next »

[pnch]

In-game gifs of the previous update

[Zorg]

Destroying asteroids is cool, but with more debris it's hard to tell if you will collide with it or not (for me, at least).

[TheWing]

Destroying asteroids is cool, but with more debris it's hard to tell if you will collide with it or not (for me, at least).

Yeah, those black scenery debris shouldn't be darker in colour than the wall you're destroying, imo

I do like how you can push the parts around :3

[pnch]

@zorg, @TheWing: True indeed!
I´ll tune the environment generator so as to never have similar black values on the foreground and on the mid (as seen on the green gif...). On the other gif the difference is way more clear.

Besides that, I´m a bit bothered by the foreground asteroids having a far more massive feeling than the huge breakable asteroids... will have to find the exact balance between making clear to the player "these walls are breakable" without getting into "this stuff is fragile" territory.

And @TheWing: being able to push the parts around was the hard part, I appreciate it

[pnch]

#66

Besides that, I´m a bit bothered by the foreground asteroids having a far more massive feeling than the huge breakable asteroids... will have to find the exact balance between making clear to the player "these walls are breakable" without getting into "this stuff is fragile" territory.

Switched the tileset to address that issue:

Looking better? The previous shapes felt more organic, but these feel more massive to me...

[Sharif]

Is it possible to change the shadows to the same color you run into?  I would expect you to hit the black shapes because of the shadow.

[pnch]

@Sharif: See for yourself

In my opinion the 2nd one may suit a slower paced game, but for the kind of tense and sometimes fast paced competitive gameplay I´m aiming for, being able to quickly read what´s part of the scenery (and reinforcing how much of the screen you´re actually NOT seeing) is key. Also, blending the foreground with the FOV helps with immersion.

Have in mind that the gifs show small portions of the screen. In fullscreen, you get lots more of fg stuff that intuitively help associating and "discarding as noise" all shapes with equal movement. As a bonus, that also forces the players to move to understand their surroundings.

EDIT: About the tileset issue, these gifs show the effect of combining BOTH tilesets.

[TheWing]

I think the solution might be rather simple, even; have smaller bits of black on the foreground? the large blobs seem like walls, but smaller debris looks like what it is, debris :D

And also, changing their colour to a bit darker shade, but still not black would also do the trick.. aka their colour being inbetween the breakable stuff and the shadows black?

[Sharif]

Hmm, i think its looking good and getting better but I would have to say if you use the black shadow why even have the debris in front of the player then if the intent is fast paced gameplay?  It looks good without having the objects on top of the ship and in the way.  Is there a gameplay reason for it to block your vision or is it just aesthetic for the particles to fly around.  I think the layers beneath the ship look good already.

[pnch]

@TheWing: To make them smaller, I´d have to scale all of the asteroids to keep the feeling of immersion, and the far away ones would possibly disappear. Anyways, it´s a matter of fine-tuning the numbers, will see what I come up with
@Sharif: Thanks! I´d say they are there to emphasize the feeling of space (removing the fg elements makes the game feel way more flat), tension (you have to be in movement to read the environment), and variation (just some levels will feature these asteroids). Again, have in mind it´s just a crop of the screen, when able to see the whole screen you don´t have to think twice what´s an asteroid and what´s a wall.

#67: Procedural asteroids upgrade

Just a google search away was a kind of field I wished I had for a long time:

Named "Animation Curve" in Unity, it actually lets you define any kind of curve for whatever purpose.

For example, I added a ramp to the procedural asteroid object where:
-x axis is the distance to the center of an asteroid (0-1),
-y axis is the probability of that cell being filled.

The previous curve returns the bigger (cropped) circle shown in the next gif, and the way smaller asteroids on its rim. The other shapes are examples of different input curves.

[pnch]

Following a change of day job that included relocation to a far far away place (hi Paris!) things have been slow as I crawl throught the consequent paperwork. Fear not, I am looking forward to keep churning out gifs from my new home ASAP, thanks for the patience! Also seriously looking forward to meet the local gamedev scene as well, feel free to PM me.

[Xonatron]

This looks great. Just chiming in to get updates.

[flipswitchx]

awesome.

[pnch]

@flipswitchx, xonatron: Thanks, welcome!

Relocation is taking longer than expected, it seems dev will still be slow for a while, anxious to get back to the usual rhythm, sadly cannot say when that will be... BUT I got an update

Dogfighting  games usually work around the scenario of your ship being disproportionately more powerful than the AI enemies.
The opposite scenario: being a frail ship in the middle of a big battle, was something I wanted to explore, and it offered a nice opportunity to test the systems. So...

#68: Epic epicness

A quick and dirty step in that direction later (mostly adding AI teams, and making drones able to target each other) gave surprisingly interesting results. AI and destructible terrain working together add a welcome subtle layer of complexity to the game.The following gifs are no stress test, I just dropped a few ships and filmed the havok, but it´s all running perfectly fine at 60 fps, even when the code isn´t exactly optimized for this scenario.

It's nice to be back! Also, as it is always the case, questions and C&C welcome!




 

[TheWing]

Now you have to add a 'havoc mode' to the game too, where you battle hordes of enemies!!

[pnch]

@TheWing haha, we'll see how that turns out!

#69: Yet another ship

Rotational inertia can be a bit too weird the first five minutes of your playing experience.
After that, you get the hang of it just fine (I've had a share of 6 years old kicking ass in Negspace to prove that point ).
Thinking mostly on exhibition builds, I thought about ways to making the first five minutes more enjoyable, without compromising the goal of making it a core part of the game.

One of the first things that came to my mind was the example of Rollcage, a fantastic PS1 racing game, featuring futuristic cars that were also quite hard to master. It offered a choice between cars with VERY different handling and speed, in such a way that some cars seemed just about impossible to drive for a newbie, but offered great rewards once you got the hang of them.

With that in mind, I just added a new ship to the game.
It is slightly more massive, feels more stable (...less nimble), and has a VERY eager automatic stabilizer...

Looking forward to see how new players react to it!

As a bonus, the quick boarding / unboarding mechanic means that, once you're good enough, you may be forced to hop between different builds in a single match  .

Frankly, I love the subtle shape differences between both ships, but perhaps they are TOO subtle ATM... What do you think?

[TheWing]

Frankly, I love the subtle shape differences between both ships, but perhaps they are TOO subtle ATM... What do you think?

Can't really say until playing the game itself, but from the gifs it seems it's not too subtle. Also, nostalgia points for rollcage o/

[pnch]

Hey there! Well, following an awesome reception of my last short film (50+ festivals and counting  )+ relocation + TONS of work, you may have seen that the devlog took an arrow to the knee. Just logging to let you know that I am sorry and that, though very slowly, Negspace still goes on as my main personal project. I am still looking forward to share my advances when life goes a bit more quiet but can't say when that will be. By the way, I just reached a big milestone in a complete AI refactor, lots to write about
Thanks a lot to every one of you that reached out to me during this time to check on the state of the project, and I hope to be back soon!

[marcgfx]

are you saying there is a difference between these two ships? I might be too tired to see it, but... I can't see it. But I did only try to spot the difference for about 2 minutes

[Sustrato]

Hey! Super psyched to see this project is still in the works, I almost commented on the IndieDB page a couple weeks ago asking about progress but I think the last update was so long ago that I said fuck it.

By rotational inertia you just mean the ships have angular momentum, right? Doesn't seem like it'd be too hard to handle.

I can tell the difference between the two ships, but it's very hard - I don't think I'd be able to with any degree of accuracy in combat, so if it can make a difference in a dogfight (and if it can't, why include the alt?), I would shake them up a bit.

Props on your progress and look forward to what's next!