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Hello. I worked on this game from pretty much day one, but I was not involved in the first game at all so I've put off posting until now. The main goal going into this project was, I think, to make a bigger and better Dig with the better technology we'd developed during Heist and upgraded graphical style, which I think ultimately we pulled off. Dig 1's graphics were made in Flash and exported into our engine, including special effects like explosions and whatnot; Dig 2 features a fully featured custom particle system engine and rigid skeletal animation for all the characters, built in Blender and Illustrator. The area at the start there, the tutorial temple, was built pretty early on as I recall, but it also went through a lot of revision before it settled on what it is today. It become kind of a test bed for a while for what we could do with non-randomly generated areas and scripting together things like levers and doors. Oh, yeah, unlike Dig 1, this game is designed all the way through. The only procedurally generated parts are some random mineral spawns. A slightly modified version of the tutorial temple would also eventually make it into the various show floor demos when the time came to show it off to the public for the first time. We expected people to go to the right first, as that's what people generally assume is the way forward, only to run into that switch/door combo that you can't pass through without the sprint hydraulics, and then be forced to go the other way to unlock it and segue into the sprint tutorial. On a somewhat amusing note, you mentioned sequence breaking at a point in the video that's very close to one of the biggest sequence breaks in the game. I won't mention all the details, but you can go directly from the starting area to one of the final areas in the game, circumventing getting Fen entirely, if you know how. It used to be even easier due to an oversight with the jumping physics that could let you trivially jump some thirteen times higher than you're supposed to be able to - that was patched out, but the sequence break is still possible. El Machino, too, was built pretty early, but the first version of the place was sparse and undecorated and languished like that until very late in the game's development - I think we only finished it a few months before going gold. We wanted it to feel a little more vertical than Tumbleton, to give the player more sense of scale and allow them to use their movement options a little more, even in town. Cog upgrades were another thing that changed a lot during development, but we'll get to those later I suppose. That big empty space to the right next to the danger sign used to be a lake for a chunk of the game's development, but was changed for reasons I'll mention when it becomes more relevant. What else... oh, those enemies are called Trilobites. They're meant to be the same enemy as the ones you fight in Dig 1, but with the charge attack added to make them a bit more exciting. Nevertheless, they are not the first enemy to be added to the game - that would be an enemy we haven't seen yet.
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Sep 5, 2019 10:14
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 22:37 |
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Lazyfire posted:Were there any upgrades/improvements along those lines that were targeted but you just couldn't make work or feel right? A couple things come to mind, but to avoid spoiling material we haven't seen yet, I think it's better to hold on to some of those things until we get the points where they would've become relevant. Some of them have to do with tools and upgrades that haven't been shown yet, for example. I believe at some point the designers considered the idea of allowing you to invest in/upgrade buildings in El Machino - for example, upgrading the ore smeltery to improve the yield of resources extracted from raw minerals - but this never proceeded beyond the design stage. I think it was considered too clunky, too far detached from the core gameplay loop and not worth the effort. The conversation system was rebuilt from the ground up for this project, which includes a lot of the little improvements like speech effects (e.g. shaking text), branching conversations and the little "..." popups above the heads of people who have something to say. Integrating it with the visual scripting system proved to be somewhat troublesome though.
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Sep 5, 2019 13:59
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I believe that's part of it. I wasn't involved in that particular decision. In general, what the increased sell value as you level up does is encourage you to defeat enemies rather than just ignore them, and smooths over your money gain in the late game as you start getting to the point where most of the easily accessed minerals are already mined out. The person who did all the economic balancing - again, not me - probably felt it necessary and was looking for the right way to implement it.
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Sep 5, 2019 14:44
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When you pick up an artifact, do pop over to the artifact tab in the pause menu and read the descriptions. Our writers spent quite a bit of time on those! Not to mention the poor localization company that had to deal with the constant stream of puns and 80s references. Speaking of artifacts, that was originally envisioned as a much more complex system where there were multiple collectors up in town that wanted different artifacts, and you had to figure out which artifacts they were interested in. Someone who wanted something zoological might want that rat you picked up, or something else of a similar nature. Each collector had their own list of rewards. However, the system was almost impossible for players to understand, and what's worse you could make sub-optimal choices and screw yourself out of rewards down the line. It was considered way too unfun, so it was simplified to a single collector and you can't miss out on any rewards. Water refills in town, as you noticed. It didn't always work automatically - that's what the lake was for in that spot to the east of the town proper. It was changed because it was just meaningless busywork to pop over and take a bath every time you came up to town. This game has a lot more secrets than Dig 1, so the challenge caves now get a green check mark when you've got everything of value from one. Completion percentage is also shown per-area on the map screen. Criss-Cross Combustion is one of my favorite cog upgrades; I think I wrote the code for it, but it's been a while.
