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[weckr]

Gonna echo Mesh here: this stuff is awesome and I love it all.

Go ahead and post when you want, no pressure, but there are people who want to see it 

Yo keep going. I don't comment lol but I read everyone of your posts

Thanks guys, appreciated!

[weckr]

Oi everybody!


GDS

Tested the game on another event, this time GDS Prague. Biggest event I've been yet. Was stressed, wasn't even going to go at first since the game still wasn't in too good of a shape. Made an impulse application week before. Glad I went tho. Made very useful observations.

First day was kind of bad actually. Was really tired, and learned that the dash movement doesn't really work. And it was incredibly buggy. And heat system was still too needlessly complex. Basically, everything sucked. Fixing worst stuff between first and second day was still pretty satisfying. So now I'm focused on making the game as playable as possible, and then really commiting to online playtest schedule. I have a new, I think promising iteration on all the systems.

By the way, if you want to test, just drop me a message here, or on weckr.net. Absolutely no commitment required. Not stealing the design would be nice tho. If there even is stuff to steal hah.


Movement



So the forced dashing all the time seemed too alien and hard to get used to for people. So. Making it a bit more friendly by enabling walking again. Dashing over gaps between platforms is now automatic and free by holding the direction. But, you can force dash by pressing "super" button. But it is actually more effective to dash! Because of


New resource system



There are now two resources. Tiles always getting destroyed directly under player character seemed really frustrating for people. But I still want to keep the idea of platform as a resource. So, now it's still that every player action damages platform, but the tiles start falling from the edge, or according to one of other few patterns (from center, from two sides, etc.). Metaphor of player discharging heat into tiles is dead, but whatever, gameplay first. Second resource is


Rings



Rings from killing enemies fuel the meter on the right, and this is then used for forced dashing, and various special attacks. This nicely paces the combat, you kill few enemies by standart attacks, and then get to use a few powerful attacks. Also, this is why dashing is still more effective than walking. It counts as one action, and you travel far distance. By walking, it counts as action ever tile you cross, so platform detoriates much more quickly and enemies get way more actions to get close to you and attack.

It also rewards you bumping enemies into each other, they drop more rings if they collide into each other than if you just kill them by attacks. In retrospect all this seems like such an obvious videogame design 101. I took me years by now. It feels very stupid. And I won't know if this iteration works until I test it again. Cool. I guess this is the valley of dunning kruger curve. It's rather cozy.




Other stuff



Above you can see protype bumpers. I kind of want to fill the platform with more cool dynamic stuff than trees and rocks. So this bumps stuff around.

Also IK will always be dumb fun and I'll never get tired of it being dumb...



So yeah, I still have some putting together to do, mainly at the game structure, I actually should just probably rewrite it it's some of the oldest code in full use right now. And then, I should test again asap. And then have somewhat regular testing schedule. Working blind is really dumb. Altough washing things out is definitely a risk too. We'll see.

And yep, this once in a while bigger progress dump feels way better than weekly thing. Gonna continue like this. Until next time boyz n' galz. Fellow kidz.

[weckr]

Allright, was a productive couple of weeks. I guess I'll just dump twitter gifs here and write about them. About 70MEGS of them.




Made missile enemy attachment. If player lines up in its direction, it fires with next player action and explodes in the distance of the player from the enemy.




GUI is progressing. To communicate super abilities better, you now get icons of abilities you have on your GUI. Also they light up if you have enough rings to use them. I'll add some way of displaying button combinations that activate them.




Changed area knockback attack to be slam from jump. Instakills enemy on direct hit.




And also is pretty allright on not direct hit.




Added another platform shape generation type. The Hole. Genius.




New enemy legs/movement type. Follows platform edge.




Pimped out reward platforms. Will make further changes how they work but pretty happy with layout/visuals right now. Hubble is placeholder, probably will be some kind of story comic thing.




Digging movement type.




So now the enemy generator is getting ok I think. Notice the cheeky invisible enemy huhaha.


Uh.. Ok so that's it I guess. Have solid momentum right now. Time spent on getting tech usable is finally converting in being able to add stuff like enemy parts and adding stuff to platforms pretty fast.

Onwards to bright tommorows, my friends!

[goshki]

So now the enemy generator is getting ok I think. Notice the cheeky invisible enemy huhaha.

The enemy designs are pretty cool. Are they done inside Unity completely (i.e. just plain boxes and animators)?

