LÖVE

Not much new to report, I've been very busy with other things. But I managed to import some of my wall graphics and create a sort of ruined house on this one map.

Took a while to get back to coding, but the projectiles now actually can hit something. And my explosion animations from last summer finally came to use in one of my projects.



Everything has one hitpoint, except the player who is immortal for the moment. The player has a sort of spectre or ghostly avatar here ... might even be that the game will be all about ghost wars. I have some ideas, but it's too early to talk, need to see if it actually makes sense.

Probably too early, given that the game has no items to pick up and use yet - but I felt inspired to make a inventory UI screen. It will be needed anyways. Right now I think I should keep things simple and 5 inventory slots will be fine. Must see if that assumption holds. Adding two more is easy without breaking the design.
The corner and borders were created using two public domain svgs:
https://freesvg.org/rose-corner-decor
https://freesvg.org/border
Thanks to the creators!

Progress is now notably slowing down. I've been moving hard coded data and values to data files for easier management and started to work on a new "desert" map type. I think I might borrow some ideas from my former "Jewelhunt" RPG project, and make the player hunt for just these jewels again. Just with a different focus this time - more action, less heavy AI and simpler, smaller maps.

But to make things not too easy and thus boring, there have to be enemies. Say "hello" to what started as "tank crawler" and developed into a crossover of maggot and porcupine.
The upper version is the baby version, the lower is the adult with fully grown spikes.

Actually I had a wood louse in mind when I started to work on it. Sometimes things change much while working on them <.<

Looks great!

Cool project!

With multiplayer games, I can recommend to try with multiple clients often. As you've noticed, logging in only one client can be completely different from logging in two...

I also think your graphics look neat, keep it up!
I think the ruin might look a bit like it's floating, might benefit from a bit of shadow (illusion of ambient occlusion) where it touches the ground?

@randomnovice

Thanks!

@Germanunkol

Thanks also! And yes ... in my last attempt to make a multiplayer game it was even different if the server was running in the local net or in a different (sub)net. Never really figured why, even if I found a solution eventually. Java tried to cache stuff and did it differently depending on the origin of the packet.

Shadows in the game are still a bit an open issue. They are needed as visual clue that something is "grounded" so much is certain. Depending on how many different tiles I want to add I might use only some few generic shadow shapes. I had hoped that I can upload a demo video with the crawlers, but it seems I'll need another day to make a proper map and work out all the small issues.

Made it ... but now I need some sleep. Many details were lost due to the small size and video compression, sadly.

Damnit ... finally found out how to make cyclic smoke and cloud animation with my tools (took some years ...) just to find out that I have a bad desync of creature positions between client and server in my project. I kill a creature and the death animation plays quite a bit away. It definitely plays where the server had stored the last creature coordinate. Just the client was showing it someplace else. I actually had allowed temporary desyncs but felt confident that at the end of each move the coordinates should be in sync again between client and server. Only moving creatures were supposed to have a small desync because the server and the client run at different time-per-frame speeds. But not 50 or even more pixels >.<

So no video today of the new death swirls for the sand maggots ... must wait till they show at the right place.

Edit: Fixed the desyncs. Stupid rounding in a loop on server side made the creatures move differently there. Client code was correct.

Many years I had been wondering how to make cyclic animations of smoke and such with my tools. Just recently found a way. It's pretty (w)hacky, but it allows me to do things like these:





The last one might become a portal in Tiny Places ... well the need for magic portals was why I started experimenting in the first place. All the results that I have so far are published here:

https://opengameart.org/content/animate ... l-variants