Negspace

Community Showcases
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2D Physics based hotseat dogfighting @byPencha

Current features:

  • 4 players split-screen, fast paced and responsive.
  • A minimalist approach to UI and controls
  • Full translational and rotational inertia, giving extra zero-g feeling!
  • Inmersive 2d field of view.
  • Three completely different ship classes, with boardings and escape pods.
  • Mines, homing missiles (actually fun to avoid) and countermeasures.
  • Killcams, and various kind of deaths. (be stranded, irradiated, incinerated or exploded).
  • Battery level affects the general handling of your systems and engines, also giant Friction chargers, grind them to recharge.
  • Magnetism, Space football, Racing! (still experimental, working on it right now) and some other bits hidden around the Tigsource devlog.

Negspace is in early development, stay tuned to see the list grow!

Press mentions:

Rock Paper Shotgun´s Devlog Watch - Indie Game Enthusiast

Mandatory gif mountain:

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Looks awesome, I love the graphics. Would make a great MMO. :sunglasses:

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Damn this looks hot. The sense of scale and depth is incredible. Good work, wow that sounds condescending.

I never like pitching for work with the beady public eye on me but I can’t send you a PM so - I’m a composer, do you need any composing? I’d love to put music to this beast.

Clickylinks to music: Star Saver OST and Gravitation OST. I do a lot of other styles, don’t think I’m assuming you’d only want retro chip stuff. Maybe the world of Negspace craves shuffle jazz or spaghetti western. I’M THERE OK

sidles off

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@IAmCraigSnedeker :
Thanks! It would be great, sadly, since it all rests in high speed manoeuvering and precise controls, any amount of lag would kill the experience, so It´s 4 players splitscreen hotseat only atm!

@DaveDexterMusic :
Thank you! Got back to you via twitter dm, stay in touch!

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Looks very nice! Are you working with 2d or 3d colliders?

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2d!

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The game sounds interesting. The artstyle looks a lot like Teleglitch, I’m guessing it’s your main source of inspiration ?

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Yes it its! Among many others I must say, like 0space, Descent, Solar Winds, GTA 1, Towerfall and a long etc!

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That is really cool looking! Nice effect creating so much depth.

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Rock Paper shotgun listed Negspace as a contender to best shooter of 2015!
Of course, I’m not sure it’ll be the best, shooter, or even 2015, but for sure it’s a great surprise!

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Even more excited for this now!

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Wow Negspace is still going on? I remember seeing this ages ago and being really excited about it

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Hey! Solo dev making his dream project and learning the ropes as he goes along here :slight_smile:
Bear with me, it´s not only still on, but getting bigger every day! In fact, you just made me notice May 7th was the project´s first birthday.
As always, for more frequent updates, check out the tigsource thread and follow the twitter feed!

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-deleted previous updates since the devlog was getting too heavy, see them HERE if you missed them-

#51: Procgen palettes

Remember the palette generator that I´m using for the background of the hint screen?
Revamped it a little, and threw the ship in, say hello to an infinite amount of infinitely scrolling empty environments

And here´s a more agressive version not embedded due to heavy flashes → seizure warning!

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#52: Node Editor V
Let´s continue with some more behind the scenes tech stuff.
The node editor kept evolving, it´s now looking like this:

805Ă—283 19.7 KB

Note the small “C”,“A” or “I” in each node? Now I can pause the game anytime, pop a quest tree window, and check exactly how´s the quest going. “C” goes for Completed, “A” for Active, and “I” for Inactive. Therefore, you can quickly grasp that you´re supposed to complete the “A” Kill node to continue with the mission.
The specific details of each node are still shown one (selected) node at a time, as demonstrated on the following gif, and now each node type has a particular interface associated to it in the details panel:

One extra benefit out of that is: I can now easily support drag and drop! Want to make the player destroy a specific object? Just drag said object to the “target” field of a kill node, same goes for a waypoint and a goal field.

Back to game dev. As always, C&C welcome!

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#53: Flick a switch

Ever wanted to flick a building sized switch with a spaceship?

Another simple addition with plenty of use cases.
They can manipulate specific machines (in this case the door right next to it) and are super easy to set up.

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#54: Notifications

I´m lagging behind in the devlogging side! This also means there´s stuff being done.
Noticed how each node held messages that were supposed to be read by the players?
A while ago I coded a simple notifications stack, that receives messages and serves them to the user through a simple UI.
You may have noticed it already in this gif:

A description message from an empty first node, and a completion message for a kill node

The UI decides how long each message will stay on screen depending on its number of characters, and once it´s done, it gets the next message from the stack. The stack is now being populated by the nodes themselves, one message sent as soon as a node becomes active (description), and again once the node is marked as completed - as long as the message fields aren´t empty (duh, but useful).

I can now, for example, use a chain of “And” nodes to send series of ordered sequential messages to the player as soon as the quest gets to them, fire messages based on exploration putting messages into “reach area”, etc.

The previous gif´s action, under the hood:

There´s still a LOT of things to do, but I´m happy to see basic single player quests starting to emerge from all that abstract dev. Hope you´re still tuned, and don´t hesitate to ask if my techno gibberish isn´t clear enough!

PS: Yes, I funkied up the colors on this level a bit.

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On a logical step after switches, say hi to…
#55: Pressure plates

They will probably end up looking a bit more handsome…

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#56: Crushing spaceships

As soon as I introduced the behemoth ships, I knew I wanted to be able to crush ships. It just didn´t feel right that pressing a much smaller ship against a wall did not have any major consequences, killing the whole “scale contrast” idea. Crushing seemed just natural due to the claustrophobic nature of the internal sections and feeling of “physicality” that I´m aiming for. Plus, knowing that one´s ship can be crushed introduces an extra layer of strategy while piloting.

On a technical level, not being able to crush ships was troublesome. Doors needed “safety sensors” at the tips to prevent them from pushing indestructible ships literally into wall colliders. The code to prevent that from happening resulted in quite complex logic (for a door…). Also, on an intuitive level… everyone is afraid of elevator doors, shouldn´t players be afraid of their giant, space-faring cousins?

What was the catch? Unity 2D physics port does not have access to the amount of stress an object is enduring, and I couldn´t find a viable alternative. Most games rely on cheats to emulate that, but being on a zero gravity / zero friction / zero orientation world, I couldn´t even find a cheat that applied. Crushing was sent to the huge bin of “Negspace II” ideas (coming soon provided I ever get filthy rich and/or able to hire people who actually know how to do stuff).

These days, playing with springs and joints on the switches, I imagined that, if I were to split ships in half, add a hinge at the bow and put a strong spring between the sides of the stern, I could get “stress” from the difference in orientation between both halves of the ship, simulating (in a very minimal way) structural resistance.

left: old collider, right: new colliders, held together

Changing the physics of your “main character” is A BAD THING. Plenty of weird stuff cropped up:
-Self crushing, accidental explosions, and springing yourself to outer space on spring decompression.
-General wobblyness and unexpected momentum.


Weird ´n´ wobbly

-Enemies not seeing ships through the right wing and friction chargers not charging the right side of the ship.
-The playable menu being completely broken, etc…

BUT door logic became WAY simpler, and now, after some fine tuning, you can be properly afraid of them:


FEARSOME

And small ships feel more fragile than ever from a behemoth´s point of view.
I´m sure I´ll be fixing plenty of bugs on the days to come, but the feeling of crushing spaceships…

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#57: Magnets revisited

I want to introduce a few elements that modify the environments in some ways, but using such a restricted graphic universe makes me be extremely picky when representing them.

Remember magnets? Most of the time magnetized objects behave weirdly, have other objects stuck to them, and makes maneuvering around them quite hard, and real life magnets doesn´t have “visual feedback”, but I had an idea about how to represent the “pull”, and decided to give it a go. Everything is made in-shader, no textures used.

Rev 1: Grab pass distortion using radial waves formula + time displacement + attenuation

I feel like I´ve seen this effect thousands of times in games with completely different aesthetics…
Also, I hate how the texture filtering softens every edge.
Side note: shooting a container resulted in crushing the pink ship!
Also note the magnets preventing the parts of the ship from spreading after the explosion.

Rev2: Add posterized angular direction and displacement amount.

Sharp edges are more in tune with the general aesthetics and give a more futuristic look, looks way better to me.

Rev3: Add posterized texture lookup

Conceptually more correct, since the sharp circles that the previous iteration gave are nowhere else to be seen in the game, but maybe it´s now a bit more generic looking? Here´s how it looks like in a more colorful setting:

Staying with Rev3, for now but still tempted by Rev2, what do you think?