Stomach Acid Liquid Physics

Hey all,
just a quick update on what I've been up to for the last days. Got some physics going for the stomach acid at last :-) So now when your cells fall in they create waves and splashes instead of just sinking down without effecting the acid at all. I used this tutorial to get it to work. So a big thanks to Michael Hoffman for posting it up!!

I uploaded a quick little video to youtube showing the effects in action:



That's it for this post anyways. As always thanks for reading :-)

Systematic Immunity Progress Update: Bosses :-D

So I've been working a lot on level design mainly for the last while. I've now got the the majority of the levels done for the game. That is levels that's I'm happy with ;-) I've also decided to add in boss battles at the end of each organ!
Initially I wasn't going to have any bosses (except at the end of the game) due to workload reasons. But now I think it seems a bit anticlimactic to just play through all the levels in an organ and just move on to the next one without anything special happening. So boss battles it is then!

Here's a quick gif of the progress I've made on the stomach boss so far:



Click here to view a better quality version on Gfycat :-)

Thanks for reading!
Take it easy,
Felix.

New Trailer, New Name (again), Progress Made

Hey all, so I couldn't help myself. I changed the name of the project again...but this is it now...I promise! Anyway, the new name is Systematic Immunity and for better or for worse it's staying. I made a new trailer as well for your viewing pleasure :-)




So as far as progress goes I've cut back the scope of the game a bit. The game is now going to have three organs/areas (stomach, lungs, brain) instead of the originally planned four. The reason for this is that I feel I'd like to release the game in the first half of next year. And I'd rather release a smaller but well polished game than one with more content but less polished. If it turns out people like the game I can always release more content in the future. I have the majority of the gameplay coding, graphics and sound for those three organs done now so my main focus from here on will be level design, testing, polishing and all that good stuff :-)

So thanks for reading and enjoy the trailer.
All the best :-)
Felix.

Hypochondria becomes Patho(il)logical

So as the title suggests I've changed the name of my game from Hypochondria to Patho(il)logical. My ideas have been seesawing a bit for the last few months. First they go one way..and then another, but I think I've finally hit on what I want now, and so have something concrete to work towards. I've been playing with some ideas around making the game more educational. So I thought I'd have the player play as a different type of white cell in each organ and have some fairly detailed cut scenes explaining what they do and how they kill harmful cells etc. But then I thought it might get a bit too complicated, so I've decided to forgo that idea and replace the collectible lemons I have already with collectible tidbits of information about the organ the player is currently in and the human immune system. That way I don't have to worry about making the gameplay ridiculously realistic ;-) and can still have a bit of educational content in there. Stuff like "Did you know that the human body produces five different types of white blood cells?" etc.
Another reason I decided against the education cut-scene idea was that I thought the game would be too impersonal then. There would be no feeling of purpose. The game would basically just be saying; "Here, this is how the human immune system works. Now go play these levels!". My idea now is that you are actually healing someone who is sick. I think this will make the player feel like that are actually accomplishing something instead of just playing the levels for the sake of it.

So enough jibberjabber about my game-design shortcomings and on to what I've actually gotten done in the last few months. I'm onto the third of four organs now. I'm playing around with some swimming mechanics, so I'd say I'll set it in the kidneys or liver maybe. Not 100% sure yet as I still need to do some more research into the two before I decide. I've gotten all the mechanics and stuff done for the lungs, and I've re-designed all the stomach levels to incorporate the many changes and un-changes I've made. Here's a video I made showing some of the stomcah and lung gameplay (yes it's a smoker lung):



You might have noticed the little guys multiplying at the end of each level. These are the bacteria/viruses etc that you will have to kill. The idea is to reach them before they outnumber you. I'm thinking of having two difficulty modes. Normal, where they will never multiply past 15, so that you have a bit of leeway to lose some of your guys. And hard of course, where they will just keep multiplying until they outnumber you or you reach them first.
I've also recently discovered (to my dismay) that the game was terribly optimised as far as the graphics code goes, so I've spent that last while working on bringing down it's graphical demands. It was mainly a case of un-optimised shaders and lots of unnecessary actions involving rendertargets, but I've gotten it down to a reasonable level for now. I've added in some graphics options too such as, optional bloom, terrain highlighting detail, blood spatter detail etc so that if people have weaker graphics capabilities they can at least turn off the shaders and play on that way. For example, the three options for the terrain highlights are:

None:

Non-shader option:

Shader option:

That's it for now anyways. As always, take it easy and thanks for reading ;)
Felix.