JLJac on March 24, 2012, 12:44:52 PM (Last Edit: May 13, 2017, 12:09:58 PM):

Rain World is a survival platformer set in an abandoned industrial environment ravaged by a shattered ecosystem. Bone-crushingly intense rains pound the surface, making life as we know it almost impossible. The creatures in this world hibernate most of the time, but in the few brief dry periods they go out in search of food. You are a nomadic slugcat, both predator and prey in this land. You must hunt enough food to survive another cycle of hibernation. Other — bigger — creatures have the same plan.

The gameplay of Rain World consists of fast paced sneaking and action. The enemies are incredibly difficult (though not impossible) to defeat through direct confrontation. Instead of being easily killable they have been made intelligent enough to be interesting opponents in stealth situations.

Ironically an entity that is stupid enough can be difficult to outsmart. The goal of the Rain World enemies is the opposite of that, being smart enough to be outwitted. This is why a lot of the development has been put towards AI. It makes for interesting situations where you get to measure your wit against an enemy that it's actually satisfying to trick and deceive.

Apart from AI, I have had a lot of fun experimenting with procedural animation. The creatures of Rain World are not animated by traditional means, but rather consist of a few freely moving pieces that are interconnected and rendered as a soft body.


Alongside the game I've been working on a stand alone level editor, which uses a voxel-like method to create graphics. The levels are collages of hand-drawn elements, molded together by filters into one coherent graphic.


For the music and soundscape of Rain World, I have the excellent James to rely on.

If you find the project interesting, please feel free to ask, suggest, comment or otherwise contribute. For those of you who are interested in technical stuff, feel free to plough through the devlog! Below follows the original first devlog entry from 2012.

Thanks for your time!

Rain World is now Kickstarting!

---

Hi! Maze Runner is of course a working title.

A while ago I posted a movement prototype in the feedback section. Since then I have worked some more on the project, starting to turn it into a game.



I haven't started on the visuals yet, and the game will probably look very different from this screen shot, but the movement of the player will be mostly the same.

I decided to start a dev log to keep track of my progress and keep myself motivated. I work at the game at a low but steady pace, and will hopefully be able to post updates every so often.

The Game
Try out the prototype to get a feel for what kind of basic mechanics I'm working with. More on that to be found in the old thread. More moves are to be added, such as balancing on poles, maybe some gripping mechanics, stuff like that. The core of the game is the movement of the player character in the environment.

The game will have three types of creatures in it. I won't go in to detail on how I plan to design them visually, that's not entirely worked out yet and will hopefully be an exciting surprise. Together the creatures will form a little eco system, where creature B eats creature A and creature C eats creature B. B, the player, is in the middle of this food chain, and the gameplay will consist of trying to hunt while at the same time avoiding to be eaten.



A is a flying creature, that can move quickly and reach every part of the map.

B, let's call it "the Bear" because of its ears, is a running and jumping creature, with medium mobility and probably also access to most of the map, as maps will be designed mainly from this creature's perspective. This is the player avatar in the game world.

C, let's call it "the Croc" is a crawling, climbing creature that can't jump, and is somewhat less mobile than the bear. This one will come in a few sub-species, some of which will be capable of wall climbing, increasing access the different areas of the map. They will have different stats and abilities and be threatening in different ways.

The game will work with one or more players sitting at the same computer. I like 2D, single screen multiplayer games as they according to me have all the feats of a board game as well as those of a computer game. The players have complete overview of the play area, and can shout stuff at each other while interacting in the game world. However I felt that my last game lost a bit of its potential audience due to being multiplayer only, so this one will be playable alone as well. The players will be playing against the computer units, but some competive elements might be doable as well.

The level editor
I love level editors, and especially did when I was a kid and couldn't really make actual games myself. I've been doing some work on the level editor already, and it seems to be coming together nicely.



It's fun to make and play levels together with friends, and I've made the level editor so that two or more people will be able to work at the same level simultaneously.

What's going on right now?
AI, AI and more AI... path finding, to be specific.



To be even more specific, it's the path finding of unit C that's a hassle. Thing is, C is not supposed to be able to reverse. Unless it's really stuck it should move forward, trying to find a way that doesn't require moving backwards into its own body. As anyone who has worked with an A* knows the main thing is crossing out tiles, like "OK, this one is checked, now I don't have to think about it again". But, if this unit is moving to a target behind it, it has to start moving away from the target until it finds a turning place, and then move back over the same tiles towards its target.

This is difficult, especially as even a conventional A* can be a sort of complicated matter... And yeah, both the start and goal positions are constantly moving and I can't afford to calculate the entire path in one frame, so it has to be realtime... And different crocs have access to different tiles... This has been, and is, very very hard. However, I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel, which is why I'm going online with this now. Hopefully from now on every single update won't be about croc path finding, as it would if I started two weeks ago.

The combination of giving the user access to a level editor and having autonomous units moving around in the environments is an interesting challange. I don't want the user to be required to place "flags" of any sort, you're supposed to be able to simply create a level and then have the units move around in it in a sensible way. Moving around without reversing, that is... Well, enough on that.

The development so far has been very technical, and will probably continue to be for a while, but I'm originally an art guy and I'm much looking forward to creating some juicy sounds and visuals for this.

I hope you find the project interesting, and am looking forward to your comments, suggestions and questions.
Thanks for your time!

JLJac on March 25, 2012, 01:59:38 AM:

Thanks! I hope you'll like the final visuals even more!

Update 1
I have worked a little with the Croc's movement, the physics of its body. Earlier I've mainly been working with the path finding, now I'm moving over to how it will animate when following those paths. Cleaned up a few situations where it would get stuck, and made it so that if it is, for some reason, cornered in a dead end it will swallow its pride and slowly and awkwardly back out again. Also identified a... path finding error... -.- Will get to that later.

Another three hours or so I've spent struggling with the eldrich horrors of recording, trimming and cropping a little gameplay video.

This seems to be in the same category as printers, a seemingly menial task that for some unknown reason coheres with an undescribable, inherent blind spot in human engineering, making it about a bazillion times as difficult as it has to be. Nothing can ever, under any circumstances, just simply work... Well, I'm out of patience, maybe tomorrow there will be a vid.

JLJac on March 25, 2012, 01:07:51 PM:

Haha! Yeah, the idea is that a food chain of three is the smallest possible where one unit can be both hunting and hunted, making for an interesting situation for the player. I could possibly make the other units playable as well, but, as you said, the gameplay as those would be more one-sided. Creature B can't really be computer controlled though, download the prototype to see for yourself why... Way too complicated movement for an AI to handle :O

I was also thinking about some plant or something for creature A... Stick around and we'll see what happens!

Update 2
Made the speed of the croc variable, across different sub-species and different terrains. For example, one could be a quick runner but a slow climber, while another one has other stats. Gravity now affects the croc, and its body has some substance so that the body parts won't collapse into themselves (as much). Path finding seems to be working nicely now, I haven't seen it getting stuck for a while. What needs work though is the behaviour when it's thinking about a path but doesn't have one yet, it should probably slow down while thinking stuff over instead of rushing around at random.

JLJac on March 25, 2012, 10:43:37 PM:

Working on a video! Just that screen recording software is such a damn hassle ... Here's a horrible little video for you in the meantime: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FbAhRjsXBko&feature=youtu.be
(Silent, no need to pause your music!)

Jay Tholen, been thinking about stuff like that as well, such as a chain or ring on the wall that's grabable... Stuff like this is fairly easy and fun for me to add, so there'll likely be some more stuff like that in there eventually!

Thought I'd do a super quick overview on "no reverse path finding", if someone else would be in a similar situation. It's an overview of the genereal idea, not a step-by-step how-to, but if someone wants more detail I'll provide it!

So this is how most path finding works:



The red dot wants to get to the green dot. You start at the goal, and make a "bucket fill" outwards, and for every step you save how many steps that specific tile is from the green dot. Once you reach the red dot, it can follow the path by each frame moving to the neighbour with the lowest score. An A* is basically the same thing, but you check tiles that are in the right general direction first instead of spreading out equally in all directions, making for a more quickly found path in most situations. This is of course an entire field of science, and there's much to read on it out there.

In my situation, however, the red unit is not supposed to be able to move backwards. That's OK in most situations, but what if the goal is behind it? In some situations it might be able to "walk around the block" and reach the goal from behind, you could create such a solution by simply blocking the tile behind the red dot (treating it as a wall) and going at it with the conventional method. Eventually the spreading numbers would reach the tile directly in front of the red dot, and it would be able to make a lap around and get to the green dot.

If this is not possible, then? Say, for example, that the green dot is behind the red dot, and the red dot is facing a corridor that's later widening up enough for it to turn around. In this situation it should go forward, turn, and then pass over its old position again to reach the green dot. Tricky!

The trick is to divide every tile, one sub-tile for each direction. This means that a tile can have one value in one direction, and another in another direction, like this:



The red dot's start tile is very close to the goal if facing left (2 steps away) but very far from the goal if facing right (10 steps).

Look closely at the green numbers and you can see in what pattern they spread. According to this pattern every sub-tile will have a value that is one less than the tile it's pointing towards. That's because when the numbers spread to a new tile they spread to the subtile that's pointing backwads to where they spread from. If that makes any sense... Just look at the numbers ;P

When the red dot is in a specific tile it doesn't ask the neighbours for their values, instead it asks the sub-tiles. It does not, however, ask for the sub-tile that indicates a direction opposite to its own. This means it has three options every frame: forward, left or right, but not reverse. Then it just moves in the direction with the lowest value, exactly like the standard solution up there.

Voila, you have a behaviour where the path finding will intelligently either "walk around the block" or find its way to the closest turning point and back, depending on what's more efficient, shorter or otherwise preferable.

In my game this is meant to create some fun and interesting situations. One such might be that you jump over a croc, but the croc runs forward, climbs up on something, climbs out to directly above you, then drops down on you. Another scenario could be that the croc has momentum and can't stop, so it runs into a narrow corridor where it has to solve a little maze looking for a turning place or another way out, to get at you again.

Hopefully this will make the game play more interesting! Let me tell you, it has to be real good to be worth it... The example above is very theoretical, doing the same thing in a more "real" (complex, that is) environment has been... Try it out if you like a challenge!

JLJac on March 27, 2012, 11:30:44 PM:

Glad I inspired you! It's a lot of fun to do path finding, as there's really nothing else that does as much for the feeling of AI units being autonomus and having their own minds. Ask me anything!

Update 3
Talking of path finding, I did a few lab tests today.

I created a floating island kind of structure, and had the croc try to path to it.



With the new dynamic abilities I've added I can change what a croc is able to do easily from its initiation code. A croc that's able to climb ceilings will, as expected, climb up the wall, then out above the island and drop down on it. A croc that's only able to climb walls will rush around desperately without ever finding a way, a behaviour I have to work with.

Actually this is going to be the next big step, I imagine. As a croc is able to drop down from somewhere it might easily get stuck in a hole. Also a croc might see a player across a gap, and the path finding will go on for ever and ever without realizing that there actually is no way across.

The task of making the croc aware of what's a "pit" where it will be stuck is almost impossible, as there's no way of saying "this is the level" and "this is a pit", all the code can find is two chunks of tiles from which you can pass from one to the other but not the other way around. You can of course say that the biggest chunk is "the level" while the rest is "dead ends" that should be avoided. This doesn't really apply to all situations though, look at the above picture for an example. The island structure might be smaller than the rest of the level, but it's more important, because more stuff is going on there. Here the majority of the level is a "pit" that you don't want to fall into.

The solution I imagine for this is that the crocs will live in holes. At start up the area that is accessable from the hole will be pre processed, and even more importantly, the areas from which you can't get back to the hole will be mapped out. The croc is only active in the area reachable from its hole.

This also allows the user of the level editor to place a croc, and decide what area of activity it'll have. For example you might want one that's confined to a pit at the bottom of the level and eats players that fall down.

More on that tomorrow!

JLJac on March 28, 2012, 07:26:37 AM:

Yeah, was also thinking about that, but I think showing the reachable areas in the level editor would ruin the illusion that the croc is actually thinking by itself, if you saw it all laid out like that... We'll see...

Update 4
Made the user able to place croc holes in the level editor and made crocs spawn at those holes.

Made a humble little start in the direction of mapping which areas are accessable from a specific hole. The goal is that in this situation



the croc (here represented by the three big dots) will not pursue the player further, as if knowing that it'd just get trapped at the bottom of the pit. That goal is however not reached yet haha!

This is especially important because of the very different movement mechanics of the Bear and the Croc. It's not that the Bear is always much more mobile, a wall climbing Croc can often reach areas unaccessable to a Bear, but the ability to jump creates some situations where a Bear can pass an obstacle that's impossible for a Croc.

This means that some levels could easily contain traps, where you let a Croc chase you to a place from which you're able to get out, but it is not. This wouldn't be fun, as constantly being chased is an important part of the game. Tricking a croc should buy you some time while it's trying to figure out a new way to get to you, not immobilize it for ever. So I think it's worth it to make the Croc do a little extra thinking to avoid that kind of stuff.

JLJac on March 28, 2012, 11:07:07 PM (Last Edit: March 28, 2012, 11:40:38 PM):

Weird, something seems to be wrong with tigsource's server... Anyway

Update 5
I'm happy with today's progress. I finished the mapping of accessable areas for the croc. The method is that I first map all the tiles that are reachable, then I map all the tiles that the hole is reachable from, and the overlap of those is the active area for that hole.



In this pic the blue areas are areas from which I can get home, while the red areas are areas I can get to from home. The platform at the top left is blue, because from here you can drop down to the rest of the map but there's no way to get there. The pit at the bottom of the map is red, because you can drop down here but not get back up again. Green areas are both reachable and returnable from, and it is this that's the croc's active area.

You can't really see the hole itself, but it's there in the middle structure. If I remove the climbable pole connecting the structure to the floor the entire floor becomes red, and the croc will keep only to the central structure, knowing that it won't be able to get home if it drops down.

JLJac on March 29, 2012, 12:18:14 AM:

I will talk about something that's not path finding for a change.

As you might remember the Bear has two major modes of movement, standing up and crawling. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I think that you're almost twice as fast when running. The croc, as it stands, moves with a speed that's variable depending on terrain, but will move along a floor with the same speed as it would a horizontal tunnel. If the tiles directly above are a ceiling or open air doesn't affect it.

This means that right now this



is no problem what so ever, while this



is a HUGE problem. A branchless corridor is more or less a countdown to death.

I like it that the Croc is faster than you in some situations and slower in some, but it might be too extreme. I don't want the player to avoid tunnels entirely. If I make the croc slower over all it will be way too slow out in the open, if I make it faster it'll be way too fast in tunnels.

Currently I'm thinking about maybe making the croc able to stretch its legs when outside a tunnel, and gain a little extra speed to match the player's ability to stand up and run. Still, this would mean making the Croc closer to the Bear in terms of movement, and maybe it's a good thing that they have those differences... Hm... Maybe this is a question of level design, levels should simply be designed in a way that makes both the player and the croc stand a fair chance.

Another problem that arises is that if the Croc is vastly inferior on open floors but much faster in close quarters the AI should probably somehow be aware of this. How would that work?

A lot of decisions here. Maybe I'll just wait until the basic gameplay is up and working, and see what needs to be balanced.

JLJac on March 29, 2012, 10:56:08 PM:

Update 6

Added the ability to balance on the tip of a pole.



There are two ways to access this mode, you can climb up a pole, and you can land on it from the air with a well timed key press. The Bear doesn't automatically land on poles, you have to press the "up" arrow at the exact right moment, making jumping between poles very difficult.

I like to add some stuff like this that's very hard to do but won't really be required in any level, so that players who have played for a long time will always have fresh challenges.

JLJac on March 31, 2012, 10:01:30 AM:

Thank you sir 

Update 7
Boring but important progress today: I managed to export a .png file.

This has implications though. If I would have to save the levels as text files I'd only be able to save the geometry of the level, and all the graphics would have to be generated on start up. When you start the level you can't really tolerate more than 5 seconds for the level to be drawn, and this would mean a pretty simple layout.

If the level can be saved as an image file however, its graphics can be generated from the level editor. After you've made an awsome level you can possibly endure to wait a minute or two for intricate stuff such as hundreds of grass straws and light and shadows to be rendered, to make it look extra juicy.

Being able to save levels as images enables me to make levels look much more complex. This stuff is far in the future, but it's nice to know as it helps me when thinking about the overall art direction for the game.

JLJac on April 01, 2012, 12:02:50 AM (Last Edit: April 01, 2012, 04:36:03 AM):

Update 8
I have started working on the AI today. What I've done up until now is path finding, getting from one place to another, but there has to be an AI that makes decisions on what places it wants to get to.

I do not want the croc to be omniscient, it will have to see its prey to know where it is. This will add a slight element of sneaking to the game, you'll want to take routes where the crocs can't see you.

In order for a unit to be able to navigate without knowing where everything is, it has to be able to have an estimation of where things are. This means a little mental mirror of sorts, that will sometimes cohere with and sometimes deviate from the real world.

This is what I've been doing today. Each Croc has a list of where it thinks the players are. For each player it can have a few different ideas, simplified they could be boiled down to:

Visual contact - I know where this particular player is because I see him.
No Idea - I have no idea where this player is.
Memory - I remember the last place I saw this player.

This is the framework I've been working on today. If the Croc has a memory about where it last saw a player and returns to that place without spotting the player there the memory will be deleted, and it once again has "No Idea" about where that player is. It also keeps track of how long ago it saw a player, maybe a memory will be deleted after a while because it's very unlikely that the player would remain anywhere close to that spot. As of now the crocs can't act on this information, but I'll get to that later.

The idea behind this is that if a croc hunts player 1, and in the corner of its eye sees player 2, then if it later looses track of player 1 it will be able to return to that point where player 2 was spotted. I will probably have to create some behaviour for searching the surroundings of a place, so that if it returns to a place where it remembered a player being it doesn't just give up, but looks around the area a little first.

Different crocs will probably have different mental stats as well as physical, with adjustments to memory, patience and the like.

JLJac on April 01, 2012, 11:23:10 PM:

Update 9
Quite a lot of progress today, all happening inside the croc's head. Some basic behaviours are up and running, such as searching, idling, hunting.

The one that has been hardest so far is the "investigate" behaviour, where a croc is given a tile and is supposed to check out its immediate surroundings. Currently I do this by sending out a few "scout" checkpoints from the main checkpoint, they travel only in tiles that are accessable to the croc and stop after a few steps. The Croc then proceeds to check out the main tile and the "scouts" surrounding it, after which it considers the area investigated.



The hunting behaviour needs a lot of work. Especially when the player dissapears around a corner the behaviour is too unintelligent, in situations where it's fairly easy to estimate where the player might have gone it should do so.

JLJac on April 02, 2012, 11:09:17 PM:

Update 10
The AI is coming together, and is now actually playable against (Even though there still aren't any effects from a croc colliding with you). The behaviour is now considerably more competent when it comes to pursuing you, if you for example disappear around a corner it will make a little "simulation" of where you might've gone, and act according to that estimation. It's all very simple, but seems to be working fine.

As it stands the lizards mill about the level idly until they see a player. Then they start hunting, and if the loose track of the player during the hunt they'll look around the area where they last saw him. If the player was moving during the last visual contact they crocs will estimate where he might have ended up since then, and look around that place instead.

One fun thing is the effects of having different ways of calculating visual contact and path finding. This means that a Croc can see a Bear across a gap, but to get there it has to take a much longer way.



I like these situations because here you can see the intelligence at work, you know that it doesn't just charge towards close targets, but it's actually able to plan a long and complicated route to get to a place. I'll try to make a video some time soon.

In the situation in the picture the player would probably be nowhere near that same place once the Croc finally arrives, and it'll use the "investigate" behaviour of the above post to look around for a little while before giving up and roaming the map again. I'm pretty happy with how all this is coming together.

I have noticed a few situations where Crocs get stuck though, will have to work on that.

JLJac on April 03, 2012, 11:02:48 PM (Last Edit: April 04, 2012, 12:57:29 AM):

Yeah, I hope you will be able to play with it in interesting ways. Right now you can do some stuff like dissapearing around several corners quickly, and watch how it gets confused and searches around for you, it's pretty fun.

Update 11
Made the croc aware of when it has reached... eh, like, the destination of an old path that it follows until the new path is calculated... well, I made the croc not turn around again and again on the same spot.

Also I kind of identified and fixed (?) a path finding error that I'm not really even able to formulate for myself... The code is too extensive and complicated for me to fully understand at this point, but it seems to be working OK. Seems like a tile can't be weighted more than a passage between tiles, but if this is an inherent feat in the A* mathematics or something I messed up is beyond me. As long as I keep it in mind it shouldn't be a problem.

Made variable speeds for the croc depending on what it's doing, so that it'll speed up when chasing you and slow down when just roaming around.

EDIT: Solution came to me in the shower. Implementing tomorrow!

JLJac on April 04, 2012, 07:39:09 AM:

Just some of the sketches from when I tried to figure out the path finding



Don't want to think about how long this has taken me, but it might be several weeks... Soon I will let this rest and concentrate on other things!

JLJac on April 04, 2012, 10:52:28 AM:

Update 12
Fixed some quirks and the above mentioned problem in the croc path finding. I pray this is the last time I write the words "croc path finding" in this dev log. Also improved the croc's estimation of where a player might have gone.

I didn't get around to write this as it was something that was finished before I started writing the log, but on the levels there are "short cuts", holes you can crawl into and be transported to another hole elsewhere on the map. This feature was included to make the levels less limited by being two dimensional, with a short cut it's possible to make a path that crosses another path without actually connecting to it, if you get what I mean. You can see the short cuts as the little white dots on the level editor screen shot in the original post, you probably already figured out what they where.

All three creatures in the game are able to use the short cuts, even though the A creature is very hesistant to enter one unless there's no other way around (it knows that a player might see it, and position himself at the exit for an easy kill). The croc path finding (DAMMIT!) has been able to handle those for a long time, and the crocs use them to transport themselves around the map. If a croc sees a player entering a short cut it doesn't simply follow him, but makes an independent estimation of what way is the quickest to get to the exit, through the short cut or by foot. If it's the latter an unpleasant surprise awaits you when you exit.

The AI creatures are assumed to be aware of the entire map lay out, it's only the players' position they don't know about unless there is visual contact.

Today's progress includes that if a croc doesn't explicitly see a player entering a short cut, but sees him dissapearing into a corridor that leads to a short cut, it will still be able to figure out what might have happened.

JLJac on April 04, 2012, 11:38:35 PM:

Thank you. Even coming from someone with [/sarcasm] in their sig it means a lot to the crocs, they send their regards.

Update 13
I gotta say, today was a good day. Not because I was very productive, but because I tested stuff and it worked.

