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[EditinLuv]

Dash Punch the Evil Peak Society to stomp them from making errr'body into pigeons!

Out on IOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ultra-zultra/id1306321343?ls=1&mt=8

Out on IOS: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ultra-zultra/id1306321343?ls=1&mt=8

Hey! You can play the game now over at http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/698998

Leave me feedback here or there! Much appreciated.

In Ultra Zultra you try to escape the "Nega-Jail" and stop the Evil Peak from turning humans into pigeons.

Using a combination of wits and items, clear stages to reach them!
Collect valuable gems fragments and exchange them for powers to pummel enemies into the ground.
Punch Dash across deadly spikes.
Double Jump across deadly spikes.
Triple Jump across deadly spikes.
Air Dash across deadly spikes.
Defeat The Peak Master and Save Errr'body man.

This Devlog will to be a place to keep info on Ultra Zultra and the massive constant changes it will under-go. Right now i'm working with a Design Doc it's all in paper and pencil and its a great mess. Hopefully the game will be out for IOS and PC soon.

New Trailer





 
Follow my Twitter for other updates at @Moraleszez


Tasty action


Check this boss out looky

 

[TonyManfredonia]

Oh man. The newer art style is SO GOOD! Not that your old one was bad, but I greatly prefer the new style. Fantastic!

Also, A+++ for triple jumping!!! 

[EditinLuv]

[OLD ART]

Art Post!
Getting into some background work

First i take a screentshot

[This background is from the previous area]


The Area i'm working on is suppose to be a sanctuary so , green will definitely be need.
[Here i just adjusted the hue to green]


Feels better, so step into design a custom background that feels more like a sanctuary
[After lots of stumbling i end with something i like]


But the colors in the new background feel a little off from the rest of the art.
[I added a little bit of tone and mood to make it feel in place]


I like this last version but i still need to let it "settle in" before i add/change it more.
After that i'll see about animating it.

[Mandetory Progress Gif]

[EditinLuv]

Oh man. The newer art style is SO GOOD! Not that your old one was bad, but I greatly prefer the new style. Fantastic!

Also, A+++ for triple jumping!!! 

Thanks! I'm glad you like it, time to keep working on it some more.

[TonyManfredonia]

Interesting method of creating a background / analyzing what you might need for the background! Really need way of doing it via screenshots.

[EditinLuv]

[OLD GAMEPLAY]

I wanted to show off some more gameplay, gifs only show a bit.

[WIP video of gameplay]




[after watching it intensively , i decided to move the camera back a bit]

music is from Cyborg Ninja Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)

EDIT :
THe vide title says alphaish but this was the original prototype before many iterations

[EditinLuv]

[DEPRECATED BOSS]

Started work on the "Caves" area boss,
Jarco , he's a Rogue Reptile-male that joined forces with the Peak Society early on and got himself genetically modified, basically he can transform into a mega version of himself.



A couple of his attacks include Jump'N Stomp and Meal Time.



[WIP] still needs some polish the pixel art and maybe add an extra frame or two,
 and a bunch of effects. The area is not his stage either,
just a quick muck up to try and get his physics right. I get to make his stage now [excited]

[TonyManfredonia]

I recently followed you on Twitter and saw the transforming boss character. Really quite remarkable! It makes me think of Yoshi's Story, with all of the bosses that got transformed into massive counterparts. Super awesome :D.

[EditinLuv]

I continues working on Ultra Zultra again.
So far I was able to finish the level generation system. and some game mechanics things.

I also added new animations and art here check them out.


double jumping onto exp crates


Punch jumping across obstacles

[EditinLuv]

Hiya!

Progress is coming along smoothlyish

I took sometime off the pixels and code to make a procgen style poster xD



Composition helper poster



The new punching animation



Making a vetrtical tileset for the Aviary area

That's the update, now back to pixeling enemy idle animations 

[EditinLuv]

I been playing a lot of Megaman Zero 2 lately, very close to beating it too.

I remember when I was little I didn't like Megaman games because they were too hard he he
but now I really enjoy them, probably because now the challenge for me is less "super fast reflex" based and more strategic timing with a dab of muscle memory.

Kinda like trying to learn to play new music in the piano, at first there are some stumbles but eventually after retrying the piece multiple times everything starts to click.

The first time I fought the boss Phoenix Magnion in Megaman Zero. I just assumed this was an impossible boss to beat, maybe I needed a couple sub tanks and double my current hp. Super unfair bosses, weak stuff, right? Well then I kept trying to beat him with my current hp, and like most bosses his patterns started to leak out. Then it was only a matter of time before I had his attacks timed and destroyed him. 

Anyways what I'm getting at is that there is something enjoyable about retrying stages/boss to learn the pattern of the stage/boss. Back to my music analogy, I think some video games are just weird musical instruments.

Little reel of the player and two bosses, one isn't even in final form yet. 

Concept tiles for a new stage i'm working on, colors separate different procedural generation styles but
in the same stage

[EditinLuv]

Gifs!



Placeholder art for the Victory! he he
Testing out enemies for feel before i start animating them.

SO I call this my pre-alpha state, getting all the enemies with rough logic in and testing them out in a sandbox.



NOW I have to go back and remove the prototype enemies from the procedural generation algorithm and add these new ones.

So far I've implemented 20 new enemies. What i'm hoping for is to come to a good magic number of amount of enemies type that make a area/stage feel good.  Also the enemies need to play well with the items the player can collect, gives me nice and clear restrictions of how complicated an enemy can be.

[EditinLuv]

A Wild Update

This weekend i spent time re-working player movement and collision.

