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[empika]

Not posted in a while as I was on the previously mentioned holiday and work has been pretty hectic since I got back, so have not had much of a chance to work on the game.

One of the last things I got done was allowing multiple idle states in battle. So when a player or enemy is below a certain percentage of health, their idle animation will switch to their "tired" version. So here's some WIP of that:

The player when tired


Decided against this version as it looks a bit lewd


And this guy

Also started on the inventory and menu screens, not much to show there yet though

Cheers!

[empika]

Blimey, been a while since my last post.

I've been super busy getting a build ready for submission to the rezzed leftifield collection. This has involved fixing a ton of bugs, adding a new menu+equip system, adding audio fx + music, a bunch more animation and tons more little bits. It's starting to feel pretty solid, although lacking in enough content for a good demo at the moment.

Here's a couple of (incomplete) menu screens:

[empika]

Hi there!

Today I spent my morning knocking up a unity script that will transform the scene view objects to the same proportions as when the game is running. As the game uses an orthographic camera with a 3D scene, normally it would look all squashed and foreshortened, so we stretch out the Y+Z axis' to pull it back together. Now I can actually see what I'm actually working with. This is something I should have done aaaages ago because it has sped up my workflow significantly today.

Here you can see the map as it normally is in the editor, all squashed when viewing from the same camera angle as in game:

And here it is with my new editor extension, looks how it would in game:

I've also been reworking a lot of maps, to extend the intro of the game as it was running a bit shorter than I'd liked, and also to make them a bit more coherent. Here's a couple of gifs of recents bits:

Bank holiday this weekend, so hoping to get lots more done!

[empika]

Been a while since this thread got an update but I've been working hard on getting a decent demo together and polished, which looks like it's worked out well because Jack Move got accepted into the Leftfield Collection at EGX this weekend!! If you're there, swing by and come and say hi

Here's a couple of new gifs of updated bits (I've updated the first post too)

[empika]

I forgot, I made a trailer too!

[empika]

Big update today as I've been working fulltime on Jack Move for the past 3 weeks or so and have made some really good progress! I've been concentrating on getting the battle system up to scratch as I feel this is where the game is currently lacking the most.

So far I've implemented...

Status effects!

• Overclock: Like Haste in Final Fantasy games
• Underclock: Like Slow in FF games
• Portscan: Once an enemy has been scanned you can see their remaining health etc. Like Scan or Libra in FF games.
  

You can also see in those gifs that there is now a turn queue that pops up when taking your turn. This makes using Overclock/Underclock more strategic as you can time which enemy to attack. I first saw this feature in Grandia and have always really enjoyed that aspect of JRPG's that feature it.

I've also been reworking how your Cyberspace Deck works. Battles revolve around your deck and the software you have installed. Each piece of software you have is essentially a "magic spell" that you load into your deck. The deck can only contain a certain amount of software depending on how much RAM you have available, and as you control only one character, managing which software you have installed at any one time is a core part of the battle system. You can change what software is installed during a battle, but that will cost you a turn.

The deck now has 3 "software presets" to make management and swapping between installed software easier during battle. For example you might have one preset for offensive software, once preset for defensive/buffing software and one preset for debuffing.

To counteract part of the cost of changing software loadout in battle I've added a system similar to Final Fantasy's limit break/trance/overdrive. Once you have dished out or received a certain amount of damage and your JACK MOVE meter is full, you get to use any of your available software, whether it is installed or not. The software will not cost any data/mana to use and will have 2x the effect. So you could use your best offensive software to deal 2x damage, or in a pinch use some healing software to heal yourself for 2x the HP.

Oh, as part of the Jack Move system I had to refactor how progress bars work, which gave me the added bonus of being able to easily animate them. So that's nice

Lastly I've been working on the Hardware or "equipment" system. As you progress through the game you will open up 3 "expansion slots" on your Deck in which you can fit hardware mods. You will find new mods throughout the world and each one can boost your stats, increase the amount of RAM in your deck or give you new abilities. Abilities may be passive, such as lowering certain elemental damage taken, or active such as counter attacking an enemy after they attack you.
Ive' still yet to implement the hardware abilities in battle, but as they are very similar to the status effect system it shouldn't take too long.

Still a million more things to do. I think the plan for next week is to finish the hardware abilities, refactor enemy selection in the battle system so you can select more than one target and a few bugs and fixes that have been bothering me. Busy busy!!

[kkairos]

I'm really liking this game's unique visual style. The battles remind me a little bit of the (old? old.) Golden Sun games on GBA, in a good way.

[empika]

OH MAN! I had totally forgot about those games, I think I only played the first Golden Sun, but it was great. Definitely going to dig out my GBA and dive in for a refresher asap!! Thanks for the reminder :D

[empika]

Hey there. A few bits to show off this week...

Firstly, I got "active" abilities working, these are status effects that can perform an action after each turn depending on the logic. The most basic example of this is counter attack. If an enemy attacks you, you get to take a free swipe at them. Other abilities will be stuff like auto-potion.

I also did some more work on other status effects along with getting "elemental" types of software working. There are 3 elements (not sure what the in world term will be, "meta type"?) that act like paper/scissor/stone. It always seemed odd to me that there are usually 4 elements in jrpgs and I can never remember what counteracts what, so just going to stick with the three. The types are Cyber > Electronic > Wetware, kinda corny, so maybe the names will change. So now it's now possible to have elemental software and then buff/debuff against that element.

It might not be super clear in this gif, but the guard is debuffed against the electronic element. You can see he has a status icon showing the little microchip + broken shield icon.

A lot of the week was spent refactoring the battle system to account of attacking multiple targets. For some dumb reason I neglected to factor this in when I initially wrote the system (eep, nearly two years ago!!), or I had some other plans that really aren't possible now. So after that looong and slightly painful process you can know target multiple folks if the software allows.

Lastly I've been trying to tidy up a lot of the software actions, although there isn't a lot to show for this. The actions are what executes when running a piece of software, so run forward, do x animation, spawn y damage sprite etc. There is still a ton of work to do here, it's all a bit messy.

I think next week will have a bunch of general planning/estimating and probably some more action refactoring, and maybe some more work on the story and environments.

[empika]

Hi there!

Not really anything to show this week. I travelled back to the UK from a month in Taiwan last sunday, so spent a few days jetlagged and finally playing a bunch of FFXV (which is equal parts weird and amazing), and then did a bunch of under the hood stuff.

When I first started on Jack Move in Unity, I didn't really know the "unity way" of doing things. Coming from a web server engineering background, I naturally wanted to make the game as data driven as possible, and my assumption was that I should store everything in json files and then load them in as needed. This has worked well for a while but I'm hitting the limitations of whats possible and easy to do. The solution to this is to move everything over to unity's scriptable objects, this includes all character info for the player and enemies, their equipment and software, and the cutscene system.

So far I've gotten character sheets and equipment ported over. The easy bit was as simple as slapping ScriptableObject or Serializable on to a bunch of classes, but then I need nice interfaces to edit all the data, so that's where most of the work has been.

So kinda boring, but very necessary work

[empika]

Again, nothing much to show this week. It's been more behind the scenes work on rewriting the cutscene engine.

Here's a shot of the new version

Some technical details... all the cutscene data is stored as a series of game objects, frames run sequentially, and each frame has actions that all trigger at the same time. Each action is just a monobehaviour. I'm just using simple coroutines to sit and wait for stuff to do it's job before moving on to the next frame.

I made a nice fancy editor window for editing the cutscenes, which has taken most of my time this week, getting the cutscenes running was actually pretty simple

[empika]

Hey there!

After a good christmas break I've been busy this past week, working on story bits in preparation for an artist starting next week (pretty excited about that!!), and some new maps and tile sets.

