Fresh Squeezed

Development Blog #2

This week I'll be discussing more changes to the user interface, improved art and animations. Additionally, I'll be talking about level generation, and some changes to projectiles.

Juicin' It Up:

Over the past few days, I've been trying to increase the visual quality of the user interface. A good UI is nice, but a responsive fluent UI is much better. I've been toying around with a bunch of different fade animations for specific states of the inventory. For example, opening/closing the inventory is now slightly delayed and will display an effect similar to a TV being turned on/off. I chose this effect since the inventory system is supposed to represent an operating system, specifically on an old cathode ray television. I thought having a neat little analog effect would help to make the interface more immersive. 

 

Tooltip Generation:  

One of the biggest ways for the user to interact with the interface is through a tool tip system. When selecting an item, a tool tip will be generated and displayed to the user. For weapons, the user will be presented with information about the weapon, such as a text description and basic statistics. Here the player can also equip the weapon they selected, and if they chose not to, they can tap on the exit button to close the tool tip. The tool tip/background covers the entire screen, preventing the user from accidentally pressing other buttons while the tool tip is showing. The tool tip is styled much like the rest of the interface, however, this feels more like a pop-up ad. The basic look and feel of the tool tip resembles a window, which helps enforce the operating system aesthetic the inventory system is striving to reach. 

 One of my favorite speeches of all time is a speech by Martin Jonasson and Petri Purho titled "Juice it or Lose it". To keep it short, this speech talked about making a game juicy. Making a game juicy is a way to add personallity and improve visual quality through maximum output with minimum input. It can be achieved through tweening, particle effects, and animations. If you would like to watch the whole speech (which I highly recommend) here: 

 This speech has influenced my work more than anything else in my time making games. Now that the basic functionality and systems have been completed, it is time to make everything juicy. The first step is with the user interface. With the use of the fade in/out effects, as well as the tool tip popup animation, the UI has felt much more responsive than usual. Here's a quick little video of it!

 

Art Refactor 2: The Electric Boogaloo

 Last status report I spent some time talking about the art refactor. Well, I've spent some more time tackling this mighty project. Over these last few weeks Ive been refactoring all enemy designs and their art. I am still working on tackling the bosses, but for now the enemies are receiving a much needed facelift. Drones and Generators now have a much more industrial look, and their ascension variants now feature more organic features, such as eyes and insect-like limbs. It has been an incredibly difficult task, but I am really loving the new art and designs. It gives the game some much needed atmosphere that will hopefully really immerse the player. 

 

Surprisingly, the enemies are roughly the same size in game. One of the bigger issues I've been trying to tackle is inconsistent pixel size, and these new sprites work a lot better than the old artwork. Of course this requires more animation work on my part, but since most of the enemies are drone-like, animation (((hopefully))) won't be too difficult. Additionally, this newer, grittier style opens a lot of doors in terms of enemy designs, and with the next status report I will try to talk about some of the newer enemies and their implementation.

 

Let's Talk about Level Generation:

One of the hardest tasks for me so far has been level generation. It has taken so many drastic twists and turns so far, which each turn making me feel less confident in my abilities. What started out as a procedurally generated tile system, soon turned into a 2.5D plane with a shader designed to scroll a repeating image. After quite some time, I decided to scrap the whole system and go back to the procedurally generated tile system. However, I looked more at games like Diablo instead of Minecraft. Tiles are now rather larger, and will be pooled from a basic pooling system instead of instantiated when needed. This means that levels can go for an infinite amount of time without any new tiles needing to be generated. This new system also allows for parallax tiles to be quickly implemented. The system is designed so you can add an infinite number of parallax layers on top of the background image, and you can set specific speeds for each layer. Now, when an image is closer to the camera, such as rafters or hanging wires, they can move much faster than their backgrounds. This helps improve the aesthetics of the levels, as well as minimizes obscurant visuals that could have an impact on the player. 

Bullets and Bombs:

Over the past few days, Ive been experimenting with how the bullets in the game should look and feel. One of the biggest hardships in creating a shootem'up is making the bullets the perfect size. They should be small enough to dodge, but big enough to post a threat. Also, since this is a mobile game, I don't really want to put a lot of emphasis on skill. I intend to make the game difficult, but having an obscene amount of bullets on the screen at once is a little too overwhelming. With these principles, I added some new basic features to bullets. Bullets now have a glowing radius around them, making them much easier to see in hectic situations. Also, the colliders for these bullets are a little smaller than the actual bullets themselves, meaning getting scraped by a bullet doesn't count. However, there are some specific projectiles from later game enemies where this principle does not apply, such as homing rockets and lasers. Also, I have completed the implementation of explosive bullets over the weekend. Any bullet can now be explosive, and when the explosion is triggered, does roughly 30% of the impact damage to enemies in the radius. Explosive weapons have incredibly high impact damage, so hopefully explosive weapons will feel meaningful in such a fast paced game. 

Finally, I have continued working on configurations for upgrades. I have a lot of unique and interesting ideas in mind for the upgrade system, but as I've been working on the interface for quite some time now, they've taken a back seat for now.  However, I do have some new items to share. The first item is a legendary upgrade titled "Booster System EV". This upgrades allows enemies to spawn a booster when they are destroyed. A booster can be one of four random possibilities:

1. Health Booster: Strongly increase health regeneration for 5 seconds 
2. Speed Booster: Nearly doubles movement speed for 10 seconds
3. Shield Booster: Grants 20 extra armor on top of your current health for 60 seconds. This effect does not stack, but any additional boosters will regenerate it back to 20
4. Bullet Booster: Adds an additional bullet(s) to your currently equipped weapon for  15 seconds. This means all rapid fire weapons will fire two bullets at a time, while shotguns and spread weapons gain 3 to 4 extra bullets to their spread. 

 Additionally, I have completed three more upgrades. The first upgrade titled "Stasis Field" slows down all bullets entering a small radius around the player. This makes bullets easier to dodge, which can be incredibly useful at times. Another upgrade titled "Dominance Plate" is a set of armor that allows the player to absorb a single projectile without losing any health. Once the plate has been broken, it needs 45 seconds without taking damage to recharge. The final upgrade is the rarest upgrade in the game. Currently unnamed, this upgrades will revive the player once they have died.Once they have been revived, the item will slash the player's max health by 50%, increase enemy damage, and remove all legendary items from the loot pool. This item is designed to be a backup for a player, but in a rouge-like scenario, getting a second chance should definitely have some draw backs. This is one of the items that can only be acquired once. Once the upgrade has been obtained, it will remove itself from the loot pool. This means it is impossible to obtain multiple of these items in one play through.