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  • Collect the Gems; Godot 3 edition

http://www.mediafire.com/file/glf5cvpx4poep6z/CTG-0.16%2528Windows%2529.zip/file http://www.mediafire.com/file/qypi7qzgg4ty78w/CTG-0.16%2528Linux%2529.zip/file

Everything is being redone compared to the old Godot 2 version. Most of the individual assets are still the same, but there are completely new materials, new logic, new objects, and new mechanics.

Among the differences 1. Some mechanics see their debut a bit earlier, the old game had powerups not being seen until the first boss level (compared to the first level here). 2. You don't just wheel into armor pieces, batteries, and other things anymore. You get them out of blocks which you break by jumping on them. 3. The special objects (that appeared when all gems are collected) are gone. In their place are special red-colored point objects. There's even a few that are only collectable if a task is completed. 4. The levels are bigger, and the camera can turn a full 360 degrees. The player can move faster too. 5. There are lives and extra life blocks now 6. Enemies that you can destroy are in 7. The UI has a new gem indicator that is more minimalist. A center circle transitions from black to red as you get close to a gem, you also get a white outline if you are moving in the direction of a gem. 8. The logic in general should be faster, the code has most logic separated into their own functions, so less code being checked at once.

The controls are mostly the same, arrows move, space jumps, but pressing space a second time with the thrusting powerup can send you down at high speed (for getting rid of enemies and smashing blocks).

Runs at a silky-smooth 60 FPS on my new GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (this is a very common card according to the statistics from Steam, very much in the mid-range, so most discrete GPU owners should see it run fine).

I did the exported builds in a Godot 3.1 dev. version (Godot itself gave no errors, so hopefully it worked). By the way, 'Totally Lost' is not dead (as I wanted to at least get a demo done to see what full use of Godot 3's new 3D engine looks like).

Enjoy. :)

4 days later

Can't wait to look at this. Will download during lunch :)

-emo

2 months later

Finally, after a bit of time on using Blender Cycles and away from this, I got to work on a update and took care of a number of todo items.

  1. Invincibility now works (with its own tune and termination of the power after said tune is done).
  2. Sound and Music for the level, movement, collecting, notification when the exit is active, finishing the level ect...
  3. Checkpoints now work (with the proper reset of stats, powerups are lost though).
  4. Variable jumping
  5. The player is now properly disabled when in a lose situation
  6. A rewritten camera system with GDscript-based interpolation and multiple angles depending on the situation
  7. Exit is functional, right now all you get is a message (with stats) where you quit the game afterward.
  8. A couple of graphical boosts (tonemapping, reflection probes).
  9. Checkpoints have higher quality detection fields and collisions (thanks to the new 'Cylinder' bounds type)

The first level is about where i want it now, the next obvious thing is getting the hub level started.

5 days later

What bothers me is the player physics, they are special and un precise , turning is too fast. A simple ball would have been more enjoyable. BTW good remake.

@MagicLord said: What bothers me is the player physics, they are special and un precise , turning is too fast. A simple ball would have been more enjoyable. BTW good remake.

The movement does need work to make it go straighter, but I haven't gotten around to testing tweaks yet. I'm also not going to take the easy way out and do a rolling ball instead (already did enough balls and boxes in the Blender Game Engine). Godot has a lot of power in its ability to have reusable object setups, so there's no reason to not do a character.

Version 1.02

  1. -The hub level has been started
  2. -Working level pads
  3. -More pads unlock as levels are completed
  4. -Returning to the hub returns you to the pad and not the beginning
  5. -Working message boxes (the Hub and the Levels)
  6. -Early preview of Level 2 (nothing of substance in yet though).
  7. -Early working code for slope alignment (a little rough yet, but it's functional).
  8. -Proper escaping (esc in the levels sends you to the hub, esc in the hub quits the game).
18 days later

New version; 1.03.

  1. -Rail detection, you can no longer get stuck on rails
  2. -Movement stabilization, you are far more likely to go straight when not turning.
  3. -More of level 2 done, introducing turrets and a shooting powerup. It's not finished yet though and there is no exit.
  4. -Fixed pressing esc. in levels often quitting the game
  5. -Better collision and detection shapes for the checkpoint objects
  6. -Extremely long jumps in some cases is no longer possible
  7. -Far better slope alignment that works for all angles
  8. -Fixed wrong sound when falling off of the level
  9. -Various other tweaks that may not be coming to mind . It should be a bit more playable now than before :)
2 months later

New version; 1.1

  1. -Level 2 about done
  2. -Level 3 sneak peek (with a new enemy and a new type of spike hazard)
  3. -A bit of rework of the player's movement and a bit of rework for movement on slopes, now it's a bit less dependent on artificial rotation constraints
  4. -A bit of rework on the camera system, it now clips a bit less in areas such as tight spaces and when the player is near high walls
  5. -Crude main menu
  6. -Pause popup
  7. -A few fixes and tweaks, some perhaps being credited to a newer Godot build
2 months later

You may have noticed any new updates for a while. I can assure you though it's mainly due to all of the art related stuff I do with Blender Cycles. I haven't run into anything with the recent Godot 3.1 builds that would cripple progress.

