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[nialltl]

this is looking so lovely - the ruby-reds and oranges on the alarm lights in the new area are great.
will you be meeting any other creatures on your way or are is there only a sole ghost bird on this adventure?

[torcado]

thanks a lot! i appreciate it, i've spent a while picking the colors in the palette

honestly, im not sure! I still have soo much to plan out for the game.

Other npc characters is something that i'd love to do, and if i do one i'll do more, but im not sure if that will follow whatever theme i end up going along with in the end.
There have been a few characters stuck in the back of my mind that i envision seeing in the game (like other birds or a raccoon or a dog, etc.) I'm just not sure how to fit them into the world/story yet .o.
now that im thinking about it i can think of a few neat quest ideas like finding items for them or helping them out in other ways. im not sure! i think i need a more solid idea of the story to decide on what to do for other characters. i usually just keep working and wait for ideas to come to me.

Thanks

[torcado]

Things have been really slow lately. also school starts again for me in about a week so progress will probably be even slower :/



I've been working on the website for the game a bit. I was able to port the shaders i use in the game into WebGL, and I remade the lighting engine in javascript so the site's grapics are basically identical to the game! I plan on adding more info on it later.




In the actual game, I've started adding some new features such as magic blocks that become solid when hit with a light beam. I plan on implementing blocks of an opposite effect, which are solid until hit with a beam. As well as several other ideas I'll keep quiet about for now

[Eluardian]

I've been lurk-following this since the first post, so I'm glad you bumped this up for me to actually follow.
Looking forward to updates however slow they might be, it'll be worth the wait.   

Really cool stuff getting everything working similarly for the website.

[torcado]

oh thank you! Hopefully at some point soon ill get back into the swing of working on the game regularly like i was at the beginning

[torcado]

oOHHH BOY LOTS OF MOVING IMAGES AHEAD

Big things: I am in the process of porting all of the lighting engine into a GLSL shader!

Not only will this boost performance significantly, but it gives me a lot more control over the lighting. for instance: blend modes!

I only have the shadows set up right now, not the colored lighting, but I still have a tooonnn of awesome things to show off just from that.

I will now spam a whole bunch of cool gifs just for you <3



The first test after finally getting the shading all working





Color shader tests











Weird blend mode tests after getting it all ported





(I like this a lot)








(Aaaannd obviously not taking inspiration from any particular game)




Color aberration stuff!









Other cool color stuff (these aren't gifs don't worry)











Some neat patterns and stuff from my firsts tests











And some glitches and other weird stuff I encountered while working on it
(Epilepsy warning)
















Annndd that's about it! Nice short post, maybe a little too text-heavy

But really I'm super happy with all of this. even just some gifs alone are really awesome. I hope you think so too!

Thanks for following my stuff!

Feel free to discuss any of these gifs individually, or all of them at once, if you want!

<3<3<3<3

[torcado]

Alright, I've finally re-added colored lights to the new lighting system!
I'm really happy remaking it, I have so much more control over color blending. I think things look so much better now.

Just look:





Very pretty!

Here's some glitches too, of course:




ALSO
Check out this 100% accurate fanart





Just beautiful. Both pictures really capture the character so well.

[Irock]

it looks so good

[io3 creations]

[Announcer] By day he's a regular adventure seeking bird.  By night ...  he's the one and only GHOST BIRD!!!

[jamesprimate]

LMAO that fan art

[torcado]

THINGS!

All of it is summarized in this neato gif:




1. New and (probably) final lighting system is finished! It now runs half-half between shader and code. The code grabs the lights in the level and generates up to 3 arrays of tiles, sends them all to the shader, and the shader generates colors based on the data and blends them and all that cool shader stuff. The colored lights work completely now.

2. Particles! You can see them in the torches. Just a neat small effect.

3. Backgrounds and stuff! Both parallax and static. These reaally make the level more visually dynamic and interesting, and I've been planning it for a while (as you can see from the gif of that web port thing i made). My only hesitation from it is this issue:
The lighting is pretty heavily affected by the color behind it, specifically its brightness. The brighter it is, the less opaque i can make the light, which is good because the more opaque the light, the less visible anything beneath it is. Moving all the lights to a shader helps this a bit because i can make it more additive (which it is now), but it's still not the best. Having these background layers darken for each layer, while looking really cool, really screws with the light colors. Because of this, i was forced to create a system where i can change colors of an image, generate the data i need from it with a java program, send it to a .txt file, and have the game load it during run-time and switch the colors of the lights, allowing me to nudge colors until it looks good on most background colors/brightnesses. I think I've done a pretty good job with the ones in the gif!
This will continue to get annoying for each additional area in the game, with its own set of background colors, so i'll have to make different alterations of lights for different areas. But this system will help out a lot with that!


ALSO

I finished a different game for a game jam about a week ago!
It's called PUMPK!N and you can play it here:

http://torcado.com/games/PUMPK!N/

It looks like this:



Thanks for playing it if you do!
And thanks for following the devlog!

[Sustrato]

Just saw this on my phone so I can't play the original or Pumpkin and I only read the 1st/4th pages but it looks really rad.

First off I'm glad you kept the warp, it looks really cool although when its really strong it can be overpowering. The lighting is obviously awesome, I think the diamond pattern, esp. with how the overall shape of a light zone is diamond shape, is really styling. It feels kinda like a pine cone which seems appropriate for a game about birds?

What direction are you going to take the gameplay? You've got a lot of cool effects and abilities but I'm not seeing how they're gone come together or how the story/mechanics/visuals will all entwine, but maybe I missed it or you're keeping it under wraps.

Glad I caught wind of this project! I always try and make interesting visual effects like this so now I have some more inspiration!

[torcado]

oh man thanks a lot for the awesome message!

I would say I'm "keeping it a secret" regarding the story/mechanics. but honestly i still don't know haha. I mean i have a good idea now, but it's not complete by any means.
I am fairly confident it will be a "exploration/puzzle platformer/metroidvania" with puzzles pertaining to lights and other stuff. There will be no enemies, and possibly no hazards (not sure yet. or at least no platforming hazards, just ones complimenting puzzles). You will be able to find abilities to let you do different puzzles, or maybe do certain puzzles easier.
The story I think i will keep what i have figured out secret for now. But that being said, all of these things are just ideas. What I'm doing mainly is just making the game and hoping/expecting all of this stuff to fall into place by the end. I spent way too much effort trying to come up with a story and world and all that, and decided I'll figure it out along the way. I have no idea if that's the right way to do it or not, but I have never done a game like this anyway so it makes no difference to me! Since I have no basis to build off, besides whatever input i accept from other people. And if anyone does have ideas/suggestions/input, I encourage you to let me know!
Because that is a worry of mine, having this game be exclusively the visual style, and totally fall apart when it comes to being an actual game. But for now I'm just making it, whatever "it" is. And as i push through this list of ideas i have, more will come up and the game will (hopefully) take shape!

But I'm really happy people like it so far anyway! And I'm glad i can create inspiration for others 

[Sustrato]

Well if you would like to consider some advice...

It's good to stay motivated on working on the mechanics/visuals if the story would just slow or weigh you down. I mainly asked because it seems like you've reworked the graphics a couple times, and more than a few rad-looking games have been lost before they ever saw daylight because their devs constantly reworked the graphics and couldn't settle on engaging mechanics to make a final product.

The spinning light thing is really cool and you can do a lot with that, introductory levels, different interactions, etc. It's not a very typical platformer mechanic, so there's lots of room to explore.

Also, I had a chance to play Pumpkin and it was pretty fun. Liked the procedurally generated Jack-o-lantern levels (or I got crazy lucky). Space bar to switch weapon scrolled my page so locking that somehow (?) would be helpful. The enemies were very tough and loved to swarm, so maybe some kind of crowd control weapon would have made that more skillfully manageable? Either way, nice job, and again keep up the good work.

[torcado]

That makes sense! And i can definitely see how that could happen to others. I feel pretty confident in saying that I see myself coming through with this game to completion, wherever that may be, and will not stop after these cool visuals. In fact, I've mainly been trying to rework the graphics over and over just so i have the most solid foundation i can to work on the actual content of the game. I could have easily started making levels and puzzles after my first tests with this lighting, but i knew it could be improved. And after every time i remade the lighting in some way, i knew it could still be improved.
At this stage right now, I have a hard time seeing how it could be improved, short of just moving all my code an assets to a different development kit altogether. And if i did choose to do that, instead of the reason being performance based, it would just be because I would love to have layer-based shaders which isn't possible currently with the tool I use (but may come later).

So for a while I've been wanting to work on content, but wanted to wait until i finished all the engine-related stuff to make that as easy as possible. (or rather, to not make it more difficult if/when i decide to remake engine related things)
So hurdle #1 was the lighting and that stuff. that is complete and out of mind
hurdle #2 is and will continue to be art assets, but that's a bit of a different context because that's many small things to work on, not one large thing
and hurdles #3-#n are world/story/dialog(if any)/mechanics/etc. stuff. tis the life of a gamedev

I'm glad you had a chance to check out pumpk!n
I'm sorry about the scrolling thing, and anything else related. This is mainly because my monitor is big enough to see everything on the page, so i never had scrollbars. And i was too rushed to check other browsers or sizes or whatever. And also because I never released a game with html5 before so I wasn't familiar with quirks like that. Anyway now I know web based games are finnicky and I'll need to focus on that stuff if i do it again in the future. (I don't think I'll be messing with that game any more) (Also shift can be used to switch weapons as well)

A crowd control type weapon would have been a good idea. like a short range shotgun type blast maybe.

Thanks!

[torcado]

Happy Halloween!

[torcado]

I've started streaming my gamedev progress recently! I plan on streaming fridays, maybe tuesdays?? I'm not sure, but follow me if you're interested in watching! https://www.twitch.tv/torcado

HERE'S SOME PROGRESS FROM STREAM NUMBER 1:



Crystal wires connect from those crystal things to any source such as light/dark blocks, etc! They work wonderfully, I just need to think of more things for them to interact with!


PROGRESS FROM STREAM NUMBER 2:



New background layers for the tech area. I'll clean them up when I make an actual level


COOL LIGHT PRISM THING



(Also the rock decorations and stuff were made during stream number 2)



Here's a Funny Moment from the latest steam







Thanks for following my progress! I <3 all of you

[Grapple Bug]

I've been following this on Tumblr, it looks really cool and very unique/memorable.

[Pixel Noise]

Not sure how I'm just seeing this for the first time - but wow! Super cool. Nice progress you've made. Following 

[torcado]

Thank you thank you!!