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Noffle
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« Reply #140 on: September 02, 2014, 06:14:37 PM »

The internal cloud animation is subtle and looks good. How did you go about implementing it?
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pnch
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« Reply #141 on: September 02, 2014, 08:23:59 PM »

@YM: I agree, thanks for pointing that up! All those new bells and whistles provide me with lots of possibilities that I´ve yet to tame (that last front cloud is too blue for my liking, the stars on the back could use a more careful color picking, etc), but it´s being a joy to negotiate weird new palettes with these tools, and since my last project was b/w, double that joy!

On the other hand, the idea is using clearly "off-palette" color accents to quickly direct the player´s eyes to things that last only a couple of frames (except for the ships themselves), for example, the bright green buoys pictured two updates ago fade to white before you realize how "dissonant" the color clash seen on the pic is, chargers go back to white as soon as they stop charging, etc. Tried extending that logic to fireworks and it sure helps them stand out but, as you mentioned, they feel off, I´m seeing it as a tradeoff for now, and I´d love to try some techniques mentioned in the article for this.
In this case, since I need the player to quickly understand that something important happenned, standing-out a lot was prioritized over palette coherence (also note how they display over the black raytracing mask to emphasize the fact that they work with a different logic).


Here´s what happens if I use more subdued tones, closer to the general palette. To my eyes, while they feel more like part of the same world, they don´t feel completely right (I doubt anything that spans every hue could be), and that near-miss makes them even worst. Plus, they don´t stand out so much. That´s how I decided that, atm, if they must be outside the palette, better if they are COMPLETELY offside  Hand Metal Right

Of course, as an illustrator, both my eyes and understanding of color may be naive, and more eyes tend to be right, so please do voice your disagreement and keep my colors in check! Be afraid of the next update, though, I´ve seen some weird colors today!

@Noffle: Thanks! It´s actually a 3d noise seen through a 2d grid. Suppose the grid looks forward in z, both the x and y coordinates are static and posterized (hence the pixelated look), while the noise moves linearly in z, without posterization. Then you can apply treshold and noise values to your liking on the resulting thin and evolving slice of noise.
You can think about it as a tomography scan, where you see very thin slices of a continuous body, over time.
If you´re new to noise, check out this tutorial!

On unrelated related news: Negspace runs fine in Linux! (both through Wine and in native mode)
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« Reply #142 on: September 04, 2014, 09:01:13 AM »

I´ll be under a new mountain of commission work by tomorrow, meaning advances will likely slow down for a while. Willing to have something playable before this new hiatus, and since I won´t have time to design and test tutorial levels in time. I´ve decided to add:

Update #26: Hints!

Now, before starting each match, one random hint message is selected from a list, and a random environment is generated for the background (lots of random variables, so there´s virtually infinite backgrounds to see). Maybe I´ll keep hints for more subtle gameplay mechanics once the tutorials are done - if I can convince myself I´m not straying too far from the no hud concept. Plan B, the random environments could be used for some sort of procedural cutscene between the menu and the match´s environment, leaving it up to players to discover whathever´s not in the future tutorials (which is nicer, as long as they do). What do you think?


A random sequence of them


A quick selection of some that seemed particularly whacky
« Last Edit: September 04, 2014, 09:11:44 AM by pnch » Logged

SimplyRivet
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« Reply #143 on: September 04, 2014, 10:47:42 AM »

I am impressed with how well everything fits on the theme of this game. It's a very tight art style.

How are you controlling the craft right now? Just from what I'm seeing, I feel like it could translate very well to a joystick.
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« Reply #144 on: September 04, 2014, 02:26:56 PM »

Thanks! Keyboard or gamepad only atm, and now that you pointed it,looking forward to try a joystick! Controls are extremely tight though, so much in fact that when on a gamepad I like to tune levels down a bit, but I can sure see a version of Negspace running on a classic arcade cabinet Wink
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« Reply #145 on: September 17, 2014, 06:12:05 AM »

Hey, it´s been a while! Here´s some news:

-Negspace and all it´s funky shaders runs fine in Mac. PC/Mac/Linux, check! Hand Metal Left

-Got a batch of feedback from "fresh" players. Flying Negspace´s ships was HARD for them. It´s meant to be, but it seems I´d better ease the difficulty curve somehow to keep new users from spinning around like crazy the first minutes. The main hurdle is getting them to unlearn asteroids-like controls to get the idea of rotational inertia, and since there´s no tutorial yet...

There´s a lot of unknown factors to consider when handing the game over for feedback, and these can make interpreting said feedback tricky. (Did they use gamepads or a keyboard? How big were their screens? Have they played againist someone else?).

For example, someone told me he played it without split screen sometimes. Since that's not yet possible, I get he had never started a match (maybe he thought they weren't yet implemented?). Someone else, that he played it alone and was struggling with the controls, but then he wrote to tell me he booted the game with a friend and had lots of fun playing football the following day (it´s the hardest mode, since getting the small ball to the goal requires precise maneuvering).

-Since the game has yet to grow a fair bit, I´m thinking about ways to get some sort of stats / output to better understand player´s feedback and relate it to their actual gaming session, as the number of factors is only going to increase from now on.
That brought me to start learning web scripting and trying to revive an old linux box to get a web server to learn on, no luck with that last bit yet.

-Got the first chance to see young kids having lots of fun playing the game, I´m done  Grin

-Slightly upgraded the game´s website: http://pencha.com.ar/negspaceb/
Would love to get some feedback before doing the switch, to make sure it works for most OS/screens/browsers out there.
Also you'll see I splashed a few quotes from some of you who said nice things about Negspace there, THANKS!
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« Reply #146 on: September 18, 2014, 11:49:18 AM »

Update #27: First steps towards procedural levels

Expanded the code I'm using to build colliders from tiles to work from any texture (Actually, I modified it the other way around to start, but now that I've got some nice features on the already modified code...).
Then, I applied the code to one of the approaches I used for early clouds generation (discarded once I got the shaders working) and...


Instant (albeit still crappy) huge procedural maps. The green lines are the colliders, generated from the red squares (texture representation of the procedural map grid). Now what's left is coding a way to generate the tiles from the map grid, automagically replacing each big red pixel with a valid tile. Once that is done, it would be trivial to generate worms style procedural deathmatch / racing maps without much work, but hopefully I'll get a more interesting way to use all that code candy soon.

Rotational thrusters

Since I'm "fighting" the notion of magical rotations in space, figured I should add some kind of visual cue for rotational thrust, to reinforce the idea that, in order to rotate, the ship is actually expending fuel and mass.


See the small angular thrusters? To make that more physically accurate, since it's turning in place, I would have to add an opposing force in the opposite side of the center of mass. Initially I implemented it that way, but maneuvering became too cluttered.
A nice side effect of doing this is that now every thruster got their own direction and label (thrusting forwards calls every thruster labeled "F", and so on), and I've added another kind of thrust particle that dies and shrinks way more quickly (notice how thrust from rotational thrusters leave a shorter trail). Also, if I get to implement a beginner's ship, the player would now easily be able to see when it's auto-stabilizing your ship.

I ended up creating the boldened pixel font, and I think it was worth it! What do you think? Feel free to register so I can drop you a line once the game is ready, whenever that is!

Back to gamedev, and thanks for reading!
« Last Edit: September 23, 2014, 11:28:33 AM by pnch » Logged

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« Reply #147 on: September 22, 2014, 10:38:55 AM »

Update #28: Procedural levels, part II!

Procedural generation of levels has been in the back of my mind for quite a while. I'm quite excited to finally be able to work on the subject!  Beer!

