BEAST SOCKET (Procedural Monsters)

M

milch

Guest
hey man, looks cute! :D

i tried giving you a quick paintover, i hope you dont mind!!

i felt like the sky was a bit overpowering and distracting... i tuned it down and gave the actual groundplane more contrast instead (also probably it would be nice if the clouds moved slower, this way they're making you a bit anxious how fast they go and its a bit distracting :D)

you could push the yellow of the lit areas and the blue in the shadows a bit more probably...

animations look very nice and fun, nothing to critique there

edit: here it is smaller and with the comparison

Unbenanntpaintover2.jpg
 

CMAllen

Member
Did you think of 'PoppySock'? Sounds like 'Poppycock' But a combo of both poppy and sock... idk lol short, sweet and catchy. Looks really cool man, can I ask you how you did the sun the sun glare? Looks really cool haha.
PoppySock. Definitely....assuming it's not already taken.
 

RujiK

Member
@JackTurbo Thanks! Core gameplay will be picking up socks or yarn and throwing them at people
@Rivo7014 Poppysock is definately catchy. Light rays are really easy. Just some basic primitives drawn with bm_add.
@milch Wow! That really pops out! I might darken by shadows a bit... As to the really cool diagonal wall shadows, I tried implementing them but I think it will be more work than it's worth. I think there would be too many special cases and it doesn't play well with my current shadow system. Here are two problems with my super WIP implementation:


(Notice diagonal pieces don't look right with other shadows.) Thanks though, your edit is really nice.

@RichHopelessComposer @DividingByZero Thanks guys!

As to the sky, I stressed pretty hard about it not being pixel art. I tried a bunch of different variations but didn't really like any besides the gradient. Here is a quick list if you want to vote on which looks better.

WHICH SKY IS BEST?


Also the clouds themselves are semi transparent so they don't play well with dithered gradients. I was planning on drawing clouds manually without alpha but decided proc-gen clouds would save a lot of time. This also explains why no two clouds look quite the same. I have infinite clouds!

Proc-Gen vs WIP Pixel art


All the clouds being in a row was partially inspired by Kirby 3. I went for retro movement with modern looking clouds.


And finally, here is the chunking engine in action. This allows for almost infinitely sized levels. (Obviously this takes place off screen normally.)


Thanks for the comments!
 
I'd say 2 or 6 for the skybox. I hear you on the clouds - it still looks really awesome despite my recommendation of maybe making the clouds more pixelart-y.
 

CMAllen

Member
3, personally. It has the right mix of visible gradation and color blending that works with the pixel-art style going on with the rest of the artwork present.
 

Rivo

7014
6 or 5. But probably 6 since it looks more 'pixely' and fits better, imo. But if you're going for more of a smooth gradient, 5 is good too :p
 
M

milch

Guest
aww yeah I suspected it could be a bit too much work to be worth it to put that shadow in :D whatever, will look amazing anyway!
for the skies... i like 1 and 6, i feel like a softer transition works well for this
 
F

FROGANUS

Guest
looks cool, dig the kirby vibe.
what kind of gameplay you imagine, or gamespace even? looks side-scrolly but maybe open to wider 3d space?
at this point it looks like it could be a fun space to experiement with ai interaction with other socks, hopefully some friendly.
maybe some coop thing? imagining teamwork to get over walls, solve puzzles etc.. i dunno.
i recently played some very fun kirby's epic yarn quest coop with a friend of mine.
the style could lend itself to similar 'friendship-themed' fun.

about the sky i actually prefer the pixel drawn clouds, lol
 

RujiK

Member
@FROGANUS Kirby and Yoshi's Island are big inspiration points. I'm hoping to implement coop, but it may not be as "friendly" as kirby. I like to be able to troll my coop buddies.

Thanks for all the comments everyone else! If I sum up the sky votes (Counting double votes as half votes) Here is the tally:
  • 1) 1.5
  • 2) 0.5
  • 3) 1
  • 4) 0
  • 5) 2 Winner
  • 6) 2 Winner
  • 24) 1

And here is why I'm probably going to stick with number 5. Since the clouds are semi-transparent. They look pretty bad in motion. Observe!


Now I've added the main gameplay hook. Grabbing and chucking balls of yarn.


Since the perspective is kind of odd, I added in a dashed line to help you aim. Similar to Yoshi's island.


Also quite by accident I found out a dashed sinusoid can do all kinds of weird stuff if you change the frequency. (These have the same code as above.)


WATERFALLS. Here are two renditions. I had a lot of trouble with the horizontal line style and gave up pretty on it pretty quickly. Hopefully you like the vertical lines better.


FINALLY I've been working on unit-2-unit collisions. Working in 3d is pretty different. It's still a work in progress as you can see:


Thanks for the feedback.
 

