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[swordofkings128]

*all drawn within the game!*

I took a break from OS stuff to work on drawing with the mouse(there will be a part of the game where you need to sign a contract with your signature) and got that working fine. But I decided to see how far I could take this idea using the built in drawing commands in adventure game studio...

Turns out you can make a very bare bones drawing program. I tried for 3 days to get flood fill/paint bucket type tool working, but it's beyond my skill level. But the program itself is intended to be based more around like if you were painting with a paint brush than doing pixel perfect precision.

A couple tools don't work yet. There's no pallet knife, and cfill(which just fills the color you click on with the new color all over the canvas) don't work yet. But the brush size can be increased or decreased, and color picking from the pallet works flawlessly.

Color picking from the canvas is bugged, but that won't be hard to fix.

Saving/loading isn't done either. Saving won't be hard, but loading will be an interesting thing to tackle...

Obviously the interface isn't done! Just shooting for basic functionality right now.

And, like all windows, it can dragged, restored down, restored up, closed, etc... but it's not a multi window so only one YCpaint can be open at a time.

I think this kind of stuff adds a bit more depth necessary to having a convincing fake operating system. Players might expect the desktop to just be a place where you go from file world to file world. Like a glorified menu. but once they open up the paint program and see it can make a picture, they might be surprised! Or not if they're reading this because then it wouldn't be a surprise.

[swordofkings128]

Making great progress lately! I'm actually very happy with how development has been going lately. The paint program in the previous post is 90% done. I got distracted with an idea for a mock chat window in the game so I pursued that for a couple days...

*looks like you have a secret admirer!*

The graphics for the chat window are place holders as I couldn't think of anything very interesting to have as a theme for the window. So it's just a generic shiny gradient for now. It's a very basic chat, all that happens is if you type and hit enter it goes one stet farther into a "conversation" which consists of random phrases until you get a certain and go to a file world.

If anyone has used adventure game studio, you'll know that text can only be one color per "label" but I found a way around it using the dynamicsprite/drawingsurface commands. I think I'll release the source project files for the operating system once it's done because it has taken a lot of work arounding and many hours of thought to be doing the kind of things I'm doing in Frog Days. I'm not tooting my own horn, I don't really consider myself a particularly good programmer, I'd just hope to save someone else a heap ton of work farther down the road if they choose to have a chat window in there adventure game studio game...

Speaking of file worlds, I'm getting very close to being able to start finishing up all the locations, render them, and put them into the game. So to prepare the essential world linking function!


I'm going through my list of locations(again) but once again, some of them are a bit dull or not really too fleshed out so I cut them for now. The lava world is leaning towards being cut since it really has nothing going on it that I plan... so either I will have less total worlds or I'll work towards more unique places. gotoroom will replaced with the starting room number for each area, by the way. I don't know what rooms those will be yet so they're just 0 for now.

So you've all gotten a glimpse at the entire game heheh! But I like to think playing the game will be vastly more interesting than a boring list of locations :p

[SirNiko]

Give the chat window some frog emoticons.

messaginJfrog is a brilliant pun.

[jctwood]

The palettes are all so perfect.

[swordofkings128]

Thank you two! Emoticons might be out of the question, but I haven't looked into them just yet. Mixing text and images might be doable, though out of my experience level. It would be awesome to have though! Help make the faux messenger authentic. And glad you noticed the username joke XD however in the final game you will be able to put in whatever name you like.

Thanks for noticing the palettes too! Heheh, the color scheme(or lack there of) has been a lot fun to see it go from glorious full color photoshop embossed graphics to horrible, flaky low color versions XD

[swordofkings128]

Working on 3d assets once more.








And I already posted this in the 3d thread but I really like how it turned!


Mainly now I'm working on a list of generic decorative props that can be sprinkled in many given locations. I'm basically concerned with having lots of objects that can be viewed at a multitude of angles, up close, far away, etc... building up an arsenal of scene fodder. These objects all have intended purposes but designing things with higher detail in consideration means that I have the option of acting on the thought of "A giant ear would be really cool here!" and I have a giant ear that has the creases modeled in as geometry.

Sometimes you need things to add a sense of the world being lived in or broken in. Let's say there's a fridge... but it needs magnets and pictures and stuff on it because no one has a plain fridge in there abode(unless you're boring! Come on, give your fridge some life!) basically I can say "How about a traffic light magnet? Or a flip flop magnet?" or even "What about giant traffic light ocean outposts?"

[jctwood]

These are all fantastic! What software are you modelling in? Sorry if I missed you explaining this in the past.

[swordofkings128]

Thank you! Blender is my weapon of choice. It's an extremely powerful program! Very stabile and efficient too for the most part. Can't imagine living with out it. A world without Blender isn't a world worth living in XD

[swordofkings128]

I don't know about anyone else, but my favorite crunchy snack is Doritos. I know there is a weird thing about these so called "gamerz" who like their Mountain Dew and their Doritos or whatever, but I liked Doritos before they were cool(ranch), man.

So I modeled some detailed nacho cheese flavored corn chips! And, with a few simple adjustments, they can be turned into any flavor, even strawberry salsa smoothie!


... But for now it's just the regular colors.

I'm also working on more stuff. Stuff will be my focus for... awhile, that's for sure! Frog Days is a game stuffed full of stuff. There will be feet:


There will be ketchup and mustard cobras!!


Maybe they will appear on the finished version of this early render of a hotdog you'll explore in the game?


I wish I had more to show as far as real location renders go but for now single objects are all I have! But I've been taking some breaks from working on 3d stuff to make some music.

First, whoever linked me to those vaporwave albums, I'm glad you did! I've listened to a lot of that stuff and it's really nice stuff to hear while working on models(It's a weird experience hearing a screwed and chopped version of a Toshiki Kadumatsu song while modeling things like a detailed toilet...)

Here's some songs to get a better feeling of the audio experience.

A calm loop for a puzzle.
Some puzzles or areas have there own looping song to give the idea of something important happens here, or maybe I need to do something here for something to happen.

First time song for somewhere
Some songs might have a clue as to what a solution to a puzzle is! Or not... I'm on the fence with an idea I have...

puzzle theme for that area
Another puzzle theme.

Some might say that putting music over puzzles might be annoying, and they would be correct. But the puzzles in Frog Days are less about moving dials, punching in codes, etc, with cryptic hints sprinkled around the world(no offense to Myst, but I find that aspect very hard to pull of and I'm pretty sure it would hurt the Frog Daysian experience) and more about trying your best to solve them but if you can't, or fail enough, there's an alternate solution, and getting some unique interactions through. So ideally you won't be spending 5 minutes trying to guess the correct star alignment while a chilled loop plays and might get on your nerves.

I'll do my best to live up to the idea of never getting stuck, never having to quit for a walkthrough(or quit and never come back!) but puzzle talk will come later when I've got some working in action... all that I have now is the lemonade making puzzle prototyped.

[swordofkings128]

All this talk about modeling, music, graphics but what good is it if there's nothing to combine them together into what is called "interactive multimedia"?

I spent the last couple of days adding in some core features that were missing up until this point dealing with audio and cutscenes.

In adventure game studio, audio is handled in a way that would be ideal for a traditional adventure game like any Sierra or Lucas Arts adventure. But the problem in the early days of Myst and pre-Myst-like games is usually only 1 instance of audio can play at a time.

I'm disregarding that in regards to music and ambience. Music will be playing at the same time as ambient sound. But audio for sound effects works as it could back in the day. Music and ambience quits playing, the sound effect is played, and then the music and ambience start where they left off. This didn't require anything fancy, and it's pretty simple code wise but it was a bit tough to get just right!


The first proper cutscene made! Please remember this is a test area, it won't be in the final game looking this shabby!

Before, I had very elaborate, messy code to get simple cutscenes to happen... But I wrote everything I did for cutscenes before from scratch so making them will be simpler and easier to do.



Putting this here in most cases, whether it be the player using an inventory item, the player clicking on a character, or a cutscene playing upon entering a new screen, is the only line that needs to be present to make something happen.



This is a simple script to animate a character while a voice clip plays and a subtitle appears on screen. Really adventure game studio makes doing cutscenes pretty easy, but what's required for my game is something not really intended for AGS, so it's really important that everything remains simple(or simpler if possible!) and creating a cutscene isn't a nightmare. Which I think I've succeeded at! Very happy with the my cutscene functions and how they work...

Unfortunately, making subtitles isn't as easy as typing in text and outputting it on screen. I'm using word art like text for any speech spoken, which means rendering 3d text, processing the image, and then adding a new subtitle line in the subtitles script.

But I think that everyone will enjoy colorful text with power point style transitions to them

[jctwood]

More games should use the immersive nature of powerpoint transition techniques! It is really incredible that you are building up all these systems though and I'm more and more excited for Frog Days every time you make a post.

[swordofkings128]

Thank you! It's really nothing too impressive, it's not like I made the game engine! XD Just lots of my own code and getting it to do my bidding...

Glad you're excited, thank you for the support! :D

[Tanner]

gosh this is cool. i am so into this

[Louard]

Certainly nails the 90's!
Reminds me of the timeframe/weird exploration of "games" like The Manhole

[swordofkings128]

Wow thanks you two! The manhole is an inspiration with its strange dream like stuff, it's sad Cyan went in the Myst direction as opposed to the Manhole direction. Well, in my eyes that is! What could have been.

That time frame is exactly what my go to inspiration material consists of.

[swordofkings128]

Frog Days, aka one of the few(the only?) games to purposefully emulate the look of a Macromedia Director "game"

I have been working on doing screen captured transitions, and I'm pretty happy with what I've come up with. This was yet another thing I was holding off on doing because I didn't think I had the ability to do it, but it wasn't as difficult as I had lead myself to think... First I began with making a simple dissolve effect over a grid of 80x60 8x8 pixels(4800 spots in total) and it worked decently on the first attempt.

The issue was I was trying a randomly selected fill in approach, which would fill about 1400 squares after running 4800 times. That's not even half! So when it ended, the end was very apparent... I then tried storing each of the spots in an array, and having the computer search for ones that have not been touched yet. It worked(not really) it would crash the game almost as soon as it ran!

That's because I was being dumb and having the computer search randomly for points across a screen with 4800 squares. The first hundred operations would be easy, but as more and more are filled in, the computer has to run through more and more steps to find the next unfilled square. There is no rhyme or reason.

Imagine painting a moving wall with your eyes close, dabbing a small brush at complete random. It will take FOREVER to fill that wall, it at all. As you dab more, filling more, there is less space where you haven't been, making each successful dab, covering new surface area, increasingly less likely.

I scrapped that entirely, and made something usable.


Here's how to fill or erase a screen at random without crashing and burning: Search the entire screen sequentially, from left to right(and then down once the edge has been reached) for untouched spots, and then decide at random if it should be filled or not(this is not just random but a random chance of the end goal number of searches minus which one your on now, so the random filling is proportionally to the amount of times the screen is searched)

But there was still a "pop" at the end, so at the last 8th of the dissolve transition, search for points that are filled. If it is, randomly fill the point to the left of that one.

You might ask "why not just draw the sprite 8x8 pixels at a time at random? Simple: this transition works for EVERYTHING because it draws a screenshot BEFORE any new things appear on screen onto the screen after new things appear, then erasing this screen shot at random. It works for going from room to room, or if a character appears on screen. Doing this for the whole screen, even for small changes, caused noticeable CPU spikes so I wrote a new version of the dissolve that only draws over the area that needs to be covered.

I made a swipe transition and a "zoom" transition(not zoom in, but erases the old screen from the center) which are going to be used mainly for navigating the world. As you can guess(correctly) these were much less of a hassle to program XD

Here's a gif of the game with all the transitions!


Also you may notice there are gifs now. I can't record video on my poor old computer to save my life, so found a nifty program called gifcam that works well. The above gif is a bit choppy though, but Frog Days runs at 60 fps when not seen as a gif. Though I'll work on getting video with audio soon! Here's what was playing in the game during the gif:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byxpy03yBoVSWkRsXy1BM2tWTlk/view?usp=sharing

Now, I will transition into the end of this post. *dissolves into square tiles disappearing into thin air*

[jctwood]

That is a pretty nifty solution to the dissolve problem. I wonder if there is a standard way of doing it. Gifcam is a great tool and it's nice to see some movement! Look forward to the next post.

[kinnas]

This is absolutely fantastic holy shit! The game I never knew I wanted to play so bad. The work of a mad genius? A fracture in the multiverse, a 90s from another world oozing its way over and it's got something to do with frogs?

See the 3d is from an era when 3d was still impressive and so retroactively I cannot help but get excited. It's that era when seeing an intro video for Theme Hospital was as important as playing the game. When skipping the intro video meant missing out on sweet 3d art. Bump maps and Blinn-Phong are the true crowning achievements of machine made art! That and Bayer matrix dithering.

[swordofkings128]

Thanks! JctWood, I'm not really sure if there is a standard way, I tried searching for dissolve transition help, but all my queries turned up video editor how-to-use-transitions results... There probably is but it's obscured by search noise. And yes gifcam is wonderful! It does a great job of making efficient gifs, that 640x480 one is pretty darn small for an animation of that size.

kinnas, I'm flattered! I'm trying very hard to have a convincing audio-visual experience. Also I'd like to mention there will be a sweet, flashy, 3d intro movie that you won't want to skip! (at least the first time around hehe ;P)

[swordofkings128]

It's one of those ...boring... updates...

 

-Added a blinking underscore to the chat box. Due to some issues with the engine, there will only be one line for text as opposed to a 3 line limit(but the character limit will be about the same, the text will just adjust in the box to show what was most recently typed) however this also isn't optimized, like I got something going on in this code that uses a lot of CPU somehow, so that needs to be fixed...

-Worked on fixing some issues with some old stuff. Scrolling was jittery when a scroll bar is bigger than like 100 pixels in scrolling range, but that's due to me using ints instead of floats when I programmed them so long ago(the old "multiply-by-a-percentile-and-divide-by-100" trick didn't do the trick!) to get the distance a window's contents need to be based on the position of the knee. It took some fiddling, but I got it working fine and now all scroll bars scroll buttery smooth.

-Subtitles would pop over a couple pixels the first time they appear, but I fixed this. I'm not sure exactly what was causing that, but before I typed the dimensions of all the subtitles in instead of using the very useful Game.GetSpriteWidth(or GetSpriteHeight) command for some reason so now subtitles can be any crazy weird size I want them to be without having to worry about typing all the numbers in.

-Redid my audio functions so that music and ambient sound won't start all the way at the beginning and then resume where they were when coming out of a character interaction or when a sound effect plays when running on an external storage device(don't know why it did this but it did)

-Began working on a web browser for FlamingOS. There will be a world where the main puzzle there is fiddling with a handful of websites on terminals within the world, but if it's simple enough I'd like to have some just for fun websites the player can see on the desktop... but that's still undecided.

Unfortunately no new visuals this time... it's a text only update.

Fixing code is a lot less fun than writing new code, that's for sure! But it's all stuff that needed to be done. I just kept getting bored with it and working on music.
Beach wandering

Airy puzzle theme

Mystery puzzle...

The good news is music has been making good progress. I'm 60/72 songs in, but that's a very shaky number because inevitably there will be songs that don't fit anymore, songs that will be replaced, unused, etc... For example, I've made 3 songs already for the same part near the end but that area is going to be completely different than how I first imagined it, and then that changed again, and it might change again since nothing for the end game is significantly finished yet... they'll be on the Frog Days OST though!