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[xix]

Xposting from sss



This is a fun one that I can't get to be under Twitter's 15mb limit. It is very frustrating. Is there an easy way to make 506x506 mp4s for twitter?

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[xix]

Here's a play by play of a round from the last tournament I ran (shout out to Madison, WI's Indie Arcade and all ya'll that came out to play)





0:00 The round starts at range with the two teams separated to the left and right sides. Blue Team Royal on the right has the advantage throwing Orbs from below and Cuirass locking down the bridge. Brave Cat tries to flank, but messes up the jump taking unnecessary damage.

0:13 Gigante then tests Cuirass's line. Cuirass misses with the big Mountain hammer, and Gigante's mace play launches a jumping Cuirass far to the top right corner. Brave Cat follows through the hole separating Team Royal completely.

0:22 The play breaks down to separate 1v1s with Gigante vs Ogre and Brave Cat vs Cuirass. Ogre's traversal over the top bridge is a good that Gigante just can't follow, and Ogre scores the first KO of the round on Gigante's pit recovery.

0:38 Brave Cat puts pressure on Ogre to delay the 1v2. Instead of regrouping, Cuirass comes in with a Mountain to finish up the round, but Brave Cat has enough time to throw out a few swings of the black branch to even it out again.

0:44 The final 1v1 between Ogre and Brave Cat hinge on a few well timed jumps and axe swings. Brave Cat fails to capitalize on a poorly placed axe swing into a crate, and the round is decided by a double KO.

[xix]

The video above is part of my attempt at making The Moon Fields *really incredibly deep*. A lot of the strategy is always the same (holding choke points, finding vantage points, footsies, pressure etc.), but the way the tons of items interact with each other and these strategies really changes things. In the above example:

The crossbow that Gigante (Onion Knight looking character) had could have been swapped for a faster attack with more ammo (but less damage) to threaten the Ogre's orbs. He should have used the XBow in many situations, but some players are less trigger happy when they don't have much ammo.

The linebreak at 0:13 could have been different if Cuirass' overhead attack wasn't The Mountain but something more agile (e.g. Polished Blade, Black Branch mace).

Any character can jump over the staked moat, but mechanically better players can use slower characters to get over that pit. It is very interesting to read other players' abilities to jump over pits and determining how good of an option it is for escape.

Cuirass never used their magic, so you'd wonder what would have happened if they took a character w/ more health or more speed.

Anyways, I'm hoping that players who dig into the game really dig into stuff like this. I really like doing these play-by-plays, so we'll see if I do more. Cheers cheers

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[TheGiant]

Looks fucking great

[xix]

Looks fucking great

Thanks dude!!

I'm trying really hard to make the game pretty, but also very competitive. I think one of the keys is to create "item combos" that extend the utility of certain items.



The Roll Shoe serves the purpose of moving you *really quickly*, and the Moon Breaker (Scimitar weapon in the GIF) moves you quickly, so the combo of them gets you a huge boost to your footsies range. It also helps you get quickly around barriers that you normally wouldn't be able to get around so I call this technique the triangle offense. Being able to have a few items that fit into this combo --- Roll Shoe, teleport spells, Jump Boot AND a bunch of different weapons --- gives a lot of variety to a particular combo. Having an item that combos w/ multiple other items is also pretty key to the meta

[xix]

There are 3 primary distances you can throw your throwables like throwbombs or throwgoo. The trickiest is the short distance/close combat throw. On the ground you can tilt the analog stick and hit the throwbomb button to throw about the vertical distance of the screen (so ~2/3 of the horizontal). You can throw about half that distance if you let go of the analog stick into neutral position before pressing the throwbomb button. But since throwing can be so powerful, I made it so that you have to be in the air before you can do the short throwin close quarters. Some people have a hard time gauging the distances. Some people have a hard time redirecting the throw so they don't follow the arc and blow themselves up. Hopefully this GIF helps.

[Devilkay]

the light effects are amazing. congratulation! did you use a plugin to make them?

[xix]

Thanks! I'm using 3 things:

1) Unity's standard PBR rendering pipeline
2) Enabled sprite shadow on all the sprites except for the lightsources (e.g. fire, explosions)
3) Unity's Post Processing Stack

One of the biggest things I think is really moving from pixel art to understanding how lighting worked. Getting really great dramatic shadows was easy in pixel art for me, but going back to (relatively) boring colors and using lighting to get that kind of excitement was *hard*. It just took me a long time to really understand how lighting works, but I also think that a delicate (but firm!) hand in lighting is necessary. Controlling Front Lights + Back Lights + Ambient is really what gets me 90% of the way there. Sometimes I do things like add extra point based ambients (for inside spaces, mostly) or replace the directional Front/Backlights with something specific like the door light in this dungeon shot:



Those tiles are just different shades of grey with a normal map. There's no coloring or shading to them whatsoever. It's really about learning natural lighting and trusting that the rendering engine will do its job.

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I'm doing a talk about "How To Show Your Game To Strangers", so I did a small write up about controllers for development and demo.

https://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/9ozd8x/controllers_and_demos/

Short summary:

Wired XB360 are still the best. Good USB Micro cables make PS4/XB1 super worth it, but they're still not perfect for demoing (theft precautions). PDP makes some controllers that feel good and the PDP XB1 controllers might be the dark horse in this race. RockCandy 360 controllers are XInput and feel better than Logitech Dual Analogs and are super cheap,but they're not winning any awards. And finally thanks to Smash5, Gamecube Controllers are going to be plentiful/cheap, and if you add that to Unity/Rewired you can start developing for that beautiful beast.

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One of the reasons I wanted to do real time lighting in The Moon Fields was to have the exploration work on a cycle. Some of my favorite moments in games:

Zelda 64 - fighting skeletons all night on Hyrule Field and being able to survive long enough to see the dawn. I must have died 5 times before I finally made it through the night. I think I tried recreating that fear and terror in subsequent playthroughs, but those stalfos never posed a challenge again...

Dragon's Dogma - fighting my way westward and finding both an overpowered dragon (that I *had* to run away from) and a chimaera (that I couldn't run away from). I hadn't heard the wailing hair metal until the dawn transition, and that moment 100% legit made me fall in love with that game...

Anyways, I've been working on the day/night cycle in The Moon Fields. Here are some GIFs:



3 minutes in each Day/Dusk/Night/Dawn phase (first GIF), and 1 minute transitions (second GIF). I am sure these times will change, but overall I am interested in a day/night cycle to be about 15 minutes long. You'd have to force engagement with enemies in the dawn/daytime and after about 7-8 minutes skeletons and other night creatures would be engaging you. I think that'll be a really interesting way to keep the engagement curve of exploration more exciting. Also, I am thinking about light occlusion via weather/mooncycles as well. I really want the player to have to consider having a lantern object so that Night time is visually exciting.

[xix]

Had some friends come over to test some core systems changes. Captured some sweet footage. I thought I'd analyze and share:

Rain Hat rolls in from the bottom right to engage The Fool top middle. To avoid arrow pressure from off screen, Rain Hat jumps into the air. The Fool attempts to throw a bomb, but overshoots and the bomb explodes behind Rain Hat. Rain Hat uses the Moonbreaker scimitar's double spinning slash to reach down from the air to hit The Fool twice. And then Rain Hat goes off screen to find the rogue Colt.

edit: Found a bunch more cool GIFs. I thought I'd show this one:



The wizard Big Hat carries the large Leather Shield. Leather Shields are not great for blocking a lot of melee attacks, but they do come in handy for blocking projectiles. It may be hard to see, but you can tell from the movement and rotation that there are a couple frames between recovering from the stun from the lightning bolt and getting hit by the bullet from below. If Big Hat had moved left instead of right, that shield would have rotated towards the bottom of the screen and that bullet would have been safely blocked. Instead, poof.