Games [WIP] Chronotura | Looking for feedback

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Chronotura it's a puzzle game focused on time travel. I've working on it for almost a year now, and it's time to receive some feedback. Visually it looks unpolish right now, that's because it's in beta, I'll be adding features and polishing gameplay and visuals later on, here is a link with all the features that will be added.

FEEDBACK, I need a lot of feedback, I want to hear and read about the bad, the good, the awful, what you like and what you don’t like in this game, so it can be more enjoyable.

Anyways here's the link: https://rfuchs.itch.io/chronotura

 

Just a thought, do plan to keep it minimalist, or ad more details to the rooms, furniture etc?

 

Love some of the shaders and effects like the worm hole! Pace of the trailer seems SUPER slow. This is a game about time changing right? What if you played with the timing of you trailer to reinforce that concept?

 

I am planning to keep it minimalist since the camera is orthographic and having details such as furniture and props, obstructs the view and can interfere with the gameplay.

 

Thanks, the wormhole effect I got from here, it has very good tutorials using the particle system. Regarding the Pace of the video, I agree, I wanted to make the video showing real gameplay of the game, maybe that's the problem.

 

Weekly Update:
Since I launched the game I started creating shaders, as I had never written shaders before, I looked for a more practical solution, and I found it, Shader Forge. This tool allows me to create Shaders in a visual way very easily and it have a wide documentation.

And so began my adventure in the world of shaders, first I wanted to make walls and floors change from one texture to another when you traveled in time, in a gradual and random way. I struggled to achieve it but in the end I did it, this is the result:


The next thing is to make water

 

Weekly Update:
It has been a rather slow week, but I come with some shaders that were hard to do. First it was the water shader, I managed to get the depth effect I wanted along with a foam effect, but it had a drawback, the foam effect did not work with the default toon shader.


Showing the depth color

After days I managed to make an effect similar to the default toon sahder adding a better outline and better colors. Taking advantage of the fact that I was retouching the player's shader, I did a dissolve effect to add it when it dies due to some paradox, and also, a silhouette effect when the player is behind a wall, but I plan to improve it.


Player silhouette plus dissolve effect

Next will be adding all this to gameplay

 

Weekly Update:
Another slow week but with progress! I added the death interaction by paradox with the shader that I made for the player, it looked a little empty so I added some particles to give it that dissolving effect over time.



The final result is decent, but it needs a little more work, but it will be for this week, in addition, I have to add the functionality of the environment change when you travel in time, which I have been doing during the day.

Next would be as I mentioned above, add the functionality of the environment change when traveling in time

 

Progress Update:
It has been a complicated couple of weeks due to problems with electricity and internet, but for now I have returned and I have made some progress with the system of changing the environment when traveling in time, it is 80% complete but for this work better I preferred to focus on remaking the textures, so it will be easier to visualize everything when traveling in time, also since I was retouching the textures, I decided to stylize them so that everything had the same style (minimalist with soft colors).


Before and after (just texture change)

Next I will continue with the stylization of the textures and then assemble the entire environment change system when you travel in time

 

Weekly Update:
Last week I was doing the script for the system to change the environment when you travel in time, and it was much simpler than I thought, I only change the value of the shader for all the materials (a total of 12) when traveling in time, I don't know if it's the best way to do it, but it works haha. (Sorry no gif this time, my internet connection it's terrible at the moment.)


Past


Present


Future

It was so simple that I even had time to change the interaction panels, currently in the game they do not attract as much attention as they should, so I will modify and unify them so that they stand out more and are more striking and easy to use. I made a simpler design, I just have to change some things like the texture on the sign.



Next I will continue working on the redesign of the interaction panel in addition to its functionalities

 

Weekly Update:
My internet connection improved (from 230Kbps to 1.3Mbps :') ) so here is the gif of the previous change.

Source: https://i.imgur.com/GQ3t2ax.gif

Last week I was free from college and work, so I could concentrate more on things I had to add and modify, starting with a button model with a sign.


Then I added functions to work with objects (fans, lights, doors, etc.) it took me two days, then I added the button animations.

Source: https://i.imgur.com/9JGYeTW.gif

Sadly the button animation did not work, but I think I know what causes the problem (I did not reference the instance ). But everything else works as it should.

Next, I will be somewhat busy during the week, but if I have time I will fix some animations of the character to make them look better

EDIT: I added the source links of the gifs.

 

Weekly Update:
Last week I have been working on animations, improving and polishing them little by little since I am not very good at it.


New walking animation (Source gif: https://i.imgur.com/6u1vdOc.mp4)


Old walking animation (Source gif: https://i.imgur.com/wqN4mQl.mp4)

That is a small comparison of the walking animation, I based on the exaggeration and speed of action to give a more drastic effect when walking. However, this is almost not noticeable since the camera is orthographic and the character is far away.



That aside, I have to continue polishing the animations and add a few more and increase the fps of the animations

 

Well your concepts are good, and it is a WIP, so things are bound to change over time. The new animation does look better, but animations compared to model/game look will dictate what they should look like.

 

Thanks, I agree, making the animation fit the game look is the hardest part.

 

Small update, the last two weeks I have been in finals and I have had little time to develop Chronotura, the good news is that I am already on vacation and I can dedicate myself to development Chronotura full time. During the last two weeks I made improvements to the animations, I increased the frames per second in the animations, making small adjustments so that they had more impact, in addition I made others idle animations, they just need to be executed.



During this week, I will make more tweaks to the animations, I will add the execution of the idle animations, it should happen every 3 minutes

 

Weekly Update:
Another week that passes and another week following the advances in Chronotura, well last week I talked about adding the new animations and other things, I did that and now the Animator window has become a disaster, But it's still coherent hehehe.



I did other things, but they are not ready yet, I will update on Twitter when I have something done, and as always every week around here too. I don't want to go into many details of what it is yet

 

Weekly Update:
Last week I started making the new object, it is an electric fence or a tesla coil that forms an electric fence, similar to the one in Crash Bandicoot.



I made the model as simple as possible with simple UV's




Now, this object cannot be turned off, in the past it works perfectly, in the present it blinks and in the future it's off. The boxes can pass through the electricity beam and stop it.


Past


Present


Future


Box stopping the electricity beam

And of course, if you pass through the beam you die. For this week I will improve the UI and the UX

 

Update:
It has been two weeks since the last update, sadly it does not mean that I have made much progress (many problems with electricity and internet), but I managed to do something at least, I changed the options menu almost completely, now it should be easier to know what are the items (drop-down menus, checkboxes and buttons) with which you can interact based on their color, the items are now correctly rounded, and the translations work correctly in the drop-down menus.


Old Menu Showing the Untranslated Dropdowns


New Menu (WIP)

Regarding to the UX, now the options menu can be closed with the ESC key and the changes made will be saved, there are still things to do regarding the UI as an inventory at the top of the screen with the keys and cards you currently have, a menu for saving and loading the game with basic statistics such as play time, when that game started to be played and at what level the player is, and finally modify the controls menu, to support both keyboard and joysticks. I have no idea how it will work or how to do it but we'll see how it goes

 

Weekly Update:
New save menu, with basic statistics, such as the date and time played. I added new animations for the menus to make them more dynamic, overall I think it looks good.



I still have to add joysticks support, and make the menu have better accessibility

 

Update:
Two weeks have passed since the last progress update, as the progress has been slow and without much to share, I decided not to make a post until having something done, I have been making compatibility with joysticks, as the Unity system varies from operating system and depending on which joystick you have the A button is not the same in Windows as in Linux, the same happens with the joysticks, the X button of a generic joystick is not the same as the X button of a Dualshock 2.

So how to fix this? Do a check for each OS and for each joystick in the market (more than 200 types)? The answer, NO, is very laborious and would take a lot of time (and money I don't have ;_; ), my solution was to look for an asset in the Asset Store that did all that, but also was free and open source. For my luck I got a good asset called hinput.

"hinput manages all gamepad interactions for you. With this simple multi-OS solution, you will never have to worry again about manually filling gamepad inputs, or handling settings for different operating systems."

Although everything may not be perfect, there is a problem, to download it from the Asset Store you need Unity 2019.1.8, I use version 2018.3 (I had already tried to update the version project to use Shader Graph, but I had many errors so I stayed with the 2018 version ). For my luck the asset was also in itch.io, so I downloaded it from there directly, to my bad luck, it was an outdated version and had a bug where when pausing (and doing timescale = 0) the pause button was pressed twice, but luckily I got the github repository where it was updated with that bug fixed.

Now I just needed to assign each button of the joystick to the actions, simple and easy, then do the navigation of the options menu compatible with joystick, this was the most laborious, since the Unity system is a bit limited, I also had to make the visualization of the UI components stand out more, since it was not clear what element was being press, but that is solved now. I still have to solve certain errors and improve accessibility a bit

 

Weekly Update:
Another week has passed and I keep moving forward, slowly but surely. This time I added images of the buttons and keys in the keyboard configuration menu, the images were taken from here. In addition I fixed a lot of errors and bugs that the menu had, and of course, I improved the accessibility with joystick, but there are still certain details to polish and improve, such as the Unity EventSystem since it currently works with the native InputSystem and not with the one I created So I will have to make my own EventSystem, we'll see how it works out

 

Weekly Update:
Last week I was trying to make my own EventSystem, it is more difficult than I thought, so I went on to do something else, I made the inventory of cards and keys collected. Now every time you grab a card or key an animation appears in the upper right corner with the item collected, I also took the liberty of redesigning them, since before they had an ugly texture.



This week I will continue trying to make the EventSystem

 

Weekly Update:
So, last week I was trying to make a new EventSystem to work with my InputSystem, since the Unity EventSystem uses the default InputSystem, but searching through the documentation I see the attributes that can be modified and I found the following “eventSystem.currentInputModule.inputOverride”. With this attribute you can indicate a new InputSystem, as long as this InputSystem has inherited the BaseInput class, this class contains the functions of GetButtonDown or GetAxisRaw, and can be overridden by your own functions in your InputSystem.





Luckily, I already had the names of the same functions, I just had to put “public override” to the functions for the EventSystem to recognize them, and for everything to work correctly you have to use the Standalone Input Module.





Where each action has to be described in both InputSystems to work correctly (since when starting the game you cannot assign the new InputSystem because it fails, that is, it cannot be assigned in Awake or Start).

And that was it, the solution was simpler than I thought, the only problem was that it was not so clear, and brought with it a few bugs that were relatively easy to fix. This week I will make a cloud thought when the player is close to a button with which he can interact, to make it easier to see what that button will do

 

Ive been watching/following your progress. Nice work, but you need to start work/thinking of the "rest of the scene", its good to work on the main character (animations, functionality), but i see no improvements on the environment. dont loose sight of the final idea, we see what you let us see, and i see alot of un-polished grid based development (look at the SS/vids you have posted), i see grids and square base dev work. Now this shows progress...
Most dont care about grid/in-dev SS/video, they are looking for the end result. (SS like above). show people what they want to see, implimentation/progress, this is what will get people interrested. You have a great project/game going on here, show it off with the best that you have, not in-dev SS/vids.

 

Thanks for your comment, you're right, I haven't spent so much time polishing visual aspects in the environment since I first have to polish the gameplay as much as possible. For now all I am doing is to increase the user experience and make it more intuitive. Unfortunately this is not something that can be easily displayed with videos or images as it is something personal. Later with luck I will have something more polished and solid to show

 

Weekly Update:
As I mentioned last week, I made a thought cloud when the player approaches something with which he can interact (for now only buttons), when he gets close enough he can see if that button needs a key card or if he can interact or not with it, it has a few bugs that I couldn't solve because in the middle of the week I got sick, so this week I will be adding the other functionalities to the thought cloud along with some bugs fixeds.

 

Update:
It has been a while since the last devlog, but I took some time fixing some background systems so that when adding or improving something it will be easy. It is also the first devlog of the year .

Well with that out of the way, in this devlog I will talk about how I made the character stare at objects around him, so that the character feels part of the environment and not as something external to it. To achieve that it was necessary to apply trigonometry.



Between the character and the object to be observed there is a distance that is easy to know, if the position of both (player and object) is known. There is also the maximum distance at which the character can observe an object, this is a fixed distance, with that you can calculate the angle, as long as it is a right triangle, which is not 100% of the time. But you can apply other ways to know the angle, but for this I need to know all the distances, which can be done since if you know the distance of both sides you can know the remaining side in a simple way.

You just have to apply a formula and it gives us a result in radians, which then transforms into degrees, then it is verified if the angle does not exceed the maximum that the character can turn the head (if not, it would look like an owl) and if the angle is smaller than that angle the head is turned, giving the effect that the character observes objects around him.

 

Weekly Update:
This week I dedicated myself to polishing the particles and effects and improving certain existing mechanics. Starting with the wind particles, they didn't exist before, so it was difficult to know what was pushing you, now you can clearly see that it is wind currents, these currents can be stopped by boxes.



I also decided to retouch the death particles by paradox, since they were very meh to put it in some way, now these particles spin around the character and fade better than before.



I also fixed the synchronization of the water drop particle with the sound it was making.

 

Update:
During these weeks I have been solving some errors and adjusting some existing mechanics in addition to increasing the visual impact of when you travel in time. Now the water level rises and the climbing platform is built when you travel in time.





There is little left to do, I just need to add some simple details, create levels and the story