Lost – js13k 2017 (Update #2)

There’s about one week left for js13k 2017. As usual the jam has sequestered my mind, draining my processing power, thinking about it all day long how to push it further.

Here’s the story from last update, reconstructed from twitter + the git log. It’s been a fun journey so far.

August 19 – Added background stones using Voronoi. Keeping up with the goal of not using pixel art, got the idea from a shower curtain. May need some additional details to make them look like rocks without using textures.

August 22 – Infinitely spawning maps, generated on the fly. This was tricky but needed in order to not be completely irresponsible with memory. One of my goals was to create a huge spawning world within the 13k limit, that of course was going to involve procedural generation (but I intend to keep the world fixed by seeding the pRNG properly). For this I’m dividing the map in 4 quadrants, and based on where the player is I clean the opposite sector and generate the closer ones.

August 23 – Implemented a CA module for Voronoi diagrams and used it on terrain and background to smooth them out. I used the output of the Voronoi library and post processed it adding the neighbor sectors. The CA module I made allow simple rules as in “For a cell of given type X, if there are (more/less) than N cells of type Y around, change its type to Z, P% of times”.

Also added a jetpack for easier exploration. I still didn’t have a clue on the theme of the game, was thinking it was may be going to be a space explorer ala Samus Aran.

August 27 – Added complete zoom support for the camera object (still thinking if it’ll be used in game, for now just using it for debugging purposes). All positions and dimensions are scaled based on the zoom factor, and then repositioned based on the camera position (which right now keeps synced with player, but may change that in the future)

August 29 – Worked hard trying to add support for smoothly walking on the slopes. I almost got it but there were some edge cases where the player would become stuck, or go through the slope and into the rock.

The way it worked was by tracing a line between the player’s hitbox center and an imaginary point below representing the gravity drag. Then I checked for the intersection of the polygon sides vs it to see what side was colliding with the player. Previously, I calculated the slope of all sides of the polygons. Then when the player was walking against the polygon, I changed his y position too, based on the slope.

One of the issues was faced was that when walking between stones the player may sometimes hit the wrong polygon side (one inside the rocks) .

August 30 – Figured out the issues with slopes were going to eat up all my time and I wouldn’t ship without them working perfectly. So decided to change theme to underwater caverns.

Tweaked the physics to allow the player to “float” (weaker gravity) as well as removing jumping since you can thrust upwards anytime now.  Initially made a “radial” movement schema where you could rotate and then thrust forward, but then decided to simplify it so you just move in the direction you press the key to. Also changed collisions so you’ll be stopped completely when colliding with anything (removed slope calculations), but they were still a bit buggy at this point.

August 31 – Up until now, the player had just been a colored squared so I decided to jump into changing it to what it was going to be in the final game. I considered several options from the beginning but since I was not going to use pixel art, adding humanoid characters with animation would have been quite painful, taking a lot of time and I wasn’t confident the end result would look good since I lack the skills. So, give that I had switched the theme to underwater, I decided to use a rigid body (a vehicle).

Did some research on deep exploration vehicles (Bathyscaphes) and in the end settled for a fantasy bathysphere. Also went ahead and added some “bubble” particles, generated from the sphere’s fans depending on the direction the vehicle was moving. Then as a last touch added a simple emulated head light, using a semitransparent white triangle.

September 1 – Started by doing some needed upgrades into the boilerplate project, mainly replacing using the uglify module with uglify-es in order to be able to use ES6 features in the source code.

Then I finally got into fixing the collisions, so right now I’m checking the intersection between the four sides of the player’s “future” hitbox vs the nearest stones, and calling it a collision in case there’s any intersection. I’m also keeping the case of projecting a line from the hitbox center to the future center and checking for intersections, to prevent cases of high y acceleration by gravity. It works pretty well now.

Did some cleanup using jshint and upgraded some parts to ES6 syntax, just for easier maintenance in the future and for the code to look better too 🙂

I got my hands into a more serious high level world layout generation, I designed the fixed world map which is composed by different sections, each section has a given type (which defines the parameters for the sector generator to build the map) as well as expected connections with neighbor sectors.

After the Voronoi diagram has been generated, the generator marks some of the sectors as special types: Unbreakable stones at the borders of the sector, and fixed open spaces representing the connections with its neighbors, these represent the constraints of the sector in order for it to fit the overall map, the CA rules don’t affect them.

I defined the parameters for some of the sector types: The Gate, Caverns, Open Areas, Farmlands and the Darkness Abyss (In which you can only see your headlight)

Then I added The Gate and the orbs needed to open it. In order to win the game you have to explore the depths, find the fours orbs and come back to open it, without getting lost in the process.

I also resized the viewport to 800×600 (was 400×400), and modified the physics a bit by generating a bit of “lift” with the vertical movement (akin to the sphere having some kind of “fins”, I guess)

Coming up

In order of relevance seeking to make a fun game

• Enemies
• Powerups
• Parallax effect for background
• Vegetation in the foreground
• Enhance sector connection
• Temple generator
• City Ruins generator
• Volcanic Ridge generator