Something Blue
Figured I'd make a thread for this, and keep ya'll filled in on what I've been up to this summer. First of all, I've been building an allotment in my backyard. Almost finished that! But more importantly, I've been making a VIDEO GAME. This has been going on for only a few weeks, and it's currently not done, but thought I'd keep a little log of what I've been adding to it since I revealed it only a day ago.
Development State
Tools: 95% Done
Level Design: 30% Done
Artistic Design: 95% Done
Gameplay Mechanics: 100% Done
Something Old
Here's full Synopsis of the game and its story:
Beta Testers
Tedium's Programming Soundtrack:
- Tool: 10,000 Days
- Of Mice & Men: Of Mice & Men
- Of Mice & Men: The Flood
- Callejon: Videodrom
- Oh, Sleeper: The Titan EP
- All That Remains: The Fall of Ideals
- Imagine Dragons: Night Visions
- Metal Dubstep Mix
- RWBY Theme
- MW2: Enemy of My Enemy is My Friend
- Monster Hunter Village Music
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Monday
Anyway, now to the sweet gooey center (cwatidid?) that led me to create this thread. Just wanted to keep track of the development stage, and this close to the end such a documentation isn't too low-level, so it should be at least a little interesting to those who aren't stupidly familiar with Flash and Actionscript.
Something New
That there is a screenshot from a level designed today: The short tutorial that runs the players through the different technologies equipped to Module_8808. Today, I've tweaked the function of the AI's messages, so that they stand out more as one of the only sources of color palette in the entire game. The red contrasts makes it clearer to the player than the AI that is guiding them is simply not concerned with your own interests - he is a companion, as well as a looming antagonist.
On top of that, I added lighting and shadow to the entirely of the environment. All instances of Azure, the luminescent blue fuel that runs Module_8808's technology, now have a faint blue glow in the darkened environment.
Some of the areas aren't decorated with the environment yet, but I've managed to keep track of player deaths, as well as some instances of how they've died:
Here, the AI that governs you keeps track of the number of times you've died due to shooting too quickly or too often, which expends Azure, the laboratory-developed fuels that runs your systems. Shoot to much, your health goes down, and your system fails. The AI which designed you has seen your predecessors fail thousands of times, and has nothing more to do other than count how you've died, and how often.
Azure also fuels Phase Mode, a state the player can go into upon holding down Shift, which allows the player to pass through certain walls, and enemy bullets. This expends Azure quickly though, and once fully gone the player's anti-gravity systems fail and they're left immobile on the laboratory floor.
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Tuesday
Completion List
- Added layering, to allow for foreground as well as background (harder than you'd think...)
- Added the following assets:
- Bridges
- Bridge Walkway
- Bridge Railing
- Bridge, Small
- Bridge Doors (basically seen from the side, as opposed to the front facing doors throughout the rest of the facility)
- Dynamic-Length Ladders
- Ladder Markers (simply drag and resize, and the code will add the struts of the ladder based on your new length)
- Elevators
- Elevator Door
- Elevator Shaft
- Bridges
- Adjusted the layering of objects
- Added lighting to windows and Azure tubes.
- Decorated the rest of the Tutorial.
- Changed AI dialogue better reflect its stance.
When designing the first level of the game, I tried to remember what xAudienceofone mentioned about letting the players absorb the environment for themselves. I didn't end up changing any of the AI's dialogue however, since that never revealed much of the game anyway. What I had to keep in mind though, was to include the superfluous features such as side rooms, wider corridors and larger rooms to allow room for visual assets. If a player is entering a room, what was this room once used for? When I asked myself that question, I found it hard to justify the vertical corridors which, to any gravity-abiding citizen of our planet, would fall straight down. How exactly is this a laboratory?
So I had to justify it. I had to tell that player that they room they are in is at least a little useful to the people who once worked in it. Adding the three aforementioned assets worked wonders for this, easily filling the spaces between the corridors for the player, giving it a vertical, rather than top-down, feel.
The hardest part was making aspects of the level appear above the player. Because of the way things are set out, it's extremely difficult to layer objects above the player, as the player is an object placed over the object, "Level". To do this, I had to script aspects of the level I wanted above the player to remove itself from the level, and reapply itself as a separate object above the player.
Here's my first try:
Not exactly, the right placing, but it turned out much better than I had feared! Now for a little positioning... (x += parent.x; y += parent.y). But that little formula to the left wasn't found for at least another few tries. So multiply the previous image by about 20, and you'll find out how often it took for me to fix this shit. Funny side story though - I wrote that formula as a placeholder when writing this article, then actually tried applying some other formulae, and eventually returned to what I originally thought was "too simple" and found it worked. So I didn't edit it out, seeing as I was accidentally right all along! Should have listened to my gut feeling... Anyway, so here's the foreground in action!
More darkness, more foreground. Yay! And don't worry, I've noticed the graphical errors. See how many you can find! I'll fix them in the morning 
And thus ends Tuesday. By tomorrow, I'll be able to build that level I had planned and, using what I've made today, keep the area full of assets and foreground to keep things filled and immersive.
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Wednesday
Completion List- Set up a www.newgrounds.com Project Management page for The Center.
- Increased gun back-blast by 200%.
- Placed heavier shadow over everything (see second image)
- Implemented foreground blur
- Wrote and implemented new classes BackgroundAesthetics and BGObject
- Created and fleshed out 50% of the Level 1, the level after the tutorial.
- Increased speed by 25%.
- Increased baseline battery drain accordingly by to compensate for an increased frequency of Azure pools (recharge areas), and to add a sense of urgency.
- Battery Drain is now uniform across levels, as it was originally proportional to the size of each level. Now, as the game has developed, azure pools are no longer placed exclusively at the end of each level, so the distance between pools is now smaller, and regardless of level size.
- Made the battery drain in, normal and phase mode, proportional to player speed, to allow the player solace in rest and as to not punish them in reading the screens.
- Other boring stuff
Today I went straight into the first level. But before I did, I fixed the graphical errors from earlier. Unfortunately placing the darkness over everything, made everything else seem washed out in comparison, as the darkness was now spread across all of the objects, rather than just the background. Here's what a it looks like with the darkness over everything.
You may have noticed that I've added a touch of blur to the objects placed in front of the player, giving more of an out-of-focus effect in the foreground. After that, I just vamped up the brightness of the lights, and everything was sorted. The issue was simply that the darkness was covering the light sources as well now, and I simply had not accounted for that when originally setting their brightness. Here's how it looks with the light sources improved:
Now with extra darkness suiting a nearly blacked-out facility. Above, you can see the extra glow around the player, as well as around the screens.
Next, I began work on adding Parallax to the background aesthetics. Parallax is the visual effect of a distant stationary object moving slower than a stationary object closer to the viewer. This is particularly hard to show off in a picture, but it should hopefully become apparent when playing for yourself. This should give even more of a depth-of-field effect to the surroundings, and once more making the space feel more like a 3-dimensional area from a 2-dimensional point of view.
Lastly, for the Beta Testers (xAudienceofone, Tomtris), the first step to testing the game is to access the game onwww.newgrounds.com. This site allows flash developers the ability to add beta testers, collaborators and contributors to a private Project Manager in the site. It'll be decked out with everything you need to start Beta Testing. In the meantime between now and the Beta's release, you'll need to create an account on the site so that I can grant your usernames access to the game. Once again, if anyone else is interested in becoming Beta Testers (possibly Z3R0FLAME, Dax, Bad Company 173, Jesus in Malibu, SOLIDSNAKEee and H2AK0N), just post your Newgrounds username below and I'll get you access to the project manager in time for the game's beta release. Any help at all is greatly appreciated, and you'll do wonders for making the game as best as it can be. Much of the game is based around the balance of the following factors, that it's often difficult to get outside opinions.
- Bullet Damage
- Bullet shot cost
- Bullet Backblast
- Player speed
- Battery Drain
- Phase Mode Drain
- Turret Shot Frequency
- Bullet Speed
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I'll be sure to update this post as I go along. By Sunday, I'll definitely have a playable version of the game. If anyone's interested in Beta Testing, let me know in the comments below and I'll PM you a version of the game once it's released.
Thanks!
