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[jarnik]

Adventure game about a space mechanic sent to a distant planet to fix a navigational beacon.

@spacrgame | spacr-game.com

In a distant future, most people are spliced - transformed into animals. The fur helps them to cope with Earth's cold atmosphere after climate changes. And the innate hibernation abilities allow them to sleep through long interstellar flights.

SPACR is an adventure game focusing on exploration. Fix stuff, eat lovely dishes, make new robot friends. The distant planet is actually bustling with life, though robotic.

You are a young space mechanic who ran away from her family and volunteered for a deep space mission. Your task is to fix a navigational beacon on a distant planet and find the missing beacon keeper.

But why is the deserted planet full of quirky robots acting like humans? And why is your compass acting crazy? Getting off this planet will take some fixing and you’ll definitely need help. Can you meet new friends to fill the gap of those you’ve left behind?

[oahda]

Starvixen?

You should make it SPAÇR to avoid having people say "spacker".

Looks cool!

[BlackseaOdyssey]

What platforms? I feel like this would be good on PC and mobile.

[fingerman]

This looks so good! Fix circuitry? Fantastic!

[jarnik]

You should make it SPAÇR to avoid having people say "spacker".

Hey, great idea!
Actually it didn't occur to me, it could be read multiple ways, so thanks!
It's supposed to be an acronym (System Preservation And Circuit Repair).

What platforms? I feel like this would be good on PC and mobile.

I'm working with keyboard and gamepad controls now, so PC is definitely on the list. Touchscreen controls could be a challenge, but I'd love to try it on mobile

This looks so good! Fix circuitry? Fantastic!

Thanks, glad you like it

A couple of friends are coming over the weekend, so I might get some very first feedback on the controls - it's still very clunky at the moment

[jarnik]

My first playtest session was a success!
Mainly in a sense that I got a lot of useful data and tons of new ideas on how to improve the controls, UI and interactions in general.
Two friends came over for the Game Developers Session here in Prague and as a favor for letting them sleep on our couch, I've asked them to try to play the game a bit.



It became quickly apparent that the game is terribly clumsy and incomprehensible. But we've also quickly came up with ideas on how to fix most of the problems.

I've recently looked at my git repo history and found out that my very first commit for Spacr was from September 2012. I've spent more than three years rewriting the game over and over without showing to anyone. So I'm quite thrilled that I've finally managed to break the cycle, get some feedback and there even seems to be a way to steadily improve the game. Even though I'm just at the beginning of the path, it felt amazingly liberating.

I guess all of you gamedevs are playtesting regularly, but if you're not and you're keeping the game only for yourself, afraid of showing it to the world, choose the right people and do it!

[jarnik]

Thanks to the playtest session last week, I've done some heavy controls tweaking.

I've rewritten the gamepad controls for walking (apply joystick sensitivity for speed, not limited to 8 directions only) and vehicle steering (use trigger buttons for throttle and brake).
Zoom is now context-controlled, with a simple zoomout toggle.
Even after these few changes, it makes much more sense and feels more natural

Next up will be simplifying the interactions.
Currently, you need to use bumper buttons to select interaction from a sequential list, it's the same with inlay systems.
I want to implement wheel selector and also merge interactions and inlay systems (which were kind of a nested menu until now).

And slightly unrelated - here's showcase of my hand-made business cards that I've prepared for a local gamedev event   



Have a great week and get ready for Ludum Dare next week

[jarnik]

I had a couple of hours today to whip up a simple radial menu and Assassin's Creed-like action hints at the top right corner.



Next up will be a simplification of the chat system.
I will ditch the character-by-character typing in favor of composing short commands from fixed dictionaries.

Also tomorrow, I created a tiny LudumDare game about growing flowers :D

[jarnik]

Finished a prototype of a word grid

In dialogues, you don't select answers from a predefined branch set.
Instead, you need to construct answers from keywords.

You can only use keywords that you have heard previously.
The selection is done through a grid (left side of the screen).



