Luminate #1 : Flickering Good Progress

Hey all, James reporting in here, a week or so late but hey, I never was great with deadlines.

Today I would like to introduce you to my little friends the Lumen

Jeff

Andy

Jimmy

Roger

*Names not representative of in-game characters

Some of the things Jeff, Andy, Jimmy and Roger don't like include :

More Trees

Trees(Especially Scary Ones)

Boulders

This, is mine and Andy's newest venture into the world of video-games, named Luminate. It is a cool cross between an infinite runner and puzzler. By now a great many of you are screaming "Limbo Ripoff! U guz suck 4 copyin Limbo, just a bad version of Limbo, etc". Well right now I am going to put those issues to rest before I continue any further, and am going to give all those who have statements like that, a nice, simple, list that their brains can process :

• While the art is very limbo-esque we are bringing our own mix of lighting and some colour into the game, and apart from that, yes we have drawn inspiration from the art of Limbo.... Because it is so damn awesome!
• Randomly Generated Terrain/Objects so that the player has an almost new run every-time
• 4-Player Multiplayer, so you can Help/Push/BeBFFWith/Troll your friends and experience the creepiness of Luminate in good(or bad) company.
• Light based system - While Limbo kills the player with nicely placed Squash-O-Matics(c), we have a value of light, which defines your "health" in a way and once you are out of light, your character, much like your motivation to play, will seemingly disappear.... Oh and we have some Squash-O-Matics(c) too!
• We are a two man indie team.

So that should really sum up any copying questions you may have and what we are doing(basically) that differentiates it from the highly acclaimed and extremely awesome game Limbo(aka Andy's life blood).

Moving onto an update from a programming point of view(Not as pretty but I'll add pictures!)

Overall progress has been good with an approximate total of 18 hours logged creating the game, most of the progress has been fairly invisible backend, making it easier for me to add features at a later date, so I will try to list the real "visible" ones as best I can.

World Generation

World generation was one of the first features I implemented to a very basic standard. All it does right now is generate completely randomly, but in the future I have plans to make it based on a percentage system of chunks spawned so you can get a diverse and non-repetitive world everytime. Here have some pretty pictures :

Not much variation right now!

Of course, as I stated before, this is a very basic implementation and in future it will use terrains like :

And many more....

Movement

Player movement by far has been the most worked on aspect of the game and well.... needs a re-write for cleanliness sake, which will be tedious but necessary.

The part that I must pride myself on is the auto rotation dependant on the slope of the hill, I though it was pretty neat :

And a little insight into the workings never hurt anyone eh?

Checking the angle made with the ground

Before rotation, checks how far it needs to rotate

Multi-player

Since it is my first time dabbling in multiplayer affairs, I have approached it with the upmost caution to bandwidth usage and so far it seems to be working perfectly with seamless and smooth streaming of player position and rotation as well as sending of the complete World Data, so it generates exactly the same on all clients. However it may also need a clean of some sort.

Next Up..... AND THE LORD(MATTER OF PERSPECTIVE) OF PROGRAMMING SAID...LET THERE BE LIGHT!

Next time I post I will have done some pretty kickass light features, along with some animation, better terrain generation and possibly some puzzles. But for now here is a sneak peak at what light may end up looking like :

Low Light Single Player

High Light Single Player

Multiplayer Light Mixing

Light Collision Boxes

And thus, I leave you with this :

“Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.”

I'm out
Myhijim(James)