THE BIG BAD CUBE BOSS - Movement tweaks, Intersections - DEV.PLAY

SilviuShader here! To be honest I completely forgor 💀 about the existence of these posts, so here you go, a massive post summarizing what I've been posting on Discord and Twitter lately.

Since the Steam page of this game was created, many things happened.

Better Movement

First of all, most of the movement code was rewritten. I wasn't really happy with how movement felt when the page was created, something fell off. I had to rewrite a good part of it so it feels more natural. Back then, the movement was relative to the center of the road. Right now, the camera movement is relative to the center of the road, but the movement of the player is relative to the camera (2 layers of indirection). This makes it feel way more natural.

Intersections

Intersections are something I planned to add for a long time. The game wasn't built with intersections in mind, unlike PalmRide, so I had to do a lot of work to make the game support them. They also caused lots of bugs in the world generation, which hopefully are now fixed (but only time will tell).

Now, you'll see the intersections in game, however, here's how they look behind the scenes (and what I have to work with as a dev):

Enemies and bosses

The code for enemies was rewritten, now they appear more naturally in the game and overall feel better. The previous enemies used the same code as the player for movement, which was quite hard to work with so they moved naturally. I changed the approach, and instead gave them their own unique movement code.

Now, there is a long way to go until they are actually useful to the gameplay (multiple types of enemies, with different patterns), but so far, the foundation for them seems to be solid enough.

I also started adding bosses. For now, there is only a big fat cube as a "boss". It doesn't do anything besides spinning endlessly. but that's good enough for now as I only focused on implementing the bosses system. Actual bosses with different attack patterns will soon come.

Duotone

I experimented with a new effect I found on Twitter by one of Unity's employees. The effect is called Duotone and it can be found here.

These are the results I managed to obtain using the technique:

There were a few problems though. Firstly, the code I wrote for this effect was a huge mess. Secondly, it didn't look that good in the game after all, and I struggled making illumination look and feel good. The outlines were also hard to make look good.

And thus, I temporarily gave up on the effect. It probably won't make it into the game, but I may still tweak the rendering of the game to look more similar (in this case, it may lose some of the Star Fox vibe, however the dithered contrast I would implement may help enhance the retro synthwave atmosphere, going a bit into future funk territory)

Shadows and highlights

I also added shadows and highlights below objects. I think they look pretty neat.

UI

The UI elements of PalmRide are soooooooo back, baby! Now with fancy 3D graphics in the UI (Temple OS style)

TLDR

Anyway, here's a video that showcases the current state of the game, and all things I mentioned above:

Dev.Play

For those who don't know what Dev.Play is, well... let me tell you. It's a conference where game developers meet, attend talks, showcase their games and so on. Anyway, I am also attending Dev.Play this year, and there will be a booth where I'll showcase this game.

There will also be a Steam sale, and PalmRide will be on that sale during the event.

More info about the event can be found here.

So, if you are in Bucharest and want to see me or the game, we can meet at Dev.Play. Otherwise, you can still join our Discord server, and talk there. I show sings of life on Discord more than I do here....

What's next?

Well, we're preparing the game for Dev.Play, the goals would be to make the city more alive (props, music, and so on). We'll see how much we can accomplish in the time we have remaining until then.

The Steam page should also be updated soon to reflect the state of the game as it is right now, so that may happen soon.

Here are some things that we'll be working on this month (and hopefully finish.. at least some of them?)

• 3D Models for the city

• Song for the city zone

  

• Shadows (they are implemented, but the code needs a little bit of cleanup)

• Tweak the movement some more

• Fix shooting/ fighting bosses bugs (they are very minor, but still there)

• Greater movement range for the player (so it actually collides with the environment)

• Split-screen rendering

• Ability to compile it for Linux

• Story

Release

I was hoping the game will be released during the fall of 2024, but the things move slower than I was expecting, so I think the game will be ready about... a year from now... but we'll see.

For all of us (me, Asterix, COVALENT) life happened so that we can't really focus our efforts on this game full time, so we are kinda grinding in our remaining time (when we still got energy). But still, I like where the game is going, and progress seems to be going good, even though it's a bit slow.

I am once again, asking you to join our Discord server, because I usually forget about the community of the Steam page. But I check the Discord messages very frequently.

That's all for now!