Polychoron 0.1.1 beta released
This update to Polychoron brings minor improvements, bug fixes and adjustments to the difficulty curve.
The most important change is the improved line of sight testing. Previously, a patient player could easily lurk behind corners and find shooting positions where the enemy does not see the player. It's still possible but a lot harder. The enemy now shoots at the player even if it only sees a part of the ship. This also fixes the cases where an enemy drone is already partially visible from player's starting position.
There is now an option to draw a white wireframe overlay on top of the maze geometry. This was primarily intended for the mobile version to improve visibility when playing in brightly lit environment but I decided to include it in all versions.
The game's difficulty curve has changed slightly. As the line of sight changes make the game a little harder, the enemy weapon damage and projectile speed now increases a bit slower. Their delay from target detection to shooting decreases faster now but starts higher. Please let me know how these changes feel.
Here's the full change log since beta version 0.1.0:
- Added a tip about double-tap-and-shoot gesture for shooting in the mobile version.
- Increased ambient light and ship spotlight brightness slightly.
- Fixed wrong titles in video and audio settings menus.
- Added an optional visible maze wireframe.
- Removed broken debanding setting in the mobile version.
- Properly adjust GLES2 renderer lighting for the camera outside level too.
- Moved virtual shoot button slightly closer to screen center in the mobile version.
- Added a setting for hiding touch screen control overlays.
- Use all available screen space for roll control on top left part of the touch screen.
- Removed confusing red crosses left in place of destroyed drones.
- Fixed weird colored flashes at level start when global illumination is enabled.
- Lowered the frequency of emergency repair power-ups on higher levels.
- Fixed enemies spawning in positions where they are visible from player start point.
- Made enemies see the player when any part of the ship is visible.
- Adjusted enemy shoot delays for slightly easier start but faster decrease on higher levels.
See Polychoron game page for more information. Direct downloads have been updated on Itch.io. Android version update has been uploaded on Google Play and will be available shortly. Web version has been updated on GotM.io.
Posted on 2021-08-13
Worm Race from 1994
I have probably mentioned a worm racing game I that remember making a long time ago but so far I had no evidence that it even existed. I had already began to question my memory when I recently found a pile of 3.5" floppy disks from my parents' house. One disk in particular caught my attention:
Of course I didn't have any PC with floppy disk drive at hand as I'm not too keen on hoarding obsolete hardware. Luckily there was one external USB floppy drive at a local public library that I could use. I went through the pile of disks: A few of them were completely gone and many required multiple attempts to read them without errors. The mystery disk with marking "WR" initially seemed damaged beyond repair but I eventually managed to create an image of the disk and got access to its contents. And there it was, the long lost game called Worm Race with its QuickBasic source code! There is even documentation on how to make tracks for it (in Finnish).
Worm Race is very likely my first finished proper game project. The player controls a worm and the objective is to finish a set number of laps around the track while collecting colored boxes appearing around the track. There is a high score table for the fastest players.
The source files are dated in 1994 and 1995. The game is written entirely in QuickBasic. Soon after finishing this I switched to C language because even this simple game was already hitting the performance limitations of interpreted Basic language on a 1994 low-end PC.
A bit surprisingly, I was able to run it in DosBox without any issues. Here's the original version 1.1 in case someone wants to give it a go.
It's nice to know that this game really existed.
Posted on 2021-08-04
Polychoron 0.1.0 beta released
Polychoron has gone beta! As expected, this first beta update does not bring any major changes, just some visual improvements and minor bug fixes.
Here's the change log since last alpha version 0.0.10:
- Animate logo transition from splash screen to menu on game start.
- Rotate the camera outside the level behind menu when game is not in progress.
- Added current high score rank to level completion statistics.
- Animate numbers in level completion screen.
- Added short menu fade in animation.
- Fixed incorrect positioning of rail gun muzzle flash lights.
- Added a proper adaptive icon for Android.
- Show an in-app privacy statement on first run in the mobile version.
- Hide keyboard shortcut tips in the mobile version.
See Polychoron game page for more information. Direct downloads have been updated on Itch.io. Android version update has been uploaded on Google Play and will be available shortly. Web version has been updated on GotM.io.
Posted on 2021-07-02
Polychoron 0.0.10 alpha released
The next alpha update to Polychoron is here! This might just be the last alpha version before beta phase.
This update adds two new ship module power-ups. The first one is an emergency repair module that repairs the ship once on level start when badly damaged, the other is a rail gun:
When enemies are destroyed, so called kill markers (red crosses) are left in their place. The idea is that it helps player recognize already visited areas. I'm not sure how well this works or if it's really necessary. Please let me know what you think.
Enemy behavior has been tweaked again. Mines no longer require contact or damage to trigger. Instead, they trigger after long enough line of sight to player. This makes them considerable more dangerous. Laser beam wielding sentries now activate their shield when they lose line of sight to player so the player has to stay visible to be able to damage them.
Now that Godot Engine 3.3 stable is available, I have updated the web version to take advantage of some of its new features. The game now uses threaded audio which fixes delayed and stuttering audio in previous versions but requires browser support. Currently it should work in recent Chrome, Firefox and Edge browsers. Unfortunately, Safari does not support required features.
Here are the changes since version 0.0.9:
- Fixed a crash when picking up jammer module power-up.
- Trigger mines based on line-of-sight alone.
- Changed default gamepad movement modifier to L1 button.
- Use threaded audio in the web version to fix audio latency and jitter.
- Fixed too dark HUD colors with GLES2 renderer (again).
- Added kill markers (red crosses) indicating positions of already destroyed drones.
- Made explosion fragments disappear much faster.
- Added enemy communication sounds.
- Added icon file in Windows and Linux packages.
- Restructured settings menu.
- Added master and music volume settings.
- Added custom splash screen at start-up.
- Fixed laser beam occasionally flashing visible even when not equipped.
- Don't activate a teleport while it overlaps the player.
- Made tougher enemy types drop more score.
- Only give out half the usual score when restarting a level.
- Flash ship integrity value in HUD when taking damage.
- Added an emergency repair ship module power-up.
- Made laser sentry guns power down the beam and raise the shield when losing line of sight.
- Added enemy-piercing rail gun ship module power-up.
- Documented ship module power-ups in readme.txt.
- Use quickly fading emissive material color for explosion fragments.
- Fixed quickly repeating sound effects cutting off.
- Added --disable-vsync command line argument.
See Polychoron game page for more information. Direct downloads have been updated on Itch.io. Android version update has been uploaded on Google Play and will be available shortly.
Note: The web version on GotM.io is still not updated. I will update the version on GotM.io once they add support for the new engine version. Until then, you can play the latest web version here.
Posted on 2021-04-27
Polychoron 0.0.9 alpha released
This is quite a big update. There are some pretty noticeable visual improvements like debanding in the web version, increased amount of dynamic lights and more variation in wall textures.
I added a couple of new weapon power-ups that give you temporary extra fire power: The first one adds one extra base weapon and the second one replaces it with a deadly laser beam.
Enemy behavior has also been tweaked. The laser wielding sentry gun is now hiding behind a shield when it's not shooting, so you'll have to wait until it fires the laser beam and deactivates the shield. Other enemies have had their timings slightly adjusted. Let me know if you feel that some enemy is too hard or easy.
Here are the changes since version 0.0.8:
- Added two new unique wall texture variants to serve as landmarks in levels.
- Added laser beam weapon power-up.
- Added extra blaster weapon power-up.
- Added a shield to laser sentry gun to make it vulnerable only when it's shooting.
- Tweaked laser sentry gun shoot/aim timing to be more consistent.
- Added charge sound to laser sentry gun.
- Added more HUD messages to instruct new players.
- Made damage glitch effect fade out slowly while not taking damage.
- Minor tweaking to red flash effect to better show the direction of damage.
- Limit some ship module power-ups to higher levels only.
- Tweaked all enemies to turn a little faster.
- Added a sound to laser beams powering up.
- Made patrolling enemy type a little bit stronger.
- Made all enemies remember player location longer after losing line of sight.
- Tweaked camera shakes to be slightly shorter but more aggressive.
- Trigger temporary glitch effects on nearby "electric" explosions.
- Moved screenshot saving to a separate thread to prevent frame drops.
- Added one more particle layer to explosions to make them "beefier".
- Improved explosion fragment spawning pattern.
- Show HUD messages when reaching major global high score ranks.
- Added a tip showing required scores for a new global high scores.
- Increased the maximum number of simultaneous dynamic lights.
- Added a separate shoot button to touch screen controls (can be hidden in settings).
- Added noise to materials when using GLES2 renderer (web) to hide the ugly banding effect.
- Allow choosing the type of anti-aliasing (MSAA 4/8x, FXAA).
- Disabled anti-aliasing by default.
- Improved HUD scaling and positioning on different aspect ratio screens.
- Redesigned HUD crosshair to indicate destructible enemy objects.
This version uses Godot Engine 3.2.4 release candidate version. This is not ideal but the stable release is likely still weeks away and I need this update out before that. I will set up a maintenance update soon after the stable engine version is available. As far as I know there are no significant open issues that affect Polychoron.
See Polychoron game page for more information. Direct downloads have been updated on Itch.io. Android version update has been uploaded on Google Play and will be available shortly.
Note: The web version is not updated because the host does not yet support the new engine version! I will update it as soon as possible.
Posted on 2021-02-02