Dev Log #35 - New Pause Menu

I've finished implementing the new Status Screen, it will update as you discover and acquire new and amazing abilities for the suit, these abilities will be shown in the categorized tabs inside the Status Screen along with your health and ammo. Currently they are not able to be interacted with.

Status Screen

The transition from the Map Screen to the Status Screen and vice verse is a simple dip to black fade transition, this was just to get it working. I'll be doing a better one later when I have more important things finished and out of the way since this works fairly well.

Simple fade transition to get to the map/status screen and back

The Status Screen is accessed by either clicking the [STATUS R] button on the top right side of the screen, or if you have a controller by pressing the Right Shoulder Button. You can return to the Map Screen by repeating the action. On the top left side of the screen there's another button labeled [L RESIGN], this is used to quit the game. Make sure you saved at a Save Station otherwise you will lose any unsaved progress.

I'm looking to finish Demo 3 by the end of the year with all bells and whistles on it. So stay tuned for the occasional update.

NiTL is getting better and better every month, thanks for your continued support and I hope to present you with some more progress updates soon!

Dev Log #34 - New Beam Art

New spritework for all the different beams have been made and added to the game, check them out in action in the .gifs below!

Regular/Charged Power Beam

Regular/Charged Ice Beam

Regular/Charged Wave Beam

Regular/Charged Plasma Beam

Splitter Beam of all different beam types

This update was first publish on Patreon, support us on there to help development!

Dev Log #33 - New Year, New Demo

Happy New Year to everyone around the world,

Previously there were some big updates to the backend of NiTL which included complete overhauls to the player wall-jumping, collision, and slope detection, followed by new Crawler AI and last week two new enemies but going forward makes that seem small!

This year is going to be big for NiTL as development of the biggest demo yet rolls in, along with it's first boss enemy!

Read on for all the details, starting with a basic comparison photo:

Comparison - New Demo is nearly 3 times as big

In this photo, everything in the colour black is empty space, the white lines are just borders of the grid the maps are on, and the different colours are different areas within the map.

Now here's where I get into the numbers and stats on the maps of the demos, hold on to your butts:

First Public Demo (Infogamer Tech Demo):

• Total Rooms: 20
• Room size: 24x14
• Map size: 5x4 grid

The first finished demo ever released for NiTL;

showcased at the Infogamer Reboot game expo.

Second Public Demo (v2.5):

• Total Rooms: 62
• Room Size: 27x15
• Map Size: 10x12 grid

That's the currently newest available demo.

Third Public Demo (v3, in-development):

• Total Rooms: 143
• Room Size: 27x15
•  Map Size: 12x15 grid

Demo currently in production.

Demo Map sizes in terms of tiles:

• First Demo: 6720 tiles
• Second Demo (current): 25110 tiles
• Demo in Development: 57915 tiles

The number of tiles is calculated by multiplying the room size with the amount of rooms in the map, the number of tiles is equal to the size of the map in 16x16 pixel tile spaces (room width x room height x amount of rooms in demo).

The current demo is 374% larger than the first demo while the one in development is 231% larger than the second demo and if you compare it to the first demo then it's 862% larger.

Enemies currently in the game:

1. Dive Bat
2. Jumper
3. Patrol Crab
4. Crawler
5. Ripper
6. Runak
7. Wallask
8. Tracking Mine
9. Spawners (and spawn)

All unique, that's 9 different types of enemies, then we have the player mechanics:

Player Mechanics:

1. Missiles
2. Morph Ball
3. Morph Bombs
4. Wall-jumping
5. Bomb Jumping  
6. High Jump
7. Morph Jump 
8. Space Jump
9. Ice Beam
10. Wave Beam
11. Plasma Beam
12. Charge Beam
13. Splitter Beam
14. Sprinting
15. Speed-boosting
16. Environmental Shield

Aside from that I'm going to add in one more enemy type, and a boss, as well as put in Ledge Grabbing/Climbing as another player mechanic.

Then on the system side, there's fully functional saving and loading via Save Stations, Mini-map, a full map screen, a pause screen, room-to-room transitions complete with fade out and fade in.

After I make the demo I'm finally gonna make a proper trailer

There's currently no set release date, but the end of May is the latest for the first version of the demo in terms of deadlines.

I'm going to be using some free assets I found on itch.io by Luis Zuno for the new demo until I can afford to commission original assets for NiTL, but in any case it's going to bring in a breath of fresh air in terms of demo areas and landscape, you're not going to be seeing the same assets over and over again for the entire demo. Eventually I'm going to be swapping out the art used in the demo.

 ____________________________________

This is also going to be the last demo, meaning that after it's done there are not going to be any more new demos with new maps but only minor updates instead, like replacing art, putting in new audio, finishing menus, etc.

With 143 rooms and a area boss in this demo, that's one sixth of the size of the final game.

Bonus points for reaching the end of the article, screenshots:

Complete map overview of Demo v2.5

Difference between Demo 1 and Demo v2.5
Demo 3 is going to dwarf them both!

Dev Log #32 - Overhauled Wall/Ground/Slope Collision Detection

Extremely proud to announce that the wall, ground, and slope detection has been heavily overhauled.

Due to the way the newest available public demo is built, nobody is going to notice any difference, not that there were many slopes in that demo to begin with.

But what this does mean however, is that development is going to be much much quicker, and it'll speed up level creation by roughly 2000% percent due to the fact that I no longer have to manually specific what a slope and what a wall is for the collision detect to differentiate, along with placing edge colliders on individual tiles since the new system lets me make use of Unity's new Tilemap and Tilemap Collider components.

Overall I'm very pleased and excited to have finally done this, it's been on my backburner for at least a year now and after finishing it I've already made 4 different backups.

More news coming somewhat soon!

Dev Log #31 - Updates and Demo News

Hello everyone!

Long time since the last update, so here's what's new:

1. Switch Gates added
2. Wave Beam Added
3. Plasma Beam Added
4. Charge Beam Added
5. Minor bugs fixed
6. Unity updated to 2017.20f3

Switch gates are gates that open only if the switch is pressed somehow. This means that until you find weapons that go through walls, they're a one-way opening gate.

Wave Beam, the wave beam adds lets the suits beam do extra damage to enemies as well as pierce the environment, letting you open switch gates or shoot enemies that are hidden behind walls.

Plasma Beam, the plasma beam is similar to the wave beam except it only pierces enemies! The plasma beam does extreme damage to any enemy, dealing full beam damage for each frame it's passing through them. When used with the wave beam, it will go through virtually all objects!

Charge Beam, feel like your beam weaponry is still too weak? Charge it up! Besides adding to the base damage, you can now charge up your beam for a huge damage boost! When used with the plasma beam it's guaranteed to eliminated all but the strongest foes.

Minor bugs fixed, NiTL project file updated from version 5.5.2f1 of Unity to version 2017.2.0f3.

Using wave beam to shoot through walls to unlock the gate

Charging up the Charge beam

Using the plasma and wave beams to shoot through walls and enemies

Combination charged plasma + wave beam deals extreme damage

Combination of Plasma, Wave, and Ice beams.

What's next?

Well, now that there's an ample amount of enemies, player upgrades and miscellaneous features, I'll be working on a boss creature!

When the boss is finished, I'll be designing a completely new demo with it's own unique map which is going to be 145 rooms large, one room is equal to an entire screen's worth of space, and for reference, the size of current demo is 62 rooms . When that's done, I'll be release NiTL's third and last free demo.

Here's a list of features the demo will contain:

•  Player

1. Missile Expansions (Allows missile fire and increases max missiles)
2. Morph Mode
3. Morph Bombs
4. High Jump
5. Morph Jump
6. Chain Jump
7. Charge Beam
8. Ice Beam
9. Plasma Beam
10. Wave Beam
11. Speed Booster
12. Environmental Shield
13. Energy Tanks (Increase Max Energy)
14. Wall-jumping

