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Tag: ocean

  • Ocean again, sound design & NPC

    Ocean again, sound design & NPC

    Hello there,

    Welcome to the April update! What’s new this month?

    Ocean Gameplay

    I’ve been working on the ocean gameplay and now, the waves have a real influence on the gameplay! The turtle can move up and down waves and I have also added the ability to jump. This makes the controls more inline with the character and feels pretty cool. Additionally, there are crates floating in the ocean that we can destroy to get bonuses.

    It wasn’t an easy task to set up, as I had to rewrite all the water detection code to make it compliant with the physics engine. So now, the water code is computed in CPU for collision and GPU for rendering, and the two versions must behave exactly the same. It was also challenging to set up real-time NON-PLANAR reflection (due to waves).

    Here’s a video of the latest version of the ocean gameplay:

    If you can’t see the video above, check it out here: https://youtu.be/_NXH5laQU-M

    Non-Playable Characters

    I have worked on a few NPCs, including 3D models, texturing, animation, and 2D avatars for dialogues. Here are a few screenshots:

    Work in progress, of course; there are still many other ones to work on.

    New Dojo Selection Screen

    I spent some time designing a more interesting dojo selection screen. One big problem in my game was that the player collected gems but without really knowing why. Now, the first time the player enters a dojo, she can get a glimpse of what’s coming up and how much it’s going to cost. This gives good motivation to collect gems (but there are other cool things to buy, of course).

    Sound Design

    I finally started to work seriously on sound design, beginning with the main character. Now, there are sounds for footsteps, jump, roll, attack, landing, slide, and climbing. There are subtle variations (pitch, volume, audio source) on each occurrence to not annoy the player on the long run.

    Communication

    I’ve entered a few more festival selections in order to showcase the game on Steam. Sadly, I had quite a few rejections (as for now, I’ve applied to 15 festivals and was only accepted to 1). It’s kind of hard for motivation, but I’ll keep applying. Luckily, what I’ve been sharing on Reddit had some great traction and feedback until now, as you can see here:

    ¡Hola a todas y todos! Les comparto un fragmento del juego PC en el que estoy trabajando: "Zefyr: A Thief's Melody". Se puede navegar en tortuga por el océano. Está inspirado en Zelda Windwaker. En este momento, estoy tratando de mejorar esta parte del juego. ¡Espero que les guste!
    byu/OneiricWorlds inVideojuegosMX
    J'essaie d'améliorer le rendu de l'océan dans mon jeu d'aventure "Zefyr: A Thief's Melody". J'ai rajouté des vagues et de l'écume en essayant de rendre les répétitions pas trop visibles. C'est une vraie galère au niveau de la pile de rendu et c'est pas fini encore, mais j'espère que ça vous plaira!
    byu/OneiricWorlds injeuxvideo
    https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/comments/128g1sq/update_of_the_ocean_big_3d_waves_geometrical_foam/

    This is cheering me up 🙂

    And yes, I try to post in English, French, and Spanish. Not that easy…

    I’ve also shared a (French) tutorial video about how I coded the translation system in my games, and you can check it out on my YouTube channel here:

    If you don’t see the video above, check it out here: https://youtu.be/CU015hL9mUk

    Fixes & Improvements

    As usual, I’m still improving puzzles, fixing bugs here and there, and reworking on code structure, factorizing, and removing useless dependencies.

    And that’s it for this month!

    As always, thanks a lot for your interest and support!

    Peace 🙂

  • Ocean, Saves & Trailer

    Ocean, Saves & Trailer

    Hello everyone,

    Yes, I’m trying to post a bit more regularly these days. I hope I’ll stick to it. So here’s the summary of what I did this month:

    Saves

    As I had some friends test the game, I had to rework the save system. When something went wrong during testing, the save file became corrupted, so I needed a way to fix it so that players could keep playing on the next session. I migrated the old binary save system to a newer and more flexible one without breaking the current tester saves. Now, it’s based on textual JSON, which is easy to update and debug, and surprisingly faster than the old system. Of course, I’ll have to encrypt it when releasing the game.

    Ocean

    After this big (and quite invisible to the player) technical part, I wanted to “rest” a little bit, and I started to work on something very fun & visible: the ocean. It’s been years since I last worked on it (check this 10-YEAR-OLD previous post), and with the feedback of players and internet comments, I decided to add geometrical waves to it. Until now, it was perfectly flat, even if there were a few normal maps.

    So I became a “tech artist” for a few days, and I added many improvements to the waves:

    • vertex displacement with various layers of movement
    • color variations
    • moving foam on the ocean surface
    • splashing foam at the wave top
    • little particle splashes on top of waves too (I had to code a 3D gradient ascent to put them in good places)
    • hue variation based on a fake depth (super useful for the design of one level particularly)
    • sparkles reacting to bloom on certain angles reflecting the moon or the sun

    I wanted the ocean to be gorgeous, and to call the player for exploration, because it’s a big selling point of the game! And here’s how it looks like now:

    The Ocean at night
    The Ocean at dawn

    And here it is in motion:

    If you can’t see the video above, check it out here: https://youtu.be/3iXwYisxSR4

    But I had 2 main constraints:

    • at the moment, I dont want to rewrite all the gameplay moves on the ocean, so I had to make it visually interesting without breaking the existing gameplay code
    • the world is cyclic, which means the ocean has to be continuous from one map edge to the other. Indeed, the player “teleports” from one side of the map to the other when she gets out of it, and the ocean MUST be tilable so that the teleport can’t be spotted. This involves using smart texture & mask scaling to hide the trick, but also hide obvious repetitions.

    While working on the ocean, I also took the time to remove the black outline on the foam and later on all visual effects. That was disturbing and didn’t match the art direction for the game. But I had to set up a different render stack for the whole game. I think it’s for the better in the end.

    Trailer

    Following the previous post, I created a trailer for the game prologue. This time, I composed the music first, thinking about what would appear in the trailer. I think it’s a better approach, and the final video is now available on the Steam page, or here below:

    If you can’t see the above video, check it out here: https://youtu.be/JR2WZQqH-p0

    Sadly, I worked on the ocean AFTER the trailer, so it’s the old version that we can see in it. Anyways, I’ll have to update the trailer one day or the other…

    Others

    While testing the game, I corrected many things, including bugs, dialogs, level design, and puzzle design.

    That’s it for this month! I hope this was interesting.

    Peace 🙂