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[dittomat]

Hey, just chiming in to say this week has been really slow in progress on PLANETER. My internet was out, so it was difficult to even write something here haha! Now Ludum Dare starts in a couple hours and I've spent some time preparing for that.. Oh well, hopefully I'll make more progress next week!

At least I've fleshed out the story a lot, but I'm not yet comfortable talking about it, so I'll save that for later! Oh and I drew what is going to be a teleporter between worlds!

Just trying the art out in game here, I'll probably have it working like it should next week, cheers!

[and]

Cool! I thought your ludum dare game looked awesome, but this looks really cool too!

I'm sure you can find time to work on both at once right?

[oahda]

I suggested instead in my LD comment that it might be possible to bring something in from the LD game into this. c:

[dittomat]

Cool! I thought your ludum dare game looked awesome, but this looks really cool too!

I'm sure you can find time to work on both at once right?

Thanks a lot!

I wish I could.. I have a day job to pay rent and food etc, and when free I divide my time between working on this, experimenting in Unity, while also trying to keep a "social life" haha! We'll see what happens, PLANETER comes first tho!

I suggested instead in my LD comment that it might be possible to bring something in from the LD game into this. c:

Yeah you're totally right, before that LD I hadn't played with sounds/music in Unity! So now I know how to do those things which is cool, and there's a bunch of other stuff in the code that I can use in both games as well!

[dittomat]

Been working a bunch on UI elements lately. Everything you can interact with now gets bright outlines!

I've also remade the speechbubbles, making them a bit more cartoony. The speechboxes are physical objects in the world, rather than UI elements. It turns out resizing them to fit the screen when the camera zooms is really difficult, took me half a day just figuring that part out! Haha!

I'm not writing all of the story myself, so I had to make a text parser that my writer can use to write dialogs and stuff! Everytime you talk to an alien it reads the file and looks for the appropriate dialog, so you can edit the dialog while in game and instantly see the effects.

Here's just me playing a bit with the dialogs and stuff, thought it was cute! ^^

[blekdar]

I've also remade the speechbubbles, making them a bit more cartoony. The speechboxes are physical objects in the world, rather than UI elements. It turns out resizing them to fit the screen when the camera zooms is really difficult, took me half a day just figuring that part out! Haha!

Wait, if they're physical objects, can you interact with them? Like, could you jump on them and use them as platforms? Cause that'd be cool as fuck.

They look great too by the way. Very nice.

[dittomat]

Wait, if they're physical objects, can you interact with them? Like, could you jump on them and use them as platforms? Cause that'd be cool as fuck.

They look great too by the way. Very nice.

Haha, that's a fun idea! When I said physical I meant I've implemented the bubbles as regular gameobjects instead of using the UI stuff that's built in to Unity, hah! The walking on speechbubbles feels a bit out of place for this game sadly :D

[slarti88]

Have been watching this on twitter for the last month or so... looks awesome! Do you plan on having planets with liquids? Like water or liquid nitrogen?  It'd be interesting to see what you can do with colors for that!

[dittomat]

Have been watching this on twitter for the last month or so... looks awesome! Do you plan on having planets with liquids? Like water or liquid nitrogen?  It'd be interesting to see what you can do with colors for that!

The thought of water planets have crossed my mind, yes! I already have a few different types of planets, but right now it's only visual. My plan is to have the different planets work somewhat differently in the end, and having water planets that you can swim through is something I REALLY want! I don't want to promise anything, but it's likely to happen!

[TheWing]

Damn, I think I've fallen in love with the artstyle.. Everything is so nicely wobbling around and stuff feels organic!

Keep it up o/

[dittomat]

These pillars will probably do something if you activate all of them!

[UmutD]

Looking interesting, posting to follow

[dittomat]

The smooth surfaces of the planets have bothered me for a long time, so today I decided to add some details to them!

I wanted to be able to add some life to the grass and such. Animating the whole planet with grass on it wouldn't work since I scale the circles pretty differently and it would look bad with the pixels sizes. I instead decided to add a halo of detail sprites around the surface of the planets. The gif below shows how the sprites are created and positioned around the planet!

Instead of animating the grass I simply play around a bit with it's scale, it looks decent enough imo!

[oahda]

These pillars will probably do something if you activate all of them!

"Probably" is my favourite design principle.

The smooth surfaces of the planets have bothered me for a long time, so today I decided to add some details to them!

Looks great!

The gif below shows how the sprites are created and positioned around the planet!

Geez. You went through the hassle of making that animation just to show it to us, or is that animation actually going to be used in the game?

[Carpetwurm]

What are you making the art in? 

[dittomat]

"Probably" is my favourite design principle.

Haha, I've learnt it's better to be vague than promise too much! : D

You went through the hassle of making that animation just to show it to us?

Yeah, but it took me ~5 minutes of extra work so I thought it was worth it! : D

What are you making the art in? 

I draw pixels in Graphics Gale. Then apply a bunch of coloring magic in Unity! : )

[dittomat]

So by now you've all probably realized I never do what I promise. The pillars still do nothing, but I made them look a bit more intense as they activate!

They actually trigger an event now, I just haven't hooked it up to anything. So when all 3 pillars are activated here, I COULD potentially have something happen! Isn't that exciting?


I also added a new alien today, it's been too long since last time I got to draw one!

They're kinda chubby, I like them a lot already! <3

[oahda]

Everything looks great!

One thing I noticed tho... You're using colours that really strain the eyes when contrasting each other for the main character as well as those new aliens (eye colour against body colour). Green-ish against pink-ish (or even the red of that other alien) is one of those combinations that are pretty, well, again, straining on the eyes.

Seems important to fix for the main character at least.

I have noticed how the main characters shifts colours throughout your images, tho. What governs that?

[ZeroTec]

somehow i missed this thread so far

looks super awesome and like a lot of fun 

[dittomat]

looks super awesome and like a lot of fun  

Thanks! :D

One thing I noticed tho... You're using colours that really strain the eyes when contrasting each other for the main character as well as those new aliens (eye colour against body colour). Green-ish against pink-ish (or even the red of that other alien) is one of those combinations that are pretty, well, again, straining on the eyes.

Seems important to fix for the main character at least.

I have noticed how the main characters shifts colours throughout your images, tho. What governs that?

Funny that you mention it because I've been thinking about this recently myself!

Okay, so here's a little snippet of the animations for some of the aliens in the game! They're all saved in white, and I separate eyes/details from the bodies. Then when I draw them in game I assign a different color to them with some code that is supposed to give two distinct colors..

Having lots and lots of bright colors easily looks messy though, so I use a trick where I put an overlay with a single half transparent color over the whole screen to "blend" the colors together a bit more nicely.

Thing is, in an attempt to make the aliens "pop" a bit more on the screen, I draw them above the overlay. It serves it's purpose, the aliens pop, but at the expense of their colors looking too bright!

Here you can see a bunch of aliens "popping" against the background:

And here you can see what it looks like if I draw them behind the overlay:

The "pop" was more necessary before I added the highlighting, and personally I think it looks better in the second picture.

I'll probably keep tweaking colors like this more before I actually settle on something.. what do you guys think?

ps.
Every time you start the game your character gets assigned a color at random, I don't know if this is what the final game will act like, but right now I kinda like it!

pps.
Keep in mind, I wrote the color generator code myself. It might just be that the code generates colors that actually strain the eyes more than it should.. In that case .. woops! I'll maybe have to look over that before releasing!