Secret hacker hideout:

Secret hacker hideout exterior:

Town:

I spent a lot of today trying to get the rain to look better than just using sprites. It's hard to make nice tiling animation that don't end up looking like weird repeating noise. So I've tried to use particles, which looks way better, but has it's own drawbacks, my main gripe at the moment is that they are not pixel perfect, ie rain can end up being off the pixel grid which i'd rather avoid. So I think I will end up writing my own particle system just spawning and pooling unity sprites.

The last thing I need to fix with the rain is clipping any rain that's drawn over the cameras background, when there is no level geometry behind it. I've got a shader that get's halfway there but it's not quite perfect.

As you can see in this image, the blend mode darkens the rain in the black area at the bottom of the screen, but it's still drawing it. This is shown in the lightened area on the bottom left hand side. I would like to not draw those pixels at all. I'd love to know if anyone has any ideas how I can achieve this? I'm using shader forge but am happy to get my hands dirty with shader code (although might take me a while to wrap my head round any suggestions).

Here's my current shader:

Cheers!

[jctwood]

The music happening in the trailer is just wonderful! Not sure how you could tackle the rain rendering issue, hope you are able to figure something out!

[empika]

Thanks! The music is by Fracture, you can find more of his music (although not game related) here http://astrophonica.co.uk/ I'm super hype to have him involved in the project :D

[empika]

Quick midweek update as i'm pretty stoked to have got this rain working!

Ended up with a couple of shaders, one that stencils out the geometry and then another for the rain particles that uses the stencil to only draw over the geometry. There were some tricky bits with the depth sorting, but got there in the end. Still need to tweak the colours, but just happy it's working for the minute :D

[empika]

Hey, what's up!

Finally finished with this town map for the time being! Just need populating with some npcs, I'll get to that in a few weeks. It took way longer than i was hoping, but the results are worth it I think. I have a ton of fairly generic props now, so new maps should start taking me less time as I go.

updated the first post in this thread too

[empika]

Hi there!

Been a busy couple of weeks since my last update, but also troubled by some RL stuff which meant i've not gotten as much done as I'd like. Still, onwards and upwards!

I've mostly been working on a new scrap yard environment which will be one of the dungeons early on in the game. My current challenge is to create dungeons that are interesting to look at, run around and interact with, and also have some interesting puzzles. I've just been laying out the maps and chaining them together, but hopefully my next update I'll be able to show some of the puzzles in action

[empika]

Hey there

Another week with some real life stuff getting in the way, but I still managed to get a few new maps done. Nearly finished the scrap yard dungeon now, with just 3 or 4 maps left to do over the next week.

Here's that big generator puzzle in action. I forgot to turn the rain on before I made the gifs, but at least they're a bit clearer to see what's happening better.

I realise these updates are a bit boring at the moment, just a bunch of gifs of the maps i'm working on. So is there anything people would like to know about the game, or any suggestions for things I should post, technical details of stuff etc?

CHEERS!

[empika]

Hi there!!

Didn't have time for an update last weekend or this weekend... but better late than never eh

I've finished up the first pass on all the current maps for the demo i'm working on. Here's the final few I was working on:

City!


Run down area/scrapyard entrance!


City penthouse!


You might notice that the player sprite keeps switching to a different looking sprite... well, that's because I've been testing out some bits from the amazing Gary Lucken (aka Army of Trolls)! He's been doing a few days work on some player and enemy sprites :D Here's a better look at the player sprite...

So now those maps are mostly complete, it's time to tie them all together and turn them into a game! My focus over the next week or two will be filling them with cutscenes and npcs and things... which leads me onto what I've been working on today, a super quick and dirty npc waypoint system:

Still got a few bits to finish on it, but it's mostly there :D

Cheers, and have a good week everyone!

[empika]

Hallo!

As I posted in my last post, I've been working on cutscenes and bringing the world of Jack Move to life! This has in practice just lead to me improving my cutscene tools as I come across new functionality I need, like duplicating common actions, setting light colours, fixing my movement code and opening and closing doors!

I also worked on some code to help generate default character animation states, as you can see with my fancy blue box pal...