SyntaxBomb - Indie Coders

Adam, not sure if you've spelt Dimention deliberately like that or not but it should be Dimension.

I'm hoping Qube disqualifies your entry for that so the other games have a chance :-)

No problem 'Dimension' changed 

Been working through all the text changing fonts and other stuff.

Furyo has been lost!


still lots to do to get it all finished, so you might get your Wish Xerra

Menus and other nice stuff 

OK, so I've switched over to looking at all the connecting stuff. I'm not posting a working pic, but a dev pic of what I am thinking about for the main menu (this is photoshop btw)


But it give an idea of the concept I'm trying to go for...

the "logo text" uses some kind of "chisel hard" bevel effect. Maybe make the "bright" and "dark" values of the effect a bit more "high contrast" to simulate the shading you use in your game (which isn't as "soft" as in the logo text).

Maybe you can bring in an alien ship too - somehow. Replacing a letter with a ship - or having one of the "mites" crawl through the "D" or over the "C" in SACRED.
Aim of this is to break the "text based" logo approach and make it a more "combined" logo (I am aware of the top of the mountain tree which already tries to break into the "text only" area). The added creep could become part of the application icon too.


The bottom tree of the mountain trees has a bright green grass color... why? it looks a bit odd if the top ones are dark green and the more-shadowy-located tile has a bright green - was it a selected tile?

Even if you do not want to add an alien to the text-area of the title screen, you might at least add one at the ground level of the mountain ("I want to climb to that tasty trees").


BTW: Thanks for keeping us updated about progress, thoughts, plans ... I enjoy reading such stuff.


bye
Ron

Yep, All sorted. The above pic was the design shot.

Here is the real thing:


complete with wireframe graphics, new island, and moving UFO.

I definitely like the meshing of the 2d with the 3d, giving it a nice modern but retro feel.

Things could slowly animate - if it is a "procedural" done title screen (not static but dynamically created by draw-commands).

So eg. the island could rotate slightly (attention to the top tree to not "cross" the letters around). The Ufo could swirl around ... and the classic "80s/90s"-light-flash could move along the title-text :-) (eg. old "sega" logo had it in).

UFO / selection bullet in the menu list looks a bit "non antialiased" (has some dark pixels on top) - maybe it is the still of the screenshot while the UFO is animated and just on the way to hide the "dark colored" flat face ?


bye
Ron

well ahead of you there... Everything is in motion...

It does look good.  Will be nice to see it in motion.  We seem to be getting some good and varied entries.

10 days to go.....might be worth getting some play testers in before the comp ends to finalise some polishing? (but don't let them alter your artistic vision)

still working away
for todays peek. it's all about the UI and global maps.
basically you need a map showing the islands and their connections:


You can see at the top is a (sort of) tube map of the islands with their possible connections. the orange is your current path. so at an position you can choose to go in a different direction to get to the end.

I havent quite got my head around things, but the three layers (top middle bottom) should relate in some way to the difficulty, top being easier to complete, bottom being more of a challenge...

and....

everything changes...

@ dangers
Maybe desaturate colors depending on difficulty/danger (so reduce "vibrance" of the color if it is not that dangerous) ?

What's the name in the bottom of the screenshot: "Trenzd" ... edit, ok, according to the "back" button it is "trenza". As said, font is a bit hard to read.

Allow yourself to use some more colors - especially a contrary color for the orange you use in many elements (so something like the orange-teal effect over-used in movie posters).

bye
Ron

Thought I'd post some interesting code findings...
I've had long running issues with monkey2 sound on MacOS (all reported and ignored by Mark). In a nutshell there is something badly borked in his code that means it really isn't 'fit for purpose'

But I've now come across another weird one:
In previous games with lots of sounds I've noticed that some of them 'click' or have clicks! This is a random event, you can't predict which sound (when loaded) will have the click! At first I ignored it, as possibly down to bad sound files.
But I can load and examine sound files down to the byte level, and noticed that when checking, there was nothing wrong with the sound file itself. But on loading (with monkey2) sometimes a click would appear in the data stream when loading! Weird huh?

Currently I will live with it, as the remedial step would mean writing importers with known results.  What I really want to do is write a new sound sub-system, so maybe that will be the next step...

And here's an in-game shot of a won level: 

Is the water surface animated a bit ? (just move the vertices ... a slight bit)

the 3rd burger menu line looks truncated/cut (and design wise the line height should meet the line width of the letters/characters - so it looks as if it was just a letter in the font).

The tree of the power tree symbol shows the bright green on the left and right side - which looks a bit jaggy. Maybe use a precreated icon there instead of a "3d model" ?. But hmm - I somehow think this tree might be rotating/animated and therefor it is just the screenshot which looks this way.


Same for the orange thingy in the top of the screen. Why am I telling you this? The fonts you use are using anti-aliasing and they build up your "HUD". The icons are "HUD elements" too - so they should share the visual presentation style. Same could be said about the "power level indicator" (also non-antia-liased).
On the other hand it might be also worth to try getting rid of anti-alias on the fonts too (use some more "blocky" ones).

I would prefer some anti-aliased lines look (I know this is harder to implement  - like rendering everything 2x scaled) as it creates some "cartoonish low poly look".
But you seem to prefer the "sharp edged" look - which is contrary to the anti-aliased-font look.


bye
Ron

yep water all moves...

Here's a little something for you...

For that original retro feeling