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[Sheepolution]

Onto next year!

Congrats

Thanks guys!

Finally fixed the code of rooms loading/unloading.

First I checked for each tile if it was inside the room I'm unloading, but that didn't work since some tiles overlap with 2 rooms.



But now I simply link every tile with the room it is in and remove every tile of that room.

[Logan Hart]

Just found this project and went through the backlog...I think you really have something here. Simplistic and beautiful Kinda like a pixelated Oddworld with the different "rooms" and such. Don't worry about time--time is the first and most essential ingredient! Don't rush. Can't wait to see what comes next. 

[jctwood]

Just caught up on this, so lovely. Glad you are sticking with black and white for now. Really like the tiny pixels in that last gif!

[davisdude]

You know what they say: slow and steady wins the race! Keep up the good work 

[Sheepolution]

For some reason I was never able to play the game properly on my laptop with Windows. About every 0.5 seconds it would stutter. I was always afraid that I did something wrong or that I underestimated the power of LÖVE, and that I'd have to make some heavy changes to make it work properly on more devices.

But a few days ago I did some debugging to check what caused the stuttering. Turns out it was the library I used to hotswap my files. Guess it didn't like checking 100 files on any changes. But I'm very happy I got that fixed.

I started working on textbox effects.



It's been a while since I had so much fun adding a feature for this game.

The way this works is that every character with an effect is its own object. To make sure the text is in the correct position, it contains the string that the text has so far. So the character "e" for example is actually the string "This is simply an e". With LÖVES colored text feature I'm able to make the whole string besides the last "e" invisble.

I already used <tags> for commands, and now I can use them for effects as well.

<circle>This is <group><italic>simply</italic></group> an </circle><wave><bold>example</bold></wave><circle> text.</circle><NL><group><fade>Nothing</fade></group> to be <group><shake>afraid</shake></group> of!

Every character object has a timer property which the effects are based on. Grouped characters are sharing the same time, meaning they are moving the same, like simply and afraid in the image above.

I did some research and found a list of commands that Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door uses for their textboxes. And this isn't really about my game anymore but I read how they have all these tags for grammer. The <AN> tag for when it's not sure what the next word is, and it places "a" or "an" accordingly. I thought that was a fun little trivia fact.

[Sheepolution]

Today I spend some more time working on the textbox.

Here's a showcase of all the effects I got so far:



Not sure if I'm even going to use all of these. It's the result of me playing around with it.

Some more features are big text, small text, and being able to execute code. The last one is going to be super useful for cutscenes.

[Pixel Noise]

Awesome. Really like the look of things! It's shaping up nicely - it gives me a very cute and playful feeling 

[Logan Hart]

The text effects really add to the atmosphere of this cool little world you're making. Really nice work! 

[s_harriton]

I love the feel of this. Nice work!

[Sheepolution]

Not really much progress today. Did a few more things to the textbox, and it's not completely finished yet but I've put it on hold for now.

Instead I wanted to make the way I can make rooms more advanced. Currently I can only make rectangular rooms, but I thought it would be nice to have more advanced shapes. But I'm kind of stuck on how I'm going to tackle this.



The upper image is what I have currently. The bottom image is something that I would like to have. My idea was to use my old idea. Use corners to make up the room, except now make rectangles out of the corners and everything inside those rectangles is part of that room. Making the rectangles out of the corners is the tricky part.

I could also just place the rectangles myself in Tiled, though I feel like this would make level design annoying.



Or maybe I'm overthinking this and is there a way better solution to all this.

Bonus gif:

[Sheepolution]

Finally got non-rectangular rooms working. I end up using objects.





I give parts that need to be merged a tag, though I should definitely find a better system for this, like using Tiled's polyline.

When working on this I realized I should make rooms out of squares. Like in Metroid Fusion.



It gives a much cleaner look.

[Sheepolution]

I added some statistics for me to check out.



I know, that's a lot of drawcalls. But I will reduce it. Someday, somehow.

Other than that some invisible progress. The cleanup-list is almost complete and with that done I can start adding new stuff.

[Sheepolution]

I showed a Dutch IRC channel my windmill, and someone pointed out the windmill rotated in the wrong way. So I fixed that.

Before


After

[Sheepolution]

Pretty much finished cleaning up. It feels good to have a big project like and not have one big pile of garbage code.

Like I said a few posts ago, I wanted to make my rooms out of equal sized squares. Today I was toying around with that concept.

This is probably the size I'm going for


This is 1 tile smaller


Of course, the rooms don't need to be perfectly rectangular.


Metroid fusion's room width (and maybe height as well) is the size of the Game Boy's screen.


And that makes sense. The thing is, if I were to do that, I'd either have to zoom in really far, or I'd have very big rooms. It also makes sense to decrease the height so that it shapes the game's screen. So I might do that.

[Pixel Noise]

I like the first (slightly larger) of the two options. Just seems to feel better to me - and I definitely agree with not making every room a squared off box!

[Sheepolution]

Using a fixed rectangle size I'm remaking the dungeon. While making the dungeon I noticed the rectangle was too small, and actually increased it with 2 tiles.



It feels really empty, not sure yet how to fill it up. I should probably make some alien-bats. And I should start working on that room transition.

[VampireSquid]

I really like the look of your game.  It just has such a distinct feel to it.

My only suggestion is to continue with your semi-random development process.  I think that is what is providing the unique overall game experience. 

Very curious to see where this ends up.

[Sheepolution]

Made a new creature.


I toyed around with room-transitions as well, but nothing final yet. I need to have something that takes less than half a second, since some rooms are very small.

[CryingGhost]

This game looks... super cool !!

So far it seems like it has this deep space exploration vibe, thats also kind of fun and quirky too? I dig it anyway. Plus the simple two tone pixels work really well for it! 

The dungeon environments are starting to come along really nicely as well. I think if you added little non-violent creatures (like those cool flies! were they moving procedurally?) you could liven it up a little. or even just more details along the floors and walls like more vines or long grass, with maybe some soft animation.

But anyway this looks really cool I'm excited to see more!

[Sheepolution]

Made some changes to Dripol (Yup that's his name).


Added another monster


Still needs some changes. I thought it would be a cool miniboss maybe. Also still needs a name.