Dev Log 11#

So unexpectedly, I'm making another dev log post barely 2 days after the last one.

Here are the footnotes:

1. Artist Semi-Found
2. Pause Screen Map finished
3. Miscellaneous 

Artist Semi-Found

Somebody answered the last dev log I made so it's possible that I found someone to do the art.
Having said that, I'm still looking for pixel artists as I need as much help as possible doing the art.

Pause Screen Map Finished

The pause screen map is finished, when viewing the map screen in the pause menu, you can pan the map around to see a large area. The room the player is currently located in blinks at regular intervals so you don't lose track of where you are and the map re-centres each time you open it.
Following this, the auto-mapping features, which include the mini-map and main map(map screen) are complete.

Miscellaneous 

With the pause screen map finished, I'll soon be able to release a Template for the Unity Asset store that I've been making. It will be a 'Metroidvania' or a 'Action-Platformer' template that will contain most of the development done for NiTL so far.

Along the template, I'll be releasing the auto-map as a separate asset (although it will be included in the template).

If you're a pixel artist looking for a project, or know someone who is, I'd love to hear it!

New to the dev log is the contact section,  please only use it if it's business related (e.g. you want to join the development team or write an article, etc).

Thanks for reading, until next update!

Dev Log 10#

News! I have some, in all flavours; both good and bad.

This post is going to be a bit short, here's the footnotes:

Temporarily without a graphical artist

Unfortunately, Frece, NiTL's lead artist is busy for the foreseeable future (at least a month) so I'm going to be without a graphic designer for a while. If you are a pixel artist or know anyone who is, please show them this blog and have them send a message to the facebook page and we can talk about the game. Alternatively leave a comment on this blog post with your email and I'll send you an email directly.

This does not mean development will stop by any means, I am currently seeing about finding someone else and failing that, hiring a freelancer to make the graphics until Frece is able to contribute again.

Automap complete

I have finished and polished the automap (minimap) features, so NiTL now has a working minimap in a similar style as Super Metroid. Now I will be working on the pause screen and putting a main map in the pause screen.

After that all I have left to program in the game is;

1. Ability items not respawning after returning to the room (I put it off to do more important stuff)
2. Maybe 1 or 2 more abilities, just for the fun of it.
3. The rest of the enemies
4. Add graphics and audio to the game when I get them
5. Level design

And then it's done. Seems like a little but it's still a lot to go.

Save Station Bug

For some reason the save station is bugged, in some scenes, for some weird reason.
The bug is regarding the raycast that detects the player, it works fine when it's just the player and the save station in an empty scene, but in the test scenes it has problems with the detection, and if placed in a specific manner it bugs the camera causing it to detach from the player.

I'll need to investigate this, but it should be fine in the end.

Surprise fourth update!

With the completion of the automap I developed, I only have a pause menu left until I'm going to make a copy of my project of NiTL which I will simplify and make into a Unity asset to sell on the Unity Asset Store for anyone who wants to make their own Metroidvania.

Thanks for reading the update, everyone, I hope you had a wonderful Valentines day!
I myself enjoyed a pizza at home while watching 'Welcome To The N.H.K' before and after programming the automap feature.

Dev Log 9#

Hello everyone! There's been a fair gap between this and the last update, mostly because I was waiting until I got some graphics from our beloved artist but that might be another week away.

1. Performance Updates
2. AI Updates
3. Dynamic Scene Loader-Unloader Updates
4. Composer joined development

1. Performance Updates

While being curious and generally playing around with the game and profiler, but mostly trying to fix an AI; I achieved some massive performance boosts.

I benchmarked the game and found that at around 14 Runaks on-screen, the frame-rate dips to around 6FPS in the Unity editor even when not detecting the player. After some tinkering with everything and changing a bunch of stuff, I got the frame-rate stable and holding at around 50FPS in the Unity Editor even with 41 Runaks on-screen with most of them detecting the player (detecting the player costs some performance, but not that much with the changes now).

This is great news for those people who might play the game on netbooks or extremely low-end computers because the power required is drastically lowered. That's not to say the game was a resource-hog before though. Prior to the test, the game was running fine on my Acer Aspire E3-111 which has an Intel Celeron N2930 CPU and runs Windows 8.1 Pro, as far as I could tell the game ran without lag at full 60FPS but this of course was a build and not in the Editor. Not that anyone who buys the game would be playing it using the Editor. Point being it ran very well before and now runs even better.

2. AI Updates

I mentioned before that I was tinkering with the AI. Most notably I was playing around with the Runak AI again. Originally it just walked around, jumping at the player when detected. I gave it some more personality but finally using the land animation Frece made with the rest of the sprites, ages ago. Now when the Runak jumps and eventually lands, it will play a short land animation during which it will not move or change direction, giving the player a little time to either escape or get in a few shots to kill it.

Among the AI updates are a few changes to the Base AI scripts and player detection methods. Nothing major, just a few subtle changes to do with setting it up and performance.

3. Dynamic Scene Loader-Unloader Updates

 So I mentioned this before and now I mention it again, even though I'm pretty sure I said somewhere that it's 100% finished (it is). Well anyway, I finished it even more by making it more robust in the sense that it's a lot more forgiving to me accidentally screwing up the set up, along with it clearing scenes in a better way. Along with another script I called the FolderCleaner, there are no accidental duplicate rooms being created at runtime.

I guess this would also result in a performance boost since the engine wouldn't be making duplicates.

4. Composer joined development

 New to the development team of NiTL is an American composer who goes by the name of Bryan Davis, I particularly liked his chiptune music as well as his orchestral pieces so I sent him a message followed by a huge email explaining the project, goals and methods and he joined on to help compose the soundtrack. Feel free to look him up, he works freelance as well as helping to development NiTL.


That's all for now folks, hope you enjoyed the update!