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[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #152 - 01/28/2015

I think you could do corner raycast + some minor tweaking to give it that nice springy feel ...

For example sometimes if I want just a little bit of easing, instead of directly setting position I set the position to "actualPos = lastPos*lagParam + targetPos*(1-lagParam)" where lagParam is a value greater than 0 and less than 1 ... (this assumes you have a fixed update rate, for delta time this needs to be done differently)

Yes! Good call. I will definitely consider adding that. I'll probably wait until the basics of carrying things is finalized before doing that though. The code is still pretty messy and I'm cleaning that up first.

Triangle Update

I've been quite busy with logistical and administrative side of things these last two days, so haven't done a lot with respect to development.

One thing I did change is the shape of the triangles on the sides of the cubes. They used to be equilateral, but now it's an isosceles triangle.



The reason is because I noticed that with equilateral triangle, a lot of playtesters didn't realize that the triangle was supposed to be pointing in the direction of the cube's gravity.

Some people thought they were supposed to match the triangle pattern with something.

I think this is because equilateral triangle seems too neutral?

An isosceles triangle seems to be more deliberate, like it's actually pointing at something. I'll have to playtest this and see.

I did get rid of the grid pattern on the cube, which I should have done a long time ago.

Wrist and Shoulder

My wrist and right shoulder had been bothering me quite a bit about a week ago. Pretty sure it was because I was spending way too much time in front of the computer.

Anyway, I finally decided to do something about it.

I started doing yoga again on a daily basis (had been doing it quite a bit during the summer, then stopped for a few months because I was traveling so much). By the third day, most of my shoulder pain was gone.

I also ordered a pair of SoftFlex computer gloves. I had seen a few other game devs wear them, and decided to give them a try.



I've only just started wearing them, but have definitely noticed improvements. There are cushions on the bottom that really help support the wrist when typing and using a mouth (or in my case a trackball).

I'm also just trying to limit the amount of time I spend in front of the computer in general.

[ofx360]

Could use an equilateral triangle, but instead of keeping them in the middle of the box, you could put them towards the bottom of the box (and maybe make them a bit smaller?). I think that might communicate intent even better.

[sam_suite]

Yeah, and then you could maybe have the bottom of the box be completely white. might be neat.

[William Chyr]

Could use an equilateral triangle, but instead of keeping them in the middle of the box, you could put them towards the bottom of the box (and maybe make them a bit smaller?). I think that might communicate intent even better.

That could work. It seems like I might as well just go for an arrow though if that's the case. Will definitely try it.

Yeah, and then you could maybe have the bottom of the box be completely white. might be neat.

Making the bottom of the box white wouldn't really work. For one, it's the bottom of the box, so you can't really see it, and two, the color of the box is important in communicating which gravity it belongs to. Having it white would make it hard to tell, so it'd interfere with the gameplay.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #153 - 01/29/2015

Still very busy with admin and logistical stuff lately. However, I recently came across some really useful level design resources. I shared them on twitter, but thought it would be really helpful to have a list with them altogether. This way, I could just link people directly to this, instead of having to track down each item separately.

Level Design Resources

This is a list of talks, articles, and other resources that I have found to be incredibly helpful in thinking about level design for RELATIVITY. Hope you find it useful as well.

Portal 1 & 2 Developer Commentary - I highly recommend playing through both games with developer commentary on. Lots of useful tidbits like how they god the player to look in certain direction, the reasoning behind the sequence of puzzles, and how each puzzle was iterated on.

30 Flights of Loving Developer Commentary - The developer commentary alone is worth the price of the game. Lots of fantastic information, especially with regards to how architecture is used to guide the player. A hallway is placed a certain way, facing a certain direction, with a certain angle of curvature, in order to guide the player to see a specific thing.



- John Romero plays through Doom and comments on the level design in all the levels. Do watch all 10 episodes. Totally worth it. Lots of useful tidbits like avoiding symmetry, using contrast, and utilizing loops effectively. Very fascinating.

Antichamber: Three Years of Hardcore Iteration - Alexander Bruce talks about all the refinement and iteration that went into Antichamber. Really fantastic.

Jon Blow playing through Braid and commenting - Shaky camera, but totally worth it.

Wayfinding and Signing Guidelines for Airport Terminals and Landside - 200+ page PDF explaining wayfinding and signage design at airports. Absolutely incredible resource. A must read for all level designers. Seriously. It's a gold mine of useful information.

Walk This Way - Podcast interview with professional wayfinder and co-author of above document, Jim Harding.

