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[RayRay26]

End of college hit us, but now we're up at it again!

This is a wonderful gif I managed to capture because it shows off like 5 additions. The most obvious of them is the level transition. I was brushing up on how to use an alpha gradient on a UI texture and this was the result, although I feel the hexagons could look a little better and have a different color.

The little dots, the firefly stuff, was an interesting decision we made for the feel in our game. We're most likely gonna have two sets of fireflies, orange for day and cyan for night, and the amount of fireflies will vary in areas.

There's some nice, randomized clouds scrolling in the background if ya like those.

The enemies have been walking into the battlefield, but we also made the allies do the same. Would show that the characters are trying to make progress, but they keep getting halted.

And finally we're using actual lighting now instead of plain blob shadows. We thought it would look better and make the popup stuff more obvious. The textures are not doing us any favors though; since all the sprites are at an angle, the most appropriate way to handle the light is to send it mostly straight down, but when objects curve at the bottom such as the rocks in this scene, you get this scenario where the shadows appear behind and in front of the objects. I raised the shadow bias of the light to help with this, but ultimately we might have to use separate graphics for the shadows.

[RayRay26]

We added barriers. They're pretty cool looking, in my opinion.

There's two types at the moment. This one shocks any melee attackers, but can be broken by a projectile. It also interrupts moves.


This one reflects projectiles, but can be broken with a good melee attack. It interrupts moves once the attacker receives their projectile.


I also updated my music engine I've been making. Now it uses music banks instead of just AudioClips, allowing for multiple audio channels, multi-stage songs, and a mix of skips and jumps for each stage in the song. I don't think Coded Universe will use any of that though, but at least it uses less CPU; the old music code was a mess. Well, better to be prepared than to have to come back to it. Procedural music became an option for us basically.

[io3 creations]

The updated visuals are looking good.

If it's not a "secret", what do you mean by using audio banks?  I'd be interested in that since you mentioned having better performance.

I know that the game is still WIP, but wanted to mention that the health damage points in the bottom image could use something to visually "pop".  Maybe different color and/or fade-out with size increase.

[RayRay26]

If it's not a "secret", what do you mean by using audio banks?  I'd be interested in that since you mentioned having better performance.

I know that the game is still WIP, but wanted to mention that the health damage points in the bottom image could use something to visually "pop".  Maybe different color and/or fade-out with size increase.

Yeah, by audio banks, it's a kind of data that I created. What it stores is all the clips that will play simultaneously (or 1 AudioClip per bank in our case), the start and end points of the loops, and the positions it starts the song at, which is almost always 0.00 seconds. I'm using this music engine in some of my other games, so it would explain why it has too many features, but it has excellent performance since all it does is just schedule when the next set of AudioSources play (you need two AudioSources to loop from custom positions without audible pops). My old engine kept reusing AudioSources, which required a lot more maintenance such as shutting them up when a source was done, but now it just tosses the sources that finished and makes new ones.

The damage numbers actually shake when they appear, not sure if the gifs do it justice. I suppose I could give them more effects like a white flash or a size wiggle instead of just positional shake.

[io3 creations]

If it's not a "secret", what do you mean by using audio banks?  I'd be interested in that since you mentioned having better performance.

I know that the game is still WIP, but wanted to mention that the health damage points in the bottom image could use something to visually "pop".  Maybe different color and/or fade-out with size increase.

Yeah, by audio banks, it's a kind of data that I created. What it stores is all the clips that will play simultaneously (or 1 AudioClip per bank in our case), the start and end points of the loops, and the positions it starts the song at, which is almost always 0.00 seconds. I'm using this music engine in some of my other games, so it would explain why it has too many features, but it has excellent performance since all it does is just schedule when the next set of AudioSources play (you need two AudioSources to loop from custom positions without audible pops). My old engine kept reusing AudioSources, which required a lot more maintenance such as shutting them up when a source was done, but now it just tosses the sources that finished and makes new ones.

The damage numbers actually shake when they appear, not sure if the gifs do it justice. I suppose I could give them more effects like a white flash or a size wiggle instead of just positional shake.

Thank you for your reply.  It's been a while when I went through Unity's basic audio tutorial but will be looking at it soon for my game.  Hope your description will make sense  i.e. I'll be able to figure out what you meant.  Or I might come back and ask again.

Regarding the damage numbers, if I look closely, it does seem to move a bit.  But maybe because the camera is moving as the character is attacking, the shaking might be similar and not very noticeable?

[RayRay26]

Regarding the damage numbers, if I look closely, it does seem to move a bit.  But maybe because the camera is moving as the character is attacking, the shaking might be similar and not very noticeable?

Yeah, turns out the shaking did not move up and down as much as it did left and right, so I fixed that. Here's the new number effects.

I made them descend and ascend accordingly. Damage has a bit of size wiggle and black/white flash, and heals have a slight zoom at the beginning. I personally like these.

[io3 creations]

The updated ones are looking great!

[11clock]

We finished importing updated graphics and animations!

Kleeg:


Bandits:


Cyu punching the bandits:


The UI has also received a massive overhaul!


We also felt that dodging was too easy and made some small changes to the dodge system to make dodging feel more tight and demanding. There may also be another update on the dodge system in the future. We feel that dodging is not as integrated into the battle system as much as we want, and we want to make some changes to make it feel more cohesive with the rest of the system. The game's battle system is divided into 3 "pillars" that are supposed to interact with each other:

-Tactical
-DDR (the action commands for boosting attack power)
-Dodging

Currently, Tactical and DDR affect each other, since the tactical decision you make (selected move) determines what the DDR sequence will be, and the DDR sequence execution will determine how well the selected move will perform. On the other hand, Tactical and Dodging have this relationship: The better you are tactically, the less good you will need to be at dodging and vice versa. This relationship, however, already exists between all 3 pillars of the battle system, and it's a relatively weak one since there is no real direct impact between pillars with this relationship alone. We need a stronger relationship between Dodging and at least one of the other two pillars for a full connection, because right now Dodging just feels like its own separate part of the game without any strong ties to either Tactical or DDR.

We have a plan in regards to creating a direct relationship between Tactical and Dodging and will reveal more details in the near future.

[11clock]

It has been a while since we said anything about Coded Universe. We will announce something soon, huge update with good and bad news.

Everything you currently know about the project, forget it (besides the story). Massive revisions have been happening under the hood for this game.

[JustFire45]

Is this still being worked on?

[11clock]

Is this still being worked on?

No, we canceled it due to slow progress and gradual loss of interest within the team.

One of the original team members is making a multiplayer co-op adaptation of this concept called Tarta. Keep an eye out for it, as this project will live on through it.