[closed] Umbra... Now available on Steam

The swimming seems a bit slow. Obviously movement underwater would be slower but it just seems a bit too slow for me.

spongehammer, I am inclined to agree. Although I want the player to suffer sometimes, that's not what I had in mind!

spongehammer yes, I remember dying many many many many many times in an earlier release hahah so I'm pretty much prepared :}

Colludium barely getting a chance to sit at the pc in the last week and my attention span is 0 at the minute but I'll definitely be giving it a go when things quiet down here

Alrighty.... Some progress has been made over the last few days, although I'm still not 100% happy with the swimming mech. Still more tweaking is required, I think.

Tweaking can be rather dull, so I've been doing some construction as a distraction...

The previous demo level has now been replaced by a taste of level 1 and part of level 2. The game's not ready for full public scrutiny yet, and I don't want all of its secrets open to general release either. A couple of kind individuals have already offered their help with testing the other levels / beta versions, and I am very much in their debt. I am not sure of the etiquette so won't mention names here - but you know who you are - thank you!! If you would like to join me in this journey of alpha/beta testing the embryonic levels as I finish them then please drop me a pm.

water puzzles and dangerous bots... cool

This is for you MadSpy - a new water animation... using Math-Fu .

Yes? No? Maybe...?

I have yet to stop the animation glitches that sometimes cause me irritation (I have a fix, should get it done in a day or so...). The maths / array work required to get this satisfactory and optimized has taken a couple of days...

--image deleted-- see below

Edited to update for the addition of a water splash effect.

it looks great with anything but grey line :p

MadSpy

lol. I am trying to create a gradient effect but I'm having CPU utilisation issues....

OK MadSpy,

After a rather large amount of heartache and poor maths, I have managed to create the following (still undergoing tweaking, but you'll get the idea):

There are still a few more fine adjustments I think I can make to this... I'll let you know when it's done!!

My hopes that my game to include a full water surface simulation, controlled by a 3x200 array, have been properly dashed (probably not totally unexpectedly after my first trials....). After a lot of event optimization and short-cutting I decided it was just not possible. Asking javascript to do 3 equations on 600 array cells in a lot less than 16 ms was just not going to happen. Even trying it on MadSpy 's NASA spec hardware proved too much, and I suspect that European power grids noticed the time of the testing....

So plan B has been implemented and, for anyone playing a game, the visual appearance is probably just as good. Oh, and there is no discernible increase in cpu load. Phew!

Here's what it looks like now (I'll leave the gif above for a "look at what you could have won" comparison). You can see it momentarily on action in the demo, just before the piranhas eat you....

Just a quick note to say that the public demo version has been updated - some visual changes, mostly to the start pages and level 1. Cheers!

Level 3 now contains more stuff. That's right - stuff - that I am not going to describe in too much detail. Except to say that there's a hidden chamber in there somewhere... Is that giving too much away? I have to say that I would never want to work in a factory like this one, lol. Now to bug test to the max!

Just tried your demo again - really impressive stuff.

I ran into a bug a few times which seemed to happen at ledges (when climbing onto a log or jumping up a low ledge) where the character froze & rotated slowly. I recreated this by moving towards the first log & doing lots of key presses of move/jump/use. I'm using firefox.

As for the design, I think you need regular checkpoints after each puzzle (I had to redo the initial log push several times while i figured out the ropes & that was frustrating) & some hint text explaining new actions would be good. Eg. press X to push/pull, or UP to mount rope, L/R to swing.

Thanks mattb - really appreciated! And thanks for the bug report and observations. I can see how re-doing the log would be frustrating - I'll move the next checkpoint up so you don't need to keep on doing it when you get to the ropes. I'm trying to make the learning progressive - I want to avoid popup instructions or diagrams, but I also want to avoid having the player find the whole experience rather dissatisfying. Hopefully with the checkpoint in a different place that would improve things.

The rotating player must be caused by a bug in the on ground sensor and animation logic (the physics object for the player is on the ground but the player FSM is stuck in falling mode...). That could be caused by Firefox - I'm only testing in Chrome / NW because NW is my ultimate export target and I've found that the different browsers seem to perform differently, and low fps could be the problem here. Anyway, I'll take a look into it just to see if it's an issue that I can negate.. Would you be able to give the demo a try in Chrome or NW 12.x for me and see if you can duplicate the problem there (for me, Firefox gives about 57 fps but I can't replicate the problem)? If you can then knowing that would be gold because I'll have to re-do the logic (again... ).

Cheers.