Side note, I cannot -wait to get rid of this art test table. It served me really well but after staring at it for like two months and getting a much better handle on the art direction and asset pipeline for this project, I’m super ready to see it go.
Quick update;
Nothing super flashy to show this week yet, I’ve just been working on HUD and UX stuff with some really ugly programmer art, just gettting base implementations in so I can tick em off the list and make them pretty later.
I realized my planned control scheme was NOT GREAT in practice, so I had to do a rather large rework on that, it still needs some work but it’s in a much better place now and some of the limitations it presents are even getting my brain cooking on how they could be turned into strengths which is a good spot to be in. I’m having to digitalize some of the stuff I wish could be analog, but you can’t have it all I suppose.
Okay, turns out I do have a lil gameplay update today, please ignore the lightspeed-ugly hud assets for now(I’m workin on it!);
also please forgive the 10fps and game-boy resolution, its REALLY hard to keep gifs under the size limit
So I think this may be the first bit of gameplay design I share where I’m deviating from traditional pinball paradigms. I’ve decided to dump the traditional tilt penalty rules in favor of a cool little resource-management micro-game. Basically what’s gonna happen is your ball has a temperature guage, and actions like nudging are going to have a heat cost associated with them. The temperature guage decreases naturally over time, but if it maxes out, it counts as a ball-out.
So this is all fine and dandy, functionally very similar to existing tilt systems in traditional pinball. However! I’ve also added a manual heat-up button. Higher temperatures are accompanied by global score multipliers. So this introduces this really cool balancing act where the player is trying to keep their heat level as high as they can for the biggest possible multipliers while also trying to account for any abilities they might need on a moments notice. I think its a really cool mechanical addition, and since progression isn’t tied to score, people feeling overwhelmed by managing both the ball and the temp guage don’t really need to engage with the manual heat management, and can still experience the game in full.
As far as the VFX on the ball go, they’re pretty simplistic for now. I’m sampling a 1D gradient with a couple different colors using the current heat level and then setting the balls emission color to the result. I’ve also got a cool fake particle light to simulate glow even on my low quality presets where stuff like bloom isn’t an option.
There’s tons more to talk about on this mechanic, but I’ll leave that for another day. A lot of it is still pretty underdesigned so I don’t want to go into excruciating detail about anything that may or may not get cut.
quick lil addition with my current UI design doodle. If anyone says you need to be able to draw well and plan out every little detail in the design phase just show em this 
After I get some work done on cinematics I’ll post some of the storyboards. Those are REALLy special looking
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Teeny tiny update cause I’m in the middle of a big task, but I had to share this liquid animation. I’m -astounded- how effective it is for how little effort it took.
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This is definitely a labor of love and you’ve got far more skill than I will possibly ever have, so that’s super cool.
Thanks for inspiring with your progress updates! Best of luck.
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I like pinballs and with that sci-fi twist… its very promising!
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A… metroidvania… pinball? I can’t even imagine how that’s supposed to play, but now I’m intrigued enough to maybe, probably buy it when it comes out, haha.
Good luck!
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Hah i love this liquid animation trick. I think making a good liquid shader would have taken far more effort than what you did and it looks super good!
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This is such a cool idea, I look forward to playing it!
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Looks very nice, looking forward to seeing more! Are you familiar with Yoku’s Island Express? While it’s at least not visually very similar it’s the only pinball metroidvania game I know of, so it might be something your game will be compared to. So it might be good to be aware of.
Though from the footage above it looks like your gameplay will be have more emphasis on the traditional pinball gameplay and perspective while Yoku’s is more of a traditional 2d metroidvania with pinball movement.
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Thanks! I am familiar with yokus island, I’ve come across a few other really cool looking titles doing research to see other projects with similarities to mine. Shout out to xenotilt and demons tilt as well, they both looks super awesome
Quick progress update; no progress
At least nothing meaty enough to share yet. I’ve been poking around here and there but I took a LOT of down time over the holidays (much needed) and am currently in the middle of a semi-chunky freelance job for my old company that’s gonna take up the bulk of my time till next friday.
After that, its tables, tables, and more tables. I’m shooting to get the block ins for the first leg of the game in engine and set up with rules and transitions and whatnot done by the end of february. This is gonna mark the scope of what can be considered the ‘demo’ content, and a fairly complete (if short) experience.
I could imagine it like sonic pinball but on steroids?
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back on my grind and WE HAVE MULTIBALL!
This has an astounding amount of tack on design and engineering considerations so I’m really pleased the first pass is done. Still got a lot of work to make it playable but we’re over the ‘getting it started’ hump.
Aside from multiball, I’m also working on a bunch of tables in parralel which are gonna make up the first ‘act’ of the game in its entirety. My goal right now is to get a fully-playable, greybox quality demo out that feels like a (short) complete experience. Once that’s done, it’s gonna be a -ton- of playtesting and gameplay tuning, then a marathon of content dev and polish.
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looks sick
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Realizing I need to refactor all the hud code :') It’s an absolute mess and as I move in to start adding alerts and scripted events and all that, a basic score/high score display isn’t quite gonna cut it. At the very least, I have some rough WIP renders to pretty them up a bit so I can look forward to getting those in-engine. They’re still real rough but they’re miles better than the existing hud assets and are at the very least in-line with the art direction for the project.
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wow, that’s some super cool design work! very well done. can’t wait to see more of your progress. <3
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Been taking a ‘break’ from development to work on the first boss, got some good progress going. I think it’ll be a good time investment to have something cool and flashy to show that really gives a strong impression of the art direction since all my levels are super greybox right now.
It’s been a lot of fun trying to come up with a really efficient process for character stuff for this project. I defs want to get a decent level of fidelity, but bandwidth is definitely a factor. I’m going straight into the low poly for the mechanical bits, but I’m gonna sculpt out the organic parts and bake them down. We’ll see how this turns out
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