RobeCreta studio

As I predicted last week, earlier this week I experimented briefly with the mechanics of dashing in flight.

As with the previous wall kick, Poi can dash by pressing the jump button while flying.

Immediately after pressing, Poi will do a dash after a temporary speed decrease, at which point you can set your direction, and hold down the jump button to keep it that way.

However, since this idea is to replace the existing wall kick technique, I needed something that could replace the wall kick's technique.

So, the first alternative I tried was to implement a technique that allows you to jump at a great speed if you hit a wall while dashing.

Unfortunately, the experimental results do not have any major advantages, and there has a problem that unintentional control mistakes occur.

If there is no better way to do this experiment, I think I’ll stop and proceed with the existing wall kick technique.

I hope I can come up with a good idea...

And next week we will be exhibiting LUCIA at G-Star, an international video game event in Korea.

If you have come a long way and are staying in Korea during this period, please come and play!

Recently, I came across this GDC lecture video.

These are basic parts, but I still think the basics are important, so I looked back at the lectures little by little.

Talks about hooks are often mentioned in lectures, so you can understand them roughly as attraction.

As a piece of advice, you need to try several times to find the 'hook' that will be the most characteristic in the game.

First, let's sort out the things that we think are the most characteristic and remove them one by one to find out 'what breaks the game the most'.

It is highly likely that the 'hook' is the one that breaks the game the most when it is not there.

- from Inven Korea : https://www.inven.co.kr/board/indie/5023/11

So I looked at which of the four pitching points I had in my game that was the least crumbly when remove them.

Among them, it was a point that did not break down significantly even without the 'Minigames with little things to enjoy' part, so I decided to reduce it and organize it in the first one.

Coming back, continuing from last week, I supplemented and organized the first point, ' A journey to unravel the secrets of the sophisticated and simple world'.

This part was inevitably covered.

At last, I decided to make a small test case for this part because I thought it would be possible to test it even if it was configured like a TRPG.

I don't know when it will be...

The second is 'Free platformer control through flight'.

White Spirit's predecessor is a reinterpretation of the mechanics of Colorless Spirit, a flash game I made in 2014.

The flight mechanism is now expanded by adding basic techniques that can be done in flight like in the 3D Mario series.

And while I was writing this section, I decided to try changing the action to dashing the jump button used in the existing wall kick later on.

Lastly, I'm in the process of organizing and finalizing the documentation for the last characteristic, item traits.

These documents will probably also be polished and organized when the draft is finished.

These are doodles drawn to introduce features in this week's document works.

At the beginning of this week, I wsa lying down for a few days for nothing, and then there was a local indie game developer's meeting, so I met them and I had calmed down while we talked on meeting.

Guess I was a mentally exhausting situation...

Anyway, it looks like the documentation is going to wrap up nicely again and overhaul things that need to be done for the playable demo.

In next week, after writing all the planning documents, I decided to take a break for a week, so I decided to skip next week's devlog.

🔗 Game design template by Rosa Carbo-Mascarell

My GDD is organized through templates that a game developer found in a spreadsheet that puts useful information.

The first characteristic that I have arranged is 'exploration', which I consider important.

Before I talk about exploration, I want to talk about a game that I made a long time ago and stopped developing because I wasn't sure of the direction it was going.

At the time, I was using GameMaker Studio 1.4 to make this game, and the program was so poorly resourced that the waiting time for playtesting was long.

But not only that, I stopped because the direction of the game wasn't clear from when I first started making it until the last time I stopped making it.

Even at the time, I had a lot of thoughts about making an exploration game that allows you to move around, but I put it down because simply putting a lot of space without meaning does not automatically motivate players, but...

After playing about Mobius Digital's Outer Wilds, I realized that the meticulously crafted worlds and secrets were the key to exploring.

In the case of Outer Wilds, it was designed with no purpose or goal presented, and only 'knowledge' that can be obtained through exploration as a reward.

While this assumes and builds on only a specific pool of players, you can see that the Outer Wilds team is willing to choose them to give them the best experience possible.

On the contrary, I aimed to give an exploratory experience to many players, so I thought about how to improve the elements that were difficult to start with in Outer Wilds, and organized them to make them feel lighter.

That's why the note system I made earlier was also made as an aid for easier exploration.

This is a scribble I put in the document for better understanding.

It's been a week where I haven't really worked on Unity, and it's probably going to be like this for a few more weeks.

This time, I decided to get a debug utility package that can display text more easily and display item information.

Now it's nice to able see what's these item is.

...I have no idea graphics when...

GitHub - vertxxyz/Vertx.Debugging

The debug utility package can be found here.

Now, the item that can be thrown and teleported is given the name 'Ghost gem', and two items from the previous stage (Anti-gravi gem and Super-mag gem) were additionally conceived.

And I decided to envision items related to musical instruments.

And now you can swing it up and down even when not in flight.

Lastly, I keep organizing the documents, and I don't think I've ever organized project planning and workflow this systematically before.

I'm in a pretty chaotic state mentally as I've been working mostly on White Spirit for a while now.

I think it might be because it's autumn, but I think I need to be careful not to suddenly get confused.

From next week, it seems that I will focus on working on documents.

I'm starting to make the strong vine now catch entities as well.

As always, the beginning is always chaos.

I've made it grippy once, but my platformer physics has no air resistance so far, so it feels like it's being dragged around more.

However, there is one variable that I hadn't thought of in the strong vine now.

I was trying to make only the visuals of the vines lead to the spring joint, but I found that the spring had an effect by attaching a fixed joint to the actual gripping joint at this end.

However, now that the spring is completely separated for display purposes only, there is a change in the reactionForce value of the fixed joint, and the part is being resolving now.

I also discovered that DistanceJoint2D's reactionForce behaves differently than a normal joint.

The expected behavior was to generate forces when moving away from a certain distance or moving away with Max Distance Only enabled.

The spring I had only made for graphic got out of the sphere of influence, and when I repositioned the head to the original fixed joint at the end, the spring messed up and I started looking for a solution.

I was trying to implement my own rope using ray, but now I've found a simple way to do it in line.

I used a method to secure stability by attaching a distance joint to the first part of the body that is attached to all spring joints. (Not perfect)

Because Unity's 2D physics is based on Box2D, I was able to find the wisdom of many people by searching with Box2D rather than searching with Unity...

First of all, I thought I was wasting too much time on the strong vine, so I decided to put it down for a while and try to make the next item.

So I created an item that is thrown and explodes after a while.

I decided to call it Surprise nut.

Of course it's also in the experimental stage.

GitHub - vertxxyz/Vertx.Debugging

Circular debug display used this package.

It has so many features that I think I will use it often.

Next time, I plan to make an item that warps to the spot when thrown and release button.

The strong vine I made last time kept getting caught in the terrain and messed up, so I made the effect layer into two that are affected by the terrain and those that are not.

And now, I made it when the grip is released, the last node slowly returns to the origin.

This is will be finished by creating logic to grab entities and object that can only be caught by the strong vine.

Right now, for some reason, entities not dragged by that, so I'm looking into the problem.

Simultaneously with the development of the item, I started writing a structured document on the workflow that could be a roadmap for the main content of White Spirit.

Through this, I expect that when I develop by myself, I will be able to clearly understand what stage the development of this project is in and or how much time, budget, and manpower are needed for White Spirit.

No matter what I do, the content of these documents may change constantly, but I am writing this because I feel I need to take care of it.

Originally, I was going to make an item that explodes when thrown this week, but time flies by doing bunch of things.

Recently, I can feel that a big event is approaching for the White Spirit 'project'.

I hope this goes well.

This time, I decided to make a strong vine item with traits that can physically grab items, enemies, and certain objects.

I wanted to experiment with something I haven't tried yet with this, but I also wanted to see how I can make it affect the platformer body to the unity physics joints.

First of all, the controls are to swing to throw, hold down to grab the target, and release to release the grab.

First of all, I made it composed by connecting the joints in this way.

The last body was connected to the first with a Distance joint to keep it stable.

First of all... it doesn't go very well when I try without a dedicated physics layer.

By the way, I had thought it might not be able to show consistent motion from wielding.

So I decided to show an animation with smear keyframes only on wielding, and show the physics elements in that place when contact.

Now that I've implemented some pretty basic interactions, I decided to see what I can do with it.

I can do a hammer throw with this!

Now I have tried to fix the minor issues.

Surprisingly, I discovered that my game didn't have a physics layer dedicated to effects, so I took this opportunity to create it.

I also fixed the physics elements to be placed in the correct position when the target is contacted.

Finally, I started implementing the logic in which my platformer physics are dragged by joints.

