Nope, not a new game!
“Gateway: Chronicles of Steve” (of just “Gateway”) is the official name of the game!
“Chrome Hunter” was the name of the game in it’s inception, when it was built for the Indie Speed Run 2013, and it made sense since the themes were “Hunting” and “Silverware”, and the objective of the game was to gather pieces of silverware in the random worlds.
Now, given the new storyline and the general tone of the game, it warranted a new title, and here it is!
That’s a screenshot of the new title screen… It even looks better animated!
For me, this signifies the end of “Phase One”, in which the game is more or less playable from start to end, with all the gameplay elements pertinent to the storyline ready!
There’s still a lot of work to be done, like better graphics, sounds, gameplay elements like the random side missions, the balancing, ports to other platforms, bug-fixing, etc, etc, etc, but this is a real milestone!
Now listening to “Swallow” by “Heavenwood”
Link of the Day: I really love the band Two Steps From Hell, they have awesome songs… And I also love the guitar playing of Eric Calderone, which does metal versions of popular songs. Combining the two is pure awesome!
As I mentioned before, I decided to make some pieces of gear “passive”, which mean they don’t have to be equipped, they can just be bought and from then on they will be available.
I already used this for armor, but the analyzer and scanner weren’t like this.
The reasoning behind this change is that it’s nice knowing how much health an enemy still has, but it’s silly abdicating of grenades or a jetpack to have this information.
This doesn’t provide the player with a big advantage, and it’s a good measure to know how much damage you’re inflicting (specially when you change weapons).
Not sure if the display is good enough, but I’ll let it be for now…
Also started to work on the “new game” functionality again… Some stuff I did in the meantime broke the initialization code, and I’d like the player to be able to start a new game… That’s almost all of my “to-do” list for “Phase One”!
Now listening to “Asylum” by “Disturbed”
Link of the Day: This game looks excellent! It seems to be my cup of tea, and I love the atmosphere (as I love all things cyberpunk). It’s still in pre-alpha, but it looks promising!
After some discussion with a friend, decided to go ahead and add the health injector to the game… The goal might be basically the same as the shield, but they play slightly different… Shields are great for slow constant small damage. Health injector is good for bursts of large damage.
This way, the player can choose whatever he likes the most!
Now listening to “Dead End Kings” by “Katatonia”
Link of the Day: This Kickstarter seems interesting… I’ve toyed with the idea of a game similar to this one (although the enemy was space aliens, not undead) for some time, so it’s good seeing someone making it. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but it looks promising! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/dreamlordsdigital/graywalkers-purgatory-turn-based-post-apocalyptic
Somewhere along the way in developing the last area, I broke the explosions…
This is what they’re looked before (some months ago):
This is how they looked at the beginning of the evening:
Terrible, especially in motion, in noticed every single “glob” of them, the ground was too dark… a mess altogether…
The problem, turns out, it was that I added a new render pass in the system (the effect pass), that is drawn after all the “solid” and “transparent” stuff… It’s also transparent, but it’s mostly used to allow for correct viewing of effects, especially in the last area, which has a lot of transparency all around…
Anyway, when I made the explosion effect, I didn’t have that, so it didn’t account for that extra pass, so it would get drawn twice (one of the transparency pass, another in the effect pass). Now, it only draws on the effect pass, which cause issues with transparent walls:
There’s no real solution to the alpha-blending problems, except sorting, and even that can’t guarantee success, since you’d have to sort “per-pixel”, and you can usually only sort “per-object”. And on Cantrip, I can’t even do that much… So, I think I’ll leave this rendering artifact in (it doesn’t happen that often in real game conditions)… Even a lot of AAA-games don’t deal with this properly (you can see this problem on a lot of places in “World of Warcraft”, for example).
The normal result for the explosion now is:
It looks way better, especially in movement…
Tomorrow, I’ll see if I can muster enough energy to tackle the main screen, so I can start playing the game again from the start (checking for obvious bugs), and more importantly, to finish “Phase One”.
Now listening to “Greatest Hits” by “Peter Gabriel”
Link of the Day: Very interesting read about the 3Cs (“Character, Controls, Camera”)… One of my pet-peeves in a lot of games (my own included), is bad camera/character controls… This article gives some structure to these thoughts: http://blog.digitaltutors.com/character-controls-camera-3cs-game-development/?inf_contact_key=3327b5632a440fe2f07c5e2ce3683236ff0d21c7a614573dbac5b4c876d50ebc
Today I finished work on the grenade display (and the consumption of items)… Nothing to show for it, since it’s all temporary art for now…
Then, I was going to start with the health injector.
The idea of a health injector is that you can use it to recharge your health bar. It’s like you have two health pools, instead of one. It would act as a “on-demand” health pack…
But when I was going to implement it, a thought struck me… what’s the actual difference between the health injector and the shield?
The shield’s charge goes down when the player is damaged, and recharges slowly… If it depletes completely, it takes some seconds to start recharging again.
The health injector was something you could do on demand, but it doesn’t recharge…
That means that the shield is almost always a better choice, unless the health injector has a better conversion…
For example, let’s imagine the health pool has 1000 points. The shield and the injector also have 1000 points… In actual terms, this means you can take 2000 points of damage minimum, but potentially, the shield can give you much more, if you take moderate amounts of damage every time you enter a fight… But if we improve the health injector conversion (2 to 1, or 3 to 1), with the health injector, you can recover (quickly) 2000 or 3000 points of health… But this seems a bit overpowered in the short term, which mean that for this difference to exist, I’d have to reduce the conversion of the shield (0.5 to 1, for example), which would make the shield a bit on the useless side…
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to add this anymore, to be honest… The shield always seems like the better choice, except if the conversion rates are tuned so that it makes the shield almost useless…
I need to think about this a bit more, to be honest… What are your thoughts on this, everyone?
Now listening to “Land of the Free II” by “Gamma Ray”
Link of the Day: This looks so neat… also looks tiring, but the coolness overweights that… It’s awesome people are looking into ways of using VR in novel ways, instead of just the same old, same old…
Well, if I knew it would take me so little time, I’d made the equipment screen a long time ago… It’s just that it is UI work, and I really hate UI work!
It’s quite simple… In the right, there’s the passive gear (some of it used to be active, but I’m switching it to passive instead, along with some reformulation on how they display data, like the analyzer).
In the middle, you can equip the two slots (weapon and gear), by double-clicking on items on the left side.
Next step is to finish adding the grenades to the player, create the “health injector” item, and switch the active items to passive as needed… After that, the new title screen and I’m done with “Phase 1” of development!
Now listening to “The Human Equation” by “Ayreon”
Link of the Day: I wasn’t too into this movie before, but this new trailer really spiked my interest in watching it… The Wachowski brothers are really good at making cool!
Working hard on getting the equipment screen up and running… It’s already functional, just needs more tweaking to work properly…
Visually is looks terrible, but I won’t waste time on this for now…
Now listening to “The Chemical Wedding” by “Bruce Dickinson”
Link of the Day: Everybody knows I love me some Assassin’s Creed… and I love cats as well… So, how about we combine both?
To be able to make the equipment screen properly, I need to finish the shop… And working on it, I saw it wasn’t very pleasant to use: the mouse wheel didn’t scroll the item list, double clicking wouldn’t buy stuff, you didn’t have any indication of the amount of items of one type you had…
Now, it has all that and it’s much nicer to use… I still have to allow the user to use the mouse in the other screens (email, captain’s log, etc)… But I’ll leave that for after I get the UI work from my friend, and for that I need to find the time to be able to sit down with him and study the current UI and see what we can do with it…
Now listening to “Rosenrot” by “Rammstein”
Link of the Day: This is a nice tool to use while prototyping… Beats using rectangles and badly drawn stickmen… It’s probably illegal to use on the 48-hour compos, but still it’s a nice one to have on your tool belt: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/2013/04/16/spritely-autogenerating-sprites-from-the-web-free-tool/
Today I didn’t have much time to work on the game… Just fixed the problems with the shop caused by the refactor of the item system.
Still need to display somewhere the amount of items of that type the player already has available (grenades, fuel, etc), but I might leave that for when I receive the new UI art.
Now listening to “Home” by “The Gathering”
Link of the Day: This is very cool… nVidia, to show off the power of their new chip, showed it off by rendering realtime GI, trying to replicate the Moon landing photos and in the process debunk the conspiracy theories about the fake moon landing… It doesn’t prove anything, of course, but it’s a really cool show and it’s better seeing the power applied to more than just impressive scenes, but just rendering stuff better:
Working on the equipment screen (UI work, which I hate)…
I’ve had to refactor all the item system, since it was the same since the 48-hour version of the game, which was clearly inadequate for this task.
Yep, this is what my whole work hours looked like!
Tomorrow I hope to see if I broke anything in the store screen, and then I’ll move to the equipment screen… I’m thinking if I want to make some stuff “equipable”, or if I just make it available if the player buys it (for example, I’ve done so already with the oxygen/water tanks, and the anti-grav boots). Case in question is the scanner (allows you to see the enemies in your map) and analyzer (allows you to see the health and weapons of the enemies). I might reformulate the analyzer altogether, I’m not happy on how it looks and behaves, to be honest. More on this later!
Now listening to “Anno Satanae” by “Moonspell”
Link of the Day: This is extremely freaky, yet awesome:
