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[drutten]

I played the Skullz, really interested in what you're going to do for this one 

[Pizzamakesgames]

Let's look at that scene again after being through a buncha revisions:

I'd like to try explaining why I felt like work was still to be done on that seemingly finished scene on the left and why the right one gives me much less of a headache. I'd like to explain it both to myself as I continue to be uneasy about my constant sluggish pace as well as anybody interested.

Let's get a couple obvious points out of the way first. Looking at these two screenshots from a couple posts back, showing the city from afar, it seemed necesarry to have yellow lights prominent in the city:

Of course that didn't necessarily mean that there'd needed to be any yellow light in the very first screen of the city, but then there's the whole palette thing. The palette thing is me trying to seperate each chapter by them having different palettes. That's a whole topic all in itself, but what it means for Bedlam is that if I'm gonna have yellow lights throughout the city, I'll have to give Bedlam's palette some yellow tones, and with that, I kinda need to have some yellow in every scene if I don't wanna have a plain looking backdrop without any real highlights.

What's more is that I didn't want you to arrive at Bedlam, your grand destination for all of the game so far, and start it off with a boring linear path you just walk down, so there's a spooky door now.

There's even one last thing I still need to figure out, which is the palette transitions. If you go back through that gate in the top right, you'll be in the blue snowscape again, but looking through the gate, it's clearly purple outside, so I was thinking of something like this:

But I feel like it's busying the screen up a tad too much with colors, same goes for the gates from outside:



Or maybe it's great, I dunno. What do you think?

[Pizzamakesgames]

Figured out how to transition those palettes, but my gif recording software is crapping out on me today. I'll be sure to cover it in the next proper devlog. Have a celebratory town gate in a long artsy aspect ratio for the time being:

[Ohmnivore]

Looking awesome!

This gif in particular is extraordinary:

[tamat]

Amazing work, I love the aesthetics. Maybe the periodic 'breathing' effect of the color palette distracts me a little, have you thought about using a different function instead of a sinusoid? like a wiggle (smooth random) or try to hve different periodic variations for different areas.

keep the good work

[Pizzamakesgames]

Amazing work, I love the aesthetics. Maybe the periodic 'breathing' effect of the color palette distracts me a little, have you thought about using a different function instead of a sinusoid? like a wiggle (smooth random) or try to hve different periodic variations for different areas.

keep the good work

Thank you very much! Somewhat sadly though, my educational background is more design than code related. I've only didcovered that coding isn't incomprehensible magic a couple years ago, so all of these backgrounds are actually hard-exported frame animations instead of a still image being animated on runtime. In a way, that does save me from having yet another design detail to worry about as stuff like what palettes to have and when to transition between them is slowing development down enough as is. Though I do see the benefit of it, I'd be more than content with ironing out that little hickup these background animations have on looping back and focusing my efforts on the development of the story, gameplay, art and audio to hopefully finish work on this before the next century.

[Pizzamakesgames]

Devlog Entry #3.17.04.15

Hey there! Another season, another update, huh?

Truth be told. As I've been giving this project the liberty to grow beyond any scope that might've ever been staked out for it, I've been working more on distilling all of the notes and scribbles that kept stacking up rather than simply creating scene after scene, all in an effort not to end up with a chaotic abomination barely resembling anything by the end of it all.

While originally keeping one big file of notes for all of the story and eventually breaking it up into chapters, I've now broken everything up further into individual scenes, which has been helping a lot with wrapping my head around the whole thing. As a little landmark, I've compiled the bulk of the scenes that make up the former first chapter, and will eventually be the free demo of the game, into a little mock-up. Caution, spoilers ahead:

Each of these post-it's is associated with a note file that holds a description of the scene along with what's going to be happening in it, a list of what's still to be done about it and a section with stuff to be kept in mind about it.

Evidently, most of these scenes are still somewhere along the way of their creative process, ranging from a scribble, be it traditional or digital, to a mock-up and finally the finished, animated scene. I'll be seeing to getting all of these scenes into a finished state one by one, with some already completely laid out in text form, just waiting to be realized, and others being not much more than a sketch yet. Recently, I've been trying to get the most out of that first scene with Providence, hence the scribbles surrounding that one.

Anyway, while all the notes and scribbles are busy being distilled to the essence of themselves, which is a process that carries on slowly but surely for everything contained within this project all at once, all the time, I'll be back to posting gifs of new scenes as they're getting finished.  

Once that's done, I'm going to get a bigger pinboard and print out every scene as a tiny little post-it sized sheet to blow your mind with another map like this, but for the entirety of the game. So long, thanks for reading.

[Pizzamakesgames]

Devlog Entry #4.17.04.20

One of the bigger things on my to do list was to figure out palette swapping. The last two days I've sat down and figured it out.

I transition most scenes with a simple fade to black (or sometimes even transitioning the hue along with it), but if you wanna evoke nostalgia through mimicking the limitations of old video game systems, that's really not what you want to do, as it's creating dozens and dozens of shades in the process.

The Shovel Knight intro is a perfect example of what I'd like to achieve:

While I'm not flowing through all kinds of different shades quite like they do yet, I think I'm pretty close to what I've set out to do.

The two functions used are OpenFL's BitmapData.paletteMap (left) and Flixel's FlxSprite.replaceColor (right). Both can do pretty much the same, but the former seems more solid and less performance-heavy with a more elaborate setup and less versatility, with the latter having the performance suffer more of a hit while being easier to apply and more versatile in it's usability. I'll probably end up utilizing both, using paletteMap for a general fade function to replace the one I've been using throughout the whole game, and replaceColor as a special tool for some crazy stuff or more elaborate step-by-step fadeouts.

[Pizzamakesgames]

Hey! It ain't Saturday but I got a little screenshot for ya.

Fun fact: Since I couldn't find a hanging bridge like that anywhere in the real world, this marks the first background I had to draw the source image for instead of taking a photo and manipulating it to look all retro pixely like that. Ironically, that made it end up looking too realistic somehow. Lowering the overall brightness kinda did the trick, though.

Made a little mockup of it to see if the characters look particularly out of place or not.

[Pizzamakesgames]

Making some spoopy early title cards

[Pizzamakesgames]

Finally turned that mockup of a title screen into the real thing. Only thing left to change is that castle!



Can't say that the new one is necesarilly better than the old one, but it's definitely a step forward!

[Pizzamakesgames]

Here's that mockup with Trug from before in-game now, with and without an alternate bridge. Care to help me decide?

[DrHogan]

Pizza. Rock on man. 

[io3 creations]

The visual style is looking *creepy* good.

It's hard to say which bridge I like more.  My first guess is that I'd probably like to see more of the story first.  As of now, I like that the bridge in the left gif is visibly a bridge while in the right gif it looks like a *creepy* tentacle ~ but in a good way!

[Pizzamakesgames]

hey! I thought it might maybe be interesting to know why development can look virtually halted from the outside even with steady progress on the inside. Not exactly a phenomenon I'm not at all a little anxious about. Uh, I brought a picture!



this was half of today's progress and I'm pretty happy with it for a variety of reasons, though evidently it's hardly even possible to understand what's going on without an explanation, making the amount of progress visible close to none.

That lower animation was, so to say, baked. it's from a scene I haphazardly threw together a while ago in an effort to just get something done already, and it's one of these things that keeps getting in your way and sticking out as you're trying to make or at least trying to consider changes to whatever's already there. the thing with that lower animation is, that it's exactly what you're seeing, frame by frame, with each framing being as big as that red box, negative space and all. now for this purpose, I just used it as a reference for my "perfect" walk cycle, as my goal with this was to create that perfect walk cycle, but not as part of a canned animation, with a start and end point, but a continuous loop that I could use for whenever our skeleton friend walks around. of course, I already had such an animation, but it wasn't perfect. I used to just kick it on and tween the character's position to anywhere over a duration of time that felt good, resulting in the sprite moving a pixel when the animation didn't suggest he should do so, like the leg he was keeping his weight on moving to the right followed by him not moving when taking a step forward. that stuff' the total most minor of details, but it's also what makes your world and your characters believable in the long run, and I want this stuff to basically feel like it exists by the end.

anyway, now there's that top animation, that tells me where the character is in terms of his x position correctly at all times, which the lower animation does not, that is loopable indefinitely, that always moves in the right way at the right time, and that I can chain any animation before or after with ease. a small step for skeleton dude, but a huge leap for pizzakind.

[Pizzamakesgames]

Been thinking of a way to surround myself with Skullz 'n Skeletonz more while also having some stuff to post whenever I didn't have time to sit down and create some new content so I'm doing a podcast while commuting from time to time.


https://soundcloud.com/pizzamakespodcasts/pizza-podcast-01

[Pizzamakesgames]

Have a mockup of my man hugo for the time being.



If I had to write something resembling a devlog entry right now it'd either turn out a list of bullet points with what's to be done at the moment, or a long rambly paragraph about the general structure of the project. I wanna show you pictures while I talk, though. So, gimme a bit and I'll be back with a new fun entry. 

[Pizzamakesgames]

here's a blink animation and here's a blink animation



seemingly similar but oh hot damn didn't I ever fuck and unfuck the entire codebase because of and inbetween those two almost exact looking little gifs.

I've talked a bunch about it in the last podcast, matter of fact that podcast was recorded in the middle of screwing up the code like something awful, so if you wanna listen to a person being about to do something really wrong while feeling like the king of smartypants-ville be sure to give that a listen.

What happened, though? In short, I wanted our skeleton buddy standing where he was while coming back from looking at that sign post.
Stuff like that has the tendency to seem real menial in it's first occurence, which is usually where it's at it's smallest possible scape, cause only the person making the video game already has that giant marketplace inhabited by all sorts of individuals doing whatever in the back of his head, that are all gonna reset to their original positions once you look at whatever little object up close because it would all get destroyed if you did. "I know!" he thought, "I'm gonna reverse the entire way game states are handled so this won't ever happen! No, I'm not gonna use substates, a super-convenient way of having little states inside your big state that you can go in and out of without destroying the parent state!".

And so, I proceded to create a horrible abomination of a state structure that would, among a lot of other things, mean that none of my gameplay scenes could ever talk back to the little textbox at the bottom, handling virtually anything the player is able to interact with. "No Problem!" he tought, "I'm gonna create an array of Strings for any state to send little messages to the textbox!". This madness goes on until I finally realized that I should reverse every dumb thing I did for the past week and just use those handy little substate classes.
Well, now I am, and it's working super neatly. The big difference between these two gifs from a frontend thing then, is that once you've come out of looking at that sign post in the left gif, you're in a new copy of the scene in which nothing has happened yet, while on the right side, you're exactly where you were and how you where before looking at that sign post, as the laws of reality would dictate, and I'm real glad it's that way now, cause I wanna create a world that actually exists, not a little game pretending to be existing that's really just a series of pretty pictures making and unmaking themselves when you're not looking.

As much as a waste of time this little journey might have the appearance to have been, I've learned of a whole bunch of ways to make my code a little cleaner, a little more concise and even more flexible in terms of what I'm able to do, like having all the state switching, custom variables I use a lot and more already there and just utilizing those with a quick line of code referencing any of it.

So as with everything in life, every wrong turn makes you come out of it knowing more than you did coming in <3

[Pizzamakesgames]

Unifying all Skullz 'n Skeletonz devlogs that have been scattering across the world wide web.

New universal place for any and all updates will be: https://pizzamakesgames.itch.io/skullz-n-skeletonz

Seeya, TIG.

[quantumpotato]

Oh no! We lost a devlog to itch!

I think itch's Devlog feature makes sense for them however I love that you an browse all devlogs at once on tigsource ....

Btw OP -- your fist post shows "RIP" which makes it look like the game's dead.. recommend you change to an exclamation mark instead.