Project Zerb , Update : April 2018 Release demo ver 1.1

Game

Project Zerb

B-Gam3zy @B-Gam3zy

6 years ago

This release sees mostly performance code fixes, some graphical polish, and a few new game play elements.

Performance:

Setting the Unity Play settings to “Simple” yields frame rates over 120 FPS (this is the preferred setting). I had a lot of frame rate dependent code in the project that worked fine when the editor was running at 70-90 FPS. But at higher frame rates, meant everything was just happening too fast, for example scene fade in and fade outs, ai enemy jumps lost their arcs and were steeper (horz velocity reduced too quick), tutorial scene ran at 300 FPS so fast it did not register certain events causing tutorial not to progress etc…. The old code used the following frame rate dependent code “ var += 1 ; ” to update a value every frame. Over the past month I created a simple “Time.deltaTime” frame rate independent value changer ( seen java example below):

		
			// frame rate independent timer & or value chg     
var  speed           : float ;
var  timer           : float ;
var  IncreaseByVal   : float ;
speed = speed + ( IncreaseByVal * Time.deltaTime) ;   
if ( timer > 0 ) { timer = timer – (1 * Time.deltaTime);  }
//  1 * Time.deltaTime provides an approximation of a real timer , a 
// value that changes by an increment of 1 each second , and the 
// updating variables  (speed , time )  need to be float variables.

Graphics :

Level : Lava Surface

I did a beauty pass on Level 1 the Lava Surface, adding highlights to some of the lava, tweaking background land masses, adding a comet in space, and finally did some justice to the volcano that was the original place holder sprite when I started this project many many years ago. Now the volcano has lava streaming down, volcanic rocks rolling down its surface, a fresh coat of pixels around the rim, it’s a definite improvement from the original and pops from a far!

Level : Crystal Cave

Rock Textures: I was never happy with the cliff rock face texture, it never felt homogeneous. It seemed busy lacking depth. I went back to the main texture and color corrected eliminating the noise of the pink flakes throughout, making the texture more monochromatic and more unified with the surroundings. I always wished it was more of a simplified cartoonish texture (which I failed to create countless times) but now this version works as a sort of self-similar hyper reality graphical texture that is sort difficult to perceive its repetition. I also addressed the graphics of the lip separating the ground from the cliff face which felt too busy/mushy. I repainted all sprites with lips, the result provides more fidelity, more of an alien look, and creates more contrast separating the playable surface textures from the foreground textures. Those changes of course meant I had to tweak the light/dark values of almost the entire level. I feel overall the level reads better, and has more depth.

Other:

I also increased the graphical size of the boss battle arena Floor, which always felt to skinny. The plus = characters, especially Punk Boss now seem more grounded in the environment, the Minus = we lose some of the players silhouette making a little harder to see Zerbs legs/position as they kind of dissolve into the floor sprites behind him, instead of what used to be the darkness of the background. The waterfall got some Bling, now stretched glowy particles descend the falls!

Game Play elements:

Obstacles:

I added a few timed obstacles in Level 1 and 2, lava balls, and acid drips and the New BOOM BUBBLE in level 1, a gassy bubble that emits toxic gas. There can only be one Boom Bubble at a time due to its gnarly lethality! Now popping bubbles will pop other bubbles and blow up bubble crater emitters. I sort of embraced the unified interactive world that has been gaining popularity in games like Zelda and Farcry 5 where objects that would do damage to the player also do damage to enemies. While it’s pretty funny to see a monster jump at you, just to fall short, and die in a fire pit, it also removes some of the challenge for the player, ( sort of like when Ai companions end up shooting all the bad guys and your like “wait! I am the hero of this is my frigin adventure”!) so I used it wherever I could without sacrificing too much of the challenge. Luckily it was as easy as changing the collider tags from “dmg1toPlayer “ to “dmg1toAll” .

Player Feedback:

{ Gun Recoil p=,=> } now the player moves backwards when shooting, which increases with each laser power up. { !~~ Screen Shake ~~ ! } I added additional screen shake which is all the rave right now in indie games. When taking damage there is a bit of clockwise/counter-clockwise camera rotation, and a fake blur effect of rendering & shaking a duplicate orthographic camera layer over original orthographic camera layer containing all interactive graphics. Unfortunately this doubles the draw count each frame but doesn’t seem to have much of a performance impact and it’s short lived. { ||<= Knock Off Rope =>|| } unlike some games, Zerb can fight while climbing, now if he is hit by enemy or projectile while on a rope he will momentarily fall off the rope. The Rope used to be a safe zone now not so much. It’s pretty funny in the first part of Crystal cave if you hang on short rope and don’t kill the monsters, they will randomly jump up to the top of the right cliff and then jump out towards the player knocking him off the rope, it’s not really scripted to happen like that, it just emerges from the open conditions in the ai code and the new Knock Off Rope code!