I made this crazy level:



and had two crocs plus four A-creatures run around on it, along with a player. Implemented that if a player touches an A-creature it dissapears and a score counter increases, no animations and no nothing, but still enough to start trying stuff out soon. It's a game!

The crocs adapt well to different environments. They are able to navigate a maze like this without looking too clueless, at least to me.

One thing I've started to notice about how the game turns out is that there is much more emphasis on not being seen by the crocs than I had anticipated. For some reason I imagined that the Crocs would know where you were pretty much most times, and the gameplay would be about hunting/fleeing. Unless I want the Crocs to see through walls this is not really possible though, if you're behind a wall you're behind a wall and the Croc shouldn't know your exact position.

The hunt/flee type of game play had a problem, if the croc would constantly be chasing the player I pretty much would have only two options: Either the croc is slower than the player, and will never ever pose any threat because it's unable to catch up. Or, the croc is faster than the player, and will catch up and kill you within a very limited time, no way to avoid it.

As it looks right now the game is leaning more towards a platformer/sneaker than an action platformer as I had originally planned. I have nothing against this, if that's the direction the project wants to go I'll allow it. I like the feeling that the crocs are physically superior to you, they outrun you easily, the only way to survive is to out smart them. This is a perspective I think is fairly rare in games. (Actually your only advantage to the crocs is your overview, if your vision was as limited as theirs you would be A-B-S-O-L-U-T-E-L-Y C-H-A-N-C-E-L-E-S-S, but it feels as if you're out smarting them!)

Ok, it'll be a long post today.

You see the little yellow things on the level editor screen shot? Those are hives. I felt that the C-creature had an objective, eating the B-creature, and the B-creature had an objective, eating the A-creature, but A was without any motivation. What would it do, just hang around one part of the map until it got chased to another part of the map? I wanted it to do something.

The hives are places where A-creatures spawn, and then during their life time they move around from one hive to another as if transporting something or what will you. This makes them motivated to go somewhere instead of just roaming by random. The behaviour looks a bit ant like, they have their paths between the hives where they move back and forth, until a player chases them and puts them off their course.



The idea is that they should be able to dive down into their hives and dissapear, so that the player has to ambush them on their routes instead.

Unlike the other creatures the A-creature will be respawned when killed, and therefore needs a logical respawning place instead of just popping up from nowhere.

The path finding seems to be more or less behind me and hopefully the pace will increase from here on! Soon I'll make a video or demo or something so you can see the stuff in motion.

JLJac on April 06, 2012, 02:27:24 AM:

Update 14

It's becoming a game! All the creatures are in and behaving somewhat like what I want them to. I've been thinking about about the game rules, here's what I came up with:

1. Catch as many A-creatures as possible within a limited time.
2. Survive! No respawns.

The idea is that I want a basic mechanic that's the same for a multi player game and a single player game. The "high score" of a level will be the amount of A-creatures eaten within a certain time, and you can attempt to break these records, for some single player replay value.

Multi player: There is a timer, urging players to hunt rather than just sitting around in some corner. When a player dies he is not respawned, but the timer is halved, so that you won't have to sit around inactive for ever and ever. The gameplay is less interesting for all players when one is dead, but the surviving players should be given just a little extra time to gain an advantage and compete among each other. The amount of time I'm thinking about is two or three minutes, the multi player game mode should be fairly rapid-fire paced with new levels every so often. This is especially important as there are no respawns.

The players are ranked from how many A-creatures they managed to eat in their lifetime, but a surviving player is always ranked above a dead one. This means that there can be no situation where you benefit from committing suicide. If all players are dead the one with the most "eats" will be the match winner, but if there is one surviving player he will win, despite not having catched a thing. So, the priorities are: 1) Don't get eaten. 2) Eat as much as possible.

Single player: The basic mechanics are the same, but the winning condition for a single player level is 1) Being alive, 2) Having eaten a certain number of A-creatures. If you manage those the next level will unlock or however the campaign will be laid out. In the campaign there could also be levels where you're supposed to just get to an exit like any platformer, the high score of those will be how fast you got there.

Possibly there could be some kind of co-operative mode where two or more players play the single player campaign, and their score is added up and then divided by their numbers or something like that. We'll see what's reasonable.

I'm currently setting this framework up, and will soon try it. Some (most) things might be revised.

Yesterday I saved a version of the game and tried on another computer, seemed to work fine. The import of text files and export of .png files worked too, which was a huge relief.

The level editor will probably save a level as an image file, which will contain the level image as well as the level data, the latter coded into a block of different-colored pixels which will look like noise to the human eye. This is probably not the optimal way to do things, but it compresses the entire level into one file, which is nice.

JLJac on April 06, 2012, 08:25:06 AM:

A video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jnpocoxuzg0&feature=youtu.be
It's a horrible horrible cellphone video, but it shows what I wanted to show... Now you can probably tell where I'm from from my accent

Glad to get something up here that isn't just another wall of text, hope you'll find it interesting! If I have any readers left, that is...

In other news saving level data in a noisy square in an image seems to be working fine, which I'm rather happy about. Soon I'll move the level drawing code over to the level editor, and then I'm set to start working on the graphics.

JLJac on April 06, 2012, 01:50:00 PM (Last Edit: April 06, 2012, 08:20:31 PM):

A sketch I made, just playing around.



Before you get excited/dissapointed, keep in mind that this is my very first pixels I ever draw for this game, it is much more likely that it will end up looking nothing like this than something like this. However, a first tiny step towards working on the visuals has been taken.

It's nice to have art in the dev log, now I might actually have read it myself!

JLJac on April 07, 2012, 11:24:15 PM:

Update 15

Limited the lizard's angle of vision.



Since the main thing making the game easy already is the croc not knowing where you are, the limitation is more in terms of not being able to see backwards rather than only being able to see forwards. Anyways, this allows you to wait in a side tunnel for a lizard to crawl by, and then crawl out behind it and get away.

You see the little bulge of vision covering the tail? If the point that's tested is close enough the angle is not tested, to simulate some kind of spatial sense and so that the player can't crawl into its tail without being noticed.

In an open level like this a lizard in the right position can cover huge areas, and two of them can see pretty much the whole level.



I think this works well, because open areas are not the crocs' favourite environment to move in. This creates a balance - close quarters: they won't spot you, but if they do you're done for. Open spaces: they'll spot you, but you have a fair chance of getting away.

JLJac on April 08, 2012, 12:45:54 PM (Last Edit: April 08, 2012, 12:52:42 PM):

Update 16
Gave the lizard hearing. To keep things simple and clear to the player the only thing that can cause a for the lizard hearable sound is landing on a floor after being airborne. If you make the tiniest possible jump by just tapping the button you'll make no sound at all. The variable of lizard hearing is how big the radius is within which it'll register this sound.

It doesn't know where you are, as when seeing you, and it doesn't know which player it heard. All the sound does is that if a croc is idling or snooping around and hears a sound it'll go to the place the sound came from to check it out. When chasing a known target it'll ignore sounds.

It is communicated to the player that a croc heard something in the way that it stops in its tracks for a second, as if listening. Once it eventually gets a head it will probably turn this towards the source of the sound as well.

JLJac on April 09, 2012, 12:37:04 AM:

Update 17

Made the croc able to kill the player. Not eat, that's a matter of animation and will be attended to later, but magically kill on touch. The croc is now able to lash out to a close by player, making it impossible to jump over it on a floor.

As I mentioned the croc is already slower than you out on open floors, and that together with you being able to jump and it only being able to turn made it possible to jump over its head again and again for ever. The new mechanic means that you can't do that any more. You can still jump over it by using a wall though.



Almost all the mechanics I imagined for the game are in now, but there's a lot of number tweaking to do. However, I feel that I'm finally at the end of the huge chunk of this project that has been the croc AI, and hopefully no other part will take as much time. There will be a revisiting to this though, when I have a little less schoolwork to do so I can try the game out with a friend. I have no idea how the crocs handle multiple players, it could be just fine, it could be in need of some redesign.

It's too hard to cath the A-creatures, need to tweak that a bit. Another thing I was thinking of was that maybe the player shouldn't eat the creatures on touch, but rather just catch them, and then you have to go find a safe place to consume your prey. I like this idea, will have to see how it plays out in reality.

Been thinking a lot lately about how I will render levels. Have some kind of semi-voxel idea going on, more on that later. However, with level rendering comes art, and with art the devlog becomes interesting! Hopefully the daily five page essays on how a virtual lizard finds its way around a maze has finally come to an end... A brighter future awaits!

JLJac on April 09, 2012, 01:35:39 AM:

Yeah, looking forward to drawing some more for this! Here's a little video showing some Croc path finding:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOzuv2QxyLo&feature=youtu.be

You see how it paces back forth a little bit at times? That's when the path is being calculated. I don't want it to be standing still during this process, because its speed will be a que to what behaviour it's engaged in. I prefer that it runs back an forth as in a bit of initial confusion, then suddenly realizes what path it'll take. Path finding speed is a stat, and some lizards may be slower than others.

JLJac on April 09, 2012, 11:13:19 PM:

Update 18

Moved the level rendering code over to the level editor, and overhauled it completely. The system is now working in a semi-voxel kind of way, where one tile is 20*20*10 pixels. I also made the level editor able to save a level in the format that I think will be final. Didn't try loading yet though... The level seems to be very light, so I'm happy about that.

The voxel format allows me to do some interesting stuff such as fog and light...



This is just 20 minutes of coding to test it, but I like the potential it has. Because of the voxels I don't have to create separate solutions for everything, stuff sorts itself out automatically. If you look at the detail in the lower right corner maybe you can imagine what a hassle it would be to calculate how the shadows would look in every special case like this, now it just works by itself.

It's flawed, yes, I have noticed the stripy floors. Also it will demand some patience, rendering it pixel by pixel will take a minute or two for an entire level. But I see a lot of potential in it!

JLJac on April 10, 2012, 10:52:06 AM:

Yeah, the creatures won't "take" or cast shadows, unless I want a framerate of... let's see... about one frame each 8 seconds

Thing is that the huge, complicated process of generating graphics for a level will have a slightly anticlimatic ending; one picture that's behind the game objects and one that's in front of them... But the process is still necessary, if those two pictures are to look good!

JLJac on April 10, 2012, 11:54:55 AM:

Update 19
The level editor can now save a level, and the game can load it. What this means is that the limiting factor of how long a level can take to render is how long you're willing to wait after having made a level, not how long you're willing to wait when starting a game.

This makes testing stuff a slight bit more awkward for me, as I have to actually save a level first. That's why I waited until now to do it.

Soon I might actually get around to some art stuff.

JLJac on April 11, 2012, 12:26:07 AM:

Update 20

Gah, most frustrating day ever... I've been struggling with the shadow renderer, and... that's pretty much it for today. This is what it looks like currently, flaws and all:



Right now the major problem is that objects don't self shadow, there's only cast shadows. The choice is between that and having the objects self-shadow even on the surfaces that should be lit...  I have no idea how to solve this, but will probably come up with something...

JLJac on April 11, 2012, 11:44:01 AM:

Update 20

Almost no progress what so ever... It turns out my code for raytracing the vision of the camera doesn't actually work. However something else (still unknown what) was obviously broken in a matching way, so the code gave me the right output anyway... Fine, up until I need to fix a problem and really have to understand the code. Then I realize it shouldn't work, but it kind of does, except from that problem I was trying to fix. If I fix the code so that it should work it doesn't work at all. So I settled for the broken code, with a dirty feeling of not having actually solved the problem.

With a horrible hack I managed to make it so that platforms are at least shaded on the underside. This is what it looks like now, with a thousand flake-thingies suspended in mid air to test the shadows.



There are some horrible bugs in there but hopefully it's mostly me who can see them. Right now - bye bye shadow code for a while, I'm painfully tired of this...

Tomorrow I will do something else.

JLJac on April 11, 2012, 01:01:48 PM:

Gah I solved it... Went back to an old approach and solved it.



No one except me can spot the difference I guess, but the difference is that now the shadows are CORRECT! Rendering time is something like 7 minutes or something though... But that's OK with me... At least it WORKS!

JLJac on April 11, 2012, 11:27:33 PM:

Update 21
I made the game considerably uglier today... That feels weird of course, but I think it's a necessary step towards starting to incorporate some kind of art direction. I want the game to be mainly flat colors, I believe, but still want the shadows around, so I'll have to find a way for those two to work nicely together.

JLJac on April 12, 2012, 11:33:09 AM:

Update 22
I think I finished the shadow renderer today, hopefully to never return to it. The game still looks bad, but now I think I have the tools to start fixing that. However, my entire level renderer is messed up at this point, it doesn't even render the slopes. Well well, two steps forward one step back. Hopefully I will get around to support for tile sets some time soon.

It's nice to see how the different part of the game work independently, when I open one of my new levels to see how it looks ingame the croc's AI navigates through the new environments with ease - obviously, as the level is mathematically the same, but still nice to see.

Today I also did some thinking on the game's overall concept, the reason why the player does what it does and how the world the game is set in will work. I'll give you some of this together with some art at a later point, ideas always sound cooler with some tasty art to go with them.

JLJac on April 13, 2012, 01:26:58 PM:

Update 23
Now there is a tile editor, though there are no tile sets. The level editor will work like this:

First, there will be the level editor. Here, two players can work at the same level simultaneously and create the layout of the level. You'll be able to save the level in som kind of test version, with no real graphics, just to try it out and make adjustments. Once you're happy with the geometrics you move on to the graphics phase.

In the tile editor, you can place objects that correspond to the level you've already made. Here I think it's going to switch to mouse control, it would be too tedious otherwise. So you look at your level and place tiles, but you're only editing the appearance of the level, it will still function exactly like it did when you tested it. Right now you can decide if a tile will be smooth concrete or rough rock, but there'll be much more to that as I start to produce some actual graphics.

Then there's the effects editor. Here you add plants and the like, it'll make sense to you when you see it (or I describe it in more detail later). Essentially it'll be stuff that grows on/hangs from/is applied to the tiles you've placed earlier.

After the effects are applied you'll move on to the exciting procedure of staring at light being raytraced for two minutes.

Finally the level is rendered and can be saved.

With the art editor I'm struggling with a balance, on one hand I want the editor to be free enough to make the level look like you want it, on the other hand I want it to be somewhat constrained. This is because not all people are artists, and you should be able to make a level that looks better than you would've been able to draw free-hand. Also I don't want you to be able to make a level that strays too far from the game's general art direction. We'll see where on this scale of freedom/constraint it finally ends up.

JLJac on April 16, 2012, 07:30:14 AM:

Update 24
I'm alive and stuff is happening. The stuff that's happening is mainly level editor stuff though, and I don't really have anything to show you. Personally I find user interfaces the most hard/boring thing to do, and it's a lot of that going on in the level editor. The user interface is going to suck, but I don't mind too much as I don't really think of the level editor as an official part of the game.

It's also important to me that the level editor I release is the same as the one I use to make the built-in levels, I don't like the dummed down level editors that are included in some games where it's obvious that the developers had access too a much wider variety of tools. So, in conclusion, the level editor is becoming ugly and hard to use, but it's more of a development tool that I'll also let you guys play with than an actual part of the game. I might include some kind of little tutorial on how to use it, though.

In other level editor news the tile editor is up and running, even more so than before. It works, it displays little previews, it's fairly fast and easy to use and it doesn't have any tile sets to work with yet. Still, the boring technical parts are more or less done by now.

Damn, it seems the level editor is the new croc path finding... Well, if I'm ever going to arrive to the point where this dev log is going to flood with juicy images there needs to be a level editor to generate those images, so it's all good I guess.

Over and out!

JLJac on April 16, 2012, 11:27:44 PM:

Thank you!

Update 25
This is what the tile editor looks like:



Just to give you an idea what I've been working on lately. With the wasd-keys you can change tool and with the mouse you place tiles. All tiles are loaded from a folder on initiation, they require much less space as external files. The little dark square to the right is the tile's requirements. It shows what kind of terrain a tile can be placed on. Some tiles can only be placed on slopes, some require open air in the middle and so on. This is what I meant earlier, that you first create your level and then you're only able to change its appearance.

After you've edited your tile layout you'll move on to the effects editor, which I haven't started on yet. After that you'll move on to a light editor, which I haven't started on either, but that one is going to be fairly simple. Basically it's going to be about drawing a black and white image which determines where there will be light and where there won't. Then the light will be rendered.



During this process you can go get a cup of coffee...

Finally the level will be rendered in its final colors. Currently this looks like this, but I don't plan to keep it that way. This is still just technical progress, I've started thinking about the art but haven't gotten around to it.



Tiles come in two versions, "box" version and "voxel" version. The boxes are basically six textures, for the front and the sides of the tile. Those occupy less space on the hard drive and are faster to render, but are limited in what they can do. The "voxel" type are actual voxel structures, more or less, and can describe more complex three dimensional shapes. The fans or whatever in the above image are voxel structures. If you look at the close up you can see that they have another set of grates inside them. I needed the voxel format to be able to do complex three dimensional stuff like that.

Now this framework is set up, and it's possible for me to start working on the graphics!

On a completely different note I've been thinking about how the Croc will look visually. Hopefully I'll be able to show you something soon!

JLJac on April 17, 2012, 11:14:51 PM:

Update 26
I worked on the art today. Still don't have anything I want to show you, but I'm getting there. It's a lot of fun to work with the voxels, any three dimensional shape I can imagine I can create, and see with (decently) correct shadows.

I've been working on a system for palettes. Basically the goal is to convey both light and distance using as few colors as possible, which is not as easy as you might think, especially if you want to make the depth of the graphics justice.



The reason I want to have few, flat colors is because a level will be pasted together from hundreds of graphical elements. By greatly restricting the palettte like this I achieve three things:
1) Some visual harmony, with many many colors it would hurt your eyes
2) Color will mainly be conveying level information, decoration is its second purpose. For the sake of conveiance three colors is actually enough (Look at the level editor), so ending up at 15 colors would be hard to motivate
3) Maybe most importantly, flat patches of color blend together. If everything has its own color every splice between graphical elements would be visible. If there are fewer colors, however, there's a much greater chance that two neighbouring fields will have the same color, making the joints invisible.

Right now I'm at 8 colors, a number I'd like to reduce to 5.

JLJac on April 17, 2012, 11:41:32 PM:

Yeah, sorry, I should've said something about that... The way the game will be colored will be somewhat unconventional, but worry not, I do have a plan! Once I've been able to produce a screenshot, or at least a mock-up, I'll do the concept / art style reveal and things will start to make more sense. Or they probably won't, but there will at least be some cohesion to the insanity!

JLJac on April 19, 2012, 12:14:44 AM:

Update 27
Added glass tiles, which are in every way the same as walls except that creatures can see through them. It's fun to see the lizards spot you through a glass wall and then find a way to get to the other side of the glass. Don't know how much I will actually use this in the levels, but it'll be in there somewhere just to point out the divide between visual contact and path finding, showing off some croc intelligence. Possibly there'll be some level that's a maze of glass with only a few blocks of solid material, where you'll have to move quickly from cover to cover waiting for a croc to face the other direction.

JLJac on April 19, 2012, 09:50:45 AM:

Wow, those are some really cool palettes!

Thing is though, that the game will be pretty heavily stylized art-direction wise, using a more or less black and white palette. This is for artistic reasons that I hope will be more clear once I get more visual stuff up here. Talking of which, I did some pen and paper designs for the croc today! Also started to implement it a little bit, it now looks like a little sasuage moving around rather than three dots. A first few steps towards giving it an actual body!

Update 28
I stepped away from my computer a little and did some sketches for the earliest single player levels in the game. I think this is a reasonable way to start, because if I know what levels I want to make I can make art assets that fit those, rather than making a lot of random art assets and then trying to fit those into the levels.



Those are likely going to be the very first levels, but they are also likely to look different from this. These levels will teach the players the controls and the basic premiss of the game. I'm trying to do this as best as I can, keeping

in mind. I won't go into too much detail, but level 1 basically teaches you how your basic moves work, and level 2 teaches you the basic mechanics of A-creature/B-creature interaction.

The main thing that happened today, aside from all this, was that I split the level editor and the game into two different applications. It got too cluttered, and I also figured that this way I might be able to release the two separately. That way people who're not interested in making levels get a smaller file size, and I can also release them at different dates, meaning I don't have to polish the level editor to perfection just to release the game.

JLJac on April 20, 2012, 11:29:34 PM:

Yeah, the project is starting to get big, so stuff like that might be necessary o.0

Update 29
Created spawnpoints for the players, and tied in the system with player and croc spawning in the shortcut system. This is mainly a question of lazyness, as now I won't have to make separate animations for a creature entering its hole and a creature entering a short cut. Basically the spawn points/home holes are shortcut openings, but instead of leading to another shortcut opening they lead to an invisible little flag, saying "this is a bear spawnpoint" or "this is a croc hole".

The croc is becoming more and more animated, now it has a body and a tail. Legs next, or head.

JLJac on April 23, 2012, 05:10:15 AM:

Update 30
Did a lot of multiplayer playtesting, most of it went rather good. The crocs are actually just smart enough to play tricks on, which is a lot of fun. At one time I was hiding in a little pipe section while a croc was snooping around outside, and my opponent wanted to mess with me. He crawled up to a balcony above, and exposed himself. He knew that the fastest route up to that balcony was through the very pipe I was hiding in...

Made lizards collide with each other, which looks hilarious when a bunch of them try to cram themselves through a narrow opening or when they meet in a corridor.

The animation is doing its part, and their bodies have gotten some kind of mushy, soft quality that I'm definitely sticking with. They have a head and are able to do a little looking around. Next up is legs.

JLJac on April 23, 2012, 11:17:31 PM:

Update 31
An entire day's worth of progress without even opening the game, only working in the level editor. Got tile sets up and running, so now I can create not only loose objects, but tile sets that will be rendered as larger, consistent structures, like concrete and the like.

The next step will be to finalize the level editor to the point where I can save a level project as a text file. Once this step is reached I can start working on levels for the game. I don't really need the level editor to be completely finished for that.

JLJac on April 24, 2012, 10:03:59 PM:

Update 32

Got my first tileset working. Now I can create levels that have a mixture of objects and tiles. Currently it looks like this:



Up in the right corner you can see a border that's like... folded. That's the metal tileset, and the things it's folded around are loose metal tiles. Hopefully you'll be able to create some interesting stuff with this.

If you squint a little you'll notice the shadows. Sad thing people won't likely be squinting when playing the game...

JLJac on April 25, 2012, 12:41:00 PM:

It's worth to note that I haven't gotten around to the effects editor yet, which will have a huge impact on the appearance of levels. It's going to be exciting!

Update 33
Made the level editor save the light to another layer, and made the game able to pick up the changed level format. Now you can, if you have a slightly stronger computer, enable the light to fade slowly back and forth. Maybe this represents clouds passing by... most importantly it brings a little bit of life into the level graphics. I want the levels to feel very still and quiet, for artistic reasons, and I think that this slow movement actually adds to this. If everything was static you'd assume it was because of technical limitations (which it, in part, is), but if there's one element of movement the other stuff look more still in comparison, I hope.

JLJac on April 25, 2012, 11:08:47 PM:

Update 34
Effects editor halfway done, no effects made.

JLJac on April 26, 2012, 10:55:34 PM:

Update 35
Effects editor more or less done! You can create effects and paint their area of influence, like so:



Variable brush size and all! This has been a user interface hell -.-

Later on the effects editor is how plants will get into the game. Right now it can do some erosion. In the game it won't be this extreme, I think, this is just to show you what it can do. For example the poles can't be allowed to grow into huge trunks.



The idea is to unify the tiles into one image, and to add an organic feel to the level. You can change the order in which effects are applied, which will have some significance. If you for example want the terrain to be heavily erroded but not the plants growing there, you can place the plants below the erosion in the effects list. If you, on the other hand, want dead plants with slime hanging from them, you apply the slime after the plants are drawn.

With the painting tool you can create gradients, like this:



Se how the geometry is molten to goo at the left side, but untouched with visible little pins and all at the right side? That's an effect gradient. It's possible to single out specific tiles to be affected or excluded as well, even though I don't know how that'll look...

This is one step closer to the landscapes that have been floating around in my mind for a while, heavily eroded industrial complexes with patches of old stone. In order to explain why I focus so much on erosion it might be appropriate that I start giving away a little about the overall concept. The working title I have at this point is
Rain World.

JLJac on April 27, 2012, 10:45:00 PM:

Thanks! Your anticipation is turned straigh into motivation!

Update 36
Light editor more or less done, which means that all the planned editors are at least started on. All of them need som adjustments, though.

The image shows the light editor UI, the light being raytraced, and finally a level being rendered with the light applied.



In the light editor you should also be able to control the angle of the light.

My tiles are drawn with a top-left highlight. I was thinking about what to do when the light is coming in from the right, and think I have settled on a kind of weird approach. In the end it'll be easier for me, I think, to just flip the entire level, render it, and then flip it back, than to try to mess with all the individual tiles. This feels unintuitive, perhaps because a non-substancial thing(the light) is allowed to affect a substancial thing (the entire level), but this is programming and weird-feeling solutions are as good as any, if they work.

On another note I've been starting to touch upon a framework that will allow for some color in the levels. I don't know if I even want it though, will have to test and see.

Made a horrible little mock-up of some grass, through the effects editor. The fading density looked nice!

JLJac on April 28, 2012, 01:01:33 AM:

Just wanted to share this most recent output of my level renderer:



This is just place holder plants, place holder colors, place holder everything, but I was surprised by how much I liked the look of this coloring method. It created just the sort of washed-out colors I wanted, the colors of a place tormented by decades of heavy rain.

JLJac on April 28, 2012, 10:48:30 PM:

Update 37
The light angle is now changeable through the light editor, so from now on maybe all my screenshots won't have the exact same top-left lightsource.

JLJac on April 29, 2012, 01:12:25 AM:

Update 37, continuation

Made the renderer support two effect colors.



Right now my intention is to cap it at two colors, both beacuse it's a hassle to add multiple gradient masks for every layer and every color, and also because it's stylish.

I am very much aware of how aful that sorry excuse for grass looks, and that it doesn't even grow on the slopes. Be assured that I'll get to this, right now I'm just trying to set up the color system. In other words, progress is still technical rather than art-oriented, even though I'm thinking about the art more now than ever. It's still hard to say how much like the above screenshots it'll look or how far it'll stray. I think, however, that I've found a technical approach that produces something I like, and I'm happy about that. Even though a level takes a solid 7 minutes or so to render -.-

Despite promises made I for some reason settled for the same old top-left lightsource.

JLJac on April 29, 2012, 01:48:57 PM:

Update 38
Made a quick concept art, and put it in the main post together with some text that's more up to date.



Haha I actually think the actual game produces better looking stuff than this concept art, which is the wrong way around I guess, but many things are with this project!

The art doesn't really give away anything you didn't know already, I figure. The current title is "Rain World", and it's set in a very rained down place. Do you remember when I said that the game will be about hunting as much as possible in a limited amount of time? The premise is that the player creature can not survive the rainfall, and has to come out to hunt on the rare, short occasions when the sky is dry.

JLJac on April 29, 2012, 09:23:12 PM:

I think that the rain will be mainly a plot element, not a gameplay element. The idea is that it's such a horrible force that unless you're deep underground when it starts you're done for. I like the concept that you'll run around in a world that's heavily scarred by this force of nature that you never actually see, making it even more terrifying.

There will be dripping water pixels, trust me! Maybe you'll even see the first few drips of rain the seconds before escaping the level.

I have a bit of a problem with levels appearing as very static, which is because they are very static, they're basically just a still image. However I want to spend most of my milliseconds per frame on creature movement and AI, not grass moving in the wind. In the end I will do what I can to try to make the levels seem alive, but I will have to do it in cheap ways. We'll see what I come up with!

JLJac on April 30, 2012, 10:47:30 PM:

I haven't really decided on what kills the creature, if it's unable to breath if wet, or the slightly more over-the-top idea that the rain can actually pound a small animal to death... Maybe I won't have to specify.

Update 39
Today I did a little work on the level editor. Not the level renderer, but the editor! Created a function that you can set up an axis for horizontal mirroring of your actions, which makes it considerably easier to paint a symmetrical level.

I made a level, which will be the first or the second one in the campaign. I also started to think about how the campaign will be set up, and how the format of the levels will look like.

I use the word "campaign" here instead of "single player game", because I have no intention of stopping two or more players from going through the campaign together. Maybe you'll have to be alone to progress and unlock new levels though, we'll see how hard it is to balance.

And, I made an important decision. From now on I'll stop working on random art assets, as I can't really motivate this by having to test the tile renderer any more. I got stuck in a pattern where I drew a lot of random tiles, thinking that I'd probably need them when creating levels later. This is a horribly unefficient method, as I in the end would likely have ended up with a lot of art assets that were never used.

The new approach is this; I create levels, and then I create the art assets needed for them. This will give me a slowly increasing library of tiles, and I will probably often find that the levels are faster and faster to make, as I can reuse old tiles. If art evolution occurs I can always go back to old levels and mix in some newer tiles to create consistency.

My thoughts on the level editor has also changed slightly. I no longer view it as a game feature, but a development tool. A development tool that I plan to release, but still a development tool. The difference here is that I don't need to focus on making the level editor look all slick, which would be wasted time anyways since half of the audience won't even open it, and those that are interested in making their own levels are probably more towards the nerdy end, and won't mind a little programming grit. What I'm saying is that I'll make the level editor mainly for myself to use, which means it's going to suck, but I still plan to release it.

In other other news I've started to set up some stats for two different types of lizards, the easiest one and the hardest one. My idea right now is that there'll be five types, one being the easiest, three being about equal but in different ways, making them depend on different terrains, and one being the hardest. This one won't be better than the three specialized ones in their specialized stat, but will have a higher over-all performance and a very persistent hunting technique, making it a fearsome hunter.

JLJac on May 01, 2012, 11:28:38 AM:

I'm thinking about releasing an alpha, so that a few first time players can try the game and provide some feedback.

Please let me know if you want to contribute by playtesting.

The alpha will be stripped of all art, it'll just be a couple of levels that you can try running around in, and some settings that you can change, to let me know what you think is a reasonable difficulty. I will only send away a maximum of five games, as I don't want to release an ugly, unfinished product to the public.

If you contact me and I send you a copy I will want some effort in return, probably a small sheet of questions answered, of course along with any free-form feedback you want to provide. The final product will of course be free, and if you want to do a little free work for me in return it'll be greatly appreciated.

The alpha won't be very cool, it'll probably suck, but by playing it you can contribute in making the final product something much cooler!

JLJac on May 01, 2012, 09:14:29 PM:

Cool! Let's hold it here.

I'll whip up a few levels, and hope to have a version released within the week. Once again, I don't want you to be dissapointed, so let me stress that it won't be all fun and games. The alpha will look awful, and don't expect a main menu or anything... (You'll have to select level by editing a text file and restarting the game I guess... it's going to be exciting!)

JLJac on May 01, 2012, 10:43:52 PM:

Update 40
Did some thinking on the layout of the game. At first I thought I wanted the campaign to be completely linear, but I changed my mind. If you are free to move a little between levels that adds two values. Firstly most people like to be able to move freely. Second, it means that the same levels will be passed several times, increasing the gameplay time/development time ratio. The idea is that during a "level" the player is supposed to get to a hunting ground with flies, hunt, and then get back within a limited time. More on this later.

I did some easy but important stuff with the Croc's thinking, again. For example there was a bug that if it saw you enter a shortcut it wouldn't always understand where you'd end up.

Did I mention that the croc does a little simulation of the player's movement in its head if it's unable to see a player? I made the physics of that simulation better, for example I added gravity. The simulated player also has a minimal amount of "AI", which will simulate the movement of a player character a slight bit better than just an object that continues in the direction of the tangent. This means that if the croc sees you passing by and dissapear into a corridor it'll have a slightly better hunch of where you might have gone once you left its field of vision.

Now, when a croc catches up with a player, it picks it up in its (yet nonexistent) mouth and quickly carries it back to its hole.

JLJac on May 02, 2012, 12:22:16 AM:

A video! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnthCU1P1Ow&feature=youtu.be

This shows how some crocs fight over the body of a bear.

JLJac on May 02, 2012, 10:18:20 AM:

Haha it's funny that you say it's dark and creepy, because I actually didn't have that in mind. I just thought that it'd be reasonable for creatures of the same size to fight over their prey, and things ended up moving like this because of a combination of technical stuff and art choices. When I looked at the video again though, I totally saw what you mean o.0 They're ripping the little guy apart! 

I'm usually hesistant to talk about art stuff (if it can be said with words, why the art?) but I guess I should explain what's going on here. I'm not making a horror game, but I'm trying to portray a world that is very harsh, and where survival has to be fought for. There is a twist though, that instead of realistic harshness I want it to be harsh, but in a slightly twisted, cartoony way.

Weird little creatures that you don't really know what's going on in their heads fit the game medium, because things will inevitably move a little jerky, behave a little uncanny. Better to play with this than fight against it.

Rain World is not a horror game, there won't be excessive amounts of blood or violence for the sake of it. I will however do my best to convey a very different world, where strange creatures live and hunt, and if aspects of this are creepy, I'll go with that.

So, to actually provide an answer, I won't try to make the game creepy, but there'll be more of this. If you find this creepy, I hope you'll find the final thing even creepier!

JLJac on May 02, 2012, 10:15:11 PM:

HAHAHA! That's amazing, I never thought of it, but when you say it it's so clear! Yeah, the game will basically play like pac-man! Maybe with the difference that in pac-man the ghosts are always aware of where you are, here there'll be more focus on sneaking. I think pac-man is a great game though, it's a simple and very self-contained design, so I don't mind at all!

Update 41

Started to clean some stuff up as a first step towards the alpha version. Implemented death by falling, both for Bears and Crocs.



In a level like this the crocs will quite often end up fighting out above the open air, and end up falling. I made it so that if a single croc catches the player when climbing on the beams it doesn't shake him like it usually does, but when two of them are out there fighting there's really no keeping them from tumbling to their death.

In this level one interesting thing happened. You see the little left-facing dead end at the very bottom of the structure? That's a shortcut that leads to the upper-left island, through that ugly pipe-thingy sticking out to the left.

The blue lizard is a wall climber. When the red lizard caught me he was seen by the blue one, and the blue one started chasing him. He tried to take the route through the short cut, but the blue lizard actually didn't follow him, but rather climbed up to the exit he was going to appear out of, intercepting him and snatching the poor bear.

This shows the pros and cons of the shortcuts, through them you can quickly escape a site, but you're suddenly very predictable. Everything moves with the same speed in the shortcuts, and you always reach the same destination.

JLJac on May 04, 2012, 10:11:31 AM:

I had a fat deadline for school today, and have sadly not been able to work on the game. Now in the afternoon I've started to play a little with the level editor, to put some levels together for the alpha. Maybe it won't be released within the week as promised, but within a week it should be out.

JLJac on May 04, 2012, 12:33:21 PM:

To at least give you something today, here's a bit of concept art. Some parts I'm happy with, others not.



I'm happy with the... face, not the head but the face. The way the head ends needs work. The body in general needs to be less anatomically realistic. I want the face to be more emotionless, I think, like a mask that looks like something that could be a biological part of the creature but could as well be added on. It needs to work better together with how the Bear looks...

Well, as you can see there's a lot that will change, this is just a rough sketch. The technical implementation will also have a huge impact, that likely won't increase or decrease quality, but just change everything fundamentally. My original sketches for the Bear looked like *deep breath* THIS:


And ended up like this:


So the technical implementation phase can do good things as well...

We'll have to see where it goes! This is an interesting part of making games, technical solutions and limitations bring something unpredictable to your art process, and if you go with that stuff might end up somewhere unexpected.

JLJac on May 05, 2012, 03:49:44 AM:

Yeah, I was thinking along those lines... Well, as I always say, we'll see where it ends up

Update 42
Today I did a (preliminary?) visual representation for the short cut entrances. They're still impossible to spot, but it took me like an hour to draw so I'm not doing it all over again until I know what they're finally going to look like. At least it's theoretically possible to spot them now!

I've started to make a few levels as well. The alpha needs levels of great variety, because I'll need to know what kind of levels you guys think works best.

Apart from all this stuff there has been a change to the gameplay mechanics. Instead of consuming the flies on touch like mario coins (or pac-man pellets) the bear cathes them in its hands. You then have to get away and sit still for a short moment in order to eat them. It's very quick, and hopefully won't try your patience too much, but I felt it needed to go in the game. As it was, because of flies gathering together, you could suddenly get something like five kills in a second by just jumping through a swarm, and then continue for a minute without getting anything. This evens things out a little, as you can't catch more than two at a time.

Also I think it fits better with the game's style, the lizard doesn't eat you on touch but rather carries you back to its hole, and I wanted the player to do something similar. I didn't want you to eat while chased. Instead you have to hunt, then escape and find a safe spot where you can quickly munch down what you caught before getting out there again. Another benefit is that sometimes the game would have small moments of dead time, when you where just ducking in cover and waiting for a croc to pass by. Now those moments have a purpose, and you can get better at trying to time them and get them to work with your hunting-escaping scheme.

It's all either not animated or horribly animated at this point of course, but the mechanics are in. The game eventually will have a bit of an animation overhaul, for example the vertical pole climbing looks unacceptable at this point. Maybe I'll get to this at the same time I give the croc its legs.

JLJac on May 06, 2012, 12:26:21 AM:

Update 43
Added a test rendering for levels, so you can get an ugly-looking thing to try out before you go through the huge process of actually rendering a level. It's a good thing, because there's often a few changes you find yourself wanting to do once you know exactly which jumps are possible to pull of and so on.

I've made a few levels as well. Still don't know what kind of layout works the best though.

Crocs don't necessarily spawn right on start up any more. You'll be able to specify from the level editor when they'll spawn. They spawn after a certain number of caught flies with an added time delay, to make it a little bit less obvious. If you want you can set them to 0 flies but a greater time delay.

JLJac on May 07, 2012, 10:43:52 PM:

Update 44
OK, now the alpha is more or less ready to be sent out. I just need to add some instruction text, and maybe a calm little turorial level where you can learn how to move.

If you play two people it'll rank you at the end of the game, according to a system where a surviving player is always ranked above a dead one, and aside from that it goes by how many flies you've caught.

I realized that the fun of playing a level is doubled if it's given at least some graphics, so I'll actually do renderings of the levels. Note that these are just quick renderings with a default tileset, the real levels for the game will have quite a lot of custom graphics going on.

Next thing I'll put togther a questionnaire to go with the alpha and then I'll send it out. We're almost there!

JLJac on May 08, 2012, 12:59:58 PM:

Alpha is out!

Here's what the main menu looks like:



I have a three year university education in graphic design, and I've gotta say, it's not every day you pull something like this off. Going straight in the portfolio.

So, hopefully I'll get some feedback from the play testers in a couple of days (if they can find the start button), until then I'll just do a little tweaking of the level editor.

JLJac on May 10, 2012, 06:05:45 AM:

Hi!

I'm mainly waiting for the feedback from the testers at this point. Did try a few things in the level editor, but didn't keep them, and made a new tileset. Other than that, nothing much. Hard to find motivation to do stuff that I know might get changed once the feedback starts coming in.

JLJac on May 11, 2012, 04:40:53 AM:

Bad news
I got to know today that I'm in a bit of a tight spot concerning certain school work. This means that for a week or two, I will have to focus on that. The game will have to be put on ice.

Note however that I'm not abandoning the project forever or for an indefinite amount of time. Within two weeks I'll be back on track. Maybe this isn't the worst time for this to happen, the alpha is released which was a huge mile stone for the project, and now feedback has started to get back to me. In a couple of days when I look at the project again I might be able to do so with fresh eyes, and by then I will have quite a lot of feedback to fall back on as well. Those of you who have an alpha, please let me know what you think! I will have time to read it.

So, a short break. See you in a few days, wish me luck!

JLJac on May 25, 2012, 10:10:52 PM:

I'm alive!
They told me I'll likely have to complement my thesis later though, so this beast is merely fended off, not slain.

Has been really interesting to recieve the comments from the alpha testers! The opinions have been incredibly diverse... The levels that are some peoples' favourites are hated by others, someone writes that wall jumping is the biggest flaw in the game, someone says it's their preferred aspect... There are some glitches that everyone seems agreed on, but other than that people are pretty much all over the place. The game seems to be a tad too difficult though, which isn't surprising as this difficulty is what I imagined for the final levels, while you guys have been thrown straight into it. I'll sit down and try to make sense of it soon, and maybe post a list of what I'll change because of the feedback.

Thank you!

Update 45
The croc is getting feet! It looks weird and unfinished still, but it's on its way. Even at this stage the poor creature consists of no less than 13 sprites, and that's going to increase quite a lot more...

JLJac on May 26, 2012, 10:27:15 PM:

Update 46
I'm a little bit stuck, on a silly thing. I need to know the point inside a three-edged polygon that is closest to a point outside the polygon. I realize this is something programmers probably do in their sleep, but as I never got any real programming education I always get stuck on this kind of stuff. I solve it eventually, but it might take a while. Tips are appreciated.

What's happening is that the croc is given some behaviour for its legs. Each leg is supposed to reach forward to a place that has grabable terrain, grab on to that, hold there while the body is hauled forward, and then let go and repeat. In order to find grabable spots on slopes I need the polygon-point-distance thingie.

Right now it looks like it's going to look very weird, but hopefully also cool. Will have to see how long the legs will end up, maybe it'll vary across the different crocs.

JLJac on May 27, 2012, 10:02:22 PM:

Update 47
More work on the crocs' legs. It still looks more weird than cool, but I hope to be able to improve it. The movement will be somewhat awkward, like it's hauling itself forward rather than actually running, and will hopefully give it a nice, creepy vibe. Still haven't solved the slopes thing.

JLJac on May 29, 2012, 10:28:35 PM:

Update 48
The legs are moving now. It still needs a lot of work, I too see the weird black things shooting out, but the framework is up.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Die5vsuLGs&feature=youtu.be

JLJac on June 01, 2012, 12:38:26 AM:

Update 49
A friend helped me with the traingle problem, and it's out of the way! The croc legs are just about finished. They've reached a good-enough kind of level, where I'll leave them to maybe revisit them later. The movement looks quite different now, they're like... hauling themselves forward through the corridors.

The movement speed is determined by how many legs are grasping, if all four limbs are holding on to something it moves very quickly, if all of them are in the air the body barely moves at all. There is a little cheating though, even with no legs contacting terrain there is some movement, so that it won't get stuck.

Still some flickering going on with the knees though, more fine tuning needed.

JLJac on June 02, 2012, 12:13:38 AM:

Update 50
Taking a first look at how I'll actually implement some graphics for the croc.



Not super happy with any of the heads, but hopefully I'm getting there.

JLJac on June 02, 2012, 11:44:44 PM:

Update 51
Implemented a jaw for the croc, that's separate from the head and can open and close. Also started to set up a framework for how the head will rotate depending on the angle of the body.

The crocs now climb poles in a slightly more reasonable manner, instead of just gliding along on the centre of the pole like a monorail then will climb on top of horizontal poles and on the sides of vertical ones.

JLJac on June 03, 2012, 10:24:24 PM:

I will have limited internet connection for a couple of days. I will still try to work on the game every day, but updates might be a bit more irregular.

JLJac on June 07, 2012, 09:42:12 PM:

Hehe thanks for making me look like less of a *forever alone*  
You didn't like the corridors? Seems everyone liked different aspects... it'll be hard to find common points in this feedback. I'll get to it, though! If you feel your feedback has not been considered, don't worry, it'll kick in for real once I get to designing the levels. Hopefully I'll be able to do a post where I summarize the feedback and describe what it made me change, so you really feel that your input made a difference.

Update 52
Do you remember the light raytracing? I came up with a new way to do it, and it baffles me that I didn't think of this before. To put it simply; imagine that instead of going through every single pixel and trace a ray from that pixel through every single layer to see where it hits, you use a bitmap. The bitmap is white in the places where there is light and black where there's shadow. It repeats through all the layers once. When arriving to a new layer it applies the "shadow image" to that layer, and then adds that layer's contour to the shadow image. This means that when the next layer is supposed to get its share of light, the pixels that were blocked by the previous layer are blacked out, creating a shadow. As it proceeds through the 20 layers the shadow image gets more shadow and less light, as the different surfaces absorb the light.

The effect of this is, sadly, almost exactly the same as the previous system. The difference is that it takes like 15 seconds to render instead of 7 minutes. You don't really care about this progess I guess, but it has implications. Being able to more swiftly regenerate or make changes to a level will make the levels better, because it'll feel worth it to regenerate a level even because of smaller flaws.

JLJac on June 09, 2012, 10:30:57 PM:

Yeah, the corridors are a bit different. Essentially there are two games, one that's a maze game like pac-man, when in the corridors, and one that's a platformer, when out in open areas. When out in the open the game is more about jumping and doing cool moves to avoid crocs that have inevitably seen you, while in the corridors the game is about making them never spot you in the first place. Try to play slower, and make sure they don't see you.

I'll look at the ledge stuff!

Update 53
As you who played the alpha are aware of, the flies are able to dive back in their hives when chased. I did some tweaking of this today, and made it so that burrowing takes a little bit of time for them, instead of them dissapearing on contact with the floor. This means that if you're right behind them you can still catch them while they're burrowing, making it a little bit easier and less unfair. To compensate for this I also implemented that flies won't appear out of a hive that a player is close to, so that you can't just wait on a hive for them to pop up and then exploit that they can't dissapear as quickly.

