camstudio and taksi. though I can't say for sure that they support mouse-capturing.

Camstudio does do mouse capturing.

There seem to be two topics going on here, neither of which is the topic that Lemmy actually started.  I'll address the two active topics, plus attempt to contribute to the original one.

Topic 1 - C# as a (game) development language: I haven't used C++ for as long as lemmy has, but I have used both C++ and C#, and I can say that for almost anything I would take C# over C++.  It's faster, easier and I personally am more productive.  Some of it is the IDE and some of it is the language itself.  If you really need your app to be cross platform and Mono doesn't fulfill your needs, then of course look elsewhere.  With no malicious intent to exclude my Mac and Linux using friends, I personally figure that if my app can run on 95% of the computers in the world (talking .Net in general, not XNA in specific) then I'm doing pretty good (and Mono and virtual machines might make that percentage even larger).  Faster, easier development + runs on almost all computers = win for me.

Topic 2 - XNA as a game development platform: I'll be the first to admit that I'm no XNA guru, but I have used it a bit and found it extremely simple to take a 2D sprite and display it on the screen.  Maybe I just found better tutorials that some others here.  And I just did 2D stuff, so I can't speak for how the development of a 3D game would go.  Obviously XNA is no GameMaker in terms of ease of use, but for someone with programming experience who wants to get into game development it seems like a very powerful yet approachable platform.  XNA is obviously not the only choice and may not be the best choice in all situations, but I think it is a valid choice in a lot of situations.

Original Topic - XNA installation incompatibilities: It's unfortunate that Microsoft doesn't seem to be more concerned about installation difficulties like these.  It has a real potential to stifle XNA development.  Lemmy, I'm sure you've investigated this, but it's my only thought.  Have you tried making a VS deployment project?  I would think that Microsoft would have support for XNA in deployment projects, but I don't know.  That might be a more robust solution, if you're not already using that option.  That's the only thing I can think of, aside from having people install the XNA SDK, which would be a little ridiculous.


As an aside rant, please don't dismiss a programming language or development platform if you haven't used it (especially if you're just dismissing it because of the company that produces it).  All programming languages and development platforms come with tradeoffs.  If you're familiar with those tradeoffs I'd much rather hear about those than "Why are you using X programming language?  It sucks!"  Sorry for the rant.

P.S. Just thought of this, you might try asking about the installation problems on stackoverflow.com if you haven't already.  That's turning into a great resource for programming related knowledge.

Yay!  40 posts!  Again, we'll ignore the fact that probably half of them are mine.

Holy cow!  Fable of Griselda made someone's top 10 list!?!!  I just saw this

http://www.bytejacker.com/episodes/008

I feel totally out-classed by everyone else on the list, not to mention the entries that aren't on that list that are much more awesome than what I did.

I'm guessing I got put on there more for nostalgic reasons than technical or gameplay reasons.  Way to milk people's childhood memories!

Oh dear I can't seem to be able to kill any ennemy in this game 

Yes, the input can take a little getting used to.  I personally like to hide behind bushes and such and wait for the bad guys to come to me.  Not very heroic, but cowards usually live longer than heroes, right?  If it helps, you can also just hold down the space bar to stick out your sword.  If a bad guy runs into it he'll get damaged.

There are also a few cheat codes debugging aides that might help.  If you're interested let me know (or you can probably find them yourself, they're not that hard).

I just played it, nice

But wait! there is ZeldaRL, which uses ASCII as well! (Well, not the extended charset :D) you can find it at http://slashie.net

(They are completely different though... ZeldaRL generates random worlds, while this one pays homage to the Zelda I level)

I didn't even know there was a ZeldaRL!  I guess I should have done better homework.  You're right though, the two games are very different.  A roguelike is actually on my list of games to make.  I've started on one or two before, but didn't get very far before I got distracted by something else (or overwhelmed before I had much programming experience). 

I love the site.  MegamanRL?  Brilliant!  A new (non-lame) feed for Google Reader!  Yay!

I wonder why so many games lacked sound effects. Can't compose music? Fine with me but with DrPetter's awesome sfxr there's absolutely NO excuse for not including sound effects in your game... Especially since the ones produced by sfx would have been IDEAL for this compo...

http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp/project_sfxr.html

You can always try to compose some music in Musagi as well. ^^

Choosing "only" 8 titles was really hard (although I clearly had some favorites like Fillauth or House Globe, obviously) so in the end I had to filter my votes by the state the given game is in as well even if it could potentially turn into something incredibly awesome.

Perhaps I'll change my decision if there are some sneaky updates after the deadline. ^^

Thanks for the link.  I'll have to try that out on my next game.  I wanted to add sounds effects (or at least music) to Fable of Griselda.  C# (in .NET 2.0+ at least) has great support for PC speaker type sounds.  (Zelda theme song over PC speaker, I can hear it now...)  But I wasn't sure if I should just rip off the Zelda theme music or try to find someone to do some Zelda-ish music for me (I'm definitely not a composer).  In the end though I ran out of time.  That's okay though.  There's always the next compo, right?

Yay!  It's finished!  Or at least as finished as it's going to get for the competition.  I wish I had more time to add more stuff, but the gist of it's there.  You can actually win and lose the game now!  I know, I know.  I'm an over achiever.

Anyway, you can download it from here.

http://mythicant.com/2008/09/07/fable-of-griselda--finalish.aspx

Thanks!  Most of it's even on purpose!

Yay!  30 replies!  We'll ignore the fact that some of them are mine.

Yeah, I shouldn't act too surprised.  Maybe a little more surprised than you might expect since we adopted him and he came a week before the due date.  But I definitely knew he was coming. Should have coded faster.

Anyway, I've been able to work on stuff a little between bottles and diaper changes and I have a new video.  I'll hopefully be able to work some more and finish up tomorrow in time for the deadline.  Most of the remaining work should be creating the maps as opposed to adding features which should be easier.

A summary of stuff added:
- Taking a completely original gameplay route, you no longer start with a sword.  You have to find a sword.  Isn't that original?
- I added maps for caves.
- Hyper-realistic fire animations with two (2) amazing colors.
- Animated hearts.
- Purchasing system implemented (you can now purchase animated hearts as well as pick them up from enemies).

Here's the link to the video:

I have good news and I have bad news.  The bad news is that I might not be able to get as much done on the game as I would have liked.  I'm going to try and finish through level one, but I'm not making any promises.  The reason I'm not making any promises is the good news.  My wife and I have a little baby boy!  He's our first.  Anyway, I'll get as much done on the game as I can, but diapers a bottles have precedence.  I'll release as much as I get done with.

Two items.

Item 1: I haven't had a chance to read through all 57 pages of comments(!) so I don't know how many times it has been seconded or thirded, but I think an AI focused compo would be cool.  When was the last time you saw an enemy in a game actually behave intelligently?  Something that after more than a few seconds you couldn't immediately classify as random or as a fixed set of rules?

Item 2: Hope this hasn't already been suggested (see note above about 57 freaking pages of comments!) but I think an uber-awesome theme compo might be fun.  This is kind of a variation of one of Melly's original suggestions.  The obsession theme.  But in this case the obsession is something uber-awesome.  You know, ninjas, pirates, Megaman, bagpipes.  Something so obviously uber-awesome that it's indisputable. 

Yep.  100% C#.  It's a good language.  In .NET 1.0-1.1 there wasn't a lot of support for console manipulation.  In .NET 2.0 they added a lot of support (I mean, you could do it all before, but it wasn't built in to the .NET Framework) for console stuff: changing colors, setting your cursor position, even playing PC speaker sounds (variable pitch and everything!).  It still isn't REALLY keen on doing ASCII based games, but it makes for an interesting programming challenge (having to implement buffering and other stuff like that).  I got into it because I was teaching a class on C# and wanted to show my students that they could do cool stuff just with what they learned in my class (it was an introductory class where we did mainly console stuff and not much with Winforms), so I made a text based game (Donkey Kong ASCII FTW!).  You can read a longer version of the story on my blog and even download DKA (and others), but I won't bore everyone with all that here.

That MonoCurses looks interesting.  I'll have to check it out.

Yer, I swear I've heard "Mel" as a girl's name too.
I actually thought Melly was male ever since I saw his posts. 
HAH at the video. And I found LoZ difficult to hit moving enemies when I first played it 
help how do you enter the cave

I actually call my wife Mel sometimes.  I never though about guys named Mel when I called her that though.  Puts kind of a weird spin on it, doesn't it?

Anyway, sorry about the caves.  I haven't made the maps for them or hooked them up to anything yet!  I think that's going to be next on my TODO list though (well, finishing out more of the map in general, but including caves).  It won't be hard now that I've got all the mapping stuff pretty much finished.  I just have to have time to do it.

P.S.  In the current build of FoG I've slowed things down a little bit so the enemies will hopefully be a bit easier to hit.  I'll post a new downloadable version once I have a few more features implemented.  (Of course, I always hide behind a rock or something and wait for them to come to me.  Some hero I am!)

  ***  Introduces screen's woot!  *** 



(Translation: Woot for intro screens)

I didn't work on this nearly as much as I probably should have this weekend.  I worked in the yard and read a book and stuff.  But I at least got the intro screen working!

I need to decide how gung ho to get on being able to buy things.  Since I don't have secondary weapons yet (and I'm not really planning to for the competition) it doesn't make much sense to be able to buy things like bombs and arrows.  And there's no shield, so there's not much point in being able to buy one of those either.  So I have to decide what to actually do with the stores.

After that I think I'll be ready to make the rest of the map up through level 1.  I figure for the purposes of the competition the end of the first dungeon would be a good place to stop.  Most of the mapping part shouldn't be hard, though I'll have to do a little bit for it and make some more enemies and such.

Anyway, just wanted to let everyone know I'm still working on it.

  ***  You can play downloading publication!  *** 

(Translation: Downloadable version to play)

It's not complete yet, of course, but I thought it might be good to let people download it and try it out.  At the moment you can walk around, kill guys, get hurt and pick up hearts and gems that the enemies drop when they die.

You can download it here

http://mythicant.com/2008/08/21/fable-of-griselda--try-it-out.aspx

Let me know what you think.

P.S.  It mentions this on the blog post, but I'll mention it here too.  You'll need the .NET Framework 2.0 or higher to run it.  You can download it for free if you don't have it (link after the jump).  Sorry to you Linux and Mac lovers out there.    If you really want to try it out it should work with Mono (they were doing pretty well on their 2.0 compliance last I looked) so you could try that out, but I haven't tested on Mono, so I won't make any promises.

  ***  The heart is now based on the special motion healthy system!  *** 

Video follows:




(Translation: "Now featuring heart-based health system!"  This time English -> Korean -> English -> Simplified Chinese -> English.)

I added in more hearts than most "heart-based adventure games" have, because it's a little hard to do half hearts using ASCII graphics.  It's a little hard to tell in the video but when the player gets hit they also get bumped back away from the enemy.  It doesn't work exactly how it does in most "get-bumped-back-when-you-get-hit-by-an-enemy-based adventure games" but I figure it's close enough.

I have the money displaying, and it would actually update if you could pick up money.  But you can't.  I have the enemies so that they drop hearts and money when they die, but I took it out for the video because it doesn't work quite right yet.

I don't think I've mentioned it before, but the colors on the actual game look better than they do in the videos.  The video codec I'm using kinda mangles the color.  Oh, well.  Maybe soon I'll have to post the current version of the game instead of just videos.  Anyone interested in play testing?

You're a guy?  How did you get a nickname like Melly then?  It seems like one of those things that there's an interesting story behind.

Anyway, back on topic, I've made a list of the things I want to get done before the end of the competition.  This list includes:

• Enough map to get through the first dungeon
• Health
• Money
• Enemies drop items
• Buying items
• Title screen

If I have enough time I'd like to implement a whole inventory system, but I think the list I have will probably keep me busy until the end of the competition.  Too bad real life gets in the way of having fun. 

In this case ASCII isn't used by someone with no artistic ability, it's being used by someone too lazy to do something better. Plus, I've already made some ASCII games for other purposes, so I've got the experience.  And I mean, what other opportunities am I going to have to make an ASCII game other than my own masochistic entertainment?

I'm hoping that the ASCII graphics don't turn out looking horrible.  Please let me know if they do, okay?  Hopefully the game will actually be fun to play too, as UltraJMan said.  (JMan isn't for JumpMan, is it?  Anyone else play JumpMan on the C64?  That game was awesome!)  I'm guessing it won't be the next WoW or anything, but hopefully it'll be fun for a few minutes.  That's how most of my other games have turned out.

Oh, by the by, does anyone else agree with BaronCid's suggestion of a name change?  I'm not married to the name Griselda or anything.  It just case up when I looked up Zelda in a thesaurus. 


P.S.  Lawn mowed!  I'm safe for another week.  Now sprinklers, those are a different matter.  Don't even get me started on sprinklers.

P.P.S.  Thanks for the interest Melly.  That's actually my wife's name.  Well, really her name is Melinda, but I call her Melly sometimes.

Now with enemies and a sword!





Unfortunately, now I have to go and mow my lawn.    I like coding better.


P.S.  I've made some other ASCII games (my inspiration for this one).  If you want to check them out you can visit my blog at http://mythicant.com/.  There are a bunch (ok, maybe five or six) there that you can download and play.

Pushing the toxic barrel in the lava results in an AWESOME death scene!