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[FrankForce]

Today I am announcing the game that I have been working on...

It's called π√, or if you must Piroot.

In this game you will experience an epic story that will literally span an entire planet. The technology that I have developed allows for an extremely attractive looking and smooth running open world game with no load times. There is also a fully integrated level editor for those who wish to make their own adventures.

This is a passion project that I've been wanting to make for a very long time. I recently quit my job as a AAA developer to focus on indie development and this will be my first major effort. I really want to focus on the design, story and feel of the game. I've only seen a few games that feature a round 2D planet, and none on the scale that I am going for, so that just seems like a really fun idea to explore. I'll also be experimenting with some interesting design mechanics. For the final game I expect around 5 hours of gameplay.

Now that I've announced it, I will be updating this devlog regularly with all kinds of cool stuff. I have a lot more to say about the project and the work I am doing. In the meantime, please play the demo and leave your honest feedback.

Wishlist Piroot on Steam
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[FrankForce]

To help get sense of scale, here's a map of Faster Blaster, a game I released a few years ago. That game was very similar to π√ in many ways, and the map is exactly the same size. This is encouraging because it gives a really good proof of concept that I can complete a project of this scale. Also it demonstrates that my engine can handle a similar size game with no issues (and there have been a ton of improvements to the engine since then).

FASTER BLASTER MAP


Here's where I am currently at with π√'s map, which is mostly blockout except for the demo area. As you can see, it is circular, with gravity going around the outside. There is a bit less area then Faster Blaster since the corners are round, but I think the circumference of the planet will add significant extra traversable space. Also I want to make the gameplay itself more dense and varied then Faster Blaster.

π√ MAP



Finally, here's a very rough mockup that I made to help understand how π√ fits together. I pasted in some stuff from Faster Blaster's map to help get a sense of scale.

π√ MOCKUP

[Geoff Moore]

Hey FrankForce, this looks really neat! My favourite parts of the Metroid series were the morph ball sections, and this looks kind of like a really enhanced version of that mechanic. I love all the effects and lighting you've got going on, I'd expect that many different coloured elements to cause confusion but it reads very well. I've added the demo to my list to check out at the weekend, I'll let you know how I get on. Also, a level editor for a sprawling metroidvania? Nice!! Keep up the good work

[Schrompf]

Looks nice indeed. I like the lighting and shadows. Parts of the video were awfully dark, but I guess this will be just fine when playing fullscreen. What technology do you use?

[FrankForce]

Geoff Moore: Thanks, I also love the morph ball parts in Metroid. Definitely a huge inspiration for this game. I'm looking forward to hearing what you think.

Schrompf: I'm using my own open source game engine which has a custom dynamic lighting system. I am definitely mindful of the dark areas. As a design rule, players should never have trouble because something is too dark. I really like how it sets the mood and helps highlight important stuff while hiding unimportant stuff. This is something I need to keep an eye on though, if players have trouble anywhere I can add additional light or emissive stuff to help guide.


To help people understand what we are talking about, here's a screenshot both with and without lighting...

[FrankForce]

Before I start posting about the day to day development details I want to talk a little about how this specific project evolved because I’ve actually been working on it for over a decade!

Almost 10 years ago I first posted about it on the Box2D fourms. I was talking about building my own game engine to make an adventure game spanning a circular planet. At that point I had a very rough prototype of the game with the circular gravity mechanics in place. It was a totally different game then, but the overall shape of the map has not changed much. Check out this screenshot showing the full planet…



Around that same time I also made a small game called Spaghetti Planet. In that game you can fly around a small planet with atmosphere, water, buildings and a shortcut through the center. It’s also the first video I ever posted of game engine!





In 2013 I made another game for Ludum Dare, called RGB. That game featured a rolling player with physics based gameplay and lots of dynamic lighting. It turned out to be one of my most successful jam games and greatly influenced the gameplay and character design for Piroot.





The project that most directly evolved into Piroot was a game called Faster Blaster. It began as a small mashup between Master Blaster and Metroid for a game jam and eventually became my main side project. It did not feature a round planet, but involved many similar mechanics and was fairly large, taking most players several hours to beat. Here’s a very early trailer for the game when it was first released in 2011 under the title Mother Lover. Most of the art in this version was ripped straight from NES games.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BtHBLz64Do

I kept adding cool new features to my game engine and integrating them into Faster Blaster. A few years after the initial release I re-released it with original art, a new lighting system, and remastered gameplay. Here's a more recent video...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EGoY9eWX4U

The level design in Faster Blaster was not the best, but I learned a lot from making it. I've also added many tools to the level editor that make it easier to work with. Most importantly for me, it's an excellent proof of concept that a game of this scale is possible in my game engine and gives me confidence that I can build it myself. To help reduce risk, I decided to make the map for Piroot use the exact same dimensions as Faster Blaster which is exactly 512 x 512.

So far I've been working on this project full time for about 2 months. My goal is to have it wrapped up by the end of next year. There's a lot of work to do!

[FrankForce]

Hi everyone! I've been working a ton on this game.

Today I uploaded my first video devlog. This is my first ever attempt at a video develog and I'd like to do these more often, so please let me know how I did and what I can improve for next time.





New Features
- loops
- spike traps
- blink blocks
- moving platforms
- jumping enemies
- buttons
- liquids!

Finally, here's a short gif I made to demo the water and buouancy...

[BravoVictor]

The technical aspects are looking quite slick. What engine or frameworks are you using?

[Ohmnivore]

Seconded ^
Very cool engine stuff going on!

[Schrompf]

I don't have the time for video devlogs, but I sure dig the GIF. Nice work. I like the small bubbles rising from the underwater wall.

[FrankForce]

Thanks guys! The engine is my own game engine that I pretty much wrote from scratch. I've been working on it for the past 10 years and even open source it if you want to have a look...

https://sourceforge.net/projects/frankengine

There are some really nice things about my engine. I can tell you after working in UE4 for the past 3 years, it feels amazing to be able to iterate this fast. In future devlogs I'd like to talk more about the unique features and implementations my engine has.

I've actually had a lot of trouble with Gifs, because of the art style there are many shades of colors which causes it to look like crap after compression. To get it to look halfway decent I had to export an image sequence and import that into gimp.

[filbs111]

This is great. Good level of difficulty, satisfying and intuitive controls, nice lighting.
The 8-way gravity setup to solve the problem of having a round grid world is interesting.

[FrankForce]

Hi everyone! I have been working constantly. I'm only a few hours into RDR2. Trying to get my game ready for MAGFest. I will be showing it there with a hastily made in game leaderboard for speed running. Really looking forward to watching people play.

I just made another quick video devlog. For this one I really wanted to talk about the tile editing system in my engine because it has some really cool and useful features that I haven't seen before. Iterating in this game engine is insanely fast, and you will see some of that in this devlog.





I've also added a lot of other stuff to the game and other improvements like hanging wires. I will talk more about the new stuff in the next devlog. The itch page is updated with the latest download incase anyone wants to check it out. I hope to see some of you at MAGFest. Happy holidays everyone!

[FrankForce]

So many big changes in the past few weeks. I'm going to do another video devlog soon to cover this stuff. Here's a short list of the major new features...

- Conveyor Belts
- Mini Boss
- Flying enemies (small and large) using astar navigation
- Several different types of rolling enemies
- Low health enemies have a chance of going haywire when their head pops off.
- Missile launcher player weapon (can be remote controlled by holding fire)
- Tiles that drop when touched and rebuild after a few seconds
- Lots of level design stuff, both adding new and improving old

I will update the demo soon with a build that has all this stuff and more...

Conveyors and Crushers:


Mini boss:

[FrankForce]

I have made huge progress in the past few weeks. Previously I could speed run the demo in under 5 minutes. Now I've yet to get through it in under 15 minutes (I think sub 10 minute runs are possible though). So, yeah, there's a lot more to the game. I have another large area that I want to build before MAGFest. The demo build on itch has been updated also.

Here's a short list of some of the biggest new features...

- Completely retweaked physics and re-balanced everything.
- Added more to the level and polished existing areas
- Lasers
- Limited player's weapon range, forces you to get closer to enemies
- Improved hit/miss effects
- Random tile randomization
- Lots of polish everywhere

Here's a gif showing off the laser...


The tile randomization is really cool. I wanted something to help with repeating patterns of tiles without needing to do the level design work to add variation.

So, it searches for these blue rock tiles that are surround by that same type. The it randomly swaps it for 3 other tiles and applies some rotation and mirroring to further mix it up. This is really helpful on both the art and level design side. It is also doing similar stuff for a few other tile types.

Check it out...

[FrankForce]

Check out this cool laser stuff I have going on. Red and blue blocks can be cut away by a laser with resulting shower of sparks.



Also, an update to the evil door area...



If you notice the big guy climbing over the crate and it goes flying in the air, that's actually a bug that I just fixed. It was because I was trying to apply the reverse sticking acceleration to the crate but at the crate's center rather then the enemies.

I've been crunching on the MAGFest demo. Just fixed the last few bugs today and it's super polished now. I was hunting down a crash bug all day and finally squashed it!

New video dev log coming soon...

[filbs111]

Great work. Having the editor/gameplay switching so seamless is very valuable. All those iterations add up.

[nova++]

I love how... dense the game feels. There's so much going on, and the whole place gives off this mad-scientist's-lair sort of vibe.

[FrankForce]

filbs111: Thanks you. It feels really awesome to iterate this quickly. While the time savings is nice, I think the biggest benefit for me is it just makes game development more fun when it's quick to iterate.

NovaSilisko: Thanks for noticing that. I'm really enjoying weaving everything together tightly.

Here's a shot of the entire playable space so far. It starts in the ship on the top right and ends the hard at the bottom right. The next area I will be working on is the black space in the bottom left where there will be another boss battle.

[FrankForce]

I just uploaded the third video devlog! – Weapons, lasers, enemies, and level design