next »

[Personman]

I am super excited about this, especially the n-style speed-based leaderboards with replays. I really, really like that.

Are you planning to release a demo soon? I would be very interested in doing in-depth playtesting for a game like this.

[naezith]

That's a really interesting question! And one that's super-important when it comes to a movement-focused game like this one. I'm not sure there's a set answer to it, but I feel like getting a decent number of playtesters moving about the game, is going to a very good start. Once you can observe what people are really having fun with, or maybe more importantly, what is frustrating them, then you have some things that you can tweak.

Yeah, playtesting definitely would help, will do it in future. Thanks!

Just wanted to jump in and say this is pretty awesome. Looking forward to following your progress.

One tiny critique, the running animation is gorgeous but seeing the player run across the game looks (IMO) really sluggish. I think this may be because the design of the character running with the leaning forward and dust kicking creates this impression of moving at a very accelerated rate and then seeing the actual movement speed, it seems to not blend with the animations which look so "quick". I'm sure a lot is placeholder at this stage, but just throwing that out there.

Best of luck on the development, will be following.

Thanks for the kind words! That sluggish look is caused by not having a "transition animation" between standing and running at top speed, I guess. There will be more animations so it will get fixed. Also, there isn't any speed limit so that's you see there is like the minimum running speed which you get by just holding right or left. Hook adds like 3x-4x more to that

I am super excited about this, especially the n-style speed-based leaderboards with replays. I really, really like that.

Are you planning to release a demo soon? I would be very interested in doing in-depth playtesting for a game like this.

You motivate me, thanks for that! It's nice to see people who like this kind of fast-paced and skill-based games. I am planning to make a demo, yeah but currently I haven't got tutorial levels and world graphics are still terrible placeholders so I will probably wait a bit more to get the real ones.

[thecolonygame]

Grapple Hook trail is a great effect. Animations are top notch as well. Great job!

[ernanir]

Looks cool as fuck. Keep it up.

[naezith]

Grapple Hook trail is a great effect. Animations are top notch as well. Great job!

Looks cool as fuck. Keep it up.

Thanks a lot!

I am simply amazed by the Tikotep Adventure's water visuals and he has a tutorial for it. So I am following that, but that is looking 3D and mine must look more like 2D with reflection(I know it does not make any sense). But yeah I keep improving it for last two days. It might finish tomorrow and then I will put visuals here.

I added some ideas into my "Things to implement" list,

• Collapsing floors
• Moving Walls that's about to squash the player
• Teleporter? Not sure about this.
• Really fun to interact with, enemies which you can "DASH" onto them to kick them around, I am thinking of some mid-air combos like grab/carry, hit/throw him to the air, hook him in air, pull yourself to him, hit again, kick one more time in air to make sure he is overkilled. Yeah I tried these kind of stuff before, you can find more info in my blogpost but here is a very old GIF from 23.01.2015,

[/list]

[naezith]

Update:
I finally managed to make the water effect and it looks pretty good in my option. Thanks to alwex for his water tutorial, that helped a lot.

I put so many stuff in a little place to show them all, sorry for the mess!
Screenshot:


GIF (low quality):


What do you think?

[Cranktrain]

I'm having a bit of trouble parsing what is going on with the water, is it 100% reflective? The red beam, that goes into the water, appears to continue along that line, but the reflection of that beam is more vivid. How come we can see the rest of the red beam that's submerged, but the platforms and the rest of the level is completely obscured by the water? If there was no warping/distortion effect, would the water plane effectively be a mirror? I wonder if it'd look more watery with some transparency, and perhaps only the top part of the water reflecting anything?

[naezith]

I'm having a bit of trouble parsing what is going on with the water, is it 100% reflective? The red beam, that goes into the water, appears to continue along that line, but the reflection of that beam is more vivid. How come we can see the rest of the red beam that's submerged, but the platforms and the rest of the level is completely obscured by the water? If there was no warping/distortion effect, would the water plane effectively be a mirror? I wonder if it'd look more watery with some transparency, and perhaps only the top part of the water reflecting anything?

Well we need to ignore all the physics here to get a beautiful look It is a little bit transparent so Red beam continues through the water(irl there would be a little bit bending I guess but yeah screw physics) and it is also mirrors the top of itself in Y axis so red beam gets reflected on the water. I know reflection should be only on the surface but it looks better this way! Water goes darker to the deep by the way, so does the reflection.

Updates:

• Beautified checkpoint image and size.
• Rendering everything smoother now.
• Added water visuals.
• Added RGB split effect on death.
• Fixed camera was scrolling to the checkpoint after death, now its instant.

Here is the RGB split effect on death moment :

[naezith]

Today I tried a couple post-processing effects such as Bloom and FXAA.

I didn't like any of them, however this is maybe because my graphics are placeholders. I just commented out the code so I can try them later. I put images as links because they are full-screen shots.  

Here are the side-by-side comparisons:

• Without Bloom : http://puu.sh/kOMH8/ac8e12e16c.png
• With Bloom : http://puu.sh/kOMD9/ae38710c71.png

It just looks like high-brightness, nothing special to me, even uglier. I thought it's because there isn't any light system so I turned on my unefficient light system code to check how it looks. And also played with variables of the bloom a little bit...

• Without Bloom : http://puu.sh/kONwA/bfdae2c011.png
• With slight Bloom : http://puu.sh/kONuM/773fd12251.png

Turns out it still looks terrible. I also tried FXAA,

• Without FXAA : http://puu.sh/kOQ4k/43c6a41ade.png
• With FXAA : http://puu.sh/kOPYJ/fb9d40c4da.png

[lithander]

FXAA is the poor-mans antialiasing and pointless for 2D games imo. just use hardware AA or brute force supersampling imo.

[FK in the Coffee]

Yeah, I think the FXAA screenshots lose a lot of detail; it looks much crisper in its original form imo

[MereMonkey]

Those lasery beams are looking really good!!

[naezith]

FXAA is the poor-mans antialiasing and pointless for 2D games imo. just use hardware AA or brute force supersampling imo.

Hardware AA does not work because I render into a rendertexture, but I will try supersampling, thanks!

Yeah, I think the FXAA screenshots lose a lot of detail; it looks much crisper in its original form imo

Exactly so

Those lasery beams are looking really good!!

Oh thank you!





I am working on making that static lightning/shadow system more efficient by pre-rendering it at level creation so it can run on any computer.

[naezith]

Finally optimized my light system, I prerender it when loading the level, which takes a bit long but it doesn't kill the during-gameplay FPS now.

Every non-solid tile is a light emitter so it gets dark into the walls and stuff.



What do you think about this kind of a light system? I am not really a fan of dynamic lightning. Maybe thats because there is only one library for SFML, Let There Be Light and it's not that stable & reliable as I remember aaaaaand also Box2D & Tiled, not sure tho.

Before this tile-based lightning, I was drawing big rectangles that represents circle light sprites. And cover rooms with those but since I have a level editor, that might be too messy and since they are circles, its really boring to cover all the level with those and make sure its looking fine.

This tile-based one is full-automatic, it was real-time updating but now it's getting created at the map load as I said, like an array of 512x512 textures are getting ready at start and I draw the ones which are inside the screen, pretty efficient, except the load time.

I would like to know more about these light stuff, maybe different techniques, I just wanna know your thoughts about this, since that was my purpose of creating the devlog here. Thanks a lot for the interest, have a nice day!

[naezith]

Today I worked on Zoom function in my game. It can be used in any situation but I only use it at the Level Editor for now. In future, camera might zoom out if character goes too fast, to see the upcoming obstacles.

[naezith]

Hello there people, university is going a little bit tough so I can't find much time to spend on my game these days. Sorry for that...

But my musician friend gave me some updates might make you happy!

Two soundtracks, both of them are work in progress so its not the end version.

RoN-Soundtrack2
RoN-Soundtrack3

A little bit feedback could be nice, have a good evening!

[naezith]

Sorry for the long break, my midterm week ends this friday, I will continue working on the game full time again. Meanwhile the graphic artist works on the tileset, its not finished yet but here is some little update for you:



Make sure you follow https://twitter.com/naezith to be updated more.

[naezith]

Here is the work in progress soundtrack:
RoN-Soundtrack3(different)

aaaaaaand here is a new screenshot with new tileset and a temporary background pattern.

[lithander]

Looks great!

[naezith]

Looks great!

Finally a feedback, thanks man!

I am adding interpolation into my whole game to make everything smoother. Even most people don't notice the difference, I am a FPS player which is really paranoiac about smoothness, monitor refresh rate and stuff so game will be smooth as a baby's ass.