May-June 2022 devlog! Ruining the Ruins 😎

Hey all!

This is a little late thanks to being sick in May, but as usual, I've got this in two halves - a video part first, and a text/images part below.

Video topics (roughly in order):

• New level design and decor for the Rubble Ruins region
• Turrets and crumble tiles
• Controller modes
• The Thin Wall Dilemma
• Waking Fossil boss fight
• Music and what's coming next

Designing some new enemies

I'd originally wanted there to be a 'heavy' type of enemy for the Rubble Ruins region, which was more challenging to deal with and had much more health than the standard Ruins enemies. Quite a while back, I drew the old mockup, but never really wanted to flesh it out, because something wasn't feeling right about it. I finally went and iterated a bunch of other possible designs, live on a stream on the Discord server, and eventually landed on something that felt intimidating, creepy, but still kind of... cute, maybe? This new Ruins Beast design was way more compelling to me, and is fully implemented in the game now!

Here's the before design, the sketch iteration process, and how the final design shaped up!

I also animated the Witch Knight miniboss, which required figuring out how I wanted its fight to be balanced and feel to the player, then working backwards from there to decide what main 'moves' needed to be in its animation set. I'm really pleased with how this came out!

Here's an animation showing all of its individual moves in order, as well as the very rough sketches I did first of how I wanted each move to roughly feel. I'd really like to do a full design start-to-finish walkthrough of this miniboss some time!

(Re)-awakening the Fossil

The Waking Fossil boss is the last major piece of content I put into the old 2020 demo back when the Kickstarter was running, and it's taken until now to actually get it properly rehabilitated. The entire game has structurally changed since then, both under the hood on the back-end in ways you can't see, as well as the new visual style with rooms having more tangible 'height' levels.

What that's actually meant in terms of making this boss work again is figuring out a brand new way to 'delete' tiles - which technically is about a hundred times more problematic than it was before. And unfortunately, because it's critical to how the Waking Foss attacks (destroying pieces of the environment), it's very much necessary - no cheating and redesigning the fight differently, I'm afraid.

A couple messy iterations of it not quiiiiite working...!

Here's what the old process was to delete a tile during gameplay:

• Remove tile
• Update surrounding tiles to no longer 'connect' to the now-empty space

All in all, the cost of doing this was nearly zero - basically nothing. Now, here's how the new process has to be to accomplish the same thing:

• Remove tile, anywhere from 2-6 times based on how many separate tilemaps are involved in creating the height effect in the game
• Update surrounding tiles (again, 2-6 times) to no longer connect to the now-empty space
• Run a level editor function that customizes the remaining tiles based on the surrounding tiles and objects - things like ensuring slopes are 'connected' to and the like, as well as supporting some of the complex tricks I use to visually appear to connect the 'diorama ceiling/floor' together for some rooms. This is fairly computer-taxing, and something I do during the level design stage so that the time involved in processing this isn't experienced by the player.
• Run a 'tile slicer' function which converts all 2-6 wall tilemaps into a variety of separate tilemaps calles tileslices, to help with selling the height effect and resolving 'sorting' issues. As with the tile customizing step before this, this is really processing-intensive to do live and which I normally do in advance. Oh, and it also has to destroy all the existing tileslices first!
• Updating the pathfinding map, which is hugely more complex due to the height system, again.
• Updating the "surface texture" map which says which footstep sound type to use based on which texture is being stepped on.
• Updating the "silhouette renderer" which has a visual copy of every tileslice for the purpose of showing the player's silhouette when they are standing behind something, and also destroying/replacing every single one of its tileslices.

So... yeah. It's not just a lot more involved, but there's (currently) a noticeable moment of lag every time it happens, which I'm still working on dealing with. Fortunately, the fight IS working again now, even if there are moments of lag while the walls come down! And really, with the new look, it's feeling great!

Misc

There hasn't been much time for 'misc' stuff this month with the admin work and being sick - but I did get a new music track out for the Chromatic Lab dungeon region! Enjoy :)

That's it for this month - see you next time!

Jake