[WIP] DARKSHIT 2040 - Laser Hell Anti-Shmup

[Kinetic]

Brian Amadori presents

Weird action game about surviving the dangers of space while eating sandwiches obsessively, strapped to your child by an umbilical cord in solo and co-op conquest campaigns. An epic war drama.

(Coming in a not too distant future for PC/OSX/Linux)

Gameplay GIFs

Level map GIFs

Wormhole transition

GIFs GIFs GIFs

Going to write updates once or twice a week.
Logs will be about art, technical stuff and my thought process as well. So expect wall of texts every once in a while.

I’m hoping you enjoy watching the progress of this thing!

TODO: Update index

Cheers!

[Patico]

Great! Can I try to play it somewhere?

[Kinetic]

Not yet! But i’m already planning to make an alpha (maybe html5) version in the near future.

[Patico]

It’s a good news!

[Kinetic]

Ok, just posting a small update, currently messing around with a text console effect thing, planning to use this in UI, HUD, etc.

I want to modify the font, so the rubbish characters look more “alien”

If you know about some easy to use free font editor throw me a tip!

[Mauri]

Looks like a fun game to play Bookmarked!
For font editing, try Birdfont or FontForge. Both are free and works with Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

[Kinetic]

Thanks!, going to check em out later and see what comes out.

[c-Row]

@Kinetic

Evade a S*** ton lasers, hazards, enemies and explosions.
Eat many sandwiches fast as possible.

Sounds like my daily routine.

[Kinetic]

Ok, time for next update!

You will be advancing horizontally across this “map”, that dotted line is supposed to be the limit you can travel. That big ship on the top is the alien overlords flagship you will be leading upon getting better sandwich-eating records, and will be always behind that line.

(html5 link for this gif)

So, for now the progress is supposed to be like this:

• You play levels, trying to achieve the best score

• All the levels best scores will be added together, the result is where the dotted line will be.

• So, If you can’t progress further and the last level is too dificult, you can go back earlier levels and get better rank (sort of mario 64-ish progression)

I’m still figuring out how to make this added scores stuff clear enough for the player.

@c-Row

Sounds like my daily routine.

lmao, your life must be fun

[Mauri]

Nice idea with the progression stuff. Better than earning enough XP to reach a certain level.

[Crystalline]

So its like, darkshit? LoL…Like, the title got me confused hehe.

[Kinetic]

@Mauri

Nice idea with the progression stuff. Better than earning enough XP to reach a certain level.

Nice that you like it
Yes, the idea is that the game would be very skill based, opposed to grinding/time based.

@Crystalline

So its like, darkshit? LoL…Like, the title got me confused hehe.

You confused me with your confusion… confused in which way?

[Kinetic]

Update #3 - Building the earth background

I’m using this movie as visual reference

Here’s what i came with:

Things i did:

• Created a custom shader to make a glowy transparent effect for the sun and earth’s atmosphere. This glow is actually another slightly bigger sphere in the same place, but with a z-buffer offset cranked up to be far away. I wanted to use Unity’s RenderQueue for this in Background+1, but when you are in deferred mode all the transparent stuff get rendered after everything regardless anything you do… very annoying.

• Again, created another custom rim lighting shader to make the earth borders match with the glow.

• All the background is rendered in a separate layer from the gameplay to a render target. This allows me the possibility to cheapen the post-processing effects and make the game friendlier to lower specs.

• The earth globe is actually composed of 4 separate layers. Terrain, Night lights, and 2 clouds layers (one with overlay blending, and a transparent one on top). I used SpaceScape to make the space background. Its enough for now, but i’m planning to improve the space skybox in the future.

• For the sun, i added a dummy flare, this is a 0 range light with a custom flare set up. When you do that the flare will show up and the light will cost nothing. Kind of a hack but works like a charm.

• Still planning to make the earth night lights shader output HDR values, but for now the glowing lights are baked.

Step by step rendering using unity’s nifty frame debugger

That’s all for now, next week i’m going to get into some wormhole transition FX and post the process here.

Maintaining a devlog is quite a task by itself, so if you reached here try to drop some feedback, i will appreciate that a LOT, and if you got some negative constructive advice it’s actually better because i get to improve on this and learn in the process.

Also, if some of you aren’t familiar with some of the terminology i may use, just ask and i will answer any questions/provide resources as possible.

Thanks for reading!

[Kinetic]

Messing around applying a rainbow texture to the rim transparency shader for a lens flare effect. I’m planning to use it for a new explosions-based hazard i’m making. Going to post a gif of that if i get something that i’m happy with.

Its not exactly screenshot saturday but whatever.

[Kinetic]

Update #4 - co-op and umbilical cord

I’m trying to make the umbilical cord joining the players in co-op mode physics based.

So i got my hands dirty and started experimenting with the JointSpring2D component.

Note the gap in the middle. That is because i’m attaching 2 joints in the middle of the rope, attached to the neighbor nodes, but only 1 joint in every other note attached to a node outwards.

Rough shitty diagram:
P1 * * * * * * * * * P2
. ← <- ← <- ↔ → -> → ->

I tried to improve this and…

Much better, now i’m attaching 2 joints only in even nodes, pointing outwards.

So it looks like this (hope it makes some sense):

P1 * * * * * * * * * P2
. ↔ <-> ↔ <-> ↔

I tried then to use LineRenderer to render the cord…

Not a fan of this… look how the cord breaks when the nodes are to close to each other…

To improve it i tried to use the particles way… Just using Graphics.DrawMesh to draw a bunch of quads between the nodes.

A lot smoother!

[Aiursrage2k]

Now this looks like a cool ass game with bringing something different to the table. It looks good and its got that weird and wacky humour I bet the youtubers will love (without being youtube fodder).

Added it to my blog list
http://indiegamegems.blogspot.ca/2015/09/darkshit-2040-laser-hell-anti-shmup.html

[joni.giuro]

That’s pretty cool! Could you please explain how you render those cool laser effects? Especially when they fire the beam, they look awesome.

[Kinetic]

Hey thanks a lot for the flattery and the blog add!

Actually i’m not fully convinced with those beams, i’m planning to make them in higher resolution and more frames in the future (right now they have 10 frames or so, i’d be drooling if they had around 20).

They are just 2D sprites animated by hand and upscaled x2 or x3 i think. They glow thanks to the bloom effect i’m attaching to the camera. I’m planning to make almost all the game effects in 2D, traditionally animated, because i found they look COOL AS F… and are really fun to make.

And this is silly… but my first inspiration to start using 2D fx anims over 3D was this bubble witch saga ad…

Hope this is clear enough

[Kinetic]

Here is a picture of the arcade prototype being played in a local argentinian event from a few months ago.

Cheers!

[Kinetic]

Update #5 - Design space, inner/outer conflict

Disclaimer: Long winded theorizing wall of text ahead

I’m going to rant a bit about some design problems i’m still tackling.

Single Player Vs CO-OP Gameplay
This game started as hot-seat co-op multiplayer. As such, the design in that frame resulted to be incredibly simple, and just worked. The thing is, i think releasing a local co-op only game is not enough to hold up to the value standard that games have nowadays, that reign reserved to competitive games.

So, I started prototyping single player after the two players mode. By removing the second player, I learned how the co-op mode added complexity to the system. This game has so few rules that the players arguing about communication strategies, blaming each other for failures, and struggling to sync movements was a relatively big thing (thinking in terms of brain space).

Inner-Outer Conflict
With action games, i tend to visualize the design with a mental model of a inner/outer conflict that fills our brain. Outer conflict would be the level, enemies and hazards. Inner conflict the complexity of controls, the system and cognitive noise the player have to deal with to deal with the outer.

A extreme inner-conflict game would be QWOP or Envirobear-2000. Outer conflict games are games like super-hexagon and danmaku shooters.

I find the difficulty in any action game is a result of the balance of these two conflicts.

Removing co-op mode removed a big deal of inner conflict to the game. With single player, this has to be compensated somehow.

Design Space Nightmare
So, this is a hardcore avoiding game, the design space of this type of games is inmense, there are hundreds of decisions i could take to restore the difficulty. For starters, I could chose to even inner and outer conflict types in similar proportion to the co-op mode. This is – have some amount of inner conflict (i.e. more than a shmup). and add a lot of outer (harder levels) still i have the same amount of difficulty.

The thing is, you start to write down ideas and realize the possibilities are endless. There are a lot of ideas and there are some that look just about right even after implemented. How are you supposed to filter them?

So, in the next posts i’m going to show you some stuff i already tried/trying and see where this ends.

Any of you have these kind of issues when figuring out how your game is going to work?