• Enemies

1. Crawler Snail
2. Diving Bat
3. Runak
4. Wallask
5. Hive Mines
6. Flying Armour
7. -Un-named Boss Creature-

• Environment
1. Damaging Lava/Magma
2. Superheated/cooled atmosphere
3. Crumble Blocks (destroyed when stepped on)
4. Missile Blocks (destroyed only with missiles)
5. Bomb Blocks (destroyed with bombs only)
6. Fake Blocks (destroyed with any weapon)
7. Speed Blocks (destroyed only by high speed impact)
8. Save Station
9. Doors
• Miscellaneous
1. AutoMap (keeps track of position and automatically creates map of explored rooms)  
2. Pause Screen with viewable map
3. Full controller support
4. Full support for Windows, Linux, and Mac

That's all for now! Stay tuned for more updates.

Bonus pic, evolution of NiTL so far:

Dev Log #30 - v2.5 Update & News

Hello Everyone,

Here's the updates since the last;

1. Updated the title graphic
2. Entirely new pause/map screen
3. Scrolling backgrounds added to the entire demo
4. Fixed numerous bugs
   - Tapping jump button while falling in morph mode sets fall speed to 0
   - Jumping directly up into an enemy cancels jump instead of continuing
   - Fixed object pop-out from previous room when entering a new room
   - Fixed arm cannon rendering in front of the legs when crouching and aiming diagonally down
   - Fixed being unable to jump while on a slope when in morph mode

As of 07-04-2017, these are the latest builds:

Demo v2.5 - 64-bit Windows Build
Demo v2.5 - 32-Bit Windows Build
Demo v2.5 - 32-bit Mac Build

 Screenshots from the new build:

Starting Room

Mid-Game Screenshot

Left: New Pause Screen, Right: Old Pause Screen

A week from now, meaning 14.04.2017, I will be moving for the duration of the summer and development will slow down dramatically as I won't be able to take my workstation with me.

In the mean time before I move, I'll be making a couple videos of the new NiTL updates so people can see the gameplay without having to download the game first.

I plan to make at least 1 short teaser game-play trailer, and one long-play video (non-100% run).

The future planned features are:

• New Beam Weaponry
• New Enemies
• New Abilities
• Boss Enemy
• More Art

If you want to actively contribute to the continued development of NiTL then please donate via PayPal or the upcoming Patreon, any amount is extremely appreciated and everything is currently going towards more art, if you want to contribute but can't afford anything, sharing this DevLog or the Facebook page helps spread awareness of the game and increases publicity to people who might enjoy this sort of game.

Alternatively, if you use any sort of AdBlock or similar, you can whitelist this website address. As of this post I have enabled ads to be shown, but only on the sidebar and from what I see, it's just a passive ad so you'll never see a big banner or anything obscuring posts and content.

This game is still in what I consider early development and has no planned release date as of yet.

Also as a final note for this update:
When I finish one (1) Boss Monster, add the Charge Beam, Ledge Grabbing mechanics to the game, and 1-2 (one to two) more enemies and finished artwork for everything to the current demo I will be expanding it's map by roughly 25-30% and then declaring it a finished demo. This means that after that is finished, there will be no more updated versions of the demo made to the public, aside from bug fixes to the demo if there are any. Any new content will not appear in the demo and will only be present in videos and in builds of the game I bring to Game Expositions like the one I presented at in Zagreb, Croatia, November 2016.

Thank you for reading the update and I hope you have a great summer!

Dev Log #29 - New Demo v2

Hello Everyone,

Here's the updates since the last;

1. Fixed bug with jumping causing player sprites to glitch
2. Entirely revamped jumping and wall-jumping programming
3. Added Wall-Jump animation 
4. Added new enemy type: Dive Bats
5. Switched from seamless rooms without transitions to rooms with transitions between them for better gameplay and easier design
6. Fixed bug with Crawler causing them to sink when timeScale is 0
7.  Null reference exception bugs in GameControl and Dive Bat scripts
8. Fixed raycast misalignment with the player (if you've experienced the player getting stuck in a wall when somersaulting into it at high speeds, that's been fixed in this update)

 This demo is much larger than the old tech demo, here's a visual representation:

It's a very big difference

Here's a screenshot of the demo, there's definitely more art direction than in the tech demo however I have an extremely limited amount of unique tiles.

Newest Builds of the NiTL Tech Demo (UPDATED):





Demo has been updated twice: from v2.0 to v2.2.

Demo v2.2 - 64-bit Windows Build
Demo v2.2 - 32-Bit Windows Build
Demo v2.2 - 32-bit Mac Build


Now that the new demo is released, if anyone is interested in actively participating in helping the creation of NiTL, I'll be creating a patreon to help fund development.

Planned updates for the following months are:

1. New enemies
2. New abilities
3. Boss enemy
4. Hopefully more art

Dev Log #28 - What's Next

Hello Everyone,

With new player art finished and all the old sprites replaced, I can focus on other things that need to be improved or implemented.

Planned for the new updates are:

1. Improvement gameplay mechanics
2. Slightly different control scheme 
3. New Player Abilities
4. New enemies
5. Pause screen art

 On my list now are improved gameplay mechanics, mostly the jumping, I'm going to be refining it and entirely redoing the script that handles it.

After that it's a slight change to the controls to streamline handling the player, just a couple buttons swapped.

New player abilities are going to be added, and some are going to be changed;

• Environmental Shield is going to be changed so that it also blocks out enemy damage, and when full can be drained using the "Inject Energy Tank" button to fill up an energy tank at the cost of the full shield's charge, similar to when the shield is nearly empty, you can inject an energy tank to charge the shield.

New enemies are going to be added, already got concepts and ideas for 2-3 enemies. Having a more diverse collection of enemies is going to allow me to make bigger demos for everyone to try.

When you press "Start" on a controller, or "P" on the keyboard, you get the current map screen. That's going to be improved and polished with some art which is going to be placeholder but a lot better than what there is now.

There's be more updates as we go along with development, so be sure to stay tuned.

Dev Log #27 - New Year, New Player

Happy New Year's Everyone!

As the year comes to a close I'd like to share a bit of history about this project;

I started making NiTL in Unity during the summer of 2015, I had no knowledge of programming C# nor at that point did I have any experience with Unity itself.  With each technique in programming I learned while making NiTL, I improved and optimized the game as much as possible.

I actually tried one of the old builds of NiTL today, which are nearly a year old now. The gameplay is incredibly slow in terms of gameplay mechanics compared to the version now. But it was the groundwork and foundation for a much better version of itself. NiTL started out as a little Metroid-like made with Construct2 with a lot of potential, and thanks to a lot of hard work, it's a really good Metroid-like made with Unity.

After finishing the last of the new sprites for the player character, I was looking through some old files and saw a bunch of screenshots of old builds and it made me realize how much this game has progressed.

NiTL has come incredibly far from it's beginning as a simple 8-bit game, and as such, I'd like to thank all of the people who helped and continue to help me develop this game, with both technical and moral support.

Evolution of NiTL

New Builds:
Windows 64-Bit

Windows 32-Bit

Mac 32-Bit

Changes:

1. All New Player Sprites
2. New Player Hit Animation
3. Fixed being able to fire while hit animation is playing
4. Fixed aiming diagonal causing hit animation to bug out

Dev Log #26 - Updates

Hello everyone,

Some good news and updates; at the Infogamer by Reboot expo that I was presenting NiTL at, I told a lot of people that after the expo was finished, I would be fixing any bugs I found in the tech demo shown there, and making new sprites for the player.

I'm announcing that most, if not all, bugs in that tech demo seem to be fixed, and the new sprites for the player are nearly complete!

On New Year at 00:00, 1st of January 2017, a new build of NiTL will be released. This build will contain all new player sprites, and a bug-free version of the tech demo shown at the expo. There have been some minor adjustments to gameplay but they don't change much.

Aside from the new player sprites, I've also finally replaced the frog icon with something more related to the current state of the game. But this is also a placeholder, and a proper icon will be made in time.

After all the player sprites are finished, new enemies are going to be designed, and potentially a boss creature. With those updates come a new tech demo as well, so in a few months there should be a completely different tech demo for people to try.

Until the build is released, here's a screenshot to tide you over.