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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsBarbearian - Fast-paced hack'n'slash action in a colorful hand-drawn world
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Author Topic: Barbearian - Fast-paced hack'n'slash action in a colorful hand-drawn world  (Read 42412 times)
gimblll
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« Reply #100 on: September 06, 2017, 08:20:22 PM »

That's interesting. I thought you were using simple sprites for the tiles of the landscape. Are you building the 3D mesh and just mapping the UV of the texture instead? Has the landscape a real third dimension as in are you able to use that for lighting?

Yes, exactly like that. I have multiple layers of tiles coming from Tiled that I UV map to the 3D mesh. I do use the mesh for some lighting. You can see some subtle shading on the left side of the last gif, just above that blue glowing bush. That's the mesh diffuse lighting that creates that little sharp lighting change there. There's a lot more to the lighting too, but it would be a long post to explain it all. Smiley
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tanis
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« Reply #101 on: September 06, 2017, 10:39:50 PM »

Definitely smart! Smiley
The mesh has got no convex shapes that could occlude the sprites, right? Or you'd end up with depth issues when sprites get partially behind it. But I guess you're using a second camera to show the 3D mesh with an isometric projection.
And one more question, what are you using LUA for?
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gimblll
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« Reply #102 on: September 06, 2017, 10:52:18 PM »

The mesh has got no convex shapes that could occlude the sprites, right? Or you'd end up with depth issues when sprites get partially behind it. But I guess you're using a second camera to show the 3D mesh with an isometric projection.
And one more question, what are you using LUA for?

Yes, exactly. I keep the hill gradient so low that there are no hills that can occlude anything so I don't have to sort anything behind any landscape mesh stuff. And yes, the landscape is rendered first with an 3D isometric camera and the sprites with a 2D camera on top of it.

Also it's a must for gameplay to keep hills low, you don't always notice the gradient changes in the middle of action, which again leads to confusing character speed changes. They're not the best for gameplay even now too, but it's a bit of a compromise between look and gameplay. I try to keep the landscape flat or at least smooth whenever there's places for action.

I use Lua very little in this game in the end. It's the export format I use for Tiled maps and then I do a few preprocess passes in Lua for the maps to get them ready to be serialized into the engine. I was planning to do some map generation in Lua too, but I ended doing it with C++ (for reasons I can't really remember anymore... Smiley).
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tanis
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« Reply #103 on: September 06, 2017, 11:48:23 PM »

I take it that the sprites aren't actually following the shape of the hills but rather moving on a flat landscape (to make collisions easier). BTW I've got my own little C++ engine as well so it's good to exchange ideas with someone from time to time :D

Maybe one day I'll hijack you to talk about engine tech more in details Wink

Anyway you've got art skills as well and that makes a whole difference between "programmer's art" and real art Smiley

On a side note I've been experimenting with LUA scripting within my own engine as I wanted to iterate quickly on game ideas but I'm having a hard time getting used not to have type safety and some sort of linter to help with the syntax and to remember me the name of methods and such.. :-P
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gimblll
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« Reply #104 on: September 07, 2017, 12:12:59 AM »

I take it that the sprites aren't actually following the shape of the hills but rather moving on a flat landscape (to make collisions easier). BTW I've got my own little C++ engine as well so it's good to exchange ideas with someone from time to time :D

Maybe one day I'll hijack you to talk about engine tech more in details Wink

The sprites are drawn on top of the landscape correctly in 3D space so that they follow the landscape etc., but yeah, the gameplay code is a mix of 2D and 3D depending on what's going on. For example the projectiles fly in full 3D space, but for example unit vs. unit collisions and movement is 2D (they can't jump or anything). I just snap the up coordinate (Z in my coordinate system) of units to the top of the 3D landscape every frame.

And go ahead, I'm happy to talk tech anytime. Smiley

Anyway you've got art skills as well and that makes a whole difference between "programmer's art" and real art Smiley

On a side note I've been experimenting with LUA scripting within my own engine as I wanted to iterate quickly on game ideas but I'm having a hard time getting used not to have type safety and some sort of linter to help with the syntax and to remember me the name of methods and such.. :-P

Thanks!

I've had the same experience with Lua. It's good when you are doing simple self contained things and have it integrated so that you can iterate really fast, but I would not use it for anything more complex with complicated dependencies etc. I've had to do some more complicated game logic with it in the past and it always ends being more trouble than what it's worth after certain complexity is reached.
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JindrichP
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« Reply #105 on: September 07, 2017, 12:21:16 AM »

This is a must have! I must admit that title didn´t catch my eye, but the screenshots and gifs. Is there any estimation regarding availability? Because - and I really mean it - I want to play it immediately.  Hand Money Left Shocked Hand Money Right
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gimblll
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« Reply #106 on: September 07, 2017, 01:08:27 AM »

This is a must have! I must admit that title didn´t catch my eye, but the screenshots and gifs. Is there any estimation regarding availability? Because - and I really mean it - I want to play it immediately.  Hand Money Left Shocked Hand Money Right

