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[HuvaaKoodia]

The todo list for the project has gotten quite long (about 100 lines). This week is for cutting it down to size.


Art pieces now have randomized names and colors. That's two off the list!

Beta milestone stream on Saturday. Progress report, showcase and plans for the few extra weeks. The audio visuals are mostly done now, I'm happy about that.

Cheers.

[HuvaaKoodia]

Breaking the flat colored creature visuals had to be done before the Beta is over. This was as good a day as any for such a daring task. Some shader wrangling and texture drawing later, the deed was done. Here's the result. Also added in the name generator for good measure.


One more of these gifs. Nearly got a rude word in there. Not checking for any, should I?

The todo list still has good 50 lines on it. Not all of them are worth the effort, been crossing many off without much trepidation.

Cheers.

[HuvaaKoodia]

Fixing, tweaking, todo list cutting; nothing spectacular. Implemented the second last main action: banish creature. Here's a group of merry fellows kicking out their favorite enemy.


The one in the middle is going bye-bye, not Super Saiyan...

Will go through the schedule in the stream tomorrow, but here's the quick outline.

• Next week: add in the last few actions, testing and tweaking.
• Last week: menus and more testing.

That should be enough. I'm happy about the current progress. Sure, I was supposed to be done by now based on the optimistic estimate, but canning the previous project did free up some time so not a big deal. Additionally I have no idea if this is interesting to play/look at for more than a few hours. That's the thing with experimentation, certain uncertainties are present in the process.

I do need to come up with a name too...

Cheers!

[HuvaaKoodia]

Editing is a headache. Too lazy to finish it yesterday so had to put in a few hours today too. Well, here it is; see them visuals in motion.





Cheers.

[HuvaaKoodia]

Down to 27 lines in the TODO list, only a few big ones left.

Movement animations in today. Wanted to go with a generative system blending together basic animations to produce more complicated ones... No dice, Mechanim did not want to play nice. No way to change the speeds of animation clips, in a direct blend tree, in code. After the disbelief and annoyance subsided settled with nothing but the basic animations, horizontal and vertical movement. Simple enough will do this time.


Imagine the movement, it really isn't worthy of a gif...

Last stream I uncovered an issue with the creatures filling the land with art and then pretty much doing nothing else. Now they can destroy art, if aggressive; remake their own pieces when needed; as well as admire and comment on art made by others. The particle effects blow up nicely when applying a little bit of force! I should have made a gif of that... Something for Friday then.

Decided to do another stream next Saturday. This one solely for testing and bug fixing. It is less official so I won't bother editing and uploading it.

Cheers!

[HuvaaKoodia]

Tweaking the actions, fixing things. Had an annoying issue with the kaleidoscope magic effect particle system. It kept disappearing, sometimes... I hate it when that happens. A weird Unity issue with particle camera culling; calling ParticleSystem.Play in the LateUpdate fixed it. A hack, but it will have to do.

Performance optimization too. The big one was actually an unnecessary script in the UI particle systems which was needed to make them work with the canvas back in Save the Civies. That code was quite heavy, funky stuff straight from the internet, which is not needed in the current Unity version. Good riddance!

As promised, here's 12 megabytes worth of gifs just for you!


Destroying art...


And remaking art!

Same effects? Yeah, sue me.

Streaming tomorrow, sometime in the evening. Just testing. Pretty much the only playtest I'm going to run, by the looks of it.

Cheers!

[HuvaaKoodia]

In reverse order.

Completely forgot the testing stream! Realized the error late Sunday; that's what I get for not making it official. Well, seems I need to commence the testing midweek then, say Thursday? Will not forget it this time, it is work time after all.

The ambient music I found a few weeks back turned out to be non-commercial after all! Looked for alternatives and found some, 70 odd tracks from the same author, Ars Sonor. Will have to drop some of them; improved the audio database code just to reduce the amount of manual tweaking when changing the track list, for instance, automatically normalising volume levels.

Lastly, the actual task of the day, menus. Settings and credits are in, the world menu will have to wait for tomorrow.


A bit sparse, eh?

Last week!

Cheers!

[HuvaaKoodia]

Came up with a very simple world creation/selection screen. World generation options would be a good fit for a project like this, but this time there really aren't that many variables to tweak. 



As for the name I'm currently thinking of Dimensium Creatorum. Slightly difficult to pronounce in English, but I like the Latin'ish grandiosity.

Last push (testing) ahead!

Cheers.

[HuvaaKoodia]

One of the last tasks on the list, balance the battle stats. Not a very visible change, especially as the darn creatures are still too happy go lucky, but it needed to be done. Nerded out with Libreoffice graphs, haven't needed to do that before in fact.