Furthermore, the croc AI had an error going on in its simulation of the movement of unseen players. It would assume that a player would fall through the passable floors, making it behave weird in a situation where the croc is below a floor with a player up above. As soon as the croc left the site to get to the player it would imagine that the player had fallen down to the lower level, and turn around. Once there, it would see that the player was actually still up there, and turn around again. This behvaiour would then repeat. It was easily fixed by making the "ghost player" in the croc's head interact with platforms in another way, which has probably created a whole batch of new, exciting errors for me to discover tomorrow!

JLJac on June 10, 2012, 01:44:48 AM:

A little weak on the art side lately, so here are some sketches:

JLJac on June 10, 2012, 11:14:28 PM:

Update 54
Started implementing graphics for the fly. Also fixed that AI problem I described earlier, for real this time.

JLJac on June 11, 2012, 11:23:08 PM:

Update 55
Further animation work on the croc. I made its head change color, a weird art direction choice that has actually been around forever, but which I don't think I've told you about. Will try it out some more to see if it works, if so it'll stick. The color changes are between black and a color, not all around the palette, and they help communicate whether or not the croc has spotted you. It looks cool but needs a lot of polish. Other than that the croc's jaw has gotten some more animation, now it opens it up when approaching a player and snaps it shut when attacking.

Hopefully the next video I upload will be a graphically exciting one.

JLJac on June 12, 2012, 09:47:20 AM:

It turns out the crocs are eating as much framerate as they are players. A single croc takes 8-9 milliseconds to draw on the screen, and then the math is simple, with a framrate where one frame can take no more than 25 milliseconds there can be no more than two crocs on the screen at the same time. I did some investigation, and it turns out that the problem is the legs I worked so much on. They're drawn as vector lines, and obviously take quite some time to draw. I'll look into one other solution before I discard them, but it seems there might be no avoiding going into time consuming pixel animations here.

JLJac on June 12, 2012, 11:30:02 PM:

Update 56
Made the croc's legs work the same way as the player's arms, they're a pixel animation that changes picture depending on distance while the software does the rotation. It looks ok, though not as good as the previous vector solution. But, it released a lot of milliseconds per frame, which can be used for other cool stuff.

As you who have played the alpha know the croc used to just pop out of existance when entering a shortcut. I made a ten frame phase where the body is sucked into the opening before it's taken out of play, hopefully creating a smoother look (and also giving you a slight advantage, since a croc will now be delayed ten frames when pursuing you through a shortcut). The player already had an animation like this, and the fly don't need one as it is already entirely covered by the shortcut graphic once the popping out of the level occurs.

JLJac on June 13, 2012, 10:10:41 PM:

Update 57
Made a pixel animation for the rotation of the croc's head. It looks nice, I think! It seems that only the head will in the end consist of four sprites, the head, the lower jaw, the teeth of the lower jaw and also one sprite with the teeth of the upper head and the eyes. Phew.

Preferably the lower jaw sprite will be below the player, so that when the croc carries you it'll look like you're really pinched in between the jaws. Because of the separate teeth sprites these can too be placed below the player, hopefully making it look like they're inside the players body (to those who play the game through a magnifier glass).

I'm sorry about those boring graphical updates, but remember that they lead to something everybody loves, exciting graphics!

JLJac on June 14, 2012, 10:38:14 PM:

Update 58
Gave the croc teeth and eyes. Also started to do the pixel animation for its arms, but there was a bit of lag in photoshop causing me to rage quit before I was done. Once I've restarted the computer it'll go away and I can finish it, but there's an "important update" looming, making me unwilling to go through that process.

Those updates are never important, are they? The fact that you can't postpone it indefinitely is extemely irritating, and that once you've postponed it an unknown number of times it just suddenly shuts down you computer makes me commit horrible acts of violence towards everyday objects in my surroundings. Now that I've already derailed I want to say that I think the main problem with Microsoft products aren't that they're bad, it's that they're irritating. Msn messenger popping up from minimized mode every time you put the computer to sleep, the "important updates", IE moving the cursor from the adress field to the page halfway through a word, "checking for solutions" even though obviously nothing at all is happening, and so on and so on... The stuff works, but by little means it's making you slowly drift towards insanity.

JLJac on June 17, 2012, 09:45:47 PM:

Here you can see a little bit of it!
Update 59
Worked some on the animation, and made the arm for the pink croc:



The way this works is that the sprite changes animation state depending on the distance between the hand and its socket in the croc's body, and the software rotates the sprite. The location of the sprite is determined by the hand position, not the socket position, making even one pixel movements visible despite the animation having a resolution of five pixels per frame.

The hind legs will have a separate animation, but now I have a template to work from and that should be quickly dealt with.

JLJac on June 18, 2012, 06:21:15 AM:

Update 60
For some reason I decided to re-open the huge can of worms that is the croc AI. As those of you who have played the alpha might know, there's a weird quirk where if a croc spots you, it doesn't turn towards you but instead hurries off in another direction, making a huge detour before finally arrive to the place you were once at.

This is because I had the following system set up: The paths are calculated from the goal position towards the croc. When the path reaches the croc, a new path is started up, with whatever new place is the croc's target as a source.

This meant that when a croc saw you, it would first of all continue calculating how to get to some random place on the map it was headed for, start off in that direction, then start to calculating how to get to you (quite often while literally outrunning it's own thought process by moving in the opposite direction faster than the pathing could catch up with it), then turn around and try getting to you.

An easy solution for this, which is now implemented, is that upon spotting a player the target position is reset. With this new behaviour a croc that was previously idle or searching, which now spots a player, will stop in its tracks for a second to calculate how to get to you, and then set off.

The problem with this however, was that during a hunt the player will appear and dissapear repetedly from the croc's view, and when the croc resetted its pathing process every time it spotted a player it didn't get very far at all. Finally this was solved, by making it so that this stuff only applies to a croc that is actually changing from idle behaviour to hunting behaviour.

As a part of looking at the AI again I noticed that a croc that has lost track of a player will investigate the area two times instead of one, which isn't very good as a search like that might take upwards 30 seconds, and two of them might mean that a croc is confined to a small area more or less for the rest of the game.

I have an idea of what's causing this, and will look into it tomorrow.

Furthermore, the arms are coming together. I had to make three animations like the one above, because the arm needs to be able to rotate... inwards so to speak, but I think that it right now looks OK, or at least has the potential to look OK.

JLJac on June 18, 2012, 11:19:23 PM:

Update 61
Hopefully managed to solve the searching twice problem.
The arms and legs ended up needing quite a lot of sprites.



What you see here is the arm, in 0-8 extension modes and three different degrees of rotation towards the viewer, where the topmost is a profile where you see the bend of the elbow, while the third row is the same arm viewed from "above". Rows 4-6 are the same thing, but for the leg.

I have also worked a little bit on the stats for the crocs, starting to differentiate them from each other. The fifth and final(?) species is in now, which is the white croc. This makes them five:

Green - Big, strong, dumb, easy. Lazy, is mostly staying still unless it sees a player.
Pink - Standard. Can climb poles, decently smart, OK hearing.
Blue - Wall climber. Prefers to hang around walls or ceilings rather than floors and passages.
White - Stealthy. Can climb walls but not ceilings. Sits still and changes color to blend into its environment.
Red - Hard. Fast, smart, superb hearing. Never stops, but is constantly moving around the map.

The white lizard will behave a little differently, because its tactic is not pursuing, but ambushing. It sits completely still on a wall, and blends into the background so that it's barely visible. When a player comes by it makes a rush. When moving it's white.

While the other lizards benefit from searching an area where they've lost a player, the white lizard is better of staying still and waiting, because the longer it stays blended the easier you forget where it is. This means that the white lizard will be considerably less persistent in pursuing you, it will instead give up pretty quickly when it loses visual contact and instead go back to stealth mode.

Hopefully this will bring some fun variety to the game, if not it might be thrown out or changed.

JLJac on June 20, 2012, 10:43:09 PM:

Update 62
Today I finally started to make changes to the different lizards' bodies. It's fun to see how much difference it makes to just make small adjustments such as making them fat/skinny, short tail/long tail and things like that. I also started on making different heads for them. I think the graphics will help giving them fun different personalities. Pics soon.

JLJac on June 21, 2012, 10:09:45 PM:

Here is a video of what the crocs looks like now, just to give you and idea what I've been working on lately.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QnWjkKgwdw&feature=youtu.be

JLJac on June 24, 2012, 02:23:19 AM:

Glad you liked it!

Update 63
Today I worked a bit on the level editor again. Added another effect, old electrical cords. They come in 1px, 2px and 3px thickness. Also note how the new shadow palette blends the cast shadow with the self shadowing on the tiles.



There's a little fog going on as well right now, I'm debating with myself wether or not to keep it. It seems cleaner with flat color surfaces, but it looks a little better with gradients, maybe? It adds a little deptht to the image.

JLJac on June 25, 2012, 08:19:03 AM:

Update 64
Improved the way creatures are displayed when moving in shortcuts. Now they are also visible against "back walls", meaning that you won't lose track of your character for a few frames the way you used to.

JLJac on June 25, 2012, 11:23:16 PM:

Update 65
Added another layer of background, to create more depth and sense of place in the levels. The process was surprisingly painless.



This doesn't in any way affect the game itself, which still just loads a two-dimensional image and has no idea about how it was rendered or what it looks like.

JLJac on June 27, 2012, 03:48:47 AM:

The flashing heads are odd, but I still consider keping them. As the world starts to take shape they will hopefully make more sense style-wise.

Update 66
Graphical baby steps... Some work with the palettes and fog code.



The third layer is almost faded away here, which I'm happy with, but the light on the second layer is too sharp. Also I think the palette is still a bit too saturated, I want it to appear more black-and-whitish than colored, but while maintaining some of the juicyness that a little bit of color gives it. It's a hard balance. The palettes will of course differ between levels, but I'm trying to set up a general set of rules for how they'll work.

JLJac on June 27, 2012, 11:32:57 PM:

Thank you!

Update 67
More playing around with palettes. I made a palette to be used for underground areas, with the main difference being that instead of close objects being darker and faraway ones being light it's the other way around.



I also added a system for having a little blur effects going on, but it'll be used rather sparesly as I don't want to stray too far from the pixel art style.

I'm hesitating to start making actual levels for the game, as I suddenly find myself doubting whether the game layout I had imagined would be the best one possible. The idea was that there would be a small hub world in which you could move freely, and that you'd visit the different levels from there. Moving around freely is always fun, but the question is how much it actually adds. If I make the game linear I can do a lot more interesting things such as changing light and weather conditions, and in the end show off more of my world. In an open world where you can move back and forth as you please it's very weird if one area always is during the sunset, while the neighbouring place has broad daylight. Instead the whole world would have to have more or less the same conditions, as there's no way I could render all the levels during all the light conditions times all the weather conditions....

So, moving around freely in a more bland world, or play a linear game in a more interesting and diverse one? Hmm...

JLJac on June 29, 2012, 02:35:57 AM:

The idea has always been that the game will be free of charge. I might open a donation account though.

Update 68
A lot of progress on the level editor today, all invisible. I made the light tracer bigger than the level, so that light can fall in on the level from outside of it.

The tile editor had some work done on it as well, mostly stuff that made it work better with the new three-layer geometry. Now you can also force place a tile in a position where it's actually illegal, by holding F. This messes stuff up, but when creating levels you might sometimes want to place a solid tile halfway out in the air for one or another reason, and this lets you do that.

In order to give you some visuals, here are some chains:



Note how the sky has a little blurred light going on. That's an option you can turn on and off (or which will be automatically triggered by certain palettes). The other option is that lit surfaces glow like this, like in the last screenshot i posted.

Still haven't really decided on the linear/open world thing, but am leaning towards linear.

JLJac on June 29, 2012, 11:09:00 PM:

Update 69
Managed to implement the correct formula for hanging wires and chains, so that their arcs are actually accurate to what a real rope hanging in constant gravity looks like. The difference is not really visible, but it brings peace of mind.

JLJac on June 30, 2012, 10:18:07 AM (Last Edit: June 30, 2012, 12:34:16 PM):

Gah... I'm actually stuck. The next step would be to start making levels, and then further development of the level editor and creation of graphical assets would depend on the demand of the levels created. However, the layout of the levels are dependent on what kind of overall game layout I'm going with, which I can't decide on.

Here are the options in more detail:

Hub world layout:
The game is set up around a lair where the bear(s) hide out during bad weather. Around this lair is a small inter-connected hub world (3x3 levels) in which you can move freely. Surrounding this hub world are seven "levels", which contain hives.

The game is consisting of seven "hunts". A hunt is a short persiod of clear weather, during which the bears go out in the world, find their way to a level, and hunt some flies. As a level is once hunted on the swarm stops, and the next hunt you'll have to go somewhere else. This means that you have to go further and further, making for increasing difficulty, maybe even with less and less time at your disposal. Still there is some possibility for variation, as you can take different routes and visit the levels in different orders.

The premiss also states that a bear needs one fly in its belly for each day it's going to hibernate, and the clear weather is more and more sparse as the wet season continues. This means that during early hunts you might only need two or three flies to win, but in the later ones you might need a lot more.

The game is about surviving one wet season, the highscore consists of how many extra flies you've caught, and how little time you've managed to do so in.

Pros: Open world, feels free and makes it feel more like an actual little world, not just a series of levels. Replayability! Once you've played it once it might be fun to try different approaches, different routes and orders and so on, in order to catch extra flies and break the highscore. "What if I take the faraway level first, then the closest one..." Many many possible ways to complete a game, making the game last longer when you for example want to play co-operative.

Cons: Visual blandness, if you can move freely, all the levels should have about the same light and weather conditions. Technical difficulties, the game should probably keep track of crocs on levels you've just left, or maybe even allow crocs to move between levels. Same goes for flies. A bit of difficulty when two players are moving around, which level will it go to if both players jump into different exits? Boring parts where you are too far away from the lair with too little time, and already know you're going to die but still have to wait it out.

Story layout
Basically the game premiss is the same, but it's "faked" rather than incorporated into actual gameplay. First there's one or a few platform levels that are about getting to the hunting ground, then there's the hunting and then maybe there's a getting back. The next hunt is a similar scenario, but with other levels.

There are also "custom levels" such as those you make yourself, which are like the ones in the alpha, short, one-level scenarios you play against your own highscore or against a friend. These you can also make yourself with the level editor.

Pros: Much more possibilities visually. I can show what the world looks like during sunset, day, night, thunder, have some levels that are just there to set the mood. I can create more cineastic events such as ~ I dunno, fleeing in a pipe with drain water chasing you, some part of the terrain falling over, customly scripted stuff like that. Halway through the game the lair might be flooded and the bears need to find another one - a lot of custom scenarios decided by me.

Cons: A linear platformer... have we seen it before, maybe? It's done to death. Replayability plummets, once you've gone through a campaign like that you're done with it. These two are very serious cons.



In conclusion, I can either make a fairly simple and bland little world, but it is actually a little world that works in and of itself, or I can show off a more grand, complicated world with many different things happening in it, but it's fake and pre-destined. This is the common mainstream approach today, I guess.

A game like pac-man or tetris is a very simple world, but everything that is said to be possible to happen in the world can actually happen in the world, even if it's only units moving around. A game like.. say, gears of war has a lot of things that are said to be able to happen, such as building collapsing and the like, that are not actually able to happen inside of the functionality of the game, but are artificially added to make the experience more exciting.

I wanted to go with the old-school approach of a self-contained world, but am now thinking about going more towards the modern movie/game kind of style.

This decision is not easy.

JLJac on July 24, 2012, 10:39:44 AM:

Hi there!
Contrary to what you're all probably thinking by now neither I nor the project is dead. Things have actually happened, even!

Yesterday the above decision was made final by me implementing the framework for moving between levels, and setting up two different game types, "custom" and "world". This means we have a hub world layout.

Pretty much every game these days do the kind of cop-out I was thinking about, where they promise something dynamic and interesting, only to cut all the corners and provide a linear movie-game. I don't wanna do the same.

Things that have happened, just the few at the top of my head:
1-lizard AI of course.
2-Graphics for the A creature, and additional behaviour
3-Started to implement sound(which I'm not very good at)
4-framrate stuff
5-level editor stuff
6-connecting levels so that you can move between them
7-endless tinkering with the palettes
And quite a lot of other things that had to be done but are not very interesting. There's more stuff, but instead of listing it all it'll be nice surprises for you when you notice it. Think of it as "free progress" you didn't think it was happening, but it was~

I hope I'll be able to get back to regular updates shortly.
Thank you for having patience!

JLJac on July 24, 2012, 11:40:57 PM:

Update 70

Today I successfully connected a couple of placeholder levels together to a hub world.




You can move freely between the levels, and there's consistensy in which entrance leads where, and if you go back you'll appear out of the same entrance you left through. Hopefully.

Soon, I'll start to actually build the world. I do have a map of what levels connect where, but will improvise the layout of the actual levels.

JLJac on July 25, 2012, 11:52:12 PM:

Today I once again struggled with making camstudio, divx codec and windows 7 work together. After two hours I had gotten nowhere, and messed up my computer horribly. Now I'm working on restoring it. I guess there won't be videos, simply. :/

JLJac on July 27, 2012, 01:12:56 AM:

Update 71
Ok, so the world is divided into hub rooms and hive rooms or whatever you want to call them, rooms you pass through and rooms where the flies are. I don't really want to include a map, but I still need to somehow lead the player towards a hive room that is currently swarming, as you won't have time to go check them all.

What I've started working on today is that when you enter a hub room, you'll see a fly dissappearing into one of the exits leading to another room. If you follow it, it will eventually lead you to the closest swarming hive room.

This has required some work, becuase there needs to be a little bit of inter-level path finding going on. It has been managable though, as I don't really want flies actually moving around through the world. Instead I can do this inter-level pathing stuff just once when loading a new room and then spawn one single fly that is very close to the exit. The idea is that you shouldn't be able to catch it, just see where it goes.

JLJac on July 27, 2012, 05:23:49 AM:

That's a good idea! If it's needed I'll implement it, I think it won't be though, because as a room is loaded the player will be in shortcut-mode half a second or so before popping out in the actual room, and during this time you'll have nothing else to look at except the fly.

This is a balance act for me. The feeling I want to create is a sort of "law of the jungle" thing, where there is a world and it's painfully obvious that no other entity than you yourself care about your survival. Like, there's no deus-ex machina leading you along, but staying alive is very much your own responsibility and failing is a very real risk. I think that in games like that it's much more satisfying when you actually do manage something, because you know that you did it yourself. Think for example of the difference between defeating an AI enemy and defeating another player in a game - online you know that you weren't favoured in any way and that makes it feel more awsome.

Guess what I'm trying to say is that if the player isn't very observant, they're welcome to die and then be more observant the next time 

On the other hand, it has to be playable... So yeah, balance act.

JLJac on July 28, 2012, 01:07:23 AM:

Update 72
Did some brushing up on the work I did yesterday. Now your score follows you between levels, as well as the flies you're holding in your hands and how many bites you've taken out of them.

I also noticed that it's way too easy to catch the "lead flies" as I call them, the ones that inhabit the hub world and are there to lead you to the actual level you're going for. I put in some pretty harsh measures to keep you from catching those, because otherwise you'd never go to the levels but spend your entire time going back and forth between the first and the second room in the hub world, and that wouldn't make a very good game.

So, now there will only appear lead flies once in each level and each direction. This means that if you've already had your chance at seeing where to go in a room, they won't appear there again.

On top of this there's a counter, so if you catch too many lead flies they'll simply stop appearing. This symbolizes that it's actually the same few flies you chase through all the rooms, and catching and killing them will ruin your opportunity to follow them to where their friends are. I guess that the first time you see one there could be a message saying "don't catch it, it'll lead you to the others" or something like that.

The effect of this whole system is supposed to be that if you're a first time player and play by the book, you'll easily be able to follow the lead flies to the closest swarming room. If you're an experienced player trying to exploit it, they'll dissappear. The goal is that the game should be... not easy, but fair, as long as you're playing fair. If you mess with it you ought to know what you're doing, because then the help will be withdrawn.

JLJac on July 29, 2012, 11:21:47 PM:

Update 73
Feature creep monday!
There's now a new and pretty fun element in the game. There are pebbles that you can pick up and throw.

Holding the pebbles is tied in with the same framework as holding flies, so you can hold two pebbles but then you can't hold any flies, and carrying around one pebble you can only catch one fly.

Pebbles can be thrown at other creatures. The lizards respond quite differently to this depending on size, the big green is barely affected, while the blue one which is the smallest in the family is tossed like a rag doll for a few frames, and then needs some time to recover. Other players and flies are of course affected too.

When a pebble hits a wall it makes a sound that can be heard by lizards.

Maybe I'll add a few different versions, such as something made out of glass that can be heard all across the level but only has one use, or something sharp that makes a lizard flee back to its hole. It's easy and fun to work with this stuff.

You will never be able to actually kill a lizard, because that would undermine them as being dangerous and put them in the "enemy" category, but at least you're now able to fend them off and buy yourself half a second. Actually I think you can kill them now, with a well placed shot exactly as they are climbing across a gap, but that would be very hard to do.

JLJac on July 30, 2012, 11:17:24 PM:

Update 74
Boring but very necessary work today. Started on some kind of main menu that holds the level editor together, from where you can load and save level projects and access the different editors.



This has been needed for a long time, but I've neglected it because I've been able to work around it. Now I'm getting to it as I can no longer make levels from scratch, I need to be able to save a level editor project as some kind of file, so I can return to it later and make changes. Once this is done it will finally be worth it to start making levels for the world, knowing that if I need to make changes of any kind that won't necessarily mean building the whole thing from scratch again.

As always when working with user interfaces the progress is painful and slow, but now I at least have some basic buttons up and running. For the first time ever you can add some tiles in the tile editor, then change your mind about some geometry stuff and go back and change it, then return to the tile editor again. In this case you'd likely have to clean up some tiles that are hanging in the air or otherwise occupying illegal positions, but it's a lot better than not being able to at all.

JLJac on July 31, 2012, 11:22:48 PM:

Thanks! I will!

Update 75
Earlier I've started to do some sound implementation, today I continued with that. Sound is really my weakest spot, and it takes a lot of trial and error to get stuff to work out.

It's been a while, so here's a screenshot of what the game looks like right now:



This level is called "shooting range", the flies keep to the middle and you get them by throwing stuff at them from the balconies. You see the little black things on the lower platforms? Those are "pebbles"(actually their graphics are most often representing different kinds of scrap metal and machine parts). When you get close to them they blink a little, so you can see them.

Right now throwing stuff when climbing on a vertical pole makes you lose your grip, I guess I should attend to that.

JLJac on August 03, 2012, 04:13:59 AM:

There's some school stuff going on, and updates might not be daily for a little while now. I'll still work on it though, and I'll try to let you know how things are progressing.

JLJac on August 04, 2012, 01:03:47 PM:

Update 76
Finally I took some time to work on some graphics!
Today I did the intricate pipe tileset, the big heads and the moss like plant shown in this screenshot.



Note how the head thingie is a little three-dimensional, you can se the slightest difference in direction between the leftmost and the rightmost face, and on the ones in the background you can see how the shadows play a little over the shapes in a way they wouldn't if they were entirely flat.

As always when I have schoolwork hanging over me I got terribly inspired, and still have ideas for pieces of graphics I didn't have time to do today. But I'll get to them!

Slowly but surely I'm getting to the point where the world starts to take shape, and I can work more with actually conveying what this place looks like rather than just working on the tools I need to get there. Still, there's a lot of tool making left to do...

JLJac on August 05, 2012, 09:56:54 PM:

Update 77
An insignificant step for the thread readers, but a huge leap for the developer! I've managed to save a level editor project and load it again. This means that I don't have to start over every time I want to make a level, but can continue from where I left off. This, in turn, means I don't have to have all the tiles and plants and stuff I could possibly ever want for a level in order to start working on that level, as I can add in stuff later. This, in turn, means that I can finally start making actual levels for the actual game.

JLJac on August 07, 2012, 01:39:14 AM:

Oh, that's a problem. I need to think about the name then!

I'll leave you for a week. I need to concentrate on a deadline for school, and the only way is to completely purge my mind of this project.

Here's a farewell gift though, a makabre little application in wich you can watch the crocs eat two dead bears. The sound is stripped away as I don't have anything I'm happy with yet, but you'll at least get an idea about what stuff looks like at this point.



See you in a week!

JLJac on August 16, 2012, 05:05:55 AM:

Hi, I'm back!
From now I'll return to the previous ~one hour a day work schedule.

Update 78
Enabled you to bring objects from one level to another in world mode. When carrying pebbles their look is consistent between levels, and when carrying flies the number of bites taken out of them is saved. If in the future I want to add other objects than pebbles the framework supports this as well.

JLJac on August 17, 2012, 04:15:46 AM:

Thanks! The way I animate things is by a combination of pixel animation and a vector animation. I don't remember how much detil I go into, but there is some stuff on animation back there.

Update 79
We've got spears! Since the early stages when I had only animated the bear character, and the setting was more jungle/temple-ish, I had always imagined the character as spear wielding. So I added it, and it seems to work OK with this setting as well.

The spear is thrown in the same way as the rocks, but is much more powerful. Most of the lizards will retreat back into their holes after one hit, possibly taking your spear with them if you don't run up to them and pull it out again. Players are killed instantly. Now the lizards have a health meter, and can die. In most cases you won't see this though, as they flee way before they're close to dying.

The red lizard, which is the persistent one, never gives up chasing you no matter how messed up it is. I had a pretty epic fight with one, where I several times threw the spear at it, then quickly jumped on it and pulled the spear out before it got out of its stun. Different lizards can take different amounts of abuse, and the red one is of course the toughest.

The health meter means you can make a lizard retreat by bombarding it with rocks, but that would take quite some time even if you're two people doing it.

JLJac on August 18, 2012, 01:46:49 AM:

Hehe! Those lizards only get a graphics update every 4:th frame though, so they might not look very smooth. I'm thinking about removing that optimization, the game seems to run OK witouth it. Oh, and a pro tip: I forgot to disable the C and V keys for the demo, try holding them!

Update 80
Made spears stick in walls. Added a few new sounds. There is a yellow lizard that hunts in packs. If one of them sees you the entire pack knows where you are.

JLJac on August 19, 2012, 08:34:25 AM:

Update 81
Did some small adjustments and added sound for the flies.

JLJac on August 20, 2012, 02:52:26 AM:

Glad to have you on board!

Update 82
Resolved several minor issues in the level editor and the game. Added some graphical stuff that makes it clearer when a lizard has spotted you.

JLJac on August 22, 2012, 03:14:50 AM:

Internet connection will be a little shaky for a few days, but I'll still be able to work on the game.

JLJac on August 25, 2012, 09:27:52 PM:

Hi!
I'm writing this from my phone, you'll get more insight into what's been going on once I get to a computer with an internet connection. Just wanted to let you know that stuff is still happening.

JLJac on August 26, 2012, 10:52:35 PM:

Update 83
Still no stable internet connection, but at least I can upload some pictures.
Most of my recent work has been on the editors:



Some of you probably recognize them, it's the level overview, the geometry editor, the tile editor and the effects editor. They are brushed up UI-wise, functions are added, projects can be saved and loaded, and the whole thing actually works as a stand-alone-application for the first time, as almost all the functions can be accessed through actual UI-solutions instead of by feeding lines into the debug code window.

Apart from this there has been a lot of small stuff in the actual game, which you never knew was missing but had to be added in. Such as up-pickable objects blinking when approaching them only if your hands aren't full, the ability to let go of flies in order to pick up spears, some work on the lizards, and so on and so on.

Art-wise there hasn't been a ton of progress, but at least some. For example these are in:



The signs are randomly generated from a set of parts:



Long ago I promised that I wouldn't make graphics and then try to fit them into my levels, but instead make levels and then create graphics for them. This didn't happen, I'm still making a lot of loose tiles. I'll try to shape up though. Now is the time to start actually building the world.

jamesprimate on August 27, 2012, 11:06:47 AM:

its got my attention!

 

JLJac on August 29, 2012, 11:59:00 AM:

 

Announcement
After a few days of mailing back and forth James and I have decided to collaborate. James is an awesome artist who has made the score for several famous games, and I'm much looking forward to what he'll bring to the project. Check out his page!

At this point it looks like James will not only make the music, but also the sound effects for the game. He sent me an amazing sounding sketch, and I have sent him a beta version of the game.

This feels great, because as I've mentioned sound is really one of my weaker spots. The work I had done up until now I felt was just passable, but with someone who's really good dedicated to it I think it'll be not only passable, but a really good element that will add to the game.

Of course it's scary to let a part of the project out of my direct control, but it's a leap of faith that will likely bring a lot of good stuff. Now this part can develop more independently, and hopefully the whole will end up greater than the sum of the parts in a way that wouldn't be possible if I did everything myself. I'm much looking forward to seeing where this goes!

Welcome James! Say something to introduce yourself!

Update 84
Thank you people for your attention!

Once again I've been wrestling the seemingly (to me) impossible task of capturing and uploading a video. Stuff just will not work. Finally I managed to get a .avi file, but it's uncompressed and too big to upload. I also have an .swf, but that one got some buggy lines in it when I uploaded it. Once again I simply got too tired of it and decided to quit, but if anyone has any tips of how capturing video and uploading it can be done they're very welcome to tell me

In other news there has been a little progress here and there, as usual. There's now a very simple function for making cracks in walls, so that you can make a passage while at the same time conveying that a structure was actually meant to look in another specific way. For example if you want to make a level that has two identical pipes at each side, but want the player to be able to pass through one but not the other, you can use the function to create a crack through one of the pipes. It'll then be passable, while it will still be conveyed that it was meant to look like the other pipe. It doesn't look awesome, but it does the job.

Also started to get back to the game engine for the campaign game mode. This needs to be finished in order to get to the long promised building of the actual world that we should be getting to soon now, I hope.

jamesprimate on August 30, 2012, 12:07:08 PM:

Thanks JLJac! These guys know me, I'll let the music do the talking ;]

If you've been following along, you know that the game is a fairly brutal struggle for survival set in the dilapidated ruins of a post-apocalyptic city. You play as a small creature searching for food in between torrential downpours, dodging the hazzards of the local flora, perpetually hunted by vicious creatures. 

From my perspective, the music needs to both set the emotional tone of the protagonist animal and immediately “describe” the fascinating world that JLJac has created. This is a start to that. The ambiance, sfx and music will of course be separate assets in the actual game, but with this I wanted to convey the overall "sound experience" that I have envisioned. Hope you enjoy!

http://soundcloud.com/james_primate/rain-world-ambiance-sketch

jamesprimate on September 07, 2012, 10:35:16 PM:

thanks guyssssssss! Im really stoked, this is going to be a great.

Looks like things are shaping up! Been talking back and forth with JLJac and the levels look pretty structured. For sound stuff, we're stitching ambiance stuff together and I've got a few tracks together that sound nice and cohesive. But I just spent like 2 days working on a new piece that Im really excited about...  and it totally isn't going to fit the gameplay haha. OH WELL, BONUS CONTENT!

JLJac on September 10, 2012, 01:51:19 PM:

Update 85
Hi! Sorry it's been a while - real life stuff has been occupying me, but I've also been able to do a little Rain World work. Here's a screenshot:



This level contains some custom graphical assets - for example the machine the player is standing on is drawn explicitly for this purpose. The idea is that if I want to use something like this in another level as well that's allowed, and this way the library of graphical assets will grow and make the levels more and more diverse.

As the levels can be loaded and manipulated I can go back to levels I've already done and add in new assets as they are made.

James has been doing some cool stuff on his side, even though it was some time since I heard from him... How's it going, James?

The world is starting to take shape, and for example the above screenshot is from an actual area in the game. This means I'm a little more hesistant to show everything I do at this point, as I don't want to give too much away. Hopefully I'll manage to find a balance between keeping the devlog interesting and still making the final release exciting with a lot of stuff that hasn't been seen before.

JLJac on September 12, 2012, 04:25:57 AM:

Update 86
Further work on the engine that will handle the *game* aspect of this thing, the one which will divide the world into levels, lead you to places in a certain order, remember what places you've already visited and so on.

What's up an running right now is this:
The player are free to access the swarm rooms in whatever order they see fit. There is, however, a recommended order. This means that each of the seven hunts has an assigned swarm room, and during that hunt you will be lead to that swarm room by the lead flies. If you play like this the game is basically linear.

But, you can visit any swarm room any time. However, once you've hunted in a swarm room it won't swarm the next hunt - meaning that if you go to room 5 the first thing you do, there'll be trouble once the game arrives at hunt 5, because the recommended room is already used up. In this case it'll just lead you to the closest active room (thank god for A*). Then there are other interesting alternatives, such as the player cathing a few flies in one swarm room, then visiting another one before going back to the den ...

The effect of all this is supposed to be that the first time you play the game it'll be all dandy, and the game will you lead you by the hand and show you all the levels. The next playthough, when you're looking to break a high score, you have the possibility to be tactical in your play style instead.

This is supposed to effectively be two difficulties in one - if you play by the rules it's easier, but you can also go rouge and lose the help the game was providing, in return for a potentially higher score.

JLJac on September 13, 2012, 01:30:35 AM:

Update 87
Tons of progress! Been working with inter-level consistensy, and have accomplished quite a few things I'm happy about. First of all, objects are now saved between levels. This means that if you pick up one specific pebble and move it a few tiles and then exit the level, it'll remain in the same position when you get back, an there is no new pebble spawned in its original position. You can also pick it up, move it to another level, put it on the ground, leave, then come back... yeah you get it.

The great thing is that objects that are not touched are not saved, so if you enter a room with 100 rocks on the ground and pick up two, the remaining 98 won't be occupying any memory. Still, if you re-enter the room, there'll be only 98 rocks on the ground.

Technically this is done by assigning each object an ID, which consists of what level it belongs in, and where on that level it's spawned. When entering a level the objects check a list of all the moved/destroyed/held objects in the world, and if it finds its own ID on that list it doesn't spawn.

About the same thing is done with lizards. They have the same basic functionality with having their positions saved as you exit a room, and re-loaded when you get back.

As some of you might remember lizards are trigged by catching flies. Now, if I enter a room having caught 4 flies, and the lizard in that room was triggered at 3, it will now appear out in the level from the start, instead of emerging from its hole, as if it crawled out while you were not there yet. Lizards' health condition is also saved across levels.

To give some fairness to the system lizards that are loaded from memory or generated out in the environment are never spawned too close to the hole from which the player is emerging.

All this functionality makes the world seem more like one place rather than a couple of stiched-together levels, and it also adds gameplay aspects. For example, now the world only has a set amount of spears and rocks, and you have to manage them carefully.

JLJac on September 15, 2012, 12:36:30 PM:

Hey people! A gameplay video!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mV7HNKWeHVQ&feature=youtu.be

jamesprimate on September 15, 2012, 05:39:17 PM:

My girlfriend was watching the gameplay video and MAN does it look good fullscreen on the iPad! Just sayin'.

jamesprimate on September 19, 2012, 05:41:08 AM:

Chiming in with some new Rain World tunes! They'll make more sense in context, but never hurts to show some WIP 

A break-centric fidget piece for a mid-difficulty level hunt:
http://soundcloud.com/james_primate/rain-world-sketch-6d

A more "positive" emotive tune for a near-end level hunt:
http://soundcloud.com/james_primate/rain-world-sketch-4

i really love working on this game!

JLJac on September 23, 2012, 09:27:01 AM:

Update 88
Working a lot lately, and what I've been doing is mostly level layouts for the world mode, which is why I haven't posted anything in a while. Still, there's slow but steady progress.

I have a world map which I think is working decently. Some of the levels on the map are more or less decided how they're going to look, while some are not started on yet.

For the first time in rain world history my work is more about creating content than about making the engine run, which feels weird. Still, it's a good thing, because it means we're actually getting there, and that I might be able to estimate how long this is going to take some time soon.

Then again... I've made the estimation that the game will be out in "about a month" for five months now, so you never know. Still, I've gotten much, much further now than five months ago!

JLJac on September 25, 2012, 12:41:18 PM:

Update 89
Did a little work on the yellow lizards, the ones working in teams. They actually work now, and do a little bit of surrounding the player.

I also made lizards able to see a thrown object (rock or spear) and calculate from where it might have been thrown. The calculation isn't perfect, so it's possible to fool them by throwing a rock in front of their faces and hope that they will go looking for you somewhere behind where you were actually at while throwing.

JLJac on September 26, 2012, 02:46:05 AM:

Update 90
Made the lizards able to pick up objects. Depending on color and mood they might pick up spears, or in some cases a rock, and dispose of them either by carrying them back to their holes or by dropping them out of the level.

The spears are a very real threat to the lizards, and it would be stupid of them to not do anything.

The next thing I need to do is make the lizards respond AI-wise to a player holding a spear, but I'm not sure how to do this. If all the lizards flee as soon as they see you picking a spear up a spear will be pretty much an infinite invincibility power-up, as you would never have to actually use it. On the other hand, as it stands the lizards just run straight at you when holding a huge thing that should be easily visible and that can neutralize most of them in one blow. They will have to still attack, but in a more sneaky manner. We'll see what I come up with.

JLJac on September 26, 2012, 11:10:53 AM:

Update 91
The more intelligent lizards now act more carefully around a player with a spear.

The solution I found was that a spear carrying player is attacked from above rather than from the side. Instead of climbing straight at you the lizard will climb upwards until it's in a suitable position above you, from where it will attack.

JLJac on September 27, 2012, 11:29:26 AM:

Update 92
A player isn't instantly dead once caught by a lizard any more, but can be alive a little while when carried. This means that if two players are co-operating you can save your friend from the gap of a lizard with a rock (or a carefully aimed spear).

Also did a little graphical work.

jamesprimate on September 27, 2012, 02:16:25 PM:

WOW, that sounds brutal!

which makes sense because this game is brutal.

 

JLJac on September 29, 2012, 09:40:10 AM:

Haha yeah, it's pretty brutal!

Update 93
Finally got around to working on some art today, which enabled me to send two "final" levels (there's always more changes to be done) to James, so he can start getting some feel for what this game will look like.

Made it so that dead lizards fall through platform type terrain, sometimes the corpses would end up with their torso on a platform and their hips below it and get stuck in a vibrating motion, now they just fall straight through to the ground.

JLJac on October 01, 2012, 05:56:28 AM:

THANK YUO!

Update 94
Making levels, making levels. For the first time like, ever, I've done something according to my policy - recognizing a demand for a feature when making a level and then adding it, rather than adding features with abandon and then trying to cram them into the levels. The feature in question is the ability to mark a tile as forbidden for flies to swarm, form chains or hang around unecessarily on. A level I made had a room that was only accessable to flies, and quickly turned very boring when all the flies decided to just hang out in that one room (why shouldn't they, right?). Also made it possible to mark tiles for spawning flies on level startup.

Have been working with a lot of juicy palettes and light options as well. The idea that the game will be monochrome is given up, it will have pretty vibrant colors actually. I'm eager to show you some of the stuff, but at the same time don't want to spoil the whole game in here. Soon I'll give you something though, I just want to have enough material to feel that whatever I'm giving away is not a substancial part of it.

JLJac on October 01, 2012, 12:29:28 PM:

Update 95
Made a little more art for the levels.

Gave the lizards a "jaw strenght" stat, that regulates a random chance of how often a player that is caught is killed instantly and how often they are alive to be saved. This is to not make the players too comfortable with always surviving a lizard bite - I'm worrying that players in co-op mode might find ways to exploit it. For the pink one, that I view as the "standard" lizard, it's a chance of 1/12. On top of this there's a small chance of death every frame you're being held in a lizard's mouth, so that the player who's supposed to save you doesn't relax too much, but has a reason to chase frantically. The games get pretty hectic!

jamesprimate on October 01, 2012, 10:32:18 PM (Last Edit: October 01, 2012, 11:09:42 PM):

Hm! Is this going to be a multiplayer only thing, or can i flail about on the buttons for a chance to escape the jaws in single player as well?


oh and just for the official record: i AM doing things update ;] 34 minutes of music in usable form and we're beginning to stitch together background ambiance audio. JLJac's level design for rainworld is *really* cool in that everything is connected with an underlying logic and many areas can be accessed a few different ways. I would like the ambiance audio to reflect that by thinking of it first as world-wide 'geographical regions' with specific sound qualities rather than simple discreet levels.

Simple example: there are many "high" levels where the protagonist animal is totally "outside" and heavy buffeting wind will be used as an aspect of that sound design. It would be cool if the areas that were geographically close to these "high" levels could still vaguely hear those buffeting winds, etc., etc. So basically, Im looking to create a cohesive sound-world that, in addition to reflecting the specific level design, also gives the player a subtle sonic picture of where they are at in the overall game world.

or maybe it'll just sound like a messy garble and suck! we'll find out

/audio nerd ramble ramble

JLJac on October 05, 2012, 02:17:25 AM:

Thank you! Now some of the bigger graphical assets are coming together, and the visual style of the game is slowly taking another direction. I think you'll like it!

James, I think that thing will be kept to co-op play, because no matter how hard I would make getting away by yourself someone would eventually learn to master it, and then the most dominant game play element (getting away from lizards) would be taken away from the game.

Update 96
A lot has happened. James has been creating a set of super awesome ambient sounds, that really help setting a mood. Next up is implementing those. Together with the music I'm convinced they'll make magic happen and take the game to a level which is higher than the sum of the parts.

I've done a few things programming-wise. Most importantly I've added a new "creature", that is a .... bubble barnacle - or rather a bubble coming out of a short cut entrance (the source of all life in this world, it seems). The bubbles just sit around there, and when flies touch them they are trapped inside. Once a few flies are trapped the bubble retracts, and the creature inside the short cut presumably consumes the flies.

The fun thing is their self defence, which consists of popping violently. This can throw a player around pretty far, and is generally hated by lizards.

Other things added:
Blue lizards (which are the lightest, and most vulnerable to rocks) react the same way to a player holding a rock as to a player holding a stone - by attacking from above. In some situations it's really fun to watch, like if you're being hunted on the ground by a lizard and makes it to pick up a pebble or a spear from the ground. The lizard can then turn away from you, climb up a wall, climb on the ceiling out above you and then drop down on you. It looks pretty smart!
Red lizards can destroy spears.
Fixed a bug in the level renderer which made short cuts invisible if there was a blurred light overlapping them.
Created a dynamic system for how each level can have a "light behaviour" attached to it - right now there are "no light", "static", "clouds" and "thunder" to choose from.
Fixed some random bugs concerning light not being displayed over the entire screen.
Fixed some bugs in the level renderer.
Made it more reasonable what lizards tend to pick up what objects.
Added features in the level editor - such as a slider to decide how much dripping water a level will contain. More of those are needed.

There are a few important things on my to-do list that I need to get to ASAP, but I keep pushing forward. Among those are:
An acutal look for the hives, so that you can see where a fly will be able to burrow down.
Settings for max amount of flies and fly respawn rates for a level.
Ambience sound and music implementation.
Start on building the actual main menu.
Active decorative objects for the world to make it appear more alive.

Hopefully the upcoming things will magically progress 6 times faster than the things I've already done, and the game will ever be finished!

JLJac on October 05, 2012, 11:58:49 AM (Last Edit: October 05, 2012, 02:41:04 PM):

Screenshot!

This is the swarm level of the "Canopy" area, which is high up and set during the sun set/rise. This is the second last area according to the recommended order.



The blue of the lizard will probably switch to the blue effect color of the level (seen here in the signs) to create visual consistency, if I ever get around to it. It's a hassle because some of the lizards have colored body parts that are bitmaps unchangeable from the code.

On that - I've been doing a little bit of variety among the lizards look-wise, they have a little different looking eyes and so on. The red one has huge teeth.

For those of you who have been around a long time it might be fun to notice the little machine boxes with 2x2 grated holes in them, those have been around for a looong time and were originally made mostly to check out that the voxelly graphics renderer thingy worked properly. I grew fond of them and now they'll probably make it into the final thing.

EDIT: Added a new plant, along with a new way to add plants - one by one. This framework will come in real useful later.

JLJac on October 05, 2012, 03:45:59 PM:

Update 97
Aaand I added the ability to define a random seed for an effect in the level editor, which means that if some plant or some wires or whatever feature turned out good you can actually keep them, while changing something else that you didn't like. Made a quick test where I kept an entire level the same but changed only one plant, and layered the outputs over each other to check - it seems to work! This is a good time saver when it comes to making levels.

That's it for today!

JLJac on October 06, 2012, 12:30:27 PM:

Update 98
More art and level design.

Added a little spark that travels through the short cuts, so that some of the more hidden ones are made a little more visible.

JLJac on October 09, 2012, 11:51:09 AM:

Update 99
Making levels making levels making levels.
I've more or less created the entire world in dull grey placeholder graphics, and now realize that the world needs to be extended a little bit. This is a great victory, as it means I for the first time ever planned something a little too small rather than vastly too big! My plan is to finish what I have so that it's more or less ready for release, and then carefully add the stuff that I want without letting feature creep get a hold of me.

More excitingly I've started to experiment with James' stuff, music and ambient sounds. It's awesome!

James and I are now contemplating on how the music will be implemented - the setup makes it hard to go with a conventional "one song per area" solution, and it's also hard to tie songs to events as there's not really any fixed narrative in the game. The jukebox needs to be somewhat aware of what's going on, and at the same time be able to surprise the player and not just be playing all the songs on shuffle. It's a challenge!

