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TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsBattleJuice Alchemist – Base-building patch is live on Steam!
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Author Topic: BattleJuice Alchemist – Base-building patch is live on Steam!  (Read 75625 times)
Alain
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« Reply #420 on: June 03, 2022, 10:32:11 AM »

You know, this didn't occur to me before but stark shadows usually imply a strong light source, which kind of clashes with the perpetual darkness idea. Of course we're not necessarily going for realism here, we're going for "does it feel like it makes sense in the universe this game is establishing", but it might be something to keep in mind.

I always thought it was the moon casting shadows in my game. Now that you make me think about it, the realism of my rotating light source for day and night is highly questionable :D



BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:
Minimap and Free Camera



Hey everyone,

recently I decided that I could no longer make this a future-me problem: some playtesters found camera movement not perfect in places. You could freely move the camera in zoomed-in third person mode, but not in top down view. Implementing free camera movement is a bigger can of worms than one might expect, but your wish is my command.


So why is this so difficult? Here is the deal: BattleJuice Alchemist now is a game where you can play in top down perspective and in third person, move by clicking and by WASD input and switch between all four combinations seamlessly. In top down mode you expect the character to move "down" when you press down. But what actually is "down"? If you rotate the camera in top down mode, "down" is not aligned with south anymore. You expect to move in reference to your camera rotation. In third person on the other hand, you maybe do not want your character to move towards the camera when you press down. Should the character walk backwards? Or should the camera pan around the character until it is behind the character again?
One person might expect that the left and right buttons in third person perspective rotate the camera, another wants them to rotate the character and a third person might want them to move the character. You want keybindings and UI buttons to turn the camera in 45 degree steps, but also want to have complete freedom to look with the mouse. How do you do that when you also walk with the mouse? All these things and quite a lot more had to be taken into consideration and new control settings and bindings hat to be implemented.

To make all of that camera movement and input comfortable to use, I had to tie in a second feature: A minimap and compass.


The minimap provided its own challenges, which were mainly performance related, but I won't bore you with that. For now, I am happy that only a bit of testing and polishing has to be done and the new features will be ready to be rolled out within the next patch.

Thank you for sticking with me and have a great weekend!
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Ramos
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« Reply #421 on: June 07, 2022, 03:38:39 AM »

Good to see that you are putting a hard accent on the quality of life features, many will appreciate this.

Keep the progress steady, it is a good direction Gentleman
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Alain
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« Reply #422 on: June 08, 2022, 03:19:51 AM »

Good to see that you are putting a hard accent on the quality of life features, many will appreciate this.

Keep the progress steady, it is a good direction Gentleman

Thanks! I'm currently taking the time to polish multiple aspects and it turns out to be quite fun. The reason might be that I sometimes tend to add features and call that polishing as well Wink
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oldblood
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« Reply #423 on: June 08, 2022, 06:31:54 PM »

Love the minimap, and its always interesting to me how sometimes implementing one request (that seems straightforward) can be such an undertaking. But glad to hear that it was a success, and seems like camera rotation could be quite useful. Looks like you're making great progress!
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Alain
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« Reply #424 on: June 09, 2022, 12:16:10 AM »

Love the minimap, and its always interesting to me how sometimes implementing one request (that seems straightforward) can be such an undertaking. But glad to hear that it was a success, and seems like camera rotation could be quite useful. Looks like you're making great progress!

Thanks! Yeah, it is quite an undertaking, but hopefully will be completely done by the end of this week Smiley
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oahda
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« Reply #425 on: June 10, 2022, 09:30:46 AM »

Thanks Prinsessa for always making sure my posts make it to the next page :D

Oh yeah, that was twice in a row Cheesy

New update is shorter but nice too. Know how finicky cameras are, sure there was a lot of work behind it! Good to hear you figured it out.
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RealScaniX
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« Reply #426 on: June 12, 2022, 04:43:06 AM »

Those are some great improvements. I think it helps a lot when the player just wants to have a different perspective on things to see hints etc.
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Alain
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« Reply #427 on: June 12, 2022, 11:42:18 PM »

Thanks Prinsessa for always making sure my posts
New update is shorter but nice too. Know how finicky cameras are, sure there was a lot of work behind it! Good to hear you figured it out.

Thank you! It turned out that rotating the camera in top down view while having a minimap forced me to re-do quite some of the visual assets for the map, because they were not strictly top-down and could not be rotated. I will talk about that in the next devlog Smiley


Those are some great improvements. I think it helps a lot when the player just wants to have a different perspective on things to see hints etc.

I hope so to Smiley I already had a dissolve effect for objects in the way but I think it is good for the player to have more control over the camera.
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kevin andersson
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« Reply #428 on: June 14, 2022, 11:50:52 AM »

I just want to say that it's nice to see all the progress you've made since I was here last time :D Keep up the great work!
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Alain
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« Reply #429 on: June 14, 2022, 11:37:47 PM »

I just want to say that it's nice to see all the progress you've made since I was here last time :D Keep up the great work!

Thanks Kevin, great to have you back here Smiley
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Alain
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« Reply #430 on: June 17, 2022, 08:00:53 AM »

BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:
Arcane Environments & Hell Skulls



Hey everyone,

it's Patch Friday! I already gave a preview about it in the last devlog, now the new mini map and camera controls are available on the Steam open alpha playtest. If that does not rock your socks, maybe the latest entry in the environmental effect series will: There are arcane environments now!


You could already freeze rivers and burn flammable objects like trees or bushes. Now you can activate sites of arcane power: Places like graves and defiled churches are triggered by arcane damage. I love how things are really coming together now, because so many objects in our world that were just decoration before now can be interacted with in cool ways.

When an arcane area is activated, a Hell Skull spawns and follows you until its lifespan runs out or until it hits you.


You can maneuver the skull into enemies so they take the damage that was meant for you. Also, the skull occasionally spawns arcane crystals that stay on the ground after its demise and can also be utilized in combat.

Defiled churches is where the real fun starts, because cultists are immune to arcane damage and their ranged attacks happen to do arcane damage, so they tend to bring Hell Skulls about quite often. A Hell Skull exploding in an arcane environment can itself produce a new skull, which can can result in fun chain reactions.

That's all for now, have a great weekend!

Alain
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JobLeonard
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« Reply #431 on: June 19, 2022, 04:57:30 AM »

How "chainy" are these chain reactions? Should I worry about exponential growth towards infinite hell skulls crashing my game?
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Alain
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« Reply #432 on: June 20, 2022, 12:29:38 AM »

How "chainy" are these chain reactions? Should I worry about exponential growth towards infinite hell skulls crashing my game?

No need to be worried, hell won't break loose in an exponential way :D Although, when running in circles around graveyards things still get really hairy with quite a few skulls on your back.
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RealScaniX
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« Reply #433 on: June 20, 2022, 03:50:13 AM »

Interesting Smiley
How close to the player are those skulls spawning? Will I get insta-skull-bombed at times? ^^
That's an interesting mechanic, though. I instantly thought of other things that might happen, like: the skull can absorb other elemental energies and become a fire skull, ice skull, vanilla skull etc. or it absorbs arcane or defiled energy and directly spawns more skulls on explosion, who will then spawn even more skulls on their explosions etc. (Here you have your mayhem, JobLeonard ^^)
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oldblood
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« Reply #434 on: June 20, 2022, 06:24:09 AM »

How close to the player are those skulls spawning? Will I get insta-skull-bombed at times?

I had this same question as well. Looking at the GIF if I didnt know this was coming, not sure I would have reacted in time. That's pretty close to the player. It looks like you have less than a second of time to react or to be hit. Granted, you would learn quickly but if you happened to be low health and died because you didnt know it was going to spawn and it spawned so close by--that could be aggravating. That being said, I love the whole idea of this.
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Alain
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« Reply #435 on: June 21, 2022, 11:39:19 PM »

Interesting Smiley
How close to the player are those skulls spawning? Will I get insta-skull-bombed at times? ^^
That's an interesting mechanic, though. I instantly thought of other things that might happen, like: the skull can absorb other elemental energies and become a fire skull, ice skull, vanilla skull etc. or it absorbs arcane or defiled energy and directly spawns more skulls on explosion, who will then spawn even more skulls on their explosions etc. (Here you have your mayhem, JobLeonard ^^)

HahahaYou should not get insta-skull-bombed, there is a certain delay and a sound cue Wink I never thought about letting the skull absorb elemental energies and I really like that idea and I'll put this into my backlog!


I had this same question as well. Looking at the GIF if I didnt know this was coming, not sure I would have reacted in time. That's pretty close to the player. It looks like you have less than a second of time to react or to be hit. Granted, you would learn quickly but if you happened to be low health and died because you didnt know it was going to spawn and it spawned so close by--that could be aggravating. That being said, I love the whole idea of this.

You are right, the first time you get an arcane area to activate, you will get hit by the skull, that is quite certain. If on low health, it could result in a death, which could be aggravating. I'll have to observe if that happens often to players and maybe tweak the system a bit. Thanks for the input Coffee
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Alain
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« Reply #436 on: July 01, 2022, 07:49:30 AM »

BATTLEJUICE ALCHEMIST DEVLOG:
Accessibility, Aiming & Ritual Magic



Hey everyone,

last week I sneakily pushed a patch for the open Steam playtest but did not have the time to properly tell you about it. Today I pushed another one, version 0.20205, and it is time to talk about it!

Some players were having trouble with aiming their shots in the game, so I thought about controls and accessibility a bit more. I implemented an aiming system that you can use with your mouse exclusively and without hotkeys.


To improve accessibility even more, I added inputs and changed settings as well as other things so you can now play the game completely without the keyboard. Hotkeys might still be the most efficient way to control your alchemist and nothing prevents you from playing the way you did before the patch.

In order to allow mouse-only play, I tweaked the ritual magic system. After burning a certain amount of a certain ingredient you have to chant a mantra, which was based on alphabetic letters. These letters are now replaced by runes, which can be clicked in a new UI, instead of typed with a keyboard. A second benefit from this is that the rune system makes it easier to translate the game into different languages.
As a consequence of these changes, all quests and riddles related to ritual magic were overhauled, so there are new scrolls with visual riddles to figure out.



Next week I will add additional accessibility features, but also more content, so stay tuned for the upcoming devlog.

If you want to read the full patch notes or just want to say hi, stop by on our Discord. Thank you for reading and have a great weekend!

Alain
« Last Edit: July 01, 2022, 08:09:38 AM by Alain » Logged

JobLeonard
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« Reply #437 on: July 02, 2022, 10:54:58 AM »

Very cool!

Is it still possible to map the runes to the keyboard? In some ways you could argue that having the option of a keyboard-only interface is also an accessibility option.
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oahda
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« Reply #438 on: July 03, 2022, 03:17:20 AM »

Some cool new updates Smiley Good work on the accessibility stuff, always nice to have more options.
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Alain
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« Reply #439 on: July 04, 2022, 12:24:14 AM »

Is it still possible to map the runes to the keyboard? In some ways you could argue that having the option of a keyboard-only interface is also an accessibility option.

I also would love keyboard-only play as well as controller support, which overlap a lot regarding the work that needs to be done. At the moment, I do not want to make promises, because I am not certain if and when I can squeeze that in. But the changes made for mouse-only play were made especially with controller support in mind.


Some cool new updates Smiley Good work on the accessibility stuff, always nice to have more options.

Thank you! I also always like to go for more options. But often I hate myself for it, because now I already need to test quite a lot more because of the different ways you can control your character Wink
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