Aggressive magic vs social magic battle duration based on HP and MP running out for different trait levels.

Testing, one of the most boring activities in most development schedules. Streamed the whole thing, 2.5 hours, which made it more bearable! Will keep doing this in the future. A severely cut down video to prove the occasion might or might not appear in a week or two. No promises there (video editing is still annoying)


An actual test screenshot

Two days to go. Committed to the name too.

Cheers!

[HuvaaKoodia]

A quick tutorial implementation, goes through the basic stats of the creatures and the user interface of course. Added a camera lock feature, which follows the selected creature. Simple stuff, only a few small bugs on the todo list.


Final GUI

Gold! Sure, will need to test some more tomorrow and make a demo, but other than that it's finished!

Cheers!

[HuvaaKoodia]

Everything* is in place. The demo required a few custom bits and pieces to put together; prepared the Itch page with images and extras, such as the soundtrack; and then found an issue with the audio.


That's a free font, by the way. Too lazy to hand write the title myself!

It is always audio isn't it. This time the usual WebGL issues aren't going to bother me, no pitch changing or ducking, nothing I can do about those. The actual issue probably has something to do with my own code; timing issues which only appear in the builds. Too tired to look into it today...

Taken that I have no actual release date, or pressure, will probably not mess with it tomorrow. Next week then.

Cheers!

[Fuzzy Branch]

Looks like you've made a ton of progress over the past few weeks -- I really dig the tessellation generation!

[HuvaaKoodia]

Looks like you've made a ton of progress over the past few weeks -- I really dig the tessellation generation!

Thanks! The world generator uses Penrose tiles, I've talked about that system prior.

This week I'll be taking it slower; the release should be rolling out by the end of the week. Uncovered a few more bugs, that is...

[HuvaaKoodia]

Took the past week free, after all the plan was to release the project a week ago. Well, that didn't happen so spent about 2 hours per day this week testing, fixing, testing some more and lastly building/uploading the project. All of it done now!


Final cover image. Wrote a script to capture creature images with transparency from the generator test scene. Useful!

Try the demo here

Phew! Technically overtime by a week, but these few hours don't really count for that much. The project turned out just fine, happy about that.

I will take the next week chill too, going to think about project 5 and maybe work on a few old ones. A handful of post-release devlog articles follow as well.

Cheers!

[HuvaaKoodia]

While not initially part of the project feature list I ended up implementing random generators for the creatures and the names.

Creature generator

Let's start with examples of the visuals; try to figure out how the generator works!













It is pretty simple. The generator randomly puts together a creature based on a set of variables:

- Body type (3 different types, with extra 3 particle effects to boot)
- Body rotation (from 0 to 360 degrees)
- Body scale (from .5x to 2x)
- Body texture (7 types)
- Body texture rotation (from 0 to 360 degrees)
- Body texture scale (from .5x to 2x, depends on texture somewhat)
- Colors (nearly the full spectrum, dark and light colors selected so that the body stands out from the eyes and mouths)
- Iris color (two colors from the full spectrum)
- Mouth type (3 different types)
- Mouth count (from 1 to 3)
- Eye count (from 1 to 3, total eye & mouth count maxes out at 4)
- Mouth and eye positions (6 different layouts)
- Voice type (3 different types)
- Voice pitch (from 0.5x to 1x, depends on voice type somewhat)
- Movement animation (horizontal or vertical, doesn't really matter!)

Permutations: (simplifying angles to 4 samples, scales to 3 samples and colors to 20 combinations):
870912000!

Sounds pretty high and, yes, that number does not reflect reality. Small changes do not actually count as completely different creatures.

Creature name generator

Both the creatures and the art pieces have their own name generators. The creature names are composed of altering vowels and consonants in the following forms:

V(cv)(-)vc(-vc)
C(vc)(-)cv(-cv)

V = vowel
C = consonant
() = optional letters

Examples:
Yr-ylun
Ofogi
Ixekeb
Komqor
Num-syd
Yaxe

There is also a short blacklist for naughty words...A few popped up while testing! No two creatures can have the same name either.

Permutations:
34737984

Once again not all permutations are that unique.

Art name generator

The art name generator is the least complicated of them all. There are 36 nouns, 35 adjectives and 30 attributes which are combined in the following ways:

Noun + "of" + Attribute
Adjective + Noun

Examples:

Device of Rending
Expedient Crucifix
Stone of Subterfuge
Striking Vortex

Permutations:
2340?

Not that many, but this time each combinations is relatively unique as we aren't just talking about changes in individual letters.

Conclusions

Good to get random generation in one of these projects. Inspired to use some in a few future projects too.

Cheers.