[quality]

how about in addition to text? voice acting read over the text can make the text more fun to read.

Actually, at that point, I think you could successfully argue that you're not making text reading more fun - you're actually removing the requirement of reading in order to get the story!

But I do agree that audio delivery is often (or at least has the potential to be) better than straight text.  The problem is just that recording all of your dialogue takes up a lot of disk/memory space, and if you don't have access to quality voice talent, you run the risk of the voices doing more harm than good because they're so annoying.

I like the number of nice touches.  Little things, like the blurry windows in the background, the cameras that follow you, the sparks when you shoot the wrong surface, etc.

Clearly this is being made by someone who loved the original portal a lot.  Looking good!

the text in castlevania:sotn for instance was fairly interesting, in a b-movie humor kind of way. i mean, why would you skip DIE MONSTER, YOU DON'T BELONG IN THIS WORLD. and WHAT IS A MAN, A MISERABLE LITTLE PILE OF SECRETS! -- those are like emblematic lines, and if you skip them you're missing a lot of what makes SoTN so great.

Actually, that might be a poor example.  I would argue that the text was immaterial in that case.  It was the voice "talent" that made those lines so great.  I'm pretty sure that they could have completely removed the text from the screen in that case, and it would have been just as great.

The devil is in the details.  I have been pretty sure I was on the cusp of being done for about a month now, but I keep thinking of things that need to be done.  Not big things like "make multiplayer work" or "figure out scoring".  Little things like "It really needs a 'return to main menu' button in the options" or "I guess they probably need a menu to turn on cheat modes, since they can't directly edit the global variables file..."

Anyway.  Today, I had a good day!  Saving and loading game state and accomplishments from disk is a go!  Return to main menu button is a go!  (It turned out to be slightly more complicated than expected given how my state system works and where it was being called from.)  And cheat options menu is a go!

More boring UI screenshots, since I can't really show screenshots of save games.  This one was more fun than most menus, since at least I got to draw some icons.

Random [unsolicited] comments about tracking the time in AS3:

In theory your game should be running at a solid framerate.  So if you don't want to go through all that hassle, you could always just do something like this instead of using the date object:

Code:

var frameCounter:int = 0;
var hudTimeField:TextField;  //assuming this is already in the draw list and on screen
this.onEnterFrame = Function(){
     frameCounter++;
     var seconds:int = Math.floor(frameCounter / stage.frameRate);
     var minutes:int = Math.floor(seconds / 60);

     hudTimeField.text = "" + minutes + ":" + (seconds<10) ? "0" : "") + seconds;
}

Since the framerate should be solid, this is a fairly safe way to handle time.  And the other advantage is that if your game DOES run slow on someone's computer, they're not penalized for this by having less time.  They'll still get the same number of "frames" to play the game, or whatever.  The "game seconds" will just be slightly slower than "real seconds".

(This was actually a bug on the commercial title Lego Soccer once - on a slow enough computer, the "penalty shot minigame" would run out of time and end before the ball had time to reach the goal from your foot...)

Alternately, if you DO really want to use "real" time, consider using Date.GetTime() instead of getting the year date day, etc.  It just gives you the time, in milliseconds, from Jan 1, 1970.  Makes it much easier to add/subtract dates and times.  (In particular it is great for frame counters, etc.)

Then you can just do something like:

Code:

var startTime:int = (new Date()).getTime();

//.....
//stuff happens
//.....

var timeSinceStart:int = (new Date()).getTime() - startTime;
var seconds:int = timeSinceStart / 1000;
var minutes:int = timeSinceStart / (1000 * 60);
//  ... etc

Anyway, I just happened to see your code, and remembered the pain I had figuring out good ways to handle time in flash game....  Hope these help!

Looking forward to seeing what you get when you're done!


[Disclaimer - I just typed these things out into the forum box, so no guarantee they will work "out of the box".  There are probably syntax errors around somewhere.]

I know, right?  That's why it has to be the final unlock.  Because, I mean, after you unlock that, what else is there to look forward to?  Where's the motivation to find anything else?  YOU HAVE ALREADY ACHIEVED PERFECTION.

I vote ground!

Or maybe both, if the paralax background in screenshot #2 is tall enough that you wouldn't see them both at the same time.

But between the two of them, I think the clouds on the ground add more.

Yeah...  Unicorn mode is the result of a very odd conversation I had with a friend.  (Tim at Final Form Games), in which I was talking about how one of the attacks the Cloud had would probably be a Rainbow, and he was like "I hope there is an option for the rainbow to have unicorns on it!" and I was like "... there isn't.  But  what if there was an option for the whole GAME to have unicorns on it?"

And one thing sort of lead to another, and it turned out, funny thing, it only took like 4 lines of code, and a quick copy-paste of art assets, (which I already had laying around from Post Apocalyptic Unicorn Uprising)....

And the game went from this...






to something more like this...



So yeah.  Probably another [the final, most likely] bonus unlock.  Gotta give people SOMETHING worthwhile if they complete the entire game, right?

And I'm pretty sure I speak for everyone when I say that there is nothing in this world, NOTHING that is more worthwhile than unicorns...

-Montoli

In other news:  Still cleaning up last bits of code.  SOOOO close to release.  Makes me frustrated!

Couldn't sleep last night though, so rather than do something productive, I spent a half hour in bed with my laptop writing totally frivolous alternate render modes.  Following the recent popularity of large-pixel retro looking games....

Behold!
Retro Mode!




After writing that, I realized that while it was cool looking, the antialiasing prevented it from looking TOO much like old atari games.  So just for giggles I added SUPER retro mode, which is even more retro than retro mode.


This, friends, is the true horror of sleep deprivation.  The fact that I'm so close to done, and in spite of that, the only thing my brain decided it was willing to work on was figuring out ways to make the game look worse... 

Oh well, I'll probably make them bonus unlockable options or something.  They're fun for novelty factor if nothing else.  They're no more absurd than "Unicorn Mode", at least.

[absolutely]

I agree completely!

In writing this, one big thing I have realized is that "making bosses and patterns is just really fun!"  It's sort of like playing with LOGO.  There is sort of a manic joy in putting random instructions together and watching them form compelling patterns.  Even when it doesn't do what you expect, it still is often really cool looking.  (Often my mistakes are cooler than my intentional plans...)

I realized this a ways into the dev cycle, and it's too late to try to graft that on to the current project.   But I am really seriously thinking that my next project will probably be a "Boss Editor" of some sort.  (I think there is enough "meat" there to be a full game, really.)

So yeah.  I agree with you guys 100%.  The actual act is enough fun that I absolutely need to figure out a way to make it into a game that people can play without editing the source code.

Do you know, I used to think "what I want is a game where there are LOTS of characters, but they can actually die.  So there are always cool replacements if one does die, but if I mess up, that character is gone!  So I'd be more ok with characters dying, but would want to keep them alive, lending more weight and meaning to my actions!  That would be rad!"

Then I found Fire Emblem, which basically does that.

...And spent the entire game compulsively reloading every time a battle went wrong, trying to keep everyone up and alive, and feeling quite silly about the whole thing, even as I was unable to stop myself from doing it.

I realized at that the difference between theory and practice, and that what I think I want is not always what I actually want.

That is an astonishing amount of blood. :D

I really should post things to this Dev Log more frequently.

Because whenever I do, it never fails - within a short amount of time after clicking "post" (the exact time varies from minutes to hours) I figure out all sorts of things wrong with the pictures I posted.

Today is no exception!

In today's case, I have abruptly realized that as it turns out, UIs look a lot better if you have some kind of consistent border between controls/widgits!  And also better if you don't have a giant, conspicuous hole with nothing in it!

For example - Previous screenshot....  but better!



The astute will notice that I have snuck in an extra control to fill in the white space.  It is something I had considered adding before, but had neglected because I was feeling lazy.  Ironic that while I was able to ignore the part in my brain saying "you should hook it up, it will make the game better", the thing I was NOT able to ignore was the accusingly empty spot on my versus mode UI screen.

Oh well.

-Montoli

Whew!  Versus mode is done finally!

I had convinced myself it was done before.  But really, all it was was just the regular game except with a custom AI for the ship that listened to keystrokes instead of performing its own evaluations.  This had the downside that the games always played out the same way as survival mode.  (Namely that the boss always died, and the only real variations was how long it lasted and how many spaceships it took down in the process)

So while you could still make your own rules, ("let's see if you can kill me in less than 3 minutes this time!  And no dying more than twice this time either!") it occurred to me that it wasn't much of a versus mode if the same side won every time.  Really, if I'm expecting this sort of play pattern, then shouldn't I be doing more to support it?  At the very least, the victor should get some little graphical flourish announcing their triumph at the end of the game, right?

Well, today I finally got around to doing exactly that.  Set up an interface so you can define rules like how long the spaceship has to kill the boss, or how many respawns it gets in the process.  Changed the game-end message in vs. mode depending on who won.  And even gave the players a hook to decide how frequently ship powerups dropped, since that seems like a useful thing to be able to control in a competitive setting.  I already had most of the hooks I needed in the game, so mostly this just required setting up a UI.  (Bleah!)

Also set up a way to swap which player got which side of the keyboard, since my left-handed friends were starting to grumble.

Unfortunately, UI work does not generate the most exciting screenshots.  Oh well.  Have a boring screenshot then, of my versus mode UI.  (Layout subject to change, but this has the basics in place at least.)

The course has been keyed in for over a week now, double-checked, and compu-optomized.  We're not even going near any of the "interesting" planetary phenomena.  I predict a smooth trip!

I'm not coming up with anything terribly insightful opinions to add to this, so I'll just stick with the banal one:  I hate writing HUDs.  Like most UI work, they always end up taking way more effort than you expect, and people seldom appreciate them since if you did your job right, their attention is almost never focused on them.

Oh nice!  I like the idea behind the inverse shoot 'em up, although I don't think I understand the gameplay.  (Or at least when I tried, I don't think I ever managed to get the ship below around 20% armor, even on easy mode.  )

Also, yeah.  The Sun and Moon boss from Kirby was one of my favorites.  And while I tried to avoid directly ripping it off, I'll freely admit that I thought about it more than once when I was setting up the cloud boss.

Also, had a bizarre conversation with a friend yesterday, which ultimately lead to me putting in a new bonus mode in the options.  (It was fairly straightfoward to implement, and I'd been needing some kind of bonus to give people who clear 100% of the challenges anyway...)  I don't want to give away too many surprises, but I'll say this.  It's called "Unicorn Mode".  And it is every bit as absurd as it sounds.

Yeah, Starcraft 5 was only decent. Still can't beleive the Zerg turned out to be real.

the best part was the reveal that not only were they for real, but that they had developed the game!

At least now we know why their units were so consistently unbalanced, anyway.

What a difference a day makes:

So after posting that last screenshot, I went to bed, and woke up, and was like "I know why I'm not thrilled with it yet!  I know what this needs!  While the sunbeams are the right shape, they are made of embarrassingly few bullets!  Why that looks so easy, even I could dodge it!"

So I went back and... spiced it up a little.  Here's the same thing, the next morning:



And.... after that I spent the rest of the weekend playing TF2 and reading Terry Pratchet.

All in all - A good weekend!

-Montoli

I'm still alive!

I got sort of swallowed up this past week, so while progress has been steady, updates have been fleeting.  Also, a lot of what I was working on was boring UI stuff, polishing up the user interface, adding menus to get to some of the various modes that previously required changing constants in the source code by hand, etc.  I. e. stuff that is both boring to write, and makes for boring screenshots to share.

Still, getting tantalizingly close to finished!

....

This would feel more awesome if I hadn't been telling myself that I was "tantalizingly close to finshed!" for the past month or so.  But so it goes.  My goal on this project is to get it to "awesome", and sometimes that requires looking at it after I've written something and realizing that it plays all wrong and needs reworking.

I've seen a quote recently, something along the lines of "after you finish the first 90% of the game, all you have left is the other 90%."  This is a good quote!  It is very true!  But I'd like to add to it, that after you finish the 2nd 90%, there is often a third 90% hiding behind it, also needing to be done.

Anyway, enough self-pity.  The end is in sight!

I spent tonight working on the last boss I plan to add to the game, and have been having a blast putting him together.  It really is a fun part, when you're at that stage of development where you've already paid your dues and done all the low-level drudgework of setting up the game systems, and can just focus on (and quickly create) high level ideas like "Ok, now I want something that acts like THIS!".  I'm at that stage now, and I think it's my favorite part of a project.  (Made significantly more fun by the fact that unlike some of my projects, I haven't collapsed under the weight of the accumulated hacks I needed to put in to keep everything working yet. )

Specifically, I'm at the point where I've got the AI working for dodging arbitrary patterns, and a bunch of boss classes that make it really quick to describe a boss, and a scripting setup for describing bullet patterns easily.  So I spent most of today doing some rapid iterations on, as I mentioned, one last boss.  Here, I even took a crappy screenshot for you guys!



It's not completely done yet, (and this shot doesn't really do it justice) but the fundamentals are there.  This one is a little different style than some of the other ones I did. (The look is less segmented, and more animated, for one.)  I suspect this will be one of the two "bonus unlockable" bosses.  As you can probably tell from the screenshot, this one is weather themed.  I'm really happy with how he's turning out, but most of the parts that are neat about him aren't easily conveyed via screenshot.  (The short version:  His attacks all interact with each other in weird ways.  For example, the whirlwind scatters the [otherwise fairly orderly] raindrops.  And there's an ice attack that changes all the raindrops into snowflakes, which move differently.  And the sun attack (pictured here) melts them back into raindrops.)

Funny story.  Originally I was planning on one boss, or maybe 2.  Three tops.  Then I realized "I spent all this time and technology making it easy to make bosses.  Why am I not leveraging it?  Why am I stopping at 3?"  So... yeah.  This one, (again, the last one I'm adding) brings the total up to around six and a half.  (There's one really complicated guy, that's really worth at least one and a half normal bosses.)

Anyway.  Onward I go, I guess.  The end is in sight!  Shooting for [finally] having it up on FGL by end of next week!  (For real this time!)

-Montoli