I remember reading a webcomic ages ago that would occasionally had a strop showing "Megaman bosses that didn't make it" or something of the sort. All I remember off the top of my head is "Bukkake-man" (You're gonna get creamed!).

Can't for the life of me remember the strip

You mean Dueling analogs?
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2005/11/22/rejected-mega-man-villains-i/

It's actually a recurring theme;
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2006/01/26/rejected-mega-man-villains-ii/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2006/04/03/rejected-mega-man-villains-iii/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2006/05/31/rejected-mega-man-villains-iv/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2006/07/17/rejected-mega-man-villains-v/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2006/10/12/rejected-mega-man-villains-vi/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2007/01/17/rejected-mega-man-villains-vii/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2007/04/18/rejected-mega-man-villains-viii/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2007/07/24/rejected-mega-man-villains-ix/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2008/02/18/rejected-mega-man-villains-x/
http://www.duelinganalogs.com/comic/2008/05/13/rejected-mega-man-villains-xi/

Really?  I see it as being the other way around.  Big projects with large teams and a large budget tend to have strict art direction and quality control to insure the look and feel of the game is consistent throughout.  With smaller, amateur teams little things tend to get overlooked...

Oh yeah, definitely. I think I was thinking more about coherency in terms of quality, while games made by large teams usually have boring parts that was made by a... let's say "less focused" level designer, models made by artists with vastly different experience levels and some programming elements that work better than others, I personally think that one-man (or few-man) projects tend to have a more even quality throughout. Or maybe it is because they aren't under as much publisher pressure to push out the game, whatever the reason I appreciate having to worry less about random boring sections in games I like.

Of course, seeing as it's been five years and he picked up the skills while making the game there should be vast differences in quality between the things he made early and the things he made recently, so the point is kind of moot.

the art is all completely hand-clicked tiles and sprites- done the right way,
pixel by pixel, like the classics we all know and love.

What? People don't give a shit about what techniques you use, the only thing they see is how it looks (unless, of course, it looks absolutely beautiful and other artists get interested in how you achieved the effect).

I think this is Bob's main problem, he assumes that just because he made it hard for himself, his game deserves credit. This is not true - he might deserve credit himself for being persistent, but it's not changing the quality of the game.

To be fair, though, I think he does deserve credit for working on a game for 5 years, that in itself is no small feat. And while I thought the trailer was a bit underwhelming, if he does all of the things listed well, the game could be good - IMO games produced by smaller teams tend to be more coherent. I'm just afraid he's setting himself up for disappointment if he expects the industry or the gamers to treat him better just because he chose to do it the difficult way; there's a reason most similar games are developed by teams.

This is one of the things on my list of "damn, I wish I could figure this out":

http://graphics.cs.brown.edu/research/art/kowalski-s99-preprint-300dpi.pdf

It shows how some guys figured out a way of creating some of Dr. Suess' trees and furs in a 3D environment.

That was awesome!

I have been experimenting some with different NPR techniques, haven't made anything new in awhile, but here is an old stroke render test...

Shouldn't it be 1600x1200 for 4:3?

Number one rule of our community:

Pimps just visiting spot after spot to sell their whores are prohibited.

Though it's seldom this literal.

Jeez dude, isn't the girl in the bikini cold in that frozen forest? and I have never seen a "bunny girl" class in an RPG before.

Oh yeah, I forgot to mention but a friend of mine is working at DICE and is on the Mirror's Edge team, I sent him a link to this thread. A couple of times. Hope you don't mind =)

Awesome. The puzzles were really nice!

Collision with the enemies felt a little dodgy though, and stage 3-3 got very hard because of this. Or maybe I'm missing something.

I can run through the levels smoothly.

Oh, I'm sure you can and I'm not saying it's impossible - poor choice of words, I guess. My point merely was that it doesn't feel fluid since you get stuck in things all the time, and while you could as you say get used to how it works the fluidity of the gameplay seems to be close to the core of the game and I would argue that it's a problem if it's not there from the start.

