Cataclysm: Fall of The Cog (WIP): Page 6

Cataclysm: Fall of The Cog (WIP)

xyz

The basic framework for quests is implemented. Not in the gameplay loop yet. "Quest" is perhaps a bit pretentious term in this case. It'll mostly be targeted destruction of one or more specific cities (and/or satellites), inside couple of turns limit. The rewards will be bonus cards or global effects like growth stagnation for one turn... don't have the full list yet.

RichTextLabel is pure gold. Using url tags I made city names clickable. When you click it, the camera is sent to look directly down onto target.

Snowflake graphic is just a placeholder.

TwistedTwigleg

Looks awesome! The amount of polish is impressive. Each screenshot looks amazing :smile:

cybereality

@xyz said: @cybereality Thanks! I'm in a phase now where I overcame most of newcomer's typical hurdles with the engine. Think I have a decent understanding of how to do things. I'm shifting the focus to my preferred area - actual game design. Trying to make something that's playable, perhaps even fun. That's always a challenge.

Yeah. Godot is really easy to learn but it does take time to master (I guess like everything). I've been productive in Godot since the beginning, but it took around 2 years to feel completely comfortable (though to be fair, I had some doubts at one point and switched back to Windows and Unreal for like 6 months). But I'm sticking with Godot now, I think I've evaluated it to the point where I'm sure it can handle anything I want.

xyz

@TwistedTwigleg said: Looks awesome! The amount of polish is impressive. Each screenshot looks amazing :smile:

Thanks @TwistedTwigleg. Tbh I didn't do any deliberate polish but I guess I'm into the habit of keeping things look tidy every step of the way. A sort of visual version of 'minimum viable product' approach. I'm kind of allergic to visual chaos. It makes me feel code underneath is somehow broken :)

@cybereality said: Yeah. Godot is really easy to learn but it does take time to master (I guess like everything). I've been productive in Godot since the beginning, but it took around 2 years to feel completely comfortable (though to be fair, I had some doubts at one point and switched back to Windows and Unreal for like 6 months). But I'm sticking with Godot now, I think I've evaluated it to the point where I'm sure it can handle anything I want.

Not even gonna try to master it. For me it's enough if I'm able to put together a basic Arkanoid clone in one evening, while relaxingly sipping tea :)

cybereality

This is my favorite quote from the legendary John Romero.

No prototypes. Just make the game. Polish as you go. Don’t depend on polish happening later. Always maintain constantly shippable code. — John Romero

https://medium.com/nathanhoad/publish-your-prototypes-bd192da4ebc5

This is the best advice I've ever received with regards to game development. When you start a project, it's the friggin' game. No prototypes, no hacks, no I'm going to clean this up later. You do it right the first time.

Also, everyone credits John Carmack for DOOM, and he did write a revolutionary engine, but John Romero was the one that designed the game. He was just as much a part of it, or maybe moreso, than Carmack. There were other games that used ray casting around that same time, it wasn't even Carmack's algorithm (though he did optimize it to run on crap computers). But a lot of time the artists and designers don't get the credit they deserve.

Megalomaniak

Even with regards to the engine id software had a lot of talent working on it not just Carmack, and I'm pretty sure Carmack has said as much himself.

cybereality

Yeah, I could see that. It's just like a celebrity thing, where one dude gets all the credit and it could have been dozens or even hundreds of people that worked on the game. For example: Cliff Bleszinski, who is an amazing designer, but hundreds of people worked on the Unreal Engine and also Gears of War. Why don't we know their names?

xyz

That Romero quote is something to live by :) I always held he was the main creative force behind early id gameplay and "cosmogony". Carmack was mainly the tech hackerman guy. It's staple now but it took quite a bit of ingenuity to combine space marines with black magic castles :) and do it in an extremely fun way.

As always with the cultural stuff, be it music, art or games, there's a lot of similar things floating around in a certain era, but only a few are destined to attain wide cultural acknowledgement. They happen to mix all the right ingredients, do it at just the right time and have a lot of luck to get singled out as an epitome. Take a look at something more recent like Minecraft. A the time of its making I remember there being at least a dozen projects doing the same thing.

As for names of people who work on large projects, I think it's a matter of corporate culture, policy and ip ownership. The brand name is deemed much more important than people's names. I personally always read credit screens in games.

xyz

Instead of working on gameplay stuff I went on to fiddle with colors. Blame it on the christmas :)

I really like the pure monochrome look. It has a mysterious x-ray feel to it. However adding more color can broaden the variety of generator output and maybe get better emotional response from the player.

I'm keeping with the approach of having one vivid dominant color, but have added a secondary varying color for the sea (plus the hue shifts caused by tinted ambient added earlier). This will hopefully result in some pleasant color combinations.

I must say that Godot's Color object is pretty simple and not really suited for color manipulation. So I had to write a basic YUV class that converts from/to rgb and handles some common color transformations, like hue and saturation shifts. Luckily, rgb-yuv conversion is rather simple (just a linear transformation). I think Godot should natively have some support for color spaces that are more intuitive to work with for humans than rgb.

Two pairs of screenies below showing variations with the same dominant color. I might go with even stronger hue/saturation shifts than this.

Main color yellow/orange:

Main color magenta:

DJM

i actually like the new color schemes makes it more readable

cybereality

Looks good. Definitely adds more pop and liveliness. I went to art school and the secret to good design is picking 3 bold colors. Never more or less. It has to be 3. You can still have gradients or slight variations, but never use more than 3 main colors.

cybereality

Also, I would say the palette is still too monotone. Try to go a little further. The second screenshot looks about right.

xyz

Sea color saturation was intentionally kept low. I could let it run wild, it's all parametrized. Will do some more tests. There may be a selection screen in the future containing multiple planets. In that case they'll have to have recognizably different "characters", so probably much more color variation.

For me it's important to keep the value structure in check so it all reads even in grayscale. What was that saying, "value does all the work while color gets all the credit" :) That's why I needed to switch to YUV color space. It lets you hold the luminosity perceptually in the same place while messing around with the chroma (hue/saturation). That way the generator output can guarantee that sea is always darker than the land to a same/similar degree. HSV and HSL, despite their misleading names, do not actually let you perceptually separate chroma and luma dimensions, and control them independently of each other.

When I get time I'll make a request for YUV and/or CIELab conversion and manipulation functions to be included into the script api. They are essential in procedural generation of functional color schemes.

cybereality

You might not need this anymore, but check this script. https://www.reddit.com/r/godot/comments/q6iipi/i_made_a_gdscript_port_of_hsluv/

xyz

Yeah, that's very similar to than what I have implemented. In fact it's a bit more perceptually stable than YUV. Maybe I'll try it out.

xyz

Spent the whole day working on Cog portrait generator. I first prototyped a relatively simple modular system in the modeling program, based on some of the sketches posted earlier. Then the thing was built in Godot.

So here's some garden variety of Cog planetary middle management:

cybereality

That looks amazing. Is that rendered in Godot?

xyz

Yep. Captured from Godot.

Erich_L

@xyz said: Yep. Captured from Godot.

*takes very deep breath. I approve. Very cool, it suits the cog just right.

xyz

Feasibility is my number one concern. They'll be rather small. And I think I'll have to add some horn-like elements to diversify the silhouettes more.

The "quests" are now in the gameplay loop, showing these animated avatars. They are dummy though. Only one quest is actually fully working. Satellite launch is announced year in advance by the mayor of the launching city. You can destroy the city to prevent it... or choose to focus your powers elsewhere.

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