diamondhex

[diamondhex]

◈◈◈◈ HAPPY NEW YEAR! ◈◈◈◈ May it be a magical and mystical year. As always a quick TL;DR: this game isn’t dead, I’ve just been busy but working hard. I hope I can have a bunch of fun surprises for you on 2022! If you are interested in knowing more details and my plans for the New Year, proceed along.

Hello, I’m AcHe and I’m the solo developer for Diamond◈Hex. It’s been a tumultuous couple of years for us all so I hope you are well and safe. My last development update for this game was in... July. Dang. Well, what happened was July was the beginning of one of the busiest times of my life. My mom’s birthday was coming up so I had to take on a bunch of freelancing for extra cash, and then a loooot of really cool projects came up and I couldn’t reject the opportunity to take them. I got to work on the new Digimon anime, and it was (and still) is one of the most fun experiences in my life, but it wasn’t an easy task to tackle, and by the end of September I was basically beyond exhausted, but things thankfully settled down, several projects were finished and I even got to participate in the Ludum Dare Game Jam! So that’s all fine and dandy, but where does that leave Diamond◈Hex? Well, it’s definitely still on development. I’ve continued to work on it consistently as my schedule and energy allow it. 

Here’s a new enemy that I’ve quietly added to the game as proof. Their name is a Stomple, a distant relative of the Sweeples and one of the biggest arthropods in the Twisted Forest.  The big thing right now is that development updates are really easy to make when you first start making a game because every day massive progress is accomplished. One day you didn’t have jumping and the next you do. But the longer you spend on a project, the more minute and specific the development gets. It’s hard to make stuff like “I rearranged the way room data is stored” or “I adjusted the cooldowns of the dash by a couple of frames” seem interesting, even tho they are equally as important for development as the flashy stuff. So as time went on I either ran out of cool things to show, or didn’t want to spoil the few surprises still left in the game. So going forward, I think I have to find a compromise. Posting weekly seems doable but it really depends on me finding a good way to balance my job and work on this game, and I’ll be honest I’m not there yet. So for now my plan is to focus on things that I haven’t really done before. More behind the scenes type of things, and breakdowns of my process and tutorials, since those are things I’ve wanted to do for a long time, and I’ve stopped myself from doing it because well I’m new at this so there’s always a strong chance that my way of doing things is the worst way possible, but if it works for me, it might work for someone else and sometimes that’s reason enough.

So one final thing in this insanely long ramble. I had my first test of the game with a friend of mine, and it was illuminating. I want to have more of my friends test the demo I’ve been putting together so I can figure out what are the biggest sources of friction around, so I can release a full public demo for everyone to try! When will this demo be out? I’m planning on having it sometime before my birthday. When is my birthday? I won’t tell you, that way you won’t see it coming. That’s all from me, enjoy your New Year!!!

[diamondhex]

Diamond◈Hex Devlog #4 Road to Demo

◈ TL;DR ◈

I have added so many things. Persistent Objects? You got it! Remappable controls? Done! The list goes on, Floating objects, climbable vines, enemies that can shield from your spells, respawning after death, not to mention all the additional art I’ve done. The issue with all of this is that it’s hard to get things to a state where they are presentable, so I hold off on posting for weeks at a time. I’ll try to be better about it. 

You can support me on Ko-Fi if you can and want.

◈  Coding my own games is harder than I thought  ◈ 

A lot of the things I’ve coded, need to be adjusted for every new thing I add so there’s a lot of back and forth You added water? Well what happens when an iceblock goes in the water? Your first instinctis that it should float, so let’s make it float and boom that’s two days of your week gone because you wanted water. What happens if you want to attack while climbing a vine? Well now you have to add an extra animation. So on and so forth. It’s why I decided that devlogs are no longer weekly but “whenever there’s enough stuff to show”. Hopefully never more than a month.

◈  Accessibility is important  ◈

I’m slowly trying to make sure my game can be as accessible as possible to people from all walks of life. Right now that translates to fully remappable controls for both gameplay and menus, and a visual option to make the background darker so gameplay elements stand out. I’m slowly building up to difficulty options that allow you to customize your experience even more.

◈  T minus 20 days ◈

At the start of the month I said I wanted to have a good comprehensive vertical slice of the game by September’s end. I think I can still pull it off, the biggest hurdle right now is doing  the level design. Metroidvania map design makes or breaks a game, so I know I wont get it right on the first try, but I really want this demo to be good. My game has a very specific gameplay loop so a short little test isn’t going to give me the info about how fun it actually is, and I want to give a good first impression. Fingers Crossed.

