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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsRe: Tower57 - Dieselpunk Pixel-Shooter (dinosaurs included)
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Author Topic: Re: Tower57 - Dieselpunk Pixel-Shooter (dinosaurs included)  (Read 65335 times)
Green Gospod
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« Reply #40 on: January 10, 2015, 01:55:48 PM »

I dig games where destruction can be felt during and after it's unleashing. Toast Right
The wall and surroundings destruction is looking lovely!

Cool lightning effect too. I've been working on a chain lightning spell myself, but I'm not quite sure how to approach it.
Do you mind sharing your approach? Do you just draw an animated sprite from one point to another? But if the lightning is longer/shorter how do you stretch/extend it? Or are there just many small nodes connected together and dancing wildly about?
 
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bounds
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« Reply #41 on: January 10, 2015, 04:35:12 PM »

Ahh, this looks brilliant, the first thing that popped in to my mind was the 'bitmap brothers' so I loved seeing that they were influences, Dan Malone did some great pixel stuff back then (Chaos Engine, Speed Ball 2, Cadaver, Z), damn I want my Amiga back!

Love the idea of setting an enemy on fire and it spreading to other enemies (players potentially), things like that add so much in my opinion and together with all the destructible 'props' and whatnot, this looks like it will be awesome to play!
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folks out there might think I'm crazy, but I've got to rescue Daisy!
Benitosub
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« Reply #42 on: January 11, 2015, 02:34:17 AM »

Thanks for the kind comments!

@bounds, Dan Malone is hands down one of my favorite pixel artists :D And yes, we're trying really hard to introduce fun mechanics, to make it a bit deeper than "just a shooter" if you fancy playing it that way, so the fire spreading is one of those mechanics, but we'll introduce a few more soon ^^

@Green Gospod, of course I don't mind sharing, quite the contrary!

As you correctly suspected, drawing an animated sprite from one point to another would require stretching as you move around, which doesn't look nice in my opinion.

Instead the lightning is indeed made of many small segments which "dance wildly about".

Imagine a sin curve along the "origin-target" axis:



Each intersection point has a relative distance from the origin (10%, 20%, etc.), so as the distance between the origin and the target changes, rather than stretching / extending a sprite, the segment points just move closer / further apart.

This looks rather dull though, so to make it look more like an arc of electricity you can modulate the amplitude of the sin wave to make it smaller at the origin and target points, and wider in the middle:



Looking better, so now you can introduce some randomness (still keeping it wider in the middle, but looks more natural)



And finally to complete the look, I make the segments thicker in the center and thinner at the ends:



Even with my sh*tty painting skills, you can kinda see where this is headed Smiley Add some additive blending, and make the segment-points move along an axis perpendicular to the origin-target axis, and you got yourself an animted lighning :D

Hope this makes sense, and thanks for commenting!

Cheers

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Quarry
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« Reply #43 on: January 11, 2015, 07:12:04 PM »

I like nitpicking on this so might as well mention it. Most of the sprite positioning and the lighting effect uses 1 wide pixels while everything else is scaled to use 2 wide pixels. Will this be fixed or are you going to leave it so?
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Benitosub
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« Reply #44 on: January 12, 2015, 06:38:04 AM »

Hey Quarry, I like nitpicking too!

I'm actually surprised nobody's called me out on the cursor yet ^^ To answer your question, the lightning effect will get fixed eventually to abide by the 2:1 scale, and the world items (crates, barrels, etc.) will be snapped correctly as well, however dynamic entities will still move with a minimum granularity of a single pixel, that's one concession I'm willing to make to retain nice smooth movement.

Thanks for the comment!
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Jonsm
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« Reply #45 on: January 15, 2015, 06:49:56 PM »

Wow, this looks great! I love the art and weapons. I also really like the idea of the environment showing damage, but I'm curious as to how you will do it. Will they just suddenly change like in the pictures you showed after taking a certain amount of damage?
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Benitosub
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« Reply #46 on: January 16, 2015, 10:03:41 AM »

Hey, thanks for the comments, glad you're liking it so far! There's actually a more detailed reply about this somewhere on the first page of the thread, but generally speaking it's a mix of both, some things may break suddenly (as in, go from "ok" to "broken" state in one frame), while others will show damage more gradually. We'll definitely be posting a more detailed update with animated gifs about this topic soon-ish ^^

Cheers!
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tower57
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« Reply #47 on: January 17, 2015, 12:37:41 PM »

Hello again everyone!

I’m really starting to enjoy this weekly update routine, so without further ado, here are this week’s additions:

Starting off with a new weapon: hand grenades! While not as exotic as some of the other weapons, they do come with their own gameplay characteristics (as everything in the game...), namely:

- relatively powerful (it *is* an exploding device after all…)
- area damage (missed your target? no problem!)
- grenades can get over certain obstacles, such as fences, which other weapons (bullets, missiles, etc.) might not be able to overcome (not pictured yet)
- come in different varieties (more on that next week, wink wink…)



The second addition of this week is blood! We’re not going for Postal / Hatred levels of violence, but it’s not Pokemon either, so, yeah, characters will bleed ( at least *human* characters … Wink ).



Blood puddles are not just there to look pretty either, they will actually slow down anything that walks over them, cause … you know… blood is slippery I guess? So new get-away strategy: bleed your teammate to death to slow down your pursuers!





Work also continued on the tileset, with more destructible states for the map tiles, such as this ventilaition shaft and these statues…





… as well as more props to populate the world (every good Big-Brother-esque dystopian society should come with pesky bureaucrats and their offices!)



And finally to wrap up this update nicely, as mentioned previously in the game’s description / mission statement, cooperative play will be a big part of the experience (though of course the game remains perfectly playable solo, with or without hired AI companions), so we’re working on the networking aspects (and all the potential headaches that entails) right from the start.

Here’s a quick clip of Cyangmou and myself barrelling through our little test room:



And one final announcement, for those who are actually reading this at the time I’m posting it, and want to see the art being made, Cyangmou is streaming live right now (you can find the link on his twitter @cyangmou)

That’s it for this week’s update! Hope everybody enjoyed reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it, and don’t hesitate to post in the comments if you have any questions / support / criticism / suggestions!

Cheers!
« Last Edit: January 17, 2015, 12:43:05 PM by tower57 » Logged

IndieEmma
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« Reply #48 on: January 17, 2015, 01:04:34 PM »

Looks amazing!
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EdFarage
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« Reply #49 on: January 17, 2015, 01:05:59 PM »

damn, you just keep delivering man, it looks really good

 Hand Money Left Grin
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Green Gospod
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« Reply #50 on: January 17, 2015, 01:47:05 PM »

I know the blood splatter is a placeholder, but the blood should really scatter more and not form such perfect shapes.  Evil

Also thanks for that lightning post. I then messed with sin curved but then in the end went with much simpler version. Basically I just draw a very small circle/dot, randomly (but in a shape of a lightning), every pixel towards the destination.
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Schrompf
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« Reply #51 on: January 17, 2015, 02:24:52 PM »

I like it very much. Going to follow this.
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Snake World, multiplayer worm eats stuff and grows DevLog
Benitosub
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« Reply #52 on: January 18, 2015, 01:05:10 AM »

@EddCoast thanks! if you liked this post some of the stuff coming soon should really please you ^^

@Schrompf thanks, we update this thread every week for easy following Wink

@Green Gospod you are right once again! the current splatter was actually meant to be used for something else, but I "re-purposed" it to implement the blood because Cyangmou was busy destroying the tile-set  Cheesy Glad I could help on the lightning stuff! Are you still in the early stages, or is there already some place I can follow your game?
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Cakeprediction
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« Reply #53 on: January 18, 2015, 02:22:45 AM »

so sweet <3
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Benitosub
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« Reply #54 on: January 18, 2015, 03:24:24 PM »

@Green Gospod just wanted to update you on the blood splatters  Grin any favorites?

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Pickledtezcat
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« Reply #55 on: January 22, 2015, 03:45:04 AM »

Great work, I've been following the project on Deviant art too.
I think the rounded blood puddles are not as good, but if you use the splashed ones it'd be good to place them so they splash away from the point of impact. 
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Green Gospod
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« Reply #56 on: January 22, 2015, 04:54:43 AM »

Anything that looks splattered is good. The nicely shaped puddles shouldn't appear if someone is shot or blown up, but they can once a body is lying on the ground and slowly bleeding. I use sprites 2 to 4 times smaller than yours (that are just smudges and dots) and then just spawn them everywhere like crazy, so it always looks different and chaotic. And yeah I'm still in early development, but sooner or later I'm going to post a devlog here. My game will have an abundance of "tasteful" gore and destruction.  Evil
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Benitosub
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« Reply #57 on: January 22, 2015, 03:26:14 PM »

Thanks for the feedback!

@Pickledtezcat thanks for following ^^ it's always great to get feedback on both sites, and good point about placing them away from the point of impact, will definitely have to fix that!

@Green Gospod yeah the puddles are for bodies and... mmmm -- "stuff"  Well, hello there! -- on the ground, whereas the splatters are for getting shot. And I fully agree with you, I'm a big fan of spawning a lot of tiny "whatevers" precisely for the reasons you stated! However in our case this approach would be a bit unpractical, as these blood puddles interact with other entities - which means collision detections and so on - so we felt slightly larger particles would be a good compromise to avoid eating up unnecessary cycles ^^

Not sure what those quotes around "tasteful" imply, but I'm sure eager to find out :D Hope you'll PM me when you start the devlog!
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DarthBenedict
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« Reply #58 on: January 22, 2015, 04:16:08 PM »

Those directional splatters are a cool idea.
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tower57
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« Reply #59 on: January 24, 2015, 06:20:36 PM »

Hello everyone,

I’m happy to be back for another update!  This week we’re starting off with a new prop and its various stages of destruction - Cyangmou and myself weren’t joking when we said blowing things up was a big part of the game ^^’ :





We’ve also reworked the blood splatters a bit - though these are still work in progress, hopefully we are inching closer to the desired effect:







Furthermore, in keeping with our tradition of weekly weapons, we are introducing the newest addition to our arsenal: the sawblade-gun! (working name…)







Rather than shoot bullets or missiles, this gun fires sharp, circular blades spinning at high velocity:





As one might expect, these blades have a propensity to slice through anything that stands in their way:







However they also happen to have another particular feature, namely the ability to bounce off walls:







And with a bit of practice, you can even pull some trick shots:





Now remember earlier when I said they slice through anything in their way?


Well … I did mean **anything** Wink





“ ’Tis but a scratch! “ you say?





Right, I wonder if …





Well then, I guess only one thing left to do:





However as every other weapon in the game, they do come with one pretty notable downside …





And that’s it for this week :D Hope everybody enjoyed it, and I’m looking forward to next week's update ^^


Cheers!

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