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[Sik]

Oh right, so they move (now I just remembered the GIF showing that section, whoops). Heh, that makes a lot more of sense (those are normal entities and their area just indicates which tiles are affected by them)

[joeyspacerocks]

Ok, so it doesn't always go to plan ...



That's what happens when you try and add another vertex attribute to your shader and you screw up the stride ...

Kind of lovely.

[ndke]

Make that a new difficulty: "insane".

[James Edward Smith]

2. I don't like the way your character looks. 

I think he looks awesome.

Thinking about your screen size and camera/view style: Have you given any thought to having the view gradually push in the direction you are moving to give you a better view of things "off screen". A lot of modern platformers do something like this and it helps make things feel a lot less claustrophobic, having a sort of leaning camera that will sometimes settle back to centering the character when you are inactive.

[Sik]

I tried that with zoom mode in my game (which makes everything larger at the cost of halving your viewable area - it's meant for people with vision problems). I tell you, while it may seem like a good idea, it's motion sickness all over the place. Honestly I would bother with it only if there's a serious need for seeing ahead (e.g. in the zoom mode I mentioned before, or if you have a character that's moving too fast to see what's ahead of you in time), and if it's added I'd add a setting to allow disabling it and/or slowing it down.

Generally, if the size of your character is small enough, you don't need to look ahead. Just don't make the character so small that it's hard to see. The average size used in 4th gen platformers generally is a good one (in proportion to the screen resolution, of course).

[joeyspacerocks]

Yes I've certainly considered it. I'm definitely not happy with the camera as it stands.

At the moment there's no shooting of any kind so i don't think I need anything too extreme but I may have a go at making the camera a bit smarter or respond to markers in the level.

For example if there's a section that requires some running and timed jumping in a particular direction then it'd certainly help to have the camera lead ahead.

Likewise if there's something dangerous below the camera can dip a bit so you can see what's underneath.

Worth playin about with. Thanks both for your comments!

[RoundaboutCircle]

Hey!

I sound designed some of the .gifs that Joe posted on this Dev Log.

Here they are:

http://vimeo.com/m/104767062

http://vimeo.com/m/104767063

I also posted a little blurb on how I made the sounds if anyone is interested.

Sorry about the poor formatting. I am in a hotel on an iPod Touch.

[joeyspacerocks]

@RoundaboutCircle - found these through a random google search the other day. They're great!

It's kind of eerie to watch them with sound given that so far the game is silent. Just goes to show what a massively important part of a game the audio is, yet so often overlooked.

Certainly motivated me to get working on the audio

[joeyspacerocks]

I've distracted myself again - this time messing about with trying to come up with a decent title page.

Acknowledging that I can only draw pictures that are 16x16 pixels I've tried to side-step the issue of drawing a decent title/logo for the game by instead generating one dynamically out of electricity:



The font is terrible so I need to mess around with ... there's also the nagging feeling that it doesn't really fit with the style of the actual game, however I always intended to have some electrical effects in the actual game itself so as to fit in with the theme of scientists-lab-run-amok, so I think I might feel better about it once I try incorporating the effect into the actual game. Or not.

Anyhoo, it's a start.

The implementation was easy in concept but a pain to quickly test out.

Each frame I randomly associate nearish pixels from an image (the text) and generate a spark of electricity between them using a simple midpoint displacement algorithm (that I also used in QB1-0 for the laser effect from one of the enemies). The sparks hang about for a few frames as they fade out.

To render a spark I have a 3x1 pixel image that I stretch over a quad formed around the line I'm drawing.

Given the low-res I'm working in I didn't bother making round end-caps or anything - seems to work well enough with out the finesse of a really proper solution.

[CasePortman]

Ohh fancy shmancy! I like it!

[ndke]

The logo looks really cool, the only problem is that the text is somewhat hard to read.

[joeyspacerocks]

Ohh fancy shmancy! I like it!

Thank you!

The logo looks really cool, the only problem is that the text is somewhat hard to read.

Sure is - working on a cleaner font, although it's surprisingly hard to tune the effect ... tried tuning it down a tad but the lo-res is really getting in the way.

Not to worry ... style over substance I'm going to have a go at making a kind of electricity-demon boss badguy out of an animated sprite and see how it goes ...

[jonkk]

Ok, so it doesn't always go to plan ...



That's what happens when you try and add another vertex attribute to your shader and you screw up the stride ...

Kind of lovely.

Holy shit! That actually looks pretty cool. Render some of that out, send it to a Video DJ or something. Ace!

[joeyspacerocks]

Holy shit! That actually looks pretty cool. Render some of that out, send it to a Video DJ or something. Ace!

I'll never be able to reproduce it now - might give it a try though, it's a great effect.

So I'm still plugging away at Spooky Pooky after a short interlude whilst I patched up QB1-0 with an iPhone 6+ fix.

Latest update is to tidy up some of the physics code so that I could impart some physically implausible reaction forces to platforms when landed on.



Similarly for floating platforms, albeit a bit more subtlety.



Tweaking this kind of stuff is really just a way of getting back into the flow of it after a bit of a creative slump. Going to change the control system next to try and improve gameplay as at the moment it's really just too twitchy.

[ndke]

The bounce effect looks great!
Good to see you're still working on this

[joeyspacerocks]

The bounce effect looks great!
Good to see you're still working on this

Thanks! Yup still going - determined to get a game out of it and nearly ready to start some proper level design.

So recently I've been working on organ collection. Well, it was halloween ...

In the game the hero must locate and collect his organs, each of which will then give him a power-up. Sometimes the power-up comes with a flip side. For example, collecting his lungs may give him a power (e.g. can blow things, or run faster) but will also limit his time underwater as he can now drown.

First up is the heart, which will make him stronger meaning he can now push blocks around.



Initially organs are trapped in vessels like the green thing above. At the moment they're freed just when the player collides with them but I'm changing that so that you'll have to jump up and down on it a few times to break the glass, or maybe drop something on it.

Once freed the heart runs/bounces away from him - when collected it sits up in the UI.

So basics done but need to work on the effects.

[macepoodle]

Ohh this is looking quite lovely! Very nice work. I also red your blog post and I love the fact that you wrote it in C. Are you using any type of frameworks for cross-plat such as SDL2 or GLFW? I'm only asking because I've tried a few tests in SDL2 but ran into issue with utilizing openGL in it and was thinking of trying out GLFW, which would you recommend?

[alvarop]

I'm in love with the way the water looks in this game. The title is cool, but hard to read. as other people said. It's too "bold" I think?

[joeyspacerocks]

Ohh this is looking quite lovely! Very nice work. I also red your blog post and I love the fact that you wrote it in C. Are you using any type of frameworks for cross-plat such as SDL2 or GLFW? I'm only asking because I've tried a few tests in SDL2 but ran into issue with utilizing openGL in it and was thinking of trying out GLFW, which would you recommend?

Thank you! At the moment I'm implementing it for an iPhone/iPad because .. well, I've got one. All of the game code is in C except for some peripheral stuff that sets up the OpenGL context, sound and touch/input events. So I'm hoping that I can lift out all the core stuff and start targeting some other platforms, at which point I'll be looking into SDL2, etc.

So I wish I could help you out, but not qualified at the moment - all my desktop experience is too old to be of much use

I'm in love with the way the water looks in this game. The title is cool, but hard to read. as other people said. It's too "bold" I think?

Thanks! Yes I've been playing about with the title and managed to slim it down a bit - I'll stick another version up shortly and see it's any easy to read.

[danieru]

I like the idea of changing the gameplay as the player collects organs.

The idea is pretty ingenious. It both unlocks new areas and locks off old ones.