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.
Reactor K Updates30/9/2019 Hello everyone! This week's post is the 50th update and I can't believe how far the game has come since the first! Over the past week, I've worked hard on the Reactor K region to get it closer to the level of the Waste Processors region. This includes new visuals, Kobold improvements and boss updates! Kragon FightAfter a week of not working on the Kragon, I decided to come back to it. I now have a solid plan of how the fight will work and I'm excited to see what players think of it. So I don't spoil too much, I won't talk about specifics of the fight but you will see a bit of it in the GIF. I've now finished off the main visuals for the Kragon. I've updated the head and given it a neck, the foot and arm positions are now much better, and both guns are now firing in its attack. There's also a new environment asset that will play a role in the fight. I've got big plans for the scenery in this level, which I will hopefully be able to get done by next week's post. The fight still has a way to go yet, but I am really happy with the progress so far! Kobold ImprovementsAs I was working on the Kragon, I remembered that I meant to revisit the Kobold. The biggest challenge of improving the Kobold is the legs, as always. The way the feet decide where to go needed improving, but the main cause of their problems is the way the Kobold moves. Gravity does not affect creatures unless they move onto an air tile that is not next to a wall or floor. This means the Kobold can go up for a short distance when on the floor. This wouldn't be a problem, but the legs are stretched just too far when this happens and they have to re-position. To stop this, I added a condition that applies gravity if no feet are on the ground. This makes things mostly much better but climbing walls is more difficult, as you can see at the end of the GIF. I will continue to work on this so that playing as a Kobold can be as much fun as playing as a Flop Shark! New VisualsAs I was updating the Kobold, I thought it was about time for some new background assets. I've only got one completed so far but another few in the works. This region revolves around a reactor, hence the name Reactor K, so I'm making some spherical coolant tanks or something along those lines. Hopefully, these assets will spruce up the levels like the trash assets did for the Waste Processors region. A challenge with these assets is the fact that they are spheres. I wasn't sure how to normal map them at first. I have a rule to only use 8 directions of lighting for the normals to keep the normal mapping stylised. However, with a sphere of this size it looked bad. So this is the first time that I've used a smooth normal map on an asset, which I hope doesn't break the visual style too much! That's it for this week's post! This week I plan to do more visual work on the Reactor K region and more improvements to the enemies and Kragon boss. I hope you enjoyed seeing the past week's progress!
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You Are Being Watched22/9/2019 Hello everyone! Over the past week, I've worked on some aspects of the game that relate to its story. I am quite excited about this as I haven't had a chance to work the story in until now! I've also worked on mutagen upgrades to give the player an edge in the Kobold levels. Watchers This is something I've been meaning to put into the game since EGX Rezzed back in April. The three cameras represent something I incorporated into the tutorial level for the demo I took to Rezzed. While they don't impact the gameplay, they are an important story element that will appear throughout the game. They also add a bit more interest to the environment. This is the first creature-like feature that does not use the creature template. They only need to look at the player and it would be a waste of time and an over-complication to build them from the template. The mechanical arms that hold the cameras are the most complicated part. I use exactly the same method to create them as the Kragon's legs. I spoke about those in the last post. I'm pretty happy with the end result but I think I'll add a few more cosmetic elements to better ground the cameras in the environment. Boss IntroductionsAfter working on the Kragon last week, I decided to revisit the Flopalodon. The Flopalodon fight has one aspect that has irritated me since I first worked on the boss. After spawning into the level, the player falls onto the slumbering boss. Then after a few seconds, the boss wakes up and starts chasing the player. I really didn't like this. Upon seeing the boss, players became both wary and confused. 'Do I need to do something?' is usually the first question they ask. I never intended this to be how the boss fight starts, but I left it like this to focus on the main parts of the fight. However, I finally had enough of the lackluster start and decided to change it. I had a few ideas about how to introduce the boss. The first was a cut-scene idea. This would be a series of art pieces presented in a slideshow fashion with animated elements. While this sounded good to me, I wasn't sure about it. Not only would take a long time to storyboard and paint the 'slides' properly, but it might also be too much of a break in style. There is nothing else like this in the game, and to integrate it properly I would want to incorporate similar elements throughout the game. Overall, this seemed like a bit too much of a time sink. So I went with my second idea, an in-game event of sorts. Way back when initially planning the boss, I liked the idea of it burrowing through and bursting out of a wall as an introduction. So that's what I've done. I simply turn off the boss collision while it jumps out of a wall and with a bit of screen shake and rubble, it creates a cool and effective introduction for the first boss. I will polish up this introduction as time goes on, but I am much happier with it now! New Mutagens & Story TimeAfter the boss of each region, there is a reward level where the player gets to pick a mutagen reward. I hadn't made a reward room for the Waste Processors region despite having started on the next region. I decided it was time to make one. This means more mutagens, which are upgrades for the player. I had two of the three planned rewards for this region already; one that kills an infested enemy when the player ejects, and one that slows down time when they eject. The third is one that stuns surrounding enemies on ejection. Luckily, I already do this as default for the fuses, the machines to deposit points in. This meant it was very easy to implement. I also added a little particle effect to help convey what it does. This reward room is now mechanically complete, but there is something else it requires... As I've mentioned before, I want the story to be quite optional. This means I need to find ways for the player to learn more without forcing it upon them. The reward rooms are the only levels where there is no combat, and this makes them the perfect place to tell the story. As I was working on a reward room this week, I created the first story telling element; a sort of hologram animation. It will only play if the player remains near it's source, this means it won't distract those who aren't interested. The story telling will be quite cryptic, as I'd like to leave most of it up to player imagination. Regardless, I am not going to show much of it, and I have zoomed in to hide things I'm not ready to show. It was an interesting challenge to create the animation and I can't wait for players to discover it! I hope you like this week's updates! As much as I'd like to discuss and show everything I work on, I think its good to keep certain things a mystery. Anyway, that's it for this week!
