Boo! I'm back :)

Hey no-one, I'm back.
Last month I never finished my post, and didn't really end up making much progress. And this month I managed to injure myself such the I've been unable to program very much, leading me to prioritise smaller games and other projects.
I'd like to start working on Alight again shortly, especially because I have learned a thing or two since last I worked on it.
The story is very clear in my mind now, but I am still not quite sure what all of the events of the game will be. We'll see though.
Thanks everyone!
〜zxin

Engines

Hey nobody! Sorry to let you down, but I didn't work on Alight at all for the last two months. But, I do have a post for you today. Expect these to become a monthly thing from now on... especially since I literally delayed making this post for 30 days.

So I've sort of had Alight on soft-hold for this time, because of engines. I've been researching different 3D engines quite a bit recently for another (much larger scale) project. Originally I really wanted to write a proprietary engine for that project, but I decided against doing so for similar reasons that I decided against writing a proprietary engine for Alight. I'm impatient. I just want to tell my story, finish my game, and move on. As much as I would be able to learn from the experience, my patience would strangle me before I'd be able to sit down with SDL2 & C and program an engine for my needs.
So what engine is Alight using? Well, I'm using GameMaker. Why? Well, I own a copy of it, I've used it since I was about 7, and I actually love GML. GML is like the slightly retarded son of C, but it's so much better than having to put up with another shitty variant of Python, or using Java or JavaScript.
OK, OK. Let me clarify my statement from the start of this paragraph. Why has Alight been on soft-hold? Well, a little while ago I migrated Alight's development to GameMaker:Studio 2. This turned out to be a massive mistake, though. Not because the experience was worse - it's certainly a reasonable improvement over GameMaker:Studio 1.4, and the quality of life changes are fantastic - but not long after I started using it, GameMaker:Studio 2's free trial switched from a limited feature trial (less rooms, etc.) to a limited time trial. This basically paralysed me, because I didn't want to invest time into a project that could just be bricked if I couldn't afford the staggering price of the engine at the end of the trial period. I find trials to be really stressful and annoying (and abusable), but they are a better business strategy unfortunately.
But we're back! For development to resume I just have to move all the code I wrote in GM:S2 back to GM:S1.4, which should take me a couple of days. Development will of course be slower while I have university work to complete, but the project's future is looking better than it did when I wanted to make this post last month.

THE GOOD NEWS:
1) I came up with a new draft of the story which makes a lot more sense and is far more coherent than the last draft. Having this clearer vision should greatly assist with pushing me forward to develop the game. Having this vision in my head is what keeps me going, and seeing it realised is always the sweetest reward.
2) Why did I move to GM:S2? I wanted to use its improved tile system, because all I'd ever heard about the tile system in GM:S1.4 is that it was useless. Uh no, it turns out that I can totally use the tile system in GM:S1.4 and there was no need for me to make my own proprietary tile format, nor migrate when I got sick of trying to upgrade it for my needs. Argh!

Well, that's all for now then. Maybe I'll see you in a month, maybe sooner? Who knows.
Thanks for reading,
～zxin

Standstill

Hi nobody!
This is a short post because I haven't really done anything with the game for a couple of weeks. I've had a lot of university work to do, and I've been focusing the rest of my time on other games.
I would really like to get to working more on Alight. I still have plenty left to do with the game, of course. A big part of it is going to be making artwork, which is still very tiring for me. Please understand that I am very short on time, and that I will dedicate some time to realising this project as soon as I have the time to spare! <3

Thanks,
～zxin

Mind 2

There's no-one left who can save me. People who I love constantly profess their hate for me.
Every day it's getting worse. All I have is my work. I cannot trust in the lies of everyone else. They're all lying to me.
I live in a prison where each day I am tortured by the ones who keep me here. There's nothing I can do, and nobody who can fix it. Whatever I say, I'm going to die.
A long time ago, I felt that being ostracised from a group was one of the greatest pains.
Not so long ago, I felt once again a similar feeling. Although this time I was less invested in some ways, and more in others.
And now I'm just trapped. Is this better? Do I want to be tortured here?
I promised I would hurt myself to get the work done. I may have delivered on that promise somewhat so far, but never to the scope of what I originally intended when I made that promise.

