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[rayteoactive]

2 March 2010: Patch playtest help needed. Please visit http://forums.xna.com/forums/p/42579/292301.aspx#292301 and sorry for the necropost.

I figured that most people can't find the URL because its in the middle of nowhere. Well here it is http://tobesadventure.squarespace.com/

13th Oct - logo update can be found in page2

Tobe's Vertical Adventure

Hi guys, here's a game I've been working on (along with 2 programmer, a musician, and I do about the rest of the job). Artists from the Pixelation forum had probably seen it quite some time ago.

Screenshot


Video(I was using a crappy screen capturing software, so the framerate seems pretty bad)




The game is a platformer set for Xbox Live Indