to fit the smallest resolution (320x240). Now everything looks a lot better, and there's no mismatch between the game and UI. So far I've only shrunked the battle UI, the world UI is next on my task list.



Getting everything shrunk down to such a small resolution has been a real challenge, especially fitting text in. Whilst looking for some bitmap font solutions for Unity I stumbled upon Fontstruct, a super handy site for designing your own fonts. It supports designing pixel fonts right out the gate and is super easy to use. For Jack Move I designed a 4px font and an 8px font for special bits (it's a bit unreadable for large stretches of text, but nice for headings and things).

4px (sorry the preview is a bit blurry):



8px:



Here they are in action:



I'm still not super happy with the layout of the top area of this screen, so I'll have to revisit it soon.

I think that's about it for the moment. Tasks for this week are to finish the UI refactor and do another pass over the world, I've been slowly adding more cyber-y/futuristic stuff

Cheers!

[empika]

Hey folks!

Spent most of last week finishing off the UI refactor. It was a chore, but everything is looking much more coherent now. I also took the time to add a new "Execute" menu screen, this allows you to use software (magic) outside of battle, so you can use your healing software etc.

Get hype for some UI screenshots!!









As a quick treat to myself after all that dull UI work, I reworked the battle transition. My original version was written before Unity enabled post effects in the free version, so I had this real hacky workaround where I took a screenshot, stuck it in a texture, and then used that in a gui element and did some weird shader stuff to it. This has worked ok, but has some downsides such as UI being present in the transition. I wasn't too happy with the glitchy effect anyway, so wanted to have another play with that.

Old version:



New version:



I've been a bit cheeky and used this excellent open source shader (https://github.com/keijiro/KinoGlitch), rather than write me own this time. I think the effect is much better than I'd have been able to come up with on my own. I combined it with the stock Unity fisheye effect to give it a bit of movement, cranking the parameters right up so it does some wacky stuff.

This week is mostly going to be looking at more world stuff, tightening up textures, look and feel, item placement etc.

Cheers!

[Ungrateful Dead]

I've seen this on my twitter feed a few times. It looks amazing everytime I see it, but going through this thread and looking at how much it's evolved since the beginning is simply mind blowing. The new animation work is phenomenal. Just excellent stuff all around.

Like you mentioned a few posts back, the 4px font can be a bit difficult to read at times, and I think it's mostly because you added breaks in the actual lettering. I think trying to stylize font that small is just going to be difficult in general. It looks good on the 8px version of the font though. I think that's my only criticism about the UI though. It's very aesthetically pleasing in general.

That overworld to battle transition is simply gorgeous by the way and I love everything about it. Nice work!

[empika]

I've seen this on my twitter feed a few times. It looks amazing everytime I see it, but going through this thread and looking at how much it's evolved since the beginning is simply mind blowing. The new animation work is phenomenal. Just excellent stuff all around.

Thanks!! It's been quite a journey

Like you mentioned a few posts back, the 4px font can be a bit difficult to read at times, and I think it's mostly because you added breaks in the actual lettering. I think trying to stylize font that small is just going to be difficult in general. It looks good on the 8px version of the font though. I think that's my only criticism about the UI though. It's very aesthetically pleasing in general.

Thanks for the feedback. I think I will roll back on the breaks in the 4px font, it might be a bit much. Although I've only used it for real words in a very few places, due to my concerns about translating that stuff in the future. I'm worried about finding a 4px font for anything other than a roman character set. I'll leave it for a few days and see how it feels after actually using it in earnest.

That overworld to battle transition is simply gorgeous by the way and I love everything about it. Nice work!

Thanks! It's certainly way slicker than the last one :D

[SolarLune]

Yo, the progress you've made on this looks pretty incredible. Really nice work, man!

[empika]

Yo, the progress you've made on this looks pretty incredible. Really nice work, man!

Thanks SolarLune, that's really appreciated