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[and]

Oh yeah I hadn't thought of outdoor loos!

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

you could add (monochrome)houses in the background to add some depth to the landscape and give the illusion of a bigger village,

[and]

Yeah that's a great idea! Would mean I could have some different shaped buildings too (I'm a bit limited with the foreground houses as they need to be landed on)

[darrenagar]

I share your pain with background. It seems that our personal weaknesses are brought to the forefront as games need proficiency in so many areas but forge on, with thoughtfulness as you are, and it will turn into a great strength!

Thanks for the heads up about Insomnia. I've never been to such an event and It scares the bejeezus out of me, but I've applied , I live quite local to Sheffield also.

looking great btw      

[dxman]

Looking good. Depending on your preference, one alternative to the fences to help distinguish the background from the traversable objects in the foreground would be a very thin layer of low-lying fog/mist.

[and]

Looking good. Depending on your preference, one alternative to the fences to help distinguish the background from the traversable objects in the foreground would be a very thin layer of low-lying fog/mist.

Yeah that could work, maybe in some of the areas. I was thinking of fences more as detail, rather than showing the difference between foreground and background.

I'll post another update when I've got a finished village!

Thanks for the heads up about Insomnia. I've never been to such an event and It scares the bejeezus out of me, but I've applied , I live quite local to Sheffield also.

looking great btw      

Good luck getting in! It's such a great festival :D

[longshorts]

Hey and been a while since I had a look at your project. You have made massive progress well done! As for village dodads go for some good old pots if you want a small zelda reference. Lame I know but I haven't slept much lately :p

[and]

hehe thanks!

I'd also thought of pots too, but that's also probably because I never sleep anymore...

[and]

Warning: this topic has not been posted in for at least 120 days.
Unless you're sure you want to reply, please consider starting a new topic.

[and]

[Tattomoosa]

If you draw the text out in black or transparent and switch characters to white to do your 'typing in' animation then you can avoid that ugliness where a word starts 'typing in' on the wrong line.

I do like what she's saying though.

[and]

If you draw the text out in black or transparent and switch characters to white to do your 'typing in' animation then you can avoid that ugliness where a word starts 'typing in' on the wrong line.

This seems so obvious, but I'd never thought of it before. I'll add it to the Trello...

Thanks!

[and]

THE SUPER MASSIVE CATCH-UP UPDATE - PART 1

Hold on to your butts, this is going to be a long one.

It's certainly been a while since I've been on this blog, for a LOT of reasons (which I'll cover below). I've never updated that frequently - mainly due to having a full-time job, a kid, and a kickstarted game that's way behind schedule - but 16 months between updates is probably pushing it.

I'm writing this on my lunch break, so I'll catch you all up as much as possible and then continue tomorrow.

Grab a  or a 


JANUARY 2017

We announced a new member to the team:

Aaaand we moved house, because 2 kids in a tiny apartment sounded like a nightmare. Moving house was a nightmare too, but a short lived one (sort of - houses have all sorts of different problems for you to deal with).


FEBRUARY 2017

Another month of just adding more stuff into the game, like:

Getting shapes from killing bosses:

Integrating the world map:

More on this later

Sinking crates:

Realising they were stupidly big and you should be able to push them:

Timed pillars:

Making the line turn red when you can kill enemies:

Secrets:

Aaaand I did a local event:

MARCH 2017

Mable got some coverage on DualShockers!

https://www.dualshockers.com/kickstarted-indie-mable-wood-delayed-indefinitely/

Oh dear.

I worked on multi-directional levels too:

APRIL 2017

I released the alpha to that tier kickstarter backers. I wasn't happy with the state of the game at this point, and feedback was mixed. The linear levels and map didn't really scream 'exploration' to most people - the divergent paths felt just kind of arbitrary.

So, it was time for me to take a step back and think about structure. Which I did, but I didn't come up with a solution for a while so it would be wrong to cover this in the April section of this catch up.

I also got this art from Trudi Castle to help with promoting the game:

And I made the stone giant's head pop off when he dies:

MAY 2017 - PERSONAL STUFF

For those off you who know me outside of TIG, or have followed this devlog from the start (or my old one for Among The Willows), I've talked about my family before. For me, gamedev is a really personal thing. I do as much as I can myself, so I feel like the games I make are a part of me and a part of my family (which sounds really cheesy but hey this is my devlog so that's fine).

I try to involve my family in the process as much as possible, although Joni's coding is awful (she was nearly 2 at this point). Sarah (my wife) was very pregnant at this point, but when she wasn't trying to sleep or eating really strange things she'd always give me feedback on the story, the designs or just ideas in general.

May was a really hard month, because Sarah's dad passed away. I'd been working about 60 hours a week with my job and the game and trying to fit family stuff in between that. That changed really suddenly and it was like getting whiplash. He basically collapsed, went into hospital and two days later he'd died.

It was horrible and there was a bunch crap that came along with it, but I kinda pushed everything except for family to the side for a bit.

And that's my dinner over, but I don't want to leave it with the depressing bit, so I'll leave you with a picture of a chicken that I drew to put in the game but never got around to:

15-20px is too big, Mable is only 30px tall...

[PetSkull]

I believe you mean 2018, right? 

[and]

I believe you mean 2018, right? 

...I wish!

I've got 12 more months to add to this update yet 

[Eyon]

What an update ! =)
First of all congratulation on the birth of your baby ! 
Sorry for your loss too... I hope time will ease your grief.

To get back to the game, I love the animation of the falling rock guy. In general the game looks cool, I'd love to try it.

[and]

What an update ! =)
First of all congratulation on the birth of your baby ! 
Sorry for your loss too... I hope time will ease your grief.

To get back to the game, I love the animation of the falling rock guy. In general the game looks cool, I'd love to try it.

Awesome, thanks Eyon! I'm tuning up a new demo as we speak, here's a link if you'd like to give it a try (Windows only at the moment sorry):

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1_kNqbVaKTL_J3RPoG6nHeejEwXH579Za

If you have any feedback on how to improve the demo then let me know! I've tried to keep it short so you want more and then go and wishlist the game...

[and]

Oh and if you're on Twitter, PLEASE retweet this for me!

https://twitter.com/EGX/status/1002127549919461376

 

[and]

SUPER MASSIVE CATCH UP UPDATE = Part 2

June 2017 - August 2017

This was a bit of a slow period, due to dealing with the family stuff that was going on. Aside from Sarah's dad Tom passing away in May, we had a little baby boy on June 17th. He was called Tommy for a couple of days (after Sarah's dad), but it didn't really suit him, so we decided to call him Evan Thomas Alexander Stewart. I've got four names, and it hasn't done me any harm, so hopefully he'll get by ok in life.

Here's the big stuff that happened with Mable over this period.


Discovery and Exploration

I'll have a specific post on this, but here's the basics:

By taking you out to world map after each level, and you navigating the world via that map, you don't really get any sense of exploring. One of the key things I wanted in the game was a real sense of discovery, and the structure of the game just wasn't supporting that.

Instead of having linear level with a few secrets hidden in the levels, I've started to pull all of the levels into a single area and arrange them almost like the rooms in a Zelda dungeon.

This felt awesome almost immediately.

It allowed me to introduce some navigational puzzles that actually rely on how you use your different forms (as well as stuff the world with secrets that are only accessible if you really understand how the form changing works.

This required some hefty changes:

Rooms are actually linked now!

Doors!

Locks and keys!*

This also led me to work on introducing hub areas, so that I could have some parts of the game where you could explore the spokes of that hub but always come back there if you wanted.

So I also added stores:

Inflation sucks

Lots More Navigation Mechanics!

First thing I had to do was make those locked barriers look better:

I also realised that having barriers meant that I could lock you in and make enemies attack you (whereas running/flying/digging/whatever) was a perfectly viable option before, these areas forced you to engage with the combat mechanics:

I've only used these combat locks in routes that are accessible if you've taken one of the aggressive paths. If you've been pacifist then you can't get to any of the areas that link to the combat rooms. Unless you've picked the mole after you beat the game and get reborn, but oh my I don't have time or space to go into that. And if you have the mole you can dig your way out of these situations anyway. Unless there's undiggable ground there.

I made some mini stone men because it took people a while to work out that they couldn't kill the stone giant boss by hitting him:

I added in elevators, for navigational puzzles and also because I was stuck on this bit in Bloodborne where there was a cool elevator:

This is my favourite lock and key mechanic:

I started adding in secrets:

I made a new mini boss for the caves:

And finally, I added in a mechanic so you could get your diamonds back after you died. I'd originally copied Sonic how he spits out rings when he gets hit and there's some slowdown, but it was too harsh to have you lose them all when you died, so I nabbed the corpse run thing from Dark Souls/World of Warcraft. I call it the Sonic Souls Death Method:

Maarten did the ice version of Mable because I can't draw ice

Oh AND Fat Bard did me some awesome new music: https://twitter.com/Fat_Bard/status/895687252944207873. It is EXCELLENT and I implore you to spend 50 seconds listening to this snippet.

Thanks for reading :D

*More on this specifically later

[MegaTiny]

Wow, this is still looking amazing. I was worried it had died, but the improvements you've made here are great.