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[chriswearly]

Animated version



I did rotoscopy for this one, I'm happy with the result

Noice! I don't think I've ever posted in this devlog, but wanna say I'm quietly cheering you on behind my screen. Loooove the look of this. It's actually part of my inspiration for when I get my game development in decent swing

And also, with the Devlog Gold 2015 post likely going up after thanksgiving, this is one of my votes

[nt]

Always nice to see your comments!

Better Level hub:



Maybe I should tone down the greenish color of the light on the wall. I guess its a proximity thing since the standing light don't have this problem, they are further away from the wall also.

Changed the key lock to a actually lock on the door for level that you can't access yet. I think it looks better.

[Davi Vasc]

wow, this looks great. Love the atmosphere of the trailer.

[nt]

[SolarLune]

Mmm, that monster hand appearing in the darkness is excellently done.

[Silkworm]

Yeah those hand animations look pretty sick!

[nt]

Been working on level design a lot, making levels, making puzzle.

Man... puzzles are hard. This is the single most complex thing I have to make in the game. I make simple stuff sometimes and it end up being real hard for people to figure out, and sometime I work so much to make something complex with more steps and people just find a shortcut and finish it in one step.

I make a lot of play testing sessions with friends, it really help balance things out, find a better way to explain things, etc...

Been trying to find every source of information regarding puzzles I can put my hands on too, if anyone has interesting stuff to read on the subject share away!

My take on puzzles is pretty straight forward. You have all the pieces, you just need to put them in the right order. There is some misdirection sometimes, but nothing is really hidden, everything is in plain sight. Figure out the mechanic, the goal is right there in your face. For me if a piece of the puzzle is too hidden, it's not a puzzle anymore, its a seeking game. If I was making a jigsaw puzzle, if the pieces are scattered around the house, its really not as fun. I don't want to be spending all my time looking for the pieces, I want to figure out how they fit instead. I wonder what you guys think about that.


Here some screenies of stuff

[TitoOliveira]

The creatures remind me of the alines from Heart of Darkness. Gave me a nostalgic feel

[TonyManfredonia]

...For me if a piece of the puzzle is too hidden, it's not a puzzle anymore, its a seeking game. If I was making a jigsaw puzzle, if the pieces are scattered around the house, its really not as fun. I don't want to be spending all my time looking for the pieces, I want to figure out how they fit instead. I wonder what you guys think about that.

This is key.  I think you have it absolutely correct.  Don't get me wrong, I think sometimes if the puzzle makes sense contextually to go and find an object, then that's fine.  E.g. - "Finding the hidden key through a letter + encrypted directions because a previous owner of the house didn't want his scary brother to find it."  Even then, it's usually frowned upon if that requires excessive backtracking.

Ultimately, though, your idea of keeping the puzzles concise and within the same vicinity is far more accepted from the typical player.  I can't tell you how many games out there get a point or two less in their reviews due to "backtracking" or "fetch-quests," even if the items retrieved are involved with a relative puzzle.

[nt]

Been working on the look for the city levels. Here is some integration test of the new tiles.

(click for full size)


Compared to how it looked before, last year :


What do you guys think?

[aamatniekss]

Looks really great, especially with the added depth of the foreground stuff.

[PilzHere]

From what I've seen I can tell I wish to play this game!

[chegr]

Recently I tried to decide for myself, do I like high resolution lightning, as you have it now, or rather prefer the same pixelated look, as sprites have. I downloaded one of your screenshots, cropped it to be product of four, shrinked it to 25% using 'nearest neighbour' interpolation and then enlarged it four times. It should have made it the same as original, but with light got pixelated... but you know what happened  All your stuff is not placed on a 4px grid. Yeah, I saw that high-resolution light is way better, but the fact your world only looks low-res makes me sad. Was it planned? Why?

New tiles are way better, I think. Now seams between bricks don't get so much attention. It also looks more night-ish. But I think the light-block is better the old way, the new one is not so simplified and clear.

[nt]

Recently I tried to decide for myself, do I like high resolution lightning, as you have it now, or rather prefer the same pixelated look, as sprites have. I downloaded one of your screenshots, cropped it to be product of four, shrinked it to 25% using 'nearest neighbour' interpolation and then enlarged it four times. It should have made it the same as original, but with light got pixelated... but you know what happened  All your stuff is not placed on a 4px grid. Yeah, I saw that high-resolution light is way better, but the fact your world only looks low-res makes me sad. Was it planned? Why?

New tiles are way better, I think. Now seams between bricks don't get so much attention. It also looks more night-ish. But I think the light-block is better the old way, the new one is not so simplified and clear.

I did some tests at some point, to render at pixel for pixel size inside unity and scale up everything, but I liked the high resolution lighting better. The reason that it doesn't scale properly now when you scale down/scale up is because the scaling is done with the camera and is not perfect. The biggest problem is that sprites that moves (player, monster, items, bg, etc) move at subpixel increment compare to the overall environment. I tried moving the player on the same grid, pixel snapping, but it didn't feel as good to control.

I do have some rules that I will try to follow until the end tho. No rotating pixels, no subpixels, FG pixels blurred is the only one getting a scale up (2x, 4x).

[ANtY]

Woah, I love the colors and the graphics overall!

Seriously, great work, mang 

[chegr]

I do have some rules that I will try to follow until the end tho. No rotating pixels, no subpixels, FG pixels blurred is the only one getting a scale up (2x, 4x).

Good rules, follow them! I hate when pixelart have different resolution, gets rotated and 'subpixelized' (that's why I'm a bit confused with 'subpixelized' shadows from environment, while you also have 'non-subpixelized' monster-hands).
I posted about it at Nikra devlog lately and that's why I tried the test I wrote about.
Smooth camera though is cool.

[UmutD]

Game looks amazing 

[nt]

So it's a new year, I still got a lot of things to do on the game.

Something I tweeted on new year eve :


not sure if there will be a snow level in the city tho : )


I've been working on the game everyday for a while now, since I don't have a day job at the moment, and no contracts to work on.

I added some simple tooltips in the game to make things more clear with interaction:



I will show tooltips when it make sense, not the whole time, at some point I stop showing them, but I show them mostly the first time you have to do something new. I also detect if its a gamepad (xbox360) or the keyboard and adjust the sprite to show accordingly.


I also added speech bubbles. I know at some point I said I wanted to make the game with zero text, but, a couple months ago I had ideas for the game and story that i could only implement using some text. There won't be lots of text, but enough to tell my story. Adding a simple dialog system was kinda fun to do, using Unity UI stuff. Only the npcs talk, the player will not.

It will look something like this



The final version will not twitch so much tho
I devised a simple code to write my texts, and a simple parser. Text bubbles have multiple lines and possibly multiple pages, they are contained in page sets. This mean a npc can say something, then you press a button, it say something else, after the npc said everything he had to say, if you come back it might say something new, or repeat the last page.

it looks like this
"Say something/nThis is a new line on the same page//New page of text/nAnd a new line&&Totally new set of text on a new page if we come back to talk/nnewLine of text on that page"

This way I parse using /n as new line, // as a new page and && for page sets. I don't know if its the best way to do it, but its pretty simple and the whole thing was done in little code. I can hold all my text in a single text file. It also support multiple language, so I guess I'll support English,french,Spanish and Japanese. I can get it translated in the first three, but Japanese I have no clue, If anyone know a resource to help me that would be nice.

Thats pretty much it for now!

[chegr]

I also added speech bubbles. ... I devised a simple code to write my texts, and a simple parser.

It's sooo familiar. I remember I had the same thinking when I first started my speech implementation. It is the second largest piece of code after physics and it had been rewritten dozens of iterations since then. One day I added *bold*#and now it had started to look#like this. Right now it supports complex dialogues and I'm a bit proud of it. I hope it to mean more than just a story-telling instrument.
You came up quickly enough with it
Is head movements of protagonist a reaction to the speech?

It also support multiple language, so I guess I'll support English,french,Spanish and Japanese.

I can do Russian, if you are up to.

[nt]

@chegr oh man.. bold, italic... those could be useful, I didn't think about it. It wouldn't be too hard to implement, but I'll do it if I actually need it. You know, some stuff that people did a million times before you, but sometime you have to figure out yourself, I actually like doing that tho.  The head movement of the player is just from it's idle cycle, I would like to make it more interesting at some point if I have time.

I'm using my twitter metrics to see who speaks which language, Japanese is 4th place with 5%, after that it's very spread out, I wasn't planing on doing Russian, but I we ll see! also the thing with translation is that I figure you need at least 3 people or more that speak the language to make sure it make sense and the core of the meaning is kept