Tag Archives: update

EUB System Overhaul: Hitboxes!

This somehow became a lengthy rambling post, if you want to look at the shiny hitboxes check the pictures below

Howdy. It’s me, Trickysticks, here with the first devlog in quite a long time. Porygon Productions has been a bit quiet lately, but we’ve definitely been putting work into the game. A lot of what we’ve done since the last update is fairly boring technical stuff, such as updating ancient code to be compatible with all of the new libraries we’re using, lots of bugfixes, and fixing Porygon’s efforts to break half the game by misspelling things. Whoops.

One of the less boring technical changes has serious impact on gameplay, though. There have been changes to one of the fundamentals of how all danmaku-based games work: hitboxes.

If I tell Danmakufu that a 10 pixel by 10 pixel area on an image is a shot, then it’ll take whatever’s in that area, render it, and give it a hitbox. Simple enough – it gets tedious with a few hundred bullets but that’s life. It helps that there’s ways to automate this process. This explains why shot sheets look like this.

Hitboxes are generated by finding the center of the rectangle you give Danmakufu, and drawing a circle or oval with a radius that’s a ratio of whatever dimensions the rectangle is. In other words, big rectangle = big hitbox, small rectangle = small hitbox. This is simple, but it works…for regularly shaped bullets. For generic round shots and bubbles, and even some more oval-shaped bullets, this works fine! It’s when you get to more special bullets, like the infamous knives, that this system starts producing weirdness.

The hitboxes have always erred on the side of generous because of this, and it’s worked until now. For the sake of being more accurate to what the bullets actually look like, we’ve done a small overhaul on some of the more weird bullets. How?

We’re using more than one circle.

Amazing.

Anyway I’ve rambled on long enough, here’s some pictures of the changes. Note that multiple circles mean more collision detection, and more processing power needed. We’ll use these bullets sparingly.

Before:

image

After:

image

Quite the change, isn’t it?

DevLog 8/8/15

Greetings once again internet!

I’ll get right to the point. Development on Ephemeral Unnatural Balance HAS continued, as those screenshots from a month ago have shown, but not as fast as I would have liked (BIG surprise). I also found out that getting registered to sell goods at conventions is a bit more difficult than I thought. Combine that with my failure to release even a 3-stage demo, and I think it’s obvious that I will not be finishing EUB before year’s Touhoucon. I WILL be going though, and may even be able to host a panel on Danmakufu. If that happens, I’ll be sure to distribute a 3-stage demo at the con and will have it up for general download not long afterward.

TL;DR I will not be finishing EUB in time for Touhoucon, but I will make it next year. I WILL be finishing the 3-stage demo by the time Touhoucon comes around, that is a PROMISE.

Now that that’s out of the way, let me list some of the new features added:

-Completed Stage 2 on all difficulty levels. Stage 3 has also been completed on one difficulty and in the process of being balanced for the other three.

-Discord can now be ended early by pressing the Discord key again. The Balance gauge’s remaining value is preserved when ending Discord in this manner.

-A new Discord scoring system for spellcards. While Discord mode is active during a spellcard, a bonus value will steadily increase from zero. As long as the spell is captured, the player will be awarded whatever value the bonus has reached by the time the spell ends.

-Updated portraits from Sixten for the entirety of the first 3 stages. I’m working on updating the sprites right now, they should be ready for the demo. Here are a couple of samples:

image
image
image
image

-Stage backgrounds have been overhauled and enhanced by gtbot, especially stage 1

-Updated player sprites for Rin Satsuki by DeityDiz:

image

He has also been working on replacement fairy sprites, although they have not yet been implemented:

image

That’s about all for the big updates. Trickysticks will be along shortly to post a video of the updates to stage 1 and probably stage 2 as well. Thanks for reading and have a good day!