fabian

[RELEASED] The World Begins With You

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I am so bad with priorities... Instead of getting all the main areas done, I spent a few hours fiddling with the lighting.

But the first area is now in a shippable state in terms of art, which is cool. I also realized that my camera system does not really work for tight interiors, so I tried a few workarounds and found a compromise where I manually blend between cameras at specific points. Works ok-ish and I think the opening area will be the only place with these constraints.

I really need to move on to the other areas I've planned. Hope to get one or two done before christmas! 

 

5a3dc457ca040_2017-12-23at03-43-02.thumb.jpg.0bed366ead5ac56307b77631cc5fcd39.jpg

 

5a3dc460abb26_2017-12-23at03-47-57.thumb.jpg.b4e60561e96b2bb99a01d38d6bb555e0.jpg

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5 hours ago, hedgefield said:

Gosh these are amazing.

Thanks!

-- 

 

5a3ee048dacfa_2017-12-24at00-00-22.thumb.jpg.5adaf1d2751e5cff3e9cdc1436319b6b.jpg

 

Managed to build a big chunk of the game's second area. It still has a lot of problems in terms of collision and a few places where I need to hide the skybox, but so far I'm very happy with this. :) 

Also I made my first own grass in Speedtree ever and I'm happy with that as well! 

The music happened to be a happy accident, as the computer was recording my desktop audio so it picked up what I was hearing in Spotify. Unfortunately, the final music won't be as nice as that ;)

Another happy accident was that I discovered the climbing feature of the third person controller asset that I'm using. So I implemented that and it works quite well I think.

 

But still a lot to do. This is supposed to be the second area of... 5? Christmas is cancelled! :D

 

 

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Looks great! I suspect people may have voted differently on the outfit if they'd known what the surroundings were going to be (I would probably have gone for H). The current look makes the character feel rather out of place - hopefully this fits with the fiction and/or is what you were going for!

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20 hours ago, Ben X said:

Looks great! I suspect people may have voted differently on the outfit if they'd known what the surroundings were going to be (I would probably have gone for H). The current look makes the character feel rather out of place - hopefully this fits with the fiction and/or is what you were going for!

Thx!

I see what you mean with the character. I think there are a few issues with the character design itself, it looks a bit bland sometimes and doesn't really match the story I have in mind. But that I'm questioning as well right now, so that's that :D

I will try to put some ideas down during the holidays, a bit of rest (and a huge amount of food) does wonders sometimes :)

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Due to Christmas, progress is quite slow and it feels good to rest for a bit and think about other things. But I also couldn't stop myself working on some small things like this animation for pulling a lever:

giphy.gif

 

And yesterday I looked into timeline and found it to be an amazing tool to sequence things like this:

 

Now I need to find a way to hook that up with the animation and start the timeline from script, but that's for another day :)

 

 

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I forgot in my planning that my stepmother had her birthday on december 27th, so I am 1 day behind on my "schedule" -_-

 

But today I built a level I wanted to build yesterday and so far I made some good progress. Here are a few wip screens! :) 

 

5a45a4013625b_2017-12-29at03-00-31.thumb.jpg.e21b13643c176b42d0a344675d190392.jpg

 

5a45a4097d2ca_2017-12-29at03-01-17.thumb.jpg.013636b6beece877a5654e9323c6d21b.jpg

 

5a45a410aebbd_2017-12-29at03-01-55.thumb.jpg.dd538a147211959b3e5bfc665dbbd45c.jpg

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This looks great! The happy accident of the music from your earlier video fits well to ambient exploring music to me, is that the sort of music you'd want to have in ideally?

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On 29.12.2017 at 11:47 AM, supasheep said:

This looks great! The happy accident of the music from your earlier video fits well to ambient exploring music to me, is that the sort of music you'd want to have in ideally?

I think it is close, but maybe a bit too much? The whole music thing is still a vague idea in my head. But I also do not have that much time left to actually do the music, so this might be very reduced. :) 

 

 

My to dos for the rest of the jam: 

  • make final level
  • implement a few simple NPCs (I said earlier I wanted to have robots in my game, that turns out to not really fit that well I think -_- ) Maybe I just put retextured main characters all over the place, with some accessories attached to make them different from each other? Or maybe I leave them out completely. Looking at the time this is probably the right thing to do now
  • write music
  • add some sound effects that are still missing
  • make short credits scene
  • add collision meshes to the edges of the levels
  • test everything as good as I can
  • create sceenshots and description for itch

 

 

These are the to dos that I might want add after the deadline in an update:

  • a more interesting way to end a certain level (instead of just "walking into a trigger")
  • more set dressing
  • a better speechbubble background
  • button sounds in main & pause menu

 

Also I really kinda want to make a trailer for this :lol:

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Tbh I'm quite relieved that @zerofiftyone gave us all another day until this jam officially ended, so thanks for that! :)

 

Today was a mixed bag. Made a little bit of progress on the level building, but also spent a lot of time fixing and adjusting small things (for example deciding wether the player running speed should be 3.4 or 3.5...).

Then I made the first build since a few days and realized that my lighting was totally broken. So I spent a few hours on that. In the end it turned out you can't have your directional light set to "mixed" while baked GI is deactivated (I know, it makes no sense to have it that way, but in the editor everything showed up just fine, so I didn't think about changing that setting.. and since I copied that one light into all other scenes... yeah, took me a while to try that setting)

But finally I managed to get a nice looking build and just finished playing through it. It is nowhere near completion and I found a whole list of things I still need to fix, but it's also nice to see everything as a whole for the first time. :)

 

While the game was building I jumped into Photoshop and tried a few ideas for a header picture for the itch page:

header_idea01.thumb.jpg.7a3fe60aa01dcccbcf77ba16441aae9b.jpg

 

Also: I have a short "stealth" area in my game and I might be proud of it :D 

 

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So I'm actually almost done with the game, but I need to hear back from itch, because I asked them to increase my file upload size. Don't want to upload 2 .zip or .rar files again, as I've learned after WJ5 that there are people who don't know what to do with these files.

The last thing I worked on was the menu. Gave it a small backdrop, which I think looks quite nice compared to the pure black from before. I also finally managed to put the controls in there.

 

The only thing left is implementing and finetuning the music, so I hope I can upload tomorrow! :)

 

giphy.gif

 

5a4d95048bcf8_2018-01-04at03-38-40.thumb.jpg.b89ff6481aab16647f320115285d46c1.jpg

 

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5a4d950b6f054_2018-01-04at03-38-58.thumb.jpg.119375c570d57ae475703b3658e33119.jpg

 

 

 

 

 

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3 hours ago, nkornek said:

This is honestly one of the best looking jam games I've ever seen.

Thank you! :)

 

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This is gorgeous, 10/10 for graphics and general atmosphere.

 

But there were, in my opinion, a few issues with gameplay.

The platforming with a fixed camera was pretty tricky because it was always hard to tell where you were gonna land. It was especially bad with the cliffs at the beginning but you already improved that a lot :tup:

The mazes were...mazes. I guess that's just my dislike for mazes. But it was also often quite tricky to tell where you were, the character blended into the ground at the shadowed parts of the first maze and the second one had those beautiful columns blocking your view. The visibility of the character

During the cave sections a few times it was kind of difficult to know where to go, mostly when you had to go towards the camera but couldn't see if there was a bottomless pit there.

 

But those were actually minor gripes and didn't, once I started using a controller, really diminish my enjoyment of this good video game.

 

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This game is really impressive in how it looks and the amount of polish in the environments and movement. I have a few observations from what I played.

  • I liked the use of fixed camera angles to show off the environments and guide the player forwards. The transitions between camera angles were pretty smooth.
  • For the platforming at the cliffs in the beginning it was a bit difficult to judge the relative position of the next platform (that is, whether it was directly to the right or a little forward or backward), so I fell down a few times.
  • The maze was a bit too large, I think. It took a long time to walk to the switches and get to the center and there wasn't really any puzzle-solving or figuring out the right path in it.
  • The searchlight section with the boat takes too long to repeat if you get spotted. I got spotted once on the second searchlight because I didn't find the right hiding spot in time. It takes about a minute of waiting to get back to that point, so I stopped playing when I got spotted again at the third light. I think there should be more checkpoints there, or the boat should move faster.

 

Edit: In case this comes off as too negative, I would like to add that I ended up finishing the game later and this is still the most impressive game in this jam that I've played so far. It's just easier to come up with nitpicks than good positive criticism, I think :).

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The graphics and the atmosphere in general are simply amazing! The text is handled really elegantly as well. I'm super impressed that you managed to achieve this level of detail within a game jam.

 

As to the gameplay, I agree with the previous comments that while the fixed camera system looks really nice and cinematic it is not the best fit for kinda punishing platforming challenges. Part of the issue is also that I have come to expect games of this style to be more forgiving in general (usually the character can either grab the ledges or the jumps are assisted somehow). I wouldn't be complaining about this if the rest of the game wasn't so brilliant.

 

Congrats on being featured on itch.io! That is well deserved. :tup:

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On 1/7/2018 at 1:29 PM, Zirrrus said:

This is gorgeous, 10/10 for graphics and general atmosphere.

 

But there were, in my opinion, a few issues with gameplay.

