SolAZ Dev Blog

*revives devblog* It’s been a while since I last posted here. and there’s significant amount of things to cover. The Maze Generation has been greatly improved, not only random lights, but now includes randomized enemy spawn points, enemies are selected from a list, *walls are randomly selected*, finally; initial dream/nightmare settings as well.

Game play wise, there’s a mini map, and all beings can have a “special move” or similar, for now, they are called Spells for Maria. (ie Spellcard, Touhou inspiration), these sap the being’s MP (which recovers bit by bit) and can land a rather large amount of damage. (Not just more bullets)

The Dreamer’s Princess - Explained

Inspiration - The Dreamer’s Princess is the result of a brainstorm on what mix would be interesting to make. Originally as a completely different game, a bullet hell shooter inspired by games like Touhou and R-Type, but never made it past concept, though many ideas are preserved. Currently inspired by games like Etrian Odyssey and Mystery Dungeon and even Persona.  The idea was changed and gained it’s title as the concept suggested the whole game was gonna be based on dreams.

Gameplay - The Gameplay of TDP is rather simple when spoken. Go through a maze, going through a possible hordes of enemies and the barrage they make. Find a Key and Find a door. And Hope to get stronger for the next run. This is the base of it, being partially an RPG the player also has to grow stronger in order to progress, and there are more ‘skills’ to learn as well.

Development - To Be honest, I completed half of the Non-Game parts (Mostly UI) so I’m happy to say the development is rather fast. Or at least not as slow as I expected. This game is my polishing and learning experience, being my first game for release (be it free or paid). The Mazes are completely randomly generated, and so are the lights, enemies and goals. I aim to make each experience different and as diverse as possible.

The Goals - Surely you’ve noticed the low-poly look of the game, Originally, I was aiming for the 3DS, and actually still do, but it’s easier to start on mobile, and hope to release on a Nintendo platform soon after mobile, and more from there if possible.

Challanges -  Currently, having the limitations of not being able to bake lighting, nor occlusion culling, is a problem at the moment. Trying to keep the ‘draw calls’/batches as low as possible (below 175). Lots of tweaking and minor changes, you can only have so much control over something that’s randomly generated, specially if you’re trying to aim for something in particular. Other minor challanges include music and textures but I’ll be working with those once I’m done with ‘development’ (programming parts)

Feel free to ask me any questions be it by twitter, tumblr or youtube comments, I’ll gladly answer. I’ll also take the liberty of documenting the questions with answers for future reference and possibly a FAQ about the project. 

The Dreamers Princess - The Lords Reveal Trailer 10.26.16 - Atlantic University Animation & Video Game Festival #FAV16

Thanks for your support guys, the presentation went pretty well despite technical issues. Next reveal us in 50 Days! I'll be publishing progress via solazdev.Tumblr.com and occasional screenshot Saturdays!

[UPADTE] The Puerto Rico Game Jam 2016 :: Escape the Earth

Sept 16-18, 2016. The Puerto Rico Game Jam is  your typical game jam, 2 themes, 48 hours to build a game. Personal Experience was amazing, x10 times better than last year. 

I worked along a team, Team Widdle Biscuit, which consisted of 3, @maalgon3 and @redmonsterdev who helped from outside. Together we built what we call “Escape the Earth”. The Game used both topics of “Creepy Fruit” and “Nature” as seen with enemy fruits. The Game starts after Nature had grown to take over the ruins of earth after an apocalypse. Dashbot, a friendly, caring robot awakens in the depths of a cave inside a swamp. Low in processing power, all he can do is jump and run, but just barely. He’ll need to escape to see if he can recover. But frighten superfruits that can also slightly move, as long as the cave itself make it harder for little Dashbot.

The Game is still under development but you can get the FINISHED GameJam version here:: https://solazdev.itch.io/escape-the-earth

“Glowing Starry Sky”  After the longest hurdles, never-ending testing, tons of mistakes, over 24 hours of Rendering and lots of 'pain'. I have finally completed, one of my favorite pieces of 3D Art! This piece came to mind when looking for a friend over at an airport around 1AM, seeing the landing areas, I thought of a forest with a similar lighting. And slowly this simple piece came to mind. 

Honestly, I’m a bit sad I couldn't do a 4K render but the finished render had plenty of post-processing (had a lot of noised, didn’t know about blender’s post-processing abilities until half a week later, I used EasyFX and Gimp for editing.) Hopefully I’ll be able to recreate this at 4K (or maybe 8K, who knows) and will be updated to some PBR Shaders I got to use for another piece (”The Hallway” PBR version). I hope to make better pieces in the near future.

“The Hallway” - PBR Experiment Edition. 

The original version of this project, my very first in Cycles Render Project, was also an experiment, but was done awfully bad, looking back at it, it has some materials that absolutely make no sense, Things like 'Mix 0.5 with 0.5 at at .554%', only added extra rendering time (44 minutes if I remember correctly.) Sadly *ALL* of the textures used were lost, I've been dying to see a higher-resolution of the original render, but seeing that wasn't gonna happen, and few days ago I made a beautiful set of PBR Shaders, I decieded to go back at it again, as procedural as I could. This experiment features only 4 texture packs, (metal scratches, server stack, desktop screen shot, and bricks). Everything else in this version is entirely procedural. That includes wood, stains, colored shades, etc. Loving to see most if not all metals are reflective, the furnace is also more accurate to it's texture, FINALLY RENDERED THE FIRE I SUFFERED FOR (the original upload doesn't have fire </3) and the lighting was untouched -fears of 10+hr renders- Also this Render (res is 2k btw) only took flat 35 minutes, original render took 40-49 minutes (Pretty damn sure it was 44 but I could be wrong)

In the other hand, with The Dreamer’s Princess, despite working with ObNat for the week, I was able to make significant progress! Some bugs were fixed, performance is finally stable (probably still need some tuning for mobile) but as you can see, the Maze Generation still needs more assets, (WIP today and tomorrow) and the first boss is finished (modeling), mind the angle tho, currently working with rigging and diffuse textures.

UPDATE 2: Return of the Practicum Project [Hopefully for Comic Con]

Originally made by a friend of mine as a Resident Evil Tribute, warped a few times, into something greater, Enter Obliteration Nation. Our Practicum Project might have a display in our college’s area in the Puerto Rico Comic Con!! The project is a Third Person “Cartoony” Shooter, and tells the story of a wolf who was captured and offered as a sacrifice, despite escaping with wounds the work was done and now his world is slowly turning into hell. Our survivor, Lazarus will be the one that’ll look into the cause of this mess and will root out the henchmen before their lord opens his path onto his home for more chaos...

Obliteration Nation was originally a 2D, Sprite, and tile based Shooter. However for practicum, it was ultimately turned to a 3D, fully explorable shooter, and from zombies to Demons and Monsters. The project was revived on late March and has slowly grown to be the bigger project (being submitted to a time limit) and hopefully it’ll be accepted onto the display for others to try out! Because of the time limit, in my case I’ve been pouring nearly all my work time onto this, specially after the teacher job had finished.

Here are some screenshots, well plenty since I posted the first update, and you can see the progress since. The level is meant to be around 15+ Minutes long. It has around 75~ Enemies and is still work in progress, we’ll be adding few more things before we hand in the final demo.

UPDATE 1: The Dreamer’s Princess - Maze Generation, In-Game Enemy Testing with their Navigation and Shooting.

As I said before, I’ve been having several issues with internet, to the point where I can’t load tumblr, can barely upload a pic to a hosting site, cloning medium-size git projects take an eternity and so on. But I can finally send the first update. SO!

#TheDreamersPrincess - A Maze, almost rouge-like, RPG-esque shooter, has made a slight, yet significant update in while I was away, in the video you can see enemies don’t only work (well, some of them, despite all running the same code) and the Screamer can shoot. But so can the player. However, just like a bullet hell, these bullets can be easily dodge, making it seem as the player and enemy isn’t hit. (that’s gonna get balanced though)