JLJac on October 10, 2012, 12:10:52 PM:

Thank you!  I'm most honored!
The irony of this is that your first interaction with this thread led to - the postponing of update 100 hahaha! I had planned to do a regular "Did some level design" post, but if there's expectations to meet I'll have to be able to give you at least something, and thus, we wait.
Don't be discouraged though, keep interacting!

Update 99.5
James sent me some rain sounds, and boy, did the scare the crap out of me! There are a few versions to pick from, and they all sound like different circles in rain hell. Suddenly I feel unsure whether my graphics can do justice to this when it comes to metal and stone being melted, pounded and disintegrated to nothingness. I'll have to look over my filters...

JLJac on October 11, 2012, 11:43:40 PM:

Haha this is particularly scary as I have no idea how many people are actually reading this.... o.0

Hehehe more expectations!

Thanks! I'll try too keep those quiet times as short as possible - I know that I myself prefer reading devlogs that update with small and unimportant stuff to devlogs that have long periods of quiet between fewer, more important updates. It's always fun to see that something's happening, even if it isn't very significant!

Update 99.8
Added screen shaking, for when the rain approaches.

JLJac on October 12, 2012, 12:27:08 PM:

Good to have you here!

Update 99.8.5
Introduced some effects for when the rain is approachning. At first the music fades out. Then a rain sound slowly starts to fade in. Then the light dissapears, as if the sun is covered by clouds. Then, in the final step, the screen starts to shake. By now the rain sound is a loud roar. One effective way I found to make the rain sound louder without bursting any speakers was to fade out the other sounds as the rain is faded in, so that everything else is muted when the rain is at its loudest.

Lizards and flies take shelter in their respective holes and hives as the rain is approaching.

Other things I've been doing include enabling effect colors for levels to be either reflective or superflourescent. This means that they have a little aura of blurred light either by themselves or if light is falling on them.

jamesprimate on October 12, 2012, 01:13:01 PM:

oh man, i cant wait to check out the next build :O This sounds incredible!

jamesprimate on October 12, 2012, 02:21:20 PM (Last Edit: October 12, 2012, 05:43:38 PM):

JLJac explains it more thoroughly earlier, but long story short, YES; rain = bad. On rain world, the environment is BRUTAL. Deadly rains pound the surface constantly, only letting up for a brief period of time during which the animals on the surface all emerge from hiding to hunt. Most of the game takes place during these hunting periods, where you have to catch enough food to survive the next rainy period, while avoiding being eaten by the vicious flora and fauna of course, then return to the shelter of your den. And if you are out too long... the rains will tear you apart  

JLJac on October 14, 2012, 01:53:29 PM:

Oh, the AI, my favourite subject! Actually I think that (in my case) it works the opposite way as what you describe. I haven't really found any obvious exploits, but rather have a problem where things aren't working out very well in the beginning of the game.

It's hard to sound humble when saying this, but I think that a player that's just introduced to the game will not really understand how complex the AI is, and because of that the game will work less satisfactory. Just a thing such as understanding that a lizard isn't always aware of where you are and pathing towards you takes some time to pick up, and the more complex stuff, such as "the last thing the lizard saw before I dissapeared behind those blocks was me falling downwards, and because of that it'll assume that I fell to the bottom of this shaft, which I can use to anticipate its behaviour" is hard to use even for me, even though I know that it's there and how it works.

I'm sure that many people will put the game down quickly thinking "it's just random and quirky and too hard", but my hope is that if you don't do this the game will grow on you.

So to answer this:
I think that the case with my game would be the opposite, that at first it could seem glitchy and weird, but later it will become more deep and and believable. This might vary widely between games though! I encourage you to give platforming AI a try, it's a real challange

The rain is kind of abstracted in a slightly more game-ey way, there's a little game over scene where everything suddenly turns black and silent and then the rain hits very suddenly. Of course it would be even cooler to have the rain build up slowly, but it's hard to display rain in the actual world as objects that would move according to common sense are actually static. The current solution is one of my favourite parts of making games, having to make art and technicalities meet. I'll make it look cool, promise!

Update 99.8.6.1
James and I are doing a little contract talk, which we should've gotten to way earlier. We're both aware that the game most likely won't make any money, but in the case it does we want to make sure that everything is as fair as possible. This is of course boring, but it's best to get it done as soon as possible.

In other news I've been wrestling a sudden drop in frame rate, which I have not fully identified but which could possibly have more to do with the latest vista update and my computer being old than with the actual game. Old versions lag too, which indicates that some of it might be in the computer, but new versions lag slightly more, which indicates that it's in the game. The frame rate flails wildly up and down, which makes it hard to get a good understanding of whether it's high or low.

Other than thgis I've started to contemplate on how to implement the music, and has started to set up a fairly complicated system of triggers for how songs could be activated and deactivated. We'll see where it ends up.

James sent me a new batch of ambient sounds, named "the weird batch", and they are awesome! Those are more abstract than the previous ones, and will help create a mood rather than add realism. Soon I'll get to implementing ambient sounds, it's very low hanging fruit at this point.

Added the ability to spear flies. Working a little with the blur effects, there's too much of them in some palettes which is a problem, and I might need to kill my darlings and get rid of them.

JLJac on October 15, 2012, 11:56:21 AM:

Hehehe!

Yeah, this is basically what I was going for as well - having a video game enemy that feels like it has a "mind". In my game some of this works pretty well for an experienced player, you can for example do cartoony stuff such as dissapearing behind a corner and then quickly into a side corridor, wait for the lizard to pass by said side corridor, and then exit the same way as the lizard was chasing you. The problem is that you need to be aware that stuff like this is doable in order to do them. For that awareness to occur you'd need to perform it at least 5 times, the first few times you wouldn't be able to tell it apart from random chance.

As the game is right now the shaft scenario could very well occur, you could drop down a shaft while visible to a lizard but then grab hold of a metal beam halfway down and dissapear somewhere else, while watching the lizard search the bottom of the shaft. I don't think of this as an exploit, as this is the way the game is supposed to work.

The problem in a situation such as this is that in 9 cases out of 10 the quickest way for the lizard to get down into that shaft would be to get to the edge and make the same jump you did. This means that in the majority of the cases the smart action is the same as the dumb action of an AI that just tries to get to the position where it last saw a player. In explaination, in the most cases you won't be able to see that the lizard is smart, even though it is. There are however cases when you notice the intelligence.

The funny part is that most of those cases are bad for the lizard. An example:



You are stranded on the little island, and a stupid AI would just end up waiting below you, as it would move towards you and then end up waiting once it got to a ledge that was too high for it to climb. This is stupid thinking, but the resulting action is smart, as you'd have no-where to go with a lizard waiting below you.

A rain world lizard, on the other hand, realizes that it can get to you through a detour. The problem is that when it's inside the tunnel it can't see the player, and once it reaches the balcony the player has long since dissapeared.

In this case the more stupid AI would be more successful, because if it just waited below the player wouldn't have anywhere to go. My point though is that the setup I have now is more fun. A deadlock would just be a deadlock, but a lizard making a somewhat stupid decision is entertaining, because you can see that it makes a decision. Instead of having a stupid AI that ends up catching you because of luck you have a creature that's thinking, but which you're outsmarting. Outsmarting things is satisfactory.

So, the exploits you're talking about are certainly there, but I've kind of built my game around them - they are the main game mechanic. To not make it too easy the lizards are compensated with physical treats - they are fast, has excellent vision and can hear you if you're not moving carefully.

When it comes to hyping the AI, I don't know... Hehe looking at what I wrote above I realize I'm already far down that road, but I don't want to over do it as raised expectations might make people dissapointed. I'm just a single guy building this on evenings and weekends, and people are used to games devloped by 50 people with a university degree each. That said, I can always emphasize that a high percentage of my hours with this has been put into AI, whatever that is worth.

Ah, whatever, here we go:
Update 100
Let's celebrate the 100'th update with that the framework for implementing James' music has taken its first solid step. I can now create a list of triggers for hunts that activate, change or deactivate songs on defined events. Today I had one song start, and continue playing until I had caught 4 flies, after which it stopped. Then another song started when I spotted my first lizard, and ended when I entered a specific level.

It seems to work well enough already! There will be changes though, but I'll try to stick to my policy and implement new technical solutions as an answer to a need on the art side, rather than just doing stuff that I think I maybe might use.

JLJac on October 16, 2012, 05:33:23 AM:

Hahaha! Actually, the longer the detour is the longer it will take for it to find a path, meaning that you'll get a little bit of it moving back and forth contemplating on its next move.

The problem here is that psychological phenomena which I don't know the name for in english, animism perhaps, that you want to play with rather than against. The thing I'm thinking of is the tendecy for humans to read more intelligence into the behaviour of dead objects than there actually is.

For example, a human dropping a marble that rolls in under some furniture might think that it "hid" in there, even though it most certainly didn't because it's a dead object and it only followed simple mechanics. The psychology behind this is obviously the magic behind computer game characters seeming to come alive.

My theory (as an amateur) is that the more you are aware of the mechanics behind a behaviour, the less you'll submit to the feeling that the object is alive. A while back I posted a video where some lizards were moving around, and got this response:


I remember this because Franklins Ghost had obviously thought that the lizard opened its mouth as a way to display frustration over the player being out of reach. I knew why the lizard opened its mouth (boring technical reason) but kept quiet, as the other interpretation was more awesome and fun. In this case not knowing what was going on behind the scenes created a more awesome experience.

So, I think that if I create a window into the lizards' heads I would also compromize them feeling like creatures, and make them feel more like mechanics. Their inner lives can never be half as complex as what we fill in the blanks with when we don't know what's going on, which is why I keep the not knowing what's going on as high as possible.

I have been thinking about symbols such as (!) and (?) though, and actually have implemented something along those lines. As a lizard is surprised its head vibrates a little and it emits some particles, which is usable as a cue that the lizard has seen you or heard you. Then again I don't know how well this actually works, as when I myself am playing I'm also aware of all the nuts and bolts behind the scenes.

Update 101
Caught a cold, and has mostly been horizontal on different surfaces today. The only thing keeping me from complete uselessness has been a sketch for how the main menu could be laid out.

jamesprimate on October 16, 2012, 06:19:58 AM:

speaking as "the other person who has played rain world pretty extensively", I'd like to throw my 2 cents into the AI chat. I certainly don't know what's going on under the hood, but the lizard behavior is quite unpredictable in a very cool way. It's hard to describe, but sometimes during a chase they will seem to anticipate your movements based on the level structure, then get distracted by snapping at flies, then mope around, then "hear" you and start stalking again. it's quite believable for neon death lizards. also, different favors of lizard (red green blue white, etc) all have their own fairly distinct personalities and behaviors, so when you get a couple of flavors in a level chasing you around you have NO idea what's going to happen and it's quite scary and chaotic, which I think is exactly the right vibe for the game.

fwiw, I had no idea that the jiggling particle head meant that it had heard you (I was assuming rage or aggravation or something? They often do that when I spear them in the face, heh heh), but I LIKE that element of unreadability where you can't tell if they are laying in wait for you or don't have a clue.. Having a more standard "!!" "??" sort of thing might be take away a bit of that in my most humble of opinions.

JLJac on October 16, 2012, 06:42:35 AM:

Hahaha that review was down to each word exactly what I wanted to hear >_< Even the "different personalities" thing was in there! Hopefully it's because the game is becoming what it's supposed to, and not because James knows too much about the project haha!

A sneak peak under the hood: They emit particles either because they hear a sound, because the've spotted you (a lot if they weren't aware of you, a small burst if they were already chasing you but didn't know exactly where you were) or because they're taking sticks and stones to the face. Maybe they do it when fighting over prey as well, don't remember.

There are other subtle ways of reading a lizard's mind as well - a slowly pulsating head means it's calm and idle, a quick change in color means it's hunting and somewhere inbetween means it's cautious or searching. Black eyes means it doesn't see you, sparkling eyes mean it's currently seeing a player.

JLJac on October 18, 2012, 08:11:24 AM:

There's one kind of lizard that co-operates, but I haven't really found a good place for it in the game and it might end up being banished to custom mode. They work together by trying to surround the player, which sometimes ends up pretty dangerous.

I think the main problem here is the very simple environment. In the end they can't really do much more than... go places, their possibilities of interaction are very limited. When I enabled them to pick up objects occasionally that was pretty cool though.

On the AI, I think I've reached a "good enough" point, from now on everything I'd add wouldn't really ever be visible to the casual player. I have a few fun things in there for those who play a little more as well, but I think I'll keep it at this.

Current progress isn't very fast, as that damned cough won't leave me alone. Working and being sick is quite enough for each day, and it's hard to find time for rain world. Hopefully it'll be over soon, please just be patient for a couple of days! I try to get at least something done every day even though I'm a bit tired.

jamesprimate on October 19, 2012, 01:13:10 PM:

hey, you were cranking out multiple updates per day for a while there! I think you've earned some relaxation 

JLJac on October 20, 2012, 07:55:23 AM:

Haha yeah maybe! Best would of course be to keep an even tempo in here...

Update 102
Got a sound editor in, in which you can pick and choose from James' awesome creations!



An ambient sound consists of a file, a volume and a pan alignment, that's pretty much all that's needed. I think this will be really helpful in setting a mood for the game!

JLJac on October 21, 2012, 12:33:13 PM:

Update 103
Raaaaaargh!
Been wrestling an extremely annoying bug for a while now.

I have known for a long time that some levels, for some reason, lag horribly. It's not the things that are going on in the level, but drawing the actual picture. Now when I got one of those levels I decided to try to nail it down.

It seems like the problem was in the image that display the light on the backround layer. I have pinned it down to this:

If I color any vertical row of pixels further away from the left edge than 118 pixels (117 doesn't work) any other color than white, the lag dissapears. It's not a specific pixel that's causing trouble - when I go into this vertical pillar of colored pixels and remove sections the lag comes and goes completely randomly. There seems to be a pattern that if more colored pixels are removed, the lag is more likely to come back. However, removing the top half makes the lag come back just as much as removing the bottom half.

In addition to this, there seems to be different reactions depending on whether I do stuff from the code or from the console, and on top of that there seems to be different reactions depending on whether I re-color the pixels one at a time or with one single command.

It's possible to locate a loosely defined area in the image that causes the trouble. If these pixels are put in a sprite they can make any level lag, so it's obviously their fault. If you start to cut this area down though, all the lag will suddenly dissapear - it's not connected to specific pixels, but rather to a combination of pixels. I badly wanted it to be about some specific pixel, maybe one color that I could just remove or so, but it's not.

I think of it as a curse - certain orders of pixels are cursed.

Even if I re-draw a level on another random seed the curse persists, which could possibly mean that whatever pattern causes it is on a bigger scale, a similar general layout will always create a cursed image. This means that some levels I create can never work.

This stuff is obviously far beyond my level, and probably has something to do with how graphics are rendered. Sadly I've seen the same problem on other computers as well ...

I have no idea what to do about this.

JLJac on October 21, 2012, 12:53:12 PM:

The only thing of significance to the curse seems to be if pixels are (255, 255, 255) white, treated as transparent by Director, or not. A black sillhoutte creates the same effect as the original image.

If flipped vertically or horizontally the effect presists. Same for 90 degree rotation. If the image is inverted (black->white/white->black) the effect goes away.

Removing all rows of pixels that are entirely white from left to right doesn't help. It's not about all-white columns top-down either.

Ladies and gents, I present to you a real cursed image:



Displaying this specific combination of black and white screws Macromedia Director up terribly. Quite interesting, if it wasn't so irritating.

Tomorrow I move the image to one of my old game projects to see if it slows that one down as well.

JLJac on October 22, 2012, 12:04:16 AM:

Today the problems don't occur on all the levels where they did yesterday. If I can't reproduce the problem I can't fix it. I officially give up...

JLJac on October 23, 2012, 12:57:59 PM:

Probably something like that...

Update 104
Been trying to supress the strangest bug ever from my mind and instead concentrate on creating some levels and art assets.

JLJac on October 24, 2012, 11:04:01 PM:

Update 105
Here's just a random screenshot:



The graphics are not really turning out the way I want to. I think the problem is that the tiles are too small - I get a clutter of detailed small objects rather than fewer, bigger machines. Problem is that big things have to be custom tailored for a specific level, and can't be used again. Maybe if I started to draw machine parts rather than the whole machines, I could piece them together in different ways on the different levels...

jamesprimate on October 24, 2012, 11:29:14 PM (Last Edit: October 25, 2012, 01:27:39 AM):

you are talking about the background artwork I gather? IMHO it looks pretty good! I kind of agree with on the more detailed stuff though. the top and middle sections are nice because its just a solid clean silhouette and doesn't get in the way of the foreground stuff. the bottom background could be a bit less detailed maybe, not necessarily as rule but because the poles are such an important part of that level and need to more visually "present" I think. As it is now the poles kind of mix in with the background machines.

just my 2 cents! I love the art, you know that

JLJac on October 25, 2012, 11:34:55 AM:

I'm not really talking about the background art specifically, as I feel the foreground stuff has the same problems. Instead of looking like something that's consistent enough to be meant to function in one way or another, it just looks like a clutter of small building blocks... which is exactly what it is -.-

Yeah, the poles certainly could stand out more. The wierd thing is that in a way the level looks better and is more readable when there's no light at all, as such:


(Old one to the right for reference)

because then there's only one, simple rule - darker=closer. Buuut I really do enjoy having the light fade out when the rain is approaching, and I've put so much work into the shadow renderer already.

Anyway, I removed some of the clutter from behind the poles, and kept it a stone wall that doesn't draw too much attention!

jamesprimate on October 25, 2012, 02:58:17 PM:

oh, well I think the foreground stuff is really good! it looks like chunks of debris and worn down mysterious things... seems right on to meeeee! 

JLJac on October 26, 2012, 11:34:38 PM:

Hehe that sounds about right then, only that I'd like BIGGER worn down mysterious things!

I have waaay too much work right now - it'll get better next week. However I've been able to do at least something:

Update 106
I'm into another assault on what I think might be one of the games' biggest design flaws - that you can't really know where a shortcut will take you unless you've made the level yourself. Earlier I added a little spark that flows through the shortcuts so that you at least have a chance to see them, now I've started on another cue as well. Instead of drawing the shortcut symbols onto the level image, I've made them separate sprites. Next up is making them blink or change color when a player is close to them, in a similar manner to items on the ground.

The trick is that they'll change color in pairs, so that you can see which of all the exits is blinking when you get close to an entrance, and from that conclude where you'll end up.

After this I'll move on to more important but boring stuff I figure, such as... the main menu -.-

JLJac on October 27, 2012, 11:45:17 PM:

Update 107
Did a little bit of cleaning up - and made the new "shortcut symbols as sprites"-system work better. It wouldn't hurt to give it some more polishing, but now it is basically up an running as I want to, with the symbols following the screen shake and everything.

Also enabled the poor flies to release their chains when the rain is approaching. Up till now the ones that had formed chains would just be hanging there as everything else escaped back into their holes, now they too have the sensibility to let go and fly home.

JLJac on October 29, 2012, 02:42:12 AM:

108
Spent some time making the "rain getting closer"-stuff a little more polished. Spent about half an hour trying to figure out why the hell a sample wouldn't loop properly, until I realized that the file was named "rain loop" despite it not being loopable at all ... Thank you James 

Right now the game seems to almost always load and play the same song, I'll have to look into that. I'm just happy as long as the bugs are reachabe from the code I write, and not hidden in the basic functions of Macromedia Director. Everyone hates hunting bugs, but I tell you, you learn to appreciate hunting findable bugs after having tried to chase the ghost of something that can't be found and can't be fixed...

jamesprimate on October 29, 2012, 09:52:22 AM:

OOOOOOPS! ill look onto it.  is it just called "rain loop"? I rendered a ton of stuff from a folder called "rain loop", so it might have gotten mid-labeled. sorry! this happens sometimes when you do complicated work at 4am

JLJac on October 30, 2012, 12:37:55 PM:

Hehe no worries James, I loopified it myself - you've heard the result. If you don't think it's good enough lemme know

Haha Lingo is the latin of programming languages - dead and dusty. This is certainly the last thing I make in it, and probably the last thing that gets made with it as well. It's good to be using a software that creates applications that you can be kind of sure will be possible to use even in a few years. I guess I'll have to emulate windows xp if I wanna play Rain World in ten years haha!


Contrary to the idea I have but never live up to - to have fun and interesting posts high up on new pages to draw new readers in - I will give you a dead boring update today. I know myself from following devlogs that boring updates are at least less frustrating than several days with no updates at all. Hrm. So here you go:

Update 109
Made a system that enables player entrances to be shut off. As those of you who have been reading this somewhat regularly might know the game will contain levels that can both be reachable from an open world and opened up through a custom game kind of setup. In the open world scenario I want them to have only one entrance, while in a custom game I might want to have one entrance for every player or something like that.

So now I can create a level with as many entrances as I want, and then shut all but one of them down from the code when loading them in the campaign. I simply make them lizard dens, because as it stands that was a good quick fix - a player entering a lizard den will be spitted out again right away. Had to make them not be counted when the lizards try to decide where to emerge, so that the same lizards will still come out of the same holes. It seems to work ok!

JLJac on November 01, 2012, 02:01:05 AM:

Update 110
Now the game has flies - not the creature I've been calling "fly" but frankly is looking more like a bat kind of thing - but actual tiny little flies that buzz around. It doesn't really make any difference, but I hope it makes the world seem a little more lively.

JLJac on November 02, 2012, 01:01:47 PM:

Oh! Almost forgot about that! Don't worry though, the game is already pretty playable, so I'll have something for you guys!

Update 111
Let me take a moment to tell the story of how to add a graphical asset to Rain World.

Let's pose the example that I'd like to put in a machine looking something like this:



Here any sane artist would just open a graphics software and happily go at it. I, on the other hand, have chosen to make it as difficult as humanly possible.

I start out like this:



Then I write some instructions for how that material will be handled, like this:



Then feed this through the good old



Before reaching my destination - something I could've drawn in half an hour. I guess that the good part is that I then can use that same machine part again, but that hasn't really started to pay off yet...

jamesprimate on November 02, 2012, 05:25:58 PM:

ah that's gorgeous!

JLJac on November 03, 2012, 12:51:13 AM (Last Edit: November 03, 2012, 01:19:39 AM):

Hehehe welcome to the depths of my insanity!

Update 112
Added a few sounds I got from James. Worked a little with the bubble creature, changed its appearance a little.

Update: Aaaaand added eggs into the same framework as other objects, so they appear in one place consistently!

