Back when I was doing gamedev part time, I had a hard time starting work on large features, because I only had blocks of a few hours when I really needed much longer periods of focus.
I'm experiencing that same problem again; there are a number of things I just can't start without a solid 8 hours to think about it.
Fortunately, I only have three weeks left in NYC, and there's a ton of minor stuff to do in the meantime. I'm also taking advantage of the many gamedev events here. The game has received a ton of playtesting in the past few weeks. One playtester, after listening to me explain the game, said "That's... kind of stupid." The game seems to really resonate with people.
On Wednesday I was able to show the game at a tiny IGDA meetup at a venue that was way too fancy for the occasion.
Scan lines
One playtester suggested that the game needed more "texture". I said goodbye to film grain a long time ago, but I decided to experiment again, this time with scan lines.
Version 1 looked like this. Vertical lines every other pixel. I used a weird blend mode which darkened the scene via multiplication, and brightened it via addition. It was odd.
(Click to see full res)
Version 2 incorporated some suggestions from Twitter: switch to horizontal lines and animate it. I also changed the density to 1 line every 4 pixels.
Then Matt Gallais, art director on Deus Ex Mankind Divided (woah), suggested I modulate the intensity based on depth, making it a sort of "scan line fog".
Pretty nice, but still a few issues to solve.
- I dropped the weird alpha blending and switched to white lines with additive blending.
- The lines were sampled via nearest-neighbor. This caused jitters once I started animating the lines. I did some manual filtering to smooth this out.
- The filtering looked great in most cases, but caused the whole screen to flash noticeably sometimes, especially on TVs. I'm still experimenting with this, but for now I'm biasing the sampling towards one pixel rather than mixing the pixels evenly. Seems to be working okay so far.
Design changes
Playtesting revealed that no one knew how to collect energy, so I decided to merge the armor pickups and energy ports. Now you earn energy based on how many armor pickups you own.
Force fields suddenly become more useful, because armor pickups can now power them indefinitely. You can capture an armor pickup, then set up a force field to protect it. Only an enemy minion can destroy the force field.
Another somewhat big change was the way players bounce off each other after doing damage. Previously, the camera instantly swung around to face the drone's newly reflected trajectory. Now I keep the camera facing the original direction. I also fudge the reflection vector so that the player bounces a reasonable distance away. This helps prevent the awkward scenario where two drones are right next to each other.
Logo
Someone suggested that the pyramid symbol made them think of the Illuminati, or a dollar bill. I mostly picked it as a fairly direct interpretation of "yearning".
Right now I'm experimenting with flipping it upside down:
This was a nifty but nearly unreadable idea:
Someone suggested that I hire a graphic designer, but I am a) too cheap, and b) too much of a control freak. So I'll just keep iterating until I find something acceptable. This was basically the process with the last game as well.