TIGSource Forums

Alright guys.
Me and the Monster King we were talking that, were both in a kind of game making slump.
Hes not doing his games, not enough at least. He doesnt want to become ALL TALK.
And im always working on freelance stuff instead of making my game makin dreams a reality.

(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-LHg3_CYorDY/TlWa3FQQGjI/AAAAAAAAAKM/ZLEgN76a0_E/s1600/PLEGE.jpg)

So here we go. We decided to pledge. We pledge to spend four hours every week day (so five days a week) on our respective game projects until theyre done, giving ourselves the right to give the other a hard time if they dont do their own 4 hours. Every day were going to post details of what weve done here. So this is going to be a weird sorta dual devlog of two completely unrelated sets of games worked on by two people.

We might let others join, but we wont let just anyone in or this topic would become pretty hard to follow, and its going to become problematic to give everyone a hard time if theres too many peeps.

The project I am currently working on is a very old one. One that I initially started as part of Mr.Podunkian's action 52 owns community project, from the game NON HUMAN. This is a very old project that is frustratingly close to completion, but I could never find the time to finally slog through the final polish and debug and bonus content crap. Im going to try to finish it up in the coming weeks by spending at least four hours a day on it, and ill report here how its doing!

(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/Screen1.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/Screen2.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/Screen3.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/Screen4.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/Screen5.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/Screen6.gif)

Heres some things about the project as it is today!
Theres a cool playthrough vid of an older version found on youtube. Theres another Action 52 owns game in there too, space dreams. This is an old version but the overall gameplay is about the same now. Ill upload a more recent vid soonish maybe.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PiA57so36Jo

heres some sprites from the game.
(http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/nonhuman/Dude.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/nonhuman/MoutherWalk.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/nonhuman/EyeArms_Move.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/nonhuman/EyeArms_Die.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.leafo.net/Stuff/nonhuman/CrawlerWalk.gif)(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/CrawlerDeath11.gif)

Heres a couple vids I made of me working on the current intro.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rYIYFHiy8sQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWVivwm3aJQ

I didnt work on this for a little while so ill prolly spend a lot of the first day just finding out what exactly I was doing when I stopped last time.

(http://i43.tower.com/images/mm101800809/will-power-friedrich-w-nietzsche-paperback-cover-art.jpg)

i wont post details, just the general things i do every day. i like surprises and to surprise, so you will probably only see my actual games when they are done. the posts will be like "did sprites" or "programmed a cool fight"

I found out that there is  generally  a subconscious reason to procrastination. Like you subconsciously know tht ther is something that will be difficult/impossible to finish , or that will take too much time or that the reward will not be worth it or that there is something in the game that doesn't really work (like it's not fun to play )

Meditate uponn yourself and the game and you'll understand your true motives.

often its because of boring parts, or hard ones yeah. we must learn to accept the boring parts

i mean i played mmos anyways right
ive grinded in games

this is more thoughtful but there is an analogy


gotta make da GAMES

(http://teamgettingfit.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/nike1.jpg)

Speaking of which, I need to put some more effort into my own current projects, haven't felt like working on them lately.

Surprises are necessary, but silence is dangerous. As moi said, leaving areas of the game unfinished and unexplained is a huge reason games fail.

Sounds like a good fit of styles, can't wait to see the games you guys make awwwww yeah.

I heard the musician for Non Human is a crap idiot who smells bad and wears a diaper. Is there any truth to this rumor?

opening sequence hnnnnghnhghg

Hes the one on the left here-
(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v235/SmileyMags/MyPics/MJWedding/Sandestin11.jpg)

FIRST UPDATE
Spent 3 hours so far on finishing the 11 alternate characters. Right now working on their subweapons. Going to keep working on that today. Im trying to make em feel different enough from one another that it changes how the game is played quite a bit. Next ill be working on their respective heads up displays.

Also, looking at the game again after all this time, some of what was left to do is coming back to me! Ill compile a lil todo list here.

• Still have to finish the final boss, a lot of its art is still sketchey/not animated/not polished
  
• I have the finale of the game to work on, the final area thats exclusive to the highest difficulty level.
  
• Two of the hardest difficulty level-exclusive mini bosses arnt done. One is a lil glitchy, the other is just at concept level.
  
• Two of the other main game areas (both exclusive to highest difficulty level) dont have background tiles and lack tiling detail.
  
• The hardest diff level has another feature still missing, extreme enemies; At regular intervals an enemy is picked to be swapped for a much harder version of it. Thats not done yet.
  
• Lots of work left on the games' alternate characters. Some of em have incomplete art, most of them dont have their own set of subweapons, none of them have their unique heads up display, two of them are just at concept level and arnt playable whatsoever yet, all of them except the main character needs some balancing and general tweaking.
  
• Got to work on the "ending cinematic" which ties the current game mode into the next higher difficulty level. Quite a bit of animation to do there, and some special effects that im not entirely sure yet how I will do. Will go into more detail when I get at that point.
  
• Add the portraits for the character select screen, and other char select screen details.
  
• Finish the achievements and medals. Not a very big part of the game, just a lil in-game acknowledgement of having played particularly well or with certain limitations.
  
• A lot of work left on the alternate game modes, theyre about halfway done. Theres a shitload of those, I really went overboard when I thought those up, I might cut some of them out or re-think them if theyre not fun enough. This is a very big one, a looot of work here, possibly more than a week's worth, unless I decide to cut a lot out of it.
  
• The intro sequence is almost done, but some bits of it have awkward timing. One of the parts of it is slow and weird, not too sure what I was thinking there. Maybe I should add more "moments" to it that would just flash by to make it more fast-paced... got to think about that one.
  
• The various game modes and diff levels need their intro pictures. Will wait for all the modes to be finished to start on that obviously.
  

Theres prolly lots of minor lil bug fixing left too.

ganbatte man

been waiting since the dawn of time for this baby's completion

Hey I'm forcing myself into this pact because I'm a Prickolas and because Frankie and the Monster King's backlogs have delayed collabs they were supposed to do with me  :handshakeL::-X :handknifeR: and also because we're knuckleheads together in real life. I've literally never finished a project I've started in any medium since longer than I can remember, but I got a good feeling about this one.

(http://i.imgur.com/nwib9.jpg)

I'm recycling a scrapped project's code to make a much smaller scale game. It's a Mega Man fangame, done in the NES style, where you play as Guts Man, a boss from the first Mega man. I'm really doing this more as a learning experience than anything, and also to say I finished something. Still, the core mechanic of Guts Man spawning and throwing blocks to navigate levels and fight enemies is satisfying, so maybe it'll turn out ok. I already had much of the art assets imported in from the previous project(and several custom frames I made myself), as well as things like jump physics, collision detection, damage, animations and gravity coded in, as well as the actual interaction with boulders.

What I've done so far is manage to make an enemy that has something that could generously be called an AI, and code a functional screen transitioning script that will let me divide the one big stage the game will consist of into small challenge rooms, like in the NES Mega Man titles. Frankie helped me pretty much every step of the way, since I am an extreme newb at all of this, so major props to him.

E: Some of the original animations I made for Guts Man.
(http://i.imgur.com/z5Kwi.gif)(http://i.imgur.com/mqteI.gif)(http://i.imgur.com/MyqA0.gif)

Aight. Done about 7-8 hours totes of working on the art for the alt characters, and on some of the animation and their implementation in the game. They're getting there. Ill prolly still work on that tomorrow. Not very exciting right now, I'm a lil rusty on that project. Still have to search a lot whenever I need to do something.

You're going to fail, mwahahaha 8)

(http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_EI_UnJy0snU/THPlBBGYV3I/AAAAAAAACT8/XhegE-suPXg/s400/hang_in_there.jpg)

Today, still working on the alt characters. Focussing on a specific one today, the first one you can unlock, temp name protobot.
(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/ProtobotPrev.gif)

At first, the idea with him was that he'd be kind of a "joke character". It would start out as a very, very good character. Stronger, faster and all around better than the first. But as you play, it starts breaking down and losing pieces, revealing a very shitty piece of junk skeleton of a robot underneath, eventually becoming almost unplayable. Subweapons malfunctioning when you shoot them, the main machinegun overloading or something, thick black smoke coming out of the back. That kind of thing. It would force you to go through the game very fast to stand any chance against the final boss. I'm not sure if im still going to go with that idea, its a kind of funny concept but isnt very fun, and I find its pretty difficult to convey whats happening to the player without outright explaining it in the character select screen (which would kind of ruin it of course).
I got a few ideas for it though, like a weird heads up display panel with a command line-like computer screen that prints out warning messages and goes nuts when the robot starts to break down, bringing attention to that moment so the player notices when a big chunk of the sprite falls off. Or even having the heads up display itself stop working, break down, fall apart. Not sure! Ill just make it a normal robot for now and experiment a little later, see if it works or not.
I didn't draw the driver portraits yet, ill do all of them in one shot later on, but for this guy I was thinking of a smarmy, flippant hero parody sort of character with a perpetual shit-eating grin and sleek hair. You know the type.

Right on, kick some ass on this game and get it finished up.  :handforkL: :handknifeR:

Spent most of the night fixing glitches in the mechanics and fiddling with projectile rules.

Doing more work today! Again on the alt characters.
While working on all of that stuff I decided to cut half of the alt characters I had thought of, picking the six more interesting/different ones and merging some of the concepts together. The goal here is that every one of them feels like it changes the game enough to go through it again.

(http://2guysreadinggibbon.files.wordpress.com/2011/06/keep-on-trucking1.jpg)

I love getting to read your ideas for some of these characters.
Really like the idea of the robot breaking down and getting worse as he keeps going.

As always Frankie, your animations are sexy and stellar.
Can't wait to see everything in motion guys.  :-*

today the monster king made some sprites and put them in the game

hours missed are catching up (though not yet those were a busy thursday and friday)

Fuck yeah, finish that shit.

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOooooooooo

Cutting down a game's scope is almost never a bad idea. Keep at it!

Worked some more on these characters. Protobot is almost all done, I got some good ideas to make it feel different. I haven't found a good way to implement the whole "breaking down" idea yet though. Not sure I'm going to keep it. I think its one of those ideas that sound cool when explained but aren't really fun. You know. One of thoooose. Maybe ill come up with something, who knows!

i like the idea of him being a speedrun character because you HAVE to speedrun him.

you could have him only get worse if you do well? So like, he starts out super powerful and stuff, but if you just blasty-blast through every enemy and rack up mad points he'll get bad super fast, but if you go easy on the trigger and only kill who you need to you could make it pretty far without getting very bad.

I don't think it should ever become 'unplayable', though. That doesn't sound fun it sounds dumb.

Or maybe collecting powerups instead of actually giving you powerups takes them away?

Every time his shots connect with an enemy, the shots ricochet back and damage him.

Yeah I'm not sure. I'm still thinking this through. I got some ideas, the problem is making the whole breaking down thing be noticeable, yet making it not be just horrible and frustrating. Also, protobot is the first alternate robot you get, so making it be shitty as a joke isnt a very good idea! Im trying things out with weapons malfunctionning, but theres always the problem that you dont really notice it while fighting for your life, unless the breakdown is a big deal, in which case its just kind of a dick move. Its really just that, finding the right balance between something you barely notice and something that makes the game frustrating. Or theres always making it be horribly frustrating but making up for it in other ways.

Could you play around with traction? Maybe it's just a clunky robot that needs a lot more control and precision to move around

Protobot could be the luigi to your primary robot's mario

Well right now its one thing im doing with it, its why hes got a one wheel thing going on. He rolls a little bit/has traction, and when he moves, he gets an angle which moves the aim of the gun, making it a little awkward to shoot if youre not used to it. But theres no progressive part to it yet, its just how that robot moves.

you could make it happen on a predictable cycle. Like have a little counter that starts at 50 or 100 or something, and every time you jump it goes down, and when it reaches 0 your tire busts and your movement becomes bumpy and your aiming gets even worse, and then the counter goes back up to 100, and then it counts down every time you use an alt weapon, and when it reaches 0 your alt weapon thing goes KaBaNg and now alt weapons fly wildly when you shoot them (both a blessing and a curse?) or use more ammo for each shot or something.

When dudes first play it they won't know what the counter is counting down to so you can still have that bit of unknown gaginess to it, but at the same time it won't be random or unanticipated and if you know what's coming you can plan for it by, for example, making sure to beat this boss that requires precise aiming and movement before your tire busts, or hoarding as much ammo as you can before your gun busts, shit like that.

The counter doesn't even have to be numerical, or a hud element at all, it could just be something like, when you land from a jump some particles pop out, and depending on the color/quantity of the particles you can tell how close you are to your next malfunction. Maybe you gradually start smoking over time that also gives you a fairly accurate read.

Yeah. the first prototype of it worked in a way similar to that, but it wasnt specific actions tied to a specific malfunction, it was an overall "condition" counter that went down along with time, and whenever you jumped, fired, got hit and used a subweapon, with getting hit affecting it by a lot more. The problem was that even putting lots of special effects around it (I ended up even making it spawn like, smoke and an explosion animation on the robot at the breaking point), you still sometimes dont notice it. Theres just too much going on in the screen usually, and youre just not paying attention to your guy. Later you just notice, wait, my dude is different, what the hell is going on? And you wont realize like, what caused this to happen, when did it happen. I need something to make it obvious that this last jump caused the tire to break off, that this last shot made your weapons burn up. I want this to be a surprise; if its not done correctly, its going to just be confusing instead.

Im trying things out right now with the Hud, I had a command line HUD panel idea that will probably help a lot with that player feedback problem. It will look like its just a useless visual detail at first, giving you obvious feedback like POWER CELL COLLECTED when you pick up one, and pointless flavor details about your surroundings. But then suddenly it would start going all AROOOGA and giving you red lines of error messages, normal feedback messages getting weird and corrupted, eventually the panel itself having a blue screen of death and maybe even like, breaking and falling off the screen.

you could always pause the game for a couple of seconds, make the whole screen dark except for the character and then play the breaking animation.

*emerges from pile of chocolate wrappers*

Huh? What? Oh yeah. I took a day off yesterday, but I worked on the beginnings of a flying enemy's AI during the weekend and also made a mock-up of the title screen. I more or less finalized the flying enemy tonight, giving him a pattern where he flies until he "sees" the player and dive bombs, then turns around and tries to find the player again. I'll probably need to tweak the timing for balance reasons later on but it's fully functional. It's the most complex AI I've made yet!

Oh, here's the title screen mock-up. Obviously the "Hulk" part will say "Guts" in the actual game.
(http://i.imgur.com/8bMFj.gif)

Not much to talk about today, Im finalizing protobot's subweapons. The special heads-up display for protobot is working, too. Doing a lot of difficulty tweaking with him, the problem is that subweapons make him horribly powerful, and having no subweapons make him especially vulnerable. Trying to attenuate the difference between the two a little bit right now.

Fine tuned the patterns of the flying enemy, coded in a functional title screen (with placeholder graphics), fixed a few glitches related to enemy deaths, created functional enemy spawning cues (so that you can't get shot by someone 20 screens over), fiddled around with some extremely basic level design to test the flexibility of the gameplay I have so far and to let me understand how I should design around Guts Man's powers, created some basic puzzles, added a functional health bar.

I keep going back and forth on wether or not I should give Guts Man a means of attacking when he's got no boulders. What he does is spawn boulders he can use as platforms and as shields, and then pick them up to turn them into projectile weapons that break into smaller projectiles upon impact. The issue is that the delay between spawning and picking up the boulder is a massive amount of time compared to how traditional mega man games let you shoot pellets instantly. I am trying to create a different feel here, but I'm worried players might feel frustrated by Guts Man's lack of split second offense.

Alright. Protobot is done, except for maybe some minor tweaking, he might be a bit too strong.
Also I did something really stupid yesterday. I lost about 5 hours of fine tuning work on protobot when I overwrote my project file. I had two instances of Game Maker open for some reason and absent-mindedly saved the older of the two windows when I closed it. I think I re-done most of the fixes and tweaks I had lost, but I probably forgot one or two.


Next up is the spider robot.
(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/TinybotPrev.gif)

A very small one, about the height of the other robots when they're crouching.
Its going to have kind of a ninja thing going on. Moves quickly, jumps high. Main attack is very powerful, but its slow, and has more or less a melee range. To fight safer you need to use subweapons, which is stuff like shurikens (thrown straight forward), throwing daggers(thrown with a slight arc), etc. The subweapons are a lot cheaper for him. Pressing down and attacking activates a shield that lasts 10 seconds and eats up a lot of power, which you can use to get close to enemies and stab safely. He also has a lot less health than the other robots. The pilot is some sort of ninja spider guy. Hud is going to have a mix of ninja and spiderish things.  This robot is almost done already, I just need to fine tune it right now and give him his own heads up display graphics/layout. I might add a little to the sprite, like dressing up the actual robot with stealthy black cloth and giving it little sandals or something.

(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/HeadsUpSpider_Base.gif)
work in progress, the heads up display for the spider ninja guy. Its not ninjay enough yet, ill fit some lil knives and ninja stars in there somehow.

Coded projectile deflection for shielded enemies, added some sound effects, fiddled with screen format. I tried working on some tilesets but there are too many obstacles right now so I shelved it.

Spiderbot's heads up display is kinda done
(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/HeadsUpSpider.gif)

Did lots of work on the robot itself too, finishing up its subweapons and polishing the main attack.

I hold myself to the much less ambitious standard of doing some sort of work on your game every day. It may be as short as 10 minutes on a given day, but getting into the habit generally gets me to work on it a few hours on each day where it's feasible.

Today I happened to work about 4-6 hours though, thanks to a lot of feedback encouraging me to fix some stuff.

So much tiling today, it feels good to finally make the game look good instead of being a hideous white room full of featureless blocks. Some camera adjustments, some enemy AI tweaking, and most importantly I managed to standardize my game's tiles to the right proportions.


That's a lot more than Monster King has been doing.  :eyebrows:

I made myself a rule that I have to do some game-making before I do anything else on the computer each day.

Going to sleep. Today I mostly worked on the spiderbot's regular melee attack, giving it a good timing, just the right range and putting a pause in your movement while its going off. Theres also a slight delay before the attack connects. To compensate, the attack is very strong, has a strong knockback effect and damages all enemies in range unlike projectiles which hit just one. I also did some more work on spiderbot's hud, and fixed some more things in general.

The spiderbot has proper subweapons now too. Shurikens, throwing knives, a boomrang, a grenade and a sort of strong beam attack. Theyre weaker than the main character's own, but cheaper to use. Theyre meant as a "safe" alternative to your main weapons. I also got the shield thing to work; you press the attack button while crouching to eat up 10 subweapon ammo to generate a temporary shield that slowly drains itself. Getting hit with the shield on makes it drain faster, but leaves your health intact. It should allow the player to be more bold with using the dangerous short range melee attack. Also, the spider robot takes three times more damage than the normal one, so using that shield is pretty important. I think im starting to like the gameplay as the spiderbot, but it still needs work.

Another days over. Did lots of minor tweaking on both Protobot and Spiderbot. Chef has tried both of em out and had some feedback on em, which made for further tweaking. I like where they are both at right now, theyre both fun and satisfying to play with in different ways.

Next I need to do some additional, minor art for both. The computer terminals used to upgrade them need their own icons. I also need to make the spiderbot's interface more clear. Subweapon pickups need their own icons for them too, subweapons being different for each robot.

Then Ill start working on robot 4, Electroz. Its an electric-themed robot with a hardhat that has multi-directionnal shooting at a very high rate, and which shares its shooting ammo with its life as the same variable.

i'm counting down the days to failure

(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/ElectroPrev.gif)
Heres Electroz, the next one im working on. Fairly straightforward, as I mentionned earlier his deal is that his life and ammo are the same variable, so shooting essentially hurts you, but any ammo pickup heals you. Also, hes got a thing where holding up or down moves the aim of the shooting, making him the only character that doesnt just aim forwards. Otherwise hes still a bit more generic than the two other robots though. Protobot and especially spiderbot feel a lot more "unique". I might have to think of ways to make his gameplay stand out a little more. For now though ill just work on finishing the current idea, and see if I get any more ideas meanwhile. I think I might keep him from moving while shooting, too.

Today I did some more tweaks on spiderbot. Gameplaywise, spiderbot seems to be about done now.

Refined the enemy spawning/despawning code(now you can kill the same enemy over and over by running back and forth), created an item drop script, created a system that keeps track of lives, added a game over screen, fixed several small bugs, fixed some formatting issues, changed Guts Man's running speed, added several sound effects, created a teleport-in sequence with a flashing "READY", tried out some basic level design, optimized some of my code, made pre-placed one-ups not respawn when you lose a life. I probably did some other stuff, too, I've been working on this game for hours every day since saturday so it all blurs together.

made the sprites be friends

this is a very friendly game

you will see

more on that 2morrow

Continued work on Electroz, his main weapon is almost done but I need to tweak its power around. It becomes terrifingly strong once you upgraded it enough! It goes from a rapidfire gun to a thick continuous beam of death. Next I move on to making its subweapons. Theyre not as important to him, acting more as a panic button than a regular weapon; his main weapon takes a while to wind up (in a similar style to many gatling guns in games), making you very vulnerable if enemies suddenly pop out and you arnt already firing. Thats when subweapons will be most useful for him, as they can be fired instantly at any time and pack a good wallop. Those subweapons are very inefficient with power though, so relying on them too much is dangerous, and will leave you without power quickly. His power also serving as his life, I think it makes for a fairly solid dynamic.

i've been being a lazy shit so I'm going to join in with this. all i'm going to do is at leastsomething every day and finally finish my long overdue game.

:edit:

wat i did:

-fade out music in menu
-made a simple program to help determine music length in bytes
-not much

Welcome to the Stop That Procrastination Bullshit Club fawfulbeans.

Almost done with Electroz today. Im soon ready to move on to the next robot, the steam engine. Balanced electroz so that I can beat Extreme mode with it, yet it still feels very challenging. It turns out Electroz wont have subweapons, he doesnt really need them, they felt tacked-on and you never really think of using them.

Heres what the steam engine looks like:
(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/BangPuck_Prev.gif)

that isnt quite what the animation looks like in-game though, its animated in separate parts with smoke and stuff, I just slapped together some of the parts in one gif file for the preview. The real one is more shaky.

Fixed a bug where you could spawn boulders on enemies, trapping them. That's it for now.

omg trap-them ripoff

-put sum music in gam
-fixed some issues with keyboard mapping menu

Continued work on steambot. Current idea is vague, but we'll see. An awkward robot to control which has an extremely powerful ramming attack when you double tap forward, and has a slow but strong main gun.

Added a mettall helper that behaves like Eddie the Fliptop. Health's not letting me do much more today.

-tweaked some music stuff
-added fade in/out for a section

Still working on Steambot, also did some unrelated pixel art animation work yesterday on ustream, going to do that again tonight at around 8 PM EST (so about 1:15 from now). Working some more on steambot until then.

Can check it out here: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frankiesmile
Im streaming work on Non Human right now, so if you wanna see clips of what the game is likeright now before everyone else, heres your chaaaance....

Working on its rushing attack and steam pressure mechanic right now, the main gun is working and doing pretty good.

-glitch with the boss's mouth
-tweaked balloon behavior

Done a couple hours on steambot. Made it work with steam pressure, and added the forward rushing attack. Theres a glitch with it though, it doesnt seem to do any damage to bosses. Going to have to look into that. It was all liiiiive! Thanks for everyone who pitched in.

[Edit]: just fixed that glitch! Took a bit of testing, but found it. Its a long boring story though.

SO'S YOUR FACE!!!!

Lurdiak: BLEH!!

Im almost done with steambot now, just have to give him proper subweapons. Also, both him and Electroz dont have a heads up display yet, im starting to sketch those.

Tonight im going to live stream again, this time ill be working on the last of the robots that ill talk about here, Pyroporous
(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/FlamethrowerPrev.gif)
Hes not going to need much work, being the only alt robot that was already a lot of fun to use before I started this topic. Hes got a flamethrower as a main weapon.  Its very powerful, slow and short range, satisfying to use. Im just going to change how it works a little bit, being a constant stream instead of a single bursts thing. Hes going to have some cool subweapons too.

The next robot after that is gonna stay s e c r e t. Hes a pretty weird one.

started work on final boss death sequence slightly

Streaming now, starting on the flamethrower guy. Same sorta thing as yesterday.
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frankiesmile to watch

>>DO NOT WATCH<<

Frankie is a noob.

>>WATCH<<

This game is awesome.

