next »

[baconman]

Prognosis: ~3% and counting. About 7% and counting.*

Okay, an early build of this may have compromised level structure, until I can definitively find a way to "daisy-chain" a wall of my blackflags randomly across and down; without blacking out my whole levels.

 

So for now; it "blacks them out" at random/10% chance. It still sets a conditional starting and ending point (which may also be affected by the randomness of the blackflags), populates a number of objective-related points, then finally fills in the rest with keyrooms, widgetrooms, and then rooms generated by cross-referencing your powers/abilities with the zones.

Now, I just have to map out sets of objects for said rooms (IE: have flags generate objects/sprites accordingly). 11 zones * (9 jpowers + 8 kpowers + 7 lpowers) = 264 MINIMUM screen variations to begin with... quadruple that for variations in gameplay (not counting fight/music - that's 1056 already!)... and that's just the "power rooms" alone. I also plan to use the margin of error, days counter, and magic seed variables to mix those up, as well.

Oh, who am I kidding? This is where the fun part begins! :D


So yeah. Broke through "the wall" for now. J- and L-Powers are incomplete still, sadly. And I'd really like to work on my dynamic music generation, but I'm lacking in musical instrument samplings... anybody know where I can get some?


* EDIT: After making a tangible list of the screens and the assets to include on each of them - I realize now that I'm considerably further along than I first anticipated. :D Musical and fighting will be a cinch to implement once I get the base for that in place, and the critters/animations and player interaction thereof are really all that's holding up the racing/shmup now, for that matter. I will have to double-back and add sound, but that's just a matter of time.
__________

I'm working on a "minimum-of-660-sub-level-screens-that-mix-and-match-and-stick-together-at-random." And a few more objects/properties in the meantime.

Mostly though... I'm thinking about the "objective-related" screens/rooms. Like if maybe there's a way to associate those by zones, appropriately; so that different conditions can represent fun aspects of other games as well. Like for example - collecting 7 gems could be like Chaos Emeralds in one level, like Triforce fragment battles in another, and then like Yoshi's Island flowers in yet another place.

I'm also thinking about what all specifically to be tracking in the NPC-related portion. Min/Max * x/y-axis jumps * towards/still/away platforms? Level completion times? Shmup frame anticipations, shot distances, and hits/misses? Should all these variables be judged seperately, or somehow simplified? How much can actually be USED?

Okay, the Min/Max * x/y * towards/still/away can actually make an elliptical range for deciding whether to attempt a jump or not, and tracking the actual execution of it would be key in duplicating the player's response; or at least providing an interesting algorhythm for NPC AI with appropriate abilities. Unlike Sonic and Knux in S&K, or X and Zero in MMX5.

Finally, another thing I'm considering is the KeyRooms. Perhaps one zone should be more Metroidlike; another more Zeldalike, and so forth where those are concerned. It would make for much more interesting and various gameplay by making different functions of key rooms, based on your zone or something.

[muku]

And I'd really like to work on my dynamic music generation, but I'm lacking in musical instrument samplings... anybody know where I can get some?

http://hammersound.com/cgi-bin/soundlink.pl (SoundFont2 format; you can either try to implement support for that or just use some program to extract the samples)

http://www.freesound.org/ (takes some digging, but there's some good stuff)

http://theremin.music.uiowa.edu/MIS.html

[baconman]

Thank you muku!

Those are some really good sound libraries. Now to get this thing put together...

[baconman]

Got most of the basic framework in place for my Dynamic Music Generator, just missing a few key GML commands, and cross-referencing notes with music instruments/scales to load and associate "keynotes" with actual sounds. Also, I'm electing to only load the notes/instruments relevant to the songs, instead of preloading everything to begin with; I just need to make sure and unload them upon songs stopping/changing.
__________

I've also finished more screen-building/level-building elements. First off, to get past the obstacle I was hitting with the blackflags, I simply added a higher frequency of them appearing across the top 3 layers and the left-hand 3 layers of screenflags, and I added a couple of additional "insurance" lines to make certain levels aren't generated WITHOUT starting/finish points. Apart from that:

Platformer mode will begin totally open, and every screen besides blackouts will close off one "face" of the screen; never to coincide with the starting point (IE: You can't get boxed in). This will ensure that while somewhat unpredictable in direction, there will generally always be a flow from start to finish, and while dead-ends will happen infrequently, they will always balance by creating another branching pathway. There will also be some rooms that don't generate any closeoffs, either.

Adventure mode will begin totally enclosed, and every screen generated will create at least one new "doorway" which will in turn, modify the next screen over along with it. All except "reinforced" doorways will be collapsable with bombs, and reinforced walls will generally correlate with obstacle-related, key-related, or boss/miniboss encounter rooms. I'm also looking into putting a different key/lock system in every zone - so one or two will feature "songs," but other elements as well. Power-ups ala Metroid? Collect a set of items from many keyrooms to open/unlock the finishing point? These and more are being tossed around, feel free to suggest more!

Since it generally works in layers instead of screendepths anyways, the majority of Racing mode will simply be about generating obstacles and some widgets to make taking different layers more interesting and effective with one another. Instead of objective/keyrooms, however, the different flags for those will generally correlate to your opponents' abilities, much the same way that other levels/zones adapt to yours. Due to this fact, and the fact that they'll be reused more often than any other type of rooms, these "power rooms" will probably account for nearly half the screens in the entire game.

And while they make various terrain layouts and obstacles, Shmup mode will interpret the flags mainly as differing types of enemies and formations. These maps generally have a continuous flow in a particular direction which will autoscroll, give or take some flexibility in perpindicular directions which will move along with you. So if a flow moves to the right, there will be a few levels of up/down you can follow. The bosslike-character will have a route preference involving them too, prioritized by moving "towards" some flags and "away" from others. For instance, areas where you can power up more will be filled more with obstacle-ridden terrain, and be related to a flag that said boss character will move away from, so once you're powered up, you have to find/chase them down again. There will also be corridors which will power THEM up too... so beware!
__________

Finally, I'm a little pressed on the fighting engine at the moment. Cross-referencing different spritesets with different special movesets is a lot more work than I first expected it to be, and so far, I've gotten just about all of the other modes working within the first/older Chumbucket outline. I don't know if he's gotten the "fighting expansion" done for the male/female/newer outlines yet, but I have yet to see it, if he has. If not, I have no idea when such an outline would exist. And finally, while each art style works independently, mixing them together just looks odd.

[baconman]

Holey. Crap.

Has it really been that long? 120+ days, now? Well, now that I'm finally close to done working through the holidays, I can get the ball rolling on this again. Protip for doing long-term projects: Taking a 4-month hiatus makes it very difficult to "pick up where you left off."

So right now, I'm in the process of the obvious early/first programming step. Coordinating the physics. So far the movement has about the right pacing to it that I'm going for, but I'm still working on my wall-collision, and an attempt to automate wall jumps by simply holding the jump button. I mean, wall jumping is as old as Ninja Gaiden now, so why not streamline that shit? Keep things fast paced and exciting! :D It's far from complete, but at least it's happening now.

Another design change that's going on is the lifebar. See, in most games, power-ups will recover large amounts of life, where sustaining damage will usually chip it off. The approach I'm taking with this is the opposite - collecting life-ups will build your life one notch at a time, and taking a hit will "chunk it off." I'm also considering a timer, and a power-up that correlates to that as well, but time will tell where that goes.

I've got a few basic map-outlines done too; they'll generally consiste of 90-110 screens apiece. I'll admit, I planned to move this a lot quicker than it's been going. But I also didn't count on becoming a one-man department at work, either; or the conditions which led to that. Water under the bridge now, I suppose!

The next thing I'm planning on doing is working on my pix-art. I'm thinking of a number of themesets to contribute to Gentrieve, as a means of practicing that, as I begin to flesh out physics more; but I'm not sure which to go for first. Robot Master theme? Detective/Explorer chick theme? Ninja Assassin theme? Haunted Castle/Mansion theme? General Badass vs. Alien Invasion theme? Olde tyme magikal knight theme? A jumping-tank-thing theme? A Classic NES influenced theme, maybe? Ahh, so much potential!

So yeah. Important thing to take from this post is, this project is not abandonware.

[baconman]

Update #1: Recovering from a total system crash is NOT fun. So now, outside of design, I'm pretty much working from scratch again. Recoding all the checks for character abilities is not much fun, either.

Update #2: Well, it's very little to show right now, but so far I've put together a little experimental buggy/incomplete level generator that isn't really working right yet. I'm not exactly sure why, either. There's a thread on the matter in the Design subforum where I'm hopefully getting some help/feedback on this matter in. The actual thing will use screen-size objects, rather than simple 64 x 48 blobs, and will feature totally different chunk sets per color.

I'm also digging around to find the electric guitar sound samples I was using in DMG, so I can get back to reconstructing that soon, if possible. I'm still putting in a few hours a day, but there's a lot of responsibilities that are keeping me tied up; and I'm also staying pretty active on other aspects of things here, too.

I would like to get at least one basic, playable form of this up by the year's end.

[baconman]

  OMFG TANGIBLE PROGRESS TODAY!!

It's about effin' time, too.

[baconman]

Well, this month, I'm working on hammering out some basic art assets for use with the level chunker. Eventually I'm going for a nice 48x48 px, 16-bit look; but for the time being I'm just doing 8-bit styled, 4-color roughs. Maybe once they're done and I get some gameplay going, I can simply upscale them, smoothen them out, and then worry about applying shading and stuff like that.

For now, I'm about 35% of the way through basic stances, which I'm doing seperately/first so that I can compare character sizes/builds. That'll be the starting basis for the character-specific sheets, which have gone from 64 frames to 80 frames now, mostly to compensate for the obviously necessary North/South standing/walking animations. It's still doable, but it's still a part I'm kind of struggling/procrastinating with. I need to stop that.

... ...

That story about the tortoise and the hare? It's not working yet.

So on the left, I'm doing some basic fighting stances, inspired by the fighting game counterparts of the characters. Colors will probably be redone, and a few are just copypasted for the sake of positioning, they aren't animated yet. Those that are will likely be 1-2-3-4-4-3-2-1-looped. Rock'N Guy will have a guitar strapped to him at some point, once I decide on how I want it oriented (he looks comparatively plain without it), and admittedly, Slash'M Dude came out looking far more "textbook ninja" than I'd like. Still plugging away at the others.

Slash'M's influences include Strider/Ryu Hayabusa (and arguably Hanzo Hattori), Metal/Shadow Man, and Ibuki/Eiji Kisaragi as far as movement stylization, but I still want to give the guy some definitive character/traits that make him stand out. One thing I'm considering is the colorization factor - sticking with purple or peach makes him instantly definable without blending too much with scenery, but it also makes him more stereotypical as the tradeoff. But I'm not completely sure what other color direction to take him in, as you don't see a lot of bright green ninjas that aren't equipped with turtle shells. Perhaps a bright yellow could work without being too obnoxious, but again, that works totally against the "ninja vibe" (IE: stay stealthy).

On the right, you can see what all I'd like to do with each of the characters by their decription columns:

Side Stand/Run: A standing frame facing to the right, followed by a simple 3 frame running loop.

Fighting Stance: Basically, what I'm copypasting from the image on the left, identifyable by the kind of fighting game character/personality I'm associating them with.

Up Stand/Run: Basically the same as Side Stand/Run, but facing North/"Stage Rear".
Down Stand/Run: Same, but facing South/"Stage Front".

Monkey Bars: A hanging frame, followed by an abstract loop where the character swings forwards. Can also be flipped for handstand purposes as well. A couple may do some smooth-looking tricks like trapeze artistry by alternating between hands and feet, or something like that.

Climb/Swim/Crawl: More a "crawl" at this point than anything else, I'd like to keep it in a context that can arguably double as a swimming motion as well. Climbing will simply be a matter of rotation.

Jump/Roll/Duck: An upward and downward jumping frame, along with the character curled up or bowled over and rotated for rolling effects (smaller/swifter characters may do stuff like cartwheels instead), and finally, a simple 1-frame crouch.

Slash: One of my favorite animation ideas; the first three frames illustrate a horizontal, one-handed slash straight across, ending with both hands on the same side, aimed down-back. Along with the remaining 5 frames, this becomes something of a double-axe handle pose that aims in 45-degree angles other than straight down or straight back. This can be used for various two-handed swinging techniques (including variants that skip frames, like down-back > forward > up-back), or to aim firearms in most appropriate directions. It can even be the focal point of a golf game.

Hit/Block: One-framers, illustrating a standing hit reaction, a standing block pose, a crouching hit reaction/low attack reaction, and a crouching block. Nothing fancy about that.

Stand Punch: A windup-frame, followed by punch attacks aimed downward, forward, and angled upwards.

Stand Kick: Kick attacks just like the punch attacks, although bear in mind, some of these can be designed to flow together as well.

Spin/Slide Attacks: A two-frame spin attack associated with the character, and a sliding move/attack with a cooldown frame.

Jump Kicks/Ladder: Three aerial kick attacks, seeing as standing/crouching punch ones can double as aerial ones often, followed by a single, flippable ladder-climbing frame ala MegaMan.

Trip/Get Up: 2 frames, one falling and one hitting the ground (or being KO'ed), followed by a 2-frame recovery animation.

Duck Punches/Kicks: Same as the standing ones, but for a character in a crouching position

Rush L/M/H: A single frame for dashing/rushing forward suddenly, along with low/mid/high-ranged followup attacks. Whether they're punches, kicks, or whatever in-between will depend on character.

Special: For sure, I want to do a two frame anti-air (active/dropdown), some kind of fireball/spellcasting with another 2 frames, a 2-frame charge-forward attack (like Psycho Crusher/Cannon Drill, etc.). Last two I might make a taunt/winpose or "warp out" if nothing else, but for now they're just there for the sake of flexibility.

EDIT: Third image now has at least a few more initial character concept arts, and I messed around with some color options for Slash'M Dude.

[baconman]

On an unrelated note, this year's upsurge of 2D mining/crafting games has kinda made me wonder about the potential of creating a fairly streamlined, but enjoyable experience like that to add to this project. Originally, the closest to it I was considering was some item-crafting in the Adventure portion of the game, and even keeping that pretty straightforward (imbue a sword to upgrade it, rather than "build another sword with spare parts, then lug 30 of those around with you").

But this is fundamentally a 2D game about exploring the joys of 2D gaming, and my experiences within the meta-genre have been fairly positive overall, so that's made it worth considering. Of course, the other tradeoffs of it include finding a way to mesh that kind of playstyle with both my level chunker approach (the easy part) and the venues concieved (the not-so-easy part).

So for now, I'm kinda on the fence about that. I suppose it'll depend on how other elements of gameplay actually play out. If the elements that make this kind of thing happen to fall in place, I don't see why it's not possible. One thing's for sure, I'm probably going to make such a concept exploration-centric, not digging-centric; and I don't want to go too insane on the tools. I'll probably stick to 2-3 total, a close-range all-purpose tool, a medium-ranged tool, and a shooter tool.

I'd imagine I'll consider this 10% once I get my character art all together, but in the meantime; do you think that would make a good/valuable addition to the already-bordering-on-ADD approach, or perhaps would disincluding the concept make it feel more incomplete?

[negativeview]

I'll admit that I only read some of the first, and all of the last page. I will read the rest eventually, but I'm heading out the door right now.

On the crafting metagame... that only really works if you have a lot of "component pieces." Think wooden sticks and bits of metal. Adding all that in for a non-core part of your gameplay seems like it's just asking for a ho-hum experience with the crafting part. Making crafting core seems like it'll take a lot of rework on what you already have.

Again, those are general answers because I'm not sure how much of the component piece type things you already have.

[baconman]

While not directly crafting, I was thinking of using different materials as a means to upgrade armor and equipment; and using a simplified form of cooking (like "ingredient x soup"), so there's some elements of that stuff in play; but it's not like using wood and gel to make torches, and combining it with stone to make fireplaces or anything on that level. And while I plan to feature *some* destructible terrain and secret passages, I wasn't going to do the entire worlds out of that stuff.

In addition, I think I'm gonna stick to a simple system of 4 melee-type weapons, for appropriate gameplay styles:

-Swords for all-purpose cutting tools, that will do extra damage against bleeding enemies.

-Axe-Hammers for terrain-destroying tools (can break open walls without consuming bombs or the like), that will do extra damage against non-bleeding enemies (bone, stone, etc.).

-Whips for switch-pulling and terrain-swinging abilities, that will do a little extra damage against the undead, but mostly be valuable for it's increased range.

-Spears/Staffs that will have good range/mediocre damage, but can be used as pole vaults to increase your agility or double as flying attacks. It won't be painfully slow like in many games, either.

[negativeview]

Totally forgot to come back and find this game again after commenting. Just now figuring out little tricks like the pencil on topics you've commented on!

I did go back and read all of your posts. I'm having trouble understanding details in a lot of them, but one thing I did figure out is that you're not THAT far along. My warning against adding new elements is a little lessened, as you probably could work them in as semi-core elements without replacing what you do have. I do still semi-warn against it though as every element you add either reduces quality or increasing development time. The real question is how much do you see it adding to gameplay, ignoring the fact that "everyone else is doing it."

[baconman]

Well, before the forced reboot earlier this year, I was actually planning on having a 2-3 year development time goal. It is rather medium-large-scale of a project no matter how many directions I try to simplify or streamline it. And while I'm not as far along as I'd like to be, I am inching towards it. Right now, I'm trying to conquer the pixel artistry monster and build some flexible character sheets. (Which includes myself getting diverted from that, too.)

What parts are you most mixed up about? I'll admit, I posted in something that falls between "plain English" and "programming code logic," and mostly it serves as a reminder to myself of how I'm working out the details in this; but I can flesh the concepts out in some easier-to-understand ways if you'd like.

[baconman]

Dabbling around in Creative (and maybe the Mancrib a bit) today has been both encouraging and a little intimidating. Finally, a bunch of back-of-my-mind concepts are starting to make sense to a lot of talented developers now; and I hope it leads to a lot of successful games and experiments. But it also means I gotta get my gears grinding again; because many of them are quite capable of beating me to the punch (and have quickly-constructed, finished projects to prove that), and they'll likely not be attempting all of the concepts (level-chunking, character development, differing genre-type gameplay engines) at once, like I am.

So rather than continuing to flesh out the cast, I think I'm gonna take a selection of character designs - maybe 8 or so, and try to get them completely illustrated and fleshed out ASAP; so I can get to coding them soon. And hopefully during Q1 of next year, get it to an actually playable state. After all, the holidays are THE HOLIDAZE. >.> And I have been juggling responsibility and social-life overload lately.

Having so many cool games to play/playtest is another terrific problem to have!! But that's not terribly productive, either. I'm not gonna complain about THAT, however!! lol

But! You aren't going to be playing as one of these characters. Every playthrough, you'll be creating a color-edit of one of these characters and developing your own unique skillsets instead, to compete with them (and your former creations) in a variety of settings and gameplay styles!

And btw, I found the essential purpose for those last 2 Special frames - the backdash!!

[TheAdam]

I will admit I didn't read most of this thread, but my thoughts from what I did read are... this is too ambitious. Have you made any progress since you last posted in November?