Wanderer

[kikito]

Excellent explanation, thanks (I recommend putting some of that in your devlog - ¡content!)

I can see why you have gone with the "splitting worlds" route. I would have probably used a single world for everything and a filter in the grab box ("when I'm going right, I ignore everything except left ledges. And viceversa"). This will probably be a bit slower (almost certainly insignificant) but it removes two worlds in exchange of one "if" in a filter function, which seems like a good trade. But of course I don't know all the details.

[Fenrir]

About splitting worlds, actually I just went this route because when I wanted to add my ledge boxes to the main world, I noticed that I had no specific object for them, they are part of my Collider class, and it ruined lots of my mechanics if I was not able to add them with an object inheriting from my entity system. So with multiple worlds, I can add them to their world binded to my Collider object without conflicting with the proper collider shape. Same with the player, in the ledge worlds it's only represented by his grab box and in the main world it uses his full collision box, everything directly binded to my player class.

And finally I used this system for multiple scenarios (also for pathfinding for instance, I have a specific world for it), which means that for each screens I have multiple bump worlds each with their own purpose. I'm still far from having any performance issues yet, it's only to fit with my current architecture that I took this path.

[BadLuckBurt]

I wish you the best of luck on this. It looks great and I like the variation in characters a lot, they're very distinct from one another.

[T-Bone]

I would definitely consider backing this - it looks really neat and moody.

[Fenrir]

I would definitely consider backing this - it looks really neat and moody.

Thanks a lot! We're currently working a lot on preparing the campaign, we'll start in a few month by doing a Collective campaign on the Square Enix platform before doing the Kickstarter one:
http://collective.square-enix.com/
I hope we'll get a demo ready for it but it won't be easy, the priority will be to get the best video possible.

[vynom]

The graphics look amazing, especially like the camera functionality youre using!

[Fenrir]

Hey guys,

These last few days I've been implementing the "shield" system for the game, you can get more details about it here:
http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?t ... msg1143147

I'll try to describe a bit more how it works! So first of all, here is the final result:


To achieve it, I went through a multi-pass system using canvas, the first step was to render my character sprite into a canvas and apply to it an outline as well as rendering it with a single color:

It's not yet noticeable but I applied an outline, for instance have a look to this great article about it:
http://blogs.love2d.org/content/let-it- ... characters
I actually wasn't able to follow it as my outline needed to be outside the original sprite, so it's a bit different but the idea stays the same.

The next step was to apply a gaussian blur to my current result:

For an example of blur implementation, don't hesitate to have a look to this amazing library for LÖVE:
https://github.com/vrld/shine
My implementation is actually based on it.

Then I rendered back my outlined version of the sprite on top of the blurred one:


And now I can render my regular sprite on top of everything to just keep the outline and the glow:


Finally I apply a last shader to my sprite to add a blue-ish overlay on top of it:


And to make it pulse I just animate a bit my blur opacity. Here is another version used when the shield is "pulsed" (when we try to absorb an attack to recharge the shield):

It's exactly the same system, just with a different color and some other values for the outline or blur.

[I~=Spam]

Cool! Very nice creative way to get a force field look! I wonder if there is a way to do this using only shaders? I have a feeling that there is but I don't have any experience with shaders and the method you're doing works just fine and looks great!

[Fenrir]

Cool! Very nice creative way to get a force field look! I wonder if there is a way to do this using only shaders? I have a feeling that there is but I don't have any experience with shaders and the method you're doing works just fine and looks great!

Thanks! And actually I'm using shaders on all passes I do (1 pass with the outline shader, 2 passes for the blur with a vertical and horizontal one, a last one to merge everything and apply the blue-ish overlay from a shader too). It can surely be optimized but I'll see later for that, it's not yet my priority.

In other news, our brand new website is online !
http://www.wanderer-game.com

[Germanunkol]

Oh wow, you've taken that glow effect to a whole new level.
I'm glad someone got inspired by the post !
That looks really awesome - absolutely professional shield effect. Well done!