I've been doing off and on work with level 3 and a key new mechanic where you can try to collect a bunch of green objects in a certain time limit (with the reward being disabled red point objects being collectable).

A couple of new things.

Spike waves, level three contains spikes that rise and fall, I have a script where a group of these can be children of a node with a script to make them produce a wave effect.

The new mechanics and larger levels are also generating more overhead for testing new stuff, I decided I would finally create a test playground like many commercial developers do. This helped me get non vertically-aligned springs working for starters.

14 days later

At long last, I found time to get a new update pushed out. Proper pre-release versioning now (0.11).

  1. Level 3 about done, spikes galore and large indoor areas
  2. More work to make the camera less crappy in tighter areas (which was needed to make level 3 work properly).
  3. Timer challenges (one in each level). Completing them will unlock valuable red point objects (which will unlock bonus levels in the future).
  4. A new hidden trigger object to discover, the target is for at least one in each level beyond level 1
  5. New logic to place the procedural sun in different spots depending on the angle of the level's sunlamp.
  6. Various fixes and enhancements based on tests within the new test level (for one thing, level 3 has angled springs that work).
  7. New message trigger in level 2 on the use of the 'shoot' powerup.
  8. New object and enemy types for level 3 (like empty ice blocks, flying enemies, and a super spring).

Get the newest version in the download links in the first post.

I tried it on my Intel kaby lake core ii5-7500T with integrated HD630 graphics but it ran too slow to be playable (<10fps). Maybe having option to toggle to windowed mode or turn down some graphics might be good (not sure yet how easy it is to change graphics options on the fly in Godot).

Options to tone down a few of the graphical bells and whistles will come in a later version, something I have already done in my other project.

How soon depends on how I balance the game creation hobby with my other interest in making art.

Version 0.12.

Not a lot of changes in this version, but it does have the start of Level 4 and a working GUI for graphics options and the Credits.

The Options mode in the Main Menu currently allows you to disable Anti-aliasing, disable lamp shadows, and disable Screen-space reflections (for a more low-graphics experience to ease the strain on weaker GPU's).

8 days later

I tried it again, this time with all the graphics options set to off in windowed mode frame rate was high enough to play :) .

Some stuff: The menu items seem to be set for a certain screen size, they don't scale with the window size so the menu / message boxes were off the screen unless I increased the window size.

I'm not quite sure what the logic was for the messageboxes telling you how to play, first times I played they appeared then disappeared so quickly I couldn't read them, I spent ages on top of the 1 & 2 platforms trying to work out what to do with them before I finally got the instruction to work so I could see to press enter.

It has a lot of potential but I agree with MagicLord the weakest point is the player physics. It seems very laggy and unpredictable, which takes a lot of the fun out, if you could improve this it would be much better! :)

a month later

Some good news on the graphics front.

I finally figured out the trick to make GI probes work, and this is an example of the results.

Now I can have a good quality mix of exterior and interior lighting without having to abuse reflection probes (due to their local ambient lighting option). As a result, I disabled all reflection probes in favor of nice voxel reflections, which as a consequence eliminates nearly all of the stutter during gameplay.

The GI probes are fast here because I'm not using the high quality option (which is too expensive for most GPU's).


Meanwhile, I've been slowing working on Level 4. The work has been more off than on due to my obsession with trying to make perfect renders with Blender Cycles.

5 days later
9 days later

An update, no new builds yet though.

I've been spending the last week trying to optimize the scripts for my game. Some of it may be my own inefficient coding practices and notable holes in GDscript knowledge revealed when I took a look at some of GDQuest's new Youtube videos. That being, using the "return" keyword to bail out of functions if certain criteria wasn't met and using smarter type checks for starters. So far, I have done dozens of smaller changes to the logic without breaking much in the way of everything, reducing the lines needed in some scripts and fixing up all of the red warnings and a number of yellow ones. Still, GDQuest seemed to reveal that I still have a long way to go before truly mastering the language.

Another thing, I've been starting to replace the game's .dae asset files with .escn files using the in-progress Blender exporter branch for Blender 2.8. It is definitely the future of working with the engine and I should be able to move all my asset and level work to 2.8 as soon as some notable bugs with the specific I/O involved is fixed.

10 days later

Another update, it turns out the major performance problem I've seen having was likely a Godot bug (because no amount of code optimization fixed it).

A recent commit means the newest Godot daily build has my game running at 60 FPS on complex levels again :smiley:

With that, I can safely let out a new build after getting level 4 fully tested.

Great news, thanks for the heads up! You wouldn't happen to have a link to the commit handy by any chance?