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Sep 8, 2019 10:18
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Ah, yes, the birds. They're called "chocobos" internally. I don't remember what the public-facing name is supposed to be. Anyway, they were the first enemy model ever made for the game, way early in development. Then for a while it looked like we weren't going to use them, then they came back again later in development and made into the avian menace that you see before you. For a while in development, we did have a classic weapon switch system where you could assign tools to the four d-pad directions. At that point, it looked like we were going to have a lot more tools than ended up actually being the case, so when the list was pared down to the ones that are in the game now, we changed it to simply give each tool its own unique button instead. The Jackhammer originally had a chisel tip, by the way, but in some meeting or another someone suggested a fist would be pretty cool and people generally agreed. Improved enemy combat was one of the explicit goals of the project. I think the people who worked on Dig 1 were generally unsatisfied with the variety of enemies in that game; most of them were just slowly moving obstacles. So this game has over twice the number of enemies, many of them are much faster (like the chocobos) and have more varied attacks. I believe bloodstones were part of that design, to give you a tangible reward for engaging with monsters (plus it smooths out the economy a bit and gives you an endless source of minerals should you mine out an area completely). I think Portal of Pardon was added in part because Dig 2 doesn't have the portable teleporter pads from the first game. It's a nice convenience feature.
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Sep 18, 2019 09:35
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Temple of Guidance Part 2! Most stuff post-hookshot was designed to let you tackle it in basically any order, although certain things are still inaccessible until you make more progress elsewhere. The Grenade Launcher is an optional upgrade, so it doesn't impact progression anyway. By the way, remember what I said about sequence breaking? You can get to that part of the Temple of Guidance right from the start with the right inputs, circumventing getting Fen entirely and going straight to Yarrow. That's a legit sequence break in the sense that we didn't think it was possible on release, unlike some other sequence breaks that were entirely intentional. (One even gives you an achievement.) That little digging spot on the left with the lever at the bottom is a somewhat vague reference to the opening sequence of Dig 1. As you can imagine, the Hook Shot went through a lot of iteration to get just right, but I personally do like the end result a lot. You can do some pretty fast movement with precise grappling, as you'll see.
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Sep 25, 2019 09:46
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Well, a certain upgrade I don't want to spoil helps a little bit, but ultimately that room is down to manual dexterity and there is nothing that makes it easy. It's one of my favorites! There is post-game content that unlocks after getting every single artifact in the game, so if you want to cover that... The Temple of the Destroyer is the first real big area you get to that is themed differently from the more "classic" Dig underground rocky caverns. Personally, I think it's one of the coolest things we managed to do with the series - expand it to new locations that look and feel very different but still maintain the same fundamental gameplay. Among many other things, I worked on the conveyor belts and crushers; the latter are infamously terrible to work with physics-wise and they ended up being a massive pile of hacks just to get them to behave correctly. Not only do they have to move, but they have to crush things if they collide a certain way, push things out of the way if the collide another, and worst of all carry things along if you stand on top of them... and still be able to crush you against the ceiling when coming back up. It took ages getting it right and I still think they might be the buggiest game object in the world to date.
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Oct 23, 2019 11:04
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Ah, the fire axe. This was originally a flamethrower that could shoot through walls, and a lot of the puzzles involving it had to do with setting fire to things in places you couldn't normally access. It was considered too weird to have a projectile that magically passed through walls in a game where the solidity of the environment is kind of a fundamental aspect of the whole digging gameplay, so it was changed into this kind of... burrowing thing that dug itself through walls invisibly. That didn't last long, and this was I think about the time when we decided to cut down on the number of selectable tools, so it got turned into a passive upgrade for the pickaxe instead. The high priest boss is, of course, none other than Ronald Hubbot, the guy briefly mentioned by the artifact collector earlier.
