Friday, January 30, 2015

Zarnok Fortress Weekly Update #7

Shaped Light and Power Sources

I've never formally introduced the inclusion of Hard Light, Glass Light, Terminals and Power Conduits. They've been programmed in the game for a while, but their appearance wasn't complete, so I tried to crop them out of photos whenever I was taking them. While the visuals will still be updated again before release, I feel like now is as good of a time to talk about them as any.
Terminal reads
The Terminal at the bottom-right is connected to the Hard Light wall blocking the player

Friday, January 23, 2015

Zarnok Fortress: Weekly Devlog #6

Crafting ZF's tutorial

Today's update comes a little early because tomorrow (January 22nd) I will be participating in the Global Game Jam and won't have the time to write this post. After the weekend's jam, I'll include a link >here< to the finished Jam Game.
As of last week, I had already begun production on levels, and while they still lack any sort of polish, I figured I could at least share the current state of the Tutorial level because it will change so significantly as a result of play testing.
Level 1-1
Lesson 1: Learn to compact

Friday, January 9, 2015

Zarnok Fortress: Weekly Devlog #5

Pipes

Oh so many Pipes. Over the course of this last week, the tiles for Zarnok Fortress have been finalized, so I can start creating permanent levels instead of the temporary decoration I've been doing thus far.
A 30 Minute Waste of Time

I started by filling a Template Room with a Background tile. The Space background will be drawn behind this layer, and man did it take long. So long that I came up with the idea of using Sprites and scaled objects instead, which is a similar solution to this week's other large endeavour; Pipes.
Many Pipes

Pipes will act as a visual indicator for connected systems. Basically, activate a Terminal and it will send power down a pipe to unlock a door, or activate a Light Bridge, etc. Perhaps more interesting are Power Conduits which must be shot with a laser to temporarily charge a system. Get ready to double time it across a Light Bridge before it shuts down or race to a bridge before it shuts down.
SO MANY PIPES

Obviously elements such as these show up rather often in a game, even if they are just to be used for the sake of decoration. To make it easier to add them to a game, I wrote a 200+ line script for a System that will draw the pipes. Thanks to GameMaker Studio's Room Editor, Objects can be scaled freely. Based on a scaled square sprite, the System I wrote traces the edges of the square. Then I added functionality to offset the start / destination points so that the Pipes could have unequal beginning and end points. Lastly, I added cases for simple 90 / 180 degree pipe systems.

Until next week!

Keep an eye out for new images shared every Monday / Wednesday and Friday on Indie DB, and follow me on Twitter for Daily updates!
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Friday, January 2, 2015

Zarnok Fortress: Weekly Devlog #4

Happy New Year!

It's going to take me at least a month to stop writing 2014 when I date my sketchbook entries. Yes, Zarnok Fortress development continues on into 2015!
Although it was a previously mentioned feature, here's what it looks like to kill a Zarnok Robot. Every enemy breaks apart into the various components they're made of. While they are animated in Spine, those parts are not accessible as normal Sprites in GameMaker, I had to re-export the bones and add them in.
He's seen better days.