RujiK

Member
@Rivo7014 I'll keep the bad collisions for the super deluxe gold collectors edition.

So every platformer needs a elevator lift, but those dang collision glitches got in the way again:


But I finally fixed all of the collision glitches (I think) and now it works as intended.


I've been designing lots of characters for the game. Here they are with and without some weird pixel art shader thing. (My EXCLUSIVE twitter followers got to see even more of these dopes. Hint hint.)


Question time! For the health indicator, is it better to use the traditional hearts style or to use hats to indicate more hp? You will probably only be able to get 2-3 hp so hat on/hat off should work. For 3 hp I could use a hat on top of the hat or a smaller hat that follows you.



OR



Question: Hearts or hats for a health "bar"?! (See images above)
 

Nocturne

Friendly Tyrant
Forum Staff
Admin
This looks lovely! The chunking engine is impressive, and I actually quite liked the way the level appeared around the player in the demo gifs... Maybe not for this game, but for another one it could be an interesting graphic hook. Fo HP, I really like the hats idea... however I'd consider making it a different hat for each hitpoint... It would be very cool to see a pile of like 10 different hats on his head (and if you could make them wobble when the player moves, then all the better!), and I'd make 1hp = 1 hat, so that they always have one on... it's very cute!

Oh, and for the name... "Sock Sock" works best for me, although I also like "Poppy the Socky".
 

RujiK

Member
@MIchael PS It's an xBRz upscaling shader. I think there is a GMS extension on the marketplace. Also thanks!
@Geoff Jones Thanks! Also if I do implement any smooth shader effects they would definitely be optional.
@Nocturne Thanks for the compliments! I had only planned on having 2-3 hp max, but that stack of wobbling hats sounds so stupidly funny I can't pass it up! Thanks for the great idea!

So here is how I went about implementing a stupid stack of hats:

First, I have this really old water splash script that's based on spring physics.


I used the same spring code base and applied it to a pole, like this:


Then I stuck some hats on the pole, and VOILA!


So then I stuck it into my actual game and, ugh, that looks really pixelated and distorted...


So I had a dilemma. The whole game is drawn at 1x pixels and then the application surface is scaled up. How could I draw the hats at 2x so they would look better when rotated?

Option 1: Draw over the hats in the draw_gui event at 2x size after the application surface is scaled. The downside being they would always be at depth 0.
Option 2: Draw the whole game at 2x. The downside being a big noticable performance hit.
Option 3: Try some weird shader stuff.

So I made a simple shader that turns all hats red. Like this:


NOW, in the draw gui event I still redraw the hats at 2x, BUT they only draw over the color red. So depth will still apply. Look at the difference (Below is a slowly animated gif)

Unfortunately the borders are still kind of boxy, but the insides look great.

And here is the final product:


Mad stacks of hats will be used sparingly so it doesn't get too annoying. Thanks for the comments guys! And special thanks to @Nocturne for an extra stupid idea ;)
 
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Looks great. Hats are HP in Mario Odyssey too, though: some of the bosses wear stacks of ten hats on their head. Not that it should keep your game from doing it...just a heads up that this quirky idea got scooped up by the most popular game franchise ever last year, haha.

I like the hats, though. Are you planning on having a bunch of different kinds? Maybe you could add stat boosts to them or something, too...dunno.

what what what? The attention to detail here is incredible!
keep up the outstanding work!
Yes, RujiK's attention to detail is some of the best around here, and he's ridiculously thorough. I love reading his devlogs because of that. I think most games are held together with duct tape and bubblegum, but RujiK seems to be patiently pouring concrete every time I check, haha! :'D

Great stuff!
 

jo-thijs

Member
Wow, this does look pretty amazing!

@MIchael PS It's an xBRz upscaling shader. I think there is a GMS extension on the marketplace. Also thanks!
@Geoff Jones Thanks! Also if I do implement any smooth shader effects they would definitely be optional.
@Nocturne Thanks for the compliments! I had only planned on having 2-3 hp max, but that stack of wobbling hats sounds so stupidly funny I can't pass it up! Thanks for the great idea!

So here is how I went about implementing a stupid stack of hats:

First, I have this really old water splash script that's based on spring physics.


I used the same spring code base and applied it to a pole, like this:


Then I stuck some hats on the pole, and VOILA!


So then I stuck it into my actual game and, ugh, that looks really pixelated and distorted...


So I had a dilemma. The whole game is drawn at 1x pixels and then the application surface is scaled up. How could I draw the hats at 2x so they would look better when rotated?

Option 1: Draw over the hats in the draw_gui event at 2x size after the application surface is scaled. The downside being they would always be at depth 0.
Option 2: Draw the whole game at 2x. The downside being a big performance hit.
Option 3: Try some weird shader stuff.

So I made a simple shader that turns all hats red. Like this:


NOW, in the draw gui event I still redraw the hats at 2x, BUT they only draw over the color red. So depth will still apply. Look at the difference (Below is a slowly animated gif)

Unfortunately the borders are still kind of boxy, but the insides look great.

And here is the final product:


Mad stacks of hats will be used sparingly so it doesn't get too annoying. Thanks for the comments guys! And special thanks to @Nocturne for an extra stupid idea ;)
Nice idea to solve that issue!
Although, I think it'd be an even better idea to use alpha values instead of colors to indicate depth.
When drawing the hats in the non-GUI events, you could use draw_set_colour_write_enable / gpu_set_colorwriteenable to only raw to alpha values.
You can then draw the hats using a blend mode of (bm_zero, bm_zero), which will clear the alpha values in the rectangular surrounding of the drawn hats to 0.
Then use the technique you alreay used to only draw hats over destination pixels with alpha value 0 instead of color (1,0,0,1).
Using colors has only 1 benefit over using alpha values as far as I currently see,
being that you won't be able to work with multiple stacks of hats at different depths.

I'm not sure though where the big performance hit from drawing the game at 2x would come from (might just be me though).
You do need more memory to use the larger surfaces and there are more pixels that need to be updated, but isn't that a piece of cake for a GPU?

EDIT:
There may also be some tricks involving z-buffers to solve this issue, but I know too little about them currently to be sure.
 
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A

Ampersand

Guest
You know a game's going to be great when you literally can't stop grinning at the demo .gifs. Great stuff, man!

By the way, how do you go about making these .gifs?
 

Carloskhard

Member
I'm in love with the art style and physics!!
At first I thought the game would not be much but then working my way down reading the updates I've fallen in love with the lovely mechanics and art.
I suggest you work on the presentation of the game at the beggining of this post so you can hook up more people since this really needs to be seen.
Are you realizing a demo any time soon?
Keep up the good work :D
 
A

Ampersand

Guest
So I made a simple shader that turns all hats red. Like this:


NOW, in the draw gui event I still redraw the hats at 2x, BUT they only draw over the color red. So depth will still apply. Look at the difference (Below is a slowly animated gif)

Unfortunately the borders are still kind of boxy, but the insides look great.
Unfortunately? I was thinking more like that's the cleanest pixel art rotation I've seen from a shader-based solution. Rather inspiring, now I want to try!
 

RujiK

Member
@hogwater @Nocturne @GMWolf @Ultrabeast @DukeSoft Thanks for the compliments guys!

@Morendral Lol I remember seeing that book a looong time ago now.
@Ampersand Thanks, also I use gifcam. Very easy tool.
@Carloskhard Yeah, I need to update the main post. Glad you like the art :)

@jo-thijs
That's actually a pretty good idea. I may revisit it in the future but it's not a priority at the momemt. Still, I appreciate your comment. Also "BIG" performance hit is a bit of an exageration. I've editied the post to say "Noticable" performance hit. Also having to draw everything at x*2,y*2 is annoying. Thanks for your comment.

@RichHopelessComposer
I think most games are held together with duct tape and bubblegum, but RujiK seems to be patiently pouring concrete every time I check, haha! :'D
Dang dude, your making me blush with that poetic stuff. I'm definitely stealing that compliment though. Some one is going to say that in Pale Meridian when you do a good job or something. I'm writing that down in my ideas book. :)
-------------------------

I've been a little distracted by some procedural salamanders, but I have started work on some worlds/biomes.

Autumn World:


I think the background trees came out nicely. Here is a progress gif:


Beach World (Gif was too big so its a .png; Gif is on twitter if you want to see it though.)


I had fun with the parallax in the beach zone. Fake 3d is cool.


Not a huge update, but I had a lot of replies to make so I wanted to post. Thanks again everyone!
 

RujiK

Member
@Ampersand Thanks! Mode 7 is pretty nostalgic for me so I like the look of it.

Three new enemies! First are penguins. They don't hurt you, they just get in your way and copy you. Like so:


And an angry walrus and a fat humming bird:



And here is a look at the new forest biome:


The forest biome looks much better in motion, but since the gif is 10 mb in size I'll advertise my twitter if you want to see it: (It's very pretty.)
https://twitter.com/TheRujiK/status/978270071494758400
https://twitter.com/TheRujiK/status/978270071494758400
I'm up to 4 distinct biomes now:


I'm not sure what I will work on next, maybe a city biome or something, but if you have any suggestions for a new biome I'd like to hear it.
 
O

orSQUADstra

Guest
@Ampersand
I'm not sure what I will work on next, maybe a city biome or something, but if you have any suggestions for a new biome I'd like to hear it.
Not sure if it would really fit the game, but having some levels on the moon with low gravity would sound fun to me :D Anyway, great work!!
 