I'm building over code that I logged here a while ago, so here goes a short recap:

-All collisions are based on the Marching Squares algorithm, which is mostly used to draw contours around pixels.
It draws the contour by evaluating, for every pixel, which "case" is present, by looking at neighbouring pixels.
For example, case 1 means that anything coming from the left will collide with this, case 2 will get anything coming from the top-left colliding, etc... After evaluating each pixel, it moves along to the pixel corresponding to the case.Eventually, after doing the contour of the whole object, it comes back to the pixel where it started.

-What I did until now was directly feeding cases to the algorithm, by setting a "case" for every tile, and carefully placing the tiles so that the level shapes complied with the way the algorithm works (basically, that there are no open shapes).

Now, I want to build my levels based on cellular automata, or any other "dungeon-making" algorithm out there that would give nice results. These generally output grids whose squares are either full or empty - for example, the red pixels on the last update are the results of a cellular automata shown as pixels. Building the levels with these methods allows to generate vast terrains automatically (think Minecraft), since placing each tile by hand is no longer needed (although still possible, in some cases).

Feeding the results of the cellular automata, and then applying marching squares, returns the colliders as shown on last update's gif. Afterwards, I'm evaluating which marching square case each square of the automata corresponds to (meaning e.g, this square collides with the top-left). Once I know that, I get the tile representing that case (e.g. a  tile whose bottom-right half is solid). Once that process runs for all of the pixels on the map, I get tiles placed perfectly over the colliders.

Once I got colliders and tiles lining-up perfectly, they can be used with most dungeon-making algorithms. These algorithms are, in general, able to generate a virtually infinite amount of different maps automatically.

Imagine that, instead of generating whole levels at once, I build them out of many smaller levels, as I build structures out of tiles. Let's call these smaller levels chunks. If I can generate an infinite amount of different levels, I can also generate an infinite amount of different chunks, and make levels using a combination of them:

Adding chunks one by one (note the scale of the ship, for reference)

Then, instead of building all the chunks at the same time, I can build as many chunks as needed in-game, given a distancce to the player. Provided the distance to the player is big enough, he won't ever notice that the level is being generated on the fly. Also, provided I use the position of each chunk as their ID, every time the player goes to the same place, the same chunk will be generated.

Adding chunks as needed, by proximity

Once you reach this stage, you're not designing you world one tile at a time, but the whole world at once! Any change on the algorithm used to sequence, load, unload, or generate the chunks will affect yout whole world at once!

More on this coming as I delve further into the subject, thanks for reading and looking forward to your questions, c&c!

PS: It seems sometime you can get "invalid email" when signing up on the webpage, did someone else had problems with that? If so, please please state your browser and OS, thanks!
« Last Edit: September 23, 2014, 11:34:18 AM by pnch » Logged

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« Reply #148 on: September 24, 2014, 06:55:51 AM »

Negspace´s monthly development sum-up is being featured on indieDB´s front page right now!
Whether you want to get a quick overview, or struggle to catch-up with the devlog, this is for you, hope you like it!
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« Reply #149 on: September 29, 2014, 06:25:41 AM »

Cool concept executed beautifully!

Really looking forward to this!
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« Reply #150 on: October 10, 2014, 07:47:30 AM »

@thecoolestnerdguy: Thank you!

Update #29: First showcase coming!

Right after mentioning (and being proud about) managing to keep a nice and constant flow of devlog updates, I stalled for over two weeks! Sorry about that, contract work it's taking it's toll.

Albeit silently, Negspace has been advancing steadily! It will be featured in an independent developers showcase in Buenos Aires, and will be running in many PCs at once for a week, starting this tueday! (It's in Tecnopolis, in case anyone's around) That will be the first time I'm showing a game in a game event  Toast Left! I'm both happy and scared about this, and really looking forward to see the player´s reactions.

With that deadline coming, I switched gears, and started polishing stuff:
- when a match is ready to start, there´s visual feedback about that.
- Pressing Esc eventually gets you out of the game (you had to press Alt+F4 until now).
- It´s now possible to join the mailing list from within the standalone (you can still join it via pencha.com.ar/negspace)
- hidden in-game QR code goodies
+ etc. (If some of that etc turns out nice enough, you'll see it in gif form soon!



The new score board iteration
(somehow never got logged, it's been there for a while!)

Also, considering that most players won´t have heard about the game before, and will not be able to play it for too long, I did some adjustments:
-Added another deathmatch level that´s easy to navigate, and small enough to ensure constant havok. Frankly, I prefer levels that are more about careful maneuvering, but to get that one needs to have spent a few hours with the game before...
-Both the hardest deathmatch level (Blue Moon, the one with the green-ish background) and the race mode were left out, since they are both pretty frustrating if you are still learning the controls.
-The match length was reduced to 5 frags (deathmatch) / 5 points (football), since matches between new users take considerably more time to get to 10 points.
-Negative scoring will be disabled (you lose a point if you get stranded - without energy- , or lost in outer space, but at worst your score will be zero).



The new deathmatch level.

Thanks for reading, wish me luck!
« Last Edit: October 11, 2014, 10:10:17 AM by pnch » Logged

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« Reply #151 on: October 23, 2014, 12:29:47 PM »

Update #30: First game show, check!

Negspace was shown in VJ14!

The game show itself was part of a much bigger expo, resulting in most players dropping by in between other attractions, and being faced with a massive amount of games to choose from. This resulted in extremely short playing sessions. With this in mind, I decided to adapt the game taking this into account before the event started.


The "adapted" game, labeled Negspace Arcade Edition, was designed to be instantly playable. Three deathmatch levels switched every five minutes or whenever any player reached five frags, with a short hint screen in between each. Every match started as soon as any player pressed a button, and 4 players split-screen was already configured.
With the input coming from 4 xbox controllers, this was my first chance to test analog input, which luckily works GREAT Kiss.
On the other hand, I was given a crappy PC during the show, resulting in a bit of lag in the more shader-heavy levels. Since the game looks deceivingly light to run, this can be a problem, so I added an option to switch off some eye candy for those on older systems to the backburner.

Besides managing to reach the event with a playable build  Hand Metal Left, I got the chance to meet lots of wonderful game devs -most of them in a giant "asado" with gamedev idols such as Al Lowe, Adam Saltsman (he even played a bit of Negspace), etc!
I also got to play wonderful games from the local gamedev community such as Helibrawl, Ernesto and Okhlos.

Long story short, now that the event finished, I´m inmensely grateful to the Buenos Aires gamedev community (most of which I hadn't ever met before) and invited speakers. To anyone who still hasn´t, be sure to attend your local events!

With plenty of feedback, pictures, and a more arcade-y build ready for the next showcase (TBA soon), I´m finally going back to actual development! Stay tuned for the usual trove of gifs coming soon, and thanks for reading!
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« Reply #152 on: October 23, 2014, 05:39:02 PM »

I just realized this brings me back to this game. For a 7 yr old back in the 90s it was hard!!! Anyway awesome, awesome report on the show and congrats on your progress man Smiley
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pnch
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« Reply #153 on: October 24, 2014, 08:42:54 AM »

@Scott: Haha, this one is pretty hard as well right now! Albeit here getting both that this is NOT Asteroids (more like Lunar Lander on steroids), and that ramming and grinding walls is a perfectly valid strategy to get to your destination effectively - or at least alive - makes the experience more pleasurable! I hope anyone who watched Gravity gets the feeling of clunkiness that real space physics comes with (although with less Clooney). Thanks, and glad to see you´re still tuned  Smiley.

Update #31: Forgotten gifs from twitterland.

A couple of interesting gifs slipped past the devlog treatment (forgot them right after posting to Twitter), so here we go!


Infinite procedural levels

I managed to get chunks of tiles tiles + colliders from cellular automata seeds created and deleted on the fly!
That means, I can now navigate infinite procedurally generated levels!

It´s still a very experimental feature, lacking a true design purpose right now, and they need work before they stop being infinitely boring, but it´s nice to have that tech working!
If I were to take this route seriously, though, I´d have to work on optimization, since generating all those tiles is prone to framerate hiccups on low-spec systems. Also, right now the level is built only from the Marching Squares test tiles, hence the thin black lines (and boring looks)!

This gave me the first opportunity to do some useful performance measurement, and the result was surprising: both the automata and mesh collider calculations, which I imagined would be heavy, tends to be trivial! The bottleneck comes from the generation of the tile objects. If I were to use some of this tech in-game, still based on cellular automata (which forces me to generate relatively large chunks of tiles at a time), I´d have to ditch the one tile / one gameobject model in favor of a - more hardcore  Hand Metal Right - unified mesh with modulated uv approach. Would love to hear from someone else who already took that route!


Individual thruster control
Remember a couple of updates ago, I introduced rotational thrusters? That rehaul allowed me to easily connect individual thrusters to actions, and therefore, both the escape pod and the behemoth now got the appropiate individual thruster firing up whenever you turn.

And, this last feature I forgot to even post on twitter!

Automatic stabilization

The main issue with the game being the controls, I decided to add a bit of help for new players without breaking the whole "floating in space" feeling. After toying with different suggestions that players made, I put in place the following logic:
If the player lets go of the steering controls and your angular velocity is over a treshold, it gets converted, via a custom mapping, to a time value. If that time goes by without receiving new steering input, the engine fires off an automatic stabilization routine, that simulates user input until the ship is back on a reasonable spin, or the player sends new steering input. On the previous gif you can see the ship getting to the top spin, and the stabilizing automatically once I let go of the controls. On a real gameplay scenario, once you get the hang of controlling the ship, you´d use this feature voluntarily by letting go of the controls after a hit or crash sent you into a high spin, or involuntarily if something sets you into a high spin while throttling forward (only left/right input is taken into account for this mechanic). When this kicks of on an extreme spin, it starts almost instantly, but when it kicks off from a moderate spin, it takes a couple of seconds before it starts stabilizing. It sounds pretty complex, but I found it to be a nice compromise between giving the player complete freedom and protecting himself from the high spins he might get into involuntarily. Most players don´t even notice it at all, but it sure helps to hone their maneuvering skills!
Also, anyone who played Rollcage may get where the inspiration came from Wink.

Welp, we´re on the brink of reaching 20k reads! I have no way of knowing how many of you actually read this but know that, as a lone, first-time gamedev, I´m deeply grateful for your support and spreading the word!

Thanks for reading, back to gamedev! (Feel free to take me back here with your questions and c&c.)
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« Reply #154 on: November 05, 2014, 11:25:42 AM »

Update #32: Flirting with AI

Developing a multiplayer only game solo is a bit ironic. I guess that´s why I started dabbling with adding some kind of AI to the game that goes beyond the missile's logic.It's also an excellent bait to get me started on steering behaviors, which I hoped to be able to get into the game for a while already. They are basically small and simple behaviors that can be added together to produce behaviors that look way more interesting, think a real life flock of birds, or any game involving herds you can think of.

Hopefully at least one of you may remember the old prototype gif. See the small AI controlled ship?
It had a dull AI that consisted of: look at player/get close/shoot. However, as you may see, it was able to kick my ass.

Old stencyl prototype

That poor ship had yet to come back after the Unity rewrite. Since it was past time to fix that, I decided to use it as a hotbed for the new tech. The old AI was ditched, and a gif recorded after a couple days of work on the new tech shows that it's now kicking my ass again(All other ships are AI controlled).

First steps towards a new enemy AI

The rewritten AI "thinks" as follows:

-If I'm spinning like crazy, counter the spin to stabilize myself.
-If there's a target close by, spin towards it (aim), and shoot once it's right in front (the weapon subsystem decides if the weapon it's loaded, etc.).
-If there's no target around, check the surroundings to see if steering towards a particular direction is needed to avoid collisions (the colored rays).
-If no particular direction is suggested, just steer slowly in a random direction by a random amount, and activate the thrusters  if the random amount is low enough.

In fact, its key feature is that it can enter spins!
The old AI was based on direct rotations, and this one is based on angular velocities, as anything floating in space should be!
This means that if the ship collides with anything, it will probably start spinning and will have to take that spin in account when deciding what to do next.

Right now the actual code is a mess, but it's already returning interesting results. Betting which ship will win is already proving fun:

AI test battle, seen from the editor

Enemies, like missiles, will prioritize shooting decoys to human-controlled ships, so throwing a decoy in front of them making them shoot gives you a window of opportunity (as they recharge) or if you're extremely lucky, this kind of stuff can happen:

Diverting a missile into an enemy using a decoy

Aand, back to gamedev.
What do you think? Feel welcome to leave C&C! Coffee
Also, It's the first time I'm showing bits of more frantic combat. A bit of feedback on these last gifs would be nice.

I have another local event coming, so possibly next update will be about optimizing stuff for a low-end laptop! (Wouldn't want to repeat that mistake after last show).
« Last Edit: November 05, 2014, 11:36:56 AM by pnch » Logged

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« Reply #155 on: November 05, 2014, 01:15:17 PM »

Very very awesome!!! :D
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« Reply #156 on: November 10, 2014, 11:53:04 AM »

@sidbarnhoorn: Thanks a lot!

You, sir reader: The devlog got over 20k reads! My most sincere thanks to each and every one of you! You caught me off guard this time, will have to think how to celebrate. In the meantime, if you' ve been following along silently, you'd do myself a great favor by helping spread the word via twitter and facebook. Chances are none of your friends has heard from Negspace yet!

Update #33: Fear the low-spec laptop

Since the game relies in very precise controls and split-second decisions, if it falls below 60fps it's not just an aesthetics problem, it can become impossible to play.
Of course, with modern PCs / consoles (hopefully someday  Smiley) that's not a problem, but I found myself having to showcase the game in an event using a low-spec (AMD Turion + integrated graphics) laptop, and I knew that some days beforehand.

Also, the game aesthetics are deceiving, I guess whenever the game launches there will be a bunch of people going "I know my rig can' t run that AAA game but it should be able to run Negspace, it looks pixel-ey!", and, as someone that finds himself only with the mentioned laptop occasionally, I'd like to cater to them.

Why do I say they are deceiving? Most physics based games rely on friction or drag to get every object back to sleep (physics stop being calculated on an object once its speed goes under a certain threshold), or everything eventually stopping after hitting the floor. Here, SPACE means no friction, so physic objects don' t go to sleep at all! The CPU will keep calculating every object until the level ends. On the other hand, the infinite procedural multiplane shaders take it's toll on the GPU (mainly since I don' t have the Unity Pro license required for some key optimizations)!

To solve that, I've quickly put together a small script that, given a higher and a lower quality limit, destroys itself when needed. The, I ran the game alternating between my high end PC and the laptop, making sure every level ran at solid 60fps, removing whatever needed removing, and boosting whatever settings could be raised. Here's what I came up with:

(Dismiss the image size difference, that's just my sloppiness taking screenshots)

LOW


HIGH

Right now, just by switching between different quality shaders and turning on/off the heavier multiplane layers, plus changing the number of vertexes on the FOV mesh, albeit with a bit less graphics, both PCs run smoothly!
There are 6 quality levels right now, and you' re seeing 0 and 6. In between, everything looks mostly similar to 6, but clouds won' t evolve, and nebulae won't be animated (by using a lighter version of the shader lacking this feature).

Of course, these were just quick hacks to reach the event in time, but getting the game from utterly unplayable to running smooth as silk in the laptop was worth it, and now that I don' t have to cater to all systems with the same settings anymore, I went over the roof with the settings for the top quality.

Back to gamedev! And by the way, I showed it already and everything went nicely (2nd game show, check  Kiss), will come back to that in the next update!

And now that's sort of the 20k reads anniversary...
I'm keeping this devlog to raise awareness about this little utterly unknown game, but also as a gesture of thanks to the previous devloggers from whose work I learnt a lot and got inspired enough to start my own project. I'd like to thank them by paying it forward, so if you find that posts are too tech-focused, would like to hear about some tech more in detail, or whatever, don't hesitate to let me know, that's why I'm here!

Thanks for your time, and looking forward to your C&C!
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« Reply #157 on: November 10, 2014, 12:20:41 PM »

Good job Pnch! I love reading your write-ups  Grin
Waita think about the little man/pc!
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« Reply #158 on: November 13, 2014, 07:54:29 AM »

Negspace was shown in EVA2014's Indie Space

EVA is mostly industry-focused, so everyone attending was either "gamer" or related to game development somehow, it's nice to see how different crowds react to the game - the previous event was mostly kids!
I showed last time's build - adding the optimizations I mentioned earlier - during a limited time-slot (2 hours), and I was lucky to have at least two persons playing the whole time, which resulted in always having a small crowd around watching the matches.


Everything went smoothly, with the usual complaints about the controls while getting used to rotational inertia, in most cases only to get over it and play long matches later.
The feared laptop worked ok, throwing the occasional graphics glitch due to heat I guess, but right after finishing my time-slot, the display died! (this laptop had just come back from the technician in order to get that same issue fixed). Plus, it wasn' t the only dead laptop around! In short:

  • Stress test your equipment, "the game runs at 60fps" is just the start + heating is your enemy.
  • Bring an extension cord and adapters for every kind of plug.
  • Print LOTS of personal cards.

Lessons learnt, yesterday I left the game running in another old laptop for hours, since I'm lucky to have a packed agenda this weekend: I was invited to show this WIP version at the Astronomical Museum during Museum's Nights, and in the Centro Cultural San Martín / Meet the Game (Both in Buenos Aires), come and try it if you're around!
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« Reply #159 on: November 24, 2014, 01:16:09 PM »

Negspace was shown at La Noche de los Museos and Meet the Game!

La Noche de los Museos (Museum´s Night) is an once a year event where all museums in Buenos Aires (a LOT) are open to the public for free until 3 AM, with special stuff from all of the arts going on everywhere. This year, the game´s premise of respecting real life space physics (albeit in 2D) got me an invitation to show Negspace in the Astronomer´s Friends Asociation.

I was told around 5.000 persons attended while Negspace was on display. As an event open to the general public, mostly family-oriented, and with Negspace being the only videogame, I got every kid around! A highlight of that night would be a 4 years old girl being able to control the spaceship, and give hell to a 40-something.

I figured the Astronomer´s Asociation was the right place to put together a new, extra-hard and extra-nerd level:



Fight inside a centrifuge!


The following day, Negspace moved to a strictly gamer crowd: Meet The Game, in the Centro Cultural San Martín.

At EVA, the previous game show, I missed a way to quickly tailor matches to the players. To that end, I ended up adding a couple of hidden key combinations that quickly switched between levels, and even allowed me to exit the arcade mode and show the playable menu and the other game modes (race and football). Using these, I was able to tailor every match to the number of players and their abilities. That tailoring usually went like this: to start, give them the smaller level, once they start getting the hang of it, I switched to a level with an AI controlled missile launcher in the middle, then the centrifuge and finally, if they got that far, the open space level, featuring ship boarding and mandatory use of the radar. Also, when there were only two persons playing, I left out the levels that are too big for that.

That level of control was especially useful when approached by other game devs or devlog readers, in order to quickly show them whatever feature I wanted to without having to play every match to it´s end. By the way, It was SUPER NICE being asked about stuff that wasn´t there at first sight, meaning there´s more of you that I thought actually reading this compilation of rants in between the gifs, thank you for that!  Kiss Also, of course, special thanks goes to those readers who managed to attend!



Matches got quite tense!
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