Umbra (RB's and PiscesMike's entry for Competition #9)

Umbra (RB's and PiscesMike's entry for Competition #9)

rbwhitaker 14 Nov 2016 02:14

Umbra

In many games, you control a character that wanders around, making mincemeat out of the enemy's minions. You take down thousands single-handedly, usually without breaking a sweat.

This game is not that.

This game is the opposite of that.

You control a swarm of those aforementioned weaklings called luxliving light as you attempt to take on massive, mechanical, shadowy enemies called umbra.

Most — maybe all — of your lux may die. But that is the price that must be paid to repel the invading umbra.

Scope for Competition #9

We don't plan to truly complete this game in the 31 day competition. Mostly, we want to get the game to a point where it is playable and can give a flavor of what we're aiming for.

We want the player to be able to control thousands of units at a time (current goal is 10000, but if we can hit 50000 or 100000, then even better). We want the player to feel like they're truly controlling a massive swarm of individually powerless, but collectively strong units to take on massive, boss-like enemies at every turn.

Ultimately, we'll just need to see how things play out. This game has a lot of challenges that we've never had to deal with before, so it will be an interesting experience for us.

We are planning on posting weekly updates, probably at the end of the weekend. (Sunday nights?)

We are also planning on making builds available for people to try. We definitely want feedback on how the game is going, especially as we get further into it and start to have a playable game.

Links and References

Downloads Page: https://bitbucket.org/umbrateam/umbra-public/downloads

Last edited on 14 Nov 2016 02:40 by rbwhitaker Show more

Sprint 0 Results, Sprint 1 Plans

rbwhitaker 14 Nov 2016 02:39

Sprint 0 Results

Well here we are at the end of the first weekend. We've made some progress and want to show you where we're at.

In a nutshell, the current version of the game places lux (the small weak "good" guys that you control) across the area of play. When they are "alert" or active, they will swarm towards the mouse cursor. When they are not alert, they glide to a stop. There is quite a bit of framework code that also went in.

The current version should give you a flavor of what the game might be like, though it is a very long way away from being an actual playable game.

Please give the downloads page (in the first post) a shot and see what you think. In particular, if you see the frame rate drop below about 40, we'd love to know that. On my (RB's) computer, the frame rate always stayed in the mid to upper 40 frames per second. The release build should run a bit faster than that.

You can also mess with the Settings.yml file if you want. (Keep in mind if you mess it up, I'm pretty sure the program will crash. But it should be intuitive as to how things should be organized there.)

Sprint 1 Plans

PiscesMike and I have not had a chance to review together where we're at and where we're planning on going. So these are just a few thoughts from me. We may completely change our plan tomorrow. Or the next day.

I think the next priorities for the game fit along these lines:

• Refine how lux move. Currently is is actually a model that is based on gravity. I don't know that that's really what we want long term.
• Add in some semblance of umbra, the bad guys in the game.
• Add in ways for new lux to spawn.
• Add in ways for lux to die.

I'm not sure how far we'll get down that list, but if we do, we'll have the skeleton of an actual playable game in there.

Re: Sprint 0 Results, Sprint 1 Plans

Marcus42 15 Nov 2016 01:50

The idea of lots of weak enemies trying to destroy a few really tough ones has come up a few times in these competitions, and I'm still really intrigued by it (probably because a game based on this idea has yet to come to fruition!), so I'm very excited to see this progress!

So, I did try the download, and I've got a few thoughts to share. First of all, the swarm effect was interesting. I liked how the lux wouldn't immediately and efficiently hone in on the cursor, but instead spiraled around a bit in a believable way - I was a bit thrown off without having much perspective, though. The way the swarm of lux curve sometimes when spiraling (as well as the starting position) gives me the impression that we're not looking at them from directly above or from the side, but without any frame of reference, I couldn't totally understand what I was seeing. Not necessarily a problem, but at some point it will probably be nice to have something a bit more tangible to latch on to.

Also, while I like that you only wake the lux close to the mouse when you press the mouse button, something about the very clearly-defined circular cutout of lux that would start tracking the mouse bothered me on an admittedly nit-pick scale. Having a few lux that are just outside the circle also waking up to soften the edges could be nice.

As for the framerate, it started around 40 fps until I woke up a bunch of lux and got them zipping around, at which point it began a slow descent to around 30-32 fps, although it never dipped below 30. However, I was running it on a laptop, so keep that in mind.

It looks and works great for only one weekend of work, though! As I've said, I'm really looking forward to seeing how this comes along, and I hope my feedback was useful for getting an idea of how an outsider perceives what you've got so far. I definitely enjoyed playing around with it for a few minutes!

Re: Sprint 0 Results, Sprint 1 Plans

Brett208 16 Nov 2016 09:03

RB and PiscesMike,

Umbra sounds like a fun concept for a game. I'm looking forward to seeing how it progresses.

I downloaded the trial. It stabilizes are 5-6 FPS on my laptop. I think it is running on my CPU only. It is always troublesome to get my GPU to work right, partly since I use it so little. My laptop is about 6 years old now I think, so it is probably slower then average!

Windows 7 64bit
INTEL i5 M460 2.53 GHz
6.00 GB ram

Re: Sprint 0 Results, Sprint 1 Plans

rbwhitaker 17 Nov 2016 04:43

Thanks Brett208 and Marcus42 for giving the first version of the game a try! We definitely appreciate your feedback.

Marcus: The game has a top-down perspective. There's no 3D movement at all, but something about the way they move (a combination of gravity, some drag, and a bit of randomness) can leave you in situations where it feels like that's what they're doing. It's definitely a problem, but we're going to revisit how lux move in the upcoming sprint. (We've already started playing around with it and have another solution—it doesn't have the randomness in it yet, and so it doesn't feel quite so organic, but maybe by the end of the week.)

Also, on your comment about the hard line of "alert" lux when you click… that's also in the plans. The intent is that lux are not very smart on their own. You can "call" for them, or signal them, but that doesn't necessarily mean they'll respond. So while at this point, I'm not sure we'll have lux wake up outside of the range, not all lux inside of the range will necessarily respond when you try to signal them. We've also talked about the idea that we want you to somehow be able to signal different types of lux more specifically (attempt to signal the fast (green) ones without necessarily also signaling the slow ones. But that wouldn't be perfect. So while you might call for only fast ones, not all fast ones will immediately respond, and some of the other slower ones will. All of that will hopefully combine to form a more organic/alive feel to the lux, and make them feel like things that are just on the edge of being alive, while also keeping the vibe of the player not controlling specific lux, but a swarm/cloud of lux instead.

Brett: The 5 or 6 FPS is painfully slow. I wouldn't mind getting the specs of your computer (CPU, memory, graphics card details) to know if it's something we should try to target. We could maybe try reducing the number of lux and seeing if that fixes things, but we may also just simply need to find a way to be more performant. We might try to make the number of lux a setting in the next release in a few days, at which point you could manually reduce the number of lux until it speeds up.

Thanks again for taking the time to look over the game as it currently stands. I know it's not much to look at yet, and isn't really much of a game yet. But your comments have helped immensely, and I'm glad you took the time to give it a try.

Sprint 1 Results, Sprint 2 Goals

rbwhitaker 21 Nov 2016 05:00

Sprint 1 Results

I think we got less done in the first full week than we did in the first full weekend, but to be fair, the week keeps us pretty busy with work, and I know I was busy doing my book project yesterday and a self assessment/performance review thing for work most of today. So there wasn't a ton of time for game dev, unfortunately.

But here's the link for the new build: https://bitbucket.org/umbrateam/umbra-public/downloads/Umbra%200.2.0.68.zip

Here's the list of features that we were able to complete this time around:

• Made the number of lux configurable. @Brett208, if you have a few minutes to play around with that setting (there's a Settings.yml file next to the EXE) and let us know what number gets you up to say 30 frames per second, that would be very helpful to us. We don't anticipate that this number will remain settable in the settings file forever. Just for now, in the early stages of the game.
• We made it so the version number displayed is not hardcoded, but comes from the version number of the EXE itself.
• We put in a pre-build step (PowerShell) to set the last revision number to the Mercurial commit number. So every commit we make will increase that number by 1, which is kind of nice. No manual work involved at all.
• We wired up the + and - keys to also zoom. There is a bug where those keys don't zoom the same way the mouse does. I believe PiscesMike mentioned he had a fix for that, but I don't think it has been pushed yet.

Aside from that, we also started playing around with some alternative lux controlling schemes. This new build is actually in a branch off of our default branch, which contains the beginnings of an alternative scheme. I think @Marcus42 will find that it doesn't feel like it's in 3D anymore, though there's a part of me that still likes the gravity-based system. Nothing is final yet, and even the current version deserves some randomness added in.

Sprint 2 Goals

I don't think we're going to promise any specific set of features for Sprint 2, with it being Thanksgiving. Especially after the results of Sprint 1. We'll get some time, I think, and our top priorities are currently improving how you control and move lux around the world, and getting the enemy, an umbra, to show up and do something as well. We'll just have to see how far we get into that.

Re: Sprint 1 Results, Sprint 2 Goals

Brett208 27 Nov 2016 01:33

RB and PiscesMike,

While we discussed in the forums, I thought I would post my results here as well so you don't have to dig through the chat logs.

I had to drop numbers of Umbra down to 1050 to hit about 30 FPS. I don't think the program is using the graphics card for some reason.

If you two design something to ping the graphics card, let me know and I'm willing to try it out.

Windows 7 64bit with Service Pack 1
INTEL i5 M460 2.53 GHz
6.00 GB ram
Graphics Card: GeForce GT 330M

-Brett

Re: Umbra (RB's and PiscesMike's entry for Competition #9)

rbwhitaker 30 Nov 2016 14:26

Sprint 2 Results

Well this week was not the most productive one we've had, but that's to be expected with the holiday weekend.

The one thing we were able to get done is that PiscesMike added in a feature that would tell you what graphics card is in use. If you've got multiple cards, and the game is running on a less great card, then there might be some things you can do to play around with your computer's settings and get it to use the right graphics card.

We're not completely sure it's working as intended yet, but there's a new build available with that code in it: https://bitbucket.org/umbrateam/umbra-public/downloads

Week 3 Goals

The first goal is to get back into the game and start making some progress again. Our focus is on a couple of things: some adjustments and tweaks to how you control the lux and get them to move around, and to begin introducing the bad guys in the game: umbra.

If things go exceptionally well (don't count on it) we might have a playable game by the end of the week. That's a stretch goal anyway.

Either way, we'll hopefully be making more progress than this last week…

Sprint 3 Results, Sprint 4 Goals

rbwhitaker 05 Dec 2016 05:10

Sprint 3 Results

Well the last week of the competition is now upon us! It's crazy how that happens…

Unfortunately (unless PiscesMike did a bunch of work in secret that I don't know about) we didn't make a whole lot of progress on the game. And as such, I'm going to skip posting another download.

A couple of small bug significant things did happen:

1. PiscesMike completed a little 3D model for our umbra, the enemy in the game.
2. We had some design discussions on how you will control the lux and generally play the game. It was some of the last big topics we had yet to flesh out, and now that they're done, we're a huge step closer to being able to build the game.

Unfortunately, we didn't even come close to the goal I had outlined.

Sprint 4 Goals

It's the last week of the competition. Based on past experience (the last two weeks have not been especially amazing) I'm going to not promise much.

It would be nice if we could still complete the things I mentioned for goals for Week 3—getting movement and objectives implemented, adding the umbra, and turning it into a playable game that can be won and lost.

I'm not holding my breath, though I do expect, no matter what, that there will be progress this week. I'm just not sure yet what.

Re: Sprint 3 Results, Sprint 4 Goals

Brett208 07 Dec 2016 08:21

RB and PiscesMike,

I tried out the last build of Umbra. It looks like the graphics detector PiscesMike put in is working. It is saying I have an Intel(R) HD Graphics.

The 3D ship looks cool that PiscesMike posted on YouTube as well.

-Brett

Re: Umbra (RB's and PiscesMike's entry for Competition #9)

PiscesMike 12 Dec 2016 06:45

Wow how terribly irresponsible of me. The competition is officially over, and I was thinking we had at least one more week.

I've been mostly away for the last little bit with a complicated and heavy real world 9 to 5, and some additional family issues. I hadn't had a chance to get here recently and missed all of the posts. It's sad that my recently means about 2 months. I guess that happens sometimes, and when it does, time keeps on slipping, slipping, slipping into the fuuuuture.

It saddens me that I wasn't more active here and in the project. We did get some things completed, and as ambitious as the project was, I don't think it's a meager effort. Obviously, towards the end we didn't make the progress we needed to but I'm by no means disappointed in what we did get done.

For me personally, game dev is a journey. Each and every effort produces results closer to my overall goals. Unfortunately this go around, my timing seemed to be a bit off.

We'll have to see what the future holds. It's still an exciting idea and maybe some more time can be devoted to it between official rounds.

As a last note, what I had been working on this week was updating the model a little bit. Here's a newer, rough-in rendering:

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"May the mercy of His Divine Shadow fall upon you." - Stanley H. Tweedle, Security Guard class IV, The League of 20,000 planets