It wasn't meant as a bashing, rather the opposite - I don't think the game is riddled with bugs, I think the collisions are the one thing you need to fix to make it really enjoyable.

On another note, it reminds me of Vertigo;

I thought it was pretty neat. Sure, the tunneling was bad and the collisions overall didn't work very well (which I guess ruined the experience somewhat since you couldn't move smoothly in a game about smooth movement), but if you fixed those it would be quite fun to play.

Thanks for the info!  My solution was to pad non-power-of-2 textures to get them up to the next highest power of 2.  That did introduce some artifacts along the edges of my sprites due to bilinear filtering, but I happened to want GL_NEAREST for this game anyway so that a sprite at (0.5, 0.5) doesn't go all blurry.  I'll definitely look into EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE for my next game!

It's a tricky thing, that, and I had the problem myself. The thing to remember is that if you want a pixel-perfect representation at all times you can't just use the texture borders as texcoords, you'll actually want to use the center of the first and last pixel - that is, half a unit from the edge (or 1.0/512.0 for a 256 - texture image). If you don't, it'll look off as soon as you try to rotate a sprite or move it in non-pixel sized units.

I would personally recommend just using NPOT textures as is, though, as it's cleaner to have uniform units for all textures, but that's entirely up to you. The information about EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE is in the OpenGL extension registry http://www.opengl.org/registry/ ...

Whew! Thanks folks.  So the moral is: NVidia lets you get away with non-power-of-2 textures. ATI will suck big time.

Here's the low-down... Skip to the code if you only want a solution:

There is an extension called ARB_TEXTURE_NON_POWER_OF_TWO that allows you to use NPOT textures just like you would any other kind of texture. It was included in the 1.5 standard (if my memory serves me correctly), but while AMD GPG (Formerly ATI) supports most of the features of even later GL iterations, they don't officially support that standard.

Instead, ATI has the extension EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE (this is also available on NVidia cards, btw) that essentially creates a new texture target that you can bind NPOT textures to, GL_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE. This texture target has three distinct differences from GL_TEXTURE_2D;
- It cannot have mipmaps
- It cannot have tiling, only clamp and edge clamp are valid values
- You assign coordinates in image-space and not normalized (so 0..w,0..h instead of 0..1,0..1)
Of course this is a pain to use since you can't process texcoords the normal way, and ATI thought of this and made a driver fix so you can use NPOT textures with GL_TEXTURE_2D and get normalized texcoords - as long as you abide by the other rules. Note that this only applies to hardware that actually supports EXT_TEXTURE_RECTANGLE, some mobility cards and non-windows drivers don't have the fix.

So; to use NPOT textures safely in OpenGL; make sure to call these once you've created the texture and you should be okay:

Code:

glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MAG_FILTER,GL_LINEAR);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_MIN_FILTER,GL_NEAREST);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_S,GL_CLAMP);
glTexParameteri(GL_TEXTURE_2D,GL_TEXTURE_WRAP_T,GL_CLAMP);

... Of course, NPOT textures are inherently slower to do lookups in than POT textures so you should strive to create POT textures when reasonably possible.

[STAR]

I am, right now, disrtibuting the game among my friends.
I'm gonna make you a STAR

Haha, thanks 

On another note, I managed to create a video. I only had access to the shareware version of fraps so it skips in a few places where separate recordings are connected. Also, this video demonstrates a full play-through so don't watch it if you want to figure things out on your own.

Ugh, I can't kill the bossus in the cave for shit.  Your game is hard.

Yeah, it is kind of hard. There are some tricks to it that makes it a whole lot easier, but as I said I'm not entirely happy with how it turned out.

can't play
vid plz.

Fraps doesn't let me capture at a decent framerate atm and I can't lower it since I did some nasty hacks a while back. I'll keep trying, though.

Yay! Finished! I'm am saddened by the fact that there was no bossus on top of that tree.

Well made, my friend, well made.

