next »

[diegzumillo]

I just implemented the Floopts logic. Anything lighter/smaller falling on them and it acts like a spring, otherwise it just squishes it.

Then I put some sprites to make it more like a game and... it looks like a game! These small wins are super important to keep the morale up. The game looks alive now. And it's cute!

This is a giant gif though. Maybe should've been a tiny video.



I wanted the first level to be interesting without introducing curves. So I'm abusing physics instead. Missing from this gif: the wireframe thing to indicate curvature, which is dispensable here, and the arrows indicating the object's local gravity, which is indispensable! otherwise it's just confusing seeing stuff falling right, left, down.

Also experimenting with pickables. Not yet pickables, but the apples seem fun.

I tried to make that first blurpoo come at the player like a goomba. First instinct needs to be jumping on it.

[RealScaniX]

I love those happy squishy little guys. :D
If you eat apples... is it cannibalism?
This looks really fun with the wacky physics. You should keep other creatures like this: No enemies, but have some impact on physics, like being a spring (like here), stuff sticking to it or changing the objects local gravity.
 
Nice work!
And keep it up. I'm missing some motivation currently, too. Trying to do a little thing each day.

[JobLeonard]

If you eat apples... is it cannibalism?

About as much as it's cannibalism for us to eat other mammals, I'd say

Lovely update diegzumilo! I agree with RSX, it's a really cute gif!

[diegzumillo]

Thanks! =)

[oahda]

I mean, there are other possible interpretations, like Apple is saving the li'l'uns, like Rayman saves lums!

Looks great!!! Maybe you should have just a tiny curve in one of the corners even in this level.

[diegzumillo]

Thanks, Princessa!:)

Past few days I: completely forgot I was doing pixeltober. Had one giant crash while working on that level, lost some work and didn't open unity for days. Completely obsessed about machine learning.

Anyway, today I came back to apfel und wormen (meine deutsch ist eine shitse). I put some aesthetic curves in there, found some bugs in portals and connections. Fixed some, swept others under the rug and matched the surfaces by hand. Here's a video:





After working on this system on tiny levels for so long I was worried about performance in a real level. But it's fine. Surprisingly, since I didn't work on optimization at all. However, the game plays and feels like it's about to break at any point, or maybe it's just me? Maybe knowing it is about to break at any point makes it look like it. The physics is unreliable and twitchy, sometimes apple spasms between rooms.

I think the physics simulation could use more work. For example, when I stacked those boxes there, the idea was to make it fun to knock them around, like bowling pins. But I can't find good mass and friction parameters to make it behave that way. It's very unsatisfying!

Anyway, I will most definitely not invest more time on the physics engine, unless it's something obvious to tweak or something that breaks the game completely and I haven't detected yet.

EDIT:
I might go for another while without updating this because... um, it's very hot where I live. I only have air conditioning in my bedroom, not in my office, and this project doesn't like my laptop.

I also can't do much with machine learning, the new obsession, so I might return to my megadrive project lol. It was supposed to be dead but it's such a fun project to work on this laptop.

[diegzumillo]

35C today. And I discovered modern fans are POWERFUL. As most people, in my home we have a collection of fans from late 90s. I got a new one today and the thing blows like a tornado and sounds like a jet engine. I got it on my side right now, allowing me to work but the wind is drying my right eye. Seriously, my right eye has an unhealthy red tint and crumpled like a raisin.

Anyway. Fixed that unsatisfying physics thing I mentioned. Apple now has a more realistic physics to it. The problem was I implemented a terminal velocity thing as a way of helping me control characters with physics. So when you jump on a physics object it cancels vertical velocity. So all I had to do was add some exceptions and voila.

What I can't really fix, and not for lack of trying, is achieving a more stable physics simulation. Things jitter, small objects might get stuck on walls, and all sort of unpleasantries. I tried implementing something like a sleep mode, at least to keep things that are quietly standing still to continue quietly standing still. All my attempts failed in some way or another. So I'm calling it done again.

