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Who shall win the Community Choice Award?! This poll is closed. |
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| Zero-Grab Kitty |
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13 | 10.57% |
| Go Fish! |
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4 | 3.25% |
| Sub Optimal |
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1 | 0.81% |
| All Senior Citizens Should Have Life Alert |
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15 | 12.20% |
| PZZL |
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8 | 6.50% |
| Coinless |
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1 | 0.81% |
| Conservation of Momentum |
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2 | 1.63% |
| Echo |
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4 | 3.25% |
| Critical Admission |
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4 | 3.25% |
| VectoRocket |
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9 | 7.32% |
| Impulse |
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34 | 27.64% |
| Sandlot Basenoball |
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1 | 0.81% |
| Slam Fighter II |
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27 | 21.95% |
| Total: | 123 votes | ||
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TheOrange posted:I thought there was talk of one happening around the Winter? Haha, glad you liked the shotgun! I would honestly estimate about 25% of the total dev time in Impulse was spent on tweaking the look and feel of the weapons to get them where I wanted them, so I'm happy it seems like my effort paid off!
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Aug 11, 2015 22:17
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GOONS ARE MEAN 
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 04:28 |
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I was having some trouble with the Impulse OSX build earlier, apparently the enemy sprites were showing up as white blobs instead of their actual sprites. I saw it on one of my Windows builds before too but not on the current one. Can someone try this OSX build for me and see if the enemies show up correctly and the game runs fine: http://www.ironpencil.com/impulse/standalone/Impulse_OSX.zip Edit: Also if anyone has seen this issue before and has any idea what causes it let me know. I've never seen it in the editor but it was definitely in my Windows build. And it was only the enemy sprites, not the player sprites or anything else. I think I might've used Unity's sprite packer at one point for the enemies, maybe that has something to do with it? sighnoceros fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Aug 12, 2015 |
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Aug 12, 2015 02:54
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Heisenberg1276 posted:Seems to work fine for me. But then the old build worked fine for me too... Thanks for trying it out for me! Yeah I hadn't had any complaints then someone sent me a screenshot showing the white blobs instead of actual sprites. All I did to fix the Windows version before was rebuild, and I still don't know if it's something that would affect all machines or what. Anyway, seems to be fixed now, so the Impulse OSX build is back up live on the site again. There's also a Linux build that I would love for someone to confirm works at some point too.
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Aug 12, 2015 14:40
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Speaking of bounties, Afal, I'm not sure if you ever finished doing your reviews, but I never saw a review of Impulse. And we definitely have screenshake - it's even customizable in the menu, from no screenshake all the way up to Vlambeer-level.
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Aug 12, 2015 16:37
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No problem on the reviews taking time! I just know I had seen you post a lot, but yeah I guess there are a lot more games than I realized, haha. Great work everyone!Adhemar posted:Shotgun is mad OP, plz nerf. Glad you liked it! Yeah the shotgun is definitely a bit OP but I think only if you have good control of your movement. Really new players tend to get stuck in a corner and just shoot at enemies coming at them. Then they learn about the grapple hook and hook onto nests and shoot them with the machine gun. Then once you get good at moving around you can zip from nest to nest, slide right up close and blast it once with the shotgun at point black and move on to the next while barely stopping at all. I tried to balance the game in such a way that even the first two groups of people would be able to last a while and not feel too frustrated, but when I go back to it I definitely want to start rewarding more of the advanced gameplay as well.
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Aug 12, 2015 22:56
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TheOrange posted:Out of curiosity is there ever an end point to Impulse or just once you die? I think I got up to Wave 9 myself before having to step away for other things but I've been meaning to go back to it. Just curious if you went procedural on it and if that helped you guys out or caused any difficulties. Impulse has no final win condition, no. There was a long period during development where we wanted to do a campaign mode and also an arena wave-based mode. That inability for us to make up our minds ended up hurting us in the long run because I held off on working on levels and some other pieces that were dependent upon that decision. I also built a lot of things with an eye towards "well how is this going to work if we do it one way vs another", and I know our artist developed a whole slew of assets that we didn't end up using because we never implemented a proper campaign. But basically what happened was we were down to about 10 days left and we still hadn't decided, so I made an executive decision during a period of development where I just said "I'm not going to have time to make a bunch of different campaign levels, so it's an arena shooter now". It was actually really liberating making that decision, because it focused down what I had to work on. So what I ended up doing was deciding (with a suggestion from Tann) that the objective would be to destroy the nests that constantly spawn the enemies, and each new level/wave would mutate in some way. So I got the enemies and nests spawning in an arena format and then started implementing ways to mutate the waves and randomly generate incremental mutations based on weighted values and maximum increment limits and stuff. A big influence on this system were the Idols and Limiters from Bastion and Transistor. Actually, originally we wanted the weapons to work similarly to Transistor in that not only would they be different if placed in different weapon slots, but also we wanted you to be able to load up modifications to the weapons much like the programs in Transistor, so you could shoot a shotgun spread of rockets, for instance. That's a system I still want to implement. We ended up with 9 different wave mutations, most of them having incremental effects that can be applied multiple times up to a maximum. Each time you start a wave, a new set of mutations (called anomalies in game) is generated, one mutation for each wave you've completed. Each mutation has a weighting for random selection, then a decreased weighting once it has already been selected for that wave. This makes it more likely that you see multiple weaker mutations before you start seeing single stacked mutations, because each time a mutation is selected, it increases the strength of its effect (up to a certain specified point). Spawn Time Reduction (Relentless) - Reduces the global enemy spawn timer, which starts at 15 seconds, by 2 seconds each time it is selected, up to 10 second reduction total. Enemy Speed (Accelerated) - Increases enemy speed by 25% each time it is selected, up to 50% total. Enemy HP (Resilient) - Increases enemy health by 25% each time it is selected, up to 100% total. Enemy Damage (Barbed) - Increases enemy damage by 25% each time it is selected, up to 100% total. Enemy Regen (Adaptive) - Enemies regen 2.5 hp/sec each time it is selected, up to 10 hp/sec total. Enemies Split (Alien) - Enemies have a 15% chance to spawn 2 new enemies on death, up to 30% chance if selected again. Enemies Explode (Volatile) - Enemies have a 25% chance to explode violently on death, up to 50% chance if selected again. Spin Camera (Dizzy) - Causes the camera to constantly rotate 15 deg/sec, up to 45 deg/sec total. [This can be turned off in the menu by unchecking Spin To Win if it makes you nauseous!] Unstable Terrain (??????) - Causes the level tileset to switch randomly every 5-10 seconds or so. I actually spent a decent amount of time building a system that would allow us to load a single Tiled level into the game, then have it apply a randomly selected tileset to it. We have 5 tileset variants (Bricks, Grass, Metal, Rocks, and Sand), each with multiple color variations, that we switch between on each level to kind of make it feel less samey even if you are only cycling between a couple levels. As you can see, the easiest thing for us to hook on without much additional work were the enemy stats, and they allowed us to give the wave mode a sense of progression of difficulty, even if some of them are mostly just for fun. We had lots of other ideas for mutators, but we finalized these a couple days before the end and decided to work on polishing up some other pieces (like the little bubble particles you see when you shoot and enemies move around), and generate a couple levels to randomly switch between in the arena (there are currently 3). In the end I think a campaign mode would've been great, and I still want to put one in. But for the scope of the game jam I had to settle on simplicity and what I could accomplish when I had spent so much time on the weapons, the player and enemy movement, the UI, and everything else I had to do. It does end up putting you in a situation where, as GlyphGryph mentioned, the player may feel that they've seen everything the game has to offer after only one level. While I think that's not strictly true due to the way the mutators and difficulty ramp up and we have a few different level layouts, the basic gameplay concept (destroy the nests while avoiding damage from enemies) does stay essentially the same. Ultimately I would consider my greatest disappointment is that you aren't really incentivized to kill the enemies. I built the points system where they give you points and if you kill so many you gain a multiplier, but as we've all known for a long time, points don't REALLY matter in the grand scheme of things to most gamers if they don't do anything. So your best course of action to progress is to simply avoid enemies and kill the nests as fast as possible, then clean up the living enemies. And a note on the enemies - some of the (perfectly valid) criticism the game has received is that the enemies don't really do anything other than move toward you. Yeah, some of them have different movement patterns, like the jellyfish move in small bursts in a random direction (but mostly towards you), and the chomping fish swim in a wave pattern until they're close, then they dash quickly at you. I would've liked to have had different enemy behaviors, but part of the problem is the actual main concept of the game. Since your weapons push you away, it was really hard to actually deal with mostly stationary enemies, because as people have noticed with the nests, when you start shooting them you get pushed away from them. And I didn't want people to feel like they had to shoot really slow and aim every shot to make them count or they'd have to turn around and move closer again. So that's why most of the enemies ended up just chasing you, and part of the reason that they move so fast -- so you don't just leave them in the dust as you're flying around spraying double shotguns wildly. I do have plans for how to alleviate this a bit in the future though, and as always, I really appreciate the feedback and criticism. What I hope to add in a future release is a full campaign mode with exploration/puzzley sections in between combat sections, a bunch more weapons that we already have art for with actual weapon progression (so you gain access to new weapons as you play instead of just having them all at the start), weapon combinations/upgrades as mentioned above, temporary power-ups and collectibles like shields and bombs and teleports, new enemies and behaviors (so they don't all just come after you), and bosses, which we wanted to get in but just didn't have time. Edit:  I didn't mean to write that much. Guess I have some stuff ready for the site when the post-mortems are added.
sighnoceros fucked around with this message at 01:37 on Aug 13, 2015 |
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Aug 13, 2015 01:25
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Generally I would say that if you're going to make the math more visible to the player, you should also make it as comprehensible as possible so they can actually make informed decisions. It's up to you whether your complicated calculations need to be preserved or not, but being able to look at "base chance + player skill - situational modifier = need a 9 on 2d6" is probably going to make things seem a lot more understandable for players.
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Aug 13, 2015 04:14
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Can't complain about Impulse not winning, some great games this year and I played the poo poo out of Zero Grab-Kitty (I think I might have been the first person to report having actually beaten it  ). Congrats to all the winners, and great job everybody who finished their games!
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Aug 15, 2015 05:16
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Oh yeah definitely not trying to seem ungrateful, was just referring to the top places. Great games all around!
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Aug 15, 2015 05:38
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Afal posted:Impulse Thank you for the kind words! I'm glad someone appreciated my stupid Vlambeer joke. 
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Aug 17, 2015 14:25
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| # ¿ May 14, 2024 04:28 |
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Thanks a lot, Afal! I will consider making Vlambeer It the default screenshake option in my future games.
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Aug 19, 2015 00:53
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