Archive:
Lumo 2’s still in QA, but I’ve had a surprisingly low number of bugs to fix – three, this week – so I’ve started to ease myself into the next game. Which is… (working title) Gilby World.
I’m spinning out the Gilby levels from 2umo into their own thing. A few reasons for this: the five that I built were a loads of fun to make, and I love how they look. I also absolutely adore Kula World, the game that inspired them, but my levels didn't do it any justice. Not surprising, I only spent a few days on them, but it feels like unfinished business.
Why not Maenhir? Purely financial reasons. That’s got a couple of years left in it, and I can’t fund myself for that long unless 2umo recoups and starts paying my rent... and that’s not happening any time soon, because it still hasn’t got a release date. Yet. So, yeah.
This is the first “official” week of development on Gilby World, and I’ve made some decent progress. The Gameplay Framework scaffold is in, I've migrated all the bits and pieces I need from 2umo, and I’ve spent a bit of time improving my debug helpers.
2umo’s debug output was, essentially, all or nothing, which was fine as I developed stuff, but it got in the way once we were in alpha, fixing bugs. This time, I’m using console variables – one in each class – so I can turn debug output on/off, at a feature level, via the console at runtime. Tidy.
Gilby’s movement in 2umo was spline-based – time was a feature, don’t @ me! – which obviously isn’t going to cut it, so this week I’ve also been working on an entirely custom character controller.
Kula World’s forward movement is grid-based, but its jump isn’t. That pings you forward two units, and you land where you land. The next forward movement detects that you’re slightly “off grid”, and sneakily pushes you back on to it. None of that’s a problem in 2D, but it gets a bit more fiddly when you're walking around arbitrary surfaces in 3D, and the grid gets offset every time you roll 90 degrees. It took me a couple of attempts to get to the correct solution, but I’m super pleased with the code, and more importantly, it feels a million times better than Gilby's movement in 2umo.
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Source Code:
I'm slowly open sourcing as much of my code as possible. It's not generic — it was all written for a specific use-case, for specific games — but it could be useful, and it might spark a few ideas:
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