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[etodd]

Wait what are you designing that map in? Looks like a text file but then there's a color picker...

Regardless, looks incredible. Posting to follow. Also hope you're back to 100% soon.

[weckr]

etodd: Thank you! It is an ASCII art tool, PabloDraw. You can "draw" into plain .txt files with it. It's far from comfortable level editor but it was best I could find without doing something myself.

Good gloomy summer evening to you.



This week was spent in by this point classic madness of pre-public showing stress. Playtest, question your life, work nonstop, playtest again, feel better, playtest again, question your life again, work etc. But also just like the last time, game moves forward so much, in the actual important things like how it plays and not in dumb level generation features.



Reworked the camera. It is single best improvement of readability so far. Wasn't really seeing the old one like a problem for some time, since it's dumb over-complex code showed everything you needed to see. BUT, if you move your camera so much, it doesn't help you any that you see everything, because everything's always moving. So, camera is now most of the time absolutely static, only moves when you're going out of screen, or need to see far for a jump. Zoom now adapts to the size of the platform, so it always contains it whole. This is so much better for the game, altough it does introduces limitations for maximum platform size. GOOD. I LOVE LIMITATIONS, PHYSICALLY.



I also had to make another tiny video from reasons. Worst visual offender in game was kind of placeholdery enemy-rip animation, since I wasn't really sure how to do it. Because you can tear apart any kind of enemy or any wreck, it had to look good in each case. The coolest way would be to use two models of each enemy half, or some cool procedural mesh, but way too complicated and time consuming. I used randomly scaled wreck models, which take material from thing being ripped apart. Works pretty great actually, thinking about making it a meaty hit particle instead of generic red stuff I have now.



Also redone the pickup/score system and rethought like half of the game which I'll try to implement next week haha. It's mostly bad stuff of so maybe it's possible. I really wasn't been able to find good use of various secondary abilities which hats granted. They all felt forced and weird. So going to remove that, you just get two most useful ones all the time, and hook is going to be alternative grab now. So for now you will just be changing weapons over time. Hats will be purely cosmetic thing. Really have no idea how or if do something else with the hats. I still don't want to do passives. But I haven't really tried them, but it never seemed like good idea for this game.



Anyway, one more crazy week and then on friday off to Wien and back. Gonna be long day that one. Also 15 meg gif limit on twitter. SAY WHAT

[TheArtistJiii]

Not sure if this was asked before, but how are you achieving the environment reaction effects? It makes the environment seem very dynamic, or is it just a physics thing?

[craigz]

Not sure if this was asked before, but how are you achieving the environment reaction effects? It makes the environment seem very dynamic, or is it just a physics thing?

Yes!! This question please! :D 

BTW just saw you on twitter through Warcube shenanigans! Your game looks freaking sweet!! :D 

[weckr]

Not sure if this was asked before, but how are you achieving the environment reaction effects? It makes the environment seem very dynamic, or is it just a physics thing?

Yes!! This question please! :D 

BTW just saw you on twitter through Warcube shenanigans! Your game looks freaking sweet!! :D 

It's really super simple, whole map is one big 2D array of tile gameobjects. Over it I have another array of floats "tilewaves" in which I store the "wavestate" of every tile. Then you just loop over area around the source of wave, adding little delay to waves on tiles further from epicenter and making them a bit smaller. The movement itself isn't movement but scaling in y-axis (tiles have origins at the bottom so it seems like movement, but translation would screw with much of my other code so scaling it is), and the scaling itself is just a simple sinusoid. Each waving tile will also emit a grey transparent dust-like quad when at the peak of the curve. That's pretty much it.

There is some more work for being able to have waves combine when spawned near each other ( because otherwise the new one just erases the old one in progress, and that looks suck ), but I don't remember how exactly I implemented it right now. I just remember I can have around 3 overlapping waves tops, but that's more than I ever need since you need to be careful with it for clarity reasons anyway.

I also apply some of the tile scale to anything that stands on it, but keeping it under control with a smaller than one multiplier.

Not really into using built-in physics much, not enough control for my control-freakiness I guess. Also would probably be more complicated than current solution with my ground being lots of destructible discrete tiles (which are now differently rotated and stuff).

