Category Lemma

Screenshot Saturday 161

This week I finished what will probably be the last map in the Kickstarter demo. It teaches the player about the "extended wall-run" ability, demonstrated here:

Normally, you hold Shift to wall-run. Now you can just keep holding Shift after you run out of wall, and you'll keep going.

I also fixed the water bugs from last week, so it looks much better now:

I've been worried that I don't have time in the demo to introduce every idea I have at a reasonable pace, so I'm thinking of including a "sandbox" map that just enables every ability and throws every idea at the player and lets them play around.

Screenshot Saturday 160

This week I finally fixed my water code to allow finite bodies of water like this:

(It's so dark because I still have a pesky rendering bug)

I also realized I accidentally had pre-multiplied alpha turned on for my cloud texture. Here's what it looks like when you use pre-multiplied alpha incorrectly:

And here it is fixed (I also made the clouds fade in over distant objects):

Screenshot Saturday 159

This week I overhauled the menu. It's very Valve-ish now:

I also distributed a number of mysterious notes around the levels to help flesh out the back story. They're actual 3D objects rendered and lit in the game world.

WHAT COULD IT MEAN? THIS REVELATORY NOTE HAS ADDED HEFTY NUANCE TO THE PLOT AND SIGNIFICANTLY INCREASED MY IMMERSION IN THE STORY.

Other than that, just lots of level design iteration, scripting, and tweaking.

All Ahead Full

Progress report. Sir, we have inbound screenshots from the first two weeks of full-time development. Bearing zero nine five, range three hundred. Prepare countermeasures.

I added motion blur around the screen edges when the player is at their maximum speed:

The phone has returned, but now it's in full 3D glory:

Some parts of the levels now build up dynamically when the player reaches them.

Ramping Up

I'm sorry, I've been terrible at keeping everyone up to date with Lemma. If you want to see what I've been up to since Alpha 3, my TIGSource DevLog has a few posts you might have missed. Starting now I'll be focusing more on blogging, so expect more posts in the coming days!

Here are some highlights from the past... gosh. Seven months? Wow.

  • Player movement has been drastically improved. No more floaty, slow acceleration.
  • New auto-respawn system. No more backtracking 10 minutes to the last checkpoint.
  • Full Xbox 360 gamepad support
  • Major gameplay overhauls. The pistol and energy pickups are gone.
  • Major level design overhauls. All but the first level has been thrown out.
  • Four new types of enemies
  • New, cleaner textures
  • New logo
  • New website

This is just the beginning. As the title suggests, I'm getting ready to ramp up development in a big way. As such, I found it necessary to upgrade my workspace. I've been using a standing desk at work, and I love it so much that I decided to build one of my own out of $200 of IKEA parts:

Lemma - Alpha 3 Ready to Play

After seven months of hard work, Alpha 3 is ready to play!

Some interesting statistics:

  • 28,000+ lines of code
  • 29 MB of compressed voxel data
  • 63 MB of sounds and music
  • 38 animations
  • 60+ textures and normal maps
  • 220+ revisions since Alpha 1

Incidentally, most of that is open source! If you're a developer, check it out on GitHub.

Quantity Brings Quality

As I suspected, I have an almost insurmountable case of coder's block after a full day at work. Nevertheless, things are getting done. In fact, this might be the best thing that's happened for Lemma because it's forced me to cut a lot out of the design and focus on core things. It's the only way I'll ever finish.

Screenshot below gives an idea of the new direction. I've dropped any pretense that the game occurs in our world as we know it. It was a restriction that existed only to service the story, and it was limiting the gameplay and visual style a lot. Now I'm free to do a lot more, and I'm not precluded from telling a story just because it's fantasy rather than sci-fi.

Internet is Back

I just got internet back after being without it since before Christmas. It was a tearful reunion, to be sure. Turns out, I was actually more productive than usual without internet. There's a one-word explanation for that, and it rhymes with "edit".

ANYway, here's what got done:

Analytics

When you finish a play session, you'll see something like this:

 

I haven't figured out the server side of this system yet, but all it really needs to do is accept plain text file uploads. Once I have the files, it's easy to load them into the editor, yielding data like this:

Progress Report

Lemma has been radio silent recently, but that does NOT mean things aren't happening! I've been able to do a ton of work almost every day these past few weeks. Here's what's going on:

  1. Did some massive surgery on the very first tutorial section after getting some feedback from a limited alpha release. It introduces, jumping, climbing, vertical wall-running, and rolling/crouching.
  2. Added a second, underground section that introduces horizontal wall-running, wall-jumping, and some important story elements.
  3. Added a THIRD section, which you will see in a moment, that reviews everything and introduces the flying kick move.
  4. Wrote a small chunk of dialog for the text-message system. It's harder than I anticipated, making the conversations truly interactive without having the dialog tree explode exponentially in size.
  5. Simplified and consolidated the controls. Everything is on Shift, Spacebar, and Control now, should be very intuitive for FPS players.
  6. Overhauled some of the animations and added new ones for some new parkour abilities.
  7. Made the menu a lot more user-friendly.
  8. Committed approximately 15 million bug-fixes and tweaks.

TL;DR: Things are happening. Here's a video that shows one of several ways to get through the third tutorial section in quick fashion.

Mac and Linux Support

How's everyone doing? I'm doing okay. It's a Monday. Hope you're doing okay too. Surviving Sandy aftermath, school, work, and whatever other forms of oppression you may be under.

I don't have anything pretty to show for the past... wow, it's been three weeks. I've been working on a very lofty addition to Lemma's feature bullet list. And that is Mac and Linux support, via the awesome MonoGame project.

Don't get too excited. There is a ton of work left to do before this becomes a reality. But after a few weeks' work, I do know a few things: