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[CullenCoyote]

SGT. SATURN

procedurally generated run'n'gun space shooter

Art: @Britt_t_brady | Programming: @CullenDDwyer | OST: @ZBWmusic

Vote for Us on Greenlight!

most recent post: ATM

Sgt. Saturn is a modern interpretation of the Gradius-style side scrolling space shooter, married to a platformer run'n'gun in the vein of Contra.  The procedurally generated map constantly scrolls to the right as you deal with an onslaught of different enemies and obstacles.  You have two gun slots which can be swapped between at any point, or traded out for one of 64+ new weapons that will drop periodically throughout your run.  Once you die, you are dead, but enemies explode into gems which can be collected to unlock perks and add new weapons to the drop mix for future runs.  We are trying to maintain an old-school, highscores and getting-better-at-the-game-based play, but we do want to take some of the concepts that we adore about new games and amalgamate the old-school things we like with the new-school things we love.

Features / Progress:

• Procedurally Generated Levels (3/3 biomes complete)
• Player: Movement / Systems / Animations (complete)
• Enemies (10/10 complete)
• End-level bosses (2/3 complete)
• A Crap-ton of Unique Guns (15/~64 complete)
• Between level shop system / Perks / Unlocks (complete)
• Title Screen / Options (incomplete)
• Highscore Board (incomplete)

I will be trying my best to update this twice a week, as well as explain the process of some of the systems in the game.  Let us know what you think!

[grayhaze]

I saw this on Twitter the other day and was immediately interested. I loved Gradius, although I was never very good at it. I like the idea of a platformer with similar mechanics, so I'll definitely be keeping an eye on this.

[CullenCoyote]

How Level Generation Works

In Sgt. Saturn, the levels are generated from left to right, using premade pieces, in a jigsaw fashion.  I built a level "chunk" editor, in which I hand design small pieces of interesting maps.

Each chunk is tagged with an Entrance Type and an Exit Type.  These are just integers, so their meaning is arbitrary, but I have marked where I want the empty spaces to be in the Entrance/Exit types with the green and red bars, respectively. (The chunk I'm working on in the below image is Entrance Type 2, Exit Type 2)

During the actual level generation, the next chunk to be generated chooses randomly from a list of chunks with the same ENTRANCE type as the previously placed chunk's EXIT type.  This jigsaws the pieces together and ensures that there is always a path through the level.

The result looks something like this:

Finally, in game, some obstacles and decorations are randomly placed on tiles above ground tiles to add a bit more variety.

The map data is all saved to a file and the chunks are loaded at runtime.  The cool thing about doing it this way is that if there is a piece of generation that I don't like, I can go back into the level editor and fix it, and if I want to add more variety to a biome, say for instance the game likes to only generate maps that are close to the bottom of the screen, I can just add more chunks to the file that have higher altitudes and BAM the chances of rolling a more mountainous map increase.  As of right now, each biome will have ~100 different chunks to choose from, and are around 16 chunks long.

Over and out,
Cullen

[CullenCoyote]

Making everything wiggly for a unified aesthetic

A few people have commented on the squishiness of the objects in our game world, so I figured I'd explain.  We are trying to treat the pixel art in the game as almost a joke that it is pixel art.  I like to think of them as pixel art paper cutouts being moved across a background. We have done 2 things in order to unify this aesthetic.

1). Everything on the actor layer MUST have a +2px/+2px, 60% alpha black dropshadow.

2). As many moving actors as possible use the same wiggle script.

The wiggle script draws the actor image onto a rectangular primitive made up of four vertices.  The top two vertices are tilted in the direction of the actor's horizontal speed, and are moved up or down based on the vertical velocity. 

Without drawing the player's sprite, here is what this looks like:

...And here is both the debug overlay and the player's sprite:

This is applied to as many moving actors as we find necessary, especially animated ones like enemies.  You can see in the final gif here that it has also been applied to the plant props and the snail enemies.  Even though the plants don't move, I can still feed them a horizontal and vertical velocity to make them wiggle nicely when you shoot them!

Another tiny thing I did was make everything that can be shot flash an offwhite color on impact, but I don't apply the wiggle to the flash, which is what gives you the really neat blur effect when the tree is shot in the above gif.

Annnnd that is about it for how we combine a couple of procedural rendering techniques to get the weird looking unified aesthetic we have so far!

Over and Out,
Cullen

[ｂ∀ ｋｋｕｓａ]

followin.
been playing Handsome Mr. Frog and it's incredibly fun.

Lookin forward for this one  

[CullenCoyote]

followin.
been playing Handsome Mr. Frog and it's incredibly fun.

Lookin forward for this one  

Thanks!  Glad you enjoyed HMF as well!

[ferreiradaselva]

Damn, I'm loving this. I like this style a lot! Keep the good work!

 

[Superb Joe]

clicked on a thread because it had saturn in the title. good luck to you.

[Tuba]

Loving how this looks. Good luck! 

[CullenCoyote]

clicked on a thread because it had saturn in the title. good luck to you.

Sweet, the 10 million i spilled into marketing is working! 

Loving how this looks. Good luck! 

Thanks!

Damn, I'm loving this. I like this style a lot! Keep the good work!

 

TY felipe 

[nialltl]

looks absolutely fab. really enjoy the tech insight as well - the 'almost a joke' pixel art sprites is perfect. I like that you're going as far as doing a sort of skew transform (it looks like?) rather than simply changing width / height scaling. it pays off! p l e a s e keep us updated

[CullenCoyote]

looks absolutely fab. really enjoy the tech insight as well - the 'almost a joke' pixel art sprites is perfect. I like that you're going as far as doing a sort of skew transform (it looks like?) rather than simply changing width / height scaling. it pays off! p l e a s e keep us updated

Hi! Thanks a lot! More updates coming soon, been very busy chipping away at this 

[CullenCoyote]

Today, I am working on some Menu Garbage.  I hate Menu Garbage.

[CullenCoyote]

08/15/2016 minor update

Working on the second boss...scary!!

Britt also made a mockup of what will be the between level Shop, where you can buy guns, perks, and healing items by spending your gems. Hope to show you what this looks like soon 

Over and out,
Cullen

[DireLogomachist]

Love the color palette!

[CullenCoyote]

Love the color palette!

Thanks! That's the work of Britt (@britt_t_brady on twitter)

[CullenCoyote]

Worlds 2 & 3

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We just finished up with all of the biomes and wanted to share a little bit about what the game looks like post World 1.

Each World is broken into 2 segments, separated by a shop and ending in a boss. 

While World 1 is an arid desert, World 2 is an asteroid belt:

Each world also sports new foes, above you see foot soldiers who pursue and fire at you,

World 3, an overgrown mushroomy forest hosts dangerous, explosive fungal creatures and unfriendly plants.

There are a few more enemies not yet shown, but we will get to the enemy roster hopefully in the next post!

Over and Out,
Cullen

[SafetySnail]

Totally loving the visual style of this game and the gameplay looks really fun and challenging already, keeping an eye on this one!

[DrDerekDoctors]

You have my attention.

[Pixel Noise]

I definitely like the look - the art style and design are different from the average look, and the colors are nice!