I'm lying too. I'm lying to everyone with this show. Why not put on a real one? Does the money ever come?

2 months!?

Hey. This post is coming out a day early 'cause it's officially the end of month number 2!

So what did we get done this month?

-mostly finished the title screen
-new character sprites (maybe?)
-numerous improvements to my script system
-somewhat functional saving/loading
-fully functional inventory system
-a little bit of music

Mostly I've been working on music this month, though little of it has been for Alight. While it's true that I have already written 20 candidate pieces for the game, not all of them are guaranteed to be finished or have appropriate uses down the line.
What I'd really like to get done soon is more artwork. Lack of artwork will restrict the creation of further areas.

Thanks once again,
～zxin

Artwork & Reliability

You know what sucks? Having to make artwork. Placeholders really won't do for working out a lot of the finer points in a videogame. Especially when it comes to things like frame count/speed.
I've been trying not to bug my artist friend too much, because I've already lost enough talented people by doing that. (One, by the way)
When working with someone on a casual project (casual as in nobody's getting paid, there's no publisher or corporate deadline) it's always a good idea to have a backup plan.
If you have a musician, make sure they're using a style you/someone else can replicate, or have all music remade from scratch.
If you have a programmer, make sure they're documenting their code so that you or some other programmer can pick up where they left off if necessary.
And if you have an artist, be ready to replace them/their artwork if they leave.

So of course I'd been trying to prepare in case Raymundo quit on me. (And I mean, he's fairly busy anyway regardless of him quitting or not.) I'd only planned for him to do the character artwork, because I can do environments alright. But this means he would probably be making every foe in the game, and that's a lot to ask when you can basically guarantee nothing in return.
My one or two attempts so far to try and make the game's character really scared me off trying it, but I wanted the freedom, so I tried again today. Here's what the progression of the sprite looked like:


I'm actually very happy with the end result. If I could animate this and use it as a design template for the other characters, I think I could honestly see this being the final design, instead of the current one. But it all depends on what Ray does, and how well I can make this thing move.
Interestingly it's basically a median between Jasper and Ray's artstyle. (Since I took inspiration from both)



Going back to my earlier topic...
If you're going to make enemies with the members of your own dev. team, for God's sake: Do it early on. The collateral damage is so much easier to cope with that way. You do NOT want to be %50 done before the programmer says "fuck this shit" and you're left with a bucket of spaghetti and a buggy game. Do you wanna let that happen? No way Jose! That's why I like working on my own. Group projects are fun, but they need to end really quickly. I was pretty comfortable coordinating one for two weeks, but if something goes wrong beyond that point things can start getting pretttty hairy. Problems even a month into development can completely rock the foundations of a project.

Thanks for reading once again.
Cheers,
～zxin

Mind

I think each day I'm getting worse and worse. I need and rely more and more on things I no longer enjoy and wish to be apart from. I know many of the things that I want, but many of those ends do not justify their means.
All I do is obsess and obsess. It's all I've ever done. I obsess until my obsession dries up, and then I'm left feeling hollow inside until I can find something else to obsess about.
I feel guilt. I feel guilt about all the things that I do and that I feel, however little I can control them.
I feel scared. I don't know what I'm going to do next. Everything is uncertain, and I'm not up to trying hard enough to get the things I want anymore. I can't ask the people the things I need to know from them because if I do I'll lose this game I'm playing. If they know how I feel about them everything will change. People will never trust me if they know my delusions. But I can't live without them anymore.
If I try just saying things they come out so bluntly, but if I don't I won't say anything at all. Is it better to be obnoxious or invisible?
My heart hurts all the time, and it'll never sit still. I can't move without needing to stop and take a breath. Particularly in these circumstances today, the _nd.
I need someone who can stop me. I need someone who has power over me that can hold me and tell me everything's going to be okay. I need someone who can stop my heart for me.

Housekeeping

Hello once again no-one! Haha.
This week I've been making markedly more progress than these past few weeks.
Here's a little graph I whipped up to give you an idea:

Okay so not exactly pique performance ... but still better than before, right? RIGHT?

Today I've actually been cleaning the house. It might be a mess of satanic filth at the moment, but I'm sure I'll be able to kill them all with enough boiling water. And it did give me some inspiration:
Q. What exists and is worse than maggots?

Don't worry, I'll give you a second to think about it.

Okay, lock your answers in.



A. Nothing in the entire world. If I dreamt more I would have nightmares about being stuck in beds of maggots. If I was brought to hell it would just be a sea of maggots, ruled over by a giant maggot... or maybe a democracy of giant maggots, elected by the sextillions of maggot people!
Revolting. But my point was there needs to be something like this in Alight. Ants have been getting under my skin a lot lately too, but they're just annoying and bad smelling - they don't deserve their own personal hell.

What else...
I've been working on letting the player save in the game. Although so far it's not going to be saving very much.

Last of all, last night I had a rather hideous nightmare. But with the memory I now have, I also have a fantastic source for more content.
That's all for now. But this game will surely include some terrible things. Hahaha.

Thanks for reading,
～zxin

Footage

Well, maybe it's time for another demo video?
This time we've got an early title screen:



Thanks for reading/watching,
～zxin

1 Month

Hey all, this is a brief EXTRA POST in addition to this week's one.
So it's been a month now. A lot has changed, especially the game. Not as much as I wanted, but enough for me to say that the month wasn't a waste. I think I need to switch to another project for a little while before I burn out on this one. Maybe I'll work on Muri v2 a little more? Or Task Force 2? I do have other bigger plans for Ichor though, like Zillion and such. All in good time! I just need to start a main website for Ichor to show off everything I have planned. :)
I hope you can be patient with me, as these coming weeks may bring slow progress. But it's all in the name of staying motivated. 'If I overwork, I'll oversleep.'


Thanks for reading,
～zxin

Horror

BOO!

Not very scary, huh? Making the "horror" part of a horror game work is very important. In my mind, there are two different schools on designing 'horror' in horror games. One: the horror of anxiety. And two: the horror of society*.
The horror of anxiety is something like what you would get from playing F.N.A.F., the anticipation that something bad might happen at any moment if you let your guard down. The problem with this type is that it often falls back on "if you fuck up something's gonna jumpscare you." Or even better: "if you keep playing the game something's gonna jumpscare you." In which case it's not even a punishment for fucking up, it's a punishment for participating... unless participating is fucking up, and this is your only way of communicating it like you're some kind of "I can only express myself through my artwork" douche**. So then the antidote is just turn your volume down/off. (except in F.N.A.F. 4, Scott, you asshole)
So what about the other kind? Well the horror of society is more akin to having depression, or finding out that something really shitty's happened like... err- your wife's been in a car crash, and is going to need surgery. You live in a country without public healthcare, and you're broke, and you just got fired. You're horrified by your situation and the thought of having to carry on through this catastrophe. In the real world, this kind of horror is much more common (unless you're a young child) and it's a real bitch to deal with. However in a videogame it's not as bad, because you can just stop playing, or start again, or stop giving a fuck. Your only option out of those three in the real world is the last one***. But when the main antidote to a horror game's formula is 'stop playing' then it's anywhere from effective enough to too effective, like constant unavoidable jumpscares. But because this kind of horror is less abrasive and obnoxious it can be force fed to the player at a much higher velocity without it seeming too serious, as long as they still have hope. If you take away all the player's hope then they will just stop playing with a bad taste in their mouth. But if you can convince them that as long as they work through the bad situation there might be hope, they'll probably keep playing. They'll probably pursue the light at the end of the tunnel despite the tunnel being a sewer that they have to wade through buck naked.
The way you keep the player from getting used to either kind of horror is give them a break. Of course, they could always take a break themselves, but that will break their immersion like a ceramic knocked onto a tiled floor, and make them not feel like playing the game again. Instead, you should make the experience bingeable (fuck you, English vocabulary) by giving the player those moments where they feel happy or at peace. The juxtaposition will hold them back from properly acclimatising, and you can therefore sustain le horror!
Well that's all on the subject of horror. Here's an image:


I got a proper domain for this blog ... because I can. I should start using it for some other stuff soon.

Also, from now on blog posts will be weekly, as I've got a lot less I can talk about now.
Thanks for reading,
～zxin

*No I wasn't just going for the rhyme, that was seriously the best name I could think of. Maybe "the horror of reality" is better?
**Id est: me.
***Equivalent to passive suicide?

Naming!

(sorry this post is a day late, all 0 readers!)

When naming something like a game there are a few things that really do need to be taken account if you want people to be able to find your game.
I was reminded of this today when I saw a game in somebody's signature on the Gamemaker forums that didn't have an accompanying link! (If you're going to self-promote, do it right dude...) So naturally I Google searched it instead. What was the game's name? Blue Void. Yeah... that name was in a very open relationship. (i.e. taken by a number of people) Adding "game" to the end yielded little extra. It took the exact search Blue Void "Dragon47" (author's name in quotes) for me to finally find the post about the game.
MORAL OF THE STORY? Don't pick a wanky unrelated name for your game that's also in use by about 8 other entities.

Next up: Lone Survivor. What, again? Well, Lone Survivor and Skyscraper share something else - we both share names with high budget films that dominate Google's SEO like a fucking gimp. Perhaps calling the extended version of Lone Survivor the "Director's Cut" was tempting fate, eh? In fact, it only just occurred to me now as I write this after 5 years that the name is a reference to one of the game's characters.
As for me, the film of the name "Skyscraper" is already out - whereas Lone Survivor predates Lone Survivor (film) by several years. It's not like Skyscraper was more than a temporary name to me anyway, but I was beginning to become a little attached.

So what name do I pick? My original temporary development title was really shit, and Skyscraper is in-use and also likely to be a fabrication. Well, what name will suit our dirty needs then? Well, the whole time I've been thinking of a name like "core" or "heart" because of the story. But also there needs to be some thing like 'decent' as well because of the game's progression. So I think for now I've settled on the title "コアへ下れ", or "Alight (to the Core)." No, not alight as in on fire.
Here's an early version of the title screen with the new title:


Thanks again for reading,
～zxin

Other Games

Someone lent me a less shitty graphics card the other day (basically anything is better than an 8400GS), so after a good 3 months I finally got to play Party Hard 2 at a playable framerate...

I must say it's a really fun game, and executes mixing 2D pixel-sprites with 3D environments rather pleasingly, even giving sprites light cutoff on one side (i.e. they cast shadows on themselves) to simulate them being more than flat planes. Unfortunately it's a fucking time sync and a half! I've played a good 5 hours of it and I'm still only on the 4th stage - certainly very different from Party Hard 1, which was usually pretty simple to get through. I was stuck in the hospital level for about 2 of those hours as well. That's not to say that the mechanics are bad or anything, on the contrary I think many of them have been adequately refined since last time.
Chief among the refined mechanics from the first game is the police calling/investigation system. In the first game if someone saw you dun do a murder they would run off towards the nearest phone at an uncanny speed (impossible to outrun) with a ringing phone icon over their head. This time around, if people see something suspicious they will get a green phone icon, and if they actually see you do something they will get a red phone icon. In addition, instead of there being public phones in all these random-ass locations, everyone just has a cell-phone. They will usually run a little ways away, but if you can catch up with them it's easy enough to 'shut them up' before they can do anything.
There are some downsides though. For one, certain characters are just invincible. No matter how many times you stab them they just keep moving. This includes the police, the terminator in stage 3, and the dude in the bed in stage 3... who you're supposed to confront at the end, but nothing tells you that specifically... and why would that make him invincible and completely oblivious to your presence in the meantime? The cleaning lady is also invincible, but I think that can be forgiven more, because the most she does to you for stabbing her is hit you with her mop until you're on the ground. (it's even a little amusing stabbing her to wake her up, and nobody calls the police over it anyway so it's usually entirely inconsequential)


