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[EditinLuv]

Thanks @kairunotabi I'll keep working hard!

Update from a playtest

Last night i took ultra zultra to one of my communities local meet ups. And i was able to get it played a whole bunch.

First thing , difficulty needs alot of tweaking. most barely got to area 4, that's out of 12 areas.
I think maybe with a little bit more time they would have gotten father. But anyways, i thought the item usage was going to be a fun thing to play around with.... BUT after the playtest i notice hardly any one using the items.

Right now i think the cause might be either:
-one time use items cause too much scarcity, nobody wants to waste them
-their usability is not visual enough, they used an item have no idea if it actually did something
-too many choices, never get to experience one enough to use

that's for the action and duration items, now the passive items worked pretty well.
My current fix is to split some action items into reusable items. More powerful items will be one use, other will be multiple use. duration items will be one time use still.

also at the end of a level if you collected enough green orbs you get sent to a screen to pick a new power, so in the playtest no one knew what to do in this screen  .  The power up chosen the most was one called 'pigeon down', it revives you once.

Aside from those things... was the punching, when i saw people playing i realized that the punch doesn't give enough feed back when landing a hit. causing the players to actually just walk to the next enemy over and get hit. 


on a super good note, I've been playing it with a controller(before was keyboard (pc) or touch controllers(mobile)), and i really enjoy how the movement feels with a controller.

[EditinLuv]

Update Some Fx

Been doing so much game balancing and tweaking, but i took a break to work on some punch fx animations.



I really enjoy tweaking the feedback of gameplay, you know like when it feels like you actually jump/grab something/punch some one.  To make it feel less like just two colliders overlapping.

Also i need to start getting those enemy animations in.

[EditinLuv]

Update Bosses

I been procrastinating doing the bosses for a while now. Mostly because i was unsure of how i wanted them.
Like :

 a. Do i want tough , pattern heavy bosses that you kinda figure out by dying a bunch of times

 or

 b. Multiple bosses that have those same patterns but you kinda just get one each run, and a different one in another run.

which lead me to the biggest question, what how many bosses? and what is the final boss?

I'm also welcoming suggestions on how to tackle this bit of design paralysis.

but for now i'm sticking to route b, and if anything hopefully i build a more systematic way of thinking about the bosses.

any ways here's a gif of the one i been working on. He/She still pretty stale.



(unfortunately those cool pulsing colors are artifacts from the gif )

[ArjenAwesome]

This looks awesome! Keep it up. Love the animations. When can we expect to play a demo?

[EditinLuv]

@ArjenAwesome Thanks! Motivation! I think a demo might be possible soon.

But for now i have some really neat gameplay footage with a couple samples of the music (still early wip) and has no sound effects.

It covers the first stage that leads to a boss and covers a tiny bit of the second stage.
It also shows a bit more of the power up system and item system.
I die in the beginning but right after i do a pretty solid run.
Towards the end the music cuts off, because there's suppose to be another clip for when after you use a pigeon down.
But i haven't gotten around to adding it.

and here it is, enjoy!





ok and just a quick thought, so i been play around with designing full levels in the game like no procedural.
I don't know if i should scrap the procedural generation(or have it for a single stage specifically) and just hand make the stages.  Making the game into a more megaman-ish core loop, you know long stage followed by boss. Will change alot of the gameplay of the game, so it's probably not something i'll decide on a whim.

[ArjenAwesome]

Hmm, I get what you're saying with the removal of procedural generation. My own experience (in my own game) is that real procedural generation is difficult to get right. Games like spelunky etc. use preset room pieces that are stitched together, there is a neat tutorial on that, by Derek Yu you might want to check that out. In our game we are going more the Isaac route, meaning preset rooms that are procedurally stitched together.
Personally, I like games like ducktales and megaman, I think your choice of level style should mainly be influenced by how long you want the player to play the game (the same level will be boring faster, perhaps you can add some type of level skipping like in mario to fix this) and how much effort you want to put into the level design. Procedural levels will always take more time. Having different preset level will take less work, and finally having fixed levels will be the most straight forward.

