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[Shephf]

So finally, I managed to apply spine to my boss:





The boss is animated in 4 separate animation tracks:

* head
* segments
* legs
* backbone

Here's an example animation for head:



Animation of each track is applied differently to the boss:

* head animation is the simplest and applied as is, it's just a decoration, it doesn't play with physics
* segments and backbone animations are applied together via motor joints, I wrote a component that takes spine
  animations and a set of physics bodies and pulls physics bodies to bones via motor joints. it's of course trickier
  than it sounds, because certain measures must be taken in order not to form a loop when physics affects the
  skeleton position and then skeleton affects the physics, etc. I solved it by fixing the skeleton position when the
  boss doesn't move in or out of his hole
* legs animations are applied via linear and angular impulses, motor joints won't work here because better precision
  is required, so I wrote another component for cases like boss's legs

And putting it all together, we can now control all aspects of this pretty complex creature via extremely powerful
Spine editor using WYSIWYG approach (well, almost ). I'm really looking forward to recreate boss's attacks using
this new technique, I bet now I'll able to make much more interesting gameplay scenarios

[Shephf]

Another progress update, this time it's new boss attack:





At first, I wanted it to catch the player with its mouth, raise him into the air and spit him out. After implementing this partially I realized it doesn't look very good, the player is too small comparing to the centipede, so he's hardly can be seen inside the mouth and generally it looked more like a bug than a gameplay element. So I decided to just make the boss headbutt the player. I'll leave it for now, m.b. tweak later.

So, Spine is definitely helping me making more complex stuff with the boss, but there're still some problems that
are related more to physics itself. One problem is that physics constraints for legs sometimes break and legs turn
"inside out", the same happens for player sometimes, it's a general problem, but I think I'll be able to fix it a bit later. Another issue is that from time to time I see that motor joint forces are not strong enough, i.e. the boss deviates from animation trajectory a bit, I then tweak forces. The fact that there might be some instability in the character unless I test it thoroughly sure makes me sad, I would like to think of an approach that would guarantee that stuff is stable all the time, but for now, I just keep tweaking things.

[Shephf]

One more update for this weekend, it turned out to be quite productive. What was done:
* I've finally solved stability problems for centipede boss. It turned out that his legs were causing them, so I just moved them to separate physics body under the hood. Visually it changes nothing, but the character is really stable now, I've been playing with him for hours and not even single thing went wrong. Rules of thumb - keep your physics model as simple as possible if you want it to be stable
* I've also tweaked charge attack a bit and added head animation to it, this looks better IMO
* Spit animation done
* Saw animation done, now those saws don't just appear out of boss's head, they come out of his mouth, so
now their appearance is reasonable
* Changed saw logic to take surface slope into account while moving, now they don't get stuck, which happened before
on more or less flat surfaces. I've also redrawed the saw itself and added some sparks on collision
* Tons of other small fixes
So hopefully I'm done with this section for now, time to move on to the next...

[LunaticDancer]

Looks simple, yet super entertaining, can't wait for this one!

[JobLeonard]

Looks really nice! What other kinds of levels do you have planned?

[oahda]

Already said in my thread that I think this is looking really cool, but I thought I'd drop a comment here as well!

Looks really neat in every aspect. The mechanics, the art direction, the animations, the overall atmosphere. Looking forward to seeing more!

[Shephf]

Thanks for the kind words, everyone!

I'm very excited myself to see where it all goes. And regarding levels, right now there's one level, it's more
of an into. It looks like this in general:



When you kill the centipede boss its body will go down back to the hole from where it came and you'll
ride it into the depths of this planet to the next level. I have lots of plans really, but I think that second level
will mostly contain liquids like water, toxic slime/lava or something like that. I always wanted to play around with buoyancy, now I'll get my chance. There're lots of interesting scenarios one can do with water and stuff, player
will of course use spider web to bypass hazards, solve new types of puzzles, fight new enemies that'll emerge from
water or slime or whatever. Needless to say that liquids give tons of ideas for new bossfight

I assume this will require tons of experimentation and will take time, which I don't have, so... There's a looooong way to go

[Karlipoppins]

This looks really awesome, I love the art direction and the gameplay looks quite entertaining.
The only thing that feels out of place to me is the lack of real physics on projectiles.
Applying some force/gravity to avoid having "space shoot-em-up bullets" might work better.