So far i had been using a unity's box2d solution for the game, but after playing a bunch of old games and really thinking about how i want the game to work (specially edge case resolution), i switched to my own solution for collision and physics. they're not super extensive or all purpose but I'm really enjoying being able to know when objects are moving and when their collision is being resolved. (i'm probably re inventing the wheel). A big upside is that mobile performance is way up.

Also with my new system i added a custom frame independence. i have a fixed step for when the game is running at 60fps and when ever it dips below that it runs at another step count. Basically did this because my collisions would get skipped over when ever the game wasn't running at 60fps if i used unity's time deltatime.

Right now i'm working on the first final rough draft of the level generation templates. when i'm done with that the game should be 100 percent playable but with no polish and only 1 boss.

[EditinLuv]

the slow down.... right now i have a ton of donish art (art is never finished only abandoned) to add to the game.

adding assets to a game is no joke, i figured that maybe a day or two tops. but man o man was i wrong. there's just so much grind that needs to be done to get those assets properly working.

tweaks and more tweaks for example one of the enemies in conception looked like this
   
And it looks alright, but in-game it looks like crap because it's too small  so the player misses and gets hit 100% of the time


i had to modify it to look chunkier like this
   
now the player can actually see this dumbo flying he he.
this are just still concepty and rough i still need to go back and refine edges and other endless tweaks.


besides that...


The cool thing about having more art in the game is that now i can start working on the auto tilers for the procedurally generated stages (all stages are procedurally generated).


start of an auto tiler

[EditinLuv]

progress...

this stage I call hell, because i had a feeling it was going to be a pain to get right xD

here are some progress images

first i started with some random fill blocks



the hard cornered edges hurt my eyes so i added some prop edges (they still don't look right)



i changed the colors a bit, and added some more edge props



later i want to light up the edge props some so the player can more easily see the grabbing path

but for now this stage is playable from reading enemies to knowing where the player is. i think so atleast

[EditinLuv]

progress...

bad design usually leads to a really hard game. xD

any ways i been doing the first edit pass on all the templates and stages, and boy were my original concepts poor.

I think that's why my game felt so off, because the first couple stages were tough as nails but had dumb enemies but the later stages with more complex enemies were funner and easier.

Somewhere along the line between the first stage and last i must have unlocked a new perspective node in my designer web of abilities. Now i can see more clearly how badly the templates of the first few stages were. Hopefully by the third pass (if there's even one 0.0) i can unlock another perspective node to make better templates. That will hopefully lead to a better experience.

On my current todo is
*redo power ups and usable items systems and
*add more diverse items and power ups
*Probably going to have to edit pass those a couple times to get them to fit nicely into the stages, also new items means new ideas for templates for stages for cool stuff for game dev.

here's a new gif with a new art and new tilemap shadows

right now explosions happen when ever the player grabs anything, it's fun, but it's just for right now.

[EditinLuv]

Just a quick check in.

Recently i started playing around with my collision and physics code, and i broke everything.

He he

after a couple hours of despair and patching things up i decided to just give up on that solution.
so i began making my own little collision solver system, think box2d-lite-lite.

Anyways i finished it recently and about 80% of old bugs i had got fixed by the new system. I probably should have done it a long time ago. But then it was kinda exhausting, i can't image trying to make this system at the beginning of development, before i even know what i needed.

that's it for this update, i'm getting ready to finish up my alpha version, right now i set my deadline to july 5th, really hoping to make that date. there's still a couple things left todo besides tweaks and polish, and those things make me feel like there's still a couple trailer trucks left of work.

 

[EditinLuv]

Time to explain my item system.

Ok so during gameplay a variaty of items will drop from enemies and boxes. You can use the items to help you clear the stages easier.

These items are separated into 3 categories : Action, Boost, Passive.

Action are a one time use, like a weapon or jetpack


This is a sword that slashed through multiple enemies

Boost Items have a duration period in which the item is active. For Example i have this item called One focus that acts like the super mario star, only difference is that you get activate it.

Both boost and action items are one time use, actually.

Last are the Passive, which are a little bit more tricky. They give the player special effects, without having to use up the item, and work as long as the player has the item with them.
A passive item in game right now is the 'escape doll', as long as you have it, whenever you get hit the doll will absorb all the damage and get destroyed. It's good because spikes are one shot kill, so having a escape doll might come in handy.

Some Passive items reflect actual power ups the player can get, only difference is that passive items can get destroyed and powers can't.

Since ultra zultra is procedurally generated, you probably wont get to use all the items on the first run. I have 20 items working right now, still trying to figure out if i need more or less. that sweet number.

Ok last thing, besides enemies and boxes there are also vending machines that sell you items. But you can also destroy them for cash for a later vending machine.

Maybe breaking too many vending machines will have consequences

why vending machines? well because i just started playing bioshock remastered.

That's it, now back to doing pointless balancing that will get overwritten next time i add a new enemy/item/powerup/takea45minutebreak.

[EditinLuv]

An item system update.



so items had been in the game for a while now, but most of the time they were broken and just there to add a little more spice to the gameplay.

And now they're just there to add alot of spice to game. The vending machine now sells you items also, it also recovers your hp for the right price and will sometimes offer a hp boost. The gif doesn't show it will, but you have to punch the vending machine to get the shop ui open.

The vending machines aren't completely random though, i built a couple patterns on when a vending machine will offer you, then
 I modified the pattern just a bit to get a few iterations.

[kairunotabi]

This is so cool! I really like the art style and your development process. Keep 'em coming!