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[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

part of that is partially out of my control (i can only work with the tiles that the tile artist has created, and he hasn't really created any more tiles for the game in the last half year or so, not sure when he'll add more) but another part of it is my own philosophy of 2d overhead level design, where i like to pick one "strong" tile and repeat it in geometrical patterns, and use other tiles as accents. it's just something i picked up from zelda1, 3, and 4. it's probably not the most visually effective but it's a system that reminds me of those games, so that's mainly why i do it

that said i do want to add *color* variation to a lot of the areas, even if i don't add tile variation. since tiles can be tinted any color, eventually i want to go through all the areas and slightly vary the colors on all the objects, to give different parts of a room different colors, as in this pic, where i tested some automatic coloring algorithms:



i think the variation in coloring like that can make an area seem less samey even though it's literally just the same tile colored differently

[baconman]

My netbook runs 1024x600 and 800x480 widescreen resolutions, so if you'd like those tested for placement (especially the critical GUI), I could do that for you.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

this last week i worked on the options menu; adding the option for particle density, among other options. the particle density option took a while because i had to literally edit like 300+ lines of code and work the particle density variable into the number of particles generated (for both per step and when there are bursts of them)

i also added joystick and keyboard controls to the title screen (previously you could only navigate the title screen menu with the mouse), with the exception of the options screen, which still requires a mouse

i also fixed joystick controls for the game itself, and added xbox controller support, with rumble. i added rumble to some (but not all) of the things that i want to have rumble; all the most common ones anyway. but joystick controls for the game are far from finished, there are still many things that require the keyboard or mouse, and eventually i want to make the game completely controllable with just a joystick/gamepad. i probably will continue working on joystick game controls this week

i also added new "controls" options: now you can tell the game to *not* make the player follow the mouse around. the default movement method is that the player follows the mouse and then stops when about 100 pixels away from the mouse, and the player's speed depends on the distance to the mouse; this is a non-intuitive method but once you get used to it i think it works very well, but i want to preserve other movement methods. so i added an option to disable mouse movement in that fashion (so that the player can use the mouse to aim and use wasd or the arrow keys to move). i also added an option for "sustained movement" using the keyboard, which works a bit like pac man where you don't stop moving unless you tell the game to stop, and an option for "relative movement" which means up moves towards the mouse rather than towards the top of the screen

so overall due to my work this week the player options for movement are now much more varied; previously it was either only mouse movement or only keyboard movement, now you can use the mouse to aim and the keyboard to move, and there are different forms of keyboard movement, and there's joystick movement

next week i plan to finish up joystick controls and the options menu, as well as return to more pressing matters (continuing the creature re-designs that i keep partially doing and putting on hold)

here are some new screenshots, this time with a focus on textboxes! (you'll note an icycalm reference, it's not a serious part of the game, just some comic relief):











one note on theo's screenshot: as mercedes explains in the next frame, the alien lilypads don't actually use DNA (but theo doesn't know that)

another note: the first screenshot shows the new textbox with, the latter ones the old textbox width (the old one was too wide)

also: i've updated the % done to 80%, because fewer than 400 tasks remain until release. at 200 tasks, i'll change the % to 90%.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

My netbook runs 1024x600 and 800x480 widescreen resolutions, so if you'd like those tested for placement (especially the critical GUI), I could do that for you.

sure, that'd be fine; i can relatively easily add support for resolutions  the game doesn't currently support, but they all have to be hard-coded, GM can't auto-detect what the player's monitor supports unfortunately

here's a pic of all the resolutions / window sizes (some of these aren't actual resolutions, just window sizes) the game currently supports:



i see that i'll need to add the two that you mention

[sergiocornaga]

I'd be happy to test resolutions at and below my monitor's resolution of 1920x1200, though I see you don't actually have that as an option yet.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

that's because the entire *room size* is smaller than that, so that if that option were allowed, it would show black spaces off-screen and would look very weird (i've tried it). imagine if you could play super mario bros and see the entire level at once, and if mario were just a spec on the screen, and if you could even see below the floor and above the sky, and behind the castle at the end. so i can't really support resolutions larger than the room size of 1600x1200

besides which, anything above, say, 1024x768 is really really slow because of all the objects onscreen at once. i wouldn't recommend anything above that unless your computer is even better than mine.

[PompiPompi]

Hmm, 4 years is a lot of time and I can't say I have heard much about this game. I saw some screenshots some time ago.
My question is, why it took you 4 years? I hope this is not too direct or rude for me to ask.
Is this game going to have a huge amount of content?

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

there's quite a lot of content yes -- ~1000 areas (each 1600x1200), ~50 types of creatures, ~10 ship functions to collect, ~12 "bosses", about two and a half hours of music in the soundtrack, about 200 pages of dialogue; the game should be around 200-300mb in size. completion time will vary widely since most of that content is optional and the game is non-linear, but 20-30 hours to "see everything" is probably a good estimate

but the main reason it's taking so long is *not* only the content, most of the content is done, and has been for two years. it's also the mechanics and level design and secrets and pacing and balancing and so on that is taking a while. and also that i'm a perfectionist. when the game's out it'll probably have taken between 4.5 and 5 years. but a lot of games take that long. cave story took 5 years, for example. so did ocarina of time. iji and glum buster took 4 years.

i'm surprised you haven't heard more about it though! i guess i need to work more on promoting it. but it did come in 5th or so (i haven't checked its current placement) in the 'most anticipated indie games' poll, so it's not entirely unknown

[Eraser]

You could use a DLL on Windows to grab the screen resolutions, but yeah.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

ah, didn't know that, maybe i'll look into resolution dll's later. i'm wary of becoming too dependent on dll's tho cause i want to port the game to mac too, and mac doesn't have dll's (it has some equivalent but there are very few GM mac extensions)

[PompiPompi]

there's quite a lot of content yes -- ~1000 areas (each 1600x1200), ~50 types of creatures, ~10 ship functions to collect, ~12 "bosses", about two and a half hours of music in the soundtrack, about 200 pages of dialogue; the game should be around 200-300mb in size. completion time will vary widely since most of that content is optional and the game is non-linear, but 20-30 hours to "see everything" is probably a good estimate

but the main reason it's taking so long is *not* only the content, most of the content is done, and has been for two years. it's also the mechanics and level design and secrets and pacing and balancing and so on that is taking a while. and also that i'm a perfectionist. when the game's out it'll probably have taken between 4.5 and 5 years. but a lot of games take that long. cave story took 5 years, for example. so did ocarina of time. iji and glum buster took 4 years.

i'm surprised you haven't heard more about it though! i guess i need to work more on promoting it. but it did come in 5th or so (i haven't checked its current placement) in the 'most anticipated indie games' poll, so it's not entirely unknown

Well, you need to make sure people outside of TIGSource know about your game. Don't forget people who visit TIGSource are not all the people who play indie games.

[JMickle]

paul eres is a successful independent developer, I think he knows how to market his game

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

people outside of tigsource are aware of it -- it's been mentioned on the indiegames.com blog, on playthisthing, etc. -- not to the degree that some indie games are of course

i also once set up a kickstarter asking for funding for the game, and it got $1500 in donations, most of which came from people not on tigsource (although increpare, from tigsource, did contribute i think 50 or 80 dollars)

there is also a teaser of it embedded with immortal defense, so that anyone who played my last game immortal defense probably knows that i'm working on this game next

but i do plan to do more promotion eventually, yes

[PompiPompi]

I guess I ran into this conclusion because I thought the poll you talked about was at TIGSource.
And yea, I actually know you are successful(unlike me, heh), but I thought maybe I could contribute something. Better safe than sorry.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

i'm not saying you're totally wrong, i do think i need to promote it more, it's just that you seemed to imply it was totally unknown, which isn't true either. i do have some ideas to promote it which i've been meaning to do:

- a trailer, which i'd then send out to various game news sites
- design videos (where i go through parts of the game and talk about their design)
- sending preview copies to various game journalists if any are interested
- a speedrun contest (where there would be a prize for the person who manages to finish the game on the hardest mode in the quickest time and records it for youtube)

if you've any other ideas i could add them to the list if they sound like they're worth doing

[JMickle]

speedrun contest is a really cool idea. have you been designing the game with this in mind (eliminating random probability etc?)

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

unfortunately there's some randomness in some creatures' behavior (particularly their movement patterns) and in weather conditions (there are 23 different types of weather -- i forgot to mention that in the content part) -- those are the only two random things i can think of. i could probably eliminate the weather randomness pretty easily, but the creature randomness would have to be done on a case by case basis since i don't recall which creatures move randomly and which have deterministic movement patterns

but i don't think that's necessarily a speedrun killer: spelunky is also random and yet there is an informal speedrun contest to beat the game in the quickest time (at one point this forum's own ortoslon was the world champ). and a lot of games which have been speedrunned (speedran?) have randomness too -- even jrpgs have been speedrun, with their random battles and random critical hits.

[JMickle]

oh yeah, i didn't mean to imply it was an eliminating factor, it is just an example of something some developers specifically go out of their way to eradicate to aid speedrunning. I was just wondering if you were taking it into account, even in a small way, when designing the mechanics of your game. Most of the time it is the case that it just works anyway, though, so it's not essential to design for.

[PompiPompi]

I think for promotion you need to do something that will be memorable.
If you take super meat boy for instance, you probably remember that video where they made this guy with big twisted teeth eat super meat boy.
This video doesn't show any gameplay, you don't even know what the game is about, but it's memorable.
So the next time someone talked about super meat boy, you were already aware of the game. Even if you didn't know what it is about.
I think on games looking for large scale success(not within my reach currently) they need to think about public awareness.
People need to instantly recognize your game whenever it is mentioned.
I think what I was trying to say before is that I wasn't quite aware of your game. I don't know how many places your game have been talked about, but the fact is I didn't even remember your game eventhough I saw it's screenshots before.
It's not that your game was unknown, I am just talking about my personal experience. Which is also why I was surprised you worked on it for 4 years, because I was sure I would have heard more about your game.

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

super meat boy was already being promoted by microsoft (since it was an xbla game); that video was like a cherry on top of a big marketing campaign, but it was memorable yes

i'm not sure i could afford to produce a live-action commercial in that style, though. for one thing i don't own a video camera. but i may do something along those lines, just not a live-action commercial. i've a few ideas for that type of thing but just 'make something that's memorable' isn't really a specific suggestion, it's kinda obvious

i'm not really looking for "large scale success" though, it'll be enough for me if this game sells a little better than my last game (which had about 2000-3000 sales). i don't expect it to sell as much as super meat boy, since it's much more niche. as long as it makes enough to live on while i make another game it's fine