We've invested a lot of time developing Worlds over the last few months. We've gotten quite far but there's a huge amount of work left to even get close to a releasable game and we're not confident we can get the game profitable, seeing as we're a very small team and MMORPGs require a lot of on-going work to run.
With Superpowers finally coming together, we've decided to put Worlds on hold and focus on making more manageable games with our shiny new game-making software!
We're preparing one final Worlds update to be released Friday with new maps and one complete dungeon to thank to everyone who followed the project as we worked on it!
Thanks and stay tuned for more fun games very soon :)
Hi! As mentioned in the other post, we’re splitting our weekly blog posts into smaller posts since they were getting overly long.
This post is about Worlds the browser-based 2D MMORPG.
Go check out our other post about Superpowers on our blog.
GameMaker interactive mockup
PIxel-boy built a very cool interactive mockup with GameMaker to test and flesh out some ideas and game mecanics. He demoed it during our weekly livestream, starts at 4:00.
Completing a dungeon, random rooms
Elisée set up various systems to support random dungeon rooms and handling the end of a dungeon (when the artifact piece gets picked up).
When a dungeon has already been completed, we decided to replace the artifact piece by a taunting scroll left by the team who picked it up.
Dungeon mechanisms and enemies
Bilou continued his work on getting all the various bits in place for building nifty dungeons: mobile turrets, laser turrets, electrifying floor tiles, etc.
Next weekend we will be using Superpowers, our new game maker tool (in progress), to participate in Ludum Dare. This means we will rush on Superpowers this week to make sure it is quite usable.
With that said, see you in two weeks for more news on Worlds!
Hi everyone! It's been two weeks since you heard from us.
We skipped a week because we were in the middle of some big tasks and this post plus our weekly livestream (in French) take a lot of time and efforts to prepare. As you will see, we have tons of stuff to tell you :D
For once, let's start with Superpowers, our next-gen cooperative game-making platform.
As presented in previous posts, the design of Superpowers was complicated. We had 14+ interdependent modules. This means whenever we changed something, we had to build several modules and that was quite unproductive.
We also made various technological choices (using WebRTC and Web components for editors, for instance) that turned out to be holding us back. These are evolving technologies with unequal support and big limitations right now.
But most importantly, after a couple months of work, while we made some good progress, we still couldn't export a basic game.
So, Elisée decided to take a step back and rethink the project. And... we ended up starting over, (almost) from scratch!
To be precise, we kept our game engine, our runtime (the piece of code that loads a game into the engine and keeps it running) and our script compiler. Everything else went out the window!
Ten days later: we got a new Superpowers that can make actual games!
The whole thing is very raw but damn, it works!!!
We did a small demo of this new incarnation during our weekly livestream. Even if you don't understand everything we say, you may want to check it out.
In the mean time, Bilou made good progress with operational transform for the collaborative script editor. It's now working for the most part and we've already integrated it in the new Superpowers! It even supports multiple edit points (using Ctrl+D like in Sublime Text) and basic undo/redo.
CraftStudio, Superpowers’ cubic ancestor
Since Elisée was hard at work on re-architecting Superpowers, he didn't make much progress on CraftStudio. Good news though: with the Ludum Dare game jam coming soon, CraftStudio will be free-to-use for 12 days, starting Friday the 28th.
If you're looking for a easy-to-learn 3D cubic engine to make a nifty game, this will give you enough time before LD starts to learn how it works. Be sure to check out the tutorials to get started!
Worlds, the 2D browser-based MMORPG
You got exciting news on Superpowers but keep reading! We have cool new features on Worlds as well!
Dungeons are coming along nicely. We've done quite a bit of behind-the-scenes work.
Only one group of players should be able to enter at once. Once they're in, the dungeon door will lock and when the group finishes the dungeon or everyone in it dies, the entire dungeon will be reset.
We added a setting for each entrance so that we can define a minimal party required size to enter (most likely 2 or 3). This will allow us to develop some multiplayer puzzles and manage the difficulty.
We also started implementing several dungeon mechanisms. We have buttons and levers which can activate some doors.
And we added some nasty enemies that try to bite you!
It's still WIP so don't expect it to be released in the near future.