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Nov 1, 2019 11:18
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The original intent was for the jetpack to run on a separate fuel resource, diesel oil. This was also the same resource that fueled the flamethrower (which was also cut). I don't remember how exactly you were supposed to get more of it, but it was supposed to be a more rarely acquired but more long-lasting resource. Eventually it was all changed in favor of what you see now. The big metal golems in Vectron are called Terminators. This is an area I remember primarily from testing; it was really difficult to get right. Anyway, now that you know of the remaining doomsday devices I can point out something that isn't really a secret because it's actually one of the achievements, but: You can take out all the doomsday devices without ever entering Vectron and getting the jetpack. Mraagvpeine posted:I wonder if you'll retry the button room now that you have the jetpack. The jetpack is the upgrade I hinted at earlier as making that room easier.
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Nov 15, 2019 09:46
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Fwoderwick posted:The only thing I think Vectron is missing is there aren't really any secrets in there, but then it'd definitely lose something if you were able to revisit it for the sake of completionism. There is one thing that loosely qualifies as a secret (though not in the game complete% sense), and Lazyfire yolo'd so hard he actually found most of it but didn't pick up on it.  It's not a huge secret anyway, though, so no worries. Technically there's a second secret, but it's so secret I don't think you can access it normally. You're certainly not supposed to. Hyper Crab Tank fucked around with this message at 18:53 on Nov 15, 2019 |
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Nov 15, 2019 18:49
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Fedule posted:The purple drank block eroding mechanic is one of those things that looks like a really straightforward concept but which I fear sits atop an underlying code nightmare. Or maybe it's actually really elegant and does something like spawn individual explosions with a given lifetime and causes impacted blocks to give themselves new explosions with less life. It's an enemy type called "acid_burn" that settles on the tile it spawns on and is scripted to deal damage to the tile at vaguely random intervals four times, then create a copy of itself with one less spread count on a random neighboring tile, then continue damaging the tile until the tile dies and the enemy is killed (because it was settled on the tile). The enemy then has an on-death event that fires an invisible projectile that immediately explodes and deals AoE damage to anything nearby. The enemy has no model, but it does have a particle effect attached to it (the purple glow). There are a few sub-instances of this enemy with lower spread counts. The drippers and others fire projectiles either continuously or on death. The projectile in turn spawns acid_burn, acid_burn_small or acid_burn_mini enemies on whatever they hit.
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Nov 27, 2019 22:16
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Lazyfire posted:This episode features the first upgrade whose use I don't see an immediate advantage to outside of killing a specific enemy There is one very specific use case for it that is necessary for beating the game (unless you know how to sequence break it). But mostly it's a convenience upgrade, much like the grenade launcher. As I recall, shooting bombs in the air was added with some hesitation. A fundamental part of the Dig experience has always been planning your downward route, and breaking blocks above you and to the right in particular is something that hasn't been allowed before. At this point, I don't think there's anything in the game you can't access except for the final area.
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Dec 9, 2019 08:18
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Of course, it is more than possible to beat the game without ever getting the jetpack. (As mentioned, there is an achievement for it, even.) Speedrun records have long since been shattered, but back during development we were routinely able to beat the game under 40 minutes without abusing any of the really broken mechanics (because we didn't know about them until people discovered them after release!). You might be wondering how a particular upcoming area can be done without the jetpack, but there's little you can't accomplish with some clever use of the hookshot...
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Dec 9, 2019 11:29
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Polsy posted:Since Lazyfire did this the pressure bomb way already - can’t you just use the horizontal bee he kills at ~34:45 in video 15? As far as I know that's the intended solution. You can also use the bee in the lower left.
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Dec 9, 2019 16:31
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Quick tip: If you're inside a puzzle cave and not sure if you've found everything yet, open up the map real quick. It'll show the area just outside and you can check if the cave has a checkmark on it or not.
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Dec 13, 2019 10:31
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| # ¿ May 8, 2024 22:37 |
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Fedule posted:I"m not sure why the game ranks your time taken (or death count). I'm honestly always a little uneasy when lines are drawn over whole game completion stats, because I don't think these considerations really work at that scope. But unless there are Trophies or whatever tied to it it's a purely incidental concern. Because the first game did (as well as Heist), and we wanted to continue the tradition (plus there are achievements for it). The expectation was that most people wouldn't really care too deeply about it, and the numbers are set so that we expect someone who plays casually to silver at least a category or two without really trying. Gold stars are the only real challenge targets, mainly intended to give some replay value to completionists. I don't remember it ever really being suggested to drop end-game stats, but I wasn't involved in the discussions, I just implemented the stat tracking. I think we just felt it was a low-cost feature to add and that the benefit to whatever small group would want to have it was worth it.
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Jan 4, 2020 09:54
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