◈  Money please  ◈

I have a Ko-Fi account? If you want to help support this crazy lil passion project, I’d really appreciate it. If you can, of course. These are tough times and I want you all to take good care of yourselves and your loved ones. 

◈ May the Moon share her blessing with you all! ◈

[diamondhex]

Diamond◈Hex Devlog #3 Houses built of straw, sticks and bricks

◈ TL;DR ◈

A lot of set up. The flimsy base for a save system, a dialogue system and a menu system are all in place.

Some abilities have been coded and animated but I don’t wanna spoil them too much.

New Content! There’s now water in game, and an enemy called Tumboca, a sort of Thwomp-like enemy.

◈  That’s a problem for future me  ◈

I’ve been using a lot of mental effort to try and make my work easier for future me, which basically involves a lot more planning than I’m used to, but hopefully in the long run it will be worth it. For example I wanted to start working on how the dialogue system is going to be in the game, so I started with doing the tasks kind of in the wrong order, focusing on the art and code instead of the design of the system. What I landed on was a spreadsheet I can put all the text of the game into, then convert that to a JSON .txt file, and then read that from the game and fill an array with all the text. That way I can use the spreadsheet to have any translation of the text done. Is it perfect? No. But it is modular, the spreadsheet is separate from the code that reads from it, and then that code is separate from the rest of the game, so if at any time I change the spreadsheet format, I can adjust the code that reads it and the rest of the game won’t be affected by it. The issue right now is that it isn’t secure, you could locate the file in your PC and change all the words to poop, and I have no way of stopping you, but I’ll look into having secure config files this week.

◈  Metroidvanias and public development ◈

I’m the only person working on this game. I do get help from friends and family, with feedback and references and all that, but the bulk of the work is done by me. Now with the game as a piece of art, that’s ok, but with the game as a product, it also means I’m in charge of creating hype for it, and all I have at my dispossal is my relatively small online audience. So I use these devlogs and screenshot saturday as a way to at least put Diamond◈Hex out there, so people know it exists. The issue comes with balancing public awareness with keeping some of the game to some degree a mystery players would enjoy uncovering.

Specially since my game is a Metroidvania of sorts, if I show too much of the map, too many of the abilities or too much of the story, it starts being in detriment of the game as a product. Like a movie trailer that spoils a big twist or reveal. If I put a gif here of a puzzle idea I had, that puzzle loses its value to the people that see it, but if that puzzle is what I worked on that week, that means I have nothing to show and my games fades an inch more into obscurity.

I’m trying to follow Vlambeer’s philosphies for Performative Game Design, a fantastic talk you should watch. My idea is basically dedicate most of my week to working on the back end, on the important things for the long run, and then spare 1 day for shareable content. A nice piece of art or a funny bug that is appealing and interesting, but that contains little substance of the actual game.

◈  Water levels incoming ◈

Nothing much to say here, I added water to the game. It’s still a wee bit janky, but I’m happy with how flexible my collision code has been so far. The previous iteration of the game never got water physics added to it because every week I had to tweak another line of code of how objects interacted with each other.

◈  How did we do this week these weeks?  ◈

It’s hard to say. I’m sad that I missed a week of devlogs, but the game is shaping up nicely. It’s funny but menus and stuff really make your game feel like a game. There’s new enviro art, too, so the goal was met.

◈  Next week’s goals ◈

More of the same I guess. Setting up systems for the sake of future content creation. As it stands right now enemies can’t hurt you, and moving paltforms are in a global cycle which means really bad things for the physics in the vines whenever I stop time for hitlag and the like, so there’s a lot of little polishing bits that don’t amount to anything exciting but are still super important. We’ll see.

◈ May the Moon share her blessing with you all! ◈

[diamondhex]

Diamond◈Hex Devlog #2 Spaghetti

◈ TL;DR ◈

Added moving platforms.

Coded the basis for pushing blocks around with more flexibility.

Not that much new art, but some!

◈  If it’s stupid but it works...  ◈

I finally have moving platforms, although I don’t think my code is in its best state right now. My game is just a retro style platformer, but I get the feeling that if a lower end PC were to run it, it would struggle at times just because of how unoptimized my code is, even tho as of right now I’m not doing anything particularly tasking.  I’ll look into optimizing some of what I’ve done, but my priority this week was just to get it working, and work it does! One thing that is missing tho, is that you don’t carry any of the momentum that the moving platforms give you so the instant you jump off one, no matter how fast you are moving, you come to a screeching halt. It’s not the worst thing in the world but it can be kinda jarring in some ocasions.