Follow Squillamorph on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to stay updated. Don't forget to tell your friends to check out the game too! Boss Trouble15/9/2019 Hello everyone! Over the past week, I've been hard at work on the next boss. It has a long way to go yet, but I hope you enjoy seeing the first bit of progress on it. PredecessorThe boss for the Reactor K region is based on the boss that was in the proof of concept demo. The boss was designed to be similar to the much smaller Root-Toot enemy, which was the predecessor of the Kobold. At the time, I did not have an official name for the boss but referred to it as the dragon. As I am remaking it, I have come up with an actual name. It might still change but for now it is called the Kragon. At the time I could only give it one attack, which you can see in the GIF above. It was quite a complex fight though. To defeat it, the player would have to infest a spot on its back, which they could only do when launched out of a vent while the boss was shooting. The new boss fight will not be like this due to the number of players who struggled to understand the original. A Big KoboldThe boss is essentially a big Kobold, in the same way the Flopalodon is a big Flop Shark. This means I had a good base to start building the boss from. However, I found it particularly difficult to get the core things setup. This was partly due to me forgetting how my boss template works, and partly due to several challenges I had making a larger humanoid. I had big trouble with positioning the body parts in the right places. For some reason, they kept wanting to be in very different positions to the ones I specified. It felt more challenging than it should have but I finally managed to get the essentials setup and working. It is difficult to put the body parts in the right places without having artwork, so this had to become a priority. I have not done the artwork for a boss before, Connor made the sprites for the Flopalodon and the original dragon boss. Things were made easier because I could use the old sprites as a base but they still needed to be reworked to fit the new art style. Even so, certain parts had to be completely redone, such as the legs. The sprites are not finished yet, I haven't even begun altering the head, but I am pleased with the direction they are going in. Some Legwork RequiredI have previously discussed that the legs of the Kobold are a big challenge to get working; I still need to work on the leg movement for humanoids. To get the same leg style for the Kragon, I simply took the Kobold leg code and scaled it up a bit. This worked perfectly, but it wasn't a good thing. Making the legs bigger exposed the problems with them. Limbs with one joint, the Flop Sharks arms for example, are relatively easy for me to make. When another is added, it gets more complicated. Unlike most other parts of the creatures, the knee and elbow joints are not physics objects. This means I can't connect them in the same way as everything else. For the Kobold's legs I came up with some position calculations that worked well enough. There is some stretching that occurs but it looks alright. This didn't work for the Kragon, so I started again from scratch. I've made some new calculations that mean the legs cannot stretch apart and it looks so much better. I am very pleased with the new method, which I will probably start using with the Kobold. However, doing this created a new problem to solve, The legs will appear further than the feet at times, meaning that when the feet are on the floor the legs will be well into the floor. It took me a while to work out a solution to this problem. I had to draw some diagrams to get my head around it. The solution does create a tiny bit of stretching in the leg if the foot becomes too close to the hip, but it works well enough. So that's one leg issue solved; the next is making the boss look as though it is able to support its weight by positioning the feet properly. That's it for this post! I know the content wasn't as varied as normal but the Kragon took up most of my development time this week. Nevertheless, I hope you enjoyed seeing the recent progress!
Follow Squillamorph on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to stay updated. Don't forget to tell your friends to check out the game too! James BarrowI'm the game developer for Squillamorph! I'll post here on the devlog as often as I can.
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