[WIP] Creeping Me Out!

[Mixel]

https://twitch.tv/mixelslab - back with my nonsense.. today im going to try finishing mummies (which will mean drawing them, mostly) adding enemy dropped coins.. maybe.. Trying to solve the issue with enemies bleeding way more than expected, and so on!

[acidbottle]

The latest stream was awesome Mixel, perfect Friday morning viewing! Often I have to just watch with volume down but still get some great tips and ideas.

The snow level is looking great, some of the best pixel art I have seen in a game for years

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

The latest stream was awesome Mixel, perfect Friday morning viewing! Often I have to just watch with volume down but still get some great tips and ideas.

Thanks and any form of watching is greatly appreciated, I'm really happy anyone's giving it the time, it's actually helping my mental health a ton tbh, it's nice hanging out with people.

As content though it's funny looking back at the sessions I do a lot of iterating and rejecting ideas in a way that I wonder if it's frustrating to watch, but it's 80% of my process, haha.

I got Twitch Affiliate status yesterday which is bizarre to me but great. So much power! I can make emotes and badges and stuff now! I just need to figure out what I'm doing!

The snow level is looking great, some of the best pixel art I have seen in a game for years

Thanks so much. One odd thing about CMO is how 16x16boxy the maps are.. By shrinking/cutting up the levels I hope to make them all have more cool signiature details. Using Castlevania SOTN as an example I tend to forget how small each of the individually loaded zones is, and if I deal with CMO maps more like that, than say, Turrican's vast sprawling maps with very little variety within each level, I'll be able to make the graphics a lot nicer, I think.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by Mixel

I got Twitch Affiliate status yesterday which is bizarre to me but great. So much power! I can make emotes and badges and stuff now! I just need to figure out what I'm doing!

Yes, I noticed at the time I was logging out your watchers goal was 74/75. Congratuations!

[commodorejohn]

Originally Posted by Mixel

Thanks so much. One odd thing about CMO is how 16x16boxy the maps are.. By shrinking/cutting up the levels I hope to make them all have more cool signiature details. Using Castlevania SOTN as an example I tend to forget how small each of the individually loaded zones is, and if I deal with CMO maps more like that, than say, Turrican's vast sprawling maps with very little variety within each level, I'll be able to make the graphics a lot nicer, I think.

This is a good philosophy I've seen a lot of homebrew/indie games that fall prey to Big Empty Room Syndrome simply because they can, and forget that the point of space is to have stuff in it. (Also the difference between Morrowind and Oblivion...)

[Mixel]

Thanks CommodoreJohn..

I'm going to be doing more dev streaming in a few mins at https://twitch.tv/mixelslab - making some gradients for the levels that dont have a ton of parallax nonsense, then I'll be doing a bunch of unexciting optimisation.. Probably building the second half of the desert stage too.

I've recorded a gradient tutorial 3 times badly already so im going to do it live instead and edit that down instead.

[Mixel]

Been working on music.. Cut my audio usage in half by downsampling some stuff and temporarily removing one piece of music to replace later..

Now I have a fun variant of the boss music for the swamp boss for anyone familiar with 1500s folk songs involving frogs.

On my last stream i made a bunch of different copper variants in Pro Motion NG, for use in level backgrounds (though PM did exhibit a weird glitch that I can't explain that I'll have to look in to.. Might repeat the process next time in GrafX2, see if that fares any better) - either as straight copper (interior levels) or as the basis for further parallax nonsense.

[Mixel]

I've been archiving (well, highlighting) my old VODs over on Twitch so they shouldn't be deleted (also backing up locally).. It's a steady process but if anyone wants to catch up on me making stuff/getting confused, there's a playlist of that here: https://www.twitch.tv/collections/_JmZf0Kg1BYjMQ

Here's the graveyard I've been working on too, using some weird animating foreground mist, and experimenting with the new masks/lighting system.. [ Show youtube player ] - made an absolute ton of new tiles for this stage that'll be useful later too.

[acidbottle]

Your streams are great Mixel, keep em coming!