Thanks! Unfortunately I don't think I can finish it this year, so it's going to be 2018. Hopefully in the first half of it.
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JindrichP
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« Reply #107 on: September 07, 2017, 01:45:15 AM »

Thanks for the answer and good luck with development. I will watch your topic in order to "not miss it".
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gimblll
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« Reply #108 on: September 08, 2017, 12:28:27 AM »

Log Entry #36

Weekly update time! This week I've been integrating the first boss relating things to the world and story, and that's finished, yay! So now you can play the game from start to the end of world 2 (no boss yet) for the first time with most things in place. Lots of things came up when I did just now, but in theory all of those are pretty easy fixes. Also, I thought I had about 30-45 minutes of content in the game and it took me 1.5h for the full playthrough so that's a plus! Smiley Really happy to get all this together now finally! Still a huge chunk of content to be done, but whatever! Smiley Next week it's time to do some work on the upgrade system, do some polish here and there and get started on a new version of the HUD (it's not up to date to the gameplay and needs reworking).

Also, it's just about 2 years since I began this project, which was supposed to take me one year to complete. So obviously things haven't gone as I'd like them to, but on the other hand this is a completely different game than what I had in mind. I am really happy with what I have now though! I hope it doesn't take a third year and I can get this done before that! Smiley

Bonus pic, this is the concept picture I draw first when thinking of starting a new game after my last project. Originally it was supposed to be some sort of tower defence/total war game, but I never really liked what I got together. At some point I decided to abandon it and go with more hero based hack'n'slash etc. There's still some of those original sprites present in the current game, like the trees, graves and the knight soldier. And now that I look at it, the pikeman is really cute, I wonder if I should put that in the game too somehow. Smiley

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tanis
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« Reply #109 on: September 08, 2017, 01:38:15 AM »

I've had the same experience with Lua. It's good when you are doing simple self contained things and have it integrated so that you can iterate really fast, but I would not use it for anything more complex with complicated dependencies etc. I've had to do some more complicated game logic with it in the past and it always ends being more trouble than what it's worth after certain complexity is reached.

Yes, LUA can be troublesome when you need to do complex things. I've also had a hard time with the build toolchain as I'm using CMake and I always need to tweak it for every new project. I ended up writing a NodeJS tool that automates the generation of the main CMake file so that I can start a new project in a breeze instead of having to do it all manually.

So your engine is actually a fully fledged 3D engine and not just a 2D one. Have you written your own importer for meshes and stuff like that?

Oh and one more question.. this is due your past experiences Smiley I see you worked on Resogun, so I need to ask you this: have you considered making your game with a voxel based engine instead? Wink

Cheers!
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gimblll
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« Reply #110 on: September 08, 2017, 02:00:18 AM »

So your engine is actually a fully fledged 3D engine and not just a 2D one. Have you written your own importer for meshes and stuff like that?

I dunno, how do you define what a 3D engine is? Smiley Yes it's 3D in a sense that I have 3D cameras, gameplay considers 3D and some of the rendering use 3D space etc.. I don't have any mesh importers as I don't need any static meshes, but I could just as well add them if needed.

Oh and one more question.. this is due your past experiences Smiley I see you worked on Resogun, so I need to ask you this: have you considered making your game with a voxel based engine instead? Wink

Oh I would absolutely love to make more voxel based games, Resogun was one of the most fun games to make in my career. It's just that to get to the level of where I would want to take a voxel game, I just don't have the resources to do it alone so I can't go voxel right now really... Maybe in the future if there's a proper team and a budget. Smiley
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ydobemos
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« Reply #111 on: September 08, 2017, 02:05:00 AM »

This looks pretty cool. Would make a neat twin stick shooter probably, as an alternative to the melee focused combat currently in there (DLC idea, heh).
 
Anyhow, would it be very resource-consuming to have some variety for the enemies? Like give some skeletons helmets, some of them some broken armor or shields? Hue-shift the blobby enemies etc? Would add a little variety to the mobs.
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gimblll
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« Reply #112 on: September 08, 2017, 02:12:49 AM »

This looks pretty cool. Would make a neat twin stick shooter probably, as an alternative to the melee focused combat currently in there (DLC idea, heh).

Thanks! The previous game I made was a twin stick shooter, and I've worked on so many on my career that I'm pretty much had my fill of them. Smiley It still has that very similar fast actiony feeling to it though.

Anyhow, would it be very resource-consuming to have some variety for the enemies? Like give some skeletons helmets, some of them some broken armor or shields? Hue-shift the blobby enemies etc? Would add a little variety to the mobs.

Yeah, I would love to and it's been on my mind, but it's a bit of a pain in many ways so I doubt it'll get into the initial release. All my basic enemy animations are prerendered sprites and adding variety starts getting a bit too either memory or cpu intensive (depending how I would implement it) on low power devices. Maybe in the future, we'll see.
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tanis
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« Reply #113 on: September 08, 2017, 02:29:42 AM »

I dunno, how do you define what a 3D engine is? Smiley Yes it's 3D in a sense that I have 3D cameras, gameplay considers 3D and some of the rendering use 3D space etc.. I don't have any mesh importers as I don't need any static meshes, but I could just as well add them if needed.

heh yeah, I know what you mean.. I just wanted to know if you have developed all the 3D stuff like meshes animations, meshes import, etc.. or if you're just like me.. throw a projection camera and build the meshes at runtime and that's it Smiley
Adding all the nice 3D features would probably be way time consuming.. and you'd need tools then.. too much unneeded work if your core business is the game and not the engine of course Wink

Oh and one more question.. this is due your past experiences Smiley I see you worked on Resogun, so I need to ask you this: have you considered making your game with a voxel based engine instead? Wink

Oh I would absolutely love to make more voxel based games, Resogun was one of the most fun games to make in my career. It's just that to get to the level of where I would want to take a voxel game, I just don't have the resources to do it alone so I can't go voxel right now really... Maybe in the future if there's a proper team and a budget. Smiley

The day you want to make a voxel engine you can count me in Smiley  I've never made one and it would be interesting to have a try at that. Since I have no past experience in this field I have no idea what tools you'd need or how many systems you'd need to come up with to have something decent on screen. It surely sounds like a big challenge.

Speaking of variations, you're probably better off turning all your sprite animations to use spine vectors if it's not too much of a fuss. It will come handy the day you actually want to add variations like suggested by @ydobemos.
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gimblll
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« Reply #114 on: September 08, 2017, 02:40:22 AM »

Adding all the nice 3D features would probably be way time consuming.. and you'd need tools then.. too much unneeded work if your core business is the game and not the engine of course Wink

Yeah, if going full 3D like that, I would just go with a ready made engine. Smiley

Speaking of variations, you're probably better off turning all your sprite animations to use spine vectors if it's not too much of a fuss. It will come handy the day you actually want to add variations like suggested by @ydobemos.

I would if I was PC only, but I need to keep the overhead low as I target low end iOS devices too. (And it would be too much work to maintain two builds with too many differences.)
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gimblll
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« Reply #115 on: September 15, 2017, 05:20:44 AM »

Log Entry #37

So I did some work on the upgrades, a few balancing things only. I still don't know exactly which upgrades there will be, but that's something I'll decide later. Now I only have a few basic ones. I don't want to make too many so they lose meaning, but on the other hand I want the player to have a good choice of things to do with the gathered loot. I also don't want the player to be able to make the character over powered, as I would prefer if this was more of a skill game than a grind. Character progression is definitely something I need to think about more as I build more content to the game, now it's pretty limited. Not sure what I should do yet.

I also did a new story character and a special level for it and integrated it into the level flow. Not spoling it for now.

And then I started working on the HUD, need to get it up to date with the gameplay and I'm adding a bit of polish to it too.

Next week will mostly be HUD work I think, and possibly I'll do a pass on fixing/polishing some enemies etc. I want to have a solid build together soon, so I can finally show it to a few new people again.
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gimblll
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« Reply #116 on: September 23, 2017, 06:53:49 AM »

Log Entry #38

Ok. So HUD work is done. I added all indicators that were missing, but some of them will need more work when I finalize more gameplay features. No point going full polish until then. Here's a .gif of one (secondary weapon indicator/bullet counter) that I hope will be final.



Then I've been adding a lot of sound effects here and there and will continue to do that for a day or two. After that it's just a matter of making a few playthroughs and fixing most obvious issues and I have a solid build for my 'internal milestone' that I can also have playtested again. Not sure what I'm going to concentrate on next, depends a bit on the feedback too. Might spend a bit of time automating making builds etc. management. Then I guess it's just content content content.
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gimblll
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« Reply #117 on: September 29, 2017, 02:46:02 AM »

Log Entry #39

Ok, slow week, but lots of little things. I added a bunch of more sound effects so that it feels "full" when playing, but still lots of monster specific sounds missing etc. I'll do that later. Also added new temp music, so there's a different track for meta and battle gameplay. I think I finally have references tracks that a) I like and b) fit into the game. It was surprisingly hard to find those!

Also reworked bits of my audio code (removed some stupidities etc.) and also added music manager that keeps the correct track playing.

Then I did scripts to automate doing PC builds, so I get a nice .zip out of it automatically to send to people. Also sent some builds around, still waiting for feedback though. I hope it's not too depressing. Well I did get a few, but it's not that much use as they spent only maybe 15 minutes on the game. Maybe that's telling something of the game's appeal? I hope not... (The beginning lacks a lot of polish though...)

Today I've been desiging boss 2, and next week will be implementing that. Probably the week after that too. Onwards! No .gifs as there's no new visuals to show...
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tanis
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« Reply #118 on: October 03, 2017, 12:56:35 AM »

If you can make a build for macOS I'd be happy to try it out and report back Smiley
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Valar05
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« Reply #119 on: October 03, 2017, 06:00:23 AM »

This is really looking good, nice work!  I especially like the idea of "captains".

I'm currently working on a procedurally generated dungeon crawler of my own, and have no goals in the levels yet - I like the idea of having to kill a tough (non-boss) enemy to proceed.  Kinda puts me in mind of the Black Knights in Dark souls, though those were generally optional
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