Project F

I finally replaced my Animech sprites and animations with something I'm happy with! I've been using a placeholder up until now. It's actually a fusion of 2 or 3 assets I bought on itch.io that I heavily modified to match the style I wanted.

I made a new font! I wanted something italic for my "internal dialogue" boxes, styled differently than actual spoken dialogue. Fun fact, did you know there are over 2,000 unique two-letter character sequences? This font required ~450 unique kerning rules for custom letter spacing. My first (non-italic) font only required 2 or 3... I call it FF57I (very creatively, for Fisher's Font, 5x7, Italic)

It's been a while - ARC Raiders has taken up more of my free time than I'd like to admit... But! I've been working on some combat improvements.

Statuses: I tried to convey more details about status conditions. I'm worried it's too much currently - but I'd rather add too much up front and then only keep what's important later. That said, I was able to create visual feedback for all the parts of a status:

Statuses are applied with "stacks" which are removed over time. This is shown with the status background, it's kind of like a vertical progress bar.

Based on thresholds of how many stacks are applied, the status is in level 1, 2, or 3 - indicated by the dots below it. As the level changes, a "upwards" or "downwards" animation is shown on top of it.

Statuses trigger their effects every 4 combat ticks (starting from the time they are applied). This is indicated by the "rotating" and flashing border.

Move "Animations": Not to be confused with actually animating my sprites, hehe - I added a flexible system for adding sprite transformations as skills are triggered. This was a relatively cheap way to add some much needed visual feedback for combat.

Tempo: Combat doesn't have to be real time, but if you queue moves fast enough, it is. If you're able to keep moves queued you increase your tempo, which adds a damage bonus. This used to be a tick counter, but I've changed it to a more abstract gauge.

Sounds! I've been working on my sound engine - something that has barely existed until now. There are two big updates shown in this video:

Dialogue Sound: I emulated the Golden Sun dialogue sounds, I'm quite happy with it. It's still a little squeakier than I want it - but I've made it possible to tweak energy, pitch, speed, "worble", etc. to get different voices for different characters.

Spatial Audio: Entities can now emit sounds, and respect fall off configurations based on their distance from the camera. You can hear the energy shield door get quieter the further I walk away from it; you can also here the footsteps of the NPCs in the hallways as they walk by

This bug has been haunting me since day one…

My camera follows a targeted entity, lagging slightly behind and speeding up as the entity gets further away. There's an equilibrium met where the speed of the entity matches the speed of the camera as it tries to catch up. This creates nice, fluid camera movements when the character starts or stops moving.

The problem is that slight differences in frame timings cause the camera movement jitter between two pixel coordinates, making the entity's render position flicker by a single pixel. The effect is subtle, it just makes the animation feel "off"…

The fix wasn’t obvious. I started tracking the standard deviation of camera-to-entity deltas over N frames. When the deviation’s low (steady motion), I lock the camera delta to a fixed threshold to stop per-frame jitter. Once it rises above that threshold, normal logic resumes.

Today marks the first time that my custom game engine was used to actually create a game-like over-world experience! I'm working on building out the initial game loop for my first play-test build, and I can only do that thanks to the recent work I've done on my entity control system.

I loved being able to add dynamic dialogue fairly easily (e.g. tracking if you try to take other people's papers, how many times you try to enter a private area) - and design some decently complex world state sequences.

Here are some screen shots of the Tiled map for this scene:

I spent a lot of this weekend working on the startup sequence of my game. Primortal is a love story to the GameBoy Advanced and my childhood playing on it: it's rendered in 240x160, and your inputs are limited to A/B/Start/Select/D-Pad.

So when a player starts my game I want them to know, in their bones, that they're getting into a GBA game.

This is what I came up with :) I'm very happy with the visuals, I want to keep working on the audio, but today is honestly the first time I've touched music editing software in almost 20 years... So it will take some practice.