Hope that helps,

Arjen

[EditinLuv]

@ArjenAwesome Yea I think I'm just realizing that now, the true depths of procedural generation are not to be taken lightly  .

I spent last weekend just designing out (sketching out) full levels by hand, mostly to see how long It took to make a general stage.

I mostly notice that there is a strong relationship between the type of enemy I want to place and how the terrain around that enemy ends up looking. I could make a drawer that follows a ruleset for each enemy that tells the drawer how to shape the terrain around it.
 
Procedural technique wise I use the stitch rooms together approach, but I want to see if I can come up with another procedural  way of creating the levels.

I have a basic idea of how I want the drawer to work, but I'm going let the idea cook for couple days before I start coding anything.

UPDATE
 i feel a slight feature creep approaching
I finish the 3 bosses for the first area, I basically split a big boss with multiple patterns to smaller more condensed bosses.

Also i finished up alot of the ui interactions, before you had to use the mouse to select powerups/buy items. Now you can do that with the arrow keys!

Next on the list is making a little mock up title screen just for looks, and adding some much need sound effects (just placeholder). I'm doing this because I want to make a playable demo build for feedback purposes.

Code wise i'm trying to keep everything as far as possible from each other (decoupled), mostly because the game changes really quickly sometimes and having things glue together really zaps away all my motivation to innovate.

[ArjenAwesome]

That could be a nice aproach to map generation indeed, the main issue I see here is that the ruleset that goes with each enemy should be somewhat loose otherwise you'll just end up with carbon copies of the same challenge. Another issue here is that having multiple enemies together may need a completely different ruleset as their rules could cause them to hinder eachother, I've been playing a lot of dead cells lately, and most of the challenge there comes from having to fight multiple simple enemies at the same time.

Looking forward to the demo, keep going! 

[EditinLuv]

Yea I think I would need a good visual editor to get rulesets done, coding them with conditionals sounds like a nightmare.

I'm trying to resolved my current uncertainties by generating full levels with tons of debug info (template numbers, template order, level uniqueness, total number of enemies per level, etc), really I'm trying to make sense of the levels being created, to be able to create better templates and balance the game more.(i probably should have done so since the start, but getting the gameplay right was my main concern then)

UPDATE

After spending probably too much time re-designing and new-designing concepts of the game, I finally took a break to add parallax  backgrounds to the game. Honestly I have more fun implementing features, doing art and making the music.  Designing the game feels like such a drag sometimes, but if i don't do the design ahead of time then all the coding , art and music feel meaningless.

..sigh..

Here's a gif of some parallax, right now i'm trying to keep the backgrounds as dark and de-saturated as possible since they are not the main focus of the game.



(i also updated the ui locations)

[EditinLuv]

UPDaTE

Update on the bosses. well on boss, and just the process of one of the patterns of that boss.

Ok usually making a boss would be a very complicated process for me. They always seems so mystic.  Like I don't want to spoil myself the actual pattern to beat them. Every time I started scripting one, I would get into this player mentality.  In this mentality I would always end up adding too much random that didn't read well, I think I did this because I wanted to be surprised by my own puzzles. And with all the random crap it would be like solving a new puzzle every time. Once I let go off the need to surprise myself with my own game. And started acting like the game master instead of a player. I finally understood that bosses are patterns and I could either make them random or make them well. Moving Puzzles.

yeaa...

Unity is super cool. It makes scripting bosses fun.

This is one of bosses go to patterns



and behind the scenes (in unity terms one boss one scene) it looks like this



the green lines are the projectile trails , but they are more like guides. I offset the projectiles trail randomly just a (little bit) every Nth shot birdro shoots. It's a good balance point of hard coded patterns and unpredictability. Just needs a crap ton of tuning and I know for a fact that in the end I'm going to end up making the offset trails by hand. When I start polishing xD

[Al_B]

Loving the art style and the basic premise of this, bro! Hope you keep doing this!

