Dev Log #32 - Overhauled Wall/Ground/Slope Collision Detection

Extremely proud to announce that the wall, ground, and slope detection has been heavily overhauled.

Due to the way the newest available public demo is built, nobody is going to notice any difference, not that there were many slopes in that demo to begin with.

But what this does mean however, is that development is going to be much much quicker, and it'll speed up level creation by roughly 2000% percent due to the fact that I no longer have to manually specific what a slope and what a wall is for the collision detect to differentiate, along with placing edge colliders on individual tiles since the new system lets me make use of Unity's new Tilemap and Tilemap Collider components.

Overall I'm very pleased and excited to have finally done this, it's been on my backburner for at least a year now and after finishing it I've already made 4 different backups.

More news coming somewhat soon!

Dev Log #31 - Updates and Demo News

Hello everyone!

Long time since the last update, so here's what's new:

1. Switch Gates added
2. Wave Beam Added
3. Plasma Beam Added
4. Charge Beam Added
5. Minor bugs fixed
6. Unity updated to 2017.20f3

Switch gates are gates that open only if the switch is pressed somehow. This means that until you find weapons that go through walls, they're a one-way opening gate.

Wave Beam, the wave beam adds lets the suits beam do extra damage to enemies as well as pierce the environment, letting you open switch gates or shoot enemies that are hidden behind walls.

Plasma Beam, the plasma beam is similar to the wave beam except it only pierces enemies! The plasma beam does extreme damage to any enemy, dealing full beam damage for each frame it's passing through them. When used with the wave beam, it will go through virtually all objects!

Charge Beam, feel like your beam weaponry is still too weak? Charge it up! Besides adding to the base damage, you can now charge up your beam for a huge damage boost! When used with the plasma beam it's guaranteed to eliminated all but the strongest foes.

Minor bugs fixed, NiTL project file updated from version 5.5.2f1 of Unity to version 2017.2.0f3.

Using wave beam to shoot through walls to unlock the gate

Charging up the Charge beam

Using the plasma and wave beams to shoot through walls and enemies

Combination charged plasma + wave beam deals extreme damage

Combination of Plasma, Wave, and Ice beams.

What's next?

Well, now that there's an ample amount of enemies, player upgrades and miscellaneous features, I'll be working on a boss creature!

When the boss is finished, I'll be designing a completely new demo with it's own unique map which is going to be 145 rooms large, one room is equal to an entire screen's worth of space, and for reference, the size of current demo is 62 rooms . When that's done, I'll be release NiTL's third and last free demo.

Here's a list of features the demo will contain:

•  Player

1. Missile Expansions (Allows missile fire and increases max missiles)
2. Morph Mode
3. Morph Bombs
4. High Jump
5. Morph Jump
6. Chain Jump
7. Charge Beam
8. Ice Beam
9. Plasma Beam
10. Wave Beam
11. Speed Booster
12. Environmental Shield
13. Energy Tanks (Increase Max Energy)
14. Wall-jumping

• Enemies

1. Crawler Snail
2. Diving Bat
3. Runak
4. Wallask
5. Hive Mines
6. Flying Armour
7. -Un-named Boss Creature-

• Environment
1. Damaging Lava/Magma
2. Superheated/cooled atmosphere
3. Crumble Blocks (destroyed when stepped on)
4. Missile Blocks (destroyed only with missiles)
5. Bomb Blocks (destroyed with bombs only)
6. Fake Blocks (destroyed with any weapon)
7. Speed Blocks (destroyed only by high speed impact)
8. Save Station
9. Doors
• Miscellaneous
1. AutoMap (keeps track of position and automatically creates map of explored rooms)  
2. Pause Screen with viewable map
3. Full controller support
4. Full support for Windows, Linux, and Mac

That's all for now! Stay tuned for more updates.

Bonus pic, evolution of NiTL so far:

Dev Log #30 - v2.5 Update & News

Hello Everyone,

Here's the updates since the last;

1. Updated the title graphic
2. Entirely new pause/map screen
3. Scrolling backgrounds added to the entire demo
4. Fixed numerous bugs
   - Tapping jump button while falling in morph mode sets fall speed to 0
   - Jumping directly up into an enemy cancels jump instead of continuing
   - Fixed object pop-out from previous room when entering a new room
   - Fixed arm cannon rendering in front of the legs when crouching and aiming diagonally down
   - Fixed being unable to jump while on a slope when in morph mode

As of 07-04-2017, these are the latest builds:

Demo v2.5 - 64-bit Windows Build
Demo v2.5 - 32-Bit Windows Build
Demo v2.5 - 32-bit Mac Build

 Screenshots from the new build:

Starting Room

Mid-Game Screenshot

Left: New Pause Screen, Right: Old Pause Screen

A week from now, meaning 14.04.2017, I will be moving for the duration of the summer and development will slow down dramatically as I won't be able to take my workstation with me.

In the mean time before I move, I'll be making a couple videos of the new NiTL updates so people can see the gameplay without having to download the game first.

I plan to make at least 1 short teaser game-play trailer, and one long-play video (non-100% run).

The future planned features are:

• New Beam Weaponry
• New Enemies
• New Abilities
• Boss Enemy
• More Art

If you want to actively contribute to the continued development of NiTL then please donate via PayPal or the upcoming Patreon, any amount is extremely appreciated and everything is currently going towards more art, if you want to contribute but can't afford anything, sharing this DevLog or the Facebook page helps spread awareness of the game and increases publicity to people who might enjoy this sort of game.

Alternatively, if you use any sort of AdBlock or similar, you can whitelist this website address. As of this post I have enabled ads to be shown, but only on the sidebar and from what I see, it's just a passive ad so you'll never see a big banner or anything obscuring posts and content.

This game is still in what I consider early development and has no planned release date as of yet.

Also as a final note for this update:
When I finish one (1) Boss Monster, add the Charge Beam, Ledge Grabbing mechanics to the game, and 1-2 (one to two) more enemies and finished artwork for everything to the current demo I will be expanding it's map by roughly 25-30% and then declaring it a finished demo. This means that after that is finished, there will be no more updated versions of the demo made to the public, aside from bug fixes to the demo if there are any. Any new content will not appear in the demo and will only be present in videos and in builds of the game I bring to Game Expositions like the one I presented at in Zagreb, Croatia, November 2016.

Thank you for reading the update and I hope you have a great summer!

Dev Log #29 - New Demo v2

Hello Everyone,

Here's the updates since the last;

1. Fixed bug with jumping causing player sprites to glitch
2. Entirely revamped jumping and wall-jumping programming
3. Added Wall-Jump animation 
4. Added new enemy type: Dive Bats
5. Switched from seamless rooms without transitions to rooms with transitions between them for better gameplay and easier design
6. Fixed bug with Crawler causing them to sink when timeScale is 0
7.  Null reference exception bugs in GameControl and Dive Bat scripts
8. Fixed raycast misalignment with the player (if you've experienced the player getting stuck in a wall when somersaulting into it at high speeds, that's been fixed in this update)

 This demo is much larger than the old tech demo, here's a visual representation:

It's a very big difference

Here's a screenshot of the demo, there's definitely more art direction than in the tech demo however I have an extremely limited amount of unique tiles.

Newest Builds of the NiTL Tech Demo (UPDATED):





Demo has been updated twice: from v2.0 to v2.2.

Demo v2.2 - 64-bit Windows Build
Demo v2.2 - 32-Bit Windows Build
Demo v2.2 - 32-bit Mac Build


Now that the new demo is released, if anyone is interested in actively participating in helping the creation of NiTL, I'll be creating a patreon to help fund development.

Planned updates for the following months are:

1. New enemies
2. New abilities
3. Boss enemy
4. Hopefully more art

Dev Log #28 - What's Next

Hello Everyone,

With new player art finished and all the old sprites replaced, I can focus on other things that need to be improved or implemented.

Planned for the new updates are:

1. Improvement gameplay mechanics
2. Slightly different control scheme 
3. New Player Abilities
4. New enemies
5. Pause screen art

 On my list now are improved gameplay mechanics, mostly the jumping, I'm going to be refining it and entirely redoing the script that handles it.

After that it's a slight change to the controls to streamline handling the player, just a couple buttons swapped.

New player abilities are going to be added, and some are going to be changed;

• Environmental Shield is going to be changed so that it also blocks out enemy damage, and when full can be drained using the "Inject Energy Tank" button to fill up an energy tank at the cost of the full shield's charge, similar to when the shield is nearly empty, you can inject an energy tank to charge the shield.

New enemies are going to be added, already got concepts and ideas for 2-3 enemies. Having a more diverse collection of enemies is going to allow me to make bigger demos for everyone to try.

When you press "Start" on a controller, or "P" on the keyboard, you get the current map screen. That's going to be improved and polished with some art which is going to be placeholder but a lot better than what there is now.

There's be more updates as we go along with development, so be sure to stay tuned.