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[GlacierEclipse]

DevLog XIII - Backgrounds

Yo,
Most of my work lately has been on backgrounds, Ive tried different techniques and art directions but eventually settled on something that requires a bit of hand made tuning to make it 'flow' and look right with the low amount of art content that I have.

Ground Work

First I scrolled through hundreds of royalty free images that NASA uploaded (link), and picked the ones that look like they would fit inside the game, I then broke them into a few categories that would fit the current level.
Some of the collected images:



But then I ran into a problem where I needed this 3Dish image of a training interior for the starting levels..No image felt like the right fit and the biggest problem is that my art skills are close to that of a toddler so I needed some creative solutions here.

I thought of setting up the background in blender, using my textures and tweaking the PBR materials to look as close as possible to mine. Here are some attempts at that:





But it just didn't look right. The 3D look felt out of place as the game uses a 2D ortho perspective with no assets giving you any side view, only the lighting is calculated in 3D.
Here it is in game with some attempts to make it feel part of the game.







Eventually I settled on a simple 2D background with a bit of a perspective shift. Rendering just a wall with the right angle, worked surprisingly well!

Smooth Transitions and In-game Backgrounds

Now the next problem was to make it seamless and tileble, my solution for this was to flip the texture horizontally and vertically depending on where the texture should be presented on screen.
I had a few issues with this but with a few cleanups this is how it looked in game:



Next were the stars and planets backgrounds, the stars are going to be the first layer of the bg which will use the same bg technique above and the planets are going to be an additional layer which will move a bit slower than the other backgrounds, basically parallax backgrounds.
Looks like this:



Now the next problem was to make the transitions between the backgrounds seamless as there are quite a few levels where the exit shuttle moves seamlessly to the next level. My solution didn't involve anything sophisticated and its very far from being robust but rather its more of a 'lets just get it done' kind of a solution. Basically I hand made transition backgrounds where the camera moves to the middle of the texture and once the game loads the next level background and moved there, the transition to it looks smooth. Basically if I have one bg called stars.png and the next level uses stars1.png then I would need to create two transition bgs stars_to_stars1 and stars1_to_stats.png
Looks like this:



I could've used some shader that takes both of these textures, blends them, and outputs that, but I chose a hand crafted solution and also I am kind of scared of running full screen shaders on mobile as performance is now in a good place, the mantra going forward is less dynamic calculations more baked stuff.

All of this creates the following transitions and backgrounds:



Next is the Player gfx + animations, seeya!

[vdapps]

Nice update! I like your creativity. I have similar problem (my artist skills are toddler level), and its inspirational how you can invent yourself and get very nice results.

[GlacierEclipse]

Nice update! I like your creativity. I have similar problem (my artist skills are toddler level), and its inspirational how you can invent yourself and get very nice results.

Thank you so much for the nice comments Having no art skills is definitely a pain, that's why I usually resolve to software/tools/plugins to create something aesthetically pleasing.
Btw I think RTG looks gorgeous tbh, simplicity and amazing lighting always buys me so I may be biased haha.

[vdapps]

Thanks! I think we two we are following similar routes when getting to art. What we can't do with modeling and textures, we do with algorithms and tools.

[GlacierEclipse]

DevLog XIV - Player/NPC Visuals and Animations

Hey!
I've been busy on making the final graphical additions/changes to the game so I can focus on polishing the last bits of the game/levels.

Player

This mostly involved cleaning the "albedo" texture and a lott of iterations to the normal maps of the player. Didn't use anything fancy, just downloaded a normal dome texture and hand-placed pixel by pixel the normal color. The tricky part here was to correctly gradient the normals so they would have smooth-ish transitions between one to the other.

In Game:







The same process applied to the NPC's.



I had a small issue with the NPC's where I had to flip the normals when the sprite flips, did that in the shader with another vertex attribute, instead of a uniform( I like to avoid uniforms as much as possible )

Player Animations

So this one was a bit tricky, all I wanted was to add a key-pose depending on where the player hooked, which would move the hands/legs in the opposite direction, to give it a more physical feeling.
But then the angles nation attacked..the hands were flying everywhere and I couldn't find a way to constrain them properly. So say the player is facing to the right the problem is that when the hands were placed behind the body and their target was above the body, the smallest angle delta would be to go CW and reach that angle by basically saying fuck you to the human anatomy.
Fixing this took some time but I reached a solution which takes into account when should the hands follow the shortest angle route and when should they take the longer but physically correct one.
Also my system didn't support animation clips playing, as to this point I would just lerp it to a given pose, but I needed clips for some Idle animations so it was a good opportunity to refactor that system.
Anyway...GIF:



Next is more animations and polish.
Happy New Year everyone! 

[vdapps]

Nice! Graphics improvement, mainly of main protagonist, is evident!

[GlacierEclipse]

Nice! Graphics improvement, mainly of main protagonist, is evident!

Thanks Man! Happy new year

[GlacierEclipse]

DevLog XV - Closer and closer to Release 

Hi!
You know you've been slacking on posting devlogs when Tig shames you

Well it has been quite a while since the last update, and although procrastination mixed with work didn't give me too much time I still managed to get some work in. The thing is in these stages of development there isn't much to show as a lot of things happen under the hood, and you can't visually show in gif form. Like Music/Sfx, Haptic feedback, bug fixing on collision and movement code etc.. etc..
But through the months the game went through couple of major milestones which I would like to write about.

New Title!

The original title was always a WIP title that was more of a codename for the game, it was quickly picked during a game jam where my thought process was just The player has a hook and he's in space...so yeah. But today I would like to announce a name that fits the game/theme/story as a whole *drum rollllll*:  Outer Hope

Main Menu

Driving closer to release I've always wanted to polish and work on the main menu a bit more than I did previously, at least make it feel a bit less static. I wanted to have the background move like someone(shh) was looking at it and breathing, animated that with some scaling. Then I added my light rendering pipeline to the main menu scene and placed some lights at the bright spots in the background, and moved them accordingly. Last thing was to make the starting experience as immersive as I can make it so I removed the buttons in the main menu and prompted the player to hold to start the game, this zooms in to earth, fades, and starts the level 1 prologue scene seamlessly.

Sfx

Most of the work these months have been on implementing the sfx and music to the game. I first started with implementing the sfx, so I went on my favorite site freesound.org, started picking sounds and editing them in Audacity. Hooked them up into libgdx, wrote a small manager for the sfx, with some functions to help me randomize pitch, volume and started adding them to different parts of the game. But why would this shit be this easy right..
On PC I didn't notice any issues, so I started testing it on my phone. One of the sounds that are very frequent and can play multiple times is the hook being shot..makes sense as the game is pretty much all about that. So I started spamming shooting the hook on my phone and FPS just dive jumped on me. Like from 60 to 20 kind of a jump.. I started reading about it and apparently sound on android is problematic for this reason and a lot of other ones. In an attempt to fix that Google created Oboe that apparently fixes all of this shit. But me being stubborn and very annoyed that I couldn't play a simple sfx multiple times a second without getting damaged so hard by the fps, I decided to start looking at semi-solving it myself.
First I tried just stopping the sound and playing it but that didn't help the fps by much. So I implemented a manager that keeps track of how many sfxs are currently playing, and plays a new one only when you don't reach that limit. That combined with trimming the sfxs to very very short clips, stabilized the performance, and didn't result in any loss of quality because of this change. yay!

So anyway, I uploaded a short clip of the sfx in Outer hope to my twitter, as I can't embed this (Or can I?) directly. Check it out! You can also hear the amazing music in the background.
Twitter SFX+Music

Music

Such an important part of the game's experience is the music. For the music I licensed a few tracks from Josh Kashdan, a really talented music producer that created tracks that were just a perfect fit for the game. For the code, another manager was needed to handle all of the background music per level. There are some levels that share the same track and some that use a completely different one so I created a nice fade in fade out between the currently playing track to the next.

The clip is again on twitter:
Twitter Music Transition

Haptic Feedback

Some people hate it some people like it, But me I really like small feedback on button touches and presses on my phone. That's why I added some to my game. The haptic is super subtle to not be too annoying when being used too much but feeling that little bump when you attach to something, or bump into a surface is very cool and adds a lot IMO. So yeah can't show it but I recommend adding it.

Graphical enhancements

I also did some work on the visuals of the game in some areas.
The static Meteor now has animated flames to it.



There are some moments in the game that the player is very hurt, for that I have created more variations of the player's parts to have some damage effect to them.

Trailer

To be a legit game you got to have a trailer right? I've spent about a week (which for me just means like 2 full days on the weekend) and started to create a rough draft for the trailer, I used Blender to edit the video (Is there something Blender can't do?!) and I tried to keep it in the realms of one minute. I'll post the trailer in a week or so here just to get some feedback before I go live with it.

Demo

All of the above leads me to something I wanted to do for quite a while, and that is build a small demo version of the game! It would act as both an introduction to the game and to catch glitches/bugs on other devices other then the few I've tested. And this will be my main goal for this month, the demo will have about 10 levels and will introduce you to the very first mechanics of the game and the story. This will go live with the trailer, or maybe the trailer and then a couple of days the demo..haven't decided yet.


That's it for this update, thanks for reading

[GlacierEclipse]

DevLog XVI - DEMO RELEASED

Hey!!!
Super excited for this one.... THE DEMO IS FINALLY RELEASED & approved by Google. Please, if you can, leave a feedback on the store listing it'll be much appreciated <3 <3
Link: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.crneumre.gravityhook
Release Trailer:



Most of the work towards the demo was really grindy and boring but this is the reality of a release at the end of it, a lot of work for small tweaks/glitches/bugs/optimizations etc..

