Author: yurio

Project Novae is back!

Hello everyone! It’s been a long while since the last update in June last year, and that’s largely because development has been extremely stagnant this last semester. Due to a lot of RL constraints and general development issues, not a lot of things were done in this period and some team members have been unable to work on the project. 

However, in January, Novae got picked up back again, some team members quit and others joined, and now the project is finally back at a decent speed. Today I’ll update on what you can expect for the project’s future.

The development updates will actually be frequent as it was originally promised, and though sometimes the months may be slow, we’ll always try to show something. Our twitter account, @projectnovae, is also going to be posting much more frequently and engaging more with the community in general, multiple times a week ideally, so please, if you’re interested in the project, follow us over there!

We have new members on the team! Since a lot of our level designers needed to step down, I’ve recruited three prominent designers from the Level Palace community to help us. They each wrote a short intro:

 

“Hey there, I’m Jon/LaserTrap_ and I’m a musician of several trades, also helping out with this game’s level design. As a huge Metroidvania fan it’s very exciting to have an opportunity to work on a new one, and watch the team’s work become a reality.”

 

“I’m MrGerund, mostly known as The Flying Dutchman.

I’m just another leveldesigner helping out with wanting to die creating something huge! I take my leveldesign and criticism seriously so that’ll be something worth working with i suppose… Alright yes kthnxbye”

 

“Hi, I’m Orangetack. I’ll be doing some of the level design for Project Novae. I’ve been interested in game design ever since playing Mario as a kid. I’m really happy to be able to contribute to a full Metroidvania game!”

Regarding the game itself, our game has been converted to C# for easier future development. The first area is being steadily worked on, as well as being adjusted to fit a newer vision. All music tracks relating to it are complete, the enemies that will appear in this area were almost all sprited, and tiles/objects are also being worked on.

The map’s design for the first area is almost final, and soon there should be a rough playable version of it. I’m extremely excited to share of it with everyone eventually, so keep your eyes peeled for that!

Speaking of eyes, I couldn’t possibly go this update without showing anything, so below I’ve compiled some sprites we’ve finished that weren’t showcased yet:

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These are all enemies that show up in the first area. More things will be gradually shown in future updates and twitter, so stay tuned!

I close this development post thanking everyone for taking the time to check our game out. and this hopefully will be the start of a new phase for our game: one where things are done and shown here more often. Our hopes is that Novae is successfully developed and shared to the public, because what we have is truly special. I’m excited to show more of it in the future, and hope you’ll end up feeling the same.

 

See you again soon,

-Yuri, director of Novae.

Project Novae: June Update

Hello everyone, it’s time for another update on our project! I know you’ve been waiting long for this, and we’ve been hard at work to make this game happen.

Today we’ll give you updates on all fronts of our project, share a bit of everything and update you on our status.

Before all that however, I’d like to announce that one of our team members is working on a brand new and professional website, so be on the lookout for that soon!

So let’s dive in.

The designers of Project Novae have been with hands full working on all sorts of things, including map designs, enemies, progression… and all the things we need to make this game enjoyable.

Currently, our focus has been centered on the first big area of the game, which I’m happy to announce is completely past its conception, and the only thing left for it to be complete is to translate it into our game’s engine. This also means that in the next update we’ll have much more concrete things to showcase, and I hope you’re as excited as us to see it!

In the art department, everyone has been working hard on making sprites and animations for the game, as well as miscelaneous art for other things.

Today we’ll showcase some examples of the things we’ve been doing: first is a cover image for our website made by Pawn: Novae_Cover

And these are two of our enemies for the first section designed by Forgotten, Karyete and Yuri, aptly named Trashcrawl and Watcher:

 

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Onto the story! We’ve been working hard, trying to figure out a flow of events and different things that truly pull the story together. Not only have we finally figured out a way to tie the story together, but we’ve also nailed the flow of events in the first major area of the game! We’ve also discussed Weaver’s world and how they and their friends live in and interact with this world. There’s a few surprises coming your way soon, too.

For the music, our main composer, Harmless, has a few words:

“As the composer for Project Novae, I have been awfully busy making sure things get done in the music department. Five full tracks of music have been made, one of them featuring three separate MP3 files for maximum cutscene coverage. In other words, we got a lot of music done, and we’re only making more from here.

In addition, I am currently working on the boss theme for the City area, as well as the Main Menu theme and various other goodies. Not everything will be revealed so that you can experience it all when the game is released, but here is a sample of a track being used for one of the levels of the game.”

Project_Novae_02_-_8_Legged_Dance.mp3
Jellonator, our programmer also has some things to say:

“On the programming side of things, a lot of the recent development is preparing things for future development. For example, a lot of code was rewritten from gdscript to C#, the engine was updated to Godot 3.1 stable, etc. However, there are a few features that were added that I can show.

Minimap

Captura de tela 2019-06-07 02.01.04

A minimap has been added to the game. It shows rooms that have already been explored.

Eyeball Enemy

A basic eyeball enemy was implemented. It doesn’t shoot any projectiles yet, but it was fun to implement and I now have a basis for how enemies will be implemented in the future. I also experimented with a ‘burn’ shader for when the enemy dies. Behind the scenes, I also wrote a Piskel importer which imports a .piskel file as a scene containing a single Sprite node with the correct number of animation frames, as well as a script to automatically generate animations from sprites. This all streamlines the animation process and makes working with artists a lot easier.

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/413106316513640452/585296028807462912/2019-06-03_22-35-17.mp4

Player Movement

Captura de tela 2019-06-07 02.01.11

The player physics have been tweaked and I’m finally happy with them. Basically there’s three ray shapes (at the bottom) which push the player away from the floor and walls (this gives the player a smooth movement along floors and slopes). The rectangle in the middle is also part of this collision, and prevents the player from entering small spaces. The big pentagon that overlaps the player is not actually part of the hitbox. Instead, it is used for detecting one-way platforms, so that the player can pass through one-way platforms from the bottom. The player’s damage hitbox (on the right) is separate from the rest, and is what will actually be used for when the player takes damage.”

That’s it for today’s update. For next time we are sure to have actual gameplay of one of the first major areas of the game. Stay tuned, and see you next time!