Cheers

[Shephf]

This looks really awesome, I love the art direction and the gameplay looks quite entertaining.
The only thing that feels out of place to me is the lack of real physics on projectiles.
Applying some force/gravity to avoid having "space shoot-em-up bullets" might work better.

Cheers

Thanks) You know, that's a good idea! I always felt that something needs to be done with projectiles, especially player's projectiles. I'll certainly give this a try, this might also improve gameplay experience, since targeting stuff will be trickier, one will have to aim taking physics into account

[JobLeonard]

And then at some point you get the ricochet upgrade that lets them bounce around for even more impressive trick shots :p

[Shephf]

And then at some point you get the ricochet upgrade that lets them bounce around for even more impressive trick shots :p

Yet another great idea I've been thinking about upgrades, one thing I though about is vehicles, like the player finds a tank or a submarine or whatever and uses its weapons and abilities. Upgrading the player itself is also cool, only proper "context" is needed, like for what reason it gets upgraded, cause I don't want to put classic powerups and pickups in the game, like this should be some kind of "mutation" that is somehow tied to a story... Guess I'll have to decide later on in the development

[Shephf]

So, another update is here. It's a small one though, just more boss animations were updated:





But it's still important, because now I'm done with boss phase 1 update and will start working on polishing phase 2,
which includes some interesting challenges More details later

[Shephf]

Progress update is here I made proper (I hope so) destructible terrain, so now it doesn't look like it's just some texture being cut in pieces:





Whenever part of the platform is removed the surroundings are filled with white concrete-like substance. And here's
how it's implemented:



It's all pretty straightforward actually, stuff is just pre-broken and concrete mesh is always there and behind actual piece. All the rest is handled by the engine. It was extremely tedious to make all those pre-broken parts, but IMO it worth it. I also thought about automatic terrain destruction which is done entirely in engine, but there are some cases that would be really hard to handle automatically, like that cog for example, how do you "guess" how to break it nicely, how do you generate proper concrete structure at the edges of the cog, etc. So for now I decided to go with manual approach.

[Schrompf]

Sure looks nice, but the manual work is truly laborious. To me it looks like a case for a Voronoi Diagram

[JobLeonard]

I made proper (I hope so) destructible terrain

I know that feeling... finger's crossed!

[Shephf]

Sure looks nice, but the manual work is truly laborious. To me it looks like a case for a Voronoi Diagram

Yes, I also though about automatic break down of things, but then I realized that the problem is deeper. e.g.:



Here we can break down the physics body of the cog automatically, but then we need to handle the visual part. Like for pieces from inside the cog it's simple, one has to generate the concrete border on all sides. But for side pieces it's harder because concrete border is only needed on some sides and it all depends on how the art was drawn and how physics body is placed. And the problem gets harder for more complicated stuff like platforms which are made of different kinds of art pieces. So after thinking about this for a while I decided to just make all the stuff manually and be 100% sure that it'll look correct.

I made proper (I hope so) destructible terrain

I know that feeling... finger's crossed!

Ye, always unsure if stuff is good enough or not)

[sidbarnhoorn]

Wow, this looks really awesome. Good luck with the dev!

[Shephf]

Wow, this looks really awesome. Good luck with the dev!

Thanks

[Shephf]

One more small update, I've added motion blur + slowmo:





It's only in this scene for now, but m.b. I'll be able to use it later for something else as well

[Shephf]

Another update is here, I started working on new boss attacks for phase 2, here's the first one:





Basically this is just laser attack from phase 2 intro scene:





It's just that laser comes from boss's mouth ) I'm also planning to make more variety of course, right now it just starts the laser on one of the platform sides and the laser goes up to the other side of the platform.

P.S. (not related to gamedev exactly): I'm getting pretty tired of working on this game recently, I have a dayjob as a programmer and lately I work on really complicated stuff at work and I spend working on the game almost all weekends. It's really hard to keep up the pace, I started to loose motivation and this game sometimes looks like shit to me (this may be true of course ). I wonder how other devs handle these situations... I feel like m.b. I need a break from this...