Underlife (WIP)

[SoggyWaffles]

yeah, sorry. like i said the more i thought it out the less useful it became... I just wanted to be helpful..... that'll learn me!

[Taehl]

Don't worry about it. I appreciate the effort. Don't be afraid to offer ideas, since even if they don't pan out, you never know what useful tangents they'll produce.

[kikito]

Well, topographically with a tile world the most "real" approximation I can think of to a sphere it would be a pacman-like map.

This is, a normal rectangular map, but when you go near the boundaries, it starts over from the other side. If you walk enough to the left, at some point you start seeying the right side of the map, and if you continue, you are on the right. And the same with left, up & down.

For gravity, here're my thoughts.

• You could just assume that the perspective is "top down" (the camera looks down, and it sees the character's head all the time). And gravity goes in the same direction.
• Any axis-aligned direction (up, left, right) would also work with tiles.You could make it go down, and maybe allow the player to change it as a game mechanic.
• "radial", non-axix-aligned gravity doesn't match tile-based stuff. You could try it if you used a polygon-based world.

[Xkeeper]

I like the spacey blue rune stuff more than a cavern. The fact that there's an empty nothingness out in the void helps, too.


If you wanted to really throw people for a loop, you could keep player-edited chunks in memory when they were scrolled offscreen and corrupt them, or (my favorite) occasionally pull a random edited chunk, corrupt it a bit, and recycle it in a new chunk (blended into the surroundings). That way, some familiarity is kept, but it isn't quite the same.


E: I also want this pretty bad. The character animation is quite bad, though, even if it is an early version; the severity of the tilt dynamics (and low jumping range...) seem to be pretty odd.

[Taehl]

I like your "throw people for a loop" ideas. The character animation in the video was from the old, Box2D-using version of Underlife. Since then, I've completely rewritten the game, and now it uses my own physics (no more tilting and odd movement) and will have a different (better) animation system. Here's the placeholder I'm using right now (warning: 5 meg .gif incoming):



Anyway, the main issue I have with making it circular is that I don't get how I could set up the game grid, and how to handle the different geometries of different rings. Maybe this picture will make it clearer:



See how the tiles from each ring have a different shape, and there's a different number of them required per ring? Nothing lines up...

[Xkeeper]

You could pull a Tetrisphere and just handle wrapping around, but then it wouldn't really be "endless".

(Tetrisphere, for those not in the know, presented a game grid as a sphere but it was actually just a portion of a square playfield mapped onto it.)

[Taehl]

Been working on it. Lots of improvements, but most notably, the game now saves itself when quitting and loads when starting; a rough draft of the Entropy is in place; and I rewrote the terrain generator - it produces spheres of terrain of any size. I can add more spheres at any time, and place them with offsets. Also, I finally got around to changing the background stars from a lame static image to detailed, independently-drawn (and pulsating) images.

A big, big map.
A map with several blobs of terrain.
The same map as the second pic, but with lighting enabled.

EDIT) Here's the mini-intro that's shown when starting/resuming a game (.avi, 1.15 megs, Xvid codec). Finally nailed how to make it run at a playable rate when doing that! And also to show the stars, though that was kind of a cheat...

[Taehl]

I'm trying to make the game make the player uncomfortable in a variety of ways, many of which are very subtle. For instance, when moving left or right, the camera will tilt almost imperceptibly - only a few degrees - but just enough to make up and down not perfectly line up (promoting a feeling of disorientation). As another example, the stars in the background move in an almost-realistic-but-not-quite manner* which combines parallax and point-centered camera panning, which I've designed to mess with the way humans subconsciously process depth and movement visual cues (the same cues which, for example, makes parallax scrolling give the impression of depth).

*The effect was exaggerated for the video as a demonstration - in the game proper, you can't move so fast, fly, or zoom the camera so far out.

[slime]

Wow that's really cool.