next »

[foofter]

Oh, man that's some nice scooping action with the spinning purple & pink plants!

[Nordanvinden]

Oh, man that's some nice scooping action with the spinning purple & pink plants!

Hey, sweet that you like it! I hope to have more of that type of interaction

#Update 85 - First night level

So I have finished another 3 levels. One teaching swings, one repeating the things learned on the last levels, and the first night level. The night levels are going to be a little bit tricky in how they render, but I think I have found a way that works. I really like how its pitch black for a while before you collect the first cube 


Intro first night level.


More advanced pusher elevator.


Level 1_8.


Level 1_9


Level 1_10 - Night level.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 86 - A few more levels

I have created some more levels and intend to keep doing the same today. Hopefully I will finish early and have time to keep working on my level tool and maybe react to some feedback I got this weekend.

Level 1_11 contains more advanced walljumping and platform jumping.


Level 1_11.

Level 1_12 keeps creating harder scenarios where wind is involved.


Level 1_12.

I had 2 playtests this weekendI and I think I will make a few changes to these levels. But not until I finish todays planned work (creating 2 new levels for the forest world).

New variations of wind and stomper

Here are the new variations on level 1_11 and 1_12 for stomper and wind.


Stomper running lane.


Swinging in the wind.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 87 - Scaling water and wind

New levels, new combinations of mechanics and a few technical solutions. Here we go:

Technical solutions

So I had this issue where wind and water did not scale their appearences. In the wind case it meant that there where as many wind-particle-emissions for a low area as for a big area. I solved this by using the area of the collider to figure out a good emission rate. And I just used the one I had as prefab as reference for this value.

The extra particles really help the player determining where the edge of the wind actually is.


Wind now and before. (Now a lot more wind particles).

For the water it was about how much the water refracted and how big the normal map texutre was i.e the tile scale. For this solution I just used the height and width separately to decide the tile scale.

The old solution affected gameplay when the refraction was set too high. This was a dealbreaker for sure. The visual part is otherwise very subjective.


Water now and before. (Now has less refraction).

New combinations of mechanics


Under water + pushers.


Swings + pushers.

New levels


Level 1_13.


Level 1_14.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 88 - Night maze

I created a new night level yesterday and wanted to try adding a maze. It felt natural since the line of sight is very limited which makes it more exciting.


Exploring maze.


Jumping on maze walls.

The idea is that its supposed to be pitch black behind the player. But I really like when the night sky is visible:


Night sky.

I also created a level with a lot of jumping cubes. Now in the last levels of the forest world, I really wanna give the player a lot of cubes to create a feeling of being overpowered.

New levels


Night level 1_15.


Level 1_16.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 89 - Level generation tool update

I got some time yesterday to keep working on the level generation tool. I have tried to figure out what I need to do by hand and what can be generated. My goal is to generate everything, including trees and mushrooms. I have gotten to the part where I can generate background and foreground meshes from the hand made path.


Generating foreground and background.

New levels

I also created two new levels that introduced a lot of run and jump energy. The running level includes a lot of timing obstacles and so does the jumping one, but with a totally different feeling.


Running level 1_17.


Jumping level 1_18.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 90 - Level generation tool update 2

New levels and some updates to the level generation tool.

I tried to figure out which path-blocks are at the very bottom to make them scale bigger in the z-axis. This seems pretty tricky since there are so many edge cases. Its not enough just raytracing downwards trying to see if there is something there. In the gif below you can see that there are still holes in the edges. Not even sure how to solve that. I think it might be one of those things that I should just let go and focus on later if I have figured something out.


Trying to generate bigger foreground pieces for bottom path.

A short gif from the second level where a maze and pushers have been mixed.


Pushers in maze.

New levels

These new levels introduced a good mix of the mechanics that I have tought through out the forest world. And the night level (level 20) introduces mazes with pushers inside them, which I think works out great. It adds to the tension when inside the mazes.


Level 1_19.


Level 1_20 (Night).

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 91 - Level generation tool update 3

I have kept on working on the level generation tool. It currently uses the hand-made path and some extra black geomtry that tells us where the player cannot go.

The background trees and horizon forest is now also being automatically generated.

The trees are generated from random points inside a certain area. Then I check if they are close to a wall and scale them down if they are going to clip it. This is very simple but since the levels are not being generated runtime at startup I can afford to have some minor errors when props are being generated. Because I can always go in afterwards and alter them a little.


Generating level 1_3.


Generating level 1_4.

Today I´m going to try to add foreground props as well and then well see if thats enough. Dont want to make it too complex.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 92 - Level generation tool update 4

The tool can now generate mushrooms, flowers and foreground trees. It can also handle background for water and adding darkness to the bottom pieces of the scene.


Generating level 1_4.

I also made the water animate. I think its a bit hard to see the water though and there are some issues with the refraction when scaling the water mesh.


Animated water.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 93 - Level generation tool update 5

Yesterday I worked on making the generation for the background trees better. I also made a lot of edge-case fixes for creating the underground parts.


How the trees are placed now.


Zoomed in to to see the smaller foreground props.

I removed a lot of the random generation logic from the trees and made a more straight forward placement algorithm. This is probably pretty visible from the sky, but not (hopefully  ) from the zoomed in player view.

[Indiana-Jonas]

hey i played through the demo at the Stugan finale! i forgot about this until now, you're making good progress, still looks really dope!

[Nordanvinden]

hey i played through the demo at the Stugan finale! i forgot about this until now, you're making good progress, still looks really dope!

Hey!

Thanks for coming by and trying out the game, much appreciated 
And thanks for the kind words, I am trying to wrap it up so hopefully the progress will keep coming!

I checked out you game Interaction Boy 3000, and it looks really nice! Is there any demo or something that I could try? (could not find any on your tigsource page)

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 94 - New forest boss

I had some other things to attend to yesterday so I did not get too much done. I made some bug fixes and started working on the new forest boss. It is a huge version of one of the spinning pushers, which I think makes sense. Im trying to keep as much logic from the old boss as possible. So the player will still restart from certain checkpoints if hit by the spinner.

I want to change up the pace a little bit, but I dont want the player to get too stressed out. In the old version, the boss sounds were very intense, so I think I can make it less stressful by having a lower-base-swooshing-sound coming from the boss.


Forest Boss. Spinning slow due to low fps rate when recording.

[Indiana-Jonas]

hey i played through the demo at the Stugan finale! i forgot about this until now, you're making good progress, still looks really dope!

Hey!

Thanks for coming by and trying out the game, much appreciated 
And thanks for the kind words, I am trying to wrap it up so hopefully the progress will keep coming!

I checked out you game Interaction Boy 3000, and it looks really nice! Is there any demo or something that I could try? (could not find any on your tigsource page)

There's not much to play yet, I'm actually hoping I will get to go to Stugan next year and make a demo there! :- )

[lowinzloGame]

I like the way it scuttles around hm hm

[Nordanvinden]

hey i played through the demo at the Stugan finale! i forgot about this until now, you're making good progress, still looks really dope!

Hey!

Thanks for coming by and trying out the game, much appreciated 
And thanks for the kind words, I am trying to wrap it up so hopefully the progress will keep coming!

I checked out you game Interaction Boy 3000, and it looks really nice! Is there any demo or something that I could try? (could not find any on your tigsource page)

There's not much to play yet, I'm actually hoping I will get to go to Stugan next year and make a demo there! :- )

Alright, let me know if you want someone to play test!

Cool! I really hope you get in I had a very good time there.
If you have any questions about Stugan, I'm glad to answer them ofc

[Nordanvinden]

I like the way it scuttles around hm hm

Hey, thanks! Im glad you like the characters movement

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 95 - Forest boss update

I kept working on the boss and the map is pretty much done. Now I need to add visual cues when passing checkpoints and such.


Part of forest boss level.


Boss level with no level generation.


Boss level with level generation.

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 96 -

I have added visual feedback when reaching the checkpoints on the boss level. I still want to change the arrow to something more "beacon"-like. It currently looks like this:


Passing checkpoint on boss level.

I have also been working on fixing bugs in the level generator. Sometimes scale and rotation has created some issues that hopefully are dealt with now.

Now its time to generate all levels, brush them up a little bit and then create a demo-build with the first world only that I can send to people


 

[Nordanvinden]

#Update 97 - First world ready for test

So yesterday I finished up the first world and played through it. It is 20 levels with 1 boss and it took me about 50 minutes to complete. I think thats pretty good. So now I need at least one more world (the plan is two more) to feel good about the amount of time it takes to finish the game. I will fix the things I noticed during the playthrough and then start having some play tests to make sure everything is clear to the player.

I also upgraded the level generation tool a little bit by adding a seed functionality. It pretty handy if I want to re-generate a level after I have removed something or messed something up. Then I dont have to check the whole scene again.


Seed implemented in level generation tool.

I also fixed some minor bugs regarding the water. Apparently for some of the 2d-collider methods, z-postion of the game object needs to be at 0. This feels a bit weird to me since we are in 2D space. But I might have missed something.