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[talrnu]

Itr8
The hit new walking simulator! Well, right now it's mostly just a walking/hoverboarding in circles simulator.

Play it anyway (right in your browser!): https://talrnu.itch.io/itr8

Table of Contents

0. Table of Contents
1. No end in sight
2. Door to door
3. Another perspective
4. The universe is expanding
5. Walking is for suckers

[talrnu]

1. No end in sight

So... it's just an infinite runner right?

[talrnu]

2. Door to door

Now with 100% less infinity! There's something to be said about the promise of an infinite world, though - even if it's empty, you want to believe it might not be, and have no reason not to.

Still, there's no place like home. Whose are these?

[talrnu]

3. Another perspective

Here's a map! It's super useful right now, I know.

[talrnu]

4. The universe is expanding

I was eager to test content generation with the code I've written so far, so I threw together a third location last night and connected it to the rest of the world. It works great, no code required! World building is a slightly tedious manual process, but not for long...

Now that the map is getting bigger and more complicated, I need to make some decisions about how to navigate the world. Currently all locations need to be chained in a non-branching sequence, but that simply won't do. We need to branch out! If I wanted to make it possible to travel to more than two other locations from a given starting location, I can currently think of a couple options:

• Lock the player inside a location until they click another location on the map to travel to. Then leaving in either direction will take them to the selected location.
• Draw paths leading out of the 2D plane (e.g. toward the camera or off into the mountains) from a location. The player must interact with these to leave a location.

It's a tough call. Neither would give a particularly smooth experience. What do you think? Any other ideas?

Also, in anticipation of the next feature, I added some appreciable friction to Captain Placeholder's movement. Now it feels a bit more like traveling on foot.

[Sundrop]

Just realised those jaggy things in the background are mountains haha! Interested to see where this goes!

[talrnu]

Hah yep, gotta love placeholder graphics. If it's not already a thing, there should be a contest somewhere for ugliest/craziest placeholder art.

[tjpalmer]

Branching option 2 seems much better to me than clicking on the map. Make obvious branches on screen, and up/down arrows or whatever can be used to follow them. Or some such. The transition would be the hard part. Either temporary (semi-)3D or fade out/in are possible options. Whatever's easiest to start with would be fine.

Zelda 2 got around this by having all distance travel be overhead, but I get that you want to maintain side view for travel here.

[talrnu]

Hey TJ, long time no see! We've met a couple times at TGD, hope I'll see you there again this month - seems you've made some good progress on Phase since I last saw you show it off

I have to agree that clicking on the map arbitrarily is just not gonna fly, especially as I hope to support game pad controls eventually. I have two concerns about the second approach, however: one, that it won't be easy to tell which exit leads in which direction; and two, that it either breaks the seamlessness I'm going for or overcomplicates the simplicity of 2D graphics.

You make a good point about Zelda. The top-down camera angle affords all the simplicity, continuity, and readability I want to achieve. My map offers that angle, so I think the best bet at this point is to pause when the player is about to leave a location, enlarge the map to bring it into focus, and let the player choose a direction to travel in at that moment.

Eventually gameplay will encourage the player to plot their path through multiple locations ahead of time, so hopefully that information when available can automate direction selection, making most journies pretty smooth.

[talrnu]

5. Walking is for suckers

The first vehicle has arrived: the hoverboard! Implementing the hoverboard has helped me scrutinize architectural details I'll need to improve in order to support not only more vehicles, but also other persistent objects in the environment. The board itself and hopping onto/off of it was easy enough to implement, but the real challenge proved to be making the board object persist if you walk away from it.

[tjpalmer]

Posting to follow now!

Here's the bookmark I use for my own devlog, by the way, to keep it from marking as a view: https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=44573.new;topicseen#new

It also goes to the most recent post with the ".new" and "#new".

[tjpalmer]

Coming to the meetup tonight?