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[nekromantikko]

The ropes look really good! Great work 

[Nebirvi]

This looks great! I would love to be able to play it on my 3DS <3 Im a huge fan of the color and style choice! Simple and nice character design too. I wish you all luck with the progress and hopefully release!

[Ishi]

Thanks all

Good feedback about the screen filter, thanks! I do like the idea of including a filter, either for nostalgic value or to soften the screen a bit for people who don't want to stare at super-sharp pixels. I used a Game Boy style LCD filter in a previous game. But yeah, just a bonus feature for if I get time

[Ishi]

Hello!

I have a fun announcement - I'll be taking Leilani's Island to Norwich Game Festival at the start of June!

http://www.norwichgamingfestival.com/Games.html

It's a free festival where a lot of indies get to show their games off. It'll be my first big event for the game so I'm excited and a little nervous!

Having finished my month of level design I was planning on spending May on visuals and theming for level backgrounds and scenery. However I'll be prioritising some important polish I want to get done before the event, as well as preparing some things like t-shirts to wear at the festival.

If anyone here lives nearby and is able to come, please stop by and try the game! The website says I will be there with Leilani on the 3rd June, but I should also be there on the 2nd.

I'll talk more about specific features I'm adding for the demo in the coming weeks. If anyone has advice for preparing to demo the game I would love to hear it.

[io3 creations]

If anyone has advice for preparing to demo the game I would love to hear it.

As a general tip, search this forum for "expo" or "convention".   Since there are only a relatively small number, once you find the names (e.g. PAX) you can search for more info.

There's quite a few posts, but here are some that I have bookmarked in the past:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=44451.msg1242437#msg1242437
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=37314.msg1016469#msg1016469
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=34910.msg964598#msg964598

[Mark Mayers]

Just stopping in and saying hello. I've been reading these posts for a while and the game looks great!

---

There's quite a few posts, but here are some that I have bookmarked in the past:
https://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=44451.msg1242437#msg1242437

And hey! I would recommend reading the Made With Unity version of that retrospective, because of better formatting and additional content.
Best of luck at the festival!

[Ishi]

Thanks for those links, they were good reading!

Apologies for being quiet, I've been on holiday for a week but also been busy starting my preparations for the festival.

Firstly, I wanted some sort of physical item to give away, and settled on magnets! Badges might be more traditional but I wanted to try something a little different.



The design is inspired by milk caps / POGs which was a big craze in the UK when I was a kid, and originated in Hawaii. I cheated a little by using 4 colours in the design rather than 2, so it doesn't have the fully retro aesthetic, but that's ok because it's a pretty niche aesthetic anyway!

I have 100 of these for 2 days of festival so it'll be interesting to see how that quantity works out.

And on the game side, I've done various bits of polish with control tweaks, adding missing animations etc. I've polished up the placeholder Course Select screen (which will eventually be replaced with the world map) to make it look nicer, and added thumbnail images to indicate what each level involves:



I've also added a thank-you screen at the end of the demo before it returns to the title screen. It seemed like a nice way to round off the experience. At this point the player can choose to go back in and play a different level if they want, or alternatively it gives a nice stopping point if the festival is busy and there are other people waiting to play. So the idea is that there's more content to play (probably 3 levels) if someone has the opportunity, but the experience won't drag on too long for people busy looking around the festival.



It's fun to get some more Hawaiian feel into the game by using a few Hawaiian words here and there, that's something I aim to continue as I start putting more content into the game.

Thanks for reading! I have some more stuff in the works to get ready for the festival so will show that in the coming weeks.

[sjdswanlund]

I have two questions concerning the levels in this game.  First, do you know how many you are aiming for?  Secondly, will there gameplay mechanics that are unique to certain levels?  The reason I'm asking this is from looking at the screens of your first and second levels of months, they had different mechanical features.  The first one had those blocks, while the second had the ropes.  I was thinking to myself that having mechanics like these spread out through different levels would give the gameplay more variety, and help the game continually feel fresh.  When I saw those two different pictures, and several other pictures and animations throughout this thread, the game reminds me of Duck Tales, in how the game can stretch out one major mechanic by having every level use it differently.  All the different variety in level design the game seems to have has made me nostalgic for Donkey Kong Country, which had loads of unique things like animals, cart tracks, and barrel cannons spread throughout, changing up the game constantly.

[JobLeonard]

Are you Hawaiian and/or in touch with the Hawaiian community? Not that I think this game is really at risk of being accused of cultural appropriation, but just to be safe

[Ishi]

I have two questions concerning the levels in this game.  First, do you know how many you are aiming for?  Secondly, will there gameplay mechanics that are unique to certain levels?  The reason I'm asking this is from looking at the screens of your first and second levels of months, they had different mechanical features.  The first one had those blocks, while the second had the ropes.  I was thinking to myself that having mechanics like these spread out through different levels would give the gameplay more variety, and help the game continually feel fresh.  When I saw those two different pictures, and several other pictures and animations throughout this thread, the game reminds me of Duck Tales, in how the game can stretch out one major mechanic by having every level use it differently.  All the different variety in level design the game seems to have has made me nostalgic for Donkey Kong Country, which had loads of unique things like animals, cart tracks, and barrel cannons spread throughout, changing up the game constantly.

I don't have a definite target for the number of levels. I like the sound of the number 40, as that's what Wario Land had. I think any fewer than that and the game would feel a bit thin. I also want some secret levels in the game so need to take that into account, if the player plays through the game with no secret levels it should still be a decent length.

I'm certainly going to try and vary the gameplay level-by-level, so there's good variety as you go through. I don't know how many entirely unique mechanics there'll be; most will probably be used in at least a couple of levels, but by combining them with other mechanics and by leaving a gap between the levels I think it can stay feeling fresh.

Are you Hawaiian and/or in touch with the Hawaiian community? Not that I think this game is really at risk of being accused of cultural appropriation, but just to be safe

My wife is from Hawaii, and so far I've spent about 10 weeks there myself in total. It doesn't give me a free pass to do whatever I want but at least I'm not approaching the game from a culturally ignorant viewpoint

[JobLeonard]

Ah, you should be fine then!

Yeah, I was more worried about the idea that if you had never been there and don't know anyone from there, the "lenses" through which you would approach the culture would have a bigger chance of being.. how shall I put this.. distorted, you know?

[jctwood]

Love the course select!

[Schoq]

Course select is cute but it couldn't possibly beat what I bet Ishi comes up with for a wario land style island map

[Louard]

Really like the promo stuff you've put together. Best of luck at the show!

[JobLeonard]

Course select is cute but it couldn't possibly beat what I bet Ishi comes up with for a wario land style island map

^

[Ishi]

Course select is cute but it couldn't possibly beat what I bet Ishi comes up with for a wario land style island map

Thanks I'm super excited to start work on the map eventually!

I'm continuing preparation for the festival! I now have t-shirts for me and my wife to wear to the event.



And have been continuing to polish various aspects of the game. One example is that pressing up/down on the controller now makes Leilani look up or down.



It doesn't have any use yet - but I wanted Leilani to react in some way when pressing down. In most 2D platformers you would press down to crouch; in Leilani the roll button doubles as the crouch button so it behaves more like the crouch button in Mario 3D Land. By making Leilani look downwards it should help to indicate that, yes you have pressed the down button, and no it doesn't let you crouch.

Finally I've done a first pass at a background for the cliff level, to replace the previous placeholder one. I'm planning on including this level in the festival demo so I didn't want it to look too similar to the beach level. I think the moving clouds add a lot of life to the level too.

[TheGrandHero]

It doesn't have any use yet - but I wanted Leilani to react in some way when pressing down.

Reminds me of Shovel Knight where you could make the knight squat ever so slightly by one pixel by pressing down. Absolutely no use except to make him "dance" by pressing the down button repeatedly. Gave you something to do while you were waiting for timings to open up, et cetera.

Finally I've done a first pass at a background for the cliff level, to replace the previous placeholder one. I'm planning on including this level in the festival demo so I didn't want it to look too similar to the beach level. I think the moving clouds add a lot of life to the level too.

Absolutely love this new background. The clouds in the foreground are what really sells it, too.

[Ishi]

Yay thanks, glad you like it!

I've been experimenting with how the cloud animation is rendered as someone asked me about the pixel shimmering happening on them. The general method is similar to how the ropes are drawn; the cloud sprites are split into polygons and I move the verts of the polygons up and down. The polygons look something like this:



Getting this to look nice in motion in a low resolution game can be tricky. I have three different versions in the gif below.



Method 1 (with small Leilani): This is the original method. I'm rounding the Y positions of the verts to the nearest pixel, so they step up and down. This causes some shimmer however when neighbouring verts step out of sync with each other for a few frames.

Method 2 (with big Leilani): Here I removed the rounding of positions so the verts move up and down smoothly. It creates some rather obvious rows of pixels crawling along the top edge of the clouds, which I find really distracting, even though the general smoothness of motion is nice.

Method 3 (with fire Leilani): This is the same as method 2 but the framerate of the cloud animation is reduced to around 10 fps. It helps to eliminate the crawling pixels and the overall effect is about the same as method 1, but maybe feels a little more solid than method 1.

Of course I could also allow texture filtering to kick in and blur the texture to make it all smooth, but that goes against the whole appearance of the rest of the game.

[qMopey]

This is my favorite devblog 

[sjdswanlund]

It doesn't have any use yet - but I wanted Leilani to react in some way when pressing down.

Reminds me of Shovel Knight where you could make the knight squat ever so slightly by one pixel by pressing down. Absolutely no use except to make him "dance" by pressing the down button repeatedly. Gave you something to do while you were waiting for timings to open up, et cetera.

Finally I've done a first pass at a background for the cliff level, to replace the previous placeholder one. I'm planning on including this level in the festival demo so I didn't want it to look too similar to the beach level. I think the moving clouds add a lot of life to the level too.

Absolutely love this new background. The clouds in the foreground are what really sells it, too.

As for Shovel Knight reference, I think Yacht Club Games were paying homage to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.  In that game, one of the accessories Alucard can find to equip are the Secret Boots, which in the game says they discreetly increase your height.  When you wear them your height actually increases by a pixel or two, which is barely noticeable.  The game also have many other items that serve no purpose except to act as jokes and Easter eggs, such as Peanuts, which are consumable items.  When you use the item, Alucard flicks the peanut into the air and catches it in his mouth, healing his HP by 1 whole point.

With this in mind, it would be interesting to see if pressing down or up, like you mentioned, did something funny along those lines.  Or, were you thinking of it doing something that is actually important to the gameplay, like a required move?