Unity - Scripting API: Joint2D.reactionForce

Joints connecting physics elements in Unity have a property called reactionForce that tells how much force to pull.

Using this, we can create something that is dragged to the joint!

https://youtu.be/JGOC2DtzHUk

Then, during testing, I discovered that I could get caught by platform effectors.

I also discovered that it is possible to move like a bouncing rubber band.

This time around, it seems to have had some pretty tangible results.

It wasn't organized, but I found a lot of interesting moves.

Next, I'm going to prepare something similar to a bomb, which is most faimous item in video games.

See you in next week.

Additional notice

DOWNFALLEN’s 1.1.0 version development has begun.

This is also the version coming to Steam with the help of Psychoflux Entertainment, co-host of 1Chicken RPG Maker Gamejam, and it's a large patch with missing or improved elements.

In order to make it clear what the entertainment experience this game can offer, I've started organizing documentation to clearly distinguish the pitchable content of White Spirit.

Through this, the large pitching elements are organized as follows.

1. A journey to unravel the secrets of the sophisticated and simple world 2. Free platformer control through flight 3. Items with good traits to play with 4. Mini-games with little things to enjoy

I think it would be better not to look any further than this.

I thought it would be used in other places in the future, so I decided to put it in order to be satisfied with whether I could convince myself in my opinion.

This table was created by White Spirit to see what table I would have if we had elemental reactions.

However, I thought that it would be better to make the items react (like a pebble - swinging a branch reaction) in order to take advantage of White Spirit's unique strengths.

Since this table was created, I decided to use it only as a reference in order not to harm the rules of the game during item reactions.

It seems that there has been a slight burnout since the BIC exhibition.

I wake up early in the morning, but I don't seem to have any energy...

I think it might be autumn, so I think it would be good if it was a temporary rain.

I also need to write a review for the BIC exhibition and the post mortem of DOWNFALLEN(both posts are not available on English), but I think it would be better to prepare slowly with a little more time in my mind.

This BIC was the first offline event for me in a long time, and there were many people who knew me, and there were many people who made good friends even after meeting for the first time.

Thank you to everyone who visited our LUCIA booth!

Now that most of the animations in Animator have been ported, I took a video for comparison.

It can be seen that the operation method is different, so the operation does not come out exactly the same.

Anyway, I'm relieved that I can now easily find and fix animation bugs.

When trying to move in the opposite direction when landing, the animation are played in the order of [Landing] > [Turn] > [Move].

Now it's time to start working on item traits again.

This time it's a branch, if you wields it, you can swing it as it is.

The reason for fixing the animation was this item, and it was confirmed that it worked much better than the Animator version, which had an inconsistent swing state.

In addition, the magic casting with new specifications made it possible to hold a pickup-type light anchor while in flight.

For that reason, I also modified the orientation of items to move with Poi during flight.

Finally, the branch perk can interact with the cobblestone perk, so we can play around with it in this way.

It seems that something is going well as intended.

What will come next?

Next week's devlog will inevitably be canceled due the Busan Indie Connect Festival. (exhibition of LUCIA, a game that I participating in development)

Dimlight did a really nice drawing of Poi, thank you so much!

Letting go of the trail experiment I made last week, I put it back as it was, and finished wall bounce and stomp animations.

Then, finally implementing the new magic casting specs, so this finishes porting Poi's animation to the AnimationPackage version.

Left : Animator / Right : AnimationPlayer

By tabulating and organizing the elements required for each animation system to work, I can see that it is much more concise.

It sure looks good.

Now, from next week onwards, I can start working on item traits! I’m so tired when doing this animation reworks...

Link : https://github.com/creta5164/fmod-rmmv

Oh, I just finished documenting the FMOD-linked plugin that can be used for the RPG Maker MV I made together while making DOWNFALLEN and just started distributing it.

Reflecting the new magic casting specifications set last week, the animation state is divided into two, and...

a sliding animation is added when flying in a narrow place.

And the last, I tried to make the trail effect that should come out in flight pretty with a single shader + trail, but...

I ended up feels wasting time with the pixel shader(...) I guess I'll have to try a different approach.

Next week, if I implement wall kicks and stepping motions during flight, the animation itself will most likely be over, hurray!

At the same time, I also working on LUCIA, preparing BIC...

preparing untested English localization for DOWNFALLEN, and preparing had to organize what I made here to reveal...

