Saturday 26 December 2015

Dev Log 6#

It's been a couple weeks since the last update, here's what I can remember:

  1. Special Block Types
  2. Speed running
  3. Major Bug Fixes
  4. AI Improvements 
  5. Demo + Extras
  6. Short break until after New Years

1. Special Block Types

New addition to the game are special parts of the environment, specifically blocks of it.
There are now parts of the environment that are destructible, some of which can only be destroyed by certain abilities or weapons. It's possible for these blocks to halt your progression until you either find a way around them or through them.

  • Fake blocks
  • Missile Blocks
  • Speed Blocks
  • Bomb Blocks

2. Speed running

The player as a new ability added to the game; Speed running.
With this ability the player's speed dramatically increases to the point of being able to break certain walls and destroy some enemies on contact.

3. Major Bug Fixes

There were a lot of hidden bugs that me and Frece caught by play testing, one of the most game breaking ones were that the player was able to completely cancel somersaulting by aiming down while in the air, allowing him to space jump straight up, along with the player bouncing off of slopes and some AI bugs which are in the next section.

Fixed Bugs:
  1. Space jumping straight up by holding the down button
  2. Player bouncing on slopes when fast enough
  3. AI bug fixes

4. AI Improvements

I have made a bunch of improvements to the AI in the game that has been implemented so far, mostly and most noticeably the Ranuk AI. I have completely changed the way that the Ranuk detects the player so that it no longer uses 2D physics boxes which the player could interact with when speed running making him destroy the Ranuk without actually "touching him", so detection now uses Ray casting.

Another improvement is to avoid fatal trapping of the player between the Ranuk and a way, I noticed that despite the Ranuk and player being "non-solid" to each other, he can still trap the player because of damage feedback, so I made it so that if the Ranuk is every facing a wall and the player is effectively between the wall and the player, he will jump away from the wall before coming in for another attack.

5. Demo + Extras

We started work on player animations and demo tile sets a few days before Christmas, so we haven't done much as of yet. Once we finish the player animations and some of the tile sets we can start taking screen shots and posting them to the dev log and facebook page for everyone to view at their leisure.

Aside from the demo, I took five days to review our game's player animation system and did some in-depth research into other games animation system of their places and thought a lot about it, so when we finish all our player animations and put them together in the game you can rest assured that they will be flawlessly tied together.


Having said that we started all this a few days before Christmas, we are taking a short break from development during the Holidays to relax so we can come back to making the game with a fresh mind and added ferocity.



I wish everyone a Merry Christmas or whichever holiday you celebrate, and a very Happy New Years!

Wednesday 9 December 2015

Dev Log 5#

Alright folks here's the update, it's mostly non-interesting back-end related things (like slope detection, AI bug fixes):

  1. Slope Detection
  2. AI Bug Fixes and Improvement
  3. Multi-Scene Editing (Unity 5.3.04f update)
  4. Player Abilities
  5. Demo release

1. Slope Detection

An important thing in any game is that the player doesn't treat slopes as walls, slopes are part of the floor but are different in the sole fact that they are at an incline, like a ramp. If not coded in you can have the player treating it as a wall, or being able to run up one but sliding down it constantly.

I think it took me about 2-3 days to get this working for both the player and the current list of enemies that need it.


2. AI Bug Fixes and Improvement

Like the title suggests, they have been a lot of AI bug fixes, mostly to the Ranuk (or Runak, we have no idea what to call it). There were a lot of small fixes and improvements, to do with detecting the player and turning to face the player.

I talked about it on our facebook page but not here so:

The biggest improvement I made to the enemy AI, which is something I will implement to all future additional enemies is that they have multiple colliders on two physics layers.

One which is "solid" makes it solid so it doesn't jump through walls and ceilings or fall through the floor and doesn't interact with the player at all, and a second one which is "non-solid" (it's a trigger collider, for those who use Unity) which only interacts with the player and his weapons. This means that there will never be an awkward moment when the enemy and player have trapped each other under or over each other and are completely unable to get out of the stuck position.

3. Multi-Scene Editing (MSE)

Thanks to the new 5.3.04f update from Unity, we now have Multi-Scene Editing (MSE) which will be super important and critical for when me and Frece come to designing the levels and blending them with the gameplay because it could potentially mean a completely seamless gameplay experience between the levels. 



4. Player Abilities

I finally got around to actually putting in ability items into the game, albeit with old art assets that I made a while ago which are now placeholders, but the main point is that I have them working and now the player can pick up ability items and use the respective ability.

(e.g. if the player picks up High Jump, they now have a high jump and can jump in their "morph" state, picking up a missile expansion lets the player use missiles [although there's no missile counter yet])


5. Demo Release

Me and Frece (you guys better know who this is by now) were talking about releasing a demo and we made a list of things which we need to finish first in order to release an Alpha Build demo.

In short, we'll need to replace all the player graphics, set up the main menu at least basically, I'll have to polish the Ranuk AI, we'd need to design a little test level and make some basic art assets for it and the ability items.


