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[tobru]

I love everything about this. The art direction is incredible. I'm looking forward to see how it will all fit together.

[troyduguid]

Big fan of this game! posting to follow
Love the effort you're taking with the OS and also that you seem to be taking the nineties as more than an aesthetic inspiration and introducing it into the gameplay itself, if that makes sense..
perhaps you might dig this (if you haven't seen it yet) http://www.windows93.net/

[swordofkings128]

Thank you tobru, tryduguid! Hopefully it all fits together nicely, this is the first game where I can't really build "levels" as I go. I can program puzzles and interactions in a modular manner but since scenery is pre-rendered graphics actually putting everything together will be the last steps... but I have a good feeling about it all!

Troyduguid, haven't heard of windows93 until now but wow that was amazing! A much more entertaining desktop experience than you can get on any real desktop hehe :p

I've been working on several things, but I didn't want to post until I had a couple  interesting visuals, you know?
-Added a text parser for puzzles where you can type in a response. You can bring it up at anytime, maybe typing in something in a suspicious looking place will do something cool!

-Getting items from your environment:


Now when you pick up any item, a bigger picture of it appears, and clicking on it kind of shrinks it into the inventory icon of the bottom bar.

-Working on a "backwards compatibility" mode but that's a secret...!

Another thing is I've bought a bunch of stock photos of sky. The original images are like 1000x1200 or whatever, so I take those and try to fill 4000x3000 with them. Here's an example:

*except the full size is 4000x3000*

Also here's something I started just yesterday:

Sometimes you get shot down in the boardroom, but hey that's just how the cookie crumbles!

It's hard to tell now but the project board will be a window to a subterranean milk cave, as you can see the milk pouring out of It and wreaking havoc on the boardroom!

[swordofkings128]

Once again, not really a picture heavy update, but I have been doing a lot of 3d modeling! I don't want to show too much, you know! Because the places I'm working on are some of the more... hidden worlds and as much as I'd like to show them off at the same time I want it to be a surprise.

With that being said, a new beach ball model with most details modeled as geometry:

*there's a lot more to a beach ball than a UV sphere, let me tell you!*

A fan!

*Are you a fan of my work?*

The scene from the last post, but with a brand new executive seat!

*Who's chair could this be!?*

Besides that I have a major breakthrough with the "lore" of the game, like a small detail that was like a missing puzzle piece. And also did some more work on some interface things, mainly a new and improved BIOS screen.

[swordofkings128]

I wanted to have a puzzle for one of the worlds be collecting elements and combining them to create stuff like salt, sugar, bleach, etc... common chemical compounds that if you knew a thing or two about chemistry you could solve easily(or some more complex ones!) But I thought it through and it seemed limiting to have a realistic system like that, and then having to include the whole periodic table if the puzzle were to be done justice!? Crazy. So instead the puzzle has become a sort of crafting system to create (hopefully) nearly any item within the game.

UGLY PLACEHOLDER ART!


Now that you have been thoroughly blinded, here's what's going on! This is the Attributizer system. The top box contains attributes(atts or maybe even @s) you want to combine, and the bottom box contains all the atts in your possession. Up to 5 atts can be selected for mixing at a time. Atts can't be used to solve inventory puzzles, and they're part of a separate inventory all together.

I don't have any icons for atts done at this time, but there are 3 categories of atts:
Tints: colors of an item, ROYGBIV plus black and white.
Substances: what an item is made up of mostly. Plastic? Metal? Fruit? Glass?
Characteristics: an aspect of an item. Is it sweet? Shiny? Pointy?

Right now the scope of how descriptive these get is in the air, but I think this could be a fun system to let people mess with. The idea is to give another avenue for problem solving. Honestly I'm very aware this could back fire and be useless, but if it gets to that point I think this system can be re-purposed for another fun gimmick.

This one took a little bit to get up and running but it's very functional now. I had to program sorting inventory so finding attributes isn't a chore and a couple fancy animations to better convey selecting inventory for mixing or canceling it out. Also a way of tagging items with a "recipe" so when you hit mix it finds one that matches the atts that were selected.

I'm still undecided on how players get atts. I think maybe you can find them sometimes while exploring, or I might add a right click menu to the regular inventory so you can "recycle" an item, or breaking it down for it's atts.

[swordofkings128]

I've been meaning to post an update about this, but every year or so I think to myself "hmm, maybe I should get a new computer?" but never do. Until now! I purchased an HP workstation, 2 cores, 16 gigs of ram! Though I didn't order one with a graphics card thinking it had onboard graphics. But, it didn't, so I needed to get a graphics card.

My graphics card(and ESD wristband, just to be on the safe side!) came in today and I've been doing a lot of cleaning things, moving things, and setting up. This was also my first time installing anything inside a computer, and man was I nervous! This isn't a cheap piece of machinery you, and if I fry components it's pretty much my own damn fault.

ANYWAY, that's not the fun part! THIS is the fun part, check out the resolution on this render:


This took 30 seconds to render hehe! Man you should have seen those tiles, the beast was chomping away at them like it was a snack. So, to give it a real test, I rendered the same thing but 400% larger. This one is substantially larger(6400x4400) so no image tags:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/20855857/frogdays_topicscreens/highestres.png

That one took 2 minutes, 40 seconds.

Before, the scene at like 750x440 or something would take FOREVER to render. That's what happens when you go from 4 cores to 24 cores!

So yeah, I can finally render poster-size renders of the promotional scenes I've got cooked up! This scene is actually a little old, the red frog has a fixed up model that I haven't swapped out there yet, and I think the blue one is an older version too.

All in all this cost me a hefty sum... but I've had money set aside for this for quite sometime, and it was a LONG time coming. Now, the next step is to see if I can get network the new and the old comp together to tag team some rendering.

As for game stuff, I have been finishing up a lot a lot a lot of music, the soundtrack is at 70+ songs at the moment, maybe I'll post some of that!
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byxpy03yBoVSUDZNa0dVRFFheGs/view?usp=sharing

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byxpy03yBoVSWG1XX0dRNFBrbnc/view?usp=sharing

Yeah only two for now. I'm hoping to start speeding through the 3d stuff though, now that I can get a preview of what my scene looks like and not have to wait a long time, or worry about killing my computer.

[SolS]

I love everything about this! Cool stuff!

[swordofkings128]

Thanks SolS! It should be even cooler stuff now that the computer rendering everything doesn't heat up like a nuclear reactor. Though imagine the rendering potential of a nuclear powered computer! *lead protective gear sold separately*

[kinnas]

Look at that crazy bump mapping! I think this game will finally convince me to shell out for a proper Voodoo graphics card.

[swordofkings128]

Thank you hehe! It's also recommended you have a Gravis Ultra Sound for the ideal Frog Days audio experience.

[swordofkings128]

First off, please keep in mind everything you see is place holder graphics! Well, except the tint/paint can graphics, those are final.

Worked on this system on and off. Originally, I thought right mouse menus for inventory was a little too much, but I think there could be a couple fun things with the right mouse(maybe a special "cut/paste" system for combining items!? Or maybe not hehe!) but right now the right mouse shows when an item can be broken down for attributes, and if you select it, it shows you the attributes you got from the item and they're added to the attributes inventory.

In the gif I have reassembled the paint wad, but that's just an example item. Let's say for instance, you have a paint wad, hot sauce and apple skin shavings.

Break down the paint wad for 1x Red, Orange, Yellow, Green and Blue tints. Breaking down hot sauce yields 1x Red Tint, 1x Sour, 1x Salty. Breaking down apple skins yields 3x fruit substance.

Combine 1x yellow tint, 1x sour, and 1x fruit to create a lemon! Or, maybe you have a cup of sugar as well, which breaks down to 3x sweet. 1x red tint, 1x sweet, and 1x fruit will create an apple.

Now that you have an apple, maybe you can put it through a juicer in a house location else where, where it can be made into apple juice! This is an optional system, so players don't ever have to fiddle this to complete the game, or hell, they won't even have to have FOUND the attributizer in the first place(it's obtained after completing a puzzle somewhere) but I think having this system would be an interesting way for players to think "Hmm, I bet I can make something out what I already have..." and allowing most items within the game to be made from this system.

[TonyManfredonia]

Holy. 90's.

Wow. This is seriously one giant blast to the past.

[FK in the Coffee]

Beyond vapor

[swordofkings128]

Thanks! amanfr01, hopefully it'll at least be a blast... to play! Well, on second thought I don't think adventure games could exactly be described as a blast to play(there aren't enough things blowing up for that hehe!)

FK, Beyond vapor sounds like the title of a vaporwave documentary!

I don't have much to show, but while I'm here how about a small update? I've been working on fixing and tweaking the attributizer system, and also another inventory system(a Clipboard, if you will, where you can "cut" one item into memory and "paste" it on another and it might make a new item) And some other fixes...

A couple small improvements:
I figured out how to have scroll bars account for the height of the scroll buttons, so now instead of scrolling only to the bottom of the up arrow and the top of the down arrow, it to the top of the top of the up arrow and the bottom of the down arrow(you'll see what I mean eventually!)

Right click menus will never be cut off by the screen now, before that was an issue. But now if you right click near a border of the screen, the menu appears in a position so it won't run off the screen.

I want to have the final inventory window graphics done before showing more inventory systems and stuff. I have an idea of what it'll look like, something to do with the brain. Here's a brain I modeled for the inventory window icon:


Also I've worked on a lot of music, I hope soon I can stop being in such a music-mode and more in a modeling-mode because that's what I need to work on more!
Summer Camp puzzle

Something or other theme

Again a theme for something

But it's just sometimes one thing comes more easily than the other. Sometimes I'm on a roll with programming difficult stuff, sometimes I churn out a lot of models, sometimes I do a bunch of music.

[maruki]

Posting to follow and to say:Oh.my.god. That's some nostalgia kicking in.

[swordofkings128]

Thank you for following! Working very very hard to for an authentic feeling experience for maximum nostals.

Speaking of such things, I implemented mouse trails to the cursor. This will be an optional feature though, since some might find it distracting. I never used mouse trails, but I recall there being a couple computers in school libraries or somewhere when I was a kid that used them and I thought it was interesting...


Now there's a couple quirks about this. Since dynamically drawing the sprite every game cycle would be pretty demanding, each separate trail is a GUI in adventure game studio that sticks to the mouse position in a previous cycle. The problem with this is how I've programmed everything around going by what GUI is under the mouse, the trails where causing problems, but I solved it by hiding the trails when the cursor passes over them.

The only draw back here is moving the mouse downward or to the right shows no trails since the cursor passes over them as soon as they appear, but when moving at angles it's fine. I'm pretty okay with that personally, but I'll continue working on fixing that if possible.

That's not the only thing that has been done, I've fixed a bunch of things, added in a new special item, and a new generic window, and a ton of other small things. But I can't show the fruits of that yet since... it's basically all background stuff. Well a couple of things that can be seen!


*a taste of Japan*

Before that mouse trail feature, I was working on different mouse cursor themes. Yes, you didn't think there would only be one look to the mouse cursors, did you? What's an OS if you can't customize your cursor, you wallpaper, your desktop theme, etc...? I hope someone plays through the game with the sushi theme... it's my theme of choice, so far!

Also, I'm working on a dynamic computer sound system that will play hard disk chatter when you do various things. Programming it was easy, but getting the sound themselves just right is difficult. But it seems promising, most likely a feature that will be in the final game.

Last week, I had a coworker of mine quiz me about my game and what I'm using to make it. In a way, he was trying to give me advice as if he knew better how to make my game than me, citing a year or something in game design school. The advice he gave me was to basically remove everything that makes Frog Days Frog Days and stop calling it a "Myst-like" because you shouldn't compare your game to one that already exists.

I don't want to go into it too much because the more I try to explain it, the more I sound like a pretentious jerk(not denying that I am sometimes!) or the more I ramble on, and it wasn't a hostile exchange by any means or a huge deal to write a lot about. So, long story short, he asked for a gameplay video so I recorded something. There's not much new stuff in it, and it's missing the fancy new stuff mentioned in this post, but in case anyone wants to see the first real footage of Frog Days here it is:




I know it's a blurry video! I'm still figuring out OBS, please bear with me! ^^;

[TonyManfredonia]

That mouse blur is perfect. Absolutely perfect. Wonderfully done!

It was "so rad" back in the day to see mouse blur.

[swordofkings128]

Thanks! What's funny is that pointer trails were apparently more of an accessibility thing, so if you had difficulty seeing the mouse moving, have trails would make it easier to follow it around. They just happen to look cool hehe! And adds a kind of "juice" to mouse movement.

Speaking of that, it seems I've fixed the problem mentioned before where trails can't be displayed going in certain directions! I had to account for several cases: If the mouse matches the previous coordinates of the last cycle, that means it's not moving, so which means if a trail is below the mouse, get rid of it. But a problem happened where the mouse cursor would change graphic when over a trail, due to how I've programmed menu interactions based on what GUI the mouse is under and what control in that gui the mouse is under. So I added some code to erase trails no matter what when the mouse collides with them when it's over a control in a GUI, which means going down or to the right with mouse might now show trails since they're erased before they're shown, but now that only happens when over buttons.

I think it's fine now, but we'll see! You know how bugs sometimes just like popping up unannounced I'm just glad to catch them when they happen so they won't be a problem later.

And a short wandering around theme:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Byxpy03yBoVSaGxGTnJKNmNScVU/view?usp=sharing

[swordofkings128]

So I tested the build with the mouse trails on my laptop, and it was using a more cpu than it should, so I rewrote most of it(it's pretty simple code to write) and now it's lighter on the system.

And I'm working on more system stuff. First, the FlamingOS assistant, Phillis(or Phillip, if you feel more comfortable with a male assistant!) has more stuff you can do with it. So far, it asks if you want to play some music, change cursor themes, and you can double click it to open a message bubble with text input so you can tell it to "stop music" if it's playing music.

*More like Bonzi Buddy than Clippy*

I hope I haven't posted assistant sprites here before! I've had it modeled for sometime, but haven't really gotten around to programming it until recently.

Also, it will be "useful(as in creating unnecessary shortcuts and popping up at the most inconvenient times)" for bring up system specific stuff. Typing in "Change wallpaper" will open up the system's Wallpaper Customizer. Typing in "Shut down" will shut the system down. Typing "Help" will bring up the desktop help manual. That kind of stuff. And of course, you can disable flAssistant if you wish(but it will comeback later to check in with you)!

*If you think this is confusing, gaudy and cluttered, you won't want to see what it looks like finished!*

Also, there a fancy clock gizit! There will be more buttons on it, but for now I wanted something big and shiny to tell time.

Now, there is still some thoughtful design here and there instead of just "gloss turned up to 11" but for the most part I'm prioritizing flashy, shiny interface aesthetic over user friendliness.

[swordofkings128]

I have been working on more UI stuff, lots of different menus and buttons! I really want to make sure no two GUIs share the same buttons, so every one has it's own open and close buttons, scroll bar graphics, and most importantly, the window doesn't have a... well, window shape! However I don't want to show too much of that because I'd like to have more of those finished before showing off too much.

But I've also been working on setting up proper links to worlds. Here's a couple of the easy ones:


*It's not a bug, it's a feature!*

If you see an icon who's text box color is neon green, you can double click it to go to a file world. This is a very easy one, you just click on the flower icon and a bee appears and now you may go to this world.


*Whoops! You dropped your ice cream!*

I'm not sure why the clock is so fast in the second GIF but in game it runs on normal, real time. Once again, another very easy one. But not all links to file worlds are icons, or have a neon green text box! Sometimes they're regular graphics.

I put this in the 3d thread, here's a desktop rabbit:


What's going on with this!? You'll see...

One more thing I've been getting done is adding in sound effects for clicking on windows. I was iffy about this at first because most OS's don't really make much noise through regular use, but it's a bit uninteresting that way in a game. So there are now sounds for opening, closing, and minimizing windows, error messages, system messages, and much more.