Otherwise thanks guys! Warcube does looks pretty cool, like the potential for massive battles.

[weckr]

Hello everyone!

First, I managed to do some new things before the radius event ( and payed for it with way more buggy build than I would like to have at an event ).

I've added a "jet-actions" to the combat system, replacing the hat abilities. You have to have more than default number of heatsinks, which means you can access them about five minutes into each run. You recharge them by ripping apart enemy wrecks and they are activated by pressing dash button + any of the 3 other buttons.



I've transfered the hat abilities that worked to this system. Dash + kick does area ground stomp with big knockback. Dash + grab does mortal kombat hook thing. These were both hat abilities, but now they are always accessible as long as you have heatsinks and because they cost way much to do they can be much more powerful and meaningful and fun to use. Dash + attack currently always does jet-punch ( on gifs above and below ). I would like to have specific jet attacks for each weapon, but this punch feels so awesome that I'm not sure. It has a bit of autoaim, basically all screen range, and you can chain it as seen here.



Also quickly asked some friends for feedback day before radius, and ended up doing lot of changes on last day pre-event. Main complaint was still problems with isometry lacking depth, so I added layers of "fog" so you can clearly see that you are falling, reduced the jump height considerably so the in-air position is closer to ground position, and made air markers massive.



Good thing I've recorded that teaser before this lol. About radius. Was amazing event, actually was really nice just to get the hell out of flat for a change. Build was really buggy, but seems like tutorial is mostly working. Which is a huge step and relief after so much failure with that. There are of course pain points, but mostly it works. Much more people played for a little while too, almost noone left immediately like some people did last time. Also there were some kids there, and they played by far the longest time and seemed to like the game the most for some reason. Weird.

But overall, core mechanics are really starting to fit together. What is coming to light is a lack of, well, everything else. Content and some kind of meaning/motivation/reward structure. Also game is still way too hard from the beginning, need to scale that stuff way in much gentler way. Have tons of notes on paper for all of this. Gonna have some pretty clear development goals in upcoming month or two hopefully. So yeah, that was fun.

Anyway, have a nice week!

[weckr]

Nice searing hot and also very wet summer everyone.

This week, after radius, I made a curious choice. I originally wanted to fix all the gameplay issues that showed during the event, but then I focused on the bugs more. And how better way to solve most of the bugs ( which are mostly collision based ), than to rewrite your collisions. This took me basically all week for some reason. Well game is all about collisions so that is mostly the reason. I'm still not done yet but there are some promising developments. I expect to have much more stable and pleasant system to continue working on.



However there was progress with dash. About fifteen minutes before the opening of the festival I made that you can turn freely in a dash. This made dashing way more responsive and fun, but threw it out of balance because I can't really have dash consume resources based on lenght of a dash because reasons. If you can't do lenght, you can do angle. You can consume a resource anytime you change direction while dashing. That works pretty well on keyboard with your 8 directions. It breaks down with analog tho. So. Solution that works is that you start a dash and your direction is saved. Whenever angle between current direction and the start direction is bigger than 50 degrees, you burn one more resource. There is visual feedback in dash effect getting bigger for a moment. You can still be pretty nimble and efficient without burning out too fast. There is a nice feeling of a skill to master, and still fun for a noob.



Also started some revamp work on base platform generation. Slowly preparing for way easier adding new stuff later. Still wasn't confident enough to start producing too much content and environments on the old platform generation codebase. It's getting a bit nuts with always refactoring everything, but these things were just never meant for a game of the current scale, and also I was even worse programmer than now when I wrote them. Also now I know much more precisely what I actually need. I guess I'm basically de-prototyping this whole thing.

Next week! STUFF! After radius, it's development wild west again, going to break this thing into thousand pieces, put it back together, and then start building more stuff on top. Hasta la vista!

[TheArtistJiii]

Are you developing this full time or do you have a day job, also how do you find the time and motivation work on this game. what's your schedule like? Thanks.

[weckr]

Are you developing this full time or do you have a day job, also how do you find the time and motivation work on this game. what's your schedule like? Thanks.

I was working on this for about a year (or more?) while finishing college (and on gamemaker 2D side view version of this and then unity 2D side version for even more years before, just for fun). Then done some basic very low pay mobile game 2D visuals jobs for few months while trying to finish the thing as fast as I could so I could finish one thing in my life and move on. I was supported by parents on college + education itself is free here in our central europe wonderland so I got really lucky in this respect. However I was drawing most of my time in school (even when I shouldn't), did some illustration jobs to earn something extra and I just wanted do draw for living, but by the end gamedev kind of took over. An interactive thing is so much more tangible and real to me than just a static image.

Staying motivated wasn't really an issue, it was only thing to do except drawing to make some basic money to keep alive, to finish the game in few months and use it hopefully to get a studio job. Then I got really lucky when I started to post things about this online, and got picked up by a publisher. Now I work on this fulltime. This is of course amazing, but also there are now very different expectations from the game, and also I am not doing much else really. But still, dreamjob right? It is super challenging for me, I sometimes get super stressed and even got a few of what I guess would be considered panic attacks. But that just means I probably live on the edge of my ability I guess, and you don't want to go to the ground properly unused, at least I don't. But yeah, currently it definitely is much more like a serious job than living your hobby or something. But you love and care about your work and you get to express creatively and that's more than many people have. And you learn SO MUCH. Maybe even too much learning sometimes if there's such a thing.

Schedule got way better since I have normie job flatmate. I get up sometimes after 7AM (he gets up at 6). Before I got up about 8:30. I hate getting up early but those morning hours before lunch really are priceless. To be honest currently in bit of a slump with this, I blame peaking summer. After that the day schedules kinda vary a lot. But I try to work basically as much as possible without burning out horribly, since I have still long way to go, and stopping is not an option. Finishing college + illustration + gamedev before showed me that you just can't work that much for long time without it resulting in just shutting down not caring about anything.

Sorry for way too overdone reply, I unfortunately enjoy writing too.

[-Ross]

Wow, this looks pretty awesome. Nice impact feel on the hits, cool art style. Cool to hear the longer term development story and real-life stuff too. Motivating.

[TheArtistJiii]

That's very insightful thank you for your response. I'm currently working on something but it is nowhere near presentable. It took me a month or so to work on the proof of concept/prototype and now I'm 4 months in. I too am nearing the end of my college years. The dream is to make a living off this and do it till I die or go bankrupt. I asked about motivation because right now I work full time as a gas station clerk and it exhausts me so I really only get work done 2 days a week but I'm keeping on. You said you got a publisher. How do they help you and is it worth it?

[weckr]

That's very insightful thank you for your response. I'm currently working on something but it is nowhere near presentable. It took me a month or so to work on the proof of concept/prototype and now I'm 4 months in. I too am nearing the end of my college years. The dream is to make a living off this and do it till I die or go bankrupt. I asked about motivation because right now I work full time as a gas station clerk and it exhausts me so I really only get work done 2 days a week but I'm keeping on. You said you got a publisher. How do they help you and is it worth it?

Yeah I messed around for years of college before getting to something presentable, but I did lots of other stuff around too (but most of that had to do with visual skills which in the end helped the game, I am still way worse coder/game designer than visual designer I think), hopefully you'll find the way. Even if you won't (and after few months of side gamedev you would have to be really amazing) make living out of it, I can imagine having just a normal job + gamedev in your life after some adjusting could be more easy than juggling job + school + gamedev.

About the publisher, well, they are keeping me alive while I do this, there's just no other way I could do this full time. They have been pretty cool with offering helpful feedback but not really forcing me to do any big changes so far. We'll see how it goes, But I think a bit of outside control on me is good, especially since this is my first legit project, keeping yourself honest and humble is super important for the work. I can get very... excited over dumb things and stop seeing context, very much to my detriment.

So yeah I probably couldn't suddenly turn this into an art game about deep feelings where you interact by burning old love letters or something, and I would actually love to do something more experimental and daring in the future if I'll get a chance, but for now, even dumb action game is hardest thing I've ever done. And it's worth it for me even if it doesn't make any money back, but of course I'll try as hard as I can to have commercially viable product, even just to try to pay back publisher who definitely took a risk with me as unproven gamedev. Hmm I don't really know if how much is appropriate to write here about this, so I'll stop I guess. Also can't reveal the publisher name just yet if you're going to ask.

Also I guess that really makes me not an indie, but believe me, my lifestyle and process so far has been probably TOO MUCH indie.

[io3 creations]

That info about publishers is probably helpful for new devs.

I also pondered about what being an "indie" developer actually means.  If indie means independent, then what does being "independent" mean exactly?  If you do everything (development, marketing) then the answer is obvious.  But if you go with a publisher, are there some situations where the indie label could still apply?  Some publishers are more flexible and less constraining than others, but there'll be at least a slight expectation at the minimum in terms of schedule.  Of course, in exchange for (potential) future funds (and sometimes IP), publishers provide funds during game development, marketing, etc so it's something worth considering.

[weckr]

That info about publishers is probably helpful for new devs.

I also pondered about what being an "indie" developer actually means.  If indie means independent, then what does being "independent" mean exactly?  If you do everything (development, marketing) then the answer is obvious.  But if you go with a publisher, are there some situations where the indie label could still apply?  Some publishers are more flexible and less constraining than others, but there'll be at least a slight expectation at the minimum in terms of schedule.  Of course, in exchange for (potential) future funds (and sometimes IP), publishers provide funds during game development, marketing, etc so it's something worth considering.

Yeah that's an old discussion now I guess. Don't really know if there's any consensus now, if you need only creative or also financial independence to be considered officialy indie, if there even is such a thing. Of course self-funding is best funding. But that's more for veterans, we noobs mostly don't have the funds hah. Glad you think stuff I write is somehow useful.

[weckr]

Devlog time!

Figured out I'll need basic attacks to have bigger reach to be fun to use, as people always try to attack from too far away. This is incremental process from beginning of the development. At first you stopped at place while attacking, which is of course really bad. I next version there was a tile long dash if you were near the edge of your current tile. Then the dash was always there. Then I prolonged the dash to two tiles. Now it is three tiles and it won't get longer since it's starts to mess with targeting a bit. But it is super fun and since you now kind of dashattack between enemies, it kind of evokes the feeling of arkham games combat in arcady way. Which is ok with me. Because of this I of course completely refactored how attacking and weapons work on player. Adding weapons is way simpler now, probably good enough for production. Downside is there is now kind of a common way how every weapon has to work, can't go too bananas, but that's after trying few bananas things and seeing they don't work gamedesign-wise anyway.



Also removed hp since the health system always felt weird in the game. Now you have always one life and you "die" every time you fall. However you just fall on new platform and play again immediately. I'll make it that you fall a few levels down, giving game kind of hybrid rogue-like progression. You won't start from beginning everytime you fall, only if you are going to fall really often. This in theory makes the game less frustrating (no start from beginning), makes good use of infinite number of procgen platforms, removes the complexity and weirdness of hp where there is no actual dmg or player death(you had this kind of "emergency jump" before that consumed hp and saved you from falling), and just really feels better and while making game as a whole easier, adds stakes to every moment of combat since every moment you can fall and end your run. And high level players will want to play the whole run without falling anyway since it will reset your score, and possibly upgrades in some way.



Also new kick. Since I removed variable alt-attacks and reduced that button to just kick (and eventually ground stomp), I needed to make that kick a bit more interesting and also make it more different from weapon attacks/punch. So made it 3-levels chargable. You will obtain the next two levels as upgrades. Which brings me that I have upgrade system figured now. It will just be unlocking few different high level abilities, and I expect that you'll have them all by the end of each run, however the order will be different each time and hopefully that gets me some gameplay variability, because all of them will be really useful, you just won't get your favourite early sometimes and will have to do with different one. Also probably better for new players to learn them one by one.

Still not really making content, but the core is really going forward and most importantly in the future content-creation friendly way. See you next week! Will try to write shorter:(



 

[weckr]

sup!

Started week by continuing platgen rework. Started by generating these three arrays, each is a potential place for obstacles on platform. The colors on tiles (which is a debug thing) signifies how big an obstacle can be placed there (they have origin point in lower left corner. So white is for largest 3x3 things, cyan is 2x2 and yellow are small ones.



Since first tileset will be kind of forrest themed, I used this to get much more consistent nad homogenous results when just randomly placing single tile obstacles. I did this by placing size 1 obstacles on in possible size 3 tiles ( white color ), and then removing possible obstacle positions around like I've placed a size 3 obstacle. This gets me nicely even distribution, without ever getting two trees next to each other like you would get with just random distribution. This is a very basic use of this of course, I'll probably base most of other tilesets obstacle placement on these position arrays. It was fairly tricky for my dumb head to figure out correct way to correctly remove positions from these arrays. Figured it out on train. Here's it in action...



Then I went to implement that figured out upgrade system. But that warranted significant changes to reward platforms. So I rewrote them of course. The layout of texts around these platforms is a ridiculous design problem, each of these labels was at some point at every side of the platform, tried everything. Also had to rewrite items. I am really big on physicality of things and don't want that you just buy something from some menu and it appears on you. Kind of had that already but needed some rework. Ended with this.



You can see all of story text on the right ingame, gif is cut off. Also it's weird offset makes sense I promise. Since this is an early one reward platform. So are there two reward platforms now you ask? Well... (I'll probably still put the text closer to platform on one reward plats)



Simplest way I could figure out how to make a choice without immersion breaking menus. You can always choose between a weapon + heatsink and upgrade, until you run out of upgrades I guess. Also the white number is your money, forgot to deduct the price of item from it when you buy, fixed it now, but too lazy to redo the gifs... The upgrades for now will take form of the hats. The new hat will replace the old one on player model, but you are acummulating the upgrades, not swapping them, so the metaphor doesn't exactly work, but not effective right now to figure out another way to display upgrades on player. This pure UI/graphic design problem was really refreshing after all the hardcore loops(haha) of platform generation. Hope this version will stick throughout the rest of the development. But that's up to the upgrade system if it holds from gameplay standpoint.



I've also iterated on how I display cooling from tiles. I now do thing above. It doesn't really hold heat transfer metaphor anymore, but from gameplay and understandability standpoint it's probably best I can do right now. We'll see with this. Also made it hardcore again, fully destroying a tile for each cooling point. Makes it much more exciting and dramatic anyway. It kind of lost it's balls when I made it just damage the tiles. We'll see.



Last I think cool little thing, not sure if from this week. People are always getting lost, and old solution was everytime you were supposed to jump on new platform, I run green markers from your platform to next one. This is dirty and inelegant, and it's still in the game but super reduced (like a marker every few seconds, instead of marker path before ). BUT! As you can see on gifs, background always kind of flows somewhere. So now it flows really super slowly, but when there's a next platform you should jump onto, the background starts flowing fast in that direction! Hopefully if will kind of subliminally work. Maybe it won't, but still I felt like mt. Cleverest when I got the idea. Also the backgrounds starts pulsing a bit. Demonstrated (badly due to gif compression) below.

Good to be writing this, haven't felt like too productive a week, but actually seems like stuff is getting done. Noice.

cya.

[Apalka]

Dude! I've been following you on Twitter for a while. Great to see you here too Love the art and concept. Keeping my fingers crossed!

[weckr]

Dude! I've been following you on Twitter for a while. Great to see you here too Love the art and concept. Keeping my fingers crossed!

Thanky you!

Booya.

cooling system
Iterated on the cooling system again. Made kind of a hybrid of the old and the new system. You have to stop moving to cool now, but it now cools you instantly from tiles around you, so it doesn't really break the tempo and gives the game a nice rhytm and also a reason sometime let go of movement buttons/stick. Also improved vis feedback.

platgen
Then dived back into the platform generation nonsense. Started refactoring in a way that I'll have a single script component for each tileset devised from common tileset class. It will specify everything about the tileset, look of the tiles, way of generating the platform and a way of placing various stuff on the platform like trees and stuff. It shouldn't really be that hard to implement and in a way most of it already works but it's a (for me)big system and it got immensely frustrating from some reason by the middle of the week. Haven't really made as much progress as I would like. I guess I'm really getting into that production phase now where things take a bit more time to see results than a day of work and not that used to that.

modular enemies
Then finally yesterday while being kind of down from all this, I went to work on the long needed pass on enemies. And as I looked on the code... Original idea when I started on them way back was that enemies will also be modular and generated somehow, but I've abandoned it because it seemed dumb from both gameplay reasons and I really wasn't good enough to implement it well enough. But now my common enemies are very well defined from gamedesign standpoint (all of them attack by ramming, what changes is way they move/way they ram (directly, from side, from air, etc). And that is currently implemented in a way that all enemies have common base in which I basically just change two functions for move/attack (but still can change way more for a more unique enemy types).


generic lazy gif!