You can check out this small demo we did during the weekly livestream.
It features more surprises ;)
We talked mostly about the technical stuff. If you want to see pretty pictures and animations, head over this post!
We made lots of bug fixes.
Since our map is based on blocks, players got stuck on corners quite often. Now, you will slide around corners automatically whenever it's possible.
Bags aren't solid anymore because it could block a building entrance keeping the player inside from leaving :D
We set a maximum of 8 players per team to avoid huge teams who crush everyone else.
There's now a nice feedback when a player is hit and a WIP death animation.
Buildings cannot be built near spawn points or the planet gate anymore and you now have a visual feedback to let you know whether you can build or not.
Projectiles can finally fly through space!
Towers won't shoot at players if there are obstacles in between.
We introduced a new debug tool: the super drill! It will let us destroy buildings with one click.
We also added a button to teleport to the planet gate.
For a complete list of bugfixes and changes, check out our Trello.
As always, thanks for reading and see you next week for more news!
Hey dear friends! Sorry about the late post, Saturday got busy and we kinda overlooked it. Without further ado...
Worlds, the 2D browser MMORPG
This week, we designed and implemented a complete weapon system with lots of properties. Each weapon and its projectile can be tweaked in various ways: time between shots, reload time, charge time, clip size, recoil, spread, knockback, projectile speed, amount of projectiles fired at once, etc.
We'll be able to build many cool weapons from that, but for now we set up the following three:
The Blaster
The Shotgun
The Machine Gun
We also made great progress on connected maps. Until now, each planet could only have one map associated with it:
Not anymore! Each planet now has a main map which is scanned on startup for references to other submaps and they are automatically loaded. When a player goes through an entrance, they'll be properly teleported to the corresponding submap.
Finally, Pixel-boy started doing concept arts for the first dungeon!
We deployed Alpha 9 Friday night with lots of bugfixes and the new weapons. As always, you can play it at worlds.sparklinlabs.com
Superpowers, the next-gen cooperative game-making platform
We're still doing grunt work! Bilou is knee-deep in Operational Transform implementation (all the good stuff required to let you edit documents together and synchronize it all).
Elisée spent time on the scene editor, figuring out how to make all the components come together. The green cubes from earlier weeks have been replaced with proper markers for empty scene nodes and we got some WIP transform handles:
CraftStudio, Superpowers' cubic ancestor
Elisée released the Web player 1.7 (with full map rendering/raycasting!), updated the website and wiki, added a bunch of new games to the CraftStudio home page and finally got back to work on the tutorials!
Thanks for reading! See you next Friday at 9 PM Paris time for our weekly French-y livestream over at hitbox.tv/elisee and this week-end for another blog update! <3
It's Halloween and our regular blog post header got a scary revamp :O. Read on for all the spooky Sparklin Labs news of the week!
Worlds, the 2D browser MMORPG
This week, Bilou worked on finishing up the new team system (replacing the old cards and locking mechanism that was complicated and unhelpful). We deployed the update and had some wicked fun playing in the Pixel-boy vs Elisée wars last night, with 20 people for like, over 3 hours.
As we expected, having an actual persistent team you belong to with a list of members was definitely needed and we're glad we didn't shy away from rewriting this important part of the game.
Stability seems to be pretty good too. We encountered a single server crash over the course of the night and it restarted right away with nothing lost thanks to automatic saves.
In other news:
Pixel-boy designed some new character heads:
Here's another preview of the new buildings for the upcoming beta version:
Elisée got started implementing dungeon maps. People don't spawn on them, you have to find the address to get there.
There will be a tunnel system too so that two maps can be connected.
Bilou replaced the discrete health bubbles by a continuous health bar of 100 health points. It doesn't look pretty yet but it's much more granular. Elisée updated the gun/tower damages and house regen rate (1 HP every 2 seconds, 5x faster than before) accordingly.
Pixel-boy started designing various weapons! We're thinking of making them look different for each character race.
That's it for Worlds this week! As always, you can play the Alpha over at worlds.sparklinlabs.com.
Superpowers, the next-gen cooperative game-making platform
This week, Superpowers saw more work on the scene editor, basic image and sound import plugins and more work towards collaborative script editing!
Elisée reworked and integrated his custom-built HTML5 tree view widget (demo, source) into the scene editor. We can now reparent and reorder actors freely!
He also spent quite a while trying to integrate panel resize handles but hit some Chrome layout bugs that made them unusable so had to back that out for now.
Bilou got started on scary Operational Transformation stuff for cooperative text editing. What's that? It's a fairly complex system that defines how to reconcile concurrent edits by several people to a single document. We're looking into supporting undo/redo right away (unlike CraftStudio). There's quite a bit of work but progress is being made.
Elisée added "gulp pull" and "gulp status" global commands to manage all our 15+ repositories in a simpler way. No more wondering whether or not we pulled all changes or forgot to commit anything.
What's coming next? We'll be continuing work on the scene and script editors. As stated before, our goal is to get Superpowers just usable enough so that the three of us can use it to make a simple game for Ludum Dare 31 (December 5th). That will require adding support for exporting games and project persistence too... tons of work ahead!
CraftStudio, cubic cooperative game-making
Map rendering and raycasting is finally fully functional in the Web player, including all the block shapes you'd expect!
That took a while :D. After being done with that, Elisée got started cleaning up all the unimplemented features that were lingering in CraftStudio's user interface: invite system, the task list and activity log, the store button, various links that needed updating.
He also integrated a translation update for the Russian language kindly submitted by Flanagun.
Check out the CraftStudio Trello board to see what's next!
That's it for this week!
Thanks for reading and as always, see you next Friday at 9 PM Paris time for our weekly livestream (in French) at hitbox.tv/elisee and Saturday for another bloggy update.
We started implementing exciting stuff this week. Follow along to see what it's all about!
The initial version of the Guard Tower was clearly overpowered, as expected. We changed the behavior a little bit. Now, a player needs to be inside the tower to activate it (but they don't have to be online). This means, the number of towers your city can have depends on the size of your group. We think it make a lot more sense.
The card and building locking system proved to be confusing and not handy at all. So we trashed it :D.
Instead, we designed a proper team system. Every player has their own team when they start and every building is automatically attached to the player's team when it is created. This means all buildings are locked automatically.
To join another team, you'll still use the town hall. Someone from the team you wanna join has to open the door by standing on the threshold. Then you can enter and choose to join. If you were alone in your previous team, all your buildings will be transferred to the new team with you. You are free to leave a team whenever you want. It will automatically create a new team with just you.
Finally, each team will be named after its leader. The leader has the power to eject any member of the team if they want to.
We might also limit access to the townhall to the leader so that only them can recruit new players, but we're not sure! For now, any member has the ability to open the townhall.
We worked a little bit more on the admin tools. We added an in-game button to force a server save. It is automatically done every 30 seconds but sometimes we want to manually do it for debugging purposes.
We also added a keyboard shortcut to toggle the in-game admin sidebar. Previously, we had to reload the game with an optional URL parameter which was cumbersome.
We fixed some bugs. Once again, we fixed the gates which weren't working as they should. Hopefully, this is the last time we have to do it! We also fixed a crash when towers were destroyed.
Pavement has been redesigned. It now connects automatically like walls do:
Pixel-boy drew a bunch of concept arts!
Finally, we started the implementation of the new graphics in game. Here is a sneak peek!
If you haven't already, you can go try the current version! Most of the changes discussed above haven't been released just yet because we've got some work left on the team system. Soon!
Also, the new environment with updated graphics won't be released right away. We're going to keep working on new planets and dungeons and release everything at once later! We will let you know when it happens.
Remember you can also check our Trello if you want daily updates on our work and more info on our plans ;)
Alright let's move on to Superpowers, our upcoming extensible & cooperative gamedev tool!
We got started on the scene editor! We can create little green cubes and they are synchronized over the network. It's still very barebones though!
We did a lot of grunt work involving separating the client and server in two separate modules and creating the reusable UI (User Interface) module we talked about recently.
Pixel-boy did some research and character concepts for the interactive tutorial.
Elisée keeps working on CraftStudio. Last week he added support for rendering every map block shape in the Web Player! Next up is finishing map raycasting to support all those new shapes and then onto more stuff.
Thanks for reading, have a nice week and see you next week-end for another update!
