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[goob256]

The full title of the game is "Egbert and Frogbert's Crystal Picnic", or "Crystal Picnic" for short.

I have to admit I haven't done one of these before, and haven't read many others, but it would be beneficial to get some feedback. Let me start by introducing myself and team.

Zoe Coleman - Another TigSource member, she's making the music and SFX.
Tony Huisman - Doing the graphics and helps with level design.
John Bardinelli - Wrote the script and is working on extra dialogue for NPCs and such.
Brad Stapleton - Doing level design.
Me - I do the programming and coordinate things between everyone.

So the game is similar to a "Tales" game or something like Summon Night. We're intentionally making it feel retro. Low-res, MIDI (but with a good chiptune-like soundfont).

There are basically two modes in the game: a 3/4 top down field view like many old RPGs had, and the platformer-like battle view. I guess the battles are something similar to a 2D pixelized Smash Bros? Can't really think of any better description. Of course it'll have a lot of RPG elements like collecting gear, exploring, leveling up and a good story. The story is not dark at all like many RPGs. It's going to be kid friendly even. The characters are all animals (the two main characters are Tony's creation since he was a kid.) It's humorous and not a typical RPG plot.

Tech-wise I'm using C++ and Lua with Allegro 5 as a backend for graphics and input and BASS for audio. We plan to run on a lot of different platforms but we're going to start with Win/Mac/Linux and OUYA (and possibly others that have good controls, ie not touchscreens.)

Maturity wise, I spent 3 years working on the engine for another game that fell through. The engine is pretty capable but we need a lot of content and that will means lots of small "upgrades" to the engine. We plan to finish in 2014 and we're shooting for the beginning of the year optimistically.

As far as past work, a lot of us have worked on other games. Zoe and Tony have a lot of experience and so does John. Brad is fairly new to game development but he's picking up quick. The "studio" we're working under is called Nooskewl and to date our biggest game is Monster RPG 2 which is now free and open source (http://www.monster-rpg.com).

Currently we're working on:

Zoe - she's ahead of us all so free to pick any tracks we need done and SFX
Tony - Also ahead, he's going to be working on new NPCs and enemies
John - Will be writing dialogue for NPCs in the two main "town" areas we have so far
Brad - Working on new levels
Me - Currently "making levels playable" which involves some light level editing, scripting and miscellaneous stuff.

Normally I just dump little tidbits of progress on Twitter or Facebook or IRC, but I'm going to try to keep this space updated as well and have more detailed and technical information. I know I haven't given many juicy details yet, but it's easier to give those at the time we're working on them. We have quite a bit done, but it's a big game. For now here are some links:

Facebook (some videos, images and sounds here): https://www.facebook.com/groups/469318416494147/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/CrystalPicnic
Website: http://www.crystalpicnic.com
Nooskewl website: http://www.nooskewl.com
Zoe's Soundcloud (some music from the game here): https://soundcloud.com/zoecoleman

And finally (for now) a few screenshots:



















Hope you enjoy reading about this! Your feedback is welcome!

[karlozalb]

Cool graphics, I like the colour palette you chose. That "2D pixelized Smash Bros" idea sounds very interesting

[FE_Game]

I like the character design a lot.
The dialogue seems funny

I agree with the post above, switching view for the battles will be very awesome. Can't wait to see more!

[goob256]

Thanks for the feedback! I just recorded a little video which may give you a better idea how things look in action:

[FE_Game]

I feel like I want to jump into the game! There is something about the nature of the humor that is really appealing.

The music is very emotive! I like it a lot.

[goob256]

I spent today getting the bulk of things working on OUYA. Here's a little demonstration: https://vine.co/v/h5pZFJ1JZXQ

Thanks for the kind comments. :D

[Zoe Coleman Music]

The music is very emotive! I like it a lot.

Glad to hear you enjoyed it! :D

[goob256]

We've got the interior levels of the town done now. All except the NPCs. Waiting on John to write us some dialogue. Also added the water wheel to the exterior.

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The arrows are panning arrows. I don't know if it'll make it into the final game in any way, but you can pan around the whole area to get a good and quick look.

Some of the areas  simulate 3D, like many games of this type. You can walk behind this building but also on top of it.

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And of course you can stop by the cafe for a nice glass of milk or eggnog.

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[ITS_Mike]

I love this! It really does bring me back to my childhood days of playing NES and SNES games   The dialogue is perfect, the characters are likeable and distinctive, the story is intriguing....  I actually want to go get back whatever was stolen!  Definitely following this one

[goob256]

John Bardinelli is responsible for the story. He did a great job. You can check out his site if you like: http://www.bardinelli.com/

EDIT: I forgot that John is also a member of these forums.

[goob256]

The past few days we've finished the whole castle and added 30 NPCs. Various types. Added a whole bunch of new SFX and some new music. On the technical side, There were problems with my triangulation method (we use nav meshes for pathfinding/collision detection) and I've replaced that with a new one. That's made things better but introduced some new issues. I'll need to tweak pathfinding for the new triangulation soon. Going to release a new alpha for people with access very soon now.

