glowykillstick-blog - Tumblr blog

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Where you at? D:

Placcessss

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Is ArcEdge still happening? Or has it been put aside?

Hey! It’s still very much alive, but progress has been too spotty to warrant an active devlog due to reasons. I plan on starting back later this year.

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Update #8 -- Combat equipment and the HUD -- 8/30/2014

Working on menus, more HUD stuff, and how equipment currently works.

So this is what it currently looks like. There are 3 things the action HUD shows:

- Main weapon & Skills - Offhand - Artes

- Main Weapon -

The magic blade Estelle summons when fighting. The spell she uses to weave its form it can be changed using objects dropped from enemies, basically allowing you to equip different weapons. These new weapons come with set abilities and passives to augment your fighting style.

 For example, this skill, [Heatstrike], is a flaming sword slash that shoots 3 short-range fireballs. Also, it converts a percentage of your damage to Fire damage.

-  Weaved Skills  -

As for how they work, there's a dedicated "Special Attack" button that executes your weapon skills. There's Neutral, Side, Up and Down, kind of like how Smash Brothers does its special attacks. They're also color coded for elements.

-  Offhand and Artes  -

On the opposite side shows Offhand. Basically it's for environmental interaction and (possibly) temporarily taking enemy weapons. The fireball skill icon there actually refers to your currently equipped magic artes. Just like weapon skills you can have 4 equipped at once, but they are independent of your weapons and are equipped in the Artes menu.

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Programming more base engine things, everything seems to be going well enough, just a bit slow because I have to design and animate stuff as well. The combat is starting to feel alot more fluid now, especially on gamepad. I just have to put some more enemies in, and I can put out a playtest.

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Golem!

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More BGs

Creating old magical ruins is pretty fun.

Danger!

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Trees and more trees

Ohh the neglect...well, i've been neglecting my logs more than anything :(

Working on assets for the forest area to make it look more foresty. Also a new HUD that's more functional than the placeholder. What do you guys think?

Also, trees! They move, but the gif i shot was too large for Tumblr. 

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Hmm?

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Update #7 -- Soldier Concepts -- 7/16/2014

Neeghh this isn't working out for me anymore, just kind of winged it as a placeholder.

So here are a few concept drawings for the base sprite references of the soldier enemies. There are 5 ranks of these guys: Fighter IV/III, Knight II / I, and Order Elite.  

Apologies for monochrome lol

These are the main type of basic humanoid enemy you'll encounter. Similar to the slime they will be distinguished by type, and will appear with different equipment sets. I'll be distinguishing them apart with sprite overlays for armor and weapons.

Similar to the slime, each class and type will have access to different movesets, and higher classes will have more total moves in rotation to use. Leaders will be able to buff nearby soldiers and execute team attacks.

Order Elites are encountered sparsely and will behave more like minibosses. These guys will serve as early-game meatdoors for important areas. An earlygame encounter with one of these guys should serve to show what an endgame loadout will look like, but you'll eventually have to take them down to gain access to certian areas.

The elites don't wear helmets because I want them to feel more like you're fighting someone of importance. Wouldn't it feel weird killing the same guy multiple times? So instead i'll overlay their heads, maybe weapons too if it doesn't make animating them too difficult.

Just for sprite height referencing on the base sprites. Estelle actually stands about 6 feet tall. Of course this is a bit impractical to stay faithful to with my chosen resolution. Maybe I should have created a pixel scale? Whatevzz.

I'd like to do a randomized female variant for the low-classes with the same abilities and a different sprite, but it'd be somewhat difficult/time consuming to achieve through sprite overlays and i'm drawing enough animations for these guys as is. So probably not happening.

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Update #6 -- First working enemy logic -- 7/10/2014

Finally got it working as intended!

During combat the King Slime (now designated with a Royal Stick of Power) will actively seek out weaker slimes and consume them, gaining their powers. Introducing the Army of Hues

The regular lowly slime. They headbutt you just to annoy you.

And Fire Slimes, what do they do? Why, they provide cover fire of course.

HEY what the -- oh, just a lightning slime. They don't even have to be line of sight?!

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I've mostly just been setting a platform for my enemy logic so that the more fleshed-out foes will be able to do more in terms of interacting with eachother. In that sense, for how basic they are i'm surprised how oppressive these little things actually are depending on how I mix them up. I've got alot of stuff to do but at least now something can kill me without debug keys.

I'd really like for people to playtest this once i fix a few nasty physics bugs. Maybe I should get the HUD and menu working first though? Iunno.

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Working on air combat mechanics, feeling out physics.

You can hop cancel an air attack to reset your options in the air with correct positioning. With finishing attacks, special moves and gained movement options, I want to let players freestyle their attacks. I've been playing with a float state (Kingdom Hearts), but consistent gravity just feels alot better here.

Aerial attacks aren't really stronger than ground attacks, but they'll keep you out of reach of most enemies, and juggles keep enemies from recovering.

Also been playing with different weapon types and features. It's surprising how little things will make the same animation feel different. The blue sword adds +1 targets and reduces the amount of screen freeze on-hit, so it feels much faster and sharper. The orange sword is just fire damage + visual effect. Some weapons will have different sprites.

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Update #5 -- Optimization and AI concepts -- 7/4/201

Even more stuff to whack!

Vast majority of my work as of late has been engine related. Managed to solve some annoying FPS dips caused by off-screen enemies, and drastically increased the amount of AI-controlled objects onscreen while maintaining 60FPS.

Hue shaders are only the beginning...

Most importantly though, the new physics optimizations have allowed me to start programming the basis for some advanced enemy features. Nearly every enemy will have variations and leader-types of themselves. And this is something i've been having fun with.

As anyone could guess, the different colors correspond to elemental strength and abilities. Normal, fire, ice, electric and arcane, ect.

The yellow one is a Leader Slime. Still not much of a threat, this guy will target any weakened slime and rush over to devour it, increasing its own strength level. And type of slime it eats determines which parameters increase and which abilities it gains. (And most importantly what you can get for defeating it.)

So that's actually a lightning slime. But I haven't decided what to visually tell the slime leader apart with yet. Maybe a hat or something.

The more complex the enemy, the more drastic the variation can be, and the more dangerous a present leader can be. Some will buff or heal teammates. Some have movesets tailored for different ranges, or execute special team attacks. Some will even attack eachother. Either way, it's intended to make you approach the area differently.

One theme i really want for all enemies in this game is emergent strategy that feels organic, with the possibility to turn even simple cannonfodder enemies into situational nightmares.  Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors is pretty boring on its own, and I don't want the player to feel discouraged from using any specific magic attack off that concept alone. The last thing I want is the player going into autopilot.

Sigh...still got alot of animations on backlog. I'll probably cover player abilities soon.

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Update #4 -- Meh -- 6/29/2014

Family tragedy, left my state for a funeral for a week. Haven't had much time to work on anything really.

Everest Eyrna, a skilled swordsman fighting for the preservation of his homeland

Concept of a supporting character. Some of the side characters will act as unplayable allies during some specific sections. They're there for story reasons, but usually showcase some useful ability you don't have access to yet. This character in particular is no good at magic, but is adept at concentrating energy and using crushing blows. This will be an early powerup for unlocking areas, but becomes useful in combat against high-defense enemies.

Being an action game, all powerups that are useful for accessing new areas will have practical use in combat.

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Update #3 -- Working as intended. -- 6/18/2014

Frustrating bug that wasted hours of my li Neat feature

I decided early on that I was going to try to do as many eye-catching unique things as my math-challenged brain and Construct would allow me to get away with. So obviously, I have to put dynamic water in the levels.

http://gamedevelopment.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creating-dynamic-2d-water-effects-in-unity--gamedev-14143

This is the best many different stupid outcomes.

For whatever reason, the waves refuse to propagate correctly in more than one direction as shown in the tutorial. Some sort of interference my logic or Construct's logic, or something. Was at this for days. Eventually, I got frustrated to the point where I stopped caring.

But before I quit, I decided to remove the waves and just keep the spring motion that was working as intended, and then apply it to all the grass sprites in the stage. Throw in some quick, cheap little "wind" code that blows through your location, and...

Voilà; moving grass!

I also just use the X-move values of the attack hitboxes to move the grass also. Works well enough. I've been playing around with this alot to use with things like shrubs, trees, even NPCs, anything I can possibly apply it to without it looking odd.

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Update #2 -- Animating attacks, Learnin' as I go -- 6/13/2014

My current animation pipeline

So, this is generally how my animations look now before I sprite them.

I used to try and shrink these and reuse the lineart, but the method takes forever and isn't really worth it because of the resolution difference. Now I simply use these as references when doing the actual sprites. I try to just get the keyframes down and approximate the other frames by eye.

Often ill try my hardest to reuse similar frames from other animations, but it almost always works against me, so i don't do it anymore.

Flashy crescent woes

Quick motions like slashes really confuse me sometimes. But i feel like im starting to get better at them. I think there's a concept behind it to make them look like actual, fluid movements and not just flashy crescents. When I first started this project, i actually created keyframes of animation during the slashes.

There's only a single frame there here but it makes the slash seem awkwardly laggy to me.

I'm learning that it's kind of like the awkward difference I feel when looking at high refresh-rate televisions (like Blu-Ray movies). I used to say the movies "looked like videogames". That's because they refresh so fast that they don't simulate motion blur. And that's all the "slash" really is supposed to be. Motion Blur is how your brain fills in motion too fast to perceive.

So, these are her basic air attacks im currently working on. I'm trying to use that principle to complete these motions. Her body and swordarm twist alot in ways i'm not tweening, but hopefully in motion you'll still see it happen. Either way, the sooner I can remove that placeholder air attack the better!

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Update #1 -- The main character and Signatures -- 6/13/2014

Here's the concept of the main character. It's been a bad idea to delay actually doing this because it's been causing slight inconsistencies in some animations. But you learn as you go I guess.

In fact, that's probably going to be the theme of this devlog: "How to be unorganized when making a game".

One more indie redheaded heroine wouldn't HURT, right?

Estelle Amaranthe: An exceptionally skilled witch and a well respected bounty hunter. Estelle makes her living collecting the bounties of beasts and local criminals. While adept in artes (magic), her calling card is the ability to effortlessly summon an energy blade at will, without the assistance of technology.

Estelle has recently ended up in the crosshairs of the Gairian military for the alleged murder of an officer. This has resulted in a rapidly increasing bounty, as the Gairian military and other bounty hunters continuously fail to subdue her.

Arcane Signature The little symbol in the middle of her concept art is an insignia that is displayed anytime she (or anything) uses magic. It's inspired by Blazblue, one of my favorite fighting games. Here, it acts as a visual manifestation of the soul, and is unique for every individual.

I'm lazy, so it's currently acting as a placeholder logo until i can decide a proper one for the project.

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In case you didn't know, this game is currently called ArcEdge, and it is an Action-RPG. Sort of leans towards Metroidvania. I guess. I don't like branding things.

The basic vision for this game's combat is merging RPG mechanics with skill-based action. This game is more about approaching enemies with strategy, using your abilities wisely, and weighing advantages. I reference Devil May Cry and competitive fighting games alot for combo mechanics.

You can view a more extensive Devlog here. Unfortuantely alot of the screenshots I post are actually GIFs, which Tumblr seems to hate alot. 

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!?