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Falconhead Studios
“We have to continually be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” - Kurt Vonnegut
Thats right! after my long hiatus, I have returned for more updates my apologies but Vriserus is back and will this time be a 3D RPG game, I and 5 others are creating the game in Unity and we are off to a great start, I've already coded out the movement script for it and will be working on attack next. Here is a short video of what we got so far!
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This week on development, I have added some life within the fishing village area of my game, I have made some new characters, some characters being references to my friends games but these characters are only ment to be background characters or side characters and have no effect on the story whatsoever. Now along with these characters, I have been testing out yet another dialogue system in which the player of Hoshi can speak to in the matter of finding clues of any trails of Nozoka in the area, I used this opportunity to add some story and lore into the game while giving each character a little bit of story that may or may not develop in later games. The dialogue system came out very successful with little fixing, although not finished completely yet.
Tomorrow I will work on the videos for both the updated version of the Queen wasp boss battle and the Cutscene video. I also plan on completing the game around the end of April since, I have pretty much completed most of the mechanics and most of the job now is making the actual levels. After April, I want to polish out the game and bug fix a little before confirming a proper 100% done post. So I've been working pretty hard here and there for the past few weeks and I have managed to get the entire tutorial completed for the game as well as the 3D rendered animation for the introduction, these two parts of the game have majorally improved the gaming experience in the game as there is now some proper gameplay and story which is really exciting to me as it shows that all my work on mechanics and design 2D and 3D are paying off very nicely.
Along with the tutorial, I have added a new character from the larger scale version of this game "Vriserus: Lands of Wisteria" which was the previous relic wielder user of space and time. In the main game, he guides you as a soul inside of you, while in this game, he is visuallised as an floating orb that travels alongside Hoshi. I thought that this was the most lore friendly way of creating a tutorial, having a previous wielder show you the controls; this also bonds the player with the game quite nicely too. At the end of the tutorial, Hoshi comes across a small event i coded out, its a small ruin which acts as a wave attack, a time of battle where Hoshi is consistantly attacked by waves of enemies until a door opens etc, while Hoshi is fighting, he is trapped and is up to his mobility and fighting skills to defend himself from his HP from draining to 0 meaning game over. In other news I am still sorry for not uploading any new game footage lately, I'm just not a fan of video editing cus it takes a bit too long for my liking, i will assure you i will have 4-5 videos of each new bits out soon. Heres some renders of realistic snowy environments that i created to improve my skills using the Blender software. I personally had a few errors making some of these renders, mainly creating the trees in the second render since the leaves didnt render out properly leaving just the snow although i still find the results promising.
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I have been quite busy over the last few weeks of January, i had been focusing a lot on the boss battle mechanics which i am very happy about, the progress making it was very smooth, i had a few bugs overtime, however everything now works flawlessly. There will be a video soon, of that when its done as i still need to create a proper death for the queen wasp. In the meantime i recently began my live in-game cutscene projects, i made a few sprites of npc characters at the beginning of the story of my game and have made a cutscene happen where Hoshi talks to these npcs, at the moment i'm still experimenting with it all and expect bugs to appears and most importantly Hoshi getting stuck since the cutscene doesn't end. Thats all for this update, be sure to check out the Experimental Video of the Queen Wasp battle if you haven't already on FalconHead youtube. Here are some new sprites to present for you:
At this moment, i'm still experimenting with bits and bobs, the path is fine after doing some tuning and messing about with it, I think this is also the correct amount of HP i wanted. Heres what i plan next Fixes: - Repair the animation texture for resting / summoning - Change how the wasp spawns (this is because the wasp is ment to be mind controlled to guard the alternative entrance into the zark hideout, at the moment since im still in testing, the boss spawns from some larvae Adding Soon - 2nd stage to the boss - HP potion drop on 2nd stage - Projectiles shot by the queen (since it has a gun on the stinger) First concept piece for one of the bosses in the game, will look something similar to this but in
more of a pixel form. The wasp is very large, planned to be the size of two humans in height and about the size of a tree in my game. The wasp has some odd additions to it, a machine fixed on to its head and also the stinger has had an upgrade. Maybe the wasp is actually an ancient guardian controlled to secure the ruins within the cave. The winter holidays are over and done with and its about time to return to where we left off with in the game itself over in Gamemaker. Yesterday i worked on debugging some of the larger errors over the period of 9 hours, fixing these bugs gave me a ton of confidence and determination which is a good start to returning to programming. Beforehand, my game could not continue in the main menu unless the player was in the first room/level, this by far was the most serious bug i had developing the game, without a fix, my game would be unplayable. Luckily i was able to fix the bug within 1-2 hours which is not bad for something i had been stuck with for a while. Once the continue button worked, i followed with altering the start game event to restart the game after the players made a new game already.
The second most important bug to fix was the rain particle system i had and shown in my latest video. The rain itself worked fine, however the rain would continue into the menu. Thinking to myself that such bug sounds easy, "all i got to do is delete it?" wrong, i found gamemakers code for deleting a particle system to be ridiculous, i spent 2-3 hours research how to stop the system, ends up you have to delete in 3 different ways at once within a specific order too. >> Delete Particle Emitter. >> Delete Particles in room. >> Delete Particle System. I reckon it would be nicer if there was one piece of code to remove them fully since it frustrated me quite a bit. finally reactivate the entire particle system when going back to the room, it came from whenever the player comes back from the main menu. It took some time for me to figure that out but i managed to figure it out in the end. Finally i managed to potentially fix a few other smaller bugs: >> Footstep sound randomly disappearing. >> Slimes attack broke, now fixed again. >> Rain sound bug causing multiple rain sounds to happen at once. >> Some other little things Thats all for this small update, hope to post again soon! So after taking a break from developing Vriserus: Caverns of B'aurek in Gamemaker, i thought that i'll take the christmas holidays to develop my 3D element of the game. The 3D element consists of a medieval indoor environment of a tavern-like building, which is designed with 4 rooms and which all join up causing a loop cycle. Later a camera will be added which will animate through this environment and will be used as the first cutscene in the game, after the animation is rendered, i will apply it into a video editing software to add in text and maybe some images which will tell the player about the story and the backstory of Hoshi. I thought that the video would work best as a loop because it can have no ending since its endless which means i do not need to worry about time length. Once implemented in the game i want to add in a skip intro button as im planning to have it run for at least 60 seconds.
New Update includes the new character Nozoka, as well as Traps, Rain effects and New Enemies I'm sorry i can't upload the videos sooner, however i can say i'm definitely working on the new one right now and should be out by tomorrow, there is a lot in this next update to talk about including Nozoka and 2 new enemies, i will be talking a bit about them because there are some interesting facts of why i made them. I also have been doing a huge amount of bug fixing a couple of weeks ago, it had to be done as it would of limited what i could of done in my game, on bug being on the warp system stopping the player from even progressing through any levels. Hoshis knockback has had a fix, some odd reason his knockback stopped working after the last update but that is now okay. To sum up thanks for the patience, video will be up tomorrow.
Fire using the particle effects in Gamemaker!
https://streamable.com/baf75 I have decided to add campfires / rest points at the end of each few levels while playing as Hoshi or Nozoka which will create some logic for when switching into another character as the player character would be deleted after resting and will come back with full HP, i thought the idea of them resting gives the illusion they are healing. I still am putting thoughts and taking ideas for this game mechanism and so this could be changed in the future.
These 4 Enemies are the first 4 that i have made for the game, each one has completely different AI.
The Wasp, (formally the yellow wasp) is the first enemy i made for the game, its a basic enemy and started off a lot more basic than it is today, the yellow wasps AI is as simple as following the player and hitting the player when up close, in recent versions of my game, the wasp properly hits enemies on a alarm cooldown for every hit whereas in older versions the wasp would move into the player and the player health would decrease overtime. The Hornet, (formally the red wasp) was built from the yellow wasps AI but was adjusted to have a new state that overwrites its current chase player state known as the shoot state, the hornet shoots stingers which look like posionous darts, in the more recent versions of the game, Hoshi can deflect the stingers back at the target if timed correctly with his sword whereas in older versions, this wasn't possible. The bunny slime is a newer enemy made in early-mid November which AI was a lot trickier to make. Unlike the first 2 enemies, making slime i did completely by myself without tutorials or videos and guides that help me as i could'nt find any. My aim for the slime was to have something similar to the slime enemy from Terraria, just changed slightly in areas, after half a week of solving known issues and bugs i got it to function although even today still has small bugs. Finally the Bat Enemy is the most recent, for this enemy i used a seperate piece of code to follow the player, known as mp_potential_step which is a really useful piece of code especially for top down. since the bat enemy isn't grounded, its okay to use mp_potential_step and is really useful for AI to manuvuer around obstacles, so when the bat spots a player it can find its way around a wall that may be in the way. Bats in the game are expected to be triggered events for the player which makes the game more interesting however i haven't set them to do that yet, i will later on when i start level design. Sorry that i haven't been uploading for a month, i've been busy studying Gamemaker and making progress with the game, you can catch up by watching the videos i have on my youtube channel. The game is now out of its pre-development stage (The Test Room) and now I am beginning to add in some of the graphics which i am planning to spend a lot of time on. Here is a few images. Also visit the youtube channel for updates as per usual, since im focusing a lot on graphics, i am slowing down the development videos a little bit.
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