[EditinLuv]

@Al_B thanks! glad you like the art! I think the new animations will make it look lot better.

UPdATE

Scripting is painful! I finally finished scripting the 3 bosses, it felt like a long journey.  The first was super complicated because I was still establishing a scripting patterns and rules.  But by the last boss I had it pretty much down. Really wanted to add a couple more after that but for now I'll leave it at 3.  

So balance wise, and this will change. Right now i can reach around area 2-2 before dying, which is alright I think. For the moment atleast.  I'm going to leave the balance for a little later. Mostly because I want to move out of the coding role and get started with some enemy animations, for the first area and first boss.

Game Design wise, I been really thinking about the game as a whole experience now, and I think I came up with a pretty cool idea, I'm moving away from the pure rouge experience of perma-death/pcg/repetitive to a more mix bag grab action platformer.  But I'll elaborate more on this when I finish the first area animations.

Here's an enemy walk animation, I call him "Limp Murtle"

[EditinLuv]

UPdATE

Working on animations. First i do a rough pass on all the queue animations. Then once they are in game I look for ways to improve them depending on how they look with movement and such. It's a long process for me, mostly because I can't really sit down and animate for too long before my head explodes.

Here are some roughs


Shoot At Player bad guy, call him mega gun Murtle


You can only kill this one with a punch to the back, call him super shield Murtle

[ArjenAwesome]

Still going strong, I am interested in your new bosses and how the scripting process went. I also use Unity I think it's pretty good. Keep up the work man.

[EditinLuv]

@ArjenAwesome
Thanks! Getting the enemy animations done was a huge roadblock for me, development should go a little bit faster now.
For my bosses they have their own state machine, a logical processor and a base state. The Logical processor has all the useful things like player location, player facing, player input, shoot trajectories, land positions and it contains the actual state machine.

The states inherit the base state, and are programmed do just one thing. Like move this way, move that way, shoot there, shoot at player. In the logical processor I remix the states to create patterns (i want to move this to like a json file for easier editing but for now it's just a method that adds new states to the state machine).  Since the state machine is just reading for the top state i can easily interrupt the pattern for like a hurt state or something else.  I wanted to have behavior trees but then i was like naaaaaa.

UPdATE
Enemy animations are finished! (roughed out at least)
Now onto backgrounds, and boss animations.

Here are some more enemies for the mean time..


this one is super strong call her Muscle Murtle


zombie gunner, shoots when ever he switches direction, call him Zombie Gun Murtle

[nathy after dark]

I like the pitch. I feel like one of the only people who thinks there are not enough good iOS games, so yeah when you get around to Testflight I'd be down to give it a shot!

[EditinLuv]

thanks @nathy grrrl , i'll let you know when i get testflight going.

UPdATE

For the last few days i been buried in making the remaining props and backgrounds for the game.
Right now i just have a couple things to check off my assets todo list.

As soon as i'm done with that, it'll be time to export them, then add all the new assets to the game (literally one of my favorite things to do).

Prop Sword

You can summon this sword once using the sword swipe item!

[EditinLuv]

Feels like animations just never end 

UPdATE

This dude is one of the bosses

He's part of the murtle familia, call him Croc Murtle.

well time to open graphics gale again.

[EditinLuv]

UPdATE

Big News! well sort of. Work on the game has been a plenty!

Mechanics-wise it's near 100% done. I'm going to spend the next weeks exporting and adding assets. This includes everything from minor UI things to the music.

Here's a promotional image thing i been working on also.


It's not the final one.

  Here's to hoping everything turns out as planned or better. (completing the game wise)

[EditinLuv]

UPdATE

Hooking up the animations of Jaco the Croc Murtle

The animations, make his fight more fun and player agency and all that other stuff.

Looky


A nice little intro to show you wut his all about.