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[andy wolff]

The sand shark is in. As with the crows, I'm putting off actually writing the AI for now. This is me controlling the sand shark directly:

The dust the sand shark kicks up when it's charging could use much more work, but for now it gives sufficient visual indication

Using direct control to test the enemies is nice because it's giving me better ideas for how the enemies should move and act than I would get just by programming in whatever I first came up with.

[Belimoth]

This is better than grape soda.

[BlueSweatshirt]

<snip>
Using direct control to test the enemies is nice because it's giving me better ideas for how the enemies should move and act than I would get just by programming in whatever I first came up with.

This is a really really great idea. 
The overhead(for controlling them, I surmise) seems well worth it.

[CK]

Why does there have to be blood?  I hate gory games.

[Ashkin]

Why does there have to be sand? I hate sandy games.

[C.D Buckmaster]

Absolutely beautiful.

[fentlewoodlewix]

thinking I will put it up for a dollar on XBLIG

I'd buy that for a dollar!

please do though.
i want to play this with friends on the sofa infront of the telly.
it looks completely awesome!

sean

[Ninja Dodo]

Looks cool! I hope you go ahead with the PC version as well.

[andy wolff]

I've still been working on this sporadically, just haven't really felt like devlogging

here's a quick report, though:
 

• crows, mummies, sandsharks, and armadillos are fully in (including AI and spawn patterns, I mean). I'm really happy with how the sandsharks turned out, though they're really hard to kill. I also added a desert version of the basic outlaws because The Dunes needed a weaker enemy type.
  
  
  

  v   that's an armadillo rolling by.

  
  \
• started adding skins so 4 people can play as the same character more easily. There will be at least 4 for each character and maybe more if I feel like it (possible unlocks for various feats). Here are a few of them:
  
  
  \
• added a couple of sounds to stuff in The Cracks
  I'm pretty bad at it, though, so I might see if JMickle wants to make some, or something
  

I've been thinking about relatively easy (not because I'm lazy so much as because I want this game finished before September) ways to add bigger arcs to the overall design. Right now it's just kind of shallow, there's little or no sense of progression anywhere.

As such, I've decided that I definitely want to do the after-death enemy possession thing because that way, you can unlock enemies you've killed enough of or possessed frequently enougg for use in Duel mode. Although pretty much all of them would be useless against a sheriff, it could be fun pitting them against each other.

I'm also considering replacing the current level-select with a sort of map exploration metaphor. There would still be the three main levels, but each of them would have a few different sections. You would start at the edges of the level, where you only fight the weakest of the level's enemies. Doing well on this would unlock the next section further in, where there are more enemies, and harder ones. Finally you would get to the deepest part of the level, where you could fight any kind of enemy that level has, including the level's boss(es). This way I could also add cool, specific things like camps where you only fight large numbers of a specific type of enemy, or a place where there are obnoxious numbers of cacti, or a boss rush dungeon. Each of them could have its own high scores and keep track of kills and such. I'll post some screens of the map later.


I have been working on this for too long

[andy wolff]

some stuff on the more technical/bugfixing side today:

• Added a loading screen to see if I could. It runs on a separate thread and tells you how many files it loads, which is kind of nice. XNA really needs an analogue to AS3's LoaderInfo, though.
• Figured out how to actually load and play mp3s for the background music. The more I play The Dunes with the El Diablo track, the more I like it
• Added volume control to the options menu, I think (haven't properly tested it yet)
• Fixed a problem I found with the way game data was saved, and added the volume settings to the save data.
• Noticed that gold could sometimes appear offscreen, so I made it clamp to the titlesafe area on its constructor. It looks a bit weird sometimes, but I don't care
• Cleaned up the code+hierarchy for obstacles like cacti and trees and teepes and such, which was actually a lot more helpful than I thought it would be
• Added the well. In-game it poofs with dust and spawns either gold or a genie when you finish bringing up the bucket.
  

I also started looking into stuff I should be doing with the GamerServices class, like actually differentiating between user accounts, but it looks rather bothersome so I'll probably put it off again until later.

I think I'm gonna scrap the camels, the sandstorms, and the quicksand, in the interest of time.
The stilts bandit, beetles, the little genies, and the huge genie boss are still a go, though. Tomorrow I want to start animating the beetles, I think

[andy wolff]

spent much of today doing the map:


(don't mind the frameskipping, it's from the screencap software again)

All of those flags are different sections of The Cracks, with variations in enemy spawn patterns and environment. The whole map pans horizontally, and there's a 'frontier line' obscuring parts which haven't been unlocked yet (not visible in the gif)

It feels pretty good. A lot better than the sloppy level select I had earlier, anyway. The different sections leave a lot more tweaking+balancing to worry about, though. Anyway, much left to do all over the place

[andy wolff]

Today:

• Made each area keep its own best and total golds and kills, in addition to the global best and totals.
• Added all of those new variables (and some other stuff) to the savedata
• Started doing some balancing on the areas
• Made a working options menu. Right now you can adjust music and sfx volumes and delete the save data
  
  
  
  

Haven't yet decided how I want to keep track of how many times you kill each type of enemy. One problem is right now I have nowhere to display that info, though I guess I could make an extended stats screen or something.

[Inanimate]

You have no clue how much I want to play this.

Keep up the good work, dude. This devlog is amazing.

[happymonster]

It really does look nice, love the little wagons following you in the level select.

[andy wolff]

Thanks guys, I really like seeing interest in the game beyond my own

Today I:

• Made the hud say "NEW" next to the highscore/mostkills text when your current score is beating the previous best
• Added a white highlight on the frontier line that shrinks away when you return to the map after playing a level for any number of rounds. It emphasizes the distance the frontier line moves forward in response to the gold/kills/whatever you got during play. I'm not completely set yet on how I want to calculate that progress, though I'm thinking it'll be gold-based. Perhaps the total gold in each level will have a decaying curve of some sort so that you can't progress as easily by playing just one level. that way it would go faster if you play them all for at least a few rounds
• made the map actually pan properly
• added some levels in The Dunes to the map (still kindof a wip, though, esp. the stat text)
  

I've been thinking lately that if you beat the snakeboss, you'll get it as a replacement option for the ox and carriages (though that will be difficult to animate again), and if you beat the as-yet-undisclosed boss of The Dunes, you'll get that for a transport option, as well.

I think I've decided that instead of counting how many times you kill every enemy class, I'll just add a counter as needed, and not make it visible to players. I'd only use it for unlocking the various special levels, like 'kill x indians of any type to unlock the indian village', or 'get killed by x cacti to unlock the cactus forest'. If I did that, I could actually make the counters visible to players, and I would just put them on each stat's corresponding level flag text. Hmm yeah, that sounds good. I can even gray out the area in some sort of glitch effect and make the flag invisible and the ox position random/circular

Also a note about something I mentioned earlier: Putting in player control for systems for which you haven't yet written AI is seeming like a better and better idea every time I use it. I did it for the oxen movement to help me get the frames and motion and carriage-following working, and I did it for the screen panning (in this case it wasn't as simple as it perhaps should have been, but using this technique helped), and I've been doing it for every enemy since I had the idea. The overhead involved is completely negligible, and it really helps collect my thoughts while I'm programming. I think I'll take this technique and apply it to my next robotics project, as well (PID loops and other mechanism AI can be a pain in the ass).
So basically, do it if you aren't already.
Oh, also, it helps to have a globally available and very succinct input handler. My code for reading whether the first connected user has just pressed the A button is very simple:
    C.I.getfirstconnected(true); if (C.I.pA) { stuff(); }

[08--n7.r6-79.84]

so awesome gifs ITT

 

[andy wolff]

Winged Doom: Thanks. I too love seeing screencap gifs and I wish more people would do it. Hempuli's ESA gifs and Xion's CK gifs are the best


added support to the basic Sprite class for easily selecting animations as int[]s of frames. I should have done this years ago.

having split up The Cracks into a bunch of different levels, I've noticed that the difficulty doesn't really ramp up in as interesting a way as I'd like. To solve this, I'll add a few harder enemies and more interesting behaviors to the current ones, such as:

a medium-sized bandit with a shield.

the shield blocks all bullets from the front

he can throw it

those gifs are me controlling him, but I have written the AI for him. He turns his shield toward anything he feels is threatening, making it rather difficult to land a hit while he's not throwing the shield

I'm considering signing up to exhibit this at the Boston Festival of Indie Games on September 22. I hope I'll be done by then. Even if I'm not finished, I know I'll be at a good point to get some player feedback. Are any of you in the Boston area interested in that happening?

I haven't worked on this nearly as much as I might have liked to this month, though I did spend the time well on other things (like sandy ponds)

[andy wolff]

finally added the proper dancing cacti
I wanted to skew them, but apparently you can't in c#'s spriteBatch without jumping through some very expensive hoops, so instead I built my own, probably more expensive hoops to jump through. That is to say, I'm making the cacti dance by drawing vertical slices of the sprite offset horizontally.

I made a silly mistake while implementing this, and got a weird-looking visual error from it:

I found the problem quickly, though, and fixed it. Turns out I was doing something wrong with the heights of each slice, where they should have been small constants

I don't think the cacti dance would translate well to a gif, so here's a video of it:

I still haven't found a very good quality screencapture setup, though I think I managed to lower the frameskipping a lot

i have a few ideas to make the cactus forest novelty level more interesting, but I haven't implemented any of them yet

[Ashkin]

Awesome cacti <3

[Franklin's Ghost]

Cacti dance looks great.

What screen capture software are you using?