AXLE: a sidescroller (4/14/12)

[laser_blaster]

I like it! Everything’s looking pretty polished so far. The backgrounds could still use some work(more details in general, and more background variety), as I’m sure you know, but it looks very promising. Good luck with it!

I have a suggestion for you: you know those colored lines in the background of the factory levels? It would be neat if they shifted color or pulsed with brightness. Imagine this: the lines glow a dim blue color, but wide pulses of red light periodically shoot up the wall, making the lines glow red.

[Lakiku]

@C.A.ligári Agreed. I just changed the ladder a bit.

@Ace Dragon good to hear, thanks!

@laser blaster Great idea, about the background. It’ll be tricky but I’ll start working on it. I hope to generally animate more of the scenery, eventually.

[Lakiku]

Update about the electric wires. I’ve made several different types of logic gates:

• OR—yellow circles
• AND—yellow triangles
• NOR—blue circles
• NAND—blue triangles

I’ll make some puzzles that involve these later on.

Cheers :eyebrowlift:

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[mrn]

This looks pretty cool! so basically you have to solve like mini puzzles?

[SolarLune]

This is starting to look very unique and pretty fun to play. I liked the lighting on him as he climbed across the wall in the video, and as Ace mentioned, the camera shift as he climbed looked very interesting, as well. Your game’s really starting to look good, Lakitu!

By the way, the logic puzzles sound like they could be hard, but fun, as long as you don’t put too many switches in!

[Mirata]

Ha, I’ve never seen this topic… Anyway, I think it looks great so far, you have some very interesting gameplay features (I’m jealous of the grapple, you can do so much with something like that… :D) And I absolutly love the water!

Great work so far

[Lakiku]

Thanks for the feedback, guys! I’m going to make some smaller puzzles, some of them involving tools, and also hopefully some larger ones that last the whole game and involve traveling between different sectors of the island for clues. But I’m also working on some enemies to add some action/combat to the game. :evilgrin: More on that soon…

EDIT: And by “soon” I mean later. School’s making me super busy :rolleyes:

[Lakiku]

Update: Here are some music tracks I wrote for the game. (Some of them are in the videos already.)

http://soundcloud.com/lakitu3/sets/axle-music

[agoose77]

Please bear in mind that you are one of the people that show the progess of the BGE!
I love the game, so keep up the fantastic work!

Would you care to share how you made the “lightning / electric arcs”? and how you aligned them to the player?
Thanks!

[KelynC]

this is amazing! the animations could use some work, but it looks like you have a solid character state system. I also like the water, that’s a very nice feature and looks to be implemented well

[Lakiku]

I’m back. It’s been 2.5 months since last post, I know, but I’m still working hard on this.

@Agoose77 Yeah you asked about this ages ago :rolleyes:… anyway, the lightning is an animated, 8-framed, scrolling, alpha, UV texture made in GIMP (you can’t see it because it’s white/transparent):

I aligned the lightning bolt to the player with this script:

...
[x,y,z] = cannon.position
if touchingPlayer.status == logic.KX_SENSOR_JUST_ACTIVATED:
    cannon["obj"] = touchingPlayer.hitObject
    [player_x,player_y,player_z] = this["obj"].position
    this["dist"] = math.sqrt(((player_x - x) ** 2)+((player_y - y) ** 2)+((player_z - z) ** 2))
    this["angle"] = math.atan2(player_z - z, player_x - x)
    
    electricity.visible = True
    electricity.orientation = Euler([0,-this["angle"],0]).to_matrix()

So, basically, when the player touches the cannon sphere thing, it rotates the electric arc object over to him.

[Lakiku]

Update:

• Porting the entire game over to Blender 2.61.
• Making more devices for gameplay.
• Right now I’m updating Axle’s skeleton to enable him to pull levers to activate things.

Horseback riding, or whatever you want to call this creature.

Elevator (not fully functional yet)

I know I’m skipping around a bit, but once I get the actions and devices to work, I will buckle down and focus on designing the levels.

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[axelredfield (Bhavin)]

name is very similar to mine.

[Lakiku]

Incidentally, “AXLE” is the name of the operating system that Axle is running. It stands for for All-purpose eXtensible Learning Engine. There’s a bit of background story to that, which I’ll tell more about later. :eyebrowlift2:

More updates soon! Stay posted.

[Lakiku]

Hey all! Been a busy year, but I have been adding a few more features. I am also working on a couple of new boss songs. :evilgrin:

I added a feature that enables you to wrap around curved surfaces in 3d while also stick to tilted surfaces (like loop-the-loops). This will also let you do things like spiral staircases. Here’s a video showing this feature in action. Basically, it works using invisible control surfaces. It aligns Axle to the surface when one is there, using a distance constraint and a script.

Also, if you’ll notice, I made his mohawk a little more pointy. Does it look ok?

Now that I have enough features, I suppose i’ll start working more on the lagoon sector.

[Lakiku]

Hey guys. Long post ahead, but there are lots of colorful pictures so hopefully you won’t fall asleep :spin:

Update: So as I said, I’m focusing on the lagoon sector and starting to make playable levels. Obviously they’re not really “playable” yet, but I have a plan as to how to get there. Here’s some of the progress I’ve made.

• Made a new wooden motorized elevator that rides on a track. You can control it just by pressing up/down, so I guess he just controls it with his mind :eyebrowlift2:

• Made a system of wheels and cables that can connect to elevators, crates, etc. You will be able to use yourself and other weights to balance/unbalance the system.

• Used the new 3D wrapping feature (see last post) to create this big pillar thing. It will be a big puzzle to figure out how to get to the top. Once it’s finished, you’ll have to put the right weights on some platforms in order to lift yourself up on other platforms.

In case you want to know how the pulley system works… it uses a bunch of segments of straight and curved cable connected together. The script looks at how much weight is on each end of the cable. When the cable moves in either direction because of imbalanced weight, the cable segments on the end stretch and the UV coordinates shift so that it looks like the cable is moving. I’m really pleased with how well it’s working so far. Here’s a video of the pulley system in action. Of course there are still a few glitches to fix—I’m working on them.

See next posts for more screenies.

[Lakiku]

More pictures (they wouldn’t fit on the last post) :rolleyes:

[Lakiku]

Any comments are appreciated!

[RossBlenderArt]

Wow, I hope you finish this, so far it looks great. So many features!
PS you can attach infinite pictures using PasteAll.

[SolarLune]

Yeah, this is looking good, particularly the rope-elevator platforms. Nice job, indeed.