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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsFates and Constellations - Line Splitting Puzzle Game
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Author Topic: Fates and Constellations - Line Splitting Puzzle Game  (Read 13014 times)
chinykian
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« Reply #20 on: January 09, 2017, 11:07:23 PM »

Last week has been about building up our tools. As the number of levels we've made increases it becomes increasingly tedious to have to cycle through other levels to get to the one we want. As such, we took some time to build a crude but functioning tool to preview and reorder levels:



It's also become pretty obvious that sorting through all the levels by difficulty without some form of automation would be a less-than-enjoyable and time-consuming task, so we also wrote a tool to help us sort the levels by difficulty. It works by presenting the user(that's us), a series of questions asking which of the 2 presented levels is harder. By the end all of the levels would be properly sorted by difficulty (files are numbered in the gif below for testing purposes).

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chinykian
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« Reply #21 on: January 26, 2017, 08:03:20 PM »

Quick update!

After attending our first local indie get-together and showing a bunch of people the game, it became quite obvious that the level-restart transition is confusing to a lot of people. Here's how it looked:


(Terrain rotates to the right on restart)


Here's the updated version:


(Swipe right to restart)

Hopefully it's now a lot clearer and doesn't look like it's going to a previous level.
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Pixel Noise
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« Reply #22 on: January 27, 2017, 07:18:20 AM »

Makes sense - I don't know if I would have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out, but the updated version should feel more natural to most.
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chinykian
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« Reply #23 on: January 28, 2017, 10:17:42 AM »

Makes sense - I don't know if I would have noticed if you hadn't pointed it out, but the updated version should feel more natural to most.

Yeah! We didn't think there were issues with the original as well until we tested it out with people!
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chinykian
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« Reply #24 on: February 05, 2017, 07:30:10 AM »

Work-in-progress level selection screen. Here's a look at some of the levels we've made!

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chinykian
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« Reply #25 on: February 15, 2017, 02:11:16 AM »

We thought it's time to finally do some post-processing to spice up the look of the game and to break away from the somewhat flat color tone. There was much experimentation, and we eventually settled on changing the hue and saturation towards the bottom of the screen so it looks like the landscape is reflecting light.

Here's the comparison (before & after):
     

We try to keep the effect subtle in order to not draw too much attention away from the puzzle. In fact, we're thinking of making the constellations stand out more by implementing glow - so that's something to look forward to! =D

While implementing the shader I came across a weird issue on iOS - unlike its Windows counterpart, which gave the above result, the iOS build had weird graphical glitches (flickering white dots, black colors turning white, etc). As it turned out, the issue was caused by floating point imprecision. More specifically, for GLSL (ES), precision qualifiers are a thing. (Much thanks to my teammate jon for fixing this!)

For some reason, the float variables in the shader were of mediump (medium precision) and is unable to represent a value as small as the following:

float e = 1.0e-10;

Consequently, e becomes 0 and resulted in a division by zero in the implementation, thereby causing weird graphical artifacts.

The following links greatly helped us in the implementation of the post-processing fx.

« Last Edit: February 15, 2017, 10:41:04 AM by chinykian » Logged

Pixel Noise
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« Reply #26 on: February 17, 2017, 06:15:58 AM »

I like the new effect on the landscape! Subtle, but I think the slightly brighter color makes things a bit more inviting. A bit of glow on the constellations should work well too I think.
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chinykian
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« Reply #27 on: February 22, 2017, 09:28:23 PM »

I like the new effect on the landscape! Subtle, but I think the slightly brighter color makes things a bit more inviting. A bit of glow on the constellations should work well too I think.

Thanks mate!
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chinykian
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« Reply #28 on: February 22, 2017, 10:06:36 PM »

Finally added some glow to the constellations. Still got to tweak this further - the glow makes the white nodes look like balls of fuzz, so we'll probably have to change how they look. Also, my teammate jon fixed up the lines so they now look smoother, goodbye aliasing!

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abuki
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« Reply #29 on: February 23, 2017, 01:03:35 AM »

Hi, the game looks cool. Like the main mechanic.
We were doing a small game jam about a year ago and we made this prototype. The mechanic was a lot different, but it looks very familiar to me on the first look. It was just this prototype, we are not continuing on this project.





I wish you a good luck, looks like a nice small mobile game.
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chinykian
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« Reply #30 on: February 23, 2017, 01:14:12 AM »

Hi, the game looks cool. Like the main mechanic.
We were doing a small game jam about a year ago and we made this prototype. The mechanic was a lot different, but it looks very familiar to me on the first look. It was just this prototype, we are not continuing on this project.

I wish you a good luck, looks like a nice small mobile game.

Oh wow, it looks really pretty! Thanks for sharing! =)
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chinykian
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« Reply #31 on: February 24, 2017, 02:11:19 AM »

Added some particle effects to emphasize the cutting of lines. The tiny particles seem to work well enough with the glow =)

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« Reply #32 on: February 24, 2017, 07:08:31 AM »

Definitely like the line-cut particles. I wasn't crazy about the extra glow on the stars at first but I think it's OK.
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chinykian
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« Reply #33 on: February 26, 2017, 02:35:23 AM »

Definitely like the line-cut particles. I wasn't crazy about the extra glow on the stars at first but I think it's OK.

Thanks again! Yeah, we'll probably be further tweaking the glowing effect over time =)
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chinykian
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« Reply #34 on: March 01, 2017, 03:40:00 AM »

Before proceeding on to adding more content, I thought it'd be a better idea to address some of the feedback we received during playtesting.

One of the minor changes we've made was to reduce the size of the nodes hoping it'd look better.

Before & After:
   

Another change we added is even more subtle. It has to do with the amount of time you have to wait for the lines to reach the edge (after the final split) of the game area before the level restarts. To fix that, we gradually speed up the line after the final split.

Here are the gifs for comparison:
Before:


After:
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chinykian
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« Reply #35 on: March 07, 2017, 11:11:42 PM »

Each level in the game is to be cleared within a certain number of splits. Till now, we have been relying on displaying a number on the top-left corner of the screen to communicate to the players the number of splits remaining - it proves to be fairly ineffective (few people notice the label, much less read it while solving the puzzle).

Consequently, we're trying a different approach to displaying the split counts, as featured below. We'll need to test this.



In other news, our artist who's previously worked with us on Spacejacked has offered to help improve the looks of the game. Early mockups seem promising. It may be a while before we're done with the graphical upgrade, but we look forward to showing it to everyone once it's ready!
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« Reply #36 on: March 08, 2017, 04:39:25 AM »

This is looking really good, and I love the work you're putting into the UI. Will it be playable on Android? (And if so where do I throw my money at?)
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chinykian
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« Reply #37 on: March 08, 2017, 10:34:04 PM »

This is looking really good, and I love the work you're putting into the UI. Will it be playable on Android? (And if so where do I throw my money at?)

Thanks mate!
We are aiming to launch it on the iOS first, but yes it'll be playable on Android at some point on Google Play Smiley
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chinykian
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« Reply #38 on: April 11, 2017, 09:18:00 PM »

It's been awhile since our last update, and I thought I should at least explain why.
I've recently took up a new part-time job, and the job training is taking up quite a bit of time. As for the rest of my time, I had to spend it on updating Spacejacked, which we're currently busy working on to bring to PS4.

That said, please watch this space for the next update! Hopefully we'd have gotten the graphical improvements in by then! =)
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chinykian
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« Reply #39 on: July 12, 2017, 05:59:07 AM »

Wrote some code to support different splitting angles - here's one really weird one.




On a separate note, we've finally gotten started(phew!) on integrating the new art assets. It'll be awhile but please look forward to it.
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