JLJac on November 04, 2012, 06:19:27 AM:

Update 113
What I should be doing right now (except from actual non-RW work) is adding a more decent main menu so that the Prince of Arcade guys won't bleed too much out of their eyes. It's hard though, because I don't know if I should start on the framework for the final main menu (and waste time making way for things that won't be used this time around) or if I should go for a quick fix (and waste time doing stuff that won't make it into the final game). Realistically I think I'll settle on changing the colors a little for the cascade of ugliness that's the main menu right now.

This is however not what I'm actually doing. I've been wrestling Macromedia Director's very 90's-ish code solutions once again today. A sound can have a "loop back here"-marker set in it, but the point from which you start playing the sound can't be set behind that point. This means that my plan, to have a song start playing at a random place and once it reached the end start over from the very beginning, was a no-go. This wasn't good, as a custom game session is shorter than the average song, meaning that there would be a lot of musical material that would never be heard.

I managed to fix it though, with a small hiccup in the looping. Maybe I'll get around to doing it differently for songs that actually start playing from the beginning, so that they won't suffer from the hiccup. Minimize the damages.

Ah well, it's sunday, I might as well make this a long post.

So, yesterday I made a small change to the level renderer that in turn made a small change to the level art. Very small, but I find it enjoyable.

Here, look:



Can't spot the difference? Try putting them in different tabs and switching between them. Here they are, overlayed:



The "earthquake" effect is because the second image is slightly scewed. I got tired of having everything completely straight and square, it seemed lifeless. But the problem was that I couldn't tilt or scew anything, because the game was mathematically built around a perfectly straight grid. The collision boxes of things would still be straight, even if the level was tilted.

The solution I found was this :



The level is rendered as 30 layers, and the objects of the game are drawn in layer 5. By having a "scewing factor" that increases as you move away from layer 5, but is fixed at 0 on layer 5 itself, it's possible to scew the background and foreground while keeping the actual gameplay relevant graphics in phase with their hitboxes.

I know the effect is very slight - I want it that way. When trying stuff out I made some renderings that made your truly sea sick, like this:



But I decided to keep it subtle. Maybe a little too subtle, now when I look at them I think I'll have a little more scewing in there after all... I'll settle on something. The point is that now everything isn't perfectly lined up, and just seeing a slight difference in angle between two things make the environments seem a little less artificial.

I guess I'm trying to strike a fine balance with the art. In one way I want it to look a little tile-ey, and not just like one big drawing made by hand. Not because I don't like hand drawn aesthetics, but because it has been done so many times before.

On the other hand I want one specific feature of the hand drawn aesthetic - the uniting of the graphics into one single image. Tiles tend to look like... tiles, different pieces that fit more or less well together. Reality - especially when dirty and worn down - tends to blend into one in a way that correlates more closely to the hand drawing than to tiles. But the drawing has certain quirks as well, such as some lines looking different than others because the drawing tool is held in one hand and not the other.

I want to have the cake and eat it. My goal is to create an aesthetic that looks like one unified image, but doesn't have the characteristics of the human hand. That's why I have this combination of tiles and effects going on. The tiles look technical and strict, while the effects make it look a little dirtier, and more importantly unifies it into one single image. What I want, after all, is to create images of worn down machines. I couldn't do without either the strict or the dirty.

On top of this comes another factor - the stylization. The game is - in a way - pixel art, with everything that comes with that art direction. One of those things is tiles. At the same time the game is not strictly classical pixel art, it's a subversion of sorts. I want to play with the pixel art aesthetic, but I don't want to play it straight. This is for example why the characters are kind of looking like pixel art, but not moving like pixel art  usually does. I want the same thing for the environments - something that's a wink to the classical pixel art genre, and something that's different.

I like to think of my game as a pixel art rendering of a world that is not a "pixel art kind of world".

The tiles are more in line with the pixel art tradition, while the effects and the scewing are something else. It's a hard line to strike, because if I get too happy about adding stuff I might go too far in one direction or the other. This is for example why I use blur in the graphics, but use it sparesly. If I just went ahead I would lose the aesthetic I'm aiming for.

So, in conclusion, now I have another factor to fine tune in this balance act!

JLJac on November 04, 2012, 08:40:57 AM:

Well, the way this works is that the software I'm making this in is kind of ancient and not really able to display any exciting graphics - so to evade that I'm rendering pre-baked levels that take several minutes each and then just display them as images. So no, no parallax scrolling, just fixed screens. Rest assured though, my next project I'll move over to something (anything) else.

JLJac on November 04, 2012, 10:08:08 PM (Last Edit: November 04, 2012, 10:52:50 PM):

Hehehe fact is I'm not a native speaker and don't have a clue how "skew" is spelled your weird ass language has no correlation between how something sounds and how it's spelled! Now I now though, thanks

Edit: changed "doesn't" into "don't". If one is unable to communicate properly in ones statement about one being unable to communicate properly, what is that even!? Unable to communicate-ception?

JLJac on November 04, 2012, 10:54:48 PM:

Haha yeah! I'd totally write this thread in esperanto, if it wasn't because I like to entertain myself with the idea that someone is actually reading it.

JLJac on November 05, 2012, 02:09:35 AM:

Update 114
Started to patch things up for the Prince of Arcade sneak peek release. It suddenly hit me that the game should probably be... playable until then.

The original design idea was that in a custom game, if one player died, the timer would be set to something very low so that the other players would only have just enough time to get to an exit. There's a problem here, as the light fading/sounds playing/screen shaking stuff that goes on when the rain is approaching is triggered by certain key frames, and those can't be skipped - meaning I can't instantly set the timer to something very low. I think I can work around that though, in a way more or less hideous code-wise.

Also started on the very basic frame work for a main menu.

jamesprimate on November 05, 2012, 03:37:19 AM:

when is this prince of arcades? sounds very cool, and I'll be very excited to hear the reactions!

JLJac on November 05, 2012, 09:09:52 AM:

Haha I should look that up!

Update 115
Worked some one the "rules" of the game, like how it handles the game aspects of what's going on. I've got it to a point I'm decently happy with.

If one player dies the other one is given just enough time to get back to a hole. This means that you can win even if you die, because if you had more flies than your opponent and he/she doesn't reach their hole in time, you still have the victory. It's however still a pretty huge advandage to not be the one to die first.

If one player is dead, the game is halted immediately as the other player goes into a hole, and you don't have to wait for the rain.

If both players go back into their holes at the same time the game is ended. I might change the requirements so that at least one player has to be dead for the game to end - sometimes you go into holes in order to escape lizards as well.

When the rain comes all players that are outside are counted as dead - those in holes as alive.

I still have to make it so that the game stops if one player is already in a hole and the other one dies.


On top of this I added a fun little detail - in competitive game modes a player can't go into a hole that's already occupied, you're spitted straight out again. I hope this will create some fun and frantic situations when players race for the closest hole. Some levels might even have less holes than players, then the gameplay becomes a balance of trying to hunt effectively and staying closer to the hole than your opponent.

JLJac on November 07, 2012, 07:48:31 AM:

Update 116
Poking around with the colors of the lizards. Sometimes I want their colors to change slightly to align with a color in the specific level's palette. For example, if one level has pink plants in it I want the pink lizards on that level to be that pink, not anything else. This is kind of a hassle in some cases, as some parts of the lizards are constituted of bitmaps loaded from memory, and for those parts the colors can't be changed from the code. So I'm doing multiple sets of those parts so that everything will be in sync.

JLJac on November 08, 2012, 01:37:37 PM:

Update 117
Menu stuff...

JLJac on November 09, 2012, 03:37:30 AM:

A video!

Click the image!


The video shows how you can play with the lizard AI - I, the white player, have a rock, and my friend has a spear. I attract the attention of the croc, and make it follow me. When the croc see me dissapear down the ledge it assumes I dropped to the bottom, and decides to drop down as well. Once down there it realizes that was not the case, and crawls back up to investigate where I might have gone. My friend is waiting for it with the spear.

This is of course an artifical situation, but it shows how the semi-predictable AI can affect the way you play. It's possible to make a plan based on what you'd think be a reasonable behaviour for the croc, and put it in motion. Not all plans will work as smoothly as this one of course, but I hope there will be fun in the element of surprise as well!

JLJac on November 09, 2012, 07:36:49 AM:

Just bringing the video to the new page ~

Click the image!



Hehe the sounds you're hearing are made by me, and I'm an amateur sound-wise. Whatever gets updated depends on whether or not my awesome sound guy has a sudden gust of inspiration!

The goal of the game is to catch and eat flies, not portrayed here, while at the same time avoiding the lizards with sneaking and jumping. Killing a lizard is just a means of survival, not an in-game goal.

I don't know exactly what "bones" is, have heard of it some time... but yeah, I think it might be the thing. The characters are made of several parts that interact according to simple physics.

Hehe yeah! The spears almost always end up sticking out of their throats, beacause whenever they spot you they turn towards you and open their mouths. It backs off because if the tip of a spear that's stuck in its body interacts with terrain it gets a little spams in the other direction.

Suddenly I realize how gruesome this stuff is XD

jamesprimate on November 09, 2012, 01:41:12 PM:

Awesome vid!  I'm have yet to play it 2 player, but the thought of tag teaming those lizard bastard makes me smile  

As for the place-holder SFX that JLJac did... I think I've played it so much that I'm used to them and kind of like them! I had thought of just touching them up a bit down the road to blend with the newer SFX, but this is probably a good time to get your opinions oh wise TIG brethren. We have one vote for more "fleshy" (realistic I'm guessing?) sounds. Does anybody else have an opinion based on what you've heard in this vid?

JLJac on November 10, 2012, 01:03:06 PM:

Update 118
I managed to make a working menu for the Prince of Arcade guys! I hate UI programming, but it has to be done, so, well, I did it. The menu is not the menu I'll use in the game, but now I have a framework, and that's a good start. Now I can do stuff such as adding a button or a list, make them clickable, switchable, highlighting, connect them to the machinery behind the scenes, and so on. I'm already feeling a huge amount of satisfaction over all the work I'm evading compared to the alternate reality where I programmed every button as a single special case with its own unique code.

JLJac on November 10, 2012, 03:36:48 PM:

What do you mean by this? Is it a good thing, or is it a bad dissonance?

I didn't really think of the characters as "cute" when I designed them, I just wanted a soft-bodied animal kind of character with a blank expression on its face. I guess in a way I wanted to create a contrast between a soft character and a hard world, but soft and hard in the literal, physical sense rather than anything else.

As always with art I as an artist can't really control your interpretation, while at the same time the piece is in your interpretation. I can try, though. I don't want my game to be interpreted as a "happy tree friends" kind of thing, where the entire point is "it's cute but violent", that's not what I set out to create. So if that is what I'm conveying, I might have a problem o.0

jamesprimate on November 12, 2012, 05:11:44 PM:

oh snap! I didn't realize it was in Montreal. I'll see if i can get some of my toy company friends to make it. I want that feedback! :D

JLJac on November 13, 2012, 08:13:01 AM:

Peeeeeeeeew I managed to send a version to the Prince of Aracade guys.

Now I'm terribly tired of rain world, and might actually even take one or two days off.

See ya'll!

jamesprimate on November 24, 2012, 01:01:55 PM:

IM BUMPING THIS THREAD LETS GET EXCITED! hopefully JLJac is enjoying is break, but I want to talk about Rain World  so.... ill do what  can contribute: music!

This track, imaginateively titled "Rain World 12" will probably be menu & "city ruins" in a gritty electronic style: https://soundcloud.com/james_primate/rain-world-12a

JLJac on December 03, 2012, 07:22:24 AM:

I know this is getting crazy, and I will get back to work sooner rather than later. It's just that after having spent several hours each day doing this without even thinking much about it the sudden contrast of not spending that amount of time sitting around trying to convince a lizard to crawl in some specific way was kind of pleasant for a change.

I'm alive, and I'll get back to work soon. The game only has its final 20% left, meaning that we're at least 25% through development!

JLJac on December 06, 2012, 12:17:02 PM:

I got an email from James, and suddenly realized that it's been waaaaay to long - so, here I am again.

Update 119
Finalized the lizard-egg interactions. A lizard will now behave reasonably if you steal its egg, and the AI seems to not mess upp too much (from what I've seen so far).

If you steal an egg, the lizard will hunt you down and kill you, but let go and take the egg home first. Then it will return for your body. If you drop the egg to the ground the lizard will prioritize the egg over you, and you're safe a little while. If you snatch the egg from a lizard that's carrying it you're pretty much instantly dead though, as it'll just snap at you the very moment you snatch the egg. When carrying eggs they have their mouths slightly open, meaning that you don't even have the few frames it ordinarily takes for a surprised lizard to open its jaws before it can snap at you. A lizard always knows where its egg is, even though it can't see it. A psychic radio connection? Idk... But if they didn't, it would be way too easy to get away with an egg, as it is now it at least poses some kind of risk and challenge.

You don't need to press the "pick up"-button to get an egg from a hole, entering the hole without carrying anything in your hands will pick up the egg automatically.

jamesprimate on December 06, 2012, 07:56:01 PM:

YAAAAAAAAAAY welcome back JLJac!

okay tell me more about the egg interaction. does it serve a purpose other than aggravating the lizards? is it food? it seems like a big thing. also... the bubble creatures? i feel like im missing a whole component!

JLJac on December 07, 2012, 08:34:34 AM:

Hehe that's a cool idea! It's not what I had in mind for the eggs though - the eggs will work as a single player collectable. I'm planning to have a sandbox gametype where you can spawn whatever lizards you want, if you've collected their egg in single player mode. And maybe there'll be an "egg hunt" gametype as well, where there are no flies and the players compete to steal eggs from the lizards. Apart from all this the eggs will be worth some food points, they'll equal to 4 or 5 flies, or whatever seems reasonable.

James, what about the bubble creatures? They're just... bubbles. I'll send you a level where they're present so you can check them out

JLJac on December 10, 2012, 01:14:05 PM:

Update 120
Found some text file handling code in an old game of mine and moved it over to RW. Am looking for a map of the world that I drew on some piece of paper, until I find it this:


is my only clue to how the world is layed out, and while I actually can decipher it it's like 24 times slower than just looking at the actual, drawn map. Worst case scenario I'll have to redraw the map from the above scribbles, I've done it before.

JLJac on December 11, 2012, 02:59:06 AM:

Update 121
Added three new plants to the level editor: fern, mushroom and plain grass.
Also sorted out a problem with the light renderer that made a plant or object just a neon-colored silhouette when light hit it. The problem was that I had forgotten to rename a variable...

JLJac on December 13, 2012, 01:53:07 PM:

Thank you very much!

Update 122
I found my map, and transfered it to a bigger sheet of paper. When looking at the map I realized that the single player campaign only has 7 levels, which is very limited compared to the like 40+ levels I've actually already made. So I decided to cram a few more of them into the single player world - it's a very small effort required and it will make the single player longer, giving me time to in peace and quiet introduce each color of lizard without rushing anything. So, now I'm well into extending the world map. Don't worry though, I won't make it too huge for me to handle. If I add maybe five hub rooms I'll have room for three or four additional swarm rooms, making the game 50% longer without much additional work.

jamesprimate on December 14, 2012, 01:03:56 AM:

MORE LEVELS

you dont know how happy this makes me...

JLJac on December 14, 2012, 11:06:37 AM:

Thank you for the kind words! Knowing that there's some anticipation out there certainly helps me catching my breath when it seems I'm out of it.

Update 123
James got inspired from the new levels, and made new music! Two new tracks of the same high standard as always. These tracks are a bit more background-ish according to me, so I think I'll try to fit them into the hub world areas. They could also work as a suspenceful background for a level with many not-too-dangerous lizards where the action is kind of even in intesity.

On my end I've been tampering a bit with the world map, and I also solved a problem where it would instantly transport you two rooms instead of just one upon entering a door. I went with an ugly solution, blocking the second of the double signals instead of finding the source for it and removing it. It's my game, I'm the only programmer and I do what I want

JLJac on December 17, 2012, 08:15:39 AM:

Update 124
The completion of the game can basically be boiled down to four points from here:

1 - Create a working menu(With art)
2 - Finish the world map(Including tutorial level)
3 - Make different gametypes for custom mode
4 - Polish and bug fixes (I'm afraid of this one)

Today I did some work on the menu, and created a way for multiple menu pages to exist. Now you can go from the "Main menu" page to the "Custom Game" page but not back again. Yay, progress!

JLJac on December 18, 2012, 09:14:57 AM:

High hopes, low expectations, please

Thank you! From here my development process seems like the most amateurish thing ever, but I guess I'm good at covering that up then haha! You write that you don't plan to start working on anything right now ~ if I could give you a tip I'd say this: Don't wait in order to create a huge project, stuff like that are probable to die in pre-production if you're a lone developer. When working alone it's better to just get started with a small project, because the only way to learn is to do. If you're a hobbyist like me the keyword would be small project, as everything takes (no joke) about 50 times as long as you think. Rain World was supposed to be a two week project. Right now It's been in development for 1.5 years, and is still most likely nowhere close to finished...

Update 125
A little menu stuff. Started touching upon saving and loading single player games.

jamesprimate on December 18, 2012, 09:16:07 PM:

personally, im psyched that the development is getting extended! it means more ideas and more polish! maybe... even MORE levels to make music for! 

JLJac on December 25, 2012, 08:37:52 AM:

Oh, you're in game college! o.0 Then I should obviously be on the recieving end of any exchange of advice haha! Maybe in my situation I shouldn't look at the gradual growth and feature creep as something bad, when doing this alone as a hobby maybe one could as well embrace the fact that there's no fixed deadline. I mean, there are a lot of people who have to cut in their projects in order to meet a deadline, and I don't. Plus, many indie game classics such as Cave Story seems to be the product of a fairly uncoordinated growth of a project.

Now of course I'm not alone any more, as I have James on board and he as well have hopes and expectations for this project. So I have to keep my s**t together to at least some degree! However, I'll of course take this:
as a que to keep pushing my deadline further and further away towards eternity ~ bad move James

Nah, just kidding

But, when we are on this lazy note, I should probably announce that I'm taking a christmas break, as you have probably noticed. And another thing - this spring I'm going on a longer trip, I'll get on the plane somewhere mid-january. James and I have been talking, and we're agreed that it would be impossible to rush a release until then, especially when taking things such as setting up a small website and the like into account. So instead the (already unspecified) release will be pushed two or three months forward into the next year. In the end this is a hobby, and as such I have to put life first, Rain World second. This said I myself don't think of it as something entirely negative for Rain World, as getting away from my screen and recieving some new impressions is good for my enthusiasm and inspiration, which in turn is what fuels the project.

In-between christmas break and travel break I hope to get some work done on the main menu, so that when I get back after my longer break full of inspiration I'm not met by a wall of user interface coding~ If I get a good chunk of menu made before I go that'll actually mean that most technical aspects of the game will be almost finished, and that means I can concentrate on giving it an awesome artistic presentation when I get back.

JLJac on January 11, 2013, 11:01:47 AM:

Thank you! The prototype isn't available anymore, because I'm not too proud of it when looking at it in the light of today's progress.

The day after tomorrow I'll be leaving for Africa! From there on I know nothing at all, except that I expect to be back 12 weeks later.

This may be a backside of game making as a hobby - Rain World is not my job, and it has to adapt to my life rather than the other way around. Still, the game is fueled by my inspiration, and only staying in my room coding doesn't give me any of that. So in that way, what's good for me is good for Rain World.

Thank you all for your interest and your help. Don't worry about the game, I've put way too much time into it to not complete it. I'll be back in shorter than you expect, and I will bring with me new inspiration and renewed energy.

See you in a bit!

jamesprimate on January 12, 2013, 09:29:59 PM:

worst case scenario, i have the alpha build! 

but i kid, JLJac will be back in a few months and in the meantime we'll hopefully be chatting about and improving RW.

Happy travels Joar!

JLJac on February 21, 2013, 10:47:00 PM:

Hello! This is just me checking in to let you know I'm alive and kicking. I've also actually been able to work a tiny bit on the game, starting to sort out how I want the menu to look like. Most of what has to be done is programming though, not art, and the african climate doesn't really encourage programming - it's simply too hot to think. I gradually get used to it though, and have high hopes I'll eventually be able to write some code.

Cheers!

JLJac on March 07, 2013, 01:12:30 PM:

Update 126
Made the basic setup for a level tier for custom mode. Basically there are two lists, one that displays all the custom levels and one that displays the ones picked for the playlist for this specific game type. When you click a level in the first list it's added to the second, when you click a level in the second list it dissapears.

JLJac on March 08, 2013, 12:42:19 PM:

Update 127
Tried to create a little bit of order in the complete and utter mess that's Rain World menu and options code. I have so much stuff from the old preliminary menu hanging about, together with three or four different solutions for everything, some preliminary, some not finished, others inbetween. Now things are starting to be reasonably tidy, at least to the point where I can understand what I'm looking at. I have a somewhat logical way of storing the state of the main menu, i. e. what options were selected, what pages were up and so on.

To give you a taste of what's up, imagine the following: For most game types there are two options that should be controlled by the player. These are the Spears option, which indicates whether or not spears will appear on the levels, and the SpearsHit option, which decides whether or not a player should be able to hit another player with a spear.

Now, these options need to be set and stored individually for each game type. If I change them in one game type's options page I obviously don't want them to be changed for all the other game types as well, I want to be able to custom tailor my play options for each game type.

At the same time, there's another factor of complexity - that some gametypes should forcefully override these options. For example, in the competitive game type you should be able to decide whether spears hit players (it has a huge effect on the gameplay, making the difference between a game where you try to outsmart each other and catch flies and one which is about fast reflexes in quick, brutal duels). In the cooperative game type I might not want this option to be available, because fighting lizards together becomes way too easy when you don't have to worry about hitting each other.

So, I need to store a lot of options separately, and I need to be able to override options, both of which I need a logical, reasonable system for which doesn't tie my brain up in a knot every time I look at it.

As I've mentioned, programming UI:s isn't at all my favourite thing. It's a lot of hard work, and you don't really get anything spectacular out of it. The greatest possible achievement for an UI is "not annoying", which seems like a not too exciting purpose to strive for. I'll get there though, as it's a necessary step in making all the good aspects of the game visible.

JLJac on March 10, 2013, 01:02:37 AM:

Update 128
These UI updates are so boring I almost feel ashamed to post them... Anyway, here we go: Today I made a scrolling list! It displays 15 items, and if you go to the bottommost item and click down it brings up one new item. If you reach the very bottom it brings you back to the top. The same goes for clicking upwards. For mouse users there are little arrows at the bottom of the list that makes the list scroll. Yaaaaaawn.

My next game won't have a menu system, it'll just have an external text file were you can input your preferences in a terribly complicated code language.

