First Test, VecBall Design
Entry posted by reepblue ·
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Another week, another weekly report. Vectronic is going more smoothly then ever before taking things one at a time, and just shelling out maps and ideas quickly. Last week, I did a few improvements with how the player picks up objects, and fixing the issue of shooting projectiles through objects. I did not shell any more maps because I thought it would be better to focus on a small amount of puzzles at a time, perfecting them before making more maps. For this, I needed help.
As of this week, I quietly put the first test build on in the Dropbox folder which used to host the Source build, and asked a small number of people to test out movement, mouse control, and if everything feels right before I make things more complex.
From the first week of testing, I'm confident that the project is moving in the right direction. From one tester who has played all other builds of Vectronic told me that this current build has better puzzle direction and clarity, and full of gameplay unlike previous builds that was just a bunch of mechanics, pretty rooms, but no gameplay at all. I got recommended a few changes I should make, like making the box heavier so when it crashes to the floor after floating in the air, it does not bounce off a button, or adding a plane of glass to block a more frustrating solution. A few tweaks still need to be made, solutions should just work, and not fully relying on the physics engine. I recall this being a problem with Quadrum Conundrum.
Word of advice though, I learned that play testers hate fully ambient lit rooms, so before you release for testing, atleast put fill lights in. One tester told me it was hard to perceive the room with a full ambient light. I have one map with fill lights as a test, and he reported that when he got to that map, he had a better experience.
I also found out that this method on leak protection didn't work when you packaged your games. It failed to initialize Steamworks although Steam was running. Not sure if this has to do with how packaged games work, or something I did wrong. I could of just uploaded the raw project, but that's a difference of 88MB vs 18MB. I'll work on this for the next build which I plan on posting a new test build biweekly.
VecBall Design
Yesterday, instead of writing this blog post, I was in an art mood, and wanted to put something back online with a model and sounds. I was using the old ball sprite and particle effects from the Demo, and I was really unhappy on how the dispenser looked in Leadwerks compared to how it was in Source. I decided if I was gonna touch anything art related, it was gonna be the basic foundation of the Vecballs themselves.
I already had an idea of how I wanted my balls to look in the previous build. I'm a huge fan of how the Portals where in Portal in pre-release builds, and I wanted to reference that.
This portal design required a large amount of textures for the mask, overlay, and other things that portals need. These portals took a whopping 174MB of VRAM PER PORTAL. and this was 2006/2007. I'm told that Valve cut it only because they ran out of memory on the Xbox360. Besides them being memory hoggers, I'm happy that I have them in a mod where they work exactly like how they did in previous builds.
Unlike Portals, I can do a sprial/swirl effect with my vecballs without going over budget. I really liked the idea of the balls being a swirling ball of energy, so this could work. I made a quick texture and effect before I focused more on LEX. I later put what I've did in the Vectronic Demo.
I pretty much just copy and pasted my swirl edits I had before into this build with a few changes. It still needs work, but it's pretty much the same as it is in the Demo, at least for now.
Now to the dispenser. What makes Vectronic diffrent from Portal is that you loose your vecballs after each level, requiring you to recollect them in the next map. When I first sat down for the design of the dispensers, I sorta saw them as the item pickup bases in multiplayer games like Unreal Tournament. In Source, the particles stood tall and really stood out. But when I was transferring the design to Leadwerks, no matter what, they appeared washed out. This might be because of the colors, but I could not replicate how they appeared in Source.
So I decided to take the dispenser back to the drawing board. I felt that the bases were too small, and needed a face lift. I quickly made this out of a cylinder in blender, added some base colors, and called it a day. UV sheet is still bad though, something I always have problems with.
Attached a few emitters and sprites to it and got this in-engine.
This is still not final as the ball sprite can still get washed out in the environment. I'm not gonna worry about it until I start messing with post processing effects and the overall look of the maps. I'm also open to suggestions. It's good for now, and it's a hell of a lot better then how they are in the demo!
So that wraps this weeks report up. I guess this weeks goal is to ask more people to test the seven maps I have and seeing how I can improve those and other things before moving forward.
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