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[BlueSweatshirt]

As to your resolution problem:

Personally, I feel like the viewport is rather huge. You see a lot of the level at one time, and I think the game might still play well if the viewport was smaller. Perhaps you can try halfing the viewport but doubling the pixel resolution? So your game would still be 400x400 but it'd be much easier to see. And.. Yeah, I don't feel like the loss in view will hurt the player much.

[eigenbom]

I appreciate the double res, thx!

[Ashkin]

Personally, I feel like the viewport is rather huge. You see a lot of the level at one time, and I think the game might still play well if the viewport was smaller. Perhaps you can try halfing the viewport but doubling the pixel resolution? So your game would still be 400x400 but it'd be much easier to see. And.. Yeah, I don't feel like the loss in view will hurt the player much.

You're right. I should experiment with the viewport a little more. But I'm worried a smaller view area will decrease the sense of exploration. But maybe it will increase it?...

I've been in a bit of a slump lately (everything aches), but I've been tweaking the treasure chest code because it's relatively simple to do. I want to make them satisfying and fun to find. The first thing to do about this was make it so you have to press down to open a chest rather than just touching it- more interaction makes it seem special, so you can't just run through a room full of chests to open them all. Next I'll be lowering chest spawn rate (seriously, they're everywhere) and adding bigger chests with better rewards, along with Uberchests to store future drill upgrades in.

Due to the recent Indie Stone incident, I'll be backing up all my code on Github, and since I'm too cheap to shell out for private repositories, I'll be doing it open-source.

But unfortunately I am having trouble with github so it will have to wait :/

Edit: Okay, I got Github working. Check the OP for the link!

[Ashkin]

Okay, guys. This is the decision. I need help making it, and I hope you can all provide guidance.
The two options:

• Keep the resolution how it has been so far (1x res, 400*400 gamespace, 400*400 window)
• Expand res as shown in screenshot above (2x res, 200*200 gamespace, 400*400 window)

I'm actually leaning towards the second option right now- it feels right, though there will be some HUD/menu redesign in store for me. But I wanted to get the opinion of everyone else.

[droqen]

• Expand res as shown in screenshot above (2x res, 200*200 gamespace, 400*400 window)

Make sure you fix that cursor, too :x

[kamac]

That GUI takes almost 1/4 of screen!

[rek]

Double size shows a bit more detail which is good, but that HUD has to change.


Don't look too closely or you'll see how mangled it is.

[eigenbom]

i concur with the above 3 posts

[Ashkin]

Mm, that's what I meant when I said reorganizing things. I'll probably take an approach similar to what rek has posted, except maybe have it across the top and bottom. In fact I quite like what rek's done, heh. Maybe I'll space it out a bit and add a curse tracker that shows the current curse you have.

[starsrift]

Due to the recent Indie Stone incident, I'll be backing up all my code on Github, and since I'm too cheap to shell out for private repositories, I'll be doing it open-source.

But unfortunately I am having trouble with github so it will have to wait :/

Edit: Okay, I got Github working. Check the OP for the link!

IIRC bitbucket does it for free and you don't have to open source.

[Ashkin]

Due to the recent Indie Stone incident, I'll be backing up all my code on Github, and since I'm too cheap to shell out for private repositories, I'll be doing it open-source.

But unfortunately I am having trouble with github so it will have to wait :/

Edit: Okay, I got Github working. Check the OP for the link!

IIRC bitbucket does it for free and you don't have to open source.

Mm, I was just checking out bitbucket now.

I don't really care if it's opensource or not, it's not like anybody wants to use my code The worst I have to worry about is someone yelling at me for my awful coding.
But a fourth backup couldn't hurt!

[baconman]

I concur with the posts above, but keep the whole GUI in the bottom strip, since until the final escape (which is a disposable part of gameplay anyhow), "down" is the direction where most players will pay the most attention anyways.

[Ashkin]

Productivity? What's that? I only know Trackmania.

I concur with the posts above, but keep the whole GUI in the bottom strip, since until the final escape (which is a disposable part of gameplay anyhow), "down" is the direction where most players will pay the most attention anyways.

Mm, but I'm afraid that it would be constantly concealing everything in a downward direction.

[baconman]

Easy enough to fix, just have the camera homing y-axis go -20 to 30 px or so from it's current position.

[Ashkin]

Easy enough to fix, just have the camera homing y-axis go -20 to 30 px or so from it's current position.

Ah, you mean have the deadzone of the camera closer to the top of the view from where it is now, so the player is always at the top of the camera zone, looking down? Yeah, I think that would work well. Thanks!

Term four is starting soon, so that means studying for exams. I'll still try to do some work on this (I've been procrastinating lately), but it will slow down. Totally not an excuse for procrastination!

[Ashkin]

Better (?) looking explosions!

Horrible mishaps!

Menu design!

ALL THIS AND MORE IS HAPPENING.

Okay, explosions. Right now I'm working on improving them in a number of different ways, like these:

• Multiple explosions per impact rather than just one!
• The timing of appearance/disappearance is staggered so we don't have a bunch of explosions at the same time, because that's BORING!
• I'm working on shifting the color closer to red the farther away from the origin the explosion is.

I'm still working on the last one- as you can see by the second screenshot, I have no idea how to shift hues properly in AS3. Could anyone help me with this?

Also, I wanted your opinion on two things.
The first of these: the new shaded explosions. Do you think they look better? Do they fit with the style? They're pretty rough right now but I'll improve them if you fellows think they look better.

The second: What do you think of the menu? The previous menu doesn't work with the size constraints I have now (everything was all jumbled together and it was horrible), so I'm thinking of remaking it to suit the size and also to possibly look better. It's obviously W.I.P. right now and will be viewed in 2x res, but what do you guys think of what I have so far?

[negativeview]

Doing it the "right way" is ... complex. There are probably shortcuts that work for some cases (for instance, from green to red only). You may be able to find/invent one of those. If you can find something in a standard library somewhere, USE IT. Believe me, you don't want to do it yourself.

If I didn't scare you away, this is a brief summary of how to do it the right way. I can't just give you all the math, because I don't even understand it.

1) Convert from RGB to HSV. This is just another way of representing color. The HSV stands for Hue, Saturation, and Value. You can find the math to convert from RGB to HSV out there.
2) Change the Hue value.
3) Convert BACK to RGB.

Knowing these three steps may also help you find the right functions in the standard library. (I'm not an AS3 guy anymore).

[Flink]

Don't know what your plans is but it would be super awesome if the bombs could set off each other to create a massive chain reaction of explosions. Reminds me of this awesome MGS1 trailer

[Ashkin]

Don't know what your plans is but it would be super awesome if the bombs could set off each other to create a massive chain reaction of explosions. Reminds me of this awesome MGS1 trailer

Perhaps I'll do something to do with that- when you drop a bomb while holding down, it doesn't explode unless another explosion hits it, and you can pick it back up? Then you could set up a bunch of bombs in a row and have them all set off with a rocket.

-snip-

Thanks for the help! I'll go scour the web for ways to pull this off properly.

[Ashkin]

Oh hey.
I discovered a nifty class in AS3 called colorTransform. FlxSprites have a built in instance of this (_colorTransform) which can be used to easily change the red, green and blue channels completely seperately, so I've been able to make explosions farther from the origin look redder! So I think explosions are done for now. I need to rework impacts: I'll be adding a bunch of debris effects.