Very good but very short, took me about six minutes start to finish, too bad there were only two bossus, but they were clever at least. Good job

Thanks! I've been real short on time seeing as we're in the final phase of production at work and I've got another project on the side, so I couldn't do everything I wanted with it. But I'm glad you like what little there is  

Is finished!

http://ekermo.se/tmp/sotb/sotb_v1.zip



I have some more ideas (for another encounter, among other things), but this time I really don't have the time to add anything new. I can still fix little things, though, so please tell me if you find something weird in it

the graphics and the whole atmosphere is ace, the arrows' physics is cool. I didn't do much damage on my first try, but now I'm going back.=)

Thanks =D

Alpha version online! Another bossus stands to challenge Stroll!

http://ekermo.se/tmp/sotb/sotb_alpha.zip

This version is feature-complete in the sense that I won't be adding any more areas or encounters; although there's still that bit of the start and ending to take care of... And progression once you've beat one of the bossii. I'll likely make these updates in about a week when I've returned from my vacation.

To be completely honest I'm not as happy with the second encounter as I had hoped, but on the other hand I had much bigger and more detailed plans for it that the resolution couldn't contain. Still, given the timeframe I'm satisfied with how it turned out.

Though maybe you could implement a "grab" control for when you're falling next to the hairy parts ...

This was actually my original plan, almost exactly as you described it, but seeing as most of the challenge is in jumping between moving platforms I decided to skip it. If I should somehow get time left next weekend I might add to see how it works, though.

Good job on the new demo.  It's kinda strange... the jumping handles much better than the previous one, but I found climbing the bossus harder than before.  Maybe I just got lucky the first time.  Or maybe I didn't have my Wheaties today.  Anyway, I did finally kill it

Thanks, and congrats =)

I removed the friction so you will gradually slide off any tilted surface, that is why it's harder to climb the bossus now. I kinda like it this way since I thought it was a little too easy with full friction. What do you guys think? I am still planning to include friction for the branches, either way.

[Below]

Freakin awesome !

Is it me ? Or there is some kind of visual bond with "Shadow of the Beast II" ?
Something in the tiles, the palette, the trees ? It reminds me that great game, not to mention the similarities of the names, btw SOTB and SOTC.

Thanks 

I didn't look at Shadow of the Beast, no. So far, when doing sprites, I have mostly studied ActRaiser, the Magical Quest series, Eternal Daughter and Aquaria (thanks Derek!) ... But who knows? it might be a case of delayed inspiration.

Below, an old demake-mockup by Fumito Ueda itself. I'll let you guess what game it is about

...

'found it, there : http://tanzi.jp/bakar/

Now that is awesome. Cool by itself, especially cool considering the origin.

I also found another area (left and down) that smelled suspiciously like boss fight, but there was nobody there.

In time, it will all be revealed...

Jumping is much better this time around. I find the sliding when you're standing on the edge of a branch slightly annoying; also, with the long branches it's difficult to tell where collision detection ends and you fall off. So, it's hard to time jumps correctly on those.

And I still couldn't find the Bossus Climbed all the way up the big tree, but I couldn't see where I was supposed to go on.

Great, thanks. I had to remove friction in order to get the jumping to work well, but I guess I could do some hack and allow friction when on the ground only.

Hmm... Slight spoiler, I guess.

... The bossus is actually not in the tree (that is the hypothetical place for another encounter), but in the area to the right of the starting area. So just keep walking right, jump up the cliffs and off the screen to get to it.

And while we're on the topic of spoilers, there is actually a way to regain health mid-fight, though I won't get into details just yet.

New demo! No new content, but some important tweaking:

http://ekermo.se/tmp/sotb/sotb_demo1_1.zip

Jumping has been given a complete overhaul and while movement is still not perfect, I have tried to do something about every issue you guys have mentioned, as well as making it possible to do lower jumps by tapping the key.

The "Invalid configuration ... Please reinstall" - bug should also be resolved in this build. Let me know if more problems arise.

I'd like to thank all of you for your feedback so far, it really made the problems easier to pinpoint. I'll try and get to work on the second encounter now but if you have more suggestions for improvements I'd be happy to hear them