This means I can't rely on physics that much. Pushing a crate here and there, that's fine if playtesting doesn't find ways to break the level by pushing the block through the ground or something like that. Beyond that, cosmetic use is also fine.

[oahda]

Sorry about the heat. And the eye! Is there any way you can move your workspace furniture around a bit so you have the fan right behind you or whatever would help?

Video is really nice! Doesn't look as volatile to me as it feels to you. It was a bit jittery going through the curve that turned the world upside down (nice touch!) but I feel like that had more to do with the camera motion than anything. Nothing a little smoothing can't fix probably. Or if necessary, a little manually scripted camera behaviour for those places, which seems like a normal thing to have anyway, cf. the tower rotation camera in that Journey camera GDC talk!

[diegzumillo]

Thanks The eye was more of a tragedy/comedy bit. I mean, it is annoying, but no big deal.

The intersection jitter shows up not only on camera, but on everything that passes there. The player movement loses itself a bit, the camera jitters, etc. Everything that needs to know its surroundings gets a bit lost during that specific crossing moment. I can probably fix that, just didn't have the right mood to look into it.

If that's all you noticed I am relieved! I can't look at those boxes falling around without triggering anxieties. But it's all good. As I said, as long as they don't break the level itself I'm fine with it.

Since I'm posting here, here's a gif I made. It's a single scale-changing loop. Even now, with everything done in-editor, it's still a pain in the ass to create levels. This tiny loop needs a minimum of 6 rooms to work.



I'm kinda happy with the grid. I'm using a simple shader that makes an alpha spot, so the grid is stronger near the player. Because of the disconnect of the rooms I made it so it has two spots and it fetches the second position from the nearest portal, in order to stitch the spots together. It breaks the illusion whenever you're too close to more than one portal, then the grid disappears from one portal. I can increase the number of spots available but I'm still digesting my feelings towards this look.

[oahda]

It's so cool to see behind the scenes of the magic.

[JobLeonard]

It reminds me a bit of the Build engine, except as a 2D platformer

[diegzumillo]

It is a similar principle. The transformation from one space to the other is more involved a bit.

I was pretty frustrated because I noticed the portals were still kinda broken on specific situations. Then I went back to the code and noticed a bunch of comments like "I need to fix this case and that" and "this is broken, remake this" lol. I guess I forgot. Now everything seems fine. Again. I think.

More gifs. Because life is better with gif.

[Superb Joe]

that gif of a small test level has overwhelming possibility. magnificent

[nova++]

This tech is terrifyingly hacky in the best possible way

[RealScaniX]

I just need to say that your making of GIFs are awesome. Also this getting smaller and bigger is a crazy mechanism. Do you somehow know when you will become smaller or bigger from the level?
 
(PS: Also thanks for playing ST!)

[oahda]

I'm imagining funnels... Wormhole-style.

[JobLeonard]

Apple and Wormhole

[diegzumillo]

I just need to say that your making of GIFs are awesome. Also this getting smaller and bigger is a crazy mechanism. Do you somehow know when you will become smaller or bigger from the level?
 
(PS: Also thanks for playing ST!)

You can tell by the grid. Which I dumbly deactivated before making this gif. You can see it funnels, to use Princessa's words. The grid is not very elegantly implemented. Because, when changing scales, at some point grid lines will have to end and start, and they do so abruptly right now. And possibly forever, because I have no easy solution in mind.



EDIT: oh, this isn't a gif, in case you are staring at it waiting to load.

[RealScaniX]

EDIT: oh, this isn't a gif, in case you are staring at it waiting to load.

Haha... hours later... :D
 
And thanks for clarification. Maybe you could use some sort of shading or a pattern that changes in size to show this to avoid the hard switch in grid line distance? Just the first thing that came to my mind here.

[JobLeonard]

It's a relativistic gif