A

Ampersand

Guest
Thematically reminds me of Gex, so a city biome with the right aesthetic would be really nice. Have you thought on any interior "biomes"? A big mansion or draconian castle that just goes on and on would be really awesome like in the Gex game for GBC, and could make great use of everything you've already implemented. Red drapes, regal staircases, the moon and trees out the windows, and ghosts out on the spook!

I can already see the penguins being all kinds of fun and annoying. This game already has so much character to it for being in a proof of concept sort of state still!
 
C

ChimaereJade

Guest
I really hope this project is still in the making because your work is awesome! A biome I would like to see would be mine/caves similiar to the old donkey kong country games on SNES. :)
 

RujiK

Member
@orSQUADstra Low gravity would be a good way to mix up the gameplay. I'd have to make the moon more interesting than just gray and craters though.

@SnotWaffle Studios City biome is now in the works but dang is it taking a long time. Also thanks!

@Ampersand I put a lot of thought into the city biome's aestetic and I'm pretty pleased with it so far. Still not done yet, but it's progressing and I think it's quite original. I have been thinking about some kind of interior biome like a castle or a cave but I haven't gotten around to it yet. It's on the to do list!

@sisi_ke3ka_khokho Thanks!

@ChimaereJade It's still in the works! Also I think a cave is a good idea because I noticed all of my biomes are pretty light colored. A cave/dungeon would provide some much needed dark variety.

Also Thanks dude :D lol:

Normally I try to only post when I have a significant update but I'm having a real headache with some pixel art.

Do any of these palm trees look good? If so which is the best?

I'm really sick of redoing them...
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
Do any of these palm trees look good? If so which is the best?

I'm really sick of redoing them...
all 3 are nice:
I think a mix of 1 and 2 would look great.
Perhaps the size and texture of 1, with the colour and shape of 2? (perhaps a little more rounded than 2)
 
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I think all three look pretty good. The only problem I see is that the trunks look paper thin compared to the tops because of the lack of shading on them, and because of how the bottoms are completely flat. Most of your art for this game is very blocky and angular, so maybe you could do the same with the trunks here? Instead of imagining them as round, imagine them as low poly models? Maybe a triangular shape if imagined from a top down view? Would work best with 1 or 2 probably. If you go with 3, I'd probably keep it round, and just make one side darker.

They all look good though. Love these colors!

Edit: Something like this, except not 💩💩💩💩ty


or this?

(Bluer shadows, shadows from leaves on trunks)

I added shadows to the left sides of the tree leaves for the first two, too, to try selling it more. Looking at your art, I notice you're actually mixing light sources a few times between the background and foreground layers. The Autumn tileset is one of them. If you flipped those background tree trunks horizontally there, they'd match the light source of the foreground a bit better, since you have shadows on the left there. Sorry for the unsolicited edits. I'm hiding from my own project. :'D



So pleasant looking with such a simple background added. I think you're going to have another winning tileset on your hands! You're making me want to do a kirby-esque platformer with all your nice artwork! D':
 
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RujiK

Member
@GMWolf I went with number 1. The Sonic-style polygon-ish look of number two doesn't really match my game. Thank you for your comment.

@RichHopelessComposer Hot dang, dude, going way above and beyond with that post! I added a shadow and slightly changed the trunk shape of number one like you suggested and I think it looks better now. I do need to probably go back and make sure all the light is coming from the same angle though. I also probably put in more work than I needed for something in the background behind the buildings... Double thanks for your very good comment.

Here are the trees in their parallax background majesty: (5 mb gif)

And here is the city tileset


And here is a new NPC. Cats:

They follow you a little bit and just kinda chill.

And a new NPC. Killer robots:


QUARTER TILES have been added and are needed for sidewalks. You can see the height being adjusted here and the step-up collisions


And here is a quick gif of how world building works:


And finally, the background can be changed at any time now. The background really changes the feel of the level.
 

GMWolf

aka fel666
@GMWolf I went with number 1. The Sonic-style polygon-ish look of number two doesn't really match my game. Thank you for your comment.

@RichHopelessComposer Hot dang, dude, going way above and beyond with that post! I added a shadow and slightly changed the trunk shape of number one like you suggested and I think it looks better now. I do need to probably go back and make sure all the light is coming from the same angle though. I also probably put in more work than I needed for something in the background behind the buildings... Double thanks for your very good comment.

Here are the trees in their parallax background majesty: (5 mb gif)

And here is the city tileset


And here is a new NPC. Cats:

They follow you a little bit and just kinda chill.

And a new NPC. Killer robots:


QUARTER TILES have been added and are needed for sidewalks. You can see the height being adjusted here and the step-up collisions


And here is a quick gif of how world building works:


And finally, the background can be changed at any time now. The background really changes the feel of the level.
whoaaaa, what? that looks awesome!
 
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