Another game I played was Combustion, or at least its demo. Combustion is a low-poly 3D game with an intentionally blocky aesthetic. It's about being an animal police officer in an animal world. It's currently on Kickstarter after having been in development for a couple of years now. After having followed it the whole time (being a long-time fan of Fredrik Strøm and all) I was quite excited to play the demo. Right away the per-pixel-shading screen filter really reminded me of Lone Survivor and Skyscraper's appearances, and the way all the extremely low-res textures intentionally have no pixel smoothing actually works fantastically in tandem with the screen filter.
In terms of gameplay, it's a mix of simple but rather engaging combat, and other side jobs like dialogue, making arrests, etc.
I did find a couple of bugs in the demo. One where I got locked into first person mode before I knew how to get into it in the first place when I tabbed out at one point. And another later on when I walked into what seemed to be a solid object and found that using first person mode from within it would let me see through most of the world.
It looks as if the game is going to at least make its initial goal, but hopefully it'll reach a few of its stretch goals as well.
The demo's free, so have a play of it if you're interested: Combustion's Kickstarter campaign

Next post is coming on 2019/04/10 at 10:00 GMT!
Thanks for reading,
～zxin

The Actual Game

So enough context! (at least for now...) How's the game shaping up?
Well progress is getting slowed down significantly by my inability to make pixel art.

In terms of features, a lot of it has been behind the scenes these last few days. Mostly refining how things work and making them more lenient for my sake. But I have expanded the scope of scripts and made text a bit more versatile. For instance, you can now use more than one colour per text box:

I even got them to immediately display when you press Z, although there is a mandatory 1 frame delay per text change. (each piece of the text uses a different object, which needs 1 frame to do the stuff that the next piece of text relies on it having done, you see)

I finally figured out how to make the Game Over screen work without crashing the game, and I've been planning around implementing things like damage and saving.

I finally got a nice animated pause screen - with relatively little effort too! - but it's going to mandate every single entity that it effects having a "if not paused" clause... unless I think of some better way to do things. (unlikely)
Here's a big ol' .GIF! It might need to play through once really slowly while it loads before it'll play properly:

Had to cut out half of it because the file was already 33MB @ 25FPS. But hey, the uncompressed recording was 800MB, so I can't complain.

And I've been working very hard to finally get this:

This will probably end up being the "home" area. I've already reworked the tiles twice, so let's hope I remain happy with them this time. The mirror is a placeholder! Later versions should have windows instead.

Next post coming 2019/04/06 at 10:00(AM) GMT!
Thanks for reading,
～zxin

Immitation

What's the best thing about being able to deconstruct something that you really love? Well, for me it's taking bits of it that you like, isolating them, and using them yourself. Like nuances in someone's writing, artistic style, or... visual effects!



One thing Lone Survivor has always had that I've always wanted is its beautiful pixel shading and lighting style... and as of today I finally have both.
It didn't take me long to figure out how it does its static effect (turn up the gamma in the demo version by pressing S), the way the fog works was fairly similar, the lighting wasn't TOO hard... and the other day I finally went through all the images in the demo version and found the image it uses for a screen overlay. Previously I had thought the game employed some form of GPU shading, but it turns out a simple image suffices for it. With all this I could create a convincing Lone Survivor web-comic! Why? BECAUSE I CAN, DAMN IT!



