What is Squillamorph?
Squillamorph is a challenging action-platformer set in a mysterious mechanical world. Pursued by hordes of brutal enemies, you must use your parasitic ability to 'infest' and take control of them. Fight back, survive, and you might just discover your purpose. Find more information about the game on the About page.
Please consider getting Squillamorph on Steam and leaving a review. It is in Early Access and still very early in development but the more feedback I get now, the more enjoyable the final game will be!
Join the official Squillamorph Discord: Squillamorph Discord Server
Below is the development log for Squillamorph. It is GIF heavy and it might take a while to load them all.
Please consider getting Squillamorph on Steam and leaving a review. It is in Early Access and still very early in development but the more feedback I get now, the more enjoyable the final game will be!
Join the official Squillamorph Discord: Squillamorph Discord Server
Below is the development log for Squillamorph. It is GIF heavy and it might take a while to load them all.
Programming and Leaping Sharks29/9/2018 Just a short update for this week! I've been working hard to make it easier for my future self to program new features into the game. I've now got a few things setup using inheritance such as a creature parent class, which the Flop Shark inherits from. This will make it much easier for me to create more creatures! I've also completely reworked the player dash mechanic. Rather than using collision and moving the player with velocity, the position is now lerped between a calculated start and end position. It is much more accurate and now there is no screen jitter from bad collision. So apart from the less noticeable behind-the-scenes changes, I've implemented a leap mechanic for the shark (still needs a bit of tweaking though). It adds a whole new way of using the shark to traverse the environment! Talking of environments, the team and I had a big discussion about the first main level on Monday. Don't want to spoil anything but know that we have a lot of exciting things planned!
Something else I did this week is set up a HacknPlan project for the game, which I highly recommend to any game developers reading this. While I haven't planned everything yet, we now have a great way of scheduling our time to hit those all important project milestones! I'm sorry I didn't have anything more visually interesting for this update. I've focused so much on programming and fixing problems that I haven't had a good chance to work on the visuals. You'll see some new things soon though, there's some interesting concepts in the work!
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Problems, Problems, Problems!23/9/2018 Hey again everyone! Since the last post much has happened and I've encountered MANY issues. This update will mostly be about behind the scenes changes but there are some visual and gameplay updates to talk about near the end of this post! I found the main cause of the issues to be the new physics and collision systems, which annoyed me immensely. So, over the course of the past week I have rewritten the collision system, along with various parts of the physics, so that things work better. I had to do this twice because the first rewrite caused unintentional problems that only affected the Flop Shark. For those who are interested, the collision now works by firing 2 ray casts in each axis that change direction depending on the object's velocity. If the ray comes into contact with a collider, the velocity of the object is stopped depending on the axis the collision occurred. Here is a GIF to demonstrate.(the actual rays are much shorter than the debug rays you can see here) Thankfully, the new system for collision and physics seems to be working well. Phew. Unfortunately, that was not the end of the setbacks. Since testing things with more than one shark in play, I have noticed that game will occasionally 'glitch' sending physics objects flying around the screen, particularly the shark tails. I used Unity's Profiler to find the culprit. - I cannot emphasise enough how useful this tool has been! The Flop Sharks use an A* pathfinding function to find a path to the player. This was having a huge impact whenever it was called and producing the 'glitch' I've been seeing. I have spent most of today optimising the pathfinding method and reducing the amount of messy code involved in it. While I have not fixed the issue, or perfected the code, I have managed to greatly reduce the impact it has on the game. Yay! So I've managed to surpass all but one of the setbacks over the last week. The last issue is a framerate independancy problem which I will address over the next week and talk about in the next post. Now, onto the gameplay updates! This week I had a chat with the team about the wall scaling capabilities we want the player to have. Up until now, I've set it so that you can directly climb walls. However, we've decided to replace this with wall jumping, which still allows the player to scale walls but in a different way. So now when you are on a wall, if you move in it's direction, you'll slide down slowly allowing you to scale a wall by jumping. I cannot say if this mechanic will stick around, there's a pun in here somewhere, but at the moment I like the way it works. Something else you might notice about the above GIF is that Blobby now has eyes and mouth parts (mandibles maybe?) that move to create a 3D effect. I'm not sure if they work well yet but we're going to do some early play testing soon and I hope to find out through that. Lastly, I've setup a simple death sequence and respawn mechanic. I'll be tweaking the amount of slow-mo but I think this is a good start! Wow, this is a pretty big post but I think that's everything! The next post will be up next Saturday as I'm going to the MTG Guilds of Ravinca prerelease on Sunday! By the way, if you'd like to see some small code snippets in these posts, leave a comment and I'll see what I can do. Flop Shark Progress18/9/2018 Hello again everyone, sorry for the delay with this update! I've been busy working to get the Flop Shark behaving nicely and implementing the 'infest' mechanic. I've also been working on the physics as I've recently discovered a new problem that affects certain physics objects when playing at different frame rates. Anyway, here you can see the updated Flop Shark, with placeholder sprites, moving around. There are quite a few changes between this version and the demo version of the shark. Most prominently, the arms now behave more 'realistically'. The Sharks are also a lot faster than they used to be, making for more exciting chases! Infesting is back! It feels much better to move around as the shark with the new physics than it did in the demo. Now its just a matter of tweaking things to make sure it is as intuitive as possible to control.
Well that's it for this update, I'll make another post on Sunday! :D James BarrowI'm the game developer for Squillamorph! I'll post here on the devlog as often as I can.
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