Settings

I worked a bit on the settings for the game, added a few essential ones like sfx/music volumes, haptic enabling disabling and quality profiles.
Because this is a mobile release and I didn't want players to start tweaking settings and testing fps I decided to implement quality profiles. So there are two profiles now: low & high. Low pretty much disables all the post-process/effects and dynamic shadows in the game:

Low:



High:



Main Menu Settings:

Mobile Release

A lot of the things I worked on for the demo were exclusively related to mobile/android. Specifically Audio on Android. I've tried to battle it with a different method but it still dropped fps when multiple sounds were playing, sometimes even dropping fps when only 2/3 sounds are playing. For this I needed libgdxs AsynchronousAndroidAudio. Problem was I was on an old libgdx release and had to carefully move things from the master to my branch as I didn't want to upgrade the libgdx version and handle the shit that could come with that.

Level Selection polish

I've also worked a bit more on polishing the level selection area, Added sounds/music/backgrounds that fit the area of that chapter/stopping the scroll when you didn't unlock that far.

Trailer

Not much to say about this, but I've tried to make the trailer look as intriguing as I can, the editing was all done in blender.




So that's about it for now, I would love if you could check out the demo and leave any feedback you can about the game, it's all truly greatly appreciated and will be used to make the final version as polished and at the best shape it can be!

[GlacierEclipse]

DevLog XVII - Demo feedback and tweaks

So eh Hi!
It's been quite a while...A lot of things happened between my last post and now..life and stuff..and I was just really burnt out from the project, I think I just 'overscoped' a lot of the game. I had a working version like 2 years ago but I wanted more, and I wanted it be an atmospheric project one that you could fall into kind of like Limbo/Inside.

I underestimated just how much extra work is needed to polish something like that..like wayyyyy underestimated + I was writing systems from scratch, animation, timeline, events, gameplay-cutscene, text managers, rendering, custom materials..the list goes on and on. At some point I was just burnt out and couldn't even put a single hour into the game..But I know I am very close to finishing it, and that's the only motivation I have at this point, if I already invested so much into it, might as well finish it.
 
I think the project taught me more about what I want to develop next.
But yeah the project isn't finished so it's not a postmortem, more like a restart to my dead motivation so from 0 I am at 0.2 motivation!

After the release of the demo I've received very valuable feedback regarding a lot of the aspects of it.

Critical Bug Fixes

There were some bugs here and there that didn't require a lot of time but one in particular was that after you press the home button a new music starts playing, which means the more you press the home button the more you get a new music playing.
The problem here was that libgdx implements an automatic pause/resume for these events for android, which works 99% of the time..except this one where I implemented a background music handler that plays the next song when the current one stops playing.
But the real catch here is that my engine code gets called imminently after resume, and the libgdx one gets called at a later stage, meaning the is song playing check isn't reliable..anyway yeah this was a nasty one to follow and required a nasty fix..fun.

Another fun bug was the asset manager that I didn't handle correctly on pause/resume this did produce some interesting images:

Tweaks

I've always wanted to change the look of the checkpoint shuttle to make it more unique and interesting, Jumped into ol' Paint.net, mocked something, played with the lighting a bit and voila the new checkpoint shuttle:



The most popular feedback was about the difficulty of the game, so the next patch of the game focused on tweaking a lot of the earlier levels to be a bit easier.

Level 3 Before/After:





Level 7 Before/After:





Level 10 Before/After:






For the next weeks I'll be focusing on getting the full game to its final polished state, there aren't a lot to do but I would like to spend some time on getting the final cutscene as emotional/gorgeous/impactful as it can be so...it'll take some time to get it to that state. Peace

[mobilelast]

I just stumbled into this thread for the first time, and I’m glad I did.

It was fascinating to read this dev diary from start to today, to see how the project has developed piece by piece and read about technical stuff as well as the process behind graphics. In the end, every developer has to cope with very similar problems. Nice to hear that you are continuing this.

Oh, and the trailer has a great mood. It raised some serious Barotrauma-vibes, although there’s nothing similar in gameplay. If you’re still planning to work with space backgrounds, I found a couple of neat open source softwares that generate seamless backgrounds and might be helpful to you. You can find more info and links from my dev log.

[GlacierEclipse]

I just stumbled into this thread for the first time, and I’m glad I did.

It was fascinating to read this dev diary from start to today, to see how the project has developed piece by piece and read about technical stuff as well as the process behind graphics. In the end, every developer has to cope with very similar problems. Nice to hear that you are continuing this.

Oh, and the trailer has a great mood. It raised some serious Barotrauma-vibes, although there’s nothing similar in gameplay. If you’re still planning to work with space backgrounds, I found a couple of neat open source softwares that generate seamless backgrounds and might be helpful to you. You can find more info and links from my dev log.

Thank you very much for the comment and reading the devlog
Holy shit I didn't know about Barotrauma looks absolutely stunning, what a phenomenal atmosphere.  
Thank you for the resources you've posted in you devlog, they were really helpful, really cool devlog aswell, will be following from now on