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[weckr]

io3: sorry for late response man, there wasn't possibility of any real bad consequences, only of good ones. Was there just to gather feedback and maybe to interest some people in the game. To be completely frank, I was hoping to be nominated for a prize for best visuals, since everyone complimented them, but wasn't that lucky.

Hello people of the internet! In the middle of implementing all the feedback from the event! First thing I did was ability to jump over small gaps and pits for free. This was at first done automatically, just by holding the direction. But that was way too much. On more worn out platform with a lot of holes, all you did was bounce around like crazy person and it was hard to control.

So current solution is that if you hold the direction, you just stop at the gap, and to cross it you need to reset your directional input (let go of an analog or WASD) and then press in the direction again. This is way more controlled way of doing this, and also feels better as the input more resembles of what happens on screen. Another possibility how to do this is to have a "ninja run" button (playing Revengeance currently), but that's overloading a button and I really like how it is currently.


Old version being fully automatic. Way too hard to control precisely.

Another thing I will be working on for quite some time, is the game prologue/tutorial. Because the game levels are built to be procedurally generated from ground up, I needed to implement an ability to make precise pre-made levels. I thought about utilising Unity editor for this, but given how my platforms work, in the end I went with implementing generating levels from .txt file templates. This was actually really easy to do in itself. The time consuming part was refactoring the whole platform generation code, which was one giant horrible file. Now it is nicely divided into reusable functions and files doing specific things, ready for later expansion into more platform types and shapes.


suprising thing actually was how hard it was to find solid offline .txt ASCII art editor for making maps

Also, changed the way stun and grabbing works. Because it was optimal way to play the game, just to stun enemies and grab them and instakill them, now you need to damage them to be grabbable. Also instead of getting the heatsink from them instantly, it pops from them as a pickup. This is more visually clear, and more interesting since you still need to get it, which can sometimes be problematic even if it is only ony tile far.


I totally wanted to do this *before* playing revengeance... the black cube is placeholder effect I guess

Also I feel I still haven't fully recovered from the conference. It was just so much. But the progress is steady, looking forward to having the prologue level out of the way, and tying all the loose ends in the combat system. And again adapting the reward system to the new heat system. So much iteration, so much work built on the bones of discarded old work. Only way to do it properly I guess.

May your iteration be fruitful, and have awesomesauce week. I'm going to be making a few minutes long uncut gameplay video, which I will maybe be posting here soon.
 

[zelgaris]

Hey Marek, though I would personally prefer the auto-jumping (as I was among the ones who suggested it ), even the "stop, then go" is still better than spending energy and overshooting the one piece gap with dashing

However, it's not clear how you are handling diagonal jumping.

[FRACTURES]

I am absolutely and totally loving the whole look of this game. Stunning.

[ashtonmorris]

This looks great. I dont know how I havent come across it yet..

In the video with the "placeholder music" it almost looks as if the tile jumps are on the beat. Have you considered intentionally making any of the animations sync with the music?

[weckr]

zelgaris:
Hey man! Yeah the stop, then go version is how it works right now. Autojumping was just too much uncontrollable. The dude stops at the edge, and when you let go of the stick/direction keys and press them again, he makes the hop. Diagonals work exactly the same. There is a little autoaim (like with almost everything in this ridiculous tile-based setup I have), so you don't have to press the exact direction.

fractures:
Thanks a lot!

ashton:
That would definitely be cool, however, this will never be a music rhytm based game, we have a necrodancer for that. And implementing it just for cool non-mechanical effect seems like incredible amount of work, and severely limiting what the ingame music can be.

Hey!
Lot has been done this week. Time was mostly spent on combat system/tutorial level.

The combat system was refined to respond to changes in the heat management done pre-conference. Since I believe this was a fundamentally good change, but haven't got time to adjust the rest of the game to it. For example, balancing stun abilities was hard. The ideal way to play was to stun enemy with heat-free stun attack, and then tear him apart. Made primary attack kind of useless. So I had to nerf stunning somehow...

So now each stunning attack has a stunpower of 2 (this is defined from how much tiles a stun-hit moves the enemy). And enemy is stunned only if it has equal or less hp. And each enemy has 3hp. So now you need to hurt them with primary attack first, to be able to stun them and tear them. This is better. But, I still don't want that all you do is the tear move, even in revengeance, the zandatsu move, however awesome it is, it just gets kind of tiring, at least for me. So I made that stun attack costs 1 heat just like primary attack. The only reason it didn't before was that it used to be only way how to regain heat. That is now delegated to discharging to tiles and tearing enemies. It also allows me to not hold back balance-wise with them and make them really powerful in their stun way ( lots of various aoe ). The design is so tight, every change warrants redesign of everything else. 


was really deeply immersed in the work this week, not many images

On the prologue/tutorial thing now. Above you can see what I have now (it has already changed a bit ofc). The design and level and custom plat generation is mostly done, I still need to implement correct button prompts and logic and stuff. It should teach you basic controls, heat management, and the core attack/stun/tear combat loop. Still have no idea how to communicate how armor works. Really want to do all of this without words. Even just to avoid localization problems in the future. Whole thing should be done next week. Then of course will have to change it all after tests... But the fun thing occured to me. With some little work, I could give people ability to make custom levels with any .txt editor! Maybe even with steam workshop support. This is something I would have never expected to do, but now it seems like a crime not to make it eventually. Probably post-launch thing tho. It's basically just about making an usable interface for it. And expanding what you can do. And documenting. etc. 


you can be judged soullessly just by your effectivity, most realistic feature yet

Another thing that popped out just as a consequence of tiles being your resource. You can now measure how effective you are by how much tiles are left on the platform when you finish it! So this will now define your score from the platform along with score from pickups which enemies drop. (also that score is used to buy stuff so it's not just an arbitrary number).

Ok so work's kind of picking up tempo. Hopefully I'll have first prologue ready for testing next week. Combat system I consider mostly done now, however, there is still supermode, an integral part of later stages, and that is so not done. I think I really won't ever get to make any passive upgrade kind of thing. We'll see. Also made progress on second miniboss, mainly refactoring minibosses to common base. Very similar to normal enemies so it was quick.

Sigh. I write too much. Kind of enjoying it tho, makes me feel like I actually done something this week! Well I did, but actual content creation is so slowed right now. Also, I have an actually usable computer now, so I can do some dev streams. In european workday times tho(because that's when I work, duh), so don't really know if it's worth it.

Enjoy your glorious time as an electrochemical machine on a wet rock, and until next week, woobly-doobly-doo(?)(*sips wine*)

[weckr]

Hello.

Funny thing, why I write this on sunday, instead of saturday. Until like 2PM yesterday, I operated under assumption it's actually friday. So I went on with it and put a full day in, not really in mood for devlog after that. I was totally day-shifted for like last three days haha.

Going to be sending build to testers sometime early this week. With that first try at tutorial level in broad strokes. So part of week was that.

Was a rather hard week. I think the game finally got too big and complex (and it's still pretty small as a game) to keep whole mental model of it in my head. I can try for a while and with some pain, I can glimpse at it, but I think this is the time to really stop adding systematic complexity. I am not comfortable working alone on a game that doesn't fit in my poor head. So a lot of the week was just sitting trying to think, staring on paper. Little depressing. Going to have to do some visualizing of the game design, large mind map or something. I really want to have basic systems designed by the end of this month. Most of it is done, but the loose ends are really hard to tie in.


so much better

In actual implementation work done, I improved the last boss stages to have game more "finishable" for testing. There were also simple visual improvements which in the end make a big difference and was a thing that made me happy this week. First I added a bit of random rotation to every tile. Don't know why I haven't done it sooner. I think Stephen sausage roll screenshots were the impulse. Such and obvious thing to do.


such a beautiful day

Also @TijmenTio on twitter tweeted how you should add flowers in your game. With such a beautiful weather outside this week, I couldn't resist. Just added 50% chance of spawning 0-3 flowers on tile. I originally planned on animating them, but I think I'll leave that for later now. Probably not worth it.


new font

So being mentally exhausted already after wednesday, I turned to something rather different. Made third and hopefully last atempt at ingame font. Suprisingly hard thing to do. Had to be square, 5 pixels to fit with HUD symbols, chunky/squarey (as few jagged pixel edges as possible) and readable at an angle. I also threw in symbols from the hud in the game. This was actually main impulse. When you gain heatsink or something, it will show +(heatsink symbol). Which is now super easy to do as it will just be a "+H" string, without any custom sprite ordering system or whatever. Adding new things to the font is not as smooth and simple as I would like, but eh. Still a five minute thing.


font in use for counting ... currency I guess

So yeah, one of the tougher weeks. Looking forward to next weekend. It's going to be a real one, with party for friends finishing their medschool, grandma's 80's birthday, and then on sunday going to the capital city to record an indie developer interview internet show. This is not scary at all, right? They had like, legit people there. But gotta do that marketing I guess. But first gotta send out those test builds this week.

Oh man oh man.

edit: Sorry for the general whiny tone, so grateful for everything. Just bit tired.

[weckr]

Hey dudettes and dudes!

Again kind of entrenched in the work, not that much giffery. Redoing the whole tutorial, again. Because when learning from zero, it takes a lot of tries to get it at least usable it seems. Going to split the whole thing into 2-3 maps, a bit less dense, bit more open, bit more fun.


the bullet-y bits teach armor

Also trying really simple 2 - 4 frame animations along with the level and button prompts to explain mechanics. Don't really know if that will be any successful. Also thinking about about lowering the entry barrier of the game by making attacks do damage even when overheated. But it kind of betrays the rest of the game design so probably not. However I would really like some way to make the heat system less punishing and more accessible from the start. Don't really have many ideas how will that work yet. Most obvious is just splitting it from the "health". Making it ammo basically. But that seems again crazy at this point, and I hate adding anything numbers.


some frames from tutorial animations, these are not in sequence, each of them is actually base for one sequence

And also since I want to split tutorial into multiple maps, there was a question of transitioning between them. Thinking about it and really hating the idea of reloading the whole scene just to switch a map, solving all sorts of problems with keeping player and tutorial objects through the load, I went with just destroying the current platform and rebulding a new text file in two frames. From some reason, with not really that much work, it works pretty great!

Probably most intriguing thing I have worked on in a while. Funny sideffect of tiles flashing red when destroyed. Actually no idea why. I think they are supposed to flash red everytime they get destroyed, but since I switch material in a frame and the get destroyed the next frame, you can't really see it normally, and here, since the frame is long because it does a lot of stuff, you can.


the second map just has the same tiles in transition point

So those are the things. Was a busy weekend, I'm writing this late on sunday instead of saturday afternoon as usual. But gotta have discipline. See you next week with hopefully most of this version of tutorial done.

[gimblll]

Really love your style, keep it up! Looks great!

[weckr]

Thanks gimblll!

Greetings fleshbags! Both tutorial maps are now done and working. Pretty sure I'll be redoing them again sometime but for now I want to test what is the most wrong with them. Cut a lot of things from the tutorial. I don't teach none of the more nuanced things in there, just the basic stuff to play the game. Hoping people will get the rest eventually from the visual feedback. So this is the first map now.


still no polish like torches at places and stuff like that, and pretty much everything placeholder

When I was not working on tutorial, I continued the never ending work on combat system. Kind of caved in on a bit of elegance, you can now damage and destroy enemies even when overheat, but they explode next to you and it is very suboptimal way to play, but it is possible. So it lowers entry barrier a bit, and allows for some fun button mash at the beginning, until the person gets the grip of the heat system. At least that's the theory. Bit sad to break that no destroying tiles no damage to enemies elegance, but It seems more fun this way. We'll see how it turns out.

Also cleared and defined visual feedback more. There is clear visual feedback when something is hit, when it lost hp, when it gets knocked back etc.


first tutorial arena, the various impacts are more readable even in this tiny 30fps gif

Also to relax from coding a bit at night, I started very slowly to work on some story/meaning elements. And of course make them up as I'll go along along. Everything in this game constantly changes in my head until I actually implement it. Then it also changes, but in constraints of not trying to throw out too much work. Also this was therapeutic to model...


getting to this will probably be the point

Also therapeutic feature from friday night, which is time only for therapeutic features. Was sitting on feedback that the player model needed more character. So I just made this simple animation. It also reacts to hits and attacking and stuff like that with various shapes. And as everything lately, it turned out kind of cute...


ohh hello I'm lovable now yes

So yeah. Probably going to be sending build to my closed tiny circle of first online playtesters, for a first not-in-person testing. Kind of scary, but actually less than personal testing, because of not having to interact with actual human being. Expecting very different kind of feedback, since people will have time to sit on it by themselves...

Also refactored this and that bla bla I can't code. Hoping you're having somehow sunny saturday ( but it doesn't make your screen unreadable ). Bye-ah!

[weckr]

Evening, ladies and gentlemen.

I sat down to write a devblog, and noticed I haven't done any gifs this week! Been focused on putting together build for my first few online testers. Getting lot of great feedback! The tutorial proved to be as bad as expected but hopefully fixable without a complete redo. Really don't want to put too much time into it now and work on some content again. But I managed to squeeze a feature in between making the build and implementing some of the early feedback...


weekend is for chill work on pretty things

Until now the game worked that you jumped onto arena, cleared it, and then got a reward platform, and the cycle repeated. To increase variability, you can now get a chain of 2 or 3 smaller arena platforms between the rewards. So you jump on this smaller arena, clear it, jump to another arena clear it, and then reward or third arena. Or just a one big arena like it is now. This makes combat a lot more variable since you need to adapt to precise combat on tight platforms or to a bit more chaotic combat on big platforms but with more enemies. Puts a bit more pressure on design to not make something too strong/weak on a small platform. Minibosses will probably be restricted just to large platforms and so on.


look at this happy asshole probably relevant to story

Overall strange week. Feels like I did a lot of work, but not too much to show for it. Really want to get to making cool stuff and content after I implement what I can from this testing phase. So brace yourselves for all the gifs. Hold onto the door you could say. Hilarious I know.

KTHXBYE

[weckr]

Good midnight everyone!

Been a very productive saturday after a rather shitty week from many reasons. Got more feedback! Oh man. Lot of work to do. (one of the reasons of not that great a week, I love feedback, but always hurts a little anyway)

As new features go, started on a last large piece of functionality, switching tilesets. Seemed like there isn't a good reason to not transition between tilesets smoothly, so It currently works like that, putting pieces into a platform from two adhering tilesets. Should make more visual interest out of less assets and also keep the game also visually smooth since there are no hard loading screens or transitions between levels. It's seems about half done right now. Anyway this should be last piece of functionality for a feature-complete alpha. But then there is so much work on each individual piece of course, but I shouldn't have to add any major system.



As for core gameplay stuff, again redoing visual feedback. Making it larger, but simpler. Easy to read. Less color. White flash base for every hit. Red particles mean damage has been done, blurred sprites are type of hit ( knockback hit, hit to attacking enemy, etc.)

Also more visual consistency, going to eventually get rid of all the hard mesh effects and replace them with soft pixelly gradients. Well I gues I keep particles hard, but otherwise all efects will be 2D sprites.

Also separated completely player color palette. Nothing will be violet or yellow except for player related things. Replaced yellow on enemies with cyan and got rid of their overdone particles.


goddamn readable from two miles away

Also softened the level as resource thing. Now you can get 3 point of cooling out of a tile before destroying. So the scoring is now based on remaining hp of tiles, not just a flat count of remaining tiles. It is certainly prettier, and easier. But don't worry, it is still pretty brutal.


woo colors

Also, after watching streams of street fighter, switched effects again to play independently of main time multiplier. So they play at normal speed through the otherwise frozen games while hitting the enemy. I was switching this back and forth, because if you freeze effects with time and so you have whole game truly frozen with nothing moving on screen, it has a bit more arcady 2D vlambeer feel, but I guess it's more readable and modern this way.

Opinions on this? Objectively should be better because the frozen game gives you time to take in the playing effect, which then also doesn't stay that long after the freeze is over, if I'm not missing anything.


just a random gif

Ok, off to hopefully better week, excited to see feature freeze on the horizon and working only on redoing everything + content to be redone. Also tried streaming on twitch and it works, but is pretty hopeless as an unknown developer I guess, also european work hours. Anyway thanks for visiting!

[Alec S.]

This game is looking like a ton of fun! 

Also, after watching streams of street fighter, switched effects again to play independently of main time multiplier. So they play at normal speed through the otherwise frozen games while hitting the enemy. I was switching this back and forth, because if you freeze effects with time and so you have whole game truly frozen with nothing moving on screen, it has a bit more arcady 2D vlambeer feel, but I guess it's more readable and modern this way.

Opinions on this? Objectively should be better because the frozen game gives you time to take in the playing effect, which then also doesn't stay that long after the freeze is over, if I'm not missing anything.

Some feedback effects happening during otherwise frozen frames can be a really cool effect, so I think that's a pretty good way to go.  If you want a middle ground, something you can do is give the feedback effect two stages, like an implosion during the frozen time that then bursts into an explosion when time starts again.

[goshki]

I love it, looks really nice.

How do you do the animations? I like the subtle bounciness in each movement and environment interactions.

[Valar05]

These gifs are really eye-catching - the animations and particles effects just look so good. 

Saw your comment about freeze frames with particles playing - have you tried using slowdown instead of cokmpletely freezing the frame?  Then both the particles and the animations would be in sync, but the slowdown would still give you that feeling of weight.  Playing God of War 3 over the weekend, I've got that on the brain, since when you block an attack in that game, there's this hugely satisfying slowdown effect right before you counter.  (I could be wrong, but I think the slowdown is actually a curve rather than a flat value - so it's slowest right when you block, and gradually speeds up to normal.)

[weckr]

re Alec S.
Thanks! Yeah two stages would probably be coolest however way more work to make every effect two stage and every effect would need to hang around that longer to be readable, which is something I don't want. Need every effect to stay on screen just for the time absolutely necessary, for clearness sake.

re goshki:
Also thanks! Character animations are very primitive blender rig. Mostly just a one frame pose I transition in and out of through unity animation system. Bouncing of tiles is scaling them on the y axis according to a simple sin function, they have origin in their botom so they scale just in upward direction. Also the scale of tiles gets applied on whatever is on them, with a limiting multiplier.

re Valar05:
Thanks too!! Did try slowdown, just a linear one tho. Given the extremely simple way I do animation and the zoomed out perspective, it didn't really seemed to work very well. Also implementation is a bit trickier given the dumb way I do things. But will try to look on some video to see hwo GoW does it if I could use it somehow.

Hello fellow gamedevians! It's time for yet another devbloggery!

Crazy week. After much pondering of the feedback, I set out on a mad quest of reworking much of how player stuff works. And refactoring it too.

First I reworked movement. I united dash and jump into single something like ninjarun thing. Basically just a dash with jumping over platforms automatically. Also much softened how fast you overheat. You get a heat point only when changing a state from jumping to dashing and vice a versa.

This lowers the barrier of entry to the game, and removes one button completely. Also made it way more satisfying and cooler with inertia and stuff. Been working on this damn jump and dash basically for year now.


You just a hold a damn button and it works!

Another thing is more detailed work on how cooling works. Now happens automatically when you walk. Given it very clear feedback. It actually was this way before, cooling by walking, but didn't have any meaning because you didn't damage tiles when doing it. Now you do. Again by making it automatic, reducing an input. Probably makes the game even more tactical now when you can't choose when to cool and not manually, but also making it more friendly by not having to worry about it almost at all when you're not playing for highscore or something.


Simple and effective feedback I hope

Then went onto attacks. Will be keeping damage and stun attack buttons. Also added dedicated grab button ( that used to be automatic, and shouldn't be, people grabbed stuff accidentally ). But started refactoring both basic attacks and stun attacks, will be remixing them, deleting few that don't work and replacing them with hopefully better ideas, again to arive at 4/4 number for now. Started with sword slash, a terrible ancient piece of code ( sword was among the first things coded in, along with punch ). Feels much better now, and have ready nice reusable parts to use in other ones. Hopefully will be last refactor of this magnitude.


WHOOSH WHOOSH

Among visual stuff, kept working on combat feedback and tileset changing. Added kind of a placeholder sky to the sides of the tower, so it's more clear it's a tower. There used to be just a gray void. Gonna animate some clouds over this or something.


It's a wall yes not a cave

Also worked on some tileset models, added random rotation to tile edges to give them more variability. I guess gamedev afterlife in hell will be solving shit with quaternions, but managed to somehow do it.


Óne looks kind of like a dick. Oh well.

Thanks for reading, it's a bigger one today. Have a gutt week. Warcraft movie was suprisingly really nicely realised vision, and I'm not even that much into the universe. Was pleasantly suprised. Also a bit tipsy, so your mileage may vary. Go see it so Blizz makes a starcraft 1 movie. We need a goddam successor to starship troopers badly.

[Tuba]

Posting just to follow the devlog and say that this looks pretty good

[weckr]

Insane week, just one gif sorry. Wasn't going to write devlog but discipline! Well basically fucked my stomach on sunday night and mostly haven't eaten much for most of the week. Such a morale blow after two super productive weeks and weekends. Taking this weekend off. Still, some work has been done...

Started work on making it possible to generate platforms and stuff on them according to different rules depending on tileset. Starting to have a clearer idea about how those three tilesets should look from platform shape perspective. Will work towards having three tilesets in alpha.



Still in the rework of core stuff. Cut two old weapons for now, since they didn't really fit in very well (gun) or don't feel good (gloves) and made one new one spear (long range melee + ability to throw it). Also made similar rework on hat abilities. Tossed out one boring one and replaced with something like the gun used to be. But just for stun, so it doesn't break the game as the one which did damage. Dash is almost there, probably no further changes until testing, reworking grab today. After that works I'll probably leave the player character alone until testing.

I really went overboard with my judgment, both in terms of ability to produce content and the size of a game system I am able to design well. Been kind of reflective week. No revolutionary ideas yet, just more humbleness I think. Also signed up for Radius Vienna.


Also, if you would like to participate in testing at some point(no promises), shoot me a message with email here.

[weckr]

A nice sunday morning to you.

This week mostly under the hood stuff again. Mostly refactored and redone "Hit" code of everything, which defines what happens if something gets hit. Since getting hit is a rather large part of the game for everything involved, it took some time. But the horrible mess that was the original script had to be retired. Sideffect of this is that new hit effects are pretty much done and defined for now, and dare I say pretty nice.



Also I have simplified collisions and stuff a lot, kind of a reverted it I guess. At one point I decided to make the game more 3D on the inside, with forces and collisions taking y axis in consideration, but this was a flawed overcomplicated direction. Now the game is more flat again, with just a ground plane height area in which everything happens. Anything under it is effectively out of collisions and effects, and above it is totally separate "air area". I'll see if that will serve for anything else than jumping in the future. Got plans for a cool air combat, but with this flat top down perspective it is very problematic to know where the hell in the space I actually am. And sure I got helpers like lines to ground and stuff, but while it works in 2D RTS, it's just a bad crutch in fast action game.



The fun bonus task this week was this dash trail. In spirit of getting away from cheap (and noisy) Unity particle systems, I made this movement trail. It generates sprites behind player snapped to a grid. Dirty simple and pretty ineffective, but it'll just be a player thing probably so I just generate sprites into an array and eraser thing goes from the other side of the array and deletes a certain number of the sprites each tick. You get a few undeleted sprites hanging around for a second sometimes when you stop and start the dash quickly again, but for now it's allright. Also probably easy to solve eventually.

Also gonna be at radius festival on 22nd in Vienna. It's like two hours by bus from here so had to try. No idea how am I going to make this somehow playable until then with other stuff I have to do in July. It's gonna be nuts month. So if some of you three people who read this are going to be around, come say hi and see how much worse this plays than it looks! jk jk jk *cries*

[weckr]

Hello!

Only really visual feature to show from this week are updated platform shadows. Just putting a sprite in there and wobbling it according to sin x * cos z. Looks less like a hard ground. It's supposed to be some kind of fog, but it probably also still looks a bit like water.



Oh also now with much more powerful dash, normal obstacles just haven't seemed obstacl-y enough, so I made a "tall" obstacle which blocks also air movement. Was difficult to come up with a good way to visualize. It is basically a tree, but the top would block too much vision behind it. Though about dynamic transparency based if the player is behind it, but that seemed also bad. So just made it dissolve into air with this smooth cutout shader. Fun sideffect is, when it gets hit the whole tree gets revealed.



Lot's of design and some refactor done this week too. Going to have to prioritise a lot before the Radius show. Going to focus on new much simpler-but-also-complex tutorial first, and then add some stuff in time left. After that I'm going to focus on levels and platform generation. So to put something there, you can have a look at my disgusting greasy platform concept art.



Classy AAA production AF. First stage's going to be natural environment, flowers, trees and stuff. Some water. Second will be more rocky with mountains and maybe lava, and then stuff will get weird. Hopefully.



Anyway that's all for today, looking forward to having core tested and done finally getting to make more substantial levels. And refactoring the system for making them. Also need to mostly redo minibosses. Oh well.

[weckr]

A happy sunny weekend to you!

This week, I've once again made a terrible but calculated mistake of taking one more shot at tutorial. Learning from all mistakes I've made before, I've went once again with a different philosophy. Last tutorial was a very controlled and tight thing, with very traditional roguelike tight corridors and platforms. It was bad for many reasons, but one of the biggest was that it was so different from the main game. Not only the platforms were premade, they were also huge convoluted things with tight spaces, stretching over the whole map. The main game is generated largely open arenas with some obstacles thrown in and always only as big to fit on the screen whole, taking only a quadrant of the map.


old tut map vs one of the new tut platforms, guess which breaks way easier

So, I've recycled some stuff from the old monolithic tutorial, it is still premade, because procgen tutorial seems like unholy madness and very much the antithesis to what a tutorial should be. But now it consists of discreet readable platforms, much simpler and less breakable in design that the gargantuan megaplatform it was. It also allows me to give player ability to jump early, so he can get to use it over the course of the whole thing. In the old one the jump was the last thing I gave to player, because it was really easy to break something with it. And most importantly it plays much more similarly to the main game. Also finally had to learn about transformation matrices.


ripping stuff apart now more juicy than before

Also been occasionally watching SGDQ, and seeing all that megaman stuff, especially megaman zero... One thing it directly contributed is time freeze on getting a pickup, I actually had it before but then removed it from some now irrelevant reason. Added it back, feels so nice.
Also retuned all the attack timefreezes.
Also had an idea about adding one more final layer to the basic player combat system. Will postpone it for now until some work on levels and minibosses is done, which probably will be like month or two away haha. But it should be a neat thing in theory. Combat would then have kinda 3 layers, which seems like a right number for everything after working on this for years.


new tree models, soft transparency of old ones was way too problematic

Anyway, entering kind of two week final stretch before the Radius Vienna. Also have to do a short teaser in that time. Going to be a bit busy I presume. Good thing I have runny nose and cough again f***.