#incinious

[grapeagata]

Go play Dungeon Deck it's great!

[incinious]

That was so easy...

So I have finished the very short “Story Mode” for Party Animal. 

Trick-shotting it up in the story mode

To be more specific, I finished designing and creating the maps, drawing the backgrounds, and implementing the game-play features/bug fixes to allow the Story Mode to work properly. If this is the first post you’re reading, this “Story Mode” is not intended to be the main aspect of the game. In fact, the only reason I created it was so that if you were unable to experience the multiplayer properly, you would still have something to enjoy. It is a very short experience, averaging around 50-60 minutes long, but I am still happy with how it turned out.

The big reason that this is so good is that now I can finally turn my attention fully onto the multiplayer of Party Animal, which is the main, and hopefully the most enjoyable aspect of the game. Of course this will not be some massive ground-up implementation of multiplayer, it is actually fairly close to being finalised, but there are still quite a few features I think are necessary to include in order for the finished game to feel like a good product;

Multiplayer with the ‘Prop Hunt’ gamemode

Things such as Steam API integration and a larger variety of gamemodes are left to do before I am happy to release the first version. That and bug fixes...lots and lots of bug fixes.

That’s about it, you can now feel updated,

Infernobomb

here’s a bonus picture, because I worked hard on drawing the map backgrounds

[incinious]

Minor Features

Hey guys,

As I stated in the last post, I have spent the majority of this week working on multiplayer. I almost completely reworked the previous system in order to reduce any lag caused when several people are on a server at a time. 

I’ll explain what I did as quickly as I can;

The previous multiplayer system would work by sending all of your player’s information to the server each step (ie. position in room, current action, health etc). The new system will only send this information when it changes. The reason why I hadn’t previously done this is that you run into the problem where a new person joins the server, and needs to receive all of the player’s information, not just what has recently changed. Implementing this system took quite a few days, and i’m not sure how effective it has been at reducing lag...

On the side of more interesting developments, I have added the small feature of being able to see other players walking around when you are both spectating;

He is ‘ghosting’ he he...

Nothing major, but it should make the experience more fun when you can hang out with other dead people.

While we are talking about small features, I implemented a “water height” system to rooms;

The dreaded water level

This feature is also not really a ‘huge’ deal, but it should allow some more interesting maps, and personally I really like how it looks.

Finally, I added in the option for rooms to have ‘foregrounds’. This allows you to design more detailed rooms, without having to create multiple objects for every minor detail;

This week I’m planning to hopefully fix AI objects in multiplayer, as they still do not sync up locations or actions properly.

Thanks for reading :)

Infernobomb

[incinious]

Games to play

Hi everyone,

This is a small post just to give you all a few free games to play!

Firstly, we recently made a short game prototype over a weekend in a small ‘game jam’ style. In it, you play as an organ surgeon who specialises more on the side of collecting the organs than in giving them:

His method of collection is very messy

Take a look at it, and let us know what you think of it!  https://incinious.itch.io/dr-transplanter 

Another announcement, is that we have also recently released a new mobile game for Android, called Splat Tennis (I mentioned it some time ago, if anyone remembers). It is a fast paced, arcade game, with several unlockables and incredibly accurate tennis physics*. 

Also take a look at this one, I tried my hand at making some music. Not sure how good any of it is though... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.incinious.SplatTennis

I hope this helps reach the itch that only free games can satisfy, and that it doesn’t feel like I am bribing any of you...

Until next time

*Accurate by an arcade games standards

[incinious]

Keep up the streak

Hey all, this post is a bit late. Life has been generally busy this time of year, but it’s starting to ease up again, so I thought I should put out a short post, just to keep up my monthly posting streak...

Not a bunch has been worked on, but I can still show some things;

When developing the payload gamemode, I discovered the issue of trying to sync up the coordinates of AI objects, namely the payload itself. In order to improve the accuracy of the payload, I modified how AI objects are displayed, so that their positions are updated based on the nearest player, rather than just having the Host calculate their positions. This way, the AI object will always appear most accurately to the player who is more likely to be interacting with it.

Think of the payload as an AI object that runs away from the player

A less interesting part, which took me a while because it was so boring to work on, was implementing a full Options menu. The way I programmed it made it easy to also add access to it while in-game.

I’m proud of some of these GUI elements, they’re very smooth to interact with

Some other big-ish additions are;

- Gamemodes are now retrieved from the Host, so a player can no longer be have a different Mode to the other players

- Explosions are properly implemented, with damage / knockback falloff working

- Players can no longer get stuck inside each-other when solid. If they do end up getting stuck, they will stop detecting collisions with each-other until they are no longer near one another.

I feel like I say this every time, but it is so close to being done. I am aiming to have a few gameplay videos / trailers releasing soon, so look out for those.

Infernobomb

[incinious]

Information Overload

This is going to be super long, so prepare yourself. There will be a point where you will wonder if you should even continue, but in the end the reward will be the journey we have taken together.

Now, as this post is pretty full, I am going to divide it into sections, starting with something cool;

VoxEdit

We have released a new development Tool!

VoxEdit is a tool for editing and viewing image strips in 3D. If you are experienced with this style, then you will also know that drawing in this style can be quite difficult, especially when you don’t know what the finished product looks like. Using this tool means you can edit an image, and view what it looks like in real time, making it easy to draw in this ‘3D layered image’ style!

VoxEdit is currently available for purchase, but there is also a free demo version available;

https://incinious.itch.io/vox-edit

Give it try, and have fun!

Now, on to the rest of this post...

Party Animal

Believe it or not, a lot of work has been done on Party Animal. Now most of that work is technical, so I will start off with showing you some improvements that have been made art-wise. With some of the older maps in Party Animal, the backgrounds were fairly plain and boring. I wasn’t happy with these, as they didn’t match the better quality of more recent maps I have made. Because of this, I have gone back and updated these backgrounds;

The beach now has a lovely view of some cliff faces

Now the Cave map is set on a backdrop of a mountain range

The Penguin watches over his city by night

Some optimisations have been made regarding physics. I realised that bullets shot by players do not need to have physics calculations done by anyone except the person who shot them, as they are the ones that determine if the bullet hits another client or not. This change was a massive improvement, as previously the lag of the game would increase exponentially alongside the number of Clients that were shooting.

Another change was done regarding stability. The way rounds work in Party Animal is that once the round of a gamemode is over, the map resets, and all objects are placed in their original positions. What was happening however, was when a round had ended, and a new round had started, actions sent to the host from a client that had been performed in the previous round were affecting the current round, causing the maps of the clients to become out of sync. In order to prevent this from happening, actions now hold a value of which round they are performed in, so that they will not be performed if the host receives them in a later round.

Also, confetti;

Fred did not appreciate Mikes festive mood

Ludum Dare

So we decided to participate in the most recent Ludum Dare. For those of you who don’t know, Ludum Dare is a ‘Game Jam’, where you need to create a new game within 3 days. For our entry, we made a game named “Body Hiding Simulator 1995″ (Yes, we gave up on finding a good name), where you play as a psychopathic housewife who murders guests, and hides the bodies from her husband.

Nothing to see here

You can play it for free here;

https://incinious.itch.io/body-hiding-simulator-1995

Some people made Gameplay videos of it, and we placed 22nd for humour, which is something...

CONGRATULATIONS!!

You made it to the end of the post!

You win a gif;

[incinious]

Pushing It

I have realised that enough time has passed for another post to be in order, so buckle yourselves in because this post is definitely going to be super exciting, and not be another one of those boring technical posts...

To start off with, I have recently created a new map to be part of the initial release. This one has a focus around a “payload escort” game-mode, where each team has to move the “cart” from one teams side to the other. The cart is moved when someone stands next to it, and the game is won when a team pushes the cart into the other teams goal 3 times:

The setting is in the sky, for some reason

The reason for adding this map, and for adding a few other maps that I have planned, is firstly because these game-modes are fun to play, but secondly as a way of demonstrating the types of game-modes that can be created yourselves, using the in-game editors. And now that I’ve hooked you with an interesting gif, it’s time to talk about technical things...

Now, while I was testing the new map in multiplayer, I came across a variety of issues. Players were not able to shoot each other, people would be disconnected at the end of the round etc. I worked out that each of these bugs all stemmed from the same issue, and that was the method that client’s were being ID’d by wasn’t working properly. Let me elaborate...

When someone joins a game hosted on a server, that player, or “client”, needs to receive a unique ID number. This ID number is used to differentiate players from one another, and needs to be the same value on each players computer. The way these unique ID’s were generated previously was using a “stacking” method. When a new player joins, they receive the largest ID number not currently taken, and when a player disconnects, all other player’s ID’s update accordingly;

Player with ID 2 gets new ID 1

Now, this ended up causing a few issues. While it felt like the most efficient method to provide ID’s to players, problems occurred when step 3 was occurring at different times on different Client computer, for example if a client still has the ID 2, and sends it’s actions to the server, who has that client stored with an ID of 1, then those actions would not be performed.

In order to fix this, a new method of providing ID’s is now used, which follows a more basic approach. Instead of reshuffling the player ID’s when a client disconnects, the ID the player had instead remains available, so that the next Client that connects will be given the first available ID to use;

The new client takes the first available ID, which is 1

This new method means that Client ID’s are no longer varying throughout the game, making multiplayer interactions as a whole a lot more stable.

Another major change that was made was in regard to optimising the actions system. Each object can be given a list of actions that can be performed, based on test-cases. For example, a door can be opened when within range of the player, or a bomb can explode when a timer runs out. These actions are all saved in an objects file, and are loaded in as a string during the game when that object is created. Now this may sound pretty stupid, but previously these actions had to be decoded each time they were performed by the object. This means that every-time a player went near to the door, for example, it would have to go through each loaded action, and decode the ‘string’ that they were saved as in order to work out what kind of action it was.

Naturally, this was extremely inefficient, and caused noticeable lag when an object had a larger number of actions to perform. The change that I made was to optimise this action system, making actions to be decoded only once, when the object is created. These decoded actions can then be easily accessed later on, without having to go through the loaded string to get the saved values.

That should be the super technical changes out of the way, so here are a few “smaller” improvements I have made;

- A kill-feed/alert system has been implemented, detailing when someone has been killed, or when players join and leave a game;

That Old man really likes leaving

- The Point system in multiplayer is now purely server-side, meaning that it is a lot more reliable keeping track of these scores across all the connected players

- Support for controllers has started, with movement and basic aiming implemented;

Like I said previously, the game is getting very close to finishing, and I plan to have it done by the end of this year. 

Hopefully this post has been an interesting read, unless you hate technical stuff, in which case my apologies,

Infernobomb

[incinious]

Back from the Dead

Hey all,

So that game we made a while back is alive and kicking once more. I have pushed out an update for Squidge on the google play store that includes more characters to unlock, and a High Scores table. Take a look at it if you haven’t before! 

https://bit.ly/2HhvuLS 

Oh, and I also put together a little promo video for it:

so professional...

And now back to your regularly scheduled program. I have managed to get my current development process for Party Animal down to a fine art. I work on a story level, and fix any bugs I find along the way. At the moment I am working on the obligatory underwater levels. Of course everyone hates them, but if I have put water into my game, than you are going to have to enjoy it!

wow, look at all those pretty corals!

Currently I am up to implementing the Giant fish boss you will have to run away from, but there are naturally so many bugs to get past to do with swimming, AI, and physics in general.

For example, one issue I resolved had to do with swimming specifically. I mentioned in a previous post that I implemented the feature of sticking to slopes when you walk down them. Now this came back to bite me, as it only worked on slopes underneath you, but when you swim upwards into slopes, you would get stuck. Adding the ability for the player and ai objects to slide along roof slopes is the kind of thing that no-one appreciates, but is annoying to implement:

Featuring scary fish monster

One other feature that I implemented was a smaller one, but I think it is one of the nicer looking ones. It is as simple as being able to choose where a player will carry an object from when they pick it up. But it adds so many options; You can carry weapons from the handles, hold a swinging lantern, carry a bottle by the neck etc.

Almost finished with the Story mode now, and then it will be on to some final multiplayer maps and features, and then hopefully I can look forward to releasing it!

Thanks for sticking with us all these years, it really means a lot!

Infernobomb