gingerbeardman said:

We did this 647 posts ago. Do keep up.

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KimonoNoNo said:

It's a tradition at this point that someone quotes that post at least once every page.

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Stealthcobra said:

yeah me too.... I'm done playing games that dont take advantage of this gen hardware.

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The trick is actually that it's not a ragdoll, so it doesn't need to find balance etc. To clarify - if I was using the "animate a ragdoll" method, I would start out with a thing that was limp on the ground, but behaving correctly in terms of physics. Then I'd have to make forces pull at this thing, and I'd have to worry about a million things such as balance.

Instead I work backwards - I start out with a pretty typical "game" movement, a thing that just swishes through the air following the A*. Then I put legs on it, then I make the legs seek contact with the ground. Then I make it so that when the legs are not in contact with the ground, the body is affected by a bit of gravity. Basically I start out with a movement that has nothing to do with physical correctness but which works, and then I add cosmetic details that makes it appear more physically correct. But it's all fake - the legs of these birds for example doesn't consist of the same "matter" as their bodies but are just 2D vectors with no weight etc.

A lot of the behaviors look really sloppy! That's why it's cool to be in this fantasy world with these fantasy creatures. If I were to animate a human looking figure like this I wouldn't get away with it for 2 seconds, but as no-one knows what these creatures are supposed to move like their sloppy scrambling might pass for correct.

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bestpersonevar said:

is this coming to consoles at all?

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Spring-Loaded said:

What does the thread title say? I can't see it on mobile

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UrbanRats said:

I hope they leave some surprises for when the game comes out, because i am too weak to go on media blackout!

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Alo81 said:

Is there any release date or timeline for the game yet?

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More_Badass said:

2016. The devs are actually working on the final region and are balancing the gameplay, but then they also need to put together the narrative and refine the multiplayer

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Alo81 said:

Multiplayer?! OH shit dude.

Man, I'm as excited for this game as Dark Souls III. 2016 can't come soon enough.

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This guy has a bunch of strange quirks. First of all it can see out of both ends, which is why the vision cone visualization is so flickery - easiest technical implementation was just switching every second frame. Don't worry though, no way to notice this once the vision cone visualization is turned off.

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More_Badass said:

New WIP creature

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Alo81 said:

Huh, does this game have a locked framerate or is it arbitrary?

Actually this is probably a better question for their twitter or something.

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Crispy75 said:

Physics/AI ticks at 40fps. Actual screen refresh is limited only by your hoardware and monitor.

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lethial said:

Neat idea but man I'm getting real fatigued of 16bit inspired "indie" games.

Stealthcobra said:

yeah me too.... I'm done playing games that dont take advantage of this gen hardware.

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Mr. Robot said:

I wanna play this game so bad, im not really following development but i have seen the thread from time to time and it's amazing the evolution of the game.

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Alo81 said:

Yeah I tweeted at the dev and they said animation is procedural and will automatically match whatever framerate it needs to. They've got a 120hz monitor too and have been seeing it at 120fps! The game animation is going to look so beautifully smooth at 120hz.

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Crispy75 said:

This game has far too many legs in it.

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Didn't really plan on it, but RNG threw down two spears in the room and then survival instinct kicked in. This is the sort of violence I's ideally like for the game to have - short bursts of action, and the violence never being a goal in itself but slugcat also not hesitating to use it if it's the only way to survive a situation.

As you can see that medium sized centipede manages to attach itself to my lower body for a little while there (will be less confusing with a sound cue), which brings up a detail about how the creature works. They kill you with electricity, and need to attach both ends to form a full circuit. The bigger ones are more effective at it, and can use their weight to restrain you more during this phase. With the smaller ones you have a little bit more of a window to do something, as can be seen in the gif.

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More_Badass said:

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Raticus79 said:

Oh man, check out the way it's holding on to the ground. They could have made a whole game just around a creepy bug-fight sandbox. (guess they could just add that as a game mode)

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Joar said:

This region has so much stuff. So. Much. Stuff. Like, four regions worth of new stuff.

I have been in absolute agony not to be able to post two or three specific gifs I have over here Shocked

Tell them James! Tell them how much stuff there is O__O

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James said:

Way too much stuffs, its crazy. I used to be proud of how many rooms there are but at this point its just ridiculous. We're well over 1200 screens at this point WTF

This new region is about the size of 4 of the earlier regions and absolutely PACKED with new visuals and mechanics. It's mind blowing. Fortunately though... it is coming to an end!!!

We're doing a bit of smoothing work and debugging right now, but by the end of this weekend region 12 will be a WRAP!! meaning that after over a year of solid level work, 12-16hrs a day pretty much every day, ALL REGIONS ARE NOW COMPLETE and we can start into the next phase

I cant even tell you what an insane relief this is.

Next steps will be polish pass, where we go through and touch-up the earlier regions and add narrative / context / setpiece stuff. but thats easy, just spruce things up here and there using our new toolkit. Nothing remotely like having to create distinct, internally-consistent, playable architecture and layout for an open world of 1200+ screens from scratch. while thats going on we should be able to post normal updates too, which will be nice. We miss you guys/gals!

But first we are taking a bit of a break. Next week Joar and I will be on the same continent (a rare occasion!), so we're going to hang out and plan all the final bits and pieces. WE MIGHT ACTUALLY FINISH THIS GAME SOON

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This is something that has been discussed a lot over the course of the devlog, but now its actually in the game and functional (amazing!) Replacing the old "number appears over the head" when consuming bats and other foods, now we have this minimal circles and lines system that will appear and disappear from the bottom left:

I think its a little large right now, but thats super easy and we'll play with that a bit later. Simple UI, but gives us a clear way of communicating some key things beyond just "food eaten":

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This is a biggie and im sure there will be opinions. As much as we'd like it to be otherwise, given the ridiculously huge size and complexity of the game world it would be heinous to not include a map function for the player.

Here is an early mockup of the map overlay:

Fairly self-explanatory, the map will fill in as the player moves through the world and the red circle indicates the location of the player. Food sources that are discovered will be indicated on the map, as well as possibly locations of player deaths and other important information. Left shoulder button will bring up the map, and D-pad movement will switch to map scrolling, allowing the player to plot new routes, see areas they may have missed, etc. Time will proceed as normal when in the map (so player can be eaten or rained on, etc), so the background will be semi-opaque, allowing to player to see if a predator is sneaking up.

One thing that we are concerned with is avoiding a situation where the player “plays” the map, running around with it semi-opaque, or quickly tabbing in and out like its a HUD, etc etc. Our concept for this is something like the slugcats visual memory, which requires some time and concentration. So the idea is that the player finds a safe place to hide for a minute or two and think hard about where its been. The map will appear at first to only be the nearby surrounding area and far off locations will take a little while to fill in, etc. This vibe stuff will be dealt with after the map is functionally implemented so we'll talk more on that later.

Problems:

Here is what Joar has in the currently implemented version:

Looks decent so far, but one thing you will notice is that it still seems pretty blockly... like a series of interconnected single screen rooms. because thats what it is  :'( Thats not the visual impression we want to give, and its going to be a bit of a biggie to fix. We want to move the world map from its current room by room layout into visually cohesive region maps that show consistent movement through 2d space. And heres how we plan on doing that:

Here is a shot of the current crude devtool map for Heavy Industry region:

Notice that there are plenty of chaotic connections and bits that dont make sense on a 2d plane. Thats my fault. Initially the game concept was "popping in and out of rooms of vague distances apart, and not necessarily all on the same axis" rather than the current "large structurally cohesive regions on a 2d plane" concept that we've evolved into.

Fortunately, with minor adjustments, it starts to make more sense:

And you can imagine that adding a connecting room here and there will make it even more clear.

Since Ill be going back through the levels and regions in polish pass anyways (starting today!), part of my work will be remixing the earlier chaotic regions into these more structurally cohesive forms. Joar will then take these "canonical room placements" and stylize them a bit, with the output being a region map thats something like this where "it all makes sense":

We think this will add a lot to the player experience, allowing them to piece together the "puzzle" of the world map with a visually satisfying end result. This will also give the regions themselves more of an individual personality and "vibe" beyond just an endless series of rooms.

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We contemplated a few solutions to make it work, such as having long shortcut connections that connect to little "mini maps" around the main map. The solution that felt the cleanest however was to just make the map layered - then if two rooms are fighting for the same space they can just be layered on top of each other. Such conflicts occur quite a lot through the regions, for example when many rooms have an open sky and feel like they should all be on the same ground level, or when water levels should be consistent between a bunch of rooms. The layered map is a good solution for many of these problems, as it allows an entire new dimension (sort of, it's 2 or 3 layers depending on the region) of freedom.

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It's essentially a flood-fill out from the player's position. We implemented this for a few reasons.

One is that we want it to feel like you're accessing the slugcat's spatial memory rather than just bringing up a map on some HUD - the slugcat is an animal, not a cyborg super soldier. If it takes a bit of time, its communicated to the player that this is an act of thinking long and hard about what was where, not just "bringing up the map".

Another is that that the animation doubles as a time penalty. The idea is that the filling in animation should be somewhat satisfying and fun to watch, masking the penalty aspect from the player while the actual gameplay implications of it remain; namely that you spend precious seconds just standing still. Hopefully this will incentivize fewer and longer map sessions rather than quickly tabbing in and out of it once every room. We want the player to look at the game, not the HUD - if you flicker in and out of the map you don't pay as much attention to landmarks in the environment, and looking at the environment is exactly what we want you to do as much as possible. Also we want the player to have to keep at least some of their route in their head, as that's part of the game's challenge.

A third one would be that your inability to move in combination with the enemy still being mobile will require you to find a good hiding spot for bringing the map up, which feels like a nice atmospheric element.

The flood fill has a bit of a bias towards where you're panning the map, so you can sort of "pull" it a bit in one direction or another. If you release the map button quickly, your map reveal progress is saved, but if you wait for too long or move around too much it's reset. There is some forgiveness though, if you take the map down and quickly move a few steps in some direction you can bring it up again without it being reset.

The blue color in the map signifies an edge of the explored area which is not a wall - basically somewhere you might potentially explore further. Not 100% settled on the aesthetic of that element just yet, but I think the functionality is sound, it makes a lot of sense that you should be able to easily browse for potential exploration destinations.

The dotted lines are, as I'm sure you've understood, longer connections between rooms.

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This one is the "scavenger", an intelligent creature that will play a part in the narrative that we won't spoil

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ChosenPredator said:

this game seems like it could perfectly expand into a cartoon/film/toyline it's going to be a massive hit.

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