The platforming with a fixed camera was pretty tricky because it was always hard to tell where you were gonna land. It was especially bad with the cliffs at the beginning but you already improved that a lot :tup:

The mazes were...mazes. I guess that's just my dislike for mazes. But it was also often quite tricky to tell where you were, the character blended into the ground at the shadowed parts of the first maze and the second one had those beautiful columns blocking your view. The visibility of the character

During the cave sections a few times it was kind of difficult to know where to go, mostly when you had to go towards the camera but couldn't see if there was a bottomless pit there.

 

But those were actually minor gripes and didn't, once I started using a controller, really diminish my enjoyment of this good video game.

 

 

On 1/7/2018 at 4:18 PM, Teljoor said:

This game is really impressive in how it looks and the amount of polish in the environments and movement. I have a few observations from what I played.

  • I liked the use of fixed camera angles to show off the environments and guide the player forwards. The transitions between camera angles were pretty smooth.
  • For the platforming at the cliffs in the beginning it was a bit difficult to judge the relative position of the next platform (that is, whether it was directly to the right or a little forward or backward), so I fell down a few times.
  • The maze was a bit too large, I think. It took a long time to walk to the switches and get to the center and there wasn't really any puzzle-solving or figuring out the right path in it.
  • The searchlight section with the boat takes too long to repeat if you get spotted. I got spotted once on the second searchlight because I didn't find the right hiding spot in time. It takes about a minute of waiting to get back to that point, so I stopped playing when I got spotted again at the third light. I think there should be more checkpoints there, or the boat should move faster.

 

On 1/7/2018 at 4:59 PM, Nappi said:

The graphics and the atmosphere in general are simply amazing! The text is handled really elegantly as well. I'm super impressed that you managed to achieve this level of detail within a game jam.

 

As to the gameplay, I agree with the previous comments that while the fixed camera system looks really nice and cinematic it is not the best fit for kinda punishing platforming challenges. Part of the issue is also that I have come to expect games of this style to be more forgiving in general (usually the character can either grab the ledges or the jumps are assisted somehow). I wouldn't be complaining about this if the rest of the game wasn't so brilliant.

 

Congrats on being featured on itch.io! That is well deserved. :tup:

 

Thanks for the feedback and kind words! 

Your feedback mirrors what I saw from let's plays and playthroughs so far and I agree on almost all of them. 

The most common things people say are the camera doesn't work very good with platforming and the boat ride is too long if you fail in a run and have to do it again and also that the searchlight mechanic comes too abrupt.

 

I think both points are very true. I think the platforming would work with this kind of camera if it wasn't full 3D but 2.5D (like e.g. Inside), where the character only can walk left or right on a straight line. One issue with my camera is that the controls are always relative to the camera perspective and the camera is always "lagging behind" a bit, so this causes the direction of a jump to change midair, although the input by the user may not have changed. That's also why I think playing with a gamepad helps a lot because most of the time you adjust the analog stick's position automatically which is not really possible with wasd on a keyboard. 

I think we can all agree on cameras being very hard :D

 

The boat thing would be less frustrating if I had checkpoints between each light, so you wouldn't have that long beginning phase where nothing really happens each time you try. 

Unfortunately I'm not a good enough programmer to figure out how to make a checkpoint with the player being on a moving object. 
For now I added a 4th searchlight before the boat section, so after passing that the player should know he can stand behind larger objects and has to crouch behind smaller objects to avoid being spottet. My hope is that players then see the boat and apply that new knowledge when they see the searchlight on the water.

Not ideal, but I think better than in v1.0.0 :)

 

Regarding the maze I agree that it's a) too large / has too long ways to go and b) a bit hard to see the character at times because of the tone in tone color palette and the light effects. I probably won't change it though, because it seems like it's split 50:50 between people liking and not liking it.

 

Regarding the second maze I think it's true that the character is sometimes hard to see. But that's also kind of by design, because actually you see where he is because the columns show it. I experimented with a higher camera angle, but thought the effect of the raising blocks wasn't that good. Also, if people get somewhat lost in a maze, isn't that a good thing? :P 

 

--

 

I really, really like the feedback (positive and negative) so far! There are some interesting discussions about many things and I already learned a hell of a lot about why certain things work and certain other things don't and how I could improve them. So thanks for everyone who took the time to write something down! :) 

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8 minutes ago, RubixsQube said:

I played a bunch of your game on a stream this morning (then I stopped when I died on the boat ride and needed to move on from the game)

 

It was beautiful, and atmospheric, and very interesting. 

 

I also did this:

 

https://clips.twitch.tv/PowerfulCovertDillHassaanChop

 

Congratulations, you found the secret ending! 

 

(wtf?! :D )

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