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Playing around with movement mechanics for my AGBIC project. Sprint -> crouch slide -> boosted jump -> mid-air crouch slide -> boosted double jump is A Lot of Fun.
I've wanted to make a parkour / freerunning game since before Mirror's Edge was even announced, and I'm finally gonna bear down for midterms and do it this month.
Yes, this is going to be a Neon Struct game, despite its Famicase inspiration, and the full title will be:
NEON STRUCT: Die Augen der Welt, Gaiden α: Carry On, Carrion Carrier; or "In which the author and reader jointly dismantle capitalism"
NEON STRUCT: Die Augen der Welt, Gaiden α: Carry On, Carrion Carrier; or "In which the author and reader jointly dismantle capitalism"
You think I'm kidding.
Roughing out the main level. Four districts each with three main areas. That's a lot to do in a jam game but I will be leaning on ~~lo-fi A E S T H E T I Cs~~ and trying to make areas that feel like they came from r/LiminalSpace.
Working on a visual target for jam game. Since this is going to be a fast platformer instead of a stealth game, I'm using light in different ways. Very high ambient term on floors to keep them readable, and local lights to draw focus.
On further consideration, I dialed the ambient light down a bit. It was good for keeping the space readable but it was wrecking that cyberpunky nighttime mood.
Thanks to folks who suggested highlighting platform edges. More glowy bits!
Not a lot of pretty things to show today, but I got the narrative and mission structure plotted out, and implemented the basic energy and credit resources.
I don't think I've described the concept for this game, as I was still figuring out it. Here's the pitch:
You're a courier who has to make deliveries to earn money to spend money to recharge yourself to make more deliveries to earn more money to spend money to recharge yourself
You're a courier who has to make deliveries to earn money to spend money to recharge yourself to make more deliveries to earn more money to spend money to recharge yourself
Also there's an Amazon-like megacorp called Frobadoodle because naming things is the hardest problem in game design.
I brought Neon's security cameras into this game and made some changes. Since there's no AIs or health, being seen by a camera gets you fined for trespassing instead of alerting guards.
Also, my engine has real-time lighting which it didn't 5 years ago, so they're prettier!
Also, my engine has real-time lighting which it didn't 5 years ago, so they're prettier!
Posting for accountability (to myself, at least): I got very little done on this project tonight but I made a couple of important assets. Modeling and texturing is hella easy when the whole aesthetic is boxes with 8 texel-per-meter textures.
It's a Neon Struct game, it's gonna get weird and a little dangerous.
It's important to set goals.
I made some power-ups with mostly inscrutable iconography. Maybe adhering to this voxel aesthetic isn't the best choice for everything but I can't stop now.
No real progress on game jam tonight. I found a collision bug and spent a while trying to track it down. Seems to be due to accumulated float error in world geo, and I don't have a good solution for that.
It's probably fine, it's not like you can exploit it to get out of bounds—
Oh.
Oh.
It's not a great general purpose solution, but since 99% of geo in this game is going to be axis-aligned and on the grid anyway, I just quantized everything and now it works. 
I highly recommend recording vocal noises as placeholders for all your SFX. I've got a bunch of "whoosh!" "bwah-wah-wah" "bwoooop" "DING!" mouth sounds in this game right now and I laugh every time.
Not much progress today, but I finally stopped procrastinating and put together a material palette.
Building out some spaces. Not quite capturing the mood I want yet, but getting there.
Did a first pass on the script for this. It sure is a thing that I did. https://pastebin.com/DsGS8LUq
Not really in the mood to jam on a game tonight, but I got the intertitle done at least. Two weekends left to do all the level design and systems balance, seems feasible.
I did all the mission scripting tonight, so this is end-to-end playable. It's mostly still empty space, and I'm procrastinating on the big huge task of level design, but I think I'm still on track to finish by the end of the month.
Hot dang, the last time I did an "A Game By Its Cover" game jam was 10 years ago.
Added distance indicator on HUD markers (in addition to the existing alpha fade with distance/occlusion). This was surprisingly difficult, my UI system is a pain.
Still procrastinating on level design, but I wrote some background music. https://soundcloud.com/dphrygian/cyme
