Time for the daily update:

Today sucked. The work:progress ration was very lopsided to the work, and everything was frustrating even when it really shouldn't have been.

On the bright side, the progress that was made looks kinda nice.



That's a butchery of dbb's dungeon tiles. They're meant to be isometric, but with careful copying and pasting I have made them sidescroll. This may be a violation of the rules, but if I wanted to annoy myself even more I could do it at runtime using bitmapdata's copypixels method and such. As I have better things to be doing than writing worthless code like that, I'll keep it as-is unless someone (important) screams at me about it.

So yes. That's progress. lol.

If anyone knows where I might find a bed or something that can be mis/reinterpreted as a bed, please tell me. Although I might be able to fake it already with these snazzy curtains...

(and yay - I now have 490mb of music and sound effects to play with)

Either that or buy off the pirates, thus turning them into privateers. Give them a Letter of Marque, and pay them not to pirate your game, and instead crack the games of competitors.

This reminds me of something I've seen elsewhere - an indie PnP RPG developer put up a notice to pirates that he'd consider them as having paid for the game if they demoed it 5 (or something) times and posted the play results somewhere. I thought that was rather clever - 'market my game for me and we're cool', basically.

@Snow:
I don't really understand why you don't understand piracy. Well, there's your misconceptions about the quality of pirated things. Unless they're very new torrents, dodgy ones don't have seeds or have comments warning others that it's no good. Then there's private and semi-private sites that reduce problems even further and are generally very well seeded. It's all very, very convenient, and the communities are usually very welcoming and friendly (with the odd one full of elitist pricks, but as you're not likely to get an invite to those anyway it doesn't matter much).

Something that non-pirates don't seem to understand is that the pirate community is really strong. It has to be or nothing would ever get shared. These aren't the equivalent of dodgy black-market mob rackets or whatever - they're mostly communities who have a strong common interest. They don't want the producers for that common interest to go out of business. They're not against you - at worst they're indifferent and at best they're big fans of what you're doing. There are ways to use that enthusiasm (and the indifferent ones you weren't going to get anything out of anyway) - going out of your way to dick them over (by introducing bugs for pirated copies, uploading corrupt versions, whatever) is a great way of alienating them instead.

I'm reminded strongly of mujakwi from the procedural compo (not a bad thing - I like that game a lot).

Guh. The initial enthusiasm-fuel is running low, and so most of the TODO list is not done and I don't feel like doing it.

So tomorrow instead of trying to get all that working I might have a shot at completely unrelated aspects, which in reality probably means glorified cutscenes, and hopefully the stock of fuel for the more important stuff with replenish with neglect.

... and hey, I was just about to ask a question about a technical thingy that's been ruining everything today, and then I realised that the answer was completely obvious. Interestingly, it seems that the equation I worked out for it using simultaneous equations (very surprised that I remembered how to do those ... oh high school, how did it turn out you were useful after all?) was actually right despite my deepest doubts of that ... it's unfortunate that I couldn't have arrived at the same thing just by, y'know, not being retarded.

v0.02? Version numbers are incredibly arbitrary.

In this update we have player control (W, S, and D), clouds moving freely in the background, and an enemy ship than potters around and shoots at you if you're in front of it.

TODO list:

• Actually clean up some of those bullets and clouds
• More satisfying movement of the dragon - both fixing the animation and adding some swooping, rapid climbing, dives, etc.
• Collision detection/being shot
• Make the enemy more interesting
• Moving camera/more than one screen worth of content

With that done I might move on to the rest of the concept I have. What I'm thinking atm is mixing SHMUP (only with less shooting and more fleeing) with adventure game. Not sure of the gameplay of the adventure game part yet. All of the thoughts I have so far look like extended cutscenes, which would suck. Don't really want to go the dialogue-tree route though. Meh, I'll think of something for it (or ditch the idea and just focus on flying, I guess).

The ship doesn't look as indistinct now with the clouds split up and moving, so I might just ignore the problem.

I meant requests as in pointing out what's already there, not as in 'draw me a spaceship, plz'.

Finding what you need in the mess of assets is quite painful. Short of actual organisation, perhaps we could have a requests thread (or just use this one for it) in the sense of 'I really need a good sidescrolling spaceship - has anyone seen one?'

That's a quite serious question. I can't believe that there's only one side-view ship in all this...

?

I agree - that looks really cool.

Mockup. Looks like the gameplay will involve being chased by spaceships while flying on a dragon. Hopefully more to it than that...



That ship doesn't work very well against that background though, but I can't find any others in my folder of images. Would have liked to have used the airship, but they're at weird angles. Anyone know of other sideways ships?

EDIT:
version 0.0001?
There's something quite wrong with the dragon animation, but I'm not sure what. The girl also kinda looks like she's jumping up and down still, but that's just tweaking the numbers, which can wait until the dragon looks less fugly.

Ads are fine for most Flash games because they're popcorn - you're not expecting a great work of art so it can't be cheapened by throwing in ads. If there were ads in any serious game, I wouldn't play it. It looks and feels cheap and nasty.

Adding bugs for pirated copies is just a bad idea.

The best way to fight piracy is, IMO, good PR. Pirates are not immune to wanting to support you and your game - they just don't right now. Convince them.

Megathanks for the girl. She shall stretch and yawn her way to victory! (oh wait, it's a magical attack...? Oh well)

This will totally not get finished, because as a rule I don't finish things.

That said, this will be a game using the little red haired girl and the red dragon. As yet, I don't know what the player will actually do, or how these two elements will interact, or - you know, anything.

If anyone can point me to the original art threads for either of these, I would be greatly appreciative. I can't for the life of me find all of the sprite sheets for the girl's animations in the folder I have.

Presumably, it will also get a better name at some point, but maybe not. I guess there's nothing quite like being straight to the point.

Thinking AS3 with Flixel, but Python with pygame is an option too.

You might want to check out Prelude to Darkness - although it's buggy as hell and didn't catch my attention in playing the first town, The Codex insists that it's a good game in that Fallout/Geneforge way. Find its forum on www.rpgcodex.net for a download link (they also have a megathread of indie RPGs over there that you might want to check out).

Dark Disciples was a lot of fun. Very retro-puzzley.

Only thing that comes to mind is Majesty, but not sure if that's what you're after.

Anyone know games with control schemes like AOOFAD (WASD+mouse for a sidescrolling shooter)? I know Soldat and Abuse, anything else?

'Adult' in this context == porn, in that same way that 'adult movie' == porn. If you mean 'intelligent', please use that instead, because if you run around talking about 'adult games', I'm going to think it's porn.

I think lo-fi graphics+textual description gives this effect a lot better than just the graphics on their own. I don't get any great imaginative boost from a game that just has the lo-fi graphics, but text can bring something to life better than most animation/graphical solutions can because it isn't limited. I think Fallout is a really good example of this.

Well ... if it isn't well distributed wouldn't you kinda expect a lot of piracy? People need to be able to buy it in order to buy it :-/ Fix the distribution problem and then see if the legit:pirated ratio balances a bit better. The piracy is only a bad thing insofar as people who would have bought it didn't, and they might have pirated it just because it was easier than buying it, so ... yeah.

(how is it being distributed anyway? Can you buy it online as a direct download?
EDIT: oh wait, it's a DS game? Guess not then...)

Looks awesome - downloading now (although I have a bad habit of not actually playing the awesome looking things I download, I'll have to make an exception for this...)

Awesome. And not starting the programming until after November? Superawesome.