More or less finished the flamethrower robot during the stream, then I started drawing some monsters for one of the game modes. All thats left for the alt robots now is, two of em have their subweapons missing, and I need to finish some of the HUDs still. Then theres the secret 7th character, and I can move on to something else, probably the whole awards/unlocking system. After that, I'll probably be finishing up the game's ending cinematics/animations, which I obviously wont stream or talk about in too much detail...

The character/ game mode unlocking used to be way too complicated; lots of achievement-like trophies that were displayed in a trophy room, some of them unlocking content, other content being unlocked by reaching an arbitrary trophy count. I decided to go for a much simpler system that gives you medals for clearing challenges, integrated in the level and character select screens. Raising your medal count is how you unlock all the characters, and you unlock most game modes by just beating the game at higher difficulty levels. Most of the work is going to be testing the game to find the high score and best time targets for all the characters and all the play modes of course. But for now I need to set up the system itself.

did moar

I fixed some minor bugs yesterday and improved the power-up and health bar codes to be simpler and behave more like the original mega man games, I also tweaked pit deaths. Wanted to do more but the sniffles made it difficult to work, gonna try to make up for lost time.

and moar

Now streaming again. This time ill be drawing heads up displays for various characters, and maybe drawing more monsters later on or implementing the HUDs into the game.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frankiesmile to watch n chat (check the tabs to the site to find the chat window, by the way)

Worked on screen transition code, added (mostly) functional ladders, which involved creating custom Guts Man climbing sprites and doublewide ladder sprites.

Also Frankie has been fighting with his code for about 2 hours now, it's kind of hilarious.

Posting liiiive from the stream.
Started working on the steambot HUD, made a cool lil rotating analogous counters for him, and as Lurdiak said, I fought with the code for a good 2 hours. I still dont know what was up with it. Lets just say I will never look at a modulus the same, ever again.

Its all right now though. Its all good. Everything's fine.

dfjisddfjasjfajfoiahgfjushFFAGGFHGHDHGDFUIFKDL

It's looking great, Frankie, but after that stream I'm going to approach mod with caution. Llllllol

It was great to see that horrifying bug progressively fixed and destroyed, though.

happy!

frankie: problem fixed! -> by himself  :noir:

Totally off-topic but hey Slunk!

Love your HS-related works and stuff, didn't know you were part of the TIGScene

Streaming some more.
Finishing up the steambot HUD, and the drawing/animating some monsters!
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frankiesmile

Tonight I got my cousin and his girlfriend hanging out. They may or may not chip in a lil. Its going to be like a shitty radio show!

Pretty much finished the steambot's hud, minus some polish left to do. That took a long while, lots of fiddling around with coordinates, shifting elements left and right till they fit together properly. There was quite a bit of animation to do there too.

Also drew 3 monsters later on. A big deformed zombie, a weird plant thing that I still don't know what it is but vaguely looks like a discoloured grass type pokemon, and something that ended up being a chicken robot, vaguely resembling something that would be a robot enemy from a megaman game.
Heres them monsters along with some others I made on a previous stream. Favourite so far is the spider with the hair and the snail-bat.
(http://www.frankiesmileshow.com/stuff/NH/Monsterpics.gif)

Thanks a lot! As a matter of fact FrankieSmileShow introduced me to TIGSource and I'm brand new here. I've been game-developing for like, a week. Frankie's streams and advice are helping a lot.

Edit: Also Frankie, I still can't quite get over how good this game is looking visually

I, uh. I fixed some bugs and added more subtleties to the spawning and transition codes to make them behave more like the old mega mans... GUESS IT'S KINDA BORING COMPARED TO A SPIDER WITH ELVIS HAIR THOUGH!!!  >:(

gahhhh those sprites are bad assssssssss good luck d00dz

Almost done on the HUD of Electroz today. Sleepy. Now going to sleep. Ludum Dare tomorrow, prolly going to stream/record most of that.

Not related to Non Human but, im streaming my Ludum Dare all weekend. Starting right away with unrelated Wizard artwork. Gonna be drawing wizards up until the Ludum Dare starts.

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frankiesmile

Can't wait, dude.  My favourite part of the Molyjam was watching your badass sprite art.

I didn't do SHIT today. Gonna catch up during the week-end.

I worked like 6 hours on the game today, if not more. Implemented E-tanks, a much more complex pause menu that lets you use said E-tanks and see how many lives/tanks you have, fixed several movement bugs, tentatively added a delay and spawning animation for boulders, fixed an animation bug. It doesn't seem like that much work typing it out, but there was an awful lot of trial and error and code tinkering involved to smooth out the kinks.

Made the boulders take damage and break apart, added graphics to show said damage and break-apart, added some sound effects.

I demand gifs of all of you.

Here you go, a boulder from the first Mega Man with cracks appearing on it, the only graphics work I've done on this game in weeks. Hooray for stealing Capcom's assets! I am on my way to the big leagues.

(http://i.imgur.com/Z2KYf.gif)

I just finally figured out the goddamn jump code!!!!

Moving platforms are the devil.

if you plan in moving platforms from the start you can design your platformer code for them. adding them into code afterwards is pretty difficult.

Well I managed to make some perfectly functional ones, but I can't really have them support anything but the hero without greatly complicating things. Unfortunately I don't think that's good enough considering the mechanics I'm working with.

Also I've been flying by the seat of my pants from the start of this project, so planning ahead isn't really very feasible, though I'm getting better at it the more I learn.


E: Make that mostly functional. The horizontal ones dump you when switching directions if you stand on the very edge.

huh what when

the monster king is not done

the monster king is making games

something

SOMETHING is comin' up

Alright. bringing this thing back. Working on Non Human again this weekend! Working on some tiles for a Extreme Mode-only level background right now, then ill work on the games' ending a little. Might stream some of that work later tonight.

EDIT: http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frankiesmile
Streaming pixel work and animation! Will prolly still be streaming for a couple hours.

Quite a bit of work done today. Made two new tile sets and re-tiled two areas that used to recycle tiles from previous areas, including that background I mentioned. Going to re-tile two last areas tomorrow, and with that, tiles are going to be all done I think! After this, I got to finish up the final boss, and the game's ending. Then I work some more on the alternate characters, do some extra polish and wrap that game up!

Streaming again tonight! Doing more tiles work.
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/frankiesmile to watch.

EDIT: streaming done. Finished two new sets of tiles, and retiled a few areas with em. Lookin good. Next weekend, should be working on the final boss.

im making sprites

Show us your sprites.

i think the difference is that grinding doesn't require any amount of creativity, though. even the most basic aspects of making a game, like bug fixing, requires more creativity than grinding in an MMO. you can turn off your brain and just grind, in the way that you can turn off your brain and watch television, but you can't turn off your brain and bug-fix

anyway, good luck i guess, but to make this more challenging, perhaps you should agree to this proposition. if you miss a single weekday of working on your game, you will both delete your forum accounts forever

Happy Birthday to this thread.

i cant right now

1) they are rough sketches
2) the subject material is a shameful no-no

get hype
i show you shit when there is shit to show belimoth it a promise


this has no bearing on Lurdiak or Frankie as they currently have other game based obligations and do not have a shitton of shitposts

I however, do

4 days per week minimum I will work on the game, or else I will delete The Monster King from tigs it is a deal paul ers

agreed, no going back

Im just too busy with Barkley 2 to put steady work in non human right now, but I do add to it a little bit on weekends. Latest things I did was animation work on bosses, and added more tiles for some areas.

Also, I've been thinking of a new name for the game for a little while now. I got a few ideas... we'll see...

did not work monday
worked today but i suck too much at anatomy to have actually done anything
cant make this drawing work

Did you and Frankie break up? Where is your avatar.

i dont know where it went, actually. had better places to go I guess. I will replace it with a more appropriate one when the time is right

replace it with the title screen to the critically terrible King of the Monsters

sure why not

king of the monsters 2 on genesis was aight

the arcade and snes versions were aight too

their title screens r gross tho

Hi Monster King

made more sprites

i will make a little counter for now

2/13
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4.5 / 20
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haha damn i am slow!!

2/13
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6 / 20
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13/08 this anim dont work. i'll do better tomorrow
14/08 i did better. but not better enough. actual results tomorrow i hope

lazy weekend. what a noob...

2/13
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7.5 / 20
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0/3

Keep it going!

wow
these .5s are actually a full thing, just that it needs to be more full


2/13
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8.5 / 20
0/6
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