The grid is built dynamically, so as you learn new keywords, it becomes more complex.
Needs a lot of visual tweaking, but it works nice with both keyboard and gamepad.

Next up will be: use LUA for internal scripting (instead of Haxe parser), skippable dialogue bubbles and general interaction tweaks.

Happy holidays! 

[jarnik]

I have switched internal scripting (events that happen within game locations) to LUA.
Up until now, I was using internal Haxe parser, but LUA can do just fine and is much more portable and platform independent.

Also I have simplified chat popup bubble.
Whenever you'd receive multiple messages in a row, there used to be this long stream of them on the left side of the screen, disappearing one by one.
Now you can see only one of them (the oldest) and once you skip, next one is displayed. Much more convenient and also allows for manuals skipping through dialogues (without needing to wait for pre-defined timers).



Happy holidays! 

[jctwood]

This looks very interesting! Really adore the little music menu.

[jarnik]

Not much coding done over the holidays, but lots of new ideas on how to simplify things.

Since the very beginning of Spacr, I'd strived for a mighty, flexible engine that could render anything and allow player to do anything. This lead to me rewriting the whole rendering and physics engine from scratch about 4 times without getting any real game content done. I love getting my hands dirty with low-level systems and frameworks, but this keeps me from making the actual games and game content. I've always felt that writing your own framework from scratch is cool and using an existing game engine is a bit of a cheat. Just recently it sank in, that with that attitude, I won't get any game done, ever. And as much as I love creating frameworks, I love crafting games even more.

So I'm ditching my custom engine and I'm going for Luxe. It's well-written, suffices my needs and is open source, so I can always tweak any stuff I need.

Along with this comes a gameplay structure change - originally you were ably to get in the ship, fly off the planet and between the stars, all using the same renderer and controls. This calls for a very flexible and robust system... which I don't have time to develop and maintain.
Instead, I'm splitting the gameplay into multiple modes - the planet (current GTA-like topdown mode) and the cruise (for interplanetary and interstellar travel).

Cruise mode will be based on a simple planetary physics, which I'm prototyping at the moment.
It simulates a planetary systems and at certain points, you can burn your engine to alter your trajectory.
Check out the cool gravity slingshot maneuver around the sun :D



Now I'm gonna be a bit busy with organizing our local site of Global Game Jam.

Hope you had a great holidays and I wish you all the best in the new year!

[Mete]

are we still fixin cobol and fortran softwares in the future? 

[voltaicore]

If you need an audio engineer or audio producer be sure to message me so we can work something out for this project

[jarnik]

Luxe engine is even better then I imagined!
All the things I've written from scratch or planned are already there, neat and polished.

I'll need to rewrite the game from scratch but even a few hours work during the evenings already proved that it's gonna be very swift process. As a bonus, it'll simplify both the code AND the design. I got a basic GTA clone done in a couple of hours I'm pruning the ideas, focusing to get things done.

I've decided to use Tiled Map Editor to create locations.

[jarnik]

Aargh, back from the dead!

On June 2016, I've ditched Luxe framework in favor of Unity.
I finally admitted that it's nice to make game frameworks and games, but you can't do both as a freetime activity.
Been working with Unity in my dayjob for 5 years, porting SPACR to it was nicely swift.

New website: http://spacr-game.com

New twitter: https://twitter.com/spacrgame

Also overcame my hesitance and actually managed to get some playtesting feedback, yielding great results! So happy about it!

Now polishing three basic missions that showcase basic gameplay modes:

puzzles & fixing devices:


docking & driving & exploration:


talking to robots:

[jarnik]

Made a super simple UI for switching quests, so you can quest while you quest.

[jarnik]

Contextual portrait popup now shows state changes, instead of an icon stuck to the top left corner ➡️ cleaner UI

[jarnik]

Tried drawing with a limited color palette for a first time (original below).



Not quite there yet, but it was fun! 

[jarnik]

Mysterious weird cool emoji stuff happening