Apparatus - Small Update [20/03/17]

Hey!

I’m working on a project on BDX. The name is tentative. Here’s a small video:

Follow me on twitter for more frequent updates: @Lucreci0us

As far as progress, I have most of the character done (animations, sound, mechanics). I have a simple tiling system which I will demo later.

Art done by Daniel Schüler.

Huh, looks pretty cool so far. Nice grass waving effects. What kinda game will it be? And what do you mean by “tiling system” - like the tiles in the game world? Because automatic tiles sounded like a good idea to me as well for Gearend - never got around to actually trying them out, though.

The game will be a platformer mostly - think Ori and the Blind Forest; Metriodvania-ish + heavy platformer.

As for the tiling system, essentially all my tiles are the same type of object and I change the texture according to what is already surrounding the tile. I also have an image parser that I use to place tiles; specific colors yield a specific tile type (grass, wall, sand, etc). The reason I use an image rather than, say, a text file, is because most image editors come with a layering system. So for one screen (like Gearend screen where the camera is locked to an area) I can have a background layer, a foreground layer, an obstacle iayer and an entity layer. And images are nicer visually lol

I use images instead of manually creating the levels in Blender so I can easily load screens that the player is currently near, and I don’t need to worry too much about the size of the world (which I plan to be open, like Gearend, and in one scene). Using images also allow me to quickly debug levels while in game by just editing and re-saving the image - that’s just a nice touch though haha

Edit:
Here’s the editor I was talking about. It’s still a WIP, but I hope this gives a better idea of what I mentioned.

I made a video about multithreading for loading world chunks to reduce lag spikes.
If anyone is interested in the actual code, I’d be happy to make a video explaining and showing exactly what I did.

Hey!

Here’s another devlog.

I talk about level editing mostly.

Hey man, the game looks cool.
I used to store levels in text files, with characters or numbers representing blocks. That was pretty much the worst way of level editing.
Recently I also tried to do it with images, but now I’ll give Tiled a try. Thanks for the useful video.

Thanks hikojj!

I noticed your project uses templates to randomly generate levels. I think you’d find Tiled extremely useful to do that too haha

The next devlog will hopefully be something more substantial gameplay wise.

Great videos. Subscribed!
It’s not that hard to code up a level editor in Blender rather than using a stock solution.
The good thing about a Blender (or BDX) editor is you can use it for more complex things like adding enemies, waypoints, items, assigning AI strategies and other things besides just placing tiles.

Lucrecious really cool game guy… I love the feel you have shaping up the art style is wicked and classic :stuck_out_tongue:

does all blender’s logic brick system work the same way for BDX as for UPBGE or just standard BGE or is it more for knowing programmers? scary I’m an artist I don’t program at all, and hardly use any code for my games outside of maybe some custom 2d filters or good 3rd person camera script…

Hello!

I’ve a small update - school is a lot for me right now, but I’ve managed to work on the project a little bit more. Nothing much has changed except that I’ve added rolling and an energy bar.

The colours in the gifs are a little messed up because I exceeded the colour limit for a single gif, but it still looks pretty good. The gifs are running at 20fps, but the game runs at a solid 60fps.

Here’s a close up:
https://media.giphy.com/media/3o7btOVOIKWqq0Hrry/giphy.gif

Here’s from further away:
https://media.giphy.com/media/xUA7b9xCaE14nDk568/giphy.gif