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[vdapps]

Niceyyyyy.

[marcgfx]

Space marine vibes, sure why not! Thanks you two

I should be in bed, but I wanted to get the tank-top animated

[marcgfx]

Fixing little things sometimes takes way too long. I noticed a small error on the tip of my bezier-legs, the fix was easy in the end, but finding the error took most of the time. Yesterday was also pretty much just fixing things I had broken on the productive day before that (shader rewrite).

You can also see that I have antialiasing disabled atm, not that noticeable in motion and I am wondering if it might give me some improved performance. Interesting to me is that it only really shows on filled polygons, but the rendered sprites don't have any noticeable quality loss.

[Schrompf]

Interesting to me is that it only really shows on filled polygons, but the rendered sprites don't have any noticeable quality loss.

For sprites, the source is an image, so the texture filter already does the job perfectly while reading. It's only the edges of polygons (or complex shading with high frequency variations) which benefit from multiple samples.

[marcgfx]

@Schrompf: Ah that explains it. I was expecting it could be something like that, but I did not know. So I might just have to add some transparent edges to the texture, so that I actually end up having anti-aliasing without having to pay more for it... Thanks!

[marcgfx]

I finally got round to testing my new changes on my mini-pc. The really quite extensive shader changes seem to have helped a bit, but not as much as I had hoped. What really did take the cake was turning off antialiasing. Jumped from 40-45fps to close to 60fps. So I really want to find an alternative solution to avoiding aliasing.

I've tried adding a gradient falloff to a simple flat texture for the legs here. For some reason there is a darker outline and so far I just can't understand why. I was guessing it had something to do with premultiplied alpha. The thing is I can't seem to export premultiplied PNG from Photoshop, so I ended up trying to hack it in Photoshop. It certainly did not work and now I am a bit frustrated.

This should be a normal straight-alpha export


But the result is this weird darker outline. On the positive side, the outline is pretty smooth, so I am hopeful.

[marcgfx]

Faking AA was more painful than it should have been. The whole reason for the dark outlines was due to a specific shader effect that I was using on the legs without me being aware of it. So I wasted tons of time making different images, assuming the issue was related to premultiplied alpha and various other things. To make things worse after finding the issue causing the dark outline, I fell right into the next problem. The white legs were still aliasing, but it was working if I disabled the shader effects and hue rotation.

Devader without any shader effects


I noticed that it was not completely failing for white, but that did not help too much.



 I fell down the rabbit hole and started going over everything that could be wrong with my shader code. While taking a short break the solution finally came to me... To make white objects really white, I was over-brightening (150%). Take a break when you get stuck, it helps.

Looks pretty smooth now

[vdapps]

That's nasty bug!

Yeah, first thing which came to my mind seeing darker edges was color channel in pixels with transparency, but shader make sense as well. Joys of debugging GPU stuff.

[marcgfx]

Debugging GPU is the worst... I should probably have created something to reload the shader on demand, but right now I have to restart. On the other hand, it's done now sooo why create more stuff.

Acid? Ground after killing these little hoppers. They should really be moving around, but I'll get to that next.

[Alain]

I just found the time to take a closer look at your devlog. It is really cool how far you have brought Devader and that you keep iterating and working on it. I fear I could not last a second in the game, because I grew up playing on PC only and don't even know how to hold a controller, but Devader looks like great fun and fast-paced action!

[marcgfx]

Hey Alain, thanks for taking the time to read and comment It really is all about iteration with me.
Devader is easier than everyone thinks at first, it's not as punishing as it looks. I mostly use WASD & Mouse to Control

There is a web-demo if you have Chrome it should run fine, does not include the new stuff though: https://devader.space/html/game.html

[marcgfx]

I made this ball thing a while back, but never really did anything with it. I am now considering to use this as a type of shield for an enemy. You will need to destroy the shield to get to the tasty enemy on the inside. To destroy the shield I want the player to have to roll it into something else. Could be a kind of mini-boss, not sure.

[JobLeonard]

Somehow it feels like something out of Pikmin


... ever considered making a chill squad management game? :p

[vdapps]

Somehow it feels like something out of Pikmin


... ever considered making a chill squad management game? :p

Regarding squads, I recall 'Cannon Fodder' action game, was cool. I can imagine merged idea of this game with Devader.. hmmmm..

[Alain]

Hey Alain, thanks for taking the time to read and comment It really is all about iteration with me.
Devader is easier than everyone thinks at first, it's not as punishing as it looks. I mostly use WASD & Mouse to Control

There is a web-demo if you have Chrome it should run fine, does not include the new stuff though: https://devader.space/html/game.html

I played the web-demo for a little bit! It worked great in Chrome. I am very unfamiliar with the genre as I said before. First I tried to outrun my red little helpers before figuring out that they are my buddies I made it to wave 7 and even figured out how the Blinkers work. Playing was a nice peek into a new genre for me. Although I as a newbie could not figure out everything that was going on, I am sure players can really dig their teeth into your game and there is a lot of depth. Also, I really enjoyed the soundtrack!

[marcgfx]

@JobLeonard & vdapps: nope I have not ... but I have considered making a little RTS on top of Devader hahaha...(it was only half an april fools joke)


@Alain: Good to know it worked I don't even know what my genre really is, it is some kind of mash-up of shoot'em up, bullet-hell with a bit of strategy. I still don't have an elevator pitch or a hook I can really communicate what's a bit of a bother.

[JobLeonard]

> First I tried to outrun my red little helpers before figuring out that they are my buddies

Oh yeah, now that he mentions that, that wasn't obvious to me either! I wonder if something could be done to make it easier to recognize "friendlies"

[marcgfx]

@JobLeonard: Thanks for picking that comment up from vdapps. I for some reason glossed over that information (I've heard it often) and did not stop to think at all. I have an option to turn on health-badges, but it gets a bit ugly on all the little units. I turned it on to show you... and then... I remembered I had solved that problem for some small turrets that get auto-spawned. So I've actually created two competing solutions. The new one is much easier on the eyes. The advantage of the badges is that they show the position of a unit outside the screen. I should fix this

Two competing standards:


edit: I remembered incorrectly, the blue outline was to make it visible who belongs to the player, but it does not show the health. I can still add the blue outline and there is probably a good way to make it function as a health bar too.

edit 2: easy update, health bar is not really required imho

[JobLeonard]

Much clearer, nice!

[marcgfx]

Added the lightning & performance seems to be ok.

Currently doing a lot of balancing and fixing work. The new robot seems to be quite a bit stronger, but it's hard to say for sure. Late game is hardest to test as the robot tends to get a lot stronger. I might need to figure out a way to get an accurate representation of the character when jumping into a late level.

The fixing work is mostly still related to changing the aspect ration from 1:1 to 4:3, the change results in a lot of elliptical motion.

Time for bed.