[weckr]

Thanks, I'm actually improving them currently. But no, they are very haphazardly modeled, rigged and animated in blender. The blender/unity pipeline is a little messy, but when you get used to it's kinks it works very well. And blender for my needs is briliant, when you learn it's quirky controls, it works super well for any basic 3d work.

[weckr]

hurrr
ok so I'm having proper sickday today since I feel like I have become a host to ebola/bubonic plague mutant so I'll just do this thing after two months of silence before I just spontaneously explode out of existence.




I've spent some time on air game so I've readed kicking dudes into air dudes




I've also added this sick corkscrew dash into air which is done just by rotating player model and normal dash animation but as always it wasn't that trivial because the player has origin in it's feet so you can't just rotate around origin and I wanted the dash always end with player rotated correctly up. So I rotate the guy around the axis in the middle of him and then when he's near the destination of the movement I'll lerp him back into proper rotation/position over the last few units. Also the rotation speed is multiplied by his travel speed. Also it's not really perfect (sometimes he changes the rotation direction when lerping to correct one at the end) but works well enough.




Speaking of math, procedural animation. Some time ago I've added these spikes to enemies to make the designs more interesting. Also I've animated them but while it's not really that hard or time consuming, it's still a pita. I thought back then about animating them procedurally, but it seemed like animating them by hand would be still faster than technical solution. Well I've managed to do it anyway, took about half a day. Above example is with animation disabled except the spikes.




How it's made. Vertices at the tip of the spike are assigned to their own "spikebones" in blender. Then I manipulate the transforms of these bones directly in lateupdate (which happens after animation update so overrides animator values on these bones) in unity. The code itself is some math that takes the last would-be global position of the bone and now position, and drags the actual bone (and the tip of the spike) along, storing it's inertia to making it springy, with some braking on it. If someone's interested in this dumb piece of not being good at math or programming I can share the code or whatever you need.

And also numbers are bit of on the gifs, first iteration, It's tuned much better now.




I got told I have shit sense of humour and falling flat on the face on the beginning of the run is dumb, so I made superhero landing. I think I'll still put in falling flat on the face with like ,01% probability.




I've diferentiated more the enemies hovering outside the platform, they are now snakes.




Recycled turrets into shooting heads for enemies. Consolidating old stuff back into modular enemies. More interesting than immobile turrets.




HADOUKEN!




This is how tutorial ends currently. It's also first implemented story bit in the game. It is also possible it is the last. We'll see.


Of course, lot of other things changed and got added. Like way bigger and more important things that are giffed here. But I'm tired now, and maybe those things aren't that giffable. Honestly, I don't know. I hope I'll do next one sooner than in two months. Felt good to write this again tho.

Thanks and take care.

[DireLogomachist]

Looking awesome!

[wuuthrer]

I'm delighted by every aspect of your game. Visuals are great, still easily readable, you put a lot of efforts on the little details (like the ground shaking), also mechanics look very tight. Can't wait to put my hands on this :]

So now I want to ask some questions!

What are your thoughts for the music and the sound design? I'm wondering because the whole thing seems pretty abstract, somehow. I mean, what's the hero made of? Metal, cardboard, meat, I don't know! To me, it feels like you can do a lot of things and try interesting new stuff.

You also mentionned you had some kind of shit sense of humour, I wonder if you'll communicate that through soundtrack, with some kind of light-hearted music. Anyway please, avoid epic / overused / generic epic music.

(sorry if you did already answer to that, I didn't went through ALL the devlog)

[weckr]

Yeah audio is a bit of a curse of this project I had to get a new guy after previous people quit so we'll see which direction he takes it. I definitely wouldn't like generic epic stuff, but also probably nothing comedic. I'm imagining more ambient stuff, disasterpiece style.

[weckr]

Hello everybody, it's saturday night and I'm enjoying vodka with peach juice, while the cinematic masterpiece of Aliens vs Predator 2 plays in the background. Let's go over some recent gifs shall we. In no particular chronological order. Chaos reigns.




Here I played hyperlight drifter, and got an idea one night how to do the drifter effect. It has changed a bit since, but I still use it just for super attacks. I copy out the players deformed mesh, there's a function in skinnedmeshrenderer for that. It got little tricky with weapon and hat, since those are different objects with different transforms and stuff, but managed to do it in the end.




Experimented with more enemy attachments, made this attachment which connects them with a laser. Going through the laser damages you. In gif is really early version.




Worked on platform traps a bit, added the laser walls here too, they do connect to the enemies with the attachment mentioned above.




Seen nier automata footage and was reminded how cool the refraction effects in action game are. Looked again into it (last time I gave up a bit after little research), but this time I finally found shader I was able to modify to work well for my use. Details on request. It compliments the tile waves pretty well, it seems a bit like it's one seamless effect.




And since we are talking shaders, friend linked me this nice set of unity stuff from this keijiro guy, google "keijiro assets reddit" for it, there was this retro 3d shader. Since I kind of think like a bit of PS1 visual style game about this now, had to try it. It was way too distracting on everything, but on character I think it works pretty well, making them more alive, bit like imperfections in hand drawn animations do there. So I use it on chars and little bits of environment now (grass and flowers) to make them pop.




I've added this launcher, to set up more air action, not that sure how it fits right now but cool enough to keep for now.




Added a weapon, gunblade. It's crappy melee weapon but it's super attack is a shot rather cheap on super resource so it's to be used as ranged weapon mostly. But still keeping the game about melee, gonna be very specific weapon.




Oh and the camera rotation around the tower is back in. It was there, and then I removed it for forgotten reason. And now I've put in back in but I'm little less of an idiot now so it works much better and has many pros. Also I don't remember why I've removed it. It was long ago.

Ok I think I've 420 blazed it through most of what could be interesting for now. You guys keep safe and amazing at all times and zones.

I think this is probably illegal way to write devlogs.

[etodd]

Love how everything's shaping up, although I'm not sure about the drifter effect. Not sure if you tweaked it since that gif, but the colors tend to bleed together into a dark soupy mess. Maybe spawn less duplicates, or switch to additive alpha, or even just bump the brightness on the duplicates?

Keep it up with the illegal devlogs. They are amazing. Fight the power.

[s_harriton]

I like the art. If I saw this on the app store I'd def download it to check it out

[weckr]

I like the art. If I saw this on the app store I'd def download it to check it out

thanks!

Love how everything's shaping up, although I'm not sure about the drifter effect. Not sure if you tweaked it since that gif, but the colors tend to bleed together into a dark soupy mess. Maybe spawn less duplicates, or switch to additive alpha, or even just bump the brightness on the duplicates?

Keep it up with the illegal devlogs. They are amazing. Fight the power.

Thanks man, drifter effect already very different.

[weckr]

Sup yo, shizz goin' down over here. Slowly getting ready for last stretch of about 3 - 5 months I think.

Two months since last devblog, of course that means everything's different now. I've been on possibly last pre-launch event last week. It was the same event as I was attending last year for a first time. It doesn't even seem like a whole year has passed, but it clearly has. Was a nuts year, It seems I'm getting profound insights not only about game design, but on like, life, every month. Ok cool story bro I hear, back to business.




Here's short intro I put together for the event. I think it'll stay. Just wanted to set the ingame scene to a place and maybe little context. Possibly will do something similar for ending...




I've done a lot of simplification this month. The game's combat was always supposed to nudge you into kicking enemies into other enemies, you basically have a dedicated attack for that. But sometime the enemy isn't really in good position to be kicked into other stuff. My solution was a grab move, you grabbed enemy and couldn't turn with him, aiming him at other dudes. This was a bit challenging to incorporate into my 4 button input limit, and I hate breaking my selfimposed limitations. Also people weren't using the grab, it is just easier to attack the enemy instead. You get more score and pickups from bouncing them around but if it isn't simple, nobody cares.

So I realized I can just incorporate the aiming functionality into kick itself. After treating the case of kicking the enemy in your own direction by making the player kick the enemy over himself, it works great and cool I think.




The grab was also used for tearing enemies apart and regaining your heat meter in an offensive way (instead waiting for time regen). This use still stayed, I felt ripping enemies apart was thematically cool. Altough now, since I'm going for a bit more zen-action thing, I had doubts. Also the input was hold one button and press other. I'm cool with non trivial inputs, I think they can add to the game (street fighter , brood war), but this one haven't felt good.

Also you can see the block is in and is very important in current game. Was a tricky thing to make it important to do but hard to abuse. Currently it costs you heat meter, makes you immobile and you have to block in correct direction. This works pretty well.




The grab-to-rip was an essential piece of this game metabolism tho, you get rings from damaging enemies, which drains your heat meter, and you regain the heat meter by ripping enemies apart which requires rings. Most action games do this kind of thing in one way or other. This wasn't really as clean as I wanted it tho, also the rings are also used for super attacks and few other things, and choosing what to do with them was supposed to be a cool choice, but I was not feeling it.

So, super attacks are already cool and spend rings, and I've finally figured out how to do properly different attacks on button holds instead of tap ( you start attack on press and inside attack if player's still holding the button you switch to the other attack - you get the instant response AND choice of attacks ). So I've dirtily hacked in that when you hit a super attack, it regains your heat meter, and you get no rings. So now it's clear: fight enemies -> get rings / lose heat meter -> spend rings on super attack. There are still other moves to spend rings on, and second super attack defined by hat you have, so there's still choice.

This all simplifies things nicely.




I also finally have better idea about structure I want the game to have, I won't do full reset on dying. Instead you will probably respawn on level you died, but the arena will be newly generated, and you will be able to choose different weapon/hat loadout. Your score will reset on dying tho, so to play properly for score, you'll have to treat it like one life thing.


Ok I think that's all for today. You guys have a(?) super springy spring!

Springalicious.

[DireLogomachist]

Looking fantastic as usual!

[xix]

Wow this is looking really great.

[l0bster]

I got to play your game on the reversed festival in Vienna.

I probably acted stupid while playing it, because i didn't know what kind of game it was, with the grid based movement and stuff, but i found it really cool in retrospective 

[weckr]

So hello everyone.


Quite a bit of time no see right? I kind of got out of rhytm of posting here... Probably a mistake. Not much really happened anyway. I just kind of soldier on, sometimes an event if its in close proximity. Balancing on the burnout edge, running out of money. Started prototyping second project to not go mad, and it has helped me a lot with bearing working on violet cycle too. VC is in that state where it's just elbow grease and work, finishing things ain't lot of fun. The joy from prototyping the new thing is keeping me going. Tired, but can't really stop since money running out, and I really need to finish this asap otherwise I'm going mad. Excited about new thing, technically challenging for me, everything's hard to do, very 3d game, lot of vectors and quaternions, but I take that as a good sign.

Probably most useful thing I've learned lately, I've put off doing fun things for too long. I've tried to focus solely on Violet Cycle, and I ended procrastinating and being miserable a lot. It seems it's actually way more productive to just do as many fun things alongside the primary project as possible. It's tiring, but you just have so much more to show after each day. Payed for the knowledge with a lot of wasted time.


And now I do the thing where I'll describe some gifs from past screenshot saturdays...




So one of the things with this game is modular enemies, where enemies get put together from various parts and attachments and modifiers. I've recently simplified and unified some of these. So this is BLOCK attachment. It acts as a shield from attacks in its direction, and makes the connected enemy heavy, so he takes zero knockback from anything and moves only if he wants to.




Just some general combat, you can see some of the new special tiles here, the yellow ones work like a conveyor belt, pulling you along the way, the dark ones just speed up anything going over them by a lot. I try to keep these simple and mainly act upon the movement. Also they affect enemies as well.




Here's disable meshrendereUH i mean invisibility attachment. You can see the enemy's eyes if he's attacking, and he also sometimes blicks in, on a simple timer or when hit.




The conveyor tiles were just fun when I made them. I enjoy zachtronics games so I like mechanical crap haha.




Lot's of UI work done too. I was forced to give up the no-text design philosophy. I still believe the #correct (as in my shitty opinion and any game with text is still a wonderful miracle) way to make videogames is to make them textless, I feel that only medium relying on text should be books, mayyybeee comics too, but in anything else we should strive to do better. But with this project I'm just not good enough to pull it off yet, so I caved in. So at least tried to spice the texts up a bit and make it usable.


So yeah, that's it. Sorry for any typos, late and tipsy. Have a jolly good slice of existence gals and dudes.

[weckr]

I got to play your game on the reversed festival in Vienna.

I probably acted stupid while playing it, because i didn't know what kind of game it was, with the grid based movement and stuff, but i found it really cool in retrospective 

Thank you, nah man, no such thing as acting stupid, it's a weird game and I'm still learning how to make it actually good and approachable.

Wow this is looking really great.

Looking fantastic as usual!

Thank you so much guys.

[weckr]

Also if anyone wants a steam beta key for some feedback please let me know.