◈  Hold me and don’t let go  ◈

So with moving platforms, came another coding challenge. Imagine you put an iceblock in a swing, and then you stand on top of that iceblock. You’d expect to move alongside the swing, but the way my code works, that wasn’t the case. I had to add a bunch of little snippets to make sure that objects in the world moved when it made intuitive sense. Every game has its rules, and you can slowly figure them out by playing, so I’m hoping that the way things are right now, people can just get a sense of what you can and can’t do over time, but that remains to be seen.

◈ Who even tied those trunks?  ◈

So I do a lot of research about aesthetics in games, specially platformers, just because I like to steal a lot, and one of the most recurring themes I see in platformer jungles is some kind of civilization that is native-american coded. You usually get like old aztec-like pyramids, and Indiana Jones traps, and I can see why that can be so attractive, it adds so many gameplay possibilities when you include some man made structures in an otherwise regular jungle. And that’s a trope that to my own dismay, I don’t want to use. The first area is called the Twisted Forest, it’s a dangerous laberynth of trees and nature that no one dares explore. It’s supposed to be a place where nature just expands to it’s most self indulgent form, and well that doesn’t really jive with a civilization. So I’m (very very) slowly trying to come up with fun gameplay ideas that can adapt to a place where even the flowers pose a threat. That scary atmosphere may not be super obvious in the gameplay gifs I’ve shared so far, but that’s in part because th upper parts of the forest are a lot nicer, and the deeper and deeper you go, that’s when things get spooooky. Hopefully, at least.

◈  How did we do this week?  ◈

It wasn’t the best, I still have a lot of animations pending, but I’m happy with what I got done. Particularly those swinging vines, I spent so much time tweaking tiny numbers to get them to look just right. Like for real, you have no idea the impact that the difference between 0.51 and 0.52 has in the way they sway.

◈  Next week’s goals ◈

I want to get some more environment art and enemies done. I think having the same forest tiles week after week can get a bit boring.

◈ May the Moon share her blessing with you all! ◈

[diamondhex]

Diamond◈Hex Devlog #1 Slowly getting back to form

◈ TL;DR ◈

Animated a lot of sprites for Lykke and some of the early enemies.

Started putting back the code for the freezing mechanic.

Drew a quick little mock up of a title screen

◈  Too many animations  ◈

As it stands Lykke has 22 animations, some reuse frames, some are longer some are shorter, but one thing is for sure, I still have so many more left to do. Animation is my thing, it is what I do for a living, and thus it’s what I focus on to make my game stand out visually, specially amongst NES like games.

It’s also important to me that she can be expressive even tho she is a little clump of squares just under 32 pixels tall, and nimble. I have a list of 6 animations pending to catch up with Lykke’s old sprite set, but even back then she had a lot of pending stuff, not even including cutscene sprites. Gosh I’m bad at keeping a small scope, haha.

I’m going to write a blog post specifically about the enemies, a bestiary thing so I can showcase their designs and animations with more space

◈  Ice to be back ◈

I reimplemented the code for freezing enemies. Diamond◈Hex is a game with non-traditional traditional combat, which is the convuluted name I gave this idea that you interact with the world as a player in a similar manner as you would in a regular game with swords and arm cannons, you can see in the 2nd gif Lykke strikes the enemy with a claw, but instead of exploding and dropping loot or EXP, the enemy freezes inside an iceblock. 

That’s the titular Diamond◈Hex, a spell you cast on entities that are being afflicted by toxic energies, inwhich they get incased in a block of ice that doesnt hurt ‘em, that way you can stop them from hurting you, or use them to traverse the world. The reason I made it this way is that it always felt wrong to have Lykke, a shy little lynx drop in to a forest and just wreck havoc on an innocent frog that is just chilling in its own home. That’s just not who my character is. 

Freezing is usually one of many mechanics in games (Like the Ice flower in Mario Wii, or the Ice Body Chip in Megman Zero 3), but I’m hoping that by having a sharp focus on a single mechanic I can come up with creative ways of using it, and that the game won’t be boring after a couple of areas.

◈  Game Feel and other abstract sentiments ◈

I’ll be honest, I lost a lot of confidence halfway through the week because the game wasn’t feeling so good, and it’s hard to put into words why, but with the help of particles, screenshake, and more importantly the DASH! the game is feeling a lot better now and I’ve regained some confidence in it. It’s hard to quantify what makes a game feel good or bad, and it varies from person to person so I really want to get feedback on this aspect. I’m clening up some of the main aspects of the game so I can run a little private alpha test, that way I can start adjusting things that ruin the experience for others. Which is why I also wasted some time this week working on a title screen for the game. I can’t help myself, I want it to feel like a real game even if it’s just a test to check if the controls work reasonably well.

◈  How did we do this week? ◈ 

Pretty darn good! I had one goal and I accomplished it for the most part. Some of the old spells I had before the art change are still missing, but the good news is that freezing enemies now works better than ever. You have no idea how janky it used to be when you froze an enemy while touching it, you got stuck, or you got yeeted to the floor in a feeble attempt by my code to get you out of being stuck, it was chaos haha. 

◈  Next week’s goals?  ◈

MORE! More animations, more spells, more background tiles. I don’t have a specific goal, I just want to carry on the momentum from this week.

◈ May the Moon share her blessing with you all! ◈

[diamondhex]

Diamond◈Hex Devlog #0 The start of a new beginning.

◈ TL;DR ◈

Started refactoring my old code to fit the new aesthetic.

 Drew a bunch of tiles using the NES pallete and I liked it but I wanna hear your opinions

I learnt about structs to improve my animation system. 

To see more details about this week’s development continue reading:

◈  New art!  ◈ As I said before, I was toying with the idea to redo my art using smaller tiles (from 32x32 pixels to 16x16) and a more limited pallete, the NES’ pallete specifically with its 54 colors. The results were actually promising enough that I decided to pursuit that direction, even tho it meant sacrificing a decent chunk of artwork that I’ve made over the past year and change. One of the most important things to me is that Lykke, my lynx protagonist, was well animated, and I feel like I actually accomplished that despite the self imposed limitations, but you can look at the gifs and tell me yourself what you think. I’m still not fully sold on the NES pallete tho, and I’m thinking of doing a slightly modified version, not adding new colors but modifying the existing ones (particularly the darker colors) to have more tools available for background art. Now I’m not a good environment artist by any stretch, but I’m also super happy with the tiles I made over the week, I feel like I finally managed to capture the dense greenery that I’ve been chasing for months. The smaller canvas size means that details are less and less necessary which is such a weight of my shoulders. However it’s also super easy to get caught in your own little world and lose all sense of perspective. A thing that terrifies me is the idea of comments saying “It looked better before”, and I guess part of me is scared because I agree. What I’m doing is definitely a compromise of my vision, but it’s not that big a compromise and hopefully people don’t see as that big of a downgrade either. I really want to know what you think so be sure to let know!

◈  What on Earth are structs?  ◈ I’m still not super sure myself, but GameMaker describes them as variables containing other variables, sort of like arrays but they are more human readable, that is to say they are easier to understand at a glance even tho the computer might interpret them in similar ways. I don’t fully understand them yet but a friend of mine (thanks Mitch!) suggested using them for animations, and tho I probably did it the wrong way the results are so good. 

I won’t get into too many details but this basically enables me to have animations that only loop specific portions (for example the fall starts with a 3 frame transition from the jump, and then becomes a 4 frame loop of the cape billowing in the wind), so that is just perfect for the way I do animations, and that means the player character has smoother looking movement. I personally love how the animations for Lykke are looking, but again I’d love to know your thoughts on them. ◈  Some final thoughts  ◈ It is definitely a bummer to see a lot of my progress being rebooted. I currently have no enemies, no code for the attacks, no menus, no room transition code, and no code for special platforms like moving ones, or oneways. These are all things that I had already done and that at best I can work on them a bit to fit them with the new code, and at worst are completely useless now. The brightside definitely is that everything is more futureproof now, my code is getting to a point where while not pretty, it’s serviceable and manageable. I’ll keep learning about the new tools GMS 2.3 Beta has to offer to keep improving it even more. I don’t wanna spend 7 years working on this project, afer all, so it’s time to kick things up and mantain the momentum that the art overhaul gave me. ◈  Next week’s goals?  ◈ I want to put enemies and spells back into the game as soon as posible. The main mechanic of the game is freezing enemies, and not having your main mechanic implemented is just silly. ◈ May the Moon share her blessing with you all! ◈

[diamondhex]

Some mockups for my game. Diamond Hex is a puzzle platformer metroidvania that I’m developing. The project started with higher res pixelart, 32x32 tiles with limitless palettes. But that kind of style is hard for me to produce at a decent pace for a solo developer, so I’m toying with the idea of scaling the game back to an art style with 16x16 tiles and limited to the NES palette. My focus was always on atmosphere and cool character art, and I feel like I can still deliver them with those restriction. Hopefully they look good in the eyes of ther people too!

[diamondhex]

◈ Lykke ◈

A young moon witch in training, Lykke is a shy and reserved lynx that sees herself forced to venture into an unwelcoming world for the sake of her beloved Grandma.