Looks pretty convincing, no? That took me a good hour to create. It's not the best, though.
For precise comparison, here's a screenshot from the actual game:



The way Lone Survivor's graphics work is very weird, actually. The game's sprites are all made for a 160x120 screen, half of the typical 320x240 or 640x480 a lot of 4:3 retro/DOS games inhabit. So how come the game's native resolution is 640x480? Well, put simply: upscaling. The game nearest neighbour upscales the 160x120 screen 4x (up to 640x480) after it's done drawing the lighting, and then adds a number of filters to the screen. It seems like it adds the big overlay, and then the randomly moving static effect. It creates a very pretty and detailed look for an otherwise extremely low-res game. I believe the game does have a few shaders, like when you go through a mirror the screen bends to the side in a manor that I'm not sure how you would achieve otherwise. (Maybe some surface redrawing?) Maybe I'll have to ask Jasper...

Maybe I should just make a fangame? It seems like I could replicate Lone Survivor very easily at this point - aside from porting NPC AI - and then use that as a platform to make mods of it. But... when you can get to that level of imitation, you can really just start producing your own original works from the ground up in a similar style, diverging from your source material as you feel necessary. For instance, I like the aesthetic of Cave Story's per-character text scrolling, but also admire the readability of Lone Survivor's per-word scrolling; so I decided to combine them by having text scroll extremely fast, but pause between every word.


Were you enjoying the post schedule then? ... pff! Trick question - I know literally nobody reads these, haha. Don't worry, I have the analytics. But I'm going to be posting every 4 days instead of every 2 from now on, and eventually every week if I have less to say later on in the game's development.

Thanks for reading,
~zxin

Retaining Motivation

Something that's always a challenge in any big project is staying motivated. At the moment my motivation levels are incredibly low, so low in fact that it would be a wonder for me to get up in the morning if it weren't for the simple fact that my bed is usually the heat of a furnace by the time I wake up.

I'm very motivated to work on Skyscraper. But the main problem isn't just staying motivated in general, but also staying motivated to work on the right things. For instance, it's extremely easy to just make a ton of music and artwork, and end up with no game, and no idea how to use the assets you've created. It's a bad trap to fall into for sure. What you want, ideally, is to program the ever living shit out of the game first, because - at least in my case - I'll run out of motivation to add new features to the game before I run out of motivation to passively push pixels into a sprite, or experiment with music until I get something vaguely listenable.

So what about retaining general motivation? Well, I find (not finding, auto-correct, can't you comprehend sentence context? I'm not an Indian scammer, you know...) that the best way to do that is to keep challenging myself. Of course, sometimes you just want to be done with the challenges and do things that don't have such a high bar for entry, like designing levels and adding content. Of course a great deal of care must be put into the design of a game, but it's not a mentally exhausting task like programming a script language.

In the end, if progress begins to stagnate, you will find yourself having less fun. The best way to get work done is keep up momentum. Perhaps it'll feel like pushing a boulder up a sharp cliff face some days, but in the end it'll pay off if you keep pushing. All fruitful work will make its ends.

And with that, here's your image for today:


Thanks for reading,
~zxin

Origins

Lone Survivor is my sole inspiration. In fact, it's the reason I decided to make this game at all. But that's not the whole story...


A long time ago Lone Survivor was in my top 5 games. At the time I researched it and learned that it was programmed with something called "Flixel". Being interested in game creation, and having used GameMaker8's DnD features for a while, I clumsily downloaded it and was quickly overwhelmed. I managed to find a demo game and modify one of the sprites in it and a few physics variables, until it felt like less of a platformer. If I still have that project anywhere, it's probably on an old laptop of mine that I don't exactly feel like trawling through right now to find that project... so you probably won't see any images of it here.
So I was quite disappointed in myself, of course; And slowly I reformed out of trying to work on original games. It's not that I didn't feel that I was good enough at it, because being absolutely abhorrent at it never bothered me back in the day (as long as I was improving and getting work done). Instead, it was because I couldn't find a suitable platform that would accommodate my shoddy programming, mathematical and abstract problem solving skills. (That is, a platform that just does everything for you...)