I have a lot of work to do!

I am feeling very busy again.

Photo taken from Second week of 2022.6 White Spirit devlog

Finally, the 'wielding action', which was the reason of the re-creating and repairing animation work, has finally been ported to AnimationPlayer.

Now I can able to create and put in the complex conditions I want to transition from wielding to each other.

Among them, there was an issue where the animation would be canceled if you crouch while wielding while standing, or stand up while wielding while crouching.

Metal Slug XX's playable Leona's special ability, Moon Slasher, is canceled and rapidly abused the action.

Something like this.

Still, in the case of White Spirit, there is no such problem because the delay for wielding again is separate from the animation, so changing the posture in the middle does not reset this delay but...

Since it looks so unnatural, I solved this while implementing.

Top : old way, bottom : new way

Lastly, I decided to make the item's magic traits instantly usable by simply holding wield button, rather than holding it long time, so that it can be intuitively used in any situation.

So, unfortunately, I decided to discrded the one-turn animation that I had made previously, and also decided to modify the existing animation of put back in wand.

Hoping that this will allow to quickly use the item's magic traits in any stance.

We can see a lot of activity on July 31, just before the end of the game jam we ran to make DOWNFALLEN.

I am working on a schedule that is more full than I thought as I was organizing the post development & post-mortem and organising for publish the new code stuffs I used while making this game.

(This is also a long one, so I can't to prepare post-mortem post in English, sorry!)

And I committed to releasing a playable demo of White Spirit in this year, and it doesn't look like it's going to be easy, but I'll have to work harder.

Oh yes, I have another news.

LUCIA, a game I am developing and participating in NEW MOUNTAIN as a programmer, will be exhibited at the Busan Indie Connect Festival!

Now I have added most of the actions from original.

In particular, now that logic and animation are integrated and the state can be controlled transparently, even flipping and twisting movements in flight can be easily and neatly implemented.

CC: The comment says 'Is belly facing upside?'

First of all, I brought it in the way it was implemented and used in the past.

Previously, I depended on the state of the animation, but now I can simply implement the motion when standing still and when moving, with these parts going all the way into the code.

Now, all I have to do is implement the transition to reflect the animation with the flipping animation while flying when belly is facing upside.

When it is turned over, the angle is also turned over to make the transition smooth.

In the process of working on this, I found a hidden case that I never thought about when I was using animation controller before.

It was state of braking while the belly was facing upside on flying.

So I made it when braking in an overturned situation, it is made to turn over so that the boat faces down, and then switch to a braking motion.

So now we can see it moving much more naturally.

In this week, an acquaintance introduced me to a meeting called Seoul Indies, so I suddenly made an plan.

I couldn't take a lot of pictures because I didn't have enough battery(...), but it was a very beneficial and good time because I was able to share many stories with many indie game developers.

And I was very happy that many people recognized and liked my game.

And STOLL drew Poi really nicely, thank you so much!

It was a week that gave me a lot of motivation to work really hard even for people who like this game.

One more thing : Causality development team got together (included me) and started getting things done, stay tuned...

Now that I've finished moving, jumping, and crouching over last week, it's time to move on to Poi's flight state.

Until now, during the flight, the three were separated as shown in the flowchart.

However, in the state of the animation controller, it was really difficult to convey the information repeatdly fast "Should I brake or not?", so at that time, even though I covered all cases at the time, performing complex motions at very precise timing could cause the animation to break.

For examples, problems occured such as flying backwards, moving while braking state, etc. Unfortunately, I couldn't take pictures of these animation issues(...)

The new animation system I working on this time also encountered the same problem while following this way.

After much consideration, I decided to switch to this way.

I planned the states of 'when moving' and 'when braking suddenly' are viewed as state on the same line, and they are paralleled process so that they transition smoothly between each other depending on the state.

From an animator standpoint, it's similar to using two sub state machines as a blend tree.

After filming all of the manipulation processes that had animation problems as replays, I tested each one by one.

The value represented by mov indicates the direction you entered.

Seeing that it works well, I think I can finish it by adding logic that only changes the angle.

I haven't been able to do much this week as I've been rearranging the furniture in the room and getting my hands on the desk to made it completely clean setup and ready for use.

But it’s okay, it feels so much cleaner and more focused than before.

I drew this while working on my laptop all week long.

I drew it in super high quality (3000x2000), it looks okay.