How To Make An Attractive City - I don't know how valid this is from an actual urban planning standpoint, but for level design, there's lots of useful tips, like balancing chaos and order to create variety.

Everything I Learned About Level Design I Learned from Disneyland - I've heard from multiple sources that theme park design has lots of valuable lessons to offer level designers. This talk by Scott Rogers covers a lot of that stuff.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #154 - 01/30/2015

Yesterday I found out RELATIVITY was not selected for the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC.

This morning I got an email saying that RELATIVITY did not get into EGX Rezzed Leftfield.

 

Not going to lie, I'm pretty disappointed. I had applied for both of these events last year, and I thought I had a pretty good chance this time around considering how much the game has changed and improved.

Oh well, there's not much that I can do. It's always disappointing to get rejected for something, but you just have to keep trying.

Like my old high school chemistry teacher used to say: "Somedays you get the elevator, other days you get the shaft."

[Mark Mayers]

I applied to the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and also wasn't selected.
Apparently it is a <10% acceptance rate this year?

It's easy to get discouraged, but I usually find adversity leads to greater success in the end.

Keep up the good work though, I enjoy reading the Devlog!

[William Chyr]

I applied to the Experimental Gameplay Workshop and also wasn't selected.
Apparently it is a <10% acceptance rate this year?

It's easy to get discouraged, but I usually find adversity leads to greater success in the end.

Keep up the good work though, I enjoy reading the Devlog!

Yes, it seems like it was quite competitive. It's a reminder for me also not to get my expectations too high. I really thought I had a good chance this year, because the so much of the game has changed in the past year, and I feel like I've improved it quite a lot.

Perhaps it's not experimental in the way the session had expected...

But you're right, I can't let this discourage me. If anything, it should push me to work harder. I'll try to submit the game again next year, for sure.

And thanks for reading the devlog! Glad to hear you're enjoying it.

[Zaphos]

I think EGW has weird criteria; I wouldn't take it as a comment on the quality of your work!

(Also, maybe it's just because of my background in fiction and academia, but I tend to think if my work is not being rejected at least a little, it's usually a sign that I'm not doing enough or not submitting to enough places ... [assuming I want to have work at those places!])

[William Chyr]

I think EGW has weird criteria; I wouldn't take it as a comment on the quality of your work!

(Also, maybe it's just because of my background in fiction and academia, but I tend to think if my work is not being rejected at least a little, it's usually a sign that I'm not doing enough or not submitting to enough places ... [assuming I want to have work at those places!])

Heh. Yeah! I think that's actually a really good way to think about submissions and rejections. You really always want to be pushing yourself beyond where you're comfortable and accepted.

Regarding EGW, I think it's more just that a lot of similar games (Portal, Scale, Museum of Simulation Technology, Maquette, Miegakure) have shown there in the past. So I keep thinking of it as a rite of passage for RELATIVITY. Like because they did it, I have to do it as well.

Ultimately though, that's just a matter of perception. My game is different from those, and the path they took isn't necessarily the path that I should take.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #155 - 01/30/2015



Working on getting player falling and object falling to feel right.

For player falling, this is the code I'm using:

Code:

if (GetComponent<Rigidbody>().velocity.sqrMagnitude < terminalSpeed * terminalSpeed)
{
     gravityVelocityChange += gravity * myNormal * -1 * Time.deltaTime;                 
     GetComponent<Rigidbody>().AddForce(gravityVelocityChange, ForceMode.Acceleration);
}

As long as the player's falling speed is less then the terminal speed I've set (70), the acceleration will be applied to the player.

ForceMode.Acceleration applies a continuous acceleration to the rigidbody, regardless of mass.

All in all, this feels pretty good. When the player initially jumps off a ledge, the fall speed is slow, and then the player accelerates and picks up speed, until the player is traveling at terminal velocity. More or less what you'd expect.

Now, with boxes, it'd be natural to think that it would just fall at the same speed as the player.

However, the problem for me is that in RELATIVITY, when the player switches to another wall while carrying a box, I need that box to drop and fall all the way to the floor. I do that by having the player drop the box turning the rotation, and not switching off the gravity for the box until the player has completely rotated onto the new surface.

When using ForceMode.Acceleration, it's a little too slow. I can tweak the gravity value to make it faster.

Or I can switch to using ForceMode.Velocity.

The problem with both these solutions, however, is that if the player is falling while carrying the box, and lets go of the box, then the box will fly away.

In Portal, this doesn't happen - the box actually falls at the same speed as the player, if you let go of it mid-flight.

The thing is, this isn't actually game-breaking. The important thing is that the player can carry the box while falling, and this already works. It does bother me though.

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #156 - 01/31/2015

Box Acceleration

I finally fixed the box acceleration problem. You can now release and re-catch a box during free fall:



Previously, when you let go of a box during free fall, it would just fly up past you.

The reason why this was happening was that in a part of the code, it was setting the velocity and acceleration to 0. So the box wasn't actually flying past you, it was having its speed drop down to 0, and so it looked like it was flying past you.

I've now made it so that when you let go of a box, the player passes on their acceleration and velocity to the box, so the box will continue to fall at the same speed.

Also, the box now has the same acceleration and terminal velocity as the player.

Split Depth Gif

I thought I'd try making one of those split depth gifs with one of the looping gifs:



This took me over an hour to wake - I was painstakingly drawing on each of 140 frames in Photoshop (because I had read online that's how other ones like this were made).

Of course, as I was about to finish, I realize I could have just easily done this using a shader and a depth texture in Unity.

Basically, the shader would overlay the white bars on the camera, and any geometry whose depth is pass a certain distance, you render it above the white bars.

So yea, this realization made me feel like an idiot.

However, I can now I can create a system that will allow me to produce these gifs easily and with more accuracy.

Mechanics System Overview

I'm at a point now where I have an idea of all the systems in the game and what they are supposed to do, and it's getting hard to keep track of it in my mind.

I decided to start writing it down, and thought I might as well share it here. That way, I don't have a bunch of poorly named word documents cluttering my desktop.

Some of these points might seem confusing or unclear. That is because this is really more for me to remember.

Cube (Single Gravity)

-   Is active when player is on its respective gravity
-   Is inactive when player is not on its respective gravity
-   Player can lift it up and place it above things
-   Materials change depending on whether it is active, inactive, or illuminate (when it’s on an appropriate trigger – has active and inactive states)
-   Cube is illuminated when placed on trigger.
-   When cube is removed from trigger, it is no longer illuminated
-   Must fall downwards when player lets go
-   Must fall downwards when player tries to switch onto another wall while carrying object
-   Cube does not rotate
-   Player needs to be able to carry box through portal
        o       Utilize phantom box renderer (that moment where the box goes into the portal first before the player
-   Player needs to be able to hold onto box while falling, even when going through the recursive world teleporter
        o       Also phantom box renderer (that moment when the box goes through teleporter before player does, it will disappear)
-   When player lets go of box mid-flight, the box should fall at same speed as player
        o               When player drops box, just take the velocity and acceleration of the player and apply it to box, so if player is stationary, box starts at 0 velocity. If player is falling, box will then fall alongside player
-   Cube should snap to grid (0.25 units)?
-   Cube should grow from trees
-   Cube + water + soil  = tree
-   When a cube is taken from a tree, the tree grows another cube
-   But when you take that new cube from the tree, the old cube is destroyed
-   Need a way to keep track of which cube is from which tree and if it has been destroyed or not

[William Chyr]

Devlog Update #157 - 02/01/2015

Continuing to work on box acceleration.

Started off the day with some weird bugs I wanted to fix.

This is one of them: for some reason, after you release a box, it would fall slightly faster than the player, eventually passing the player.



It's not really a game breaker, but it's kind of weird and inconsistent. Also, it means player only has a small window of time to catch the box again, otherwise it falls out of reach.

The problem was that even though I had set a terminal velocity on the box, I didn't set a terminal acceleration. So it was reaching a slightly faster speed earlier than the player. I fixed this by assigning both player and the box a terminal acceleration, which, when reached, both will stop accelerating.

Also, notice how the box flies upwards after it's released. The reason why this was happening is because when the box is given the position from the last frame, when released. This was a pretty simple fix. I just had to move the segment of code where the position of the box is assigned to after where the new position is calculated and updated.

There was also another problem:



I can'r really remember how I fixed this, as I was trying a bunch of different things and eventually it stopped happening. I believe it's because of an issue with layers. I had to make the box ignore certain layers, otherwise it kept mistaking some invisible triggers as the floor which was screwing it up.

Anyway, it's fixed now, and you can fall with a box, release it, and catch it again, and it falls at the same speed. Also notice that when released, it stays in the location relative to the player where it's release at:



This means that you can release a box, move away, then move back close, and catch it again, which is really cool. This actually opens up a lot of game mechanic possibilities. Like imagine trying to construct something while in free fall, having to fly around and pick up objects and bring them to one another. I'd probably need a way to speed up and slow down fall speed though...