Not much later, I started getting into Cave Story modding. A very approachable way to get into game design and learn a lot of vital lessons.
It's especially approachable because there are a couple of good editors for it that list every command in the script language, which in itself is very simple and easy to understand. For instance, anything that ISN'T a command is just printed as text. Of course, without a textbox the text is just invisible. There's a command '<MSG' to open a textbox, and a further '<CLO' to close one. Simple stuff. Some commands have 4 numbers after them which do a thing. Like '<IT+0001' gives you item 1, which is a key. The way everything was designed and handled internally makes sense from a "how would I do this in a way that works but won't take the rest of my life to finish?" sort of approach.
Once you get beyond editing map, script and entity files you can also edit things like the x86 code in the exe of the game, which of course requires learning x86asm. I held off of doing this properly for a very long time, because trying to do it was so overwhelming due to the volume of the code and its sheer insignificance. (i.e. one operation does next to fuck-all)
In late 2016, I made my first faint efforts to go a little deeper than the colon and was actually able to locate and change a few simple values. By 2017, I was able to do vaguely advanced things... like somewhat optimising some of the game's extremely verbose code and inserting very elementary routines to make values change over time, etc.

Finally, in early 2018, I gave up the pretence that I wasn't able to program at all, and started coding overtime. I programmed so much in that time that it was as if I was making up for all the time that I had put off learning x86asm properly. I don't regret a moment of it. So somehow in the space of several months, together my programming, mathematical and abstract problem solving skills increased at least 10-fold. Contextually though, "10-fold" is still not very much when your starting value is less than, say, one. So, I did get much better, and I'm still improving... I guess... but the point is that that's how I made it from "Ohh to add y to x you express it as 'x = x + y'", to "Oh right - the way this function works means that it's returned a negative real from this byte that I wanted to be unsigned, because it's unconditionally reading it as signed and now I just gotta invert it like 'if(n >= 128) n = -256 + n'".

Returning to the time of writing, I recently started replaying Lone Survivor, and immediately re-realised why I loved it so much. With all my new perspective as a designer and programmer, I was even more fascinated by it. My desire to make a game of the same genre re-ignited, and thus here we are.



I hope my excruciatingly long story didn't bore you too much.
In other news, I've been making some mediocre tiles and backgrounds since last time. Hopefully with a little practice I should be able to make enough tiles for my first room to look like more than Placeholder City, USA.
Also here's something I was doing with coloured lighting:


Thanks for reading,
zxin

Slow, Satisfying Progress

FUCK! Has it already been 3 days since the first post?
... yep! Well, here's another one:

I've managed to make a whole lot of progress on the engine in these past two weeks, but not a whole lot on sprites. I've done 5 light sprites, the fog, an anorexic font and like 2 ground-items. The player sprite was made by one of my friends, who I hope will come 'round soon and start helping me out a little more like I wanted...
Oh well, in the meantime I could at least TRY to make some tiles myself. I'm definitely going to need someone's help doing people's sprites though. If precision doesn't matter, like in the fog sprite, I can do it easily. Otherwise I'll have a lot of trouble.

Progress has been moderately slow, but very satisfying thus far. I hope to get some people implemented into the game soon, so that there's actually some reason for me to start making the game's core mechanics. Along with like... health, psychology, hiding, etc.

I'm curious to know what people think of the look of the scanlines mixed with the pseudo-dithering on the light. I quite like dithering for the sake of dithering, rather than for the sake of making up for a limited colour palette. Lone Survivor arguably did that better than I.

WELCOME!

Hello people!
My name is zxin, and this is my dev blog for a game I'm working on. It's currently called Skyscraper, but I'm not a massive fan of that name. Hopefully I'll come up with something better later on.

I went a bit more in-depth on my personal blog about this, but here's a video of some early gameplay: