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Skydsgaard
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« Reply #660 on: September 21, 2016, 07:48:55 AM »

@JShrum.Composer Thanks for the support!

@Howard Day hey dude! very long time! I am PMing you right now

@Antraxx Thanks for the support!  so awesome what you guys are doing! Wish you the best of success with your KS campaign next month!

@digitallava glad you find the code posts interesting mate! I also like them a lot! Even if I only get 10% of it xD

@crusty Thanks for taking the time to write! Being honest, it’s something that has surprised me also. Barely two mockups and a few gifs in 3 years have made a disproportionate amount of hype, which I´m not sure is good or bad. Because yeah, to disappoint all the people who are interested in this scares me a lot. I am doing my best to offer something more than just visuals, having interesting mechanics and diferents ways to play the game, at least that is my intention.

And yeah, @Juju has been doing a great job so far. I am aware that the game concept is super ambitious for a two members team.. but he hasn’t run away..yet xD

@CesarD8 Thanks a lot dude! We are making a lot of progress these days!

The update!

@Juju have been improving the AI a lot, it is shaping really well (I will let him take on the technical stuff as usual xD ) but here you can get an idea of where we are:



From my end, I have been working on building designs, places where you will be able to produce units, research updates, unlock weapons etc, here a couple of draft designs:



Also here a few ideas of how to show to the player all the information needed without having to go inside every time you need to check the state of the building, the current research or whatever. But after seeing this, I think I will remove all the floating UIs, and try to find a way to integrate all the information in the scenery aesthetics...let’s see.



And finally, a generic animation that I will use as base for inside/out building animations (plus fading to black in/out).
It is known that mechs are not big fans of stairs xD but here:



You get the idea  Wink



One more time, thank you all for being there, things are coming together finally! <3

« Last Edit: September 21, 2016, 08:53:58 AM by Skydsgaard » Logged

io3 creations
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« Reply #661 on: September 21, 2016, 10:50:28 AM »

And yeah, @Juju has been doing a great job so far. I am aware that the game concept is super ambitious for a two members team.. but he hasn’t run away..yet xD
Sometimes two people is all you need if there' a good fit and the right experience/attitude to create magic.   WizardHand Thumbs Up Right
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Skydsgaard
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« Reply #662 on: September 22, 2016, 01:19:29 AM »

And yeah, @Juju has been doing a great job so far. I am aware that the game concept is super ambitious for a two members team.. but he hasn’t run away..yet xD
Sometimes two people is all you need if there' a good fit and the right experience/attitude to create magic.   WizardHand Thumbs Up Right
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« Reply #663 on: September 25, 2016, 06:19:09 AM »

It's been a while since I checked this thread. Fantastic that you are still at it, new animations look sweet.
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« Reply #664 on: September 25, 2016, 08:17:31 AM »

Yo word! Glad this project is still continuing. The graphical overlay is cool, but incorporating it into scenery would be straight ripping. I would make the contrast/distinction higher tho; and for tallies above three, you could change the system (ie III -> IV instead of -> IIII).

Keep up the good work! I'm proud of you!
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« Reply #665 on: October 08, 2016, 08:20:32 AM »

Looks good, glad to see this getting the day of light:) Toast Left
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Skydsgaard
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« Reply #666 on: October 12, 2016, 01:26:34 PM »

@chevkoch Thanks! glad you still like them xD

@7heSama Thanks for taking the time to write! I really appreciate the feedback, it is gold to me <3<3 About the contrast, I have received the same comment before and it is something that I need to work on a little bit. Because you are right, the most obvious element where this problem is visible is the weapon.. you kind of stop tracking the shape of it in some places where it almost blends with the background :\

For the roman numbers, it’s a good idea, even more if you don't have a big space to put them. But I need something that looks more progressive, without changing the “unit symbol”. Something like:



I think this integration of the UI with the actual structure of the building will look better than just floating UI (at least in the main gameplay level).

@Snowbox Thanks!

The Update! We have been working on a couple of things xD.

@Jujuadams had improved the level editor, the enemy AI and the platform’s shadow projection got implemented:



And he is close to finishing the main logic structure for the buildings Smiley

From my end, I have been working on a bunch of animations for the new element of the game I want to introduce to you:

Human survivors!





The way they will help you, after you rescue them, is kind of a mix of the prisoners from Metal slug’s games and Mudokons from oddworld Abe’s games Smiley



I hope we can show you all of this put together in a gif/video soon.

Thanks again for all the support dudes!
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« Reply #667 on: October 12, 2016, 02:02:03 PM »


Human survivors!




Is that a dude being roasted? WTF And man, your art is on point  Hand Thumbs Up Left it's really, really nice.
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« Reply #668 on: October 12, 2016, 02:52:47 PM »

Time for some tech!

I've been pretty busy the past week working on a spiffy (read: 100% programmer art) mouse-drive GUI for the editor, but I've managed to find some time to squeeze in a shadow casting system. There are two steps to this process:

1) You gotta work out where to draw the shadow
2) You gotta work out what shape the shadow is when it hits the terrain.

Irkalla is a platformer, that much is obvious, but the use of perspective in the environment and terrain means we need to be careful about how we render the shadows - they've got to react to the space as if its real. Sounds obvious I know but there are implications!

First up is where the shadows are going to go. This is easy in principle: We decided on a single-point shadow that's drawn where a line drawn downwards from the middle of the player first intersects with a platform. There's a bit of a hitch here though, we need the exact XY position and distance from the player. GM's collision detection is designed to work more efficiently between rectangles and doesn't like dealing with exact collision coordinates...


...fortunately, there's a system in the game that's already designed to work with exact coordinates. It's the pathfinding system! At its core, it's a basic node-arc graph with some special dispensations for enemy crowding and jumps (all of which will be a topic for another tech post in the near future). Whilst the collision system works with rectangles, the world looks very different to the pathfinding:


Not quite as colourful, but it represents the information that we need. Now it's a case of getting the intersection between the platforms and the vertical line dropping out of the player. Since the line coming out of the player is perfectly vertical, we can make some sweet optimisations that rejects any line that's too far to the left or right of the player. Getting the exact point of intersection is done with some simple maths.

The next step is to "mask" or "clip" the shadow. Shadows for most entities in the game are simple ellipses, including the player's shadow. But the environments are so detailed! It'd be a shame if my code used a grey crayon to doodle shadows all over the place. The shadows need to conform to the shape of the terrain, stopping appropriately at the edges and not drawing over the top of features. We need a mask image like this:


Anything that's black gets rejected, anything that's white gets accepted. When there's more than one entity on the screen, we draw all the shadows to a single surface (a.k.a. canvas/buffer in other engines) and then clip them all at once for performance reasons, and so that shadows don't interfere with each other by drawing at different times.

Irkalla has a looot of image files, not only for the extensive animations, but also for the backgrounds. And they're big files too. If we stored a masking image as well as a background image for every single part of the game, we'd have a simply unmanageable mess of PNGs that'll take hours to download. To halve the number of images, we're using a trick that's reasonably common in technical art that some people might not be aware of. We're going to steal a channel, in this case it's the alpha channel.


This might not be immediately obvious, but the areas of the background that are the "accept" portion of the shadow mask are stored at 50% alpha on the background. We realised that the backgrounds were only ever going to have pixels that are 0% and 100% transparent. That means we have a lot of space in each pixel's alpha channel (7 bits, to be precise) to encode special information; in this case it means that we can squeeze in some shadow clipping information on a per-pixel basis. A couple of shaders later, and we've got dense data storage for a neat and tidy shadow casting effect.
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« Reply #669 on: October 12, 2016, 03:27:12 PM »

I love Irkalla's style and the vibe it gives off... keep on!
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« Reply #670 on: October 12, 2016, 05:06:52 PM »

I love the art style for this so much, keen to see more!
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« Reply #671 on: October 12, 2016, 07:39:27 PM »

Your pixel art is really good! liking the updates as well can't wait to see it all put in a video soon, but I do understand the time it takes to make these things Tongue
Really like your technique there to grab the alpha channel for drawing the shadows at the right spot as well, wish my brain thought more like that when programming some stuff Durr...?
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« Reply #672 on: October 17, 2016, 09:19:44 AM »

And a very very raw test idea for the UI inside the buildings. Once you select what you are looking for, it will unfold with more options ( to do next ).


Oh god I didn't even see this till now. That's so sexy. Is that a 3d render or 2d sprites with scalers/depth layering? One idea: you could have the new option spin out from the right side, just like the old one leaves on the left, only at the same height it's at now, and then rise up as it does now. But that's just a tiny thing.

Now that the pathfinding/shadows have been updated, are slopes still in game?

The new art looks great! I went back and rewatched the video too and I absolutely love the square cubes swirling around the elevator. Your human survivors look like suitable grizzled badasses; will be glad to have them backing me up. This animation:



Looks both attractive and functional. Not sure how it'd translate to all the other GUI elements you need, but it seems you're on the right track.

How do you have such a fast turnaround on creating all this? I read juju's post about getting the "game engine closer to the design tools", which is obviously important (and something I struggle with), but a lot of this is creating new art from scratch, too. Do you have some premade assets that you work with?
« Last Edit: October 17, 2016, 10:25:28 AM by 7heSama » Logged

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« Reply #673 on: October 18, 2016, 08:35:45 AM »

Is that a dude being roasted?

@CesarD8 crunchy human meat, best on earth :D

@slowmath Thanks!

@orseoste7o Glad you like it!

@Aedous Thanks! I won't let this opportunity pass without saying how much I love your game! can't wait <3<3<3
About the shadows’ system, all the credits for @jujuadams Smiley

Is that a 3d render or 2d sprites with scalers/depth layering? One idea: you could have the new option spin out from the right side, just like the old one leaves on the left, only at the same height it's at now, and then rise up as it does now. But that's just a tiny thing.

@7heSama Thanks for taking the time to comment! That is a 3d render.
About your proposal, I am not sure if I understood it right. Do you mean like this?



Now that the pathfinding/shadows have been updated, are slopes still in game?

Slopes still in game Smiley

Not sure how it'd translate to all the other GUI elements you need

Yeah, me neither, I don't know if it’s going to be possible to fit all the UI needed in the graphic aesthetics but we will try it.

How do you have such a fast turnaround on creating all this?

You mean this?


This is not implemented yet. It is just a fake gif that took 5 min to make, the animation is pretty simple and it is always the same (which I like xD ) so not a big deal.

Jump of the survivors: down/up states



Thanks a lot again for all your feedback, it is really appreciated <3!
« Last Edit: October 18, 2016, 11:03:26 AM by Skydsgaard » Logged

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« Reply #674 on: October 18, 2016, 04:08:19 PM »

Looks really, really awesome. Looking forward to playing this one. Two devs is a lot of work but it's very rewarding Smiley

Love the look it has and being a fan of the Front Mission series, this is exactly tailored for me :D as I am a programmer myself, I am quite interested in the AI side of it -- is it scripted, hard-coded to all or each enemy type, or something else?

Cheers guys, really digging this one!

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« Reply #675 on: October 18, 2016, 06:59:43 PM »

@7heSama Thanks for taking the time to comment! That is a 3d render.
About your proposal, I am not sure if I understood it right. Do you mean like this?


Yeah, that is pretty much what I had in mind, except it could start at the same y-position as it is now. But it's your game, whatever you think best.

You mean this?


This is not implemented yet. It is just a fake gif that took 5 min to make, the animation is pretty simple and it is always the same (which I like xD ) so not a big deal.

Yeah, that's what I meant. It looks really good, very readable and responsive.

Jump of the survivors: down/up states



Thanks a lot again for all your feedback, it is really appreciated <3!

Look sharp! I was checking out some of my old sprites and felt a little pride to think that they were maybe of comparable quality to yours. Then I remembered I'd based them on the pilot in the first place..

Anyways, thanks for sharing, really excited to play this. I'm going to work on some GUI editor tools for my game to improve my workflow.
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« Reply #676 on: October 22, 2016, 11:52:40 PM »

I registered only to say... This looks great ! Keep up the great work !
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« Reply #677 on: November 05, 2016, 03:29:05 AM »

The animation blips for the buildings are now in ^_^
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« Reply #678 on: November 05, 2016, 05:27:05 AM »

Great you're still keeping busy with this project, it's looking better and more awesome every time! Smiley
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« Reply #679 on: November 06, 2016, 05:52:58 PM »

@Aedous Thanks! I won't let this opportunity pass without saying how much I love your game! can't wait <3<3<3
About the shadows’ system, all the credits for @jujuadams Smiley
Back atchya! Beer!
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