JLJac on March 10, 2013, 11:02:19 PM:

Update 129
Today I messed a little with keyboard/mouse controls for the menu, and how it'll know which one is currently in control. When it comes to the point where I start trying to implement joysticks I might do something with that as well.

jamesprimate on March 12, 2013, 03:08:36 AM:

YAY! Glad to see the devblog back up and running 

JLJac on March 12, 2013, 07:23:04 AM:

 

Update 130
Managed to get the new menu connected to the actual game, meaning that it's now possible to start a custom game again. It also creates a playlist out of the levels you have choosen, and srambles it if you checked the little "shuffle" button.

JLJac on March 12, 2013, 02:02:16 PM:

Update 131
And I finally connected the World game mode to the new menu as well, and started outlining the framework for continuing a game from a saved file. Also when running around in the single player world a bit for the first time in ages, I found a bug where a spear would re-appear if you lodged it in a lizard and that lizard then fell off a cliff. It was easy enough to resolve, the problem was because the lizards are created earlier than the spears. First the lizard object is created, and asks "is a lizard with my ID reported wounded/missing/dead in world memory?", and when it finds itself it deletes itself from world memory, as it is now loaded on the actual level. Then the spear would be created, and ask "is there any lizard in world memory reported to have me stuck in it?", and the answer would be no, as the lizard had deleted itself. So, the spear would appear on the level. The problem was solved basically by changing the creation processes so that the spears are created first, stay tuned for the bugs that will arise from moving the chunks of code around.

JLJac on March 12, 2013, 11:04:06 PM:

Sir, with all due respect, your post worries me a little. I don't remember putting out a public demo, and I remember spending almost a year implementing a gazillion details, so if all of those have dissapeared and given way to "minimalism" I have a problem.

JLJac on March 13, 2013, 07:32:34 AM:

Lol 

JLJac on March 14, 2013, 09:54:45 AM:

Update 132
As the new menu and the game are now connected I've started to mess around in the actual game a little bit again. Today I discovered that a problem I thought was solved was in fact not, which is always annoying. The problem is about the how the levels are supposed to have multiple entrances in custom mode, but only one when playing world mode. Because of this I set them up with an "activeEntrance" property in world mode, and shut down every other entrance, making them empty lizard holes. This works wonderfully when entering a level, and also when exiting it, if you exit through the leftmost entrance. If you exit through any of the others it returns an error which I feel perfectly confident I know what it is, but which has roots deep down in everything that has with inter-level connectivity to do. Which in turn makes me think that I should probably rewrite all that stuff...

But then again, I can always stack ugly hacks on top of each other There's nothing like changing a problem of today into a problem of tomorrow!

JLJac on March 14, 2013, 10:30:46 AM:

Horrible hack: applied!

The solution completely relies on that swarm rooms only have only one entrance, which is - in my defence  - something I plan to stick to. Still, a beautiful solution would be dynamic and work in all scenarios, even those that are not included in the game. Still still, in my mind a beautiful game is a game that ever gets released...

jamesprimate on March 14, 2013, 08:14:56 PM:

now this is what we like to hear! 

JLJac on March 15, 2013, 01:14:17 AM:

Why don't you just keep it coming, sooner or later you'll know what's the right amount 

JLJac on March 20, 2013, 03:32:09 AM:

Oh, wow!
I found out because my email was suddenly overflowing with notifications that people are subscribed to me on youtube... She says she hasn't been able to reach me, that's no good. I'll send her an email, I guess. Sooner or later I ought to make a website for this thing, so that stuff like reaching me won't be an issue.

To the people from Rock, Paper, Shotgun,

Welcome!
A few months ago I got the idea I should go to africa, and well, here I am. Because of this development of RW is somewhat slowed down, but I count on being back on a more regular schedule within a month.
Until then there's quite a lot of material back in the thread, if you're interested. Glad to have you on board!

JLJac on March 23, 2013, 12:45:18 AM:

Thank you all for being interested!

The game is created in Macromedia Director and written in Lingo (At first I considered writing the game in iron-age runes on stone slabs, but then I settled on going with a slightly older and more traditional development environment).

It's very hard for me to estimate how far through development I am, as I've made the estimation "50%" about seven times already. Today I am definitely beyond 50% though, as pretty much the only things I can think of are: The menu, some more art, four-player support, joystick support and the menu art. If not on the final 10% I'd say I'm somewhere in the final 20-30.

At this very moment I'm living under very african conditions (I can literally see goats outside my window when writing this), which I have taken as an excuse to keep development on hold. Fact is I probably just really needed to take a break from the project, after one year + of development.

Very soon I'll move from the small town to Accra, and start at a desk job and live in an apartment. Then I'll try to get back to a strict minimum 1 hour a day schedule. Likely things will go quicker than expected then, as I'm fully confident in how to do all the remaining things that have to be done, it's just a question of sitting down and doing them.

jamesprimate on April 04, 2013, 09:21:02 PM:

what! i leave town and rain world gets featured on rock paper shotgun??

i should leave the house more often 

JLJac on April 08, 2013, 12:51:24 PM:

Hehe! The universe doesn't work that way ~  

People, I'm slowly getting back on my feet after a mild case of malaria  
And now I bring you update... eh... where were we?

Update 133
Today I implemented saving and loading. The game has two save files, one for co-op play and one for single player. The files are encrypted, so you can't mess around with them. If there's no file the game will create one etc etc.

As you get back to the den after a successfull hunt the game is automatically saved, and when you hit "Continue" in the main menu it's picked up again.

Things seem to be working out just fine. Objects that are moved will, for example, be found at the same place after loading. Lizard are a little more complicated, as I don't want them to be found at the same place after loading. Pretty much the only data I want to save with them is their health, otherwise I'm happy with them emerging from their holes as if they had never existed before. I guess the easiest approach to this will be to just loop through them on save and delete all data that's not health-related.

JLJac on April 09, 2013, 12:59:11 PM:

Update 134
When messing with save files some new problems emerged, because of some special cases that didn't occur if you just played a fresh world every time. So I rewrote the code that loads lizards from memory, in order to be able to be more selective about what to save and how when I save a lizard. This way I can for example save the health of a lizard but ignore it's position. It comes in handy when you end a hunt in world mode and want the lizards to have crawled back into their holes, but their injuries to be intact.

The current system supports the following scenarios:

Lizard has not spawned yet
Lizard has spawned offscreen, and should be generated out somewhere in the level
Lizard is saved as alive, and should be recreated close to where it was last seen
Lizard is saved as dead, and a corpse should be recreated on the same spot
Lizard is saved as dead and not on the screen (for example if it has fallen out of the level), and should simply not appear at all

Seems to cover it, right?

Everything's working out fine in the artificial de-bugging scenarios I've been running, but with stuff complicated as this it's hard to know if something has escaped me.

In short, saving/loading seems to be pretty much done by now. The next big step in getting the single player campaign up and running will be the between-level screen, which should have little animations showing how many flies you've caught and so on.

JLJac on April 10, 2013, 01:48:46 PM:

Update 135
Dear readers, I'm happy to say that single player is up and running!
You go out into the world, follow the flies to where they're swarming, catch as many as are required, and then head back to your den. If you have enough flies, you're brought back to the "den" screen, and the game is saved. From here you can either get started on the next hunt, or you can quit the game. The next time you load it your progression will be saved.

What I did today was mainly to connect huge building blocks that were all done - saving was done, swarming of different rooms was done and so on. But today I could really see the flow of the game for the first time. Still haven't really played it though, so I can just imagine all the tweaking it's going to need.

Aside from that I also sorted out a few quirks and gave some things cleaner solutions. For example, if the requirement for this hunt is to catch 5 flies, and you enter the den with four flies in your stomach and one in your hand, it still lets you in. That kind of stuff.

Oh, and items your bring into your den at the end of a hunt will reappear on the ground outside the den the next time you start playing. I think this will be neat in co-op, you'll be able to collect a little "armory" outside your den and run through it to collect some weapons before heading out into the world.

JLJac on April 11, 2013, 12:35:24 PM:

Update 136
Today I made it possible to change the screen resolution from the menu. The game's resolution will always be 1024*768, but if you have a widescreen you might prefer black borders on the sides to a stretched image.

Also I wrestled for a bit with a glitch that has been around a long time. When you exit one room and enter another there's quite a bit of data for the game to load, and it's loading it all in one frame. For some reason Director has a thing where it pauses the sound if a frame drags on too long. This messes up James' beautiful music tracks, the beat is broken by the hiccup. Today I divided the load so that some of the heavier parts are spread out over a few different frames.

The hiccup has become clearly shorter, and in some cases doesn't appear at all. The problem is the lizards mapping out what part of the level they have access to, for intricate levels this might take almost half a second per lizard. I'll see if I could possible divide it even more. It really helps the immersion to have the sounds play continuously across levels.

Oh, and here's my sketching up some logos:





Here's the one I'm most fond of right now:




I'm going to travel a little, so things might be a little slow here for a week. See you!

jamesprimate on April 12, 2013, 04:35:46 AM:

ahh cool! im no visual artist, but i personally like these, because of the legibility AND because is looks sort of like some of the in-game environmental elements:





this one the stylization is really really cool BUT its a little illegible... "pain world". I think if its cleaned up just a bit it will look pretty awesome though.

One odd thing that I have an opinion on is having the lizard on the titlescreen. This may be just my silly opinion, but for some reason, I think it might spoil the spookiness of the first few lizard encounters by being confronted with it when you first start up. I liked having the initial impressions being about the bear and the environment and rain, with the lizards being this kind of lurking unknowable death in the shadows. Makes them more terrifying IMHO.

just my 2 cents!

JLJac on April 12, 2013, 07:00:11 AM:

Hm. The lizard thing is a really good point. Perhaps the title screen could show off some more environment instead - it could still feature the "growers"(I hesitate to call them plants) that are a pretty iconic element of the RW environments.

The legibility issue is also something I should look at. The R should read R, for example. I think the type might need to have some more work done on it - it can most likely be made made more legible while retaining some of its graffiti-ish aesthetic. The drooping I versions are much more legible, but to me they look a little to "fantasy" and lack a certain "early cartoon" kind of vibe that I really appreciate in the other one.

JLJac on April 21, 2013, 12:51:14 PM:

Update 137

Today I added a little HUD detail, an indicator on the starting screen to how many flies you have to catch this particular hunt.



Later I'll upgrade it with actual graphics. The functionality is in though, it shows how many flies are needed and how many you have.

Other than this I added a new thing - saving flies in the den. As some of you might now, the basic premise of the game is that deadly rains haunt the place for several days in a row. The... creature you play needs food to survive, so when the rain briefly stops it goes out to hunt for bugs. It knows how many days the next rain will last, and has to catch one bug for every day. The game is divided into these "hunts". As the rain season goes on the rains will be longer and longer, demanding you to catch more and more flies in the same limited time.

The saving bugs feature means that if one hunt demands 4 flies, but you catch 6, you'll have 2 at the beginning of the next hunt. I don't know about whether or not to keep this, it seems a bit cheap. Maybe only half of the excess should be stored? That would create complicated rules that would have to be explained in text rather than visually, which is never a good thing. Hm...

As the creatures are clearly shown as eating the extra flies in-game it has to be assumed that they throw the food up again, especially since in co-operative the players share the same numbers. And then it comes to how long a thrown-up bug would last in a inevitably moist animal den, which is something that's too squicky for me to be compelled to simulate in code.

Let's see where to take this feature. It might stay in, and it might not. In either case, catching excess flies will be the way to measure the high score of a campaign playthrough.

jamesprimate on April 21, 2013, 04:22:45 PM:

^ 

JLJac on April 24, 2013, 11:01:51 AM:

Man, never until I had one did I realize how fulltime a fulltime job is... It like... fills up your entire time.

Update 138
Today I worked some on the menu layout to have it make more sense. The most complicated menu screen is no doubt the Custom Game screen, so I started with that hoping that everything else would feel easy afterwards. Now I have the layout:



and also the functionality, so it's just a question of applying one on the other. And draw the actual icons and stuff, of course. These symbols are place holder.

The big squiggle will be the game type title, similar in style to the game's title screen. The arrows on the sides cycle through the game types. Between the two lines are the game type options, complete with level tier. The four little ellipses represent the players, you click them to toggle their participation in the game (four player mode is something I'm hoping to do, but I've not actually tried it so I'll have to see how the engine is able to handle it). Here I'll use the in-game sprites, they'll animate between the standard standing animation and a sleeping animation. Other than that there are some small buttons doing some small but necessary things, such as resetting things, scrolling and so on.

I think that I'll have the "all levels list" on the left dissapear down the edge of the screen when not used, in order to make the whole thing perfectly symmetric.

JLJac on April 24, 2013, 11:08:11 AM:

@Wolfbane
Hey thanks! I really like your stuff. However, I already have a music/sound artist on board, James Primate, who has made no less than 15 (!) awesome tracks for me as well as some sound effects. So we don't really need any more music. But you could always contact James, he's the one in charge of the music and maybe he has some ideas. He's on these forums.

JLJac on April 26, 2013, 01:44:43 AM:

Update 139

Yesterday I did some small but important changes, most notably changing the hard coded "if key is pressed" solutions for input into an actual input system, that I copied straight from my old game block towers. There's still no way to set up your controls, but I should get to that. Another thing I did was to save the options to a file in a similar manner to the save games, though not encrypted.

And I made this mock-up for a pause screen:

JLJac on April 26, 2013, 12:10:03 PM:

Hm... I've been pondering on that and think I'll actually not. I think there's some interesting graphical contrast between the crazyness of the title script and the strictness of the menu texts. Something like this works well, according to me.



The title here is of course not supposed to be "rain world", but a name of a game type instead.

EDIT: And this is when I realize that I've based my menu layout on a 600x800 canvas while my actual game is 1024x768. Well, I'll have to scale it I guess. The proportions should be the same.

JLJac on May 04, 2013, 12:18:44 AM:

Wow, that video was really cool!
As for the graffiti, I'm still kind of searching for my style... I knew from the start that I wanted the interface to have some sort of black and white graffiti, but I didn't know exactly what it would look like - that's what I'm trying to nail down now. I don't want it to be "cute and curly", rather I think what I'm going for could be summed up as "stange". We'll see how I'll get there.

As for the  I plan to release the game for free - that way no one can complain about it being buggy and unplayable hehe! I might put up a donation page though.

Update 140
I'm sorry for not writing here very often these days. It's for your own safety though, as you could easily die from boredom if I put all the things I'm currently doing up here. I'm doing... interface stuff -.- So, basically, I've been implementing stuff like sliders for sound and music volume, different kinds of buttons, frameworks for how buttons will handle highlighting, checking if the pointer is above them, and so on and so on.

The main reason why this is so time consuming is that I'm making the entire interface accessable through both mouse and keyboard. I think that will be a really nice feature in the end, especially for those players who prefer to use a controller (which reminds me that I probably should add joystick input too... but that'll go under the keyboard framework).

jamesprimate on May 04, 2013, 01:26:14 AM:

listen to this man Joar. Its time you embraced commerce.

embrace it.

and embrace gamepad support.

JLJac on May 04, 2013, 03:30:13 AM:

Hahaha
It's just that there's this really annoying bug where the player suddenly falls of a ledge at the speed of light, which leads to some really unfair deaths, and which I don't at all feel like tracking down and fixing ~ And that makes releasing the game for free the logical conclusion, as no-one can say anything as long as they didn't pay for it...

jamesprimate on May 04, 2013, 10:20:11 AM:

in a game where you die 10,000,00 times during NORMAL play, you think that an occasional bugged death breaks the game?? Hardly. I've logged in probably 20 hrs of RW and haven't encountered it once.

also, it's not like games are released as some perfect ideal of coding perfection. every single one of them has flaws and unfix able things, but that doesn't stop them from being released and people enjoying them. Fez was for some people an unplayable mess: http://www.bitloaders.com/2012/07/19/fez-developers-will-not-be-fixing-game-breaking-bug-in-patch-re-release/ but that doesn't take away anything from its "worth". It's just a part of what game development is. everybody who buys games understands that. I can't even count how many huge budget AAA games I own that are buggy fuckups, I'm sure that people will understand when you, a lone game dev working in macromedia director, have a few rough edges.

plus, why not just release it, then do a patch or an update when you feel like sifting through? or hell, just get someone to do it for you (I know 10 programmer friends that would do it in a heartbeat!)

you've spent a huge amount of time on a really really awesome game and you are in the final stretch of the race. it's worth it! go all the way!

JLJac on May 05, 2013, 01:05:40 AM (Last Edit: May 05, 2013, 01:51:29 AM):

Hehe thank you James! 

There's another argument against the "pay whatever you want" idea though - it requires people to have paypal or something. For me, the first objective is very clear: I want people to play my game. If I can collect some change in the process that's fine, money is fun. It's just that I don't think it's worth it if there are people out there who go "oh, you have to have a paypal account... nevermind then". I know I would. In that case I get neither money nor a player :/ It all comes down to the golden rule, I think. Do I like it when people charge me for their games? No. Or actually, I feel completely indifferent about it, because I won't even play the game. I haven't payed for (or illegaly downloaded) a game in something like five years - the few hours of playing games I've had during those years are all from the ever depleting pool of "download for free indie" games.

And on top of this I don't even know if it's possible to legally purchase the software I'm developing this on any more.

And And I have no idea about how to implement some kind of copy protection, neither am I very interested in it as I view that kind of programming as counter-productive. Who wants to sit down for 36 hours and code a device that keeps people from enjoyment?

What it all comes down to is that if I use myself as a template for my audience, paying makes the entire difference between actually playing the game and not playing it. Put that next to my priority list - players over money - and the outcome seems clear.

That's my logic, at least. I don't know if it makes sense to anyone else?

Update 141
More menu stuff. Made the game smarter in some regards - for example now it doesn't keep an entire world map in memory while playing a custom game, and it doesn't keep a custom game handler in memory when playing the campaign.

Also the pause menu is now working properly, and I have the framework for a game over menu. Oh, and the game now supports game pad for the menu, if player 1 is set to game pad. Basically the menu can always be controlled by arrow keys and space/enter, but it can also be controlled by whatever input player 1 has set up.



Noticed a bug where when a croc picks up a spear the spear will be displayed above both its upper and lower jaw, making it look like it's just kind of... glued to the side of its head. The correct way for this to be is that the spear should be above the lower jaw but behind the upper jaw, making it look like the lizard is pinching it in its mouth. This has to do with me changing the spawn order of lizards and spears a while back, so I'll just have to go take a look at that.

JLJac on May 06, 2013, 01:33:20 AM:

Hahaha never in my life would I suspect so many people would ask to pay for something!
What about kids without credit cards, then? Or maybe stuff has changed since I was a kid, I guess these days they get their weekly allowance in bitcoins or whatever.

Perhaps I could make the game accessable in two ways: either you pay what you want (even 0), or (if you're a kid, or flat broke) you can send an email explaining why you can't pay for the game, and I'll send an email back saying "no worries buddy" and the game attatched.

jamesprimate on May 06, 2013, 10:50:32 AM:

there was a time when the novelty of getting everything for free was a big deal, but I definitely think that the current culture of the indie games scene (and indeed a lot of other artistic scenes) has moved past that. people want to show their support. they ENJOY it, it makes them feel like part of the process, champions of their preferred art form, and that is important to them.. the insane success (and excess!) of kickstarter funding is vibrant proof of this. every day my twitter feed is assaulted by hundreds of my friends rallying around one new project or another. it means something real to them.

think of it this way: for a normal person who enjoys videogames, how else would you be able to influence what sort of games come out? they're not paying out of some sort of charity! they are paying because they enjoy it and want the developer to make more games, perhaps in that style or with that unique aesthetic. and fellow creatives want to celebrate their fellow developers successes as well, much like you would buy a friend or colleague a beer or cake for their birthday or some special occasion. as is evidenced by this thread, your friends want to take you out for a beer, let them 

JLJac on May 06, 2013, 12:13:26 PM:

If that's the case, then that's amazing! I guess you're right in that the gaming world, especially the indie one, is very different today.

And if it's like you say, that people want to give money to the projects they enjoy, then I'd certainly enjoy recieving some of that money. If not for anything else, at least because it would be proof that people enjoyed my work

Still, I remember when I was a kid and me and my friends used to play games during lunch break - if you had to pay, or if there was any kind of hassle, we would simply treat that game as non-existent. We played only stuff like Liero, that you could download in less than a minute and be playing in less than two.

I don't know... In the end, I'm pretty much decided in that there will be a way to download and play the game for free. But if there are people who want to give me some money, there should definitely be some way for that to happen too.

James, you and I have been talking about this before, but I don't remember what we settled on? Donations?

Update 142
Made it possible to re-map the keyboard controls. The excitement! Still it's cool to see how these things are coming together. I could make my way through the menues with the mouse, change the controls for player 1, make my way back with those new controls, start up a custom game, hit esc, see how the menu reacted to player input, go back to the menu, etc. It's a flow of... working stuff, which seems awesome in comparison to the separate shards this project has been up until now.

jamesprimate on May 10, 2013, 11:54:42 AM:

i think we talked about it for a bit, but then got bored of talking about it, and were like "eh lets talk about this later", haha.

i think donationware is a really cool way to do it. i also like what hofmeier did for Cart Life, where there is a freeware version, then some bonus $ versions that include extras and memorabilia. that might be too much of a hassle, but i like the idea: http://www.richardhofmeier.com/cartlife/

basically im saying that because I want a rain world creature plushie doll  

JLJac on May 11, 2013, 02:07:47 AM:

@Jubjub: Thanks!
@James: Hehe I promise you, if this brings in enough money to make a stuffed toy, then we'll do it, even if it puts us back to 0! Plushie dolls always pay back tenfold, rule number 73 of capitalism.

Update 143
Work has totally flooded me these last couple of days, which is, for some strange reason, no only a bad thing. When you can't get the time to work on your own projects you tend to be thinking about them in the back of your head, and when you suddenly get that one hour of precious free time you make power progress 

Yesterday's power progress included hooking players up to their controls, changing the input system so that hard-coded uglyness was taken out (at one point I just wrote "if keyPressed("K"), completely ignoring whatever controls the player had set up. Seriously.) and making it possible to activate and de-activate players for the custom game type. For the first time ever I spawned four players on  a level:


(Player colors are subject to change, perhaps)

It seems to work. Then there are of course two different kinds of "work", one means "doesn't stop and throw error messages in your face" and the other means "plays well and is balanced enough to work as a game". The second of these I know nothing of at this point. But the lizards don't seem to be too confused, at least.

Next up is game pad support, which is going to be interesting as I'm in africa and I don't have a game pad. My idea is that I'll copy the code line by line from Block Towers, and then send a version to James to try out. We'll see how it goes. Worst case scenario I'll have to postpone the game pad stuff until I get home in two months.

I think the fact that I actually accept that the game will not be finished and released in eigth weeks time reflects some kind of new found maturity - the last year I've continuously been beliving that I'm in the last two weeks of development. Still, at this point it might be a reasonable estimation to say that the remaining devlopment is closer to two months than it is to a year.