Anyway, it also opens up a ninja move, where you release the box while in free fall, and then use that box as a surface on which to rotate and change gravity:



Could probably be used for some crazy speedruns.

[Rob Lach]

Ooh, these box wielding discoveries are great examples of exploratory programming as game design.

[TheWing]

Oh dang the box-mechanics look awesome, both for speedruns and perhaps some brain-melting level design :D

[eaxs]

My wrist and right shoulder had been bothering me quite a bit about a week ago. Pretty sure it was because I was spending way too much time in front of the computer.

I've had the same issue, especially with my wrist. What solved it for me was that I've setup my chair to a new height, so that my forearm and hand was aligned horizontally with the table surface. Basically you want to avoid having your wrist in a bent position for a prolonged time:

Correct:

Code:

----o-

Wrong, hand bent downwards:

Code:

----o
     \

Wrong, hand bent upwards:

Code:

     /
----o

* left part is the forearm, "0" is the wrist. right of that is the hand.

[William Chyr]

Ooh, these box wielding discoveries are great examples of exploratory programming as game design.

Yes, indeed! I'd actually never thought it this way, but I think "exploratory programming as game design" is pretty much the method I've been using for the past two years in making this game.

Oh dang the box-mechanics look awesome, both for speedruns and perhaps some brain-melting level design :D

Yeah! I'm pretty excited about the opportunities that this opens up. Can't wait to play around with it some more.

I've had the same issue, especially with my wrist. What solved it for me was that I've setup my chair to a new height, so that my forearm and hand was aligned horizontally with the table surface. Basically you want to avoid having your wrist in a bent position for a prolonged time:

That's a good point, and I've started to be more conscious of that. I definitely had my wrists bent upwards in the past. The softflex gloves help a bit with leveling the wrist because there are these cushions at the bottom that raise your wrists up a bit.

A bit source of my problem is actually the left Shift and Ctrl keys, because I use my left pinky to hit them and always end up bending my wrist in a really awkward manner. I'm now moving my whole hand instead to press down on the key to avoid doing this.

[mordof]

Saw this game a while ago on the Unity showcase list, and I am definitely following this so I can give it a try when available :D. This game looks awesome, and I'm even happier to see the discussions going on in here. Keep up the awesome work!

[William Chyr]

Saw this game a while ago on the Unity showcase list, and I am definitely following this so I can give it a try when available :D. This game looks awesome, and I'm even happier to see the discussions going on in here. Keep up the awesome work!

Thanks so much for the kind words and for checking out the devlog. Really appreciate it!

[Sjonsson]

I started doing yoga again on a daily basis (had been doing it quite a bit during the summer, then stopped for a few months because I was traveling so much). By the third day, most of my shoulder pain was gone.

I also ordered a pair of SoftFlex computer gloves. I had seen a few other game devs wear them, and decided to give them a try.



I've only just started wearing them, but have definitely noticed improvements. There are cushions on the bottom that really help support the wrist when typing and using a mouth (or in my case a trackball).

I'm also just trying to limit the amount of time I spend in front of the computer in general.

Hey again Willy,

I've been in your situation when it comes to work injuries too. I was very close to getting RSI which is Repetitive Strain Injury (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repetitive_strain_injury). Just one day my right hand gave me extreme shots of pain whenever I did ANY small movement. I took this very seriously and started some reading up on this. Seemingly RSI is very common in the professional e-sports scene and on Team Liquid (which is a StarCraft commmunity) I found this really good post on how to heal RSI: http://www.teamliquid.net/forum/general/134466-how-to-heal-and-prevent-computer-injury-rsi

I would recommend Yoga if it wasn't for the fact that you're already doing it. My last tip would be reconsidering to buy a standing table, I bought an automatic adjustable standing table on second hand for roughly translated 150 euros. It's undoubetly one of my best investments so far. Ever since then I never had problems with my back or knees, only strains in my shoulders but that's fine as long as I keep doing yoga.

And for those who think you gotta be old for this shit, think twice. I was only 22 when my back went all crazy and left me stranded in bed for two days.

If anyone of you truely wants to become a professional game developer, take this _very_ seriously. This is should be just as clear to us as it is to industry workers to wear proper gloves, saftey glasses and a helmet.

Hope you get better soon Willy!

Cheers!