Stay tuned!


Sunday 29 November 2015

Dev Log 4#

There weren't any updates this past week but that's because me and Frece have been busy.

I'll get down to it in footnotes and explain it in detail after that;
  1. Story and storyboards
  2. Map design
  3. New enemies and enemy concepts
  4. AI adjustments
  5. Bug fixes

 1. Story and storyboards

Over the weekend while I was talking to Frece, and thanks to Frece, I managed to make some cool advancements finer details of the game's story along with making a basic storyboard of the character's origin and the game's ending.

I had talked to Frece about making a short graphic novel detailing the back story and events leading up to the beginning of the game, but if we do end up doing it it'd be strictly at the end of development when literally everything else is finished. Obviously not going to reveal any story here because of spoilers.

2. Map design

After talking with Frece about the story, we moved on to the map since we were also discussing enemy types and how they would be placed and what their role would be, along with what they were from a realistic standby (i.e. if they existed then what kind of creature they would be, etc).

We dipped a bit into the general layout of the game's overall map design and structure, nothing too detailed like room placement and such. Just general area shape and structure. We touched a bit on player progression through the maps and then moved on to the new enemy concepts we came up with.

3. New enemy and enemy concepts

We came up with two new enemy types for the game, both of which are of the flying variety. Still figuring things out but one of them produces toxic gas when the player is near, causing passive damage that does not induce a damage knock back which makes it especially deadly since you can wonder into a cloud thinking you're not getting damaged due to the lack of knock back.

Overall we're both very happy with what we came up with so far and are still working on development.

4. AI Adjustments

This might bore a lot of you, I made a number of  AI behaviour adjustments and other changes to the AI programmed in so far and the base AI scripts that most enemy AI in this game use. They're relatively small changes but the effect of said changes is staggering.

Among the AI adjustments were refinements for the collision detection of the AI-floor and AI-slope detection which check if the AI is standing on solid ground or currently on a slope, respectively. These are all fundamental changes that help speed up the development time in the long run.

5. Bug Fixes

While implementing the AI adjustments and testing them in a "real" in-game environment, some game breaking bugs were found that could be used to exploit the AI, which have been patched and remedied. Examples of the bugs were things like glitching the Wallask (floor worm) AI in a certain way that let you stand on top of it while it attacks but not getting hit.

Not all bugs were AI related, some were to do with the player damage knock back script that knocks the player back upon getting damaged. So far all the bugs found have been dealt with and patched out.

Conclusion

In the end it's been a very eventful week for me and Frece, working on NiTL is definitely a blast and there is something very special about coming up with a monster concept( or any concept), making the art and then programming it to see it come to life.

Sunday 22 November 2015

Frece's Surprise

I got an amazing surprise from Frece (Fabrice, the artist for the game), he sent me this badass concept art:

Saturday 21 November 2015

Dev Log 3#

So me and Fabrice have been working diligently the past couple days on the game, we went through several different main character concept designs because we wanted to revamp the player design.
We created a brand new enemy type, Ranuk, which I feel is going to bring a lot of surprises to the player.

On the programming side, I added slope detection to the player, so the player can now run up and down slopes normally without mistaking it for a wall, along with cleaning up some code so it runs smoother.

Here's some of the art Fabrice made:

Ranuk Enemy
New Player Concept Art


Tuesday 17 November 2015

Dev Log 2#

So today after finally getting back from the reboot infogamer expo I was at in Zagreb for five days. I got to talking to Fabrice, my friend and the artist for the game when I finally got home and we made some progress on the game.

Wednesday 11 November 2015

Dev Log 1#

Welcome to the official NiTL dev log blog!

Here I'll post the progress and other advancements I do on NiTL.
I started this dev log a bit late considering I've got a bunch of the player character mechanics done so I won't be able to splurge a bunch of posts saying I got him jumping or able to shoot.

NiTL is a 2D Metroidvania game I am developing for PC and hopefully other platforms later.
Although I am currently making NiTL in Unity3D, originally I made a fatal error and sought out the fastest way to make a game without coding but I ended up with a lot of nerve raking problems with the engine I was using at the time and not being able to code restricted me a lot. With NiTL about 65% finished on that first engine I was using, I decided to switch to Unity3D and start learning C#.

So now with NiTL being developed in Unity3D, here's what I have so far:

  • Basic movement (left, right, jump, and sprinting)
  • Basic attacking (shooting beams, missiles, and dropping morph bombs)
  • Abilities
    1. Somersaulting
    2. Missiles
    3. Morph Bomb
    4. Morph Bomb Jump
    5. High Jump
    6. Morph Jump
    7. Space Jump
  • AI
    1. Simple (Walks left and right, doesn't not fall off of platforms, passive)
    2. Worm (Bursts out of the ground to attack the player, active)

 All the animations are coded and done for the player for the abilities and such so far, however all the artwork used are place-holders.

For the cherry on bottom of the post, here's a mock up from about a month ago done by a friend of mine.