A little art update.
I painted this guy and I'm planning to use him as an NPC in the testing fields. At first I sketched him out as a monster, but I liked the general look of it and decided to turn him into an NPC instead. He will be somewhere on the horror side of the Testing Fields hub area and probably won't have too many lines, but I think it will add to the overall atmosphere of the place.
I just finished painting and I'm now integrating a couple larger, more open areas in the Abandoned Archives cave. I needed these for a couple larger monster encounters and these have a chance to appear towards the end of the cave.
I've been coding a decent bit for the game for a while now so I wanted to take a break from that and do some painting. I showed a sketch of a good chunk of the overworld probably months ago and I just now finally got to painting it. Honestly, it's been fun, especially because for once the painting was going faster than I expected and I felt more energized to do this extra artwork besides the stuff I do as a freelance artist daily.
I was working on this sci-f i themed blue wire area of the overworld and it will need some final touches once I have more work done on the rest of the place, but this bit is 80 or 90% done. That took me around 5 days( not full days, mind you) which is way faster than I expected.
Here it is together with my progress gif and a couple close ups:
I've been having fun with this and it continues to go fairly quickly so I painted another part of the hub area. The previous blue wire area was scifi themed and this time it's fantasy.
This area also contains the entrance to the cave a lot of the previous work on the game was focused on:
I think I will continue with this and paint the horror themed area that connects to these two and if I manage to finish that soon, then I will have most of the hub I want to have for the game demo. There are smaller bits I need to add to make the area more alive, like sparks to the exposed wires, but it would be a huge amount of work done. I want to have more and more of the hub unlocked as needed, probably including the last quarter of the hub I haven't touched yet - the cartoon themed area. I also need to figure out how exactly I want to hide the area outside of the hub artwork so it doesn't look like it's sitting in the middle of a grey void, but I have an idea for that that I think will fit in thematically.
And here is the remaining part of the hub I wanted to paint for now - the horror themed area:
Here's a little GIF of how I painted it:
And a couple bits up close:
Now I need to let all three parts of the hub art sit for a little bit, marinate in the back of my head and add some final touches. I want to make a few adjustments for better visual readability, add a tiny bit more detail in places and I'll probably come up wit a couple more things I need to change to call it complete. But this really has been going surprisingly quickly so far, so hopefully I can finish it up real soon as well.
After that I will need to integrate quite a bit of artwork into the game itself, together with this I have a bunch of assets pilled up and ready for that. I'm sensing another potential work heavy period in the near future so I want to do a lot on this personal project while I have some time.
Overall I'm pretty happy with how this turned out. I also came up with quite a few little ways to add some animations and movement to this area, so I'll share that as well once I have this integrated into the game.
So this bastard is really getting close to it's final form. Here is the layout of the entire cave. The white rectangle marks the size of a single game screen. I did end up zooming the camera out by around 20 % so in game everything looks a bit more detailed and a slightly larger area is visible.
The blue outlines mark all the areas that have variations or optional rooms that have a random chance to appear in a given play through. Some of these have a 70 percent chance to show up, some as low as 25. I can always add more but for now these are all I wanted to add and hopefully they provide a decent bit of variation on top of various paths you can take through the cave. Some of these areas simply block a path and open another, some are shortcuts and some lead to semi secret rooms with upgrades or even small arenas for rarer monsters that can only be found there.
Now I need to finalize the monster placements. I will be adding some randomness to that as well, though I won't leave it entirely to chance or balancing would be impossible. I want to have two or three options for most rooms to ( so for example you might find 5 low tier monsters, or 2 higher tier ones), and there are a couple areas closer to the end of the cave where it pulls from a much larger list of possible monsters. I actually wrote a monster spawner script months ago, so it's mostly placing things around and seeing what I like now.
I had the artwork for this initial area hub finished for a couple months or so now, but now it's time to fully integrate it into the game and give it some life.
I've been adding details like sparks randomly jumping between damaged wire. This is just 3 little png images I drew rapidly switching, but I think the effect looks quite good:
I added spinning teeth to these digger monsters in the background. I simply made two teeth circles spinning in opposite directions and squished them a bit so they appear elliptical in shape:
I still need to add a dialog system, but I started integrating the characters. They have a slowly flickering white outline to make them stand out from the background more and they display a thicker outline when you mouse over to indicate that they can be interacted with. All these effects have sounds added to them that fade out if you move further, so they never just blare at you all at once:
The hub area is not too huge for now, it's about 4 or 5 screens in size and has a clear border, beyond which will be further unlockable areas. I had the idea of showing it as a prohibited area covered by a holographic wall or something like that. So it shows this message if you mouse over beyond the edge:
The yellow hologram also has lines of slowly changing color, which probably isn't obvious in these compressed gifs. It still needs some work, but I think I'm getting there with this area. There are more little animations I'm adding all over the place here and I think it really helps to make the area feel alive.
I’m not making a story focused game, but I still need some sort of dialog system to explain a few things about the game and to make it a bit more immersive. I noticed two games back that even a very simple dialog is much better in that regard than a tutorial bubble. At least to me.
I have coded dialog systems before, but I’m not exactly a pro programmer so spaghetti code is wild and I tend to forget what the hell I coded months ago and how to modify it to begin with. I found some simple tutorials for dialogs, no need to reinvent the bicycle after all. I tried copying a specific very simple dialog system that seamed promising, but it just refused to work in the game engine, it showed multiple errors. Could have been a number of things, but the problem is that the tutorial used some code a bit above my knowledge level so it was hard for me to tell that the hell was going on. And the whole idea is to use code that’s easy to modify later so what the hell?
So I decided to reinvent the bicycle anyway and rewrote most of it, just kept a couple things that seemed to make more sense compared to my previous attempts and it works now. Took me less time than trying to debug the tutorial and I know how everything works in it now. Haven’t found any issues with it so far, but of course that remains to be fully tested. Basically, build your own bicycle, I guess.
Also I wanted to blur out the background when entering the dialog to make the dialog window and the characters stand out more. It’s easy theoretically, there are just some image post processing functionality in the engine, but that ended up being a lie. The thing is, the menus and the official documentation for all this in unity says that you can blur out any layers you choose, so you could blur out the background, but not the characters, but that turns out to be nonsense. In the set up I have it either blurs out everything except UI layer, or nothing at all, while showing in the menus that it’s blurring out just the background. Took me like two hours to figure that whole nonsense out and it seems a lot of people were confused by that. Oh well, it’s not worth trying all sorts of workarounds for just that, it’s not a huge issue in my case. I just wish the documentation was a little less ass.
The gif showing how this works is a bit too large to work on this site, but take a look at this same devlog post on my DA page if you want to see that: https://www.deviantart.com/augustinasraginskis/journal/Devlog-33-Dialog-System-1...
I’ve been working on a variety of smaller things for the game, adding some polish and such to the parts of the game that are close to being finished.
Here is an item that grants a skill point used for upgrades. I only had a small green plus shaped icon of it before, and I decided I want have a much larger and fancier version when it is dropped by some of the stronger monsters on first capture, found in hard to reach areas or at the end of a level etc:
I painted the main character you play as a while ago and I decided I don’t like his goofy head. So I changed that. It’s becoming more important after I finally added the dialog system and you can see the characters at full size:
Also it’s been a long time since I drew some monsters and that’s just plain unhealthy. I started thinking about some cartoon themed monsters I want to add into the game after the demo is done. These are some sketches of this evolving golden brain worm guy and he will be drawn using linework, as opposed to being painted later on:
I've been tiding up and finishing up the monster collection menus. Small, but very important part of the game.
All captured monsters are sorted into categories and displayed in the hub area like so:
The collection shows the type of monster, so in this case Fantasy monsters in the left pillar and Horror monsters in the right. You can also scroll to see how many and what tier monsters are still not captured. Some of the monsters have white lines connecting them, those mark the evolution lines for the monsters that have those.
Also I added short descriptions to each monster together with other info, which you can see if you mouse over them. Some explain a bit about mechanics of a specific monster, some are purely for flavor text:
The controls are getting slightly complicated at this point, so I finally got to adding an explanation about those. These are shown every time you want to enter a cave, and can also be checked any time in the pause menu while in the cave:
It's quite possible I will be adding a couple more buttons for various Cave Drone upgrades I have planned, but I want to display only the base controls until that is unlocked, so as to not overwhelm a new player with too much info at once. I don't know about you, but I usually skim any rules explanation if it's too long and pretend I will be able to figure it out as I go.
I had the beginnings of this from almost the start of this game development over a year ago now, but I just now got to finally implementing it properly. I plan to have a fair few more upgrades available later on, but I think these will serve as a good start. I have two types of upgrades, the ones that use monsters you capture and give higher upgrades depending on the tier of the compatible monster and MODS.
Mods can be upgraded via mod points you find by exploring, capturing some of the more difficult monsters etc. The plan is to make at least most of the mods to not have a cap on how many mod points you can invest, so you can use all of them on a single mod even, if you are of the extremely min-maxed mindset. We'll sea how that shakes out in the end.
The upgrade menu as of now:
It fades out and let's you select a monster from your captured monster collection for upgrades. In this example I need to select a monster with the tag EVOLVING tag and I had used up all higher tier ones already so I selected one of the same tier just to show how it looks:
The menu seams pretty simple but of course there are tons of non obvious little problems I've been working out. How to intuitively show which monsters are available, how to sort the various extra smaller menus that pop up, how to change the monster, how to convey sometimes a bit complicated explanations, how to turn off the skill if it doesn't suit your playstyle etc. I think now it works fairly well, but I look forward to releasing the working demo "fairly soon" and seeing some feedback.
Here are the explanations of other basic upgrades I implemented:
And also here we have a MOD that potentially changes the gameplay quite a lot :
It allows you to play much more aggressively and still capture some monster at the expense of HP. Also it has a nice synergy with the HP Multiplier Upgrade, as that one heals you when you capture a monster. As I mentioned, mods, including this one don't have a skill cap so you can easily go into negative base HP. This is not an automatic loss, because other upgrades and permanent HP increases found by shooting at monsters a lot, can pull you out of the negative numbers. However, this is the only mod I have without any cost added if you want to downgrade it and retrieve a mod level( and reduce the HP debuf in this case). Otherwise you might soft-lock yourself and die as soon as you enter a cave area wit less than zero HP.
Lastly, I made one more monster based upgrade( Lightning Ring) and two other mods( Lightning Proliferation and Chaotic Lasering) that serve as upgrades and changes to your weapons and they have more visuals I want to show off. I'll ramble about those later, but I think they are turning out quite fun so far, possibly a bit ridiculous.
Alright, so here is what the remaining three upgrades do:
The two Lightning Ring upgrades feel pretty fun, but I gotta say, they are kinda too strong right now. Here's how it looks normally and how it can look if you have both of them and run into an optimal use scenario( a bunch of monsters tightly packed):
images below are supposed to be gifs. If they refuse to work, check out the same devlog on my DA: https://www.deviantart.com/augustinasraginskis/journal/Devlog-37-The-Other-Upgra...
This needs some more testing so I'm not changing anything at the moment, but maybe I need reduce the damage, kinda make it obvious that this is a large area attack, but each individual Ring has low damage so you need a bunch of them. For me it's visually more fun to have just a ton of them. Also I could make them disappear after reaching a wall so they don't cover such a large part of the map. That would make it so larger open area allows for a larger Ring.
I found a related bug when working on these as well. Some monsters spawn objects on every hit and that's just not a good combo with a ton of fast low power attacks. You could easily kill yourself or bring down the frame rate or both. I will probably change it so that those monsters spawn something after taking 10 damage, which is how it effectively worked when you had only the basic shots.
Here's a preview of Chaotic Lasering. It starts with 30 randomized projectiles and I tested even with 150. This one starts out a bit week, but ends up quite ridiculous. It can also destroy fragile walls and can be used in combination with regular shooting so I'm much happier with the balance for that. Maaaybe I will do the reverse and buff it a bit at low level.
I'm adding two little side areas: Slime Nest and Eye Nest. Here are the sketches for those:
The Eye Nest will be close to the start of the level, so easily accessible, but I will probably add a secondary exit to the overworld from the Slime Nest, so it will serve as another access point to the underground areas in general.
I have two lines of evolving monsters in the game right now, one slime themed and one eye themed. Normally you can encounter up to tier 3 versions of those monsters, but in these caves you will be able to fully upgrade them to the maximum 6th tier( maximum for these monsters, I might have higher tiers later on for others).
I'm still working out the details, but the idea is that you can bring a certain device to these caves which can extract genetic info left in the nests and synthesize higher tiers than normally possible. You will have to bring some combination of resources to that device in order to spawn each tier monster which then can be captured and you can repeat the process if you failed or want multiples of the same monster. This is probably going be the way you will be most easily able to catch evolving monsters in future levels too. At least for now these evolving monsters can go a couple tiers higher than any other monster, so they will be valuable for Cave Drone upgrades I mentioned in recent devlogs and I will probably add other rewards for fully evolving a monster.
The evolving device art is pretty much finished:
