next »

[tjcbs]

Hey, if you're unlucky, the pits can be instant death traps! Reach the light, and fall into the eternal abyss.

[PapaCheech]

yep.
 I am using the dreaded bogo sort  (generate random numbers in an infinite loop until ones are found that are suitable) when I generate positions for the enemies, and for the light to move to. So the result is if I generate positions a certain distance away from the player AND the black hole, I will sometimes get an infinite while loop that breaks the game.
I know I need to fix this very soon, but I am struggling to think of a way to preserve the randomness while being able to generate new positions more efficiently and between more objects. if anyone has any tips on this I would be very grateful.

[tjcbs]

It seems like the light can spawn fairly close to the player as it is. I don't think that those two requirements should generate an infinite loop? *But*, I had the exact issue in my game. The solution for me was to permit only so many iterations (1000 in my case). if no solution was found throw the whole thing out and try again.

[PapaCheech]

See, say the light is directly between the black hole and player, and its trying to find a position that is 10 blocks away from both (for example). If the map isn't big enough to accomodate this, then it will run infinitely.
Good call. Maybe I will do it with a ticker, and if it takes to long, will slowly decrement the distance. Or, maybe if I keep generating positions a certain distance away from the player, and just run a check if the light will be on top of the black hole (cause it doesn't matter how far away it is only that it isn't sucked in). If the position generated is ON the black hole, it will throw that position  out.
Who knows. I am going to be working on optimization and bugfixes like this this weekend so ill report back if i'm successful

[tjcbs]

Really in a simple case like that you just need to build an array of possible locations for the light and pick one randomly. If none exist then yeah decrement the distance or something.

Just ran into a weird bug on stage 11 where the input froze and the shadows were rapidly moving back and forth. kind of freaky.

I feel like the game lost some of its charm with the new level progression. Before it seemed to make more thematic sense, like 6 stages of shadows and then you introduced the bad cross, and once you got past the difficulty hump of stage 20 you uncover the mystery of the voids. Now it feels like stuff is just being thrown at you.

[PapaCheech]

uh oh i changed the spawn values for testing and then uploaded a new version gotta fix that :s

[PapaCheech]

fixed. nice catch thank you.

[PapaCheech]

I just updated the game once more. I completely rewrote the movement system to be more in line with classic snake, or tetris games, and make the gameplay more about strategy than speed. It feels much better now.

This is the last time I am going to update the game, and the test version will be taken down at the end of the month to start preparing for the full release at the end of november. I want to keep a couple tricks up my sleeves for the full release Thank you so much everyone for your feedback, I would not be as on-track as I am without you all!

To keep updated on Flicker and its eventual release, follow me on twitter, @papacheech.

Thanks again, and I will update this thread once more at the end of november! See yall around the forums.

Cheers,
Dan

[tjcbs]

66!

A few bugs, some of which I'm sure you're aware of:

The search for the light placement is broken, it will dump the light into a void when there are perfectly good spaces for it to go.

Lights fall in even when they are 1 space away from a void.

Game gets very easy once the voids appear, because all the enemies fall in, death is usually caused by carelessness at this point.

I saw the shadows freak out again at level 38, this time I could move but the movement seemed weird while this was happening.

A red "core" of a shadow was left behind, and just sitting in place. It never went away, and I didn't risk touching it.