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[haks109]

You suddenly find yourself in an unknown declining advanced citadel of an unknown planet. Without weapons, the only thing you've got to survive is a device that generates matter so you can move, but what if that device unleashes an unknown dark power? Help this lost explorer to reach the way out of this powerful darkness.

With this matter device as your only way to survive, deal with challenging puzzles and dangerous enemies, discover hidden places to discover the dark story behind this doomed citadel.

Hello guys!  "Matter" is an adventure pixel-art game in which the only thing you have to deal with the dangers of this unknown and declining world is a device that generates matter. With this device you will be able to solve puzzles, protect against enemies, discover secrets, and even enhance this device to unleash its full power.

Progress:

• Core mechanics at 100%!
• Game mechanics: Currently there are 6 levels made with some iterations of every mechanics
• Challenges: Right now there is only 1 enemy fully working: the electric turret, the roach was suspended since I still gotta learn about AI (not just "if" and "moveTowards()", but real pathfinding)
• Aesthetics: Lighting and shading refactoring finished and ready for artwork on new levels, level 1, 2 and 6 are a proof of concept of how would can be the art in the future
• Story: It would be decoupled to game objectives, you can explore and figure out what happened to this citadel, or just find your way out and scape

The game

October 2018 demo (warning: it can be insanely hard  ) itch.io

The mechanics are pretty simple at the moment: a platformer where you have to jump and move, just like any other platformer, with the difference that at least at the beginning you have no weapons to fight back or destroy obstacles, just a device that generates matter. The matter consists on strange balls of unstable and high energy matter that can float in the middle of the air, they however don't last there forever, that's what I call matter decay. Also, the device cannot go crazy and generate matter infinitely, that's matter overload, you have to let it cooldown a bit, each decayed matter makes it cooldown, if it overloads too much, it will explode in your hands

I plan to have some powerups for the matter device, the one working till the moment is explosive matter: you can place matter that when decays, instead of just disappearing, explodes.

Latest updates

I'm currently creating and improving levels, testing the ones I have and learning about game balancing, reward, control of boredom vs stress and all this academic stuff behind designing levels. I also need to place more SFX for some places where its needed, for example matter overload, it seems some players are not aware enough that they're running out of matter.

After that, I should place some music on some levels and finally define the entire scheme for all the levels, and think if I would be creating more mechanics or if I'm ok for now

Tools I'm using

- Unity 2018 (I updated it to use the sprite shapes)

- Sprite light kit: a plugin from Prime 31 to use sprites as lights, so I don't have to deal with pixel lights, tho I could use deferred lighting I feel it might be overkilling for a pixel art game, besides for the moment I don't plan to use normal maps and all this fanciness
- Aseprite: What can I say... this software is the best for doing pixel art sprite sheets and animations

- Pyxel edit: This one saved my ass for hexagonal patterns, it's a breeze to draw tiles and textures here

- Tiled: for some pre-defined tiled things, right now tho I haven't used it too much
- GIMP: for handcrafted stuff


Hope you find this project interesting, any suggestions, comments, and questions are more than welcome!

Thanks for your time

[mzn528]

I love the idea! It seems pretty interesting to me.Keep up the great work!

[KevinTillman]

I like the idea and art style, should make for some cool and interesting platforming!

[TonyManfredonia]

This is pretty neat, indeed! I like how you can create your own platforms...opens up a ton of possibilities.

[haks109]

Thanks for your positive comments   

Here are some full size screenshots of what we've being cooking, this will become the first playable level, its a short one but shows the most basic gameplay and aesthetics elements.





Notice those green floors are colliders without artwork, that's what needs to be finished so far, also those bars below each screenshot indicates character's HP and matter limit, this is to limit a bit what player can do with the matter device, and also adds some challenge 

[TonyManfredonia]

The art on the foliage is gorgeous.

Absolutely gorgeous!

[haks109]

Hi! its me again

Sorry for not posting more frequently, is a bit difficult to maintain just your twitter and your webpage 

So... let me show you the matter destroyer device



See the device at the middle? Its objective is to not let you go to places you shouldn't be able to go (imagine you could just go high to the sky) or to block you to go to a place where is something cool or the exit to the next level.

There is work to do yet, for example that device has an effect radius, however it still doesn't look like it does something until you place matter close to it, I have to fix that.

Any comments are welcome!

[TheWanderingBen]

As others have mentioned: unique mechanic and lovely art! Subscribing for updates!

[haks109]

December started! time is faster than expected... and desired 

The platform

It may be weird that you being able of creating your own platforms creating matter you would need to use other platforms, thats right.

But... there are 2 scenarios that comes to mind that makes this platform useful

• One is ready and is in the GIF: you cannot pass coz there is a matter destroyer preventing the player to reach some places, so you need the platform. That platform can be disabled and needs to be enabled somehow
• A gameplay I've been developing consist on the player having to move upwards using matter, but there are some enemies in the way up awaiting for him, they see the player and start to shoot... You will have to deal with shoots while you jump into the upper matter you just created, taking care of not creating too much or the device will overload and you'll die. If achieving this is not imposible, at least is a real pain. Hopefully you have a platform to get protected.

More features on the way! Hope I get some more time tho... For the next post I will tell you more about the plot of this game

[NuSan]

I like the bright colors on the foliage and background, it's unusual but great. The gameplay remind me a bit of the game Isbarah, but it was focus on bosses/shmup and not on platforming.

[TonyManfredonia]

Neat new concepts!

Great stuff, as usual :)ß

[haks109]

The gameplay remind me a bit of the game Isbarah, but it was focus on bosses/shmup and not on platforming.

Uhmm I have to check out that game, but from what I can see... matter units (these ones needs a better name I think haha) looks like those spheres generated by those bosses! 

[haks109]

Little update



This will be the most basic of our enemies.

Why these guys look that way? The city in the planet the "hero" is stuck inside, has fallen in decadence because of a technology they developed that turned against them. That dark technology is sentient and has taken control of almost all the citizens' minds. Now these citizens are no more than dumb and emotion-less beings following orders they cannot refuse while their bodies get deteriorated yet remaining alive and with enough strength and coordination to use weapons.

[haks109]

I made some improvements to the HUD to place matter.

I still have to figure out what choices do I have to make the HUD tell the player that he can drag the pointer to create more matter rather than clicking and releasing

[Music Vortex]

So many gameplay possibilities! Great stuff. Digging the art too! 

[The Armorman]

I really enjoy the art style you're using in this, because it looks unlike a lot of other colorful platformers. It almost reminds me of indie games circa 2005-2008. It almost reminds me, in a way, of the old indie game Halo Zero

[haks109]

The Armorman: Interesting, those are good references to think about the art I want to have for this game.

Now: more updates!



This is a mockup of the HUD I'm working on, this still looks early, artwork needs to be polished

Mechanism:

• Those 4 blocks contains the power-ups the player has collected so far, those power-ups are interchangeable and those give different properties for the matter (TBD)
• That circle should look more like the matter ball itself, it tells if the device is getting overloaded (if you use it too much, it can explode)
• The big sky-blue bar is the life bar
• The little bar below previous one is the matter overload bar, another mechanism to tell that too much matter is being used

[Smerik]

Hey! This looks pretty neat! The art like everyone is saying looks good.Also the positioning of the arms while you rotate the mouse here look really good:


I was wondering, will you also defeat enemies by luring obstacles in their faces or shooting, or is this there no offense but purely defense?

[thomf00]

Your UI mocks definitly match the art style but might be a little dense. Have you nailed down the art for the power ups yet? It might make sense to make the power up icons look like the power ups you collect in the main game. This goes along with making the circle look like the matter ball a bit more. You could even keep the UI raw text for now until you nail the mechanics down.

[haks109]

I was wondering, will you also defeat enemies by luring obstacles in their faces or shooting, or is this there no offense but purely defense?

You made a great question actually, I was trying to figure it out when planing this game. So basically you have this device being only able to place matter and making those enemies to avoid reaching you. A single enemy can be neutralised this way and that's it... boring, so what about having various enemies strategically positioned?

The scenarios I see for now are:

• Moving quickly and taking care of the matter device for it to not get overloaded or it will explode and you'll die
• If those enemies are placed in a way that seems to be obviously imposible or extremely difficult to pass thru only using matter, you'll have to look for something that blocks at least some of those enemies, so the rest can be bypassed thru matter. This part is where matter puzzles come in

There could be other scenarios, that depends on the enemies, right now I only have 2: roaches and "soldiers"

In other levels I was thinking about powerups for generated matter, for example one that generates matter that when decays, explodes

Your UI mocks definitly match the art style but might be a little dense. Have you nailed down the art for the power ups yet? It might make sense to make the power up icons look like the power ups you collect in the main game. This goes along with making the circle look like the matter ball a bit more. You could even keep the UI raw text for now until you nail the mechanics down.

Yea I made some improvements (tho I've been a bit unplugged from Twitter and forgot to create GIFs for it ), I'll probably post those for #indieDevHour today later... in a nutshell: I removed those power-ups blocks now there is an animated icon of matter, if you choose another power-up, that icon will change (that part is not done since there is no power-up mechanics yet)