2013-9-30 journal, design

While working today, I decided on something sort of interesting with one of the entities in the game.  It arose accidentally.

In Even the Ocean, there are entities which launch water very quickly. It’s magic water though (…or something!), and when you touch it, your velocity becomes the same as the water – so the bullets launch upwards, thus, you kind of get boosted upwards into the air when touching a bullet.

 

I can choose how many “bullets” each entity launches – I set the default to five. The bullets all launch at the same time, but have staggered velocities (i/n * max_vel, where i = bullet index, n = nr of bullets). The way I set the velocity of the player is: if on a frame of the game, the bullet touches the player, then increment a “push velocity” counter which will be added to the players velocity in player’s physics routine, before the position of the player was updated (whew , that was a mouthful).

Anyways, what this basically amounts to is that if you are touching multiple bullets at once, the velocities end up being incremental. So if the bullets launch at velocities 90, 60, 30, and I touch all of them, I get a boost of 180 (whereas my desired behavior was only getting a boost of 90)

i.e.:

for each bullet:

   if bullet overlaps player:

     player’s velocity += bullet’s velocity.

What usually happened was, only the fastest bullet touched the player anyways (since this usually hits you on the ground or the air), so things behaved normally.

But sometimes, multiple bullets overlap the player in one frame, so instead, we get the effect of shooting the player up REALLLY fast.

I couldn’t reproduce it consistently, likely because there is some random factors I added into the initial bullet velocity. I instead now choose to use the fastest velocity of any number of bullets touching you.

But that interaction with boosting you too far was interesting, so additionally, I decided to be able to make it consistent, and sort of a “skill” thing. So now, when you press jump within a certain time frame, the bullet velocity that affects you, it is doubled (and then some). To sort of visualize this, just look at the GIF up there. If you jump *right* before the bullets launch, then the effect is doubled.

 

This isn’t physically realistic or anything, but it’s interesting and allows for various scenarios (needing to time it correctly to get some secret, needing tot ime it while avoiding other stuff, etc.)

Bugs can be great!

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Was moving around a bit today, so not much done, but story is definitely-finally ironed out as well as some other details. I’m going to try to work on some level stuff later today.

I think a good place to get ideas for levels is train stations. They are often varied, and usually funnily juxtaposed with streets or whatever. There was one train station today (Rosemont Blue Line) that I think would work well for a place in Even the Ocean, so I’m stealing it. Maybe everything in Even the Ocean was just stolen from train stations and some pretty landscapes, maybe not.

I also unpacked this tiny space heater I bought. It was only $20 and I think it is a good investment. Mornings are often very cold for me and the heater heats up really fast. The power rating is 1.5kW , so I think that’s only like $5-8 a month if I run it in the morning for an hour. Worth it, compared to before where we left the entire apartment A/C on all the time and our bill was like $300-400 for electricity. Never do that.

I swear I’ll finish that Anodyne Postmortem…later. I’ve decided to do shorter blogs to kind of talk about development and life in general, a public facing journal, I guess. A mish-mash of development and other stuff. We’ll see how long this lasts…

Development on my end this week has been sort of slow. I spent the first half of the week sorting out my flooded apartment (I live in a basement) and getting our carpet cleaned and dried out. That was stressful, but now the apartment is dry, so…things are okay, for now.

However, Jon and I did some e-mailing and have come to a pretty good set of plans with respect to the world and story design in “The Ocean”, as well as a system for rewarding “better” players. Before, I had a lot of areas planned out and a rough world to put them in. Now, things are falling into place better, so we can continue to design the levels with a sense of where they will be fitting into the game, and write music and create artwork accordingly.

So, the hard part starts now…

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I recently listened to COLTEMONIKHA, a project from 2007 or so by Yasutaka Nakata and Kate Sakai. I think they only released a few mini-albums, I’ve been listening to the 2nd one. It reminds me of sort of a laid-back fashion runway show, with a lot of white colors. Anyways, it’s good. I’d like to make such music, but it’s considerably difficult. I’ve been working on various pieces that aren’t for Even the Ocean, but they are all pretty terrible. I have to write something for the IndieStatik Kickstarter album, too – I have a song for Even the Ocean I’m considering submitting, but maybe I should write something unique. Hm.

https://soundcloud.com/kooccachoo/coltemonikha-darkness-rabbit