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[♒ben]

✢✣ A Snowboard inspired - race through ruins - on top of a floating archipelago ✣✢






Ben Swinden ◆ Richard Flanagan


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This will be a 'report' on day to day activities for now. We are very early in the project but will hopefully be moving along quickly! Read on for the specifics

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[♒ben]

Log - 2015.09.07

hi hello ! The purpose of this devlog will be to keep track of what we're up to, day - to - day. Feedback is greatly appreciated !

Brief project history : This is a game we made for the Toronto Game jam this year. The prototype was a success and so we've been working on it here and there for the last couple of months. We are both very much part time on the project at the moment.

We will be showing our game in Austin at Fantastic Arcade in about 3 weeks so we're currently working towards that. Our main goals for the next few weeks are level design and mechanics mostly.

Our current level designs were all built for the jam version of the game and since the mechanics have all since been rebuilt since then, most of the design is broken.

Mechanics wise, we have a few small features we want to get done before FA. Mostly feel related stuff, like landing properly from the air either increasing or decreasing speed, not letting you move around while on your head . . other trivial stuff like that!

[EddieBytes]

I think the game needs a bit more work. I watched the teaser, but it's not much of a teaser, more like a tech demo of sorts.
At least a third person view of some character would have been nice. Unless it's a first person game? I didn't quite understand which one it's supposed to be.

The idea of the game is nice, but I believe it will require two things to get right for it to be successful:
- great environments, so basically excellence in environment art
- a great set of combos/tricks, with the level design to support them and make them shine

I hope this feedback helps.

[Christian]

I think the game needs a bit more work. I watched the teaser, but it's not much of a teaser, more like a tech demo of sorts.
At least a third person view of some character would have been nice. Unless it's a first person game? I didn't quite understand which one it's supposed to be.

The idea of the game is nice, but I believe it will require two things to get right for it to be successful:
- great environments, so basically excellence in environment art
- a great set of combos/tricks, with the level design to support them and make them shine

I hope this feedback helps.

Have you seen Fract OSC?

[♒ben]

Log - 2015.09.07 (2)

Spent the day removing a shortcut I had stuck in and had forgotten about. Previously I was clamping velocity to a max speed, it was an easy way to not have to fiddle with friction, gravity and player force values. However it leads to situations where you pick up a bunch of speed somewhere like descending a super steep slope or hitting a booster and then lose that speed a lot faster than you should.

So I removed the max speed clamps then tweaked friction and gravity values to properly control the player's speed instead.

[EddieBytes]

I think the game needs a bit more work. I watched the teaser, but it's not much of a teaser, more like a tech demo of sorts.
At least a third person view of some character would have been nice. Unless it's a first person game? I didn't quite understand which one it's supposed to be.

The idea of the game is nice, but I believe it will require two things to get right for it to be successful:
- great environments, so basically excellence in environment art
- a great set of combos/tricks, with the level design to support them and make them shine

I hope this feedback helps.

Have you seen Fract OSC?

I have now. Looks great. But I don't understand the relevance. If you are pointing it out for it's similar visual style, then ok, I agree they have similar visual styles. But my points still stand.

[richardeflanagan]

I think the game needs a bit more work.

It needs a metric ton of work, but there's a kernel of goodness here that excited us despite our many other responsibilities.

At least a third person view of some character would have been nice. Unless it's a first person game? I didn't quite understand which one it's supposed to be.

It's first person, and it will stay that way.

The idea of the game is nice, but I believe it will require two things to get right for it to be successful:
- great environments, so basically excellence in environment art
- a great set of combos/tricks, with the level design to support them and make them shine

Definitely agree with the first point - and am confident that both Ben and I can make that happen. The second point is something, which at this point, seems at odds with our design goals. Think Proteus on a snowboard, and that might get you in the right mindset.

[richardeflanagan]

I have now. Looks great. But I don't understand the relevance. If you are pointing it out for it's similar visual style, then ok, I agree they have similar visual styles. But my points still stand.

I made FRACT, so some of my techniques are going to carry over here. I suspect that's what he was getting at.

[richardeflanagan]

Log - 2015.09.07 (2)

Spent the day removing a shortcut I had stuck in and had forgotten about. Previously I was clamping velocity to a max speed, it was an easy way to not have to fiddle with friction, gravity and player force values. However it leads to situations where you pick up a bunch of speed somewhere like descending a super steep slope or hitting a booster and then lose that speed a lot faster than you should.

So I removed the max speed clamps then tweaked friction and gravity values to properly control the player's speed instead.

Sweet, this makes so much sense, pulling now!

[richardeflanagan]

So today I'm going to tinker with using Unity terrain instead of our mesh terrain. It will make life easier and Ben had the insight to suggest that smooth terrain might make for a good visual contrast between snow and objects.

[richardeflanagan]

Since I'm having trouble with the SVN today, here are a great many GIFs of the first version:

[♒ben]

Log 2015.09.09




Spent most of the day working on control things. Updated to the newest version of InControl ( unity input library ) that had a new paradigm for handling binding inputs. Switched to the new system and it ended up being a good opportunity to try out some new things with the controls that turned out pretty well.

The first version of the game had a duck mechanic so you would hold the trigger to duck and release it to jump. The duck mechanic didn't work out well since visually you can't really tell when your ducking in a first person game at high speeds. The jump however has stayed until now on the trigger. Moving it to a bumper was a big improvement. Also added a separate button to  dive down quickly while in the air.

Tasks completed today:
• Control changes
• Adding physics materials to objects for bounciness, previously you would just run into objects and stop dead
• Increased minimum jump height, it was set to an arbitrary low value before.
   • This helps with another issue we are running into which is getting stuck in holes and in front of large objects, now you can hop your way out of more situations
• Added screenshot functionality in game

[melos]

It definitely looks like a game!!!

how will progression structure work? like if the game consists of levels how do you go between them

[Xenophyn]

This definitely reminds me of the classic Quake mod from the 90's, Slide Quake. Expansive tracks, nearly no friction, whipping around tracks at breakneck speed... good times.

One thing that old mod did that I don't think I've seen since is the ability to turn/twist without changing your trajectory, so you can observe your surroundings without messing up your flow. Definitely not a required feature, but it was an appreciated one.

I'll be watching to see where this goes!

[diegzumillo]

Looks fun!

Are you going for a sifi Skiing thing? Also, where did I see this video before?

[archgame]

@richardeflanagan, when I saw the first gifs this totally reminded me of Fract OSC! Then I read that you made that game so it totally makes sense. I had a chance to play it at IndieCade last year and really enjoyed it (along with the three trailers that were supposed to be played together).

So is this going to be basically a faster version of that game? At first my instinct was the same as EddieBytes, I was imagining an SSX tricky in Fract OSC's world, but it sounds like you are sticking to the first person, which is cool too.

If you are sticking with the first person I think you'll need to do a lot of work with the camera so that it doesn't make people motion sick and it is showing the player the best views of the world you've created. In the teaser video there are moments where the screen is almost entirely filled up with a ramp or a hill the player is about to go over. I wonder if you could figure out how much screen real estate is looking at the ground and how much is looking above it.

I think one quick and simple trick would be to have a raycast from your camera's transform.forward and if it hits something 'x' distance in front of it it tilts the camera up based on how far away the raycast hit, that way when I'm going off a ramp I'm looking out instead of down.

I'm really excited to see where this is going, I feel like it has a chance to make Tokyo Megaplex look soft.

[Trev]

This is absolutely beautiful. Posting to follow.

[Juskelis]

This reminds of Zineth; I'm excited to see where it goes. 

[♒ben]

Log 2015.09.10

Spent a lot of time prototyping a new mechanic that didn't work out too well. The player's character controller is still pretty basic so i'm looking at way's of adding features, but if they are just over complicating things without adding anything meaningful then i'm just going to ditch them. The game is made to be played with a controller by the way

The current character controller does this:
- The left joystick adds force in the direction you are holding the joystick, relative to the player's current forward facing vector, holding left or right basically strafes the player controller. It also adds some rotation with the horizontal axis.
   - Ex. Holding forward on the left stick adds force on the player's forward vector, so when they are not holding forward they will just continue on their trajectory regardless of where they are looking
- "Forward" for the player is taken from the position of the body
- The right joystick rotates the head object in all directions with no constraints. I have a task currently to add contraints to where you can look while on the ground.

The interesting thing about this control scheme is that you can just freely rotate in all direction, which gave you the ability to do simple tricks like 360s and backflips. The extent to which trick mechanics affect the gameplay is far from being resolved and something were not worried about at the moment.

So my main task right now is constraining the player's ability to look around with the right joystick, and instead giving them torque when they take off from a jump. This might be cool !! I have no idea : D

Note: I use rotation to talk about what the player is doing with the right stick because the vertical axis controls the player's 'head' going up and down, but the horizontal axis controls the players body's horizontal rotation ( the body being a parent of the head ) which directly affects the player's forward movement.

Tasks completed today:
• Prototyped using torque 'all' the time on the player
    • Mostly unsuccessful due to my quadratic gravity algorithm but lead me to think that constant torque isn't a very good solution for what we want to do
• Added horizontal rotation to horizontal movement on the left stick, made movement feel more natural
• Made Horizontal movement much stronger in general, more feeling of control
• Slowed down rotation using the right stick significantly, this will work in conjunction with a new torque function to allow player's to spin themselves off jumps but not just freely control their rotation 100% like before

[♒ben]

Thanks everyone !

It definitely looks like a game!!!

how will progression structure work? like if the game consists of levels how do you go between them

G AME ! \:D/  We are still super open to progression ideas, but our current plan going forward is, each "level" is a floating island, the level will have self contained goals, and exploring will consist of launching off your current island and trying to land on other ones. There would probably also be a UI to select different islands you've been to.

We want to keep each one pretty small.

This definitely reminds me of the classic Quake mod from the 90's, Slide Quake. Expansive tracks, nearly no friction, whipping around tracks at breakneck speed... good times.

One thing that old mod did that I don't think I've seen since is the ability to turn/twist without changing your trajectory, so you can observe your surroundings without messing up your flow. Definitely not a required feature, but it was an appreciated one.

Sounds fun, i will check it out! Looking around and not having that directly affect your trajectory makes a lot of sense to me. It's in there now to a certain extent, but i'm definitely going to keep it in mind as things progress.