#pitfiends

Got the stands working, using appropriately Mega Shitty textures.

Trust me, it looks more like stands up close. Really it does.

It also helps if the camera is moving, so you can see the 3d effect.

Anyway, hopefully I’ll have textures that don’t look like ass to show off soonish, so expect that. Today’s post is pretty bare, having not done too much since last time, so I’ll make up for it with a poem I wrote a while ago.

I feel the cold hand of the machine on my shoulder, it does not budge when I shrug it off. It has no more power than what I have given it, but I have forgotten how to stop giving.

As you can see, I’m doing a computer science course.

Finally got those archways “done“. Currently they’re still very WIP, and I’m going to be doing a lot more work with them to shift away from the cardboard box aesthetic, but for now they’ve helped me to ask a bunch of fun questions about my graphics system. Questions like, why are the stake heads drawing over the top of the roof, and why is the inside of the arch just as light as the outside. Perhaps even the age old mystery, why is that line bent like that. So far I only know the answer to one of those questions. Hopefully by next week I will have answered the rest.

I’ve also been playing through a bunch of LD41 entries. I still stand by my statement of two weeks ago, that the theme was pretty restrictive in it’s specificity, but despite this there were still some pretty amazing entries. For Instance:

Forbidden Love Although it isn’t very long, 15-20 minutes at most, this one was subversive and surprising in a way that I don’t often see in Ludum Dare games. If there was anything I would want to compare it to, it would be Frog Fractions, a comparison that I do not make lightly.

Tactical Hydra I honestly can’t think of any improvements that I could possibly make to this one. The idea is awesome, and the execution is masterful. Everything fits together really well, making for an extremely enjoyable experience. It’s also really fucking hard.

Jeez, it’s been a while since I posted here. I really overestimated how much time I would have to work on stuff with uni around. With that said however, I have made a few changes around the place, as well as started working on some significant parts of the map design.

I changed the damage mechanics so that when standing idle for a certain amount of time, all your wounds heal automatically. This makes the combat a little less mutually destructive. Or at least it should, I’ll have to wait on testing to confirm, but from the testing I have done so far it seems to be a lot more cautious.

I also started working on some new map objects to spice things up. So far this is just a rectangle sitting on the map, but I’m planning on turning it into an arch kind of thing. The eventual idea will be to have doorways at each of the cardinal directions of the arena, from which players spawn.

In other news, downloads for my 7DRL entry, Bones, recently passed 250, so it’s good to see people enjoying that. I’ll have the post mortem for that up after the results are out, which is looking like it might be a while.

I’ve also been writing some stuff, non game related stuff that is, which I might end up posting about at some point.

I’ll put in an effort to post more regularly over the coming weeks, maybe even on a weekly basis. I’m sure I can squeeze a few hours from somewhere.

Sorry about the quality of the video, forgot to lower the resolution of OBS before I started recording, so everything is pretty squished up.

Finally got all the draw order stuff done. Along the way I also made a number of graphical improvements and fixed up the particle system in a couple ways, so overall the game is looking much better.

The most important change out of these is the alterations to the order in which things are drawn. Previously everything just had a set draw order based on their position in memory, which was of course a terrible idea.

In the above picture, that glaive should really be drawn inside the sack, instead of on top of it. The previous draw system didn’t really have a way to work around this without some heavy spaghetti code, so I decided to rewrite the system with a red black tree. Now, each graphical element is added to the tree and automatically sorted to the correct draw order based on its height. Packaged with this element is a function that can then later be called to draw it. Once everything is added, the tree is traversed in order, drawing the element at each point.

Developing the tree and making it function with the rest of the code took around a week and a half, which is why I haven’t posted in such a long time. It should be worth it though, I’m not going to have to look at this kind of back end stuff for a long time.

I’ve also greatly improved the way the sacks are drawn, there is now much more perspective on the side of the sack, and it has a lot more depth, instead of the flat 2d pumpkin that it used to be.

The shadows have been improved significantly so that they actually draw like shadows instead of overlapping black goo. Ribbons now have shadows as well, and stay attached to their master when they become particles (in the top right you can see a ribbon attached to a chain). I was going to implement a gaussian blur for the shadows, but it turned out to be quite a bit more complex than the simple shaders I’ve created in the past so I’ll leave that for a later update. One other thing worth mentioning is that particles now stay within the bounds of the map and actually collide with the walls, instead of flying off into the infinite beyond.

So yeah, that’s my progress since my last post. I’m thinking I’ll start working on more of a user friendly interface, i.e. a start menu and more noticeable score board, after I fix up some last remaining graphical stuff. Currently there’s a lack of distinction between the foreground and the background, for instance in the picture above, it’s difficult to tell which weapons are being swung by the players and which are lying harmlessly on the ground.

Finally got the ribbons working well, here they are implementing a banner like attachment to the lance.

They also handle the rag like things to the chains, and the top of the sack. The sack has also changed quite a bit, I’ve switched the colour scheme to be more like that of a sack, and less like that of a weird dark beach. Below is an image of the side of the sack, and the way the character tilts a little when moving.

I uploaded as a video this time, so no more trouble with gifs :).

Speaking of videos, here’s a gif, since tumblr apparently only allows one video upload per post.

I recently changed the way damage works. Instead of just taking damage when hit, every blow will slice open your sac, spilling your beans until you die. I’m hoping this will increase the significance of each hit, and increase the impact of each strike. It used to be that some strikes would do almost no damage, and feel really weak, but now even light knocks will put you on a timer to death.

I’m hoping this will also encourage more aggressive play, as any damage is now good damage, instead of only the final blow being valuable. On the other hand, I’ve also increased the health of the sacks slightly to increase the importance of bleed damage.

I still don’t have shadows for the ribbons, so that’s probably going to be my next goal. I think I’ll make that a part of a larger graphics overhaul that will remove all the weird artifacts that I haven’t been showing you anyway, so I might not have an update for a while. I’ll probably improve the shadows overall anyway though, so I’ll probably make a post showing off that once it’s done.

I was going to wait until I had them a bit more polished, but then I looked at how long it was since my last post and though better of it.

I’ve been working on a ribbon system to spice up the characters a bit. It’s also let me finally realize that coloring the sacks to show their team color was a really bad idea, so I’ve moved the coloring system to the chain ribbons instead.

Currently the ribbons on the chains look more like sheets of swiss cheese than fabric, and also if you look closely they seem to be shadowless vampires, but I’ll have all that and more fixed by my next post, in less days than it took me to make this one (hopefully) :)

In the mean time, here’s a gif of the ribbons gently waving in the wind.

Edit: Also, it looks like I have to fix up my blog theme to allow for larger images :/. Figuring out how to do that should be fun.