Shards - The Shattered World (RPG)

— - that's sort of what I'm doing, I guess I didn't describe it well enough. The first third of the game/story arc will work just fine as it's own game/story. It won't leave off like stopping a movie partway through with huge plot threads hanging - there will be some unanswered questions, but part 2 will be more like a sequel instead.

Looking good Arimi. Glad your keeping a blogging thing about this. looking forward to the demo

Nice work Arima, seems like "Shards" is off to a good start, and its looking great so far. I particularly like the contrast between the characters and the scenery, really makes them stand out!

If you have enough content, splitting the game seems like a good idea! Always leave them wanting more, as the old saying goes

You're right, this type of thread can really help to raise awareness/interest in a project. I've also discovered it can help to provide the developer with added motivation too. Opening up your creation to the world, seems to come with an underlying sense of obligation to provide further updates. And I've found that can encourage me to work, even when I don't really feel like it.

Anyway, good luck, I look forward to seeing more

This looks beautiful

Reminds me of loot pursuit, but even more refined looking.

Sorry to hear the health issues! Cheer's to hope your feeling better soon!

This look's excellent! I'm really liking the cell shaded main characters, and how they flow against the backdrop/layout. Looking forward to playing this one!

Are you making the sprite sizes based on a 1080p resolution (then scaling the game from there)? I'm going to get a 2560x1600 res screen soon, it'll be interesting to see what 1080p 2D stretched games look like on it and whether it remains crisp enough.

Thanks for the compliments!

— - yeah, I'm targeting 1080p with the characters somewhere around 256 pixels tall for the most part. I debated going higher res, as these games will take long enough to make that 4k will probably be as ubiquitous for monitors as 1080p is now by the time all 3 games are released (with loot pursuit I didn't think ahead and monitor res and aspect ratio increased), but I thought about it and decided 1080p will still look fine even on 4k screens, as well as I don't want preview times to take too long loading huge graphics. What's more, the character art is all vectors, so I can upres it later if need be without redoing them.

Yeah, I think you're right. It'll probably still look reasonable!

Looks good!

Looks very good and nice work

Arima what a great work !!!

Looks sweet!

Seems like as good a time as any for an update.

The level editor is coming along great. Stuff made with it is looking super awesome.

However, I've recently discovered that the game is kinda CPU intensive. This is a problem for my game in particular because of how I want the level itself to be able to be used as a weapon, and I want the players to be able to be clever and lure a difficult enemy into a trap that was a bit earlier in the level to defeat it instead of tackling it head on. This means as the players move from one room to another, the game has to keep processing what's going on in other rooms so enemies can follow.

I've been optimizing and have managed to double the number of enemies in an area from 50 to 100, though that will probably be reduced some later when the rest of the code is in there. Some good news is that's on an about ten year old CPU that I want to be the minimum spec (AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+), and top of the line modern processors' single threaded performance is about three times that, so on even a midrange modern computer that should be more like 150-200 enemies or more.

This is still less than I hoped for the minimum spec (100 enemies in an area not enough? You crazy, Arima?), but I think I can make it work, though I'll likely have to design a dynamic level loading system that loads sections of a level that are close and saves and deletes sections that are far. I have to be careful when doing that though, or an enemy could wander into a section of the level that isn't there.

I was hoping to avoid having to implement anything like that for the prototype, but to get a good idea of what the game is like it'll probably have to be there, though I have an idea for a 'cheating' version that will be less effective, but hopefully effective enough and far easier to implement.

I'm also beginning to doubt a design decision. I've made each unit use physics for its base, which works great for sliding objects along obstacles and allows me to make cool swarms like this:

However, doing do ups the CPU use, especially since I discovered chrome/node webkit doesn't actually support asm.js for accelerated physics, and I'm not sure it's worth it. I'm going to have to debate it for a while. Perhaps if I'm clever, I can set it up to make it so I can turn on physics use when I want swarms and leave it off otherwise, but then players might wonder why enemies can move through each other sometimes and not others. I'm not sure it's a good idea to be inconsistent on that matter. Hmm, maybe I can dynamically turn it off or on depending if an object is overlapping another or not. Gonna have to play with it a bit to find out if that's effective or not, or even necessary with a dynamically loading level.

If you just want movement or pathfind but not allow overlap, use the plugin solid push out.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/577 ... solid.html

I use this to get my spaceship fleets to go somewhere without bunching up, works great.

— - I gave it a try, but if I have any more than about 10 objects, it stops working properly because the objects push out, then end up overlapping another object, and get pushed out further, resulting in a weird vortex of teleporting objects. I was also getting teleporting while sliding along walls.