So there isn't really reason now not to connect each of these functions with an actual part of enemy. Movement is bottom half of the enemy, attack is top part. Since movement and attacking are very discrete now and don't really interfere with each other, I can mix these in almost any way. So I will be cutting up my currently working 7 or so enemies into about 3 "legs" and 3 "heads" and these are going to be randomly put together for each enemy. I'll get 9 pretty well working enemies. And with every part I add the number grows nicely. Sure they get to be a bit more generic as whole, but it's definitely worth it in basically every way, I can't imagine making enough content in viable time in any other way. This actually doesn't require too much work, I got first leg/head pair working yesterday, now it's just cutting others and adding them to the mix and tuning the whole thing a bit. Increased modularity also means much easier way making changes to everything in the future. So that's good thing from this week.

personal crap
So moral-wise, not really best of weeks. Kind of wish I was at gamescom, not that far, but it haven't seemed like a useful thing right now. These things are still pretty expensive for me. Also spend some time in C# documentation. It's fun learning basic stuff about language you work with for living for months already. Fortunately haven't really found any feature that would save me some incredible amount of time in the past yet. Altough I think it feels I really should use generics in some way (than just in unity functions). I do all the more complicated things in generation and stuff through delegates for some time now, and it's prolly wrong.

This week made me think hard about investing into spot in coworking space. By this point I crave an actual office and some basic work day time limits (one I was looking at was open from 8AM to 8PM) and more clear work/life division that it brings. It will eat into my monthly costs considerably even at few days a week, but I feel I need a change. I am kind of convinced now that home office is bad(for me) in longterm, if you don't at least have a clearly separated room for work (well, actual office). Homeoffice without office is crap. I learned some discipline to get up in an actual morning and start doing some work some time ago now, but I feel it's just not enough for times when work gets hard.

Sorry for lack of images, this is one of these that's more just for me...

[etodd]

...

Hey man, sorry to hear about the morale issues. I was in a similar place trying to wrap up development last winter. All the fun work was done and I was just slogging through for weeks to hit the release. Also my mood tends to be heavily affected by the weather, which was miserable at the time. There was so much stress that I started breaking out in hives.

I ended up renting a desk from a co-working space. There were only ~5 other people in the office, and I didn't even like them that much, but just knowing someone was there helped force me to work. I moved back to the home office after three months, but by then the weather was better and the worst was over.

Anyway, I don't have any advice. Just wanted to commiserate and say that I'm rooting for you.

[James Edward Smith]

personal crap
So moral-wise, not really best of weeks. Kind of wish I was at gamescom, not that far, but it haven't seemed like a useful thing right now. These things are still pretty expensive for me. Also spend some time in C# documentation. It's fun learning basic stuff about language you work with for living for months already. Fortunately haven't really found any feature that would save me some incredible amount of time in the past yet. Altough I think it feels I really should use generics in some way (than just in unity functions). I do all the more complicated things in generation and stuff through delegates for some time now, and it's prolly wrong.

This week made me think hard about investing into spot in coworking space. By this point I crave an actual office and some basic work day time limits (one I was looking at was open from 8AM to 8PM) and more clear work/life division that it brings. It will eat into my monthly costs considerably even at few days a week, but I feel I need a change. I am kind of convinced now that home office is bad(for me) in longterm, if you don't at least have a clearly separated room for work (well, actual office). Homeoffice without office is crap. I learned some discipline to get up in an actual morning and start doing some work some time ago now, but I feel it's just not enough for times when work gets hard.

Sorry for lack of images, this is one of these that's more just for me...

The struggle is real, brother.