If I am totally honest, not sure I like the flashing on the light effect there, a steady light ambience would be nicer. Could be just a WIP for all I know so apologies if flicker isn't intended!

The rest of it looks utterly fantastic of course

[Mixel]

TY that’s v useful feedback!

The flicker is really difficult to both capture and time right, between the refresh rate and the video’s inability to capture it perfectly.. I guess it’s like the background rainbows in Agony a bit, where in emulation they flicker nastily but on a real Amiga they don’t.. TBH as many players would be using emulation it makes sense not to use the flickery effect.. I’ll try animating it growing and shrinking over a few frames instead. And then I’ll likely settle with it being static anyway, haha!

[Mixel]

[ Show youtube player ] Preposterously long stream today, half optimising, but mostly fixing up these three enemies.. I'm finding it incredibly difficult to keep on top of the various social places at the moment but hopefully will do better soon.

Progress is going well, at least.

[Mixel]

Contemplating revisiting the demo.. Not really to add new stuff so much as to update it to the current level of polish, and likely add a whdload thingy.. So the version people could test on The A500 mini would at least be up to date.

This’ll quite likely introduce new bugs so I’ll possibly need to do another mini test cycle.

Biggest changes since the previous version of the demo:
- Refreshed graphics in various places.
- Slight optimisations..
- Redesigned motorbike mechanics.
- minor gameplay tweaks.
- password system

I don’t have plans to add new levels to the demo. That’s actually a lot more work than you’d think with the piecemeal way I’ve been working on the game. Also, it’s a pretty long demo already!

One other thing I’m seriously considering is shrinking the world map so that it no longer scrolls. I keep going back and forth on this idea.. Hmmmm.. scrolling is fine probably. Either way I do need to slightly adjust it so that the Francis head icon stays in place in the current location while the player controls a cursor (possibly the same planchette from the password ouija board) to “look around” so I don’t have to do a ton of different dialogue for both characters for no reason. Atm it looks like you’re controllling them directly when you’re clearly not, or you wouldn’t be able to look all around the map.

[acidbottle]

Think it would be great to update your current demo to showcase some of the changes since its initial release. Have seen first hand, via those epic streams, some of the work you've poured into this and along with all the SE improvements, it would be a great taster for the finished product now

[earok]

Demo is definitely a great length already, though it'd be nice to have an up to date version with the latest polish for sure

[Mixel]

Thanks both, I'll try taking a stab at it tomorrow on stream.. Slightly later than usual (covid booster yay), but should be fun..

Will be interesting to see how small things get when i shrink it down again. Even when I made the demo last time it contained some redundant assets.

There are a few things I'll probably omit from this demo that were in the last one.. the credits are getting a little difficult to keep on top of so i might just.. not include them until the final game.

I have one tiny section of motorbike level that's broken and needs fixing.. The Eye boss behaves a little odd last i tried..

Other features I might add before branching off the demo.. Better boss health bars in particular i think are pretty important.. The map logic can probably stay as it is for the demo.

[Mixel]

Originally Posted by acidbottle

Think it would be great to update your current demo to showcase some of the changes since its initial release. Have seen first hand, via those epic streams, some of the work you've poured into this and along with all the SE improvements, it would be a great taster for the finished product now

After all that umming and ahh-ing about the password section I am definitely including it in the demo. Going to make people work slightly harder for their stage teleportation.

That was a really fun/productive stream (though maybe a bit tedious to watch, haha!), again got so much stuff done..

[Mixel]

Demo 1.1 is ouuut..

https://mixelslab.itch.io/creeping-me-out-hex-night - And CMO is on Itch.io, finally! There'll be some more interesting news soon too, but for now I'm happy to have this more polished version of the old demo out.

New Stuff:
Password screen is in the demo, yup!
Everything is slightly more polished, new graphics in various places
Reduced memory requirements
Better game logic
Motorbike handling very different..
Zombie logic much better
So so many tweaks..

[Reido]

Great work, Mixel, really impressive stuff

[acidbottle]

Awesome mixel, great to see this finally getting rolled out

Will give it a spin tomorrow and let you know how it went!

[nikosidis]

Thanks Mixel. Looking forward to try it out tomorrow