Welcome, Guest. Please login or register.

Login with username, password and session length

 
Advanced search

1411275 Posts in 69323 Topics- by 58380 Members - Latest Member: bob1029

March 28, 2024, 07:19:12 AM

Need hosting? Check out Digital Ocean
(more details in this thread)
TIGSource ForumsCommunityDevLogsLeilani's Island
Pages: 1 ... 22 23 [24] 25 26 ... 67
Print
Author Topic: Leilani's Island  (Read 400833 times)
Ishi
Pixelhead
Level 10
******


coffee&coding


View Profile WWW
« Reply #460 on: January 14, 2017, 02:16:42 PM »

Oh man, Woofle is working on Leilani's Island OST???

FP is one of my favorite soundtracks, and I love her independent work too.

Ooh yay, a fan! Yeah she is fantastic, hope you enjoy her work on this game too!
Logged

breakfastbat
Level 2
**



View Profile
« Reply #461 on: January 14, 2017, 04:00:24 PM »

Yeah I had a listen to the 3 she has up right now. Seems like it's going to be good as expected of Woofle!
Logged

♫ December, ♫
♫ December. ♫
zilluss
Level 1
*



View Profile
« Reply #462 on: January 16, 2017, 01:35:23 PM »

The SNES Echo (which SMW uses) is based on a FIR Filter, which gives it its distinctive sound. You should be able to find the FIR register values for SMW on some ROM hacking site.
Logged

@zilluss | Devlog  Hand Point Right
TheGrandHero
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #463 on: January 16, 2017, 04:33:49 PM »

Cue Points: I can embed cue points into music tracks, and the gameplay code receives a callback when the music hits a cue point. I can use this to time things to the music. One example I'm considering is that in the mechanical base / factory levels, it'll initially be dark, and the factory lights will turn on in time with the beats in the music's intro.

Reminds me of New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, where the enemies would hop on certain beats in the music.
Logged

1leggedseagull
Level 0
*



View Profile
« Reply #464 on: January 17, 2017, 06:05:52 PM »

Really love the attention you're giving to your audio systems, it's really going to be worth the effort! Great news about Woofle building tracks for this too, her FP stuff is fantastic!  Hand Metal Left No No NO Hand Metal Right
Logged
Ishi
Pixelhead
Level 10
******


coffee&coding


View Profile WWW
« Reply #465 on: January 19, 2017, 05:41:35 AM »

The SNES Echo (which SMW uses) is based on a FIR Filter, which gives it its distinctive sound. You should be able to find the FIR register values for SMW on some ROM hacking site.

Ah that's good to have a lead on that, thanks! I don't know if FMOD's reverb counts as an FIR filter (I would assume so as it sounds like a similar thing). I'm using one of FMOD's preset reverb settings but might fiddle with it sometime to see if I can get that SMW feel from it.

Reminds me of New Super Mario Bros. on the DS, where the enemies would hop on certain beats in the music.

Hah yeah, I love that "wah wah" sound throughout NSMB though I know some people who are less keen on it. It's interesting that it has a non-cosmetic effect on gameplay. For example the koopas pause briefly when they dance, or a fire flower on a moving platform can end up falling off the platform because it bounces a little when it 'dances'.

Really love the attention you're giving to your audio systems, it's really going to be worth the effort! Great news about Woofle building tracks for this too, her FP stuff is fantastic!  Hand Metal Left No No NO Hand Metal Right

Thanks Smiley
Logged

Ishi
Pixelhead
Level 10
******


coffee&coding


View Profile WWW
« Reply #466 on: January 22, 2017, 02:27:49 PM »

Was hoping to do a proper devlog today but I got sidetracked by a bug. I was working on these debug text labels that show which sounds are playing, and the position they're playing at:



In my Release build the labels were showing up ok, but in Debug they weren't visible. It took me a couple of hours to track down what was happening.

The cause of the problem was an obscure C++ thing. I use static const variables to define commonly used colours, for example cColour::White is a static variable for the colour white. It basically saves me typing cColour(1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f, 1.0f) every time I want white. My debug text rendering system cDebugText is also static, and it initialises its text colour using the cColour::White constant.

It turns out that in C++ static variables that aren't in the same file don't have a guaranteed initialisation order. In the Release build it just so happened that cColour::White was initialised first, so it worked correctly. In the Debug build, cDebugText was initialised first, so when it accessed cColour::White it got a garbage colour value back (0.0, 0.0, 0.0, 0.0 in this case). This resulted in the debug text colour alpha being 0.0, so the text wasn't visible! If you use C++, watch out for this.

Edit - Just wanted to point out that the 8x8 font that I'm using for the debug text is from here by téjon. It won't be present in the final build of the game but since I'm showing it publicly here I want to give credit.
« Last Edit: January 23, 2017, 01:52:14 PM by Ishi » Logged

TheGrandHero
Level 1
*



View Profile WWW
« Reply #467 on: January 22, 2017, 06:32:19 PM »

This phenomenon is known as the "static initialization order fiasco", and I've shot myself in the foot with it more than once.
Logged

tylerfunk
Level 0
***


I make games for fun and games


View Profile
« Reply #468 on: January 22, 2017, 06:57:31 PM »

Just read through the whole devlog. This game is sexy as can be! The art and mechanics especially. I don't know if it's been said here yet, but the way you have everything interact in the game reminds me of the point made ( by Shigeru Miyamoto I think?) that said each object/gameplay component should have more than one use. Like how enemies aren't just enemies, but can be used to affect other things.

Honesty, this game looks brilliant!  Hand Money Left WTF Hand Money Right
Logged


MEAD✿W LARK - Metal Deity - That Sea of Neon - Breakvania
Ishi
Pixelhead
Level 10
******


coffee&coding


View Profile WWW
« Reply #469 on: January 23, 2017, 02:46:07 PM »

I don't know if it's been said here yet, but the way you have everything interact in the game reminds me of the point made ( by Shigeru Miyamoto I think?) that said each object/gameplay component should have more than one use. Like how enemies aren't just enemies, but can be used to affect other things.

Thanks Lugalias! Yeah I really like that kind of game design, I love that in many cases the player can choose how they want to interact with an object - avoid it, play with it, make use of it, whatever. There are plenty of times when progressing through the level only has one method, but even so I try to design the mechanics themselves so that they don't have one obvious use.

Time to write a proper devlog!

More sound system features

I've fleshed out the sound system a little more with some new abilities. The goal is to decouple the code from the audio as much as possible. Most of the sounds I'm adding are placeholder, so I want to be able to edit and replace them later without altering the code.

Includes in Sound Bank XML: My sound bank XML files can now include other XML files. This is pretty simple, I just load the other XML files as if they were separate sound banks, but add all the sounds into the same sound bank as the original file. Basically it allows me to split up the sounds more neatly - a sound bank with 100 sounds in can still be manageable.

Code:
<Include filename="Gameplay_Pickup.soundbank"/>
<Include filename="Gameplay_Player.soundbank"/>

Random selection of sounds: A sound can specify multiple options for what to actually play. So I can add variety in sounds without the code needing to know how many sounds there are, and what all their names are. Note that volume/pitch can be set for each option if necessary, and they can also be given weights to alter the probability of picking each one.

Code:
<Sound name="RandomExplosion">
   <Option filename="Explosion1.wav"/>
   <Option filename="Explosion2.wav"/>
   <Option filename="Explosion3.wav"/>
   <Option filename="Explosion4.wav"/>
</Sound>

Sounds can reference other sounds: The sounds that are defined in the soundbank used to just specify a filename for the wave that they should play. Now they can instead choose another sound to play. The best usage for this is shown here; if I want to make use of that random selection of explosion sounds, I can reference the RandomExplosion sound rather than listing out all of the different explosion wav files each time.

Code:
<Sound name="EOLMachineImpactExplosion"
   soundname="RandomExplosion"
   volume="0.8"/>
   
<Sound name="EOLMachineExplosion"
   soundname="RandomExplosion"
   minFrequency="0.6" maxFrequency="0.7"
   volume="0.3"/>

So I'm quite happy with the abilities of the sound system now. There's always a danger of overengineering systems like this, but I believe I've added a lot of useful features which will make it far easier for me to stay on top of the game's audio. After this audio month is over I'm planning on adding sounds as I go along rather than leaving most of the game silent.

End of Level Machine - Audio

I thought it'd be nice to show off a bit of audio! Here's the end-of-level sequence, both with and without music (and with the audio debug labels mentioned in my previous post). There's more work to go into the visuals of the sequence, and some of the sound effects are placeholder, but it's in a pretty good place. The video is 60fps. Enjoy!



Logged

Mahn
Level 0
***


View Profile
« Reply #470 on: January 23, 2017, 03:54:49 PM »

I don't have much to add other than to say this looks superb, the art style is adorable, everything looks super polished. It may well end up being the Mario-like game on PC. Looking forward to more updates Smiley
Logged
HIDEJI
Level 0
***



View Profile WWW
« Reply #471 on: January 23, 2017, 11:26:43 PM »

The game looks great, but I think the very prolific bsfxr/sfxr atari-esque sounds you're using are doing a disservice to the game. They don't match the (very high!) quality of everything else shown, in my opinion.

Anyway, game looks very good overall. Good luck with the project. Looking forward to seeing more.
Logged


If you like what you see, please help spread the word on twitter! Thank you! Beer!
Ishi
Pixelhead
Level 10
******


coffee&coding


View Profile WWW
« Reply #472 on: January 24, 2017, 05:26:38 AM »

The game looks great, but I think the very prolific bsfxr/sfxr atari-esque sounds you're using are doing a disservice to the game. They don't match the (very high!) quality of everything else shown, in my opinion.

Thanks for the feedback, and I agree! I can't remember whether I mentioned it before, but I'm not planning on keeping the BFXR / Chiptone sounds in the game. They're just quick and easy to use at the moment. I purposefully didn't choose chiptune-style music for the game, and I don't want the sound effects to have that retro feel either.
Logged

baconman
Level 10
*****


Design Guru


View Profile WWW
« Reply #473 on: January 27, 2017, 11:21:54 AM »

It's been a good while, Ishi. Glad to see you've kept things, uhh... rolling. :D

Lookin' sweet!
Logged

Grapple Bug
Level 0
***



View Profile
« Reply #474 on: January 27, 2017, 05:22:09 PM »

The game looks great, but I think the very prolific bsfxr/sfxr atari-esque sounds you're using are doing a disservice to the game. They don't match the (very high!) quality of everything else shown, in my opinion.

Thanks for the feedback, and I agree! I can't remember whether I mentioned it before, but I'm not planning on keeping the BFXR / Chiptone sounds in the game. They're just quick and easy to use at the moment. I purposefully didn't choose chiptune-style music for the game, and I don't want the sound effects to have that retro feel either.

Hey, so, in general, what is your opinion on the whole "retro" or "nostalgic" side of current day indie development? For me, I feel like the games and visuals and sounds I love never left me, so it's hard for me to think of these games as "retro" or anything like that. Honestly, I just look at things like pixel art as quick, appealing art mediums that are quite attractive if done well.
Logged

Follow me on Twitter!
https://twitter.com/WotenDX
Ishi
Pixelhead
Level 10
******


coffee&coding


View Profile WWW
« Reply #475 on: January 28, 2017, 01:23:27 AM »

Hey, so, in general, what is your opinion on the whole "retro" or "nostalgic" side of current day indie development? For me, I feel like the games and visuals and sounds I love never left me, so it's hard for me to think of these games as "retro" or anything like that. Honestly, I just look at things like pixel art as quick, appealing art mediums that are quite attractive if done well.

I agree, I don't really think of these things as retro - maybe it's because I never stopped playing older games, and also because the retro aesthetic is still so common in new games. I don't play Shovel Knight and think "whoa it feels so old". I wouldn't choose whether to play a game based on whether it does or doesn't go for the retro vibe. What I value more is consistency, whether a game uses detailed 3D, hand drawn art or low res pixel art I just like it to have a cohesive style.

My reason for using pixel art for Leilani is that with my skill set and the amount of time I'm willing to spend on the artwork, it's the best choice for enabling me to create a cohesive art style. The Dragon's Trap remake springs to mind as a non-pixel-art game that seems to nail the artstyle, but that obviously requires a lot of time and a very talented artist!

For music, since I don't have the ability to make anything myself, I could have chosen any style. I steered away from retro / chiptune style music partially because, even though I like retro music, the game soundtracks I listen to day to day are almost always more modern sounding. And also because I didn't want the game to come across like it was chasing retro appeal just for the sake of it.

For sound effects, I also want something non-retro as it has to be somewhat consistent with the style of the music. A quote that always comes back to me is one from this Making of Crash Bandicoot blog (which is a great read), "the sounds make the game look better". I think the right audio can really elevate the whole style of the game. Just because it uses pixel art, if the audio is more modern, I think the general feel of the game will end up being more modern. I'm not ready to properly tackle the game's sound design yet (this month was mainly focusing on the technical side of audio rather than the actual sounds themselves) so I don't know whether I'll come up with things myself or find someone to work with.
Logged

fireboy
Level 0
***



View Profile
« Reply #476 on: January 28, 2017, 05:47:32 AM »

I like the colors, the art and the character. She has charisma.
The game is also very interesting. I like the mechanics of the game. And it is very diverse.
Good job. Hand Clap
Logged

Ishi
Pixelhead
Level 10
******


coffee&coding


View Profile WWW
« Reply #477 on: January 29, 2017, 04:22:44 AM »

Time for the weekend's devlog update. I don't have much to show for the game itself - just been adding a load more placeholder sounds. But it's nearly the end of January, and I've been planning out how to divide my time over the coming months! This is my rough plan.

Work schedule

  • November - Gameplay mechanics
  • December - Level design
  • January - Audio month
  • February - Gameplay mechanics - Polishing and adding mechanics! Need to continue making dangerous and challenging things to add to levels.
  • March - Character month - Adding Leilani's missing animations, and need to finalise the antagonist design. Might also include title screen + UI polish.
  • April - Level design
  • May - Theming month - Work on backgrounds, tilesets, foliage.
  • June - Level design
  • July - Technical month - Get my half-finished resource building tool done, also optimisations and other small fixes and improvements.
  • August - Map month - First bit of work on the overworld map!

I think by the end of June I should have a good chunk of playable levels, so by then it'll be worth starting work on the overworld map. That's a part of the game I've been excited to make for a long time.

It feels a little weird to plan so far ahead like this, but also makes me feel good to have a little more structure. Instead of having a massive todo list with such a wide variety of tasks on it, I can look ahead to a particular month and think, "yeah it'll be good to have that done".
Logged

Grapple Bug
Level 0
***



View Profile
« Reply #478 on: January 29, 2017, 01:45:04 PM »

Hey, so, in general, what is your opinion on the whole "retro" or "nostalgic" side of current day indie development? For me, I feel like the games and visuals and sounds I love never left me, so it's hard for me to think of these games as "retro" or anything like that. Honestly, I just look at things like pixel art as quick, appealing art mediums that are quite attractive if done well.

I agree, I don't really think of these things as retro - maybe it's because I never stopped playing older games, and also because the retro aesthetic is still so common in new games. I don't play Shovel Knight and think "whoa it feels so old". I wouldn't choose whether to play a game based on whether it does or doesn't go for the retro vibe. What I value more is consistency, whether a game uses detailed 3D, hand drawn art or low res pixel art I just like it to have a cohesive style.
I really agree with this sentiment. I understand that nostalgia is sometimes a powerful marketing tool, but I just don't feel that way about modern pixel art games. I think it's a practical style that looks great, and I really feel like it's very much alive and kicking.
Logged

Follow me on Twitter!
https://twitter.com/WotenDX
Quicksand-T
Level 4
****


@Quicksand_T


View Profile WWW
« Reply #479 on: January 30, 2017, 12:15:25 AM »

I'm excited to see what you do with the overworld map.
Logged

Pages: 1 ... 22 23 [24] 25 26 ... 67
Print
Jump to:  

Theme orange-lt created by panic