One of my fave parts of the castle:

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[goob256]

I fixed the pathfinding/smoothing issues this morning. There was a huge oversight where I was checking collisions slightly differently in different spots (one in path smoothing and one when actually handling the real movement.) This caused weird behavior like the entity jittering off course a bit at times. This has been a plague for me for a while and I didn't notice it until today.

The other thing was, while I was running pathfinding in a separate thread, it was blocking on a single mutex shared between all entities. Obviously not what I intended so I made it run in the background correctly. Now it appears much faster. On my very slow netbook during pathfinding the whole game would blip during finding long paths and now that's gone.

So now pathfinding is faster and seems to be perfectly accurate! Was very happy to discover bug #1! :D

[ITS_Mike]

Ah, it's nice to see that a 2D game is using a navmesh and triangulation (I assume you mean polygon triangulation); I plan on using it for one of my projects, but I wasn't certain how well it would work  A post about how you are doing it would be very interesting

[goob256]

A post about how you are doing it would be very interesting

Sure. I'm using it not only for areas but for entities too. I have two separate editors that are really simple, no frills things to place points/connect lines to make an outline and holes. The entity editor allows for different types of "bones" (couldn't think of a better word for it) such as "normal", "attack", "defend"... normal can take hits, attack deals damage etc. The level tools is called, plainly, lineed, and you save a screenshot of the level from the actual level editor and make an outline. Connect the final segment with the 'l' key, escape to back up... very simple, no frills. After the main outline, fill in the holes.

This writes out a Lua script which is simply a data definition which I sometimes tweak a bit by hand here and there if my point placing wasn't perfect. The engine loads this definition and triangulates it with poly2tri (https://code.google.com/p/poly2tri/.) I experimented with my own triangulator but it's more work than I wanted to put in with all the corner cases I was coming up with, and the results weren't very good anyway. So anyway this gives me a vector of triangles which I then process.

I store a few types of data from this processing. First I store the triangles themselves in a structure that contains a pointer to the adjacent triangle on each edge (if there is one.) I use this for pathfinding. I believe I read about pathfinding on a nav mesh in Game Programming Gems Volume 1. At the most basic level it's no more difficult than tile based A*. However if you want to get good paths, it's more work. I use a look-ahead process to smooth the path so that the entities go as far ahead in a straight line as possible, rather than triangle to triangle. It has to work around corners and stuff, and took a while to get right.

The second type of data I store is just the outline, without the inner lines of the triangles. I use this for collision detection. I break the area up into small squares and test entities against lines in those squares.

Anyway, can't think of anything else interesting about the topic, but here's a small gif showing the process of outlining a level. I did this as quickly as I could so this doesn't represent how I would do a real level. :D... I'm much more careful when it matters.

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EDIT: replaced with a better gif.

[ITS_Mike]

Very nice! Also, thanks for the poly2tri tip   I had looked for a library like this, but for some reason I didn't find it

[goob256]

Added a bunch of NPCs to the town. Have 5 left to add and then the shop/mini game owners. Adding NPCs takes a while but the castle and town are the main areas where there are NPCs and they're almost done.

Lots of other work has been done. I made the keyboard control orient the player better; if you're running downwards then run diagonal it stays on down instead of switching to left/right animation. Got around to setting custom reverb levels for each song - some sound much better at the right level than the defaults. Also music fades in and out when changing songs. Removed dependency on one library in order to make loading faster, which increases our datafile size a bit but it's worth it. Tony has made a ton of new sprites and a cool water mill animation (the interior part, exterior has been shown.) Should be moving on to the next level within a week. Brad's been designing it and it's coming out well. Bunch of modifications to our first mini game such as making it so you can't repeatedly bash a mole over and over, as fun as that was lol.

All in all things are progressing which is good.

[Pemanent]

I really like the art. I think you've pulled off the cartoon, happy, kid friendly art style without looking too chiche. I like the idea of different views for the battles. For me those types of camera changes can be really jarring, but I'm interested to see how you do it.

I know this really isn't the direction you're going, but I would LOVE to see these animals outright cold blooded murder each other. Just the pure contrast between the art style and the characters excessively violent actions would make for some a very grabbing game. 

[goob256]

Thanks. You can see the battle transitions here (I linked to this video already, but this starts at about the time the battle starts): http://youtu.be/jnylexGwWG0?t=1m. As far as excessive violence, I'm not really into that. It will have plenty of cartoony violence but no blood or gore or anything like that. The game will be kid friendly but there's plenty of humor and action there that should appeal to a lot of adults as well. Just no excessive violence.

[goob256]

Had a team change today. Without getting right into it, we're 1 member shorter and Tony and I are going to have to pick up the slack. We can't afford to pay another person at this point as it wouldn't be worth their time for what's left of the money we were paying the other person.

Good news though, I think we'll be finished the town this weekend, then moving on to the first "dungeon" next week. Should be pretty fun.

[goob256]

Tonight we finished River Town and I bumped us up to 20%. We're definitely there or past, even though plot-wise we're not.

The last few touches were adding the merchants who will appear throughout the game, and finishing the shop interface. I thought the shop was mostly done, but instead I spent all day on it to get it working (it's now 12:50am.)

Here are a couple screenshots.

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