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.

Hypochondria Update #4 - Shaders

So for the past while I've been trying to dip my toes into the vast ocean that is HLSL shader programming....and oh my is it a vast ocean. But after some initial terror I've had some success :-) The two main things I was trying to achieve were some simple lighting (for starters) and textured polygons. I haven't even attempted shadow casting yet because I may end up bald if I try (from tearing my hair out in frustration), but I would like to give it a try at some point because it's something that I think adds a certain level of polish and proffessionalism to any game if done well.

So here's an example of what I've managed to hack together so far:

As you can see, I just have some point lights at the moment that simply light up everything underneath them (foreground and background). I'm not sure yet if I will leave it like that or if I will make layer specific lighting. Maybe it would be best to add it in as an option. I aslo changed the stomach acid shader to make it glow. Super realistic eh? ;-) I'm quite happy with the overall effect for now. I think it's a nice step up from what I had before. This doesn't represent the final look of the game though. It's just a start.

The other big change I made (as you may have noticed) is the terrain. After discussing with a friend of mine I decided that the terrain I had looked too flat and rigid. It didn't really suit the setting (inside a living human). So I'm redesigning everything to have curvy terrain :-) I made a bezier curve editor (basically the pen tool from photoshop) for my level editor so that I can quickly build these shapes. These are then triangulated (I think I'll do a seperate blog post on that) in order to give me a filled polygon which can then be textured and highlighted/shaded using shaders. This should hopefully speed up the development process beacuse I can now just build my terrain using the curve editor and the game will take care of all the drawing for me. All I have to do is make some nice textures in photoshop instead of hand-drawing loads of images. The texture in the image above is just for test purposes and won't actually be used in the final game.

In terms of collision detection and player movement for the curvy terrain I'm still using a path system similar to the one described in the last post for the "sticky" surfaces. But I scrapped that one and re-wrote it from scratch again becuase I noticed it was a bit crap. Works pretty nicely now apart from a few little bugs that still need to be squashed.

Here's a short video I made showing the first few levels with the above mentioned improvements:


So that's it in a nutshell for this post.
Take it easy ;-)

Hypochondria Update #3

Ok so it's well past time for another update on Hypochondria. And as I suspected from the start, the project is snowballing...like crazy. So that October release date is out the window and I'm probably going to be looking at early next year (I hope). Right, so as mentioned before I made and uploaded a demo a while back showcasing some very early gameplay and I'm fairly happy with it. Got some good feedback off my friends, and one very kind youtuber by the name of johnyliltoe (check out his channel here) made some awesome lets play videos as well. Go watch!

So since the last post I've been working o the lung section of the game. The two main things I've gotten done are "sticky" surfaces and the new player ability. The sticky surfaces allow the cells to run vertically/upside down etc due to being covered in sticky cigarette tar. I implemented this by using box2d edgeShapes combined with a path system. The edgeShapes are used to detect when a cell collides with the sticky surface and they each have a start and finish way point as well. So once the cell is "sticking" I simply switch off the gravity for it's body and move it along the path if the player is pressing the move buttons. The way points can be used to determine the draw angle too.

In the picture above you can see a simple example of the sticky edges. The yellow line is made up of multiple edgeShapes and the green dots represent the way points. These are generated automatically when I draw the curved surface. Here's an ingame look (ignore the crappy graphics)

The other thing I've been working on is the player ability for the lungs. In the stomach section of the game the cells can turn into little spheres and roll around. In the lungs the main cell can inflate himself into a bubble ,with the other cells inside it, and float around. While in bubble form the main guy can't move...but the others can! So they can roll around inside him to get him moving. Here's a look at that.

That's kind of it anyway for now. Take it easy ;-)

Hypochondria Update #2

Ok so I've finally gotten that demo up on IndieDB. It includes 25 levels + 2 unlockable levels. These represent the early levels of the game where the controls and basic mechanics are introduced to the player, so there's nothing too complicated or difficult here. Graphics and sound are not in their final form, and the menus are just placeholder for the moment.

Xbox360 pad Controls:
movement - left stick
run - right trigger
jump - A
roll - B
re-group - X
pause - start
re-start level - back

Keyboard Controls:
movement - A + D
run - Left Shift
jump - W
roll - Down Arrow
re-group - Up Arrow
pause - escape
re-start level - backspcace

keyboard controls aren't bindable at the moment.

Here's the link to go download it.

Also I made a quick little video showing a few levels being played. Nothing fancy just some raw gameplay footage. It's a little bit laggy cause fraps was being a bit dickish (it's really time I get that ssd) but you get the idea.

Hypochondria Update #1

So this update is a bit delayed due to a random holiday and some forgetfulness on my part. Anyways I'm currently working away on preparing a demo version of the game in the hopes of getting some early feedback. I wanted to have it ready last week but I didn't get as much done as I would have liked. But I should have it ready this week. I just need to do a bit more work on the menus and art, and I thought I might as well make some unlockable levels and character skins as well to give a better impression of what the final game will be like...and what's the point of trying to high score the levels if you get nothing for it anyway?... ;-)

Here take this screenshot: