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[Andy Wolff]

some stuff on the more technical/bugfixing side today:

• Added a loading screen to see if I could. It runs on a separate thread and tells you how many files it loads, which is kind of nice. XNA really needs an analogue to AS3's LoaderInfo, though.
• Figured out how to actually load and play mp3s for the background music. The more I play The Dunes with the El Diablo track, the more I like it
• Added volume control to the options menu, I think (haven't properly tested it yet)
• Fixed a problem I found with the way game data was saved, and added the volume settings to the save data.
• Noticed that gold could sometimes appear offscreen, so I made it clamp to the titlesafe area on its constructor. It looks a bit weird sometimes, but I don't care
• Cleaned up the code+hierarchy for obstacles like cacti and trees and teepes and such, which was actually a lot more helpful than I thought it would be
• Added the well. In-game it poofs with dust and spawns either gold or a genie when you finish bringing up the bucket.
  

I also started looking into stuff I should be doing with the GamerServices class, like actually differentiating between user accounts, but it looks rather bothersome so I'll probably put it off again until later.

I think I'm gonna scrap the camels, the sandstorms, and the quicksand, in the interest of time.
The stilts bandit, beetles, the little genies, and the huge genie boss are still a go, though. Tomorrow I want to start animating the beetles, I think

[Andy Wolff]

spent much of today doing the map:


(don't mind the frameskipping, it's from the screencap software again)

All of those flags are different sections of The Cracks, with variations in enemy spawn patterns and environment. The whole map pans horizontally, and there's a 'frontier line' obscuring parts which haven't been unlocked yet (not visible in the gif)

It feels pretty good. A lot better than the sloppy level select I had earlier, anyway. The different sections leave a lot more tweaking+balancing to worry about, though. Anyway, much left to do all over the place

[Andy Wolff]

Today:

• Made each area keep its own best and total golds and kills, in addition to the global best and totals.
• Added all of those new variables (and some other stuff) to the savedata
• Started doing some balancing on the areas
• Made a working options menu. Right now you can adjust music and sfx volumes and delete the save data
  
  
  
  

Haven't yet decided how I want to keep track of how many times you kill each type of enemy. One problem is right now I have nowhere to display that info, though I guess I could make an extended stats screen or something.

[Inanimate]

You have no clue how much I want to play this.

Keep up the good work, dude. This devlog is amazing.

[happymonster]

It really does look nice, love the little wagons following you in the level select.

[Andy Wolff]

Thanks guys, I really like seeing interest in the game beyond my own

Today I:

• Made the hud say "NEW" next to the highscore/mostkills text when your current score is beating the previous best
• Added a white highlight on the frontier line that shrinks away when you return to the map after playing a level for any number of rounds. It emphasizes the distance the frontier line moves forward in response to the gold/kills/whatever you got during play. I'm not completely set yet on how I want to calculate that progress, though I'm thinking it'll be gold-based. Perhaps the total gold in each level will have a decaying curve of some sort so that you can't progress as easily by playing just one level. that way it would go faster if you play them all for at least a few rounds
• made the map actually pan properly
• added some levels in The Dunes to the map (still kindof a wip, though, esp. the stat text)
  

I've been thinking lately that if you beat the snakeboss, you'll get it as a replacement option for the ox and carriages (though that will be difficult to animate again), and if you beat the as-yet-undisclosed boss of The Dunes, you'll get that for a transport option, as well.

I think I've decided that instead of counting how many times you kill every enemy class, I'll just add a counter as needed, and not make it visible to players. I'd only use it for unlocking the various special levels, like 'kill x indians of any type to unlock the indian village', or 'get killed by x cacti to unlock the cactus forest'. If I did that, I could actually make the counters visible to players, and I would just put them on each stat's corresponding level flag text. Hmm yeah, that sounds good. I can even gray out the area in some sort of glitch effect and make the flag invisible and the ox position random/circular

Also a note about something I mentioned earlier: Putting in player control for systems for which you haven't yet written AI is seeming like a better and better idea every time I use it. I did it for the oxen movement to help me get the frames and motion and carriage-following working, and I did it for the screen panning (in this case it wasn't as simple as it perhaps should have been, but using this technique helped), and I've been doing it for every enemy since I had the idea. The overhead involved is completely negligible, and it really helps collect my thoughts while I'm programming. I think I'll take this technique and apply it to my next robotics project, as well (PID loops and other mechanism AI can be a pain in the ass).
So basically, do it if you aren't already.
Oh, also, it helps to have a globally available and very succinct input handler. My code for reading whether the first connected user has just pressed the A button is very simple:
    C.I.getfirstconnected(true); if (C.I.pA) { stuff(); }

[08--n7.r6-79.84]

so awesome gifs ITT

 

[Andy Wolff]

Winged Doom: Thanks. I too love seeing screencap gifs and I wish more people would do it. Hempuli's ESA gifs and Xion's CK gifs are the best


added support to the basic Sprite class for easily selecting animations as int[]s of frames. I should have done this years ago.

having split up The Cracks into a bunch of different levels, I've noticed that the difficulty doesn't really ramp up in as interesting a way as I'd like. To solve this, I'll add a few harder enemies and more interesting behaviors to the current ones, such as:

a medium-sized bandit with a shield.

the shield blocks all bullets from the front

he can throw it

those gifs are me controlling him, but I have written the AI for him. He turns his shield toward anything he feels is threatening, making it rather difficult to land a hit while he's not throwing the shield

I'm considering signing up to exhibit this at the Boston Festival of Indie Games on September 22. I hope I'll be done by then. Even if I'm not finished, I know I'll be at a good point to get some player feedback. Are any of you in the Boston area interested in that happening?

I haven't worked on this nearly as much as I might have liked to this month, though I did spend the time well on other things (like sandy ponds)

[Andy Wolff]

finally added the proper dancing cacti
I wanted to skew them, but apparently you can't in c#'s spriteBatch without jumping through some very expensive hoops, so instead I built my own, probably more expensive hoops to jump through. That is to say, I'm making the cacti dance by drawing vertical slices of the sprite offset horizontally.

I made a silly mistake while implementing this, and got a weird-looking visual error from it:

I found the problem quickly, though, and fixed it. Turns out I was doing something wrong with the heights of each slice, where they should have been small constants

I don't think the cacti dance would translate well to a gif, so here's a video of it:

I still haven't found a very good quality screencapture setup, though I think I managed to lower the frameskipping a lot

i have a few ideas to make the cactus forest novelty level more interesting, but I haven't implemented any of them yet

[Ashkin]

Awesome cacti <3

[Franklins Ghost]

Cacti dance looks great.

What screen capture software are you using?

[Andy Wolff]

@Franklin's Ghost: I'm using CamStudio. So far I haven't really fiddled much with other recording software, but I know there's a good list of alternatives here. I just haven't really bothered to try the others out properly yet.

Nothing I've tried has been able to record sound exactly as it is output to the speakers/headphones in software. I have a cable that jacks the audio out into the audio in, but it's often noisier than recording the speakers through a mic. I might be able to fix this with a little bit of electronics funkery, though. I speculate that it might also be possible to write a recording method directly into the game, which would probably get better quality than anything, but that'd most likely be more work than it's worth. I know that works well for video because I've done it before, but I'm not sure about audio.

• Fixed an oversight which allowed players to spawn on cacti, causing them immediate serious injury or even death.
• Made it so that you can't shoot through Obstacles like cacti or trees (anything you can't walk through). I had this in originally but it must have gotten lost somewhere
• Fixed the code for Arrows so that you can give them a target point and they'll calculate a suitable trajectory (cheers for elementary math). This means archers actually aim at you now. I made them arch their arrows a lot at further distances because it wouldn't really be fair for them to be able to hit you quickly at any distance.

These recordings are only skipping like a tenth of the frames now, instead of like 3/4 of them, so I might start making more little videos than gifs (it was taking kind of a long time to make the gifs). I just wish you could embed videos on here

I'm revisiting the indian chief and the snakeboss. Right now they're not that interesting to fight. The snakeboss just outright kills you without giving you much of a chance unless you're very good at dodging, and killing it isn't any more interesting than just shooting it a bunch of times, and the chief is just kind of random and drawn-out. I'm thinking I should add distinct phases to their behavior, like attack phases and a rest phase, to better control the flow of the fight.

[Andy Wolff]

Made a bunch of changes to the indian chief. He's pretty hard now. Still some polish/cleanup to do. I actually haven't really given him distinct attack and rest phases like I thought wanted to, but this is still a lot better than before.

[Andy Wolff]

Worked on the snake boss.
Gave it some bloodied frames to show that you're doing damage to it
Now when you kill it, the snake's entire body turns into gold. I'll probably get a video when I finish meddling with the snake's behavior.

Added the beetles, though I haven't decided whether I like the way they behave yet.


I mean, I like the bug-like zig-zaggy motion, but in terms of gameplay it's kind of iffy, especially if their method of attack is to just run into you. I'm thinking I might make it so shooting them doesn't destroy shots, which would be better for their large groups. I'm also toying with the idea that they won't hurt you immediately, but if you touch them they'll latch on to you and there will be a way to shake them off before they bite you and scurry off. I might give them a flying behavior, as well (they do have wings, after all). Maybe I'll do some flocking behavior to keep them close to each other.
I'd love to hear suggestions for other ways of making the beetles feel more 'right'

[Inanimate]

I was about to recommend flocking. Having them show up in waves would make them hard to dodge; and if you give them a little bit of AI that tells them to try to find an optimal distance from each other (not too close, not too far), the swarm will spread out like a ripple, making dodging it very skill-testing.