next »

[Maurycy]

FB:Submuncher | Landing Page | @RetrocadeNet | FB:Retrocade.net

About

Submuncher is a top-down action game about losing a lot, learning from your mistakes and precise timing (in that order). After an accident Mariana Trench has been polluted by dna strands that mutated the local wildlife. An elite team of international problem-fixers has been given a super-advanced yellow submarine to clean up the mess.
Gameplay

Submuncher is fast to play - we guarantee that the average best time for each level will be below 10 seconds.
Submuncher is difficult - the game will require very precise timing and retrying the same level over and over in order to master it.
Submuncher is forgiving - it takes less than two seconds after dying to try again and the levels will always allow you to get into the action asap.

Your objective in each level is to collect all of the regular, green DNA strands at which point the level becomes completed. Each level will have an optional time-attack reward where you'll square against the creators' or testers' best time (no unnecessary leeway here) and an optional 100% collection reward, for collecting all the secret DNA strands in each level.
Meat Boy and Pac Man (and an old Amiga title Jackman) are the inspirations behind this game.

Media

Bubbles are pretty


It ain't no game without no sokoban puzzles!


Testing optional replay ghosts.


I forgot to use radians...

Devlogs




(29.12.2015) Devlog #002 - playing through 5 levels.

[vaaasm]

Looks nice! Love the graphics and the grid-based movement. Gives it kind of an obscure vibe to it, fits pretty well with the whole ocean theme.

[Maurycy]

Looks nice! Love the graphics and the grid-based movement. Gives it kind of an obscure vibe to it, fits pretty well with the whole ocean theme.

Thanks! I had taken a short break from making this game to pursue a POC for another project, but now that I am back I've got another gif to share:


We've added graphics to the enemy that looks like Pacman in the dev video. It was meant to be a frog initially, but in the end we decided to go with oysters/shell-thing. It's much easier to fit .

I am also starting to churn out the levels. After I did my counting there'll be at least ~130 levels, considering the existing number of game elements, but considering the levels are going to be short (the par time will average below 10 seconds per level) we need a bunch of them.

[Maurycy]

I come with a bunch of new stuff! First of all, we've finalized the way the level progression will work. Initially the plan was to have a menu-based level selection, but then someone suggested a hub-style and I liked it. The end result is a hub with an ability to quickly jump between discovered level groups.

Programmer art at it's finest, but it's fine for mockups.

As you can see you get quick glance at the state of the current level group and easy way to jump between them.

Speaking of programmer art, after I replaced the death animation with something less flashy and more classy I added a halo/nova effect to the explosion. It clashes a bit right now, but that's yet another thing that's to be reworked. At this stage of the development we're constantly short on art:

And the best way to combat bad programmer art is to divert attention to another one.

There is also a new level-completion animation:

Nothing to do here.

But, arguably, the coolest thing to mention is that the first boss is mostly finished! Right now the graphic used is just upscaled sprite of the regular fish, but as soon as we get done with the updates to the tileset we will retouch it:

"EVIL MEGA LASER FISH! EXPLOSIONS! jeebus, it's the super extra action update!!"

To quote a friend after she played the boss for the first time:

So the game is progressing nicely!

[wirelessbrain55]

What language is this being coded in

[Maurycy]

What language is this being coded in

Actionscript3 with GPU accelerated rendering and ultimately the game will be released as a standalone captive runtime.

[oahda]

mutated the local wildlife

submarine

collect […] green

nuclear waste

Holy smokes. Our games are to an eerie extent the same. I haven't really mentioned nuclear stuff and mutated wildlife in my devlog, but it's been in my design doc for years.

And Insomniac just announced their submarine game too. Seems I'm getting more and more company. Well, welcome to the Kool 'N' Exklusive Sub Klub™!

Our gameplay and way of dealing with the wildlife is nothing alike anyway. Plus yours is an action (and arcade-ish?) game and mine is an exploration game. One can die in yours, but not in mine. Yours is fast and mine is not. Actually makes you closer to the Insomniac game from what I've seen of it.

Interesting to see how you've settled for steering that doesn't rotate the submarine, too. And the fact that you literally collect huge DNA double helices is kinda funny.

Well, I think this is some of the motivation I needed to get back to working on my gameplay and stop messing around too much with the engine and its graphics capabilities (even tho that's a lot of fun...). Thank you for that!

This game seems quite well under way already... How long have you been working on it?

And yes, bubbles are pretty. Nice job!

[Maurycy]

This game seems quite well under way already... How long have you been working on it?

This, uh, project has some history behind it . Back when I was making small and simple Flash games I started the original Submuncher. It was... The middle of 2011. Part of the engine was written, some levels were done but ultimately we never released the game. In December I decided to resurrect the project, because my artist couldn't figure out an art direction for another game, and this one had a lot of art already made, plus a lot of code...
Except I rewrote the whole game and rendering engines anyway so I can say that I started from scratch .

So I'd say the project has been ~1.5 month in development!

Interesting to see how you've settled for steering that doesn't rotate the submarine, too. And the fact that you literally collect huge DNA double helices is kinda funny.

That's because we didn't have a good solution to how to handle the rotation up/down back when the art was originally made. Now it probably wouldn't be much of a problem, but I really like the oldschool vibe it gives.

Plus yours is an action (and arcade-ish?) game and mine is an exploration game.

Indeed, a huge inspiration for me were the design decisions that stood behind Super Meat Boy, that is short levels to facilitate little-to-zero tedious repetition. Even though I can't say I loved Super Meat Boy that much, that part really influenced my outlook at videogames in general.

I looked at your project and indeed seems to be a completely different genre. I'm going to keep a closer eye on your game because from what I quickly glanced it seems pretty neat! Plus maybe I will finally learn better how GPU and shaders work

Well, I think this is some of the motivation I needed to get back to working on my gameplay and stop messing around too much with the engine and its graphics capabilities (even tho that's a lot of fun...). Thank you for that!

We're complete opposites then, the only thing I like less than working on the rendering stuff is working on the general UIs (title screens, menus, stuff like that).

Well then, happy to be part of the club!
 

[oahda]

Well, well! 2011 must've been a good year for submarines, because it was in fact during Ludum Dare 22, in December of 2011, that I made my first version. Apparently you can't access entries that old on the LD website any more. Left that aside for a year and then it was chosen for further development. A couple of additional roadblocks, like other little games, and, well, life, came in between, and here we are~

Interesting to hear AS3 is still alive and well, and even offers for acceleration — is it still tied to Flash, tho, or are you using it with something else? Flash is very much dead in my mind at this point, even tho I know it's still supported, heh... But you said it'd be a standalone game in the end, so yeah, how are you achieving that? I don't know much about AS at all.

[Maurycy]

Left that aside for a year and then it was chosen for further development. A couple of additional eventually roadblocks, like other little games, and, well, life, came in between, and here we are~

It's always good when old, never finished projects get a new life

Interesting to hear AS3 is still alive and well, and even offers for acceleration — is it still tied to Flash, tho, or are you using it with something else? Flash is very much dead in my mind at this point, even tho I know it's still supported, heh... But you said it'd be a standalone game in the end, so yeah, how are you achieving that? I don't know much about AS at all.

It's going to be lightyears before flash completely dies simply because so many big companies have invested so much time and money into tools and product. Heck, last year I quit a job in a company where the main application was built in Flash!

Generally speaking when you create an application in AS3 you have different targets. Using the same codebase I can make an SWF (which can be embedded in a website or played in a standalone player), I can make an AIR app out of it which requires you to have AIR runtime installed on your computer; I can compile to a captive runtime, which is basically the game bundled with a portable version of AIR (only Mac and Windows really) and finally I can target iOS and Android though the performance is suboptimal there.

Like in my previous game I'll be using the captive option, so the game will be ~40MB larger thanks to including the AIR runtime but at this age it's not a big price. On the other hand it's my final project in AS3, as much as I like working in it, in the future I am planning to switch to HTML5 game development. I have briefly considered Haxe but I had some issues with cross-compatibility of hardware acceleration .

Btw, hardware acceleration has been available since Molehill version of the player in 2012 or so! In the previous game of mine I used it for realtime lighting, although many players have reported it to slow down a lot on their (not the worst) computers: https://youtube.com/watch?v=UW3SuSwvKog

[oahda]

Ah! Thanks for the info. c:

[Maurycy]

Inspired by how others make daily dev logs I will try to post more regularly here, so now let's commence with:

Devlog #001:

Today was a day of polishing, optimization and adding basic-but-missing things. I had a lot of fun optimizing the level loading code, and managed to go down from 1.5s to ~120 ms for loading the hub! It was mostly optimization of the tilemap renderer. Previously it just scrapped all renderer objects and recreated them a new, which was heavy both on garbage collection and object instantiation, so the smart thing was to instead reuse these objects which worked great, uh...

Except this part .

Then I finally added ammo to the game, implemented some new art Alex drew and finally had an epiphany how to implement the hud. There are basically three ways to go about it: completely hidden behind some kind of menu, overlay it over the playfield or keep it in a separate box with a full background. Option #1 would not work in this game since it's pretty handy to have this information, especially when routing a level. We don't have space for option #3 and the old, old overlay we had was very unreadable:

Btw, that's how the game originally looked in 2011! As you can see the readability is not the best. But what is worse, its business was enough to make it unpleasant to read the level. So things had to change. Ultimately I went in the direction of limiting the number of elements as much as possible and making them unintrusive:

I think the way they slide in is very cute . If you run out of keys or ammo they slide away out of the room too! One other thing you may notice that the time uses frames instead of seconds and milliseconds. Considering it internally uses frames anyway I find this more intuitive.

[oahda]

Not sure players will find that more intuitive tho.

Nice new graphics! Are all levels going to be as tiny as the one you showed here, or are still going to have scrolling levels, just with some sort of vignette around them, to have the HUD remain readable?

[Maurycy]

Not sure players will find that more intuitive tho.

Hah, that's a good point! I actually thought about adding an option to toggle between the two time displays and once there is actually an options menu I'll do just that.

Nice new graphics! Are all levels going to be as tiny as the one you showed here, or are still going to have scrolling levels, just with some sort of vignette around them, to have the HUD remain readable?

Thanks! There are bigger levels in the game but the vignette only displays around the level's boundaries, not the screen's. To be frank I haven't yet tested how the hud looks on bigger levels, without the shade (the only one so far is a hub and it has no collectibles, so yea) but the HUD graphics are directly taken from the old version of the game and I am fairly sure the artguy will want to redo them anyway, so at that point we'll make sure it works fine on all background types!

[oahda]

I wonder if it can't quite simply be solved by adding a white border around the existing dark edges — that way there will be a visible edge against most, if not all, backgrounds.

[lobstersteve]

Looks cool i'm always in for games that have simple gameplay but are well polished.
I think you can come up with some cool hazards, that fit the grid-based movement well.

Actionscript3 with GPU accelerated rendering

Starling?

[Maurycy]

I wonder if it can't quite simply be solved by adding a white border around the existing dark edges — that way there will be a visible edge against most, if not all, backgrounds.

I suppose that could work, but I try to stay away with my programmer art from the graphical things as much as I can unless it's conceptual . I'll pass the info to the artist (and ask him if he wants to hang out here too!).

Looks cool i'm always in for games that have simple gameplay but are well polished.
I think you can come up with some cool hazards, that fit the grid-based movement well.

Actionscript3 with GPU accelerated rendering

Starling?

Thanks! The gameplay is indeed generally simple, although we take care to provide interesting interactions between enemies to make them as versatile as possible! And yes, you guessed correctly, the one and only Starling

[Maurycy]

Ugh, I've been dreading to post this but it has to be done.

Officially, Submuncher is on a hiatus, probably until September. The reason for this is Alex, the artist, has asked to take a break so that he has more time to work on his own stuff.

Now, we're planning to release a demo and a greenlight page in May or June with the first section of the game, which will include 20 levels, 4 intermissions and a boss fight.

In other news, I've worked hard on the editor! I've got some cool stuff done there and really the only thing left to do is make it possible to place objects and set their properties - which is probably going to take much more time than I make it sound like.

See you in the future