Hey folks!
It's been a bit slow lately. That horrible thing called Real Life have been creeping upon us.
But there have been some progress anyway.
Afe have reworked parts of the saving system and fixed various things.

I changed some of the tiles, separating the decorative elements and the actual colliding stuff.
Then I went on to redo the test level (since it broke when saving system changed).
Reloading the level without restartinghave not worked before (basic, i know) but I finally got around to fixing it.

I added quite a lot of decorative elements to make things look more lively. Since our editor is the actual game I can test the level while editing. I noticed the game getting laggier and laggier as I added more things.
Crap, I thought, and figured it was because of the larger amount of decorative items. We do have all items present in the physics "world", even the non-colliding decorative items, so I thought that was the problem.
Through a lot of trouble I managed to separate them. One of the problems was that we set the item-positions from their physics body. Since I had removed the physics body from the decoration items I had to make an ugly hack to make that work. This also affected the editor part, selecting and moving stopped working. More ugly hacks, but finally it worked.

Through the hell, I dreamed about my lovely refactored project, where none of these problems would have occured.

I was coding on my laptop in bed at the time, very ergonomical, and hot... in an entirely non-sexual way.
While fixing this did provide a slight performance increase, not blocking the airflow to the computer proved to have much bigger impact on performance... *sigh*

The moral of the story? When in bed, don't do things prematurely, especially optimizations.

On a more serious note, I'm starting to notice that it's quite hard to construct puzzles that are both intuitive and hard with the mechanics we have now. A lot of work goes in to blocking "unwanted" solutions and trying to lead the player towards your intended solution.

I have only made a few puzzles so far, maybe it will get easier with practice? :)


I use decorative items to hide the low-res nature of the ground "mesh".

Today was another quite productive day.
Afe implemented editing for the ground and I made a concept sketch and tried to implement it in game. We also tweaked the movement a bit, but still not really satisfied with the feeling yet... Doesn't feel exact enough.

We also had a long discussion about a lot of things regarding the game. We tried to figure out things like if you were going to be able to die in Chomp and how those kind of things would affect the way people felt when playing.
I want Chomp to be a pleasant experience, gameplay wise as well as artisticly.
In my mind this is not the game where you would tear your hair out before, hours later, figuring out the solution to a puzzle. Obviously it's going to be hard to balance.

Every day new gameplay and puzzle ideas comes to me, and we are soon at a point where we can start testing which ones that are actually fun to play. Can't wait really :)


Ground Editing


This was the concept art. We are not quite here yet, but it's coming along fine.
I'm quite satisfied with the look of this, maybe I'll blow it up an put it on my wall :)

Well well, over and out!
/Hannes

Great day today. Finished recording the drums for the bands first song, downed Yogg Saron with the WoW guild... And even got time left for some Chomping :)

Afe added ground. A segmented solution that I think will work splendidly with some graphic overlays. This is todays big thing, awesome!

I imported the animations I made and fixed a few small things, like beeing able to toggle debug-draw-mode in-game, turning Chomp towards the movement direction and an idle-animation.

Had an interesting bug where you could only jump at some times. Turned out that the characters physics representation was rotating as you ran around and the "can jump?" detector rotated with it. Really hard to figure out without the debug-draw. Fixed simply by not allowing rotations.

I have also started working an the overall structure and story of the game, sectioning it up and starting to think about fitting graphics and musical styles for the different parts.
Going for a cozy, almost childrens-book, feeling, but with sharp teeth.


We got ground!


... and a debug-draw-mode :)

/Hannes

The last few days have been unproductive due to Real Life™ events.
But finally I got the finger out of my *** and started animating.
Got some useful hints and critique from Tove, fixing a lot of small problems.


It's not perfect, but a good first try, don't-cha-think?
With a bit of tail-wag I think it'll look sweet.

On the programming side of things only a few simple engine stuff have been added. Like the ability to eat berries.

Lots more work needed! Want to continue right now. But really need the sleep!

Huggies to everyone (Chomp makes me all warm and fuzzy inside :) )
/Hannes

Hey folks!

Armed only with a computer, a ballpoint pen, and an old envelope, me and Tove (artist extraordinare and overall wonderful person) sat up late last night, working on the character design of our hero, Chomp.

Now, he looks a whole lot more defined and expressive. Got some nice ideas for his motion scheme, can't wait to start animating.

Also, we have started to look at designs for a few friends of chomp. Cuddly little delicious fellas :) The gameplay ideas around this is growing in my head.

If my far gone sleep-depravation doesn't kill me tonight, maybe I'll start to work on a new walk cycle.

So, time for a little update.

We have been busy with Chomp, our new (and first) flash-game.
Above you can se an actual screenshot of the game. We have multi-parallax-scrolling backgrounds, physics (through box2dflash), simple level editing, walkcycle on Chomp, and a few other things. Still a ton of work left to do, but we are getting there!

Feels good to be back doing some game development :)

Oh, and also, I have made a short music-test that I wanna share with you: Chomp - Golden morning(preview) (mp3)

Take care!
/Hannes

Concept mockup: