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[vivavolt]

Could i send a track or two of music for you to consider to be in the game, even though you are heading up music?

Yes! Certainly, always glad to give things a listen. PM me.

Sliding box

(new gameplay element!)

Shouldn't it tilt in the opposite direction? Inertia and all?

At which point? It's being dragged from the bottom O ring by a (currently invisible) rope so I agree that makes very little sense visually. At the end it just swings back to being flat because that was less complicated.

[vivavolt]

We've done some work on the look of the first area, getting somewhere I'm happier with now:



Here's a gif showing the (almost) complete pulling animation. He doesn't have a "throw rope" animation yet, though.



Also; here's a bug:



Working on the cutscene system at the moment, I'll probably do a technical writeup on it later.

[iammonshushu]

Hey guys, if you are interested we've (errrrm just Ben has) done a technical write-up of the cutscene mechanic.

[peous]

Interesting article, thank you for sharing !

I made something similar one day and the difference was I had "blocks" like yours with a start and end duration, instead of "wait" blocks, that leads to the opportunity to do things with a long duration at the same time like this 10s cinematic where multiple things happen at the same time:
0s - Fade in for 2s
0s - Play welcome sound for 10s
1s - King moves from 0px to 100px in 4s
2s - Hero moves from 200px to 100px in 3s
5s - Say "Oh a new hero"
8s - Fade out for 2s

[iammonshushu]

Brief summary of what has been happening!

We've been working on the general atmosphere, and its reaching a point where we are very happy with it!


We have put a placeholder menu into the game, so its looking less like an idea and more like an outcome.


More and more backdrops are going into the game, which is great 


And there are the beginnings of house and doors. I am really looking forward to the game feeling less like a series of levels and more like its own world.


At the moment, the interiors are a bit sparse however...

From the gameplay side of things we are reaching another milestone:

6000 lines is closing fast!

We have just started putting levels into the game, which should come together really quickly into the first area. At the same time we have been fiddling with the story and gameplay elements for the rest of the game, to get it *just right*. We are also looking at music for the game and at the moment we are thinking classical-inspired, sparse, piano music. Hopefully, the next few weeks will be filled with advances and quick development before we get busy around November    .

[vivavolt]

I feel kinda bad that every screenshot I post is from the same area, but hey, I have to look at it all day and so should you.

I've been tweaking the lighting and graphics some more, and we finally made ONE level for the game..!!!







Also, we are at 6316 lines of code if people care about that!

(Don't worry the game doesn't actually need that much memory, it's in debug mode).

[vivavolt]

Days, weeks, they blend into one... Will he ever stand on these blocks properly? What did I do to deserve such a fate.

Until...



(It's actually still not perfect, but almost)

[Impmaster]

Looks great! Keep on with the good work, people.

[vivavolt]

Had a pretty fantastic bug today:



But also got it working properly:

[somin]

This looks really promising *following

[vivavolt]

So, I'll be starting art for the second area soon (yay not the exact same images over and over again). But in the mean time:

Here's me activating a piston using an undisclosed item:



And here's me with a totally reasonable number of particles spraying from my head:



Here are some old-fashioned stationary images too:


Moving platforms are in, which was a headache.


Here is the new dust/smoke effect, which I quite like actually.

[Impmaster]

Actually, by now, I feel as though the main character doesn't fit the art style of the rest of the game. Everything else is subtle and highly detailed while he is minimalist and basic.

[vivavolt]

I see where you're coming from, and it is food for thought. The character is deliberately simple, but I do feel the rest of the game is surpassing him in graphical fidelity.

I don't really have any new ideas for his design, however...

[OniWorld]

I'm loving this, those screenshots and GIFs really make the game feel awesome already. Looking forward to more updates, will be following your blog for sure!

[ericmbernier]

Actually, by now, I feel as though the main character doesn't fit the art style of the rest of the game. Everything else is subtle and highly detailed while he is minimalist and basic.

Now that this has been pointed out to me, I can't unsee it anymore :/

The effects look great as usual. I believe you're using FlashPunk, if my memory serves me right. How does your FPS rate hold up with a lot of effects on screen?

[vivavolt]

We're working on completely reworking the character (and other characters who didn't exist before) from scratch. After you guys brought it up, we realised the character wasn't really in line with what we were trying to achieve in terms of style - so hopefully we'll have a new character to show you soon!

I'm redoing all the animations now, which is annoying, but I'm much MUCH happier with what we came to. It took a few days of constant discussions, sketching and searching for inspiration but we got there.

The effects look great as usual. I believe you're using FlashPunk, if my memory serves me right. How does your FPS rate hold up with a lot of effects on screen?

FlashPunk is pretty great honestly, I can get ~500 particles bouncing around and all that with constant 60FPS, that's without object pooling or any optimisation. The FPS normally doesn't ever drop, but Flash can be quirky sometimes.

So, new screenshots of the new area and player are coming!

[vivavolt]

Okay, so as promised, new character art!





Still early on the animation front, but we are much happier with the overall tone and appearance of this design. This resolves a lot of issues were having from a design point due to lack of clarity in the character.

[Impmaster]

He looks kind of creepy because of the stiffness of his arms. I'll keep my judgement until the final animations are done, though.

[vivavolt]

That's a little bit intentional, but I think they need a little bit of swing in the arms themselves still. Animation is hardly my specialty - sadly.

[vivavolt]

Sorry things have gone dark lately! I'm in the middle of exams and Ricky is off overseas for a couple weeks.

I took a break from studying today and drew some more background elements (need to set up some levels for screenshots), and I also started adding in Entity-Component based design to the game (this kinda sucks in AS3 since there are no generics but it's possible).

This took a while but it's helping to reduce the massive code bloat of the player class, obviously the benefits of this will be more obvious to me down the line (haven't actually used this design pattern before). Though, through refactoring player animation alone I reduced the player class by 200 lines.

I still need to rewrite the platformer physics as a component rather than a super-class but that's for another day.

(You can see I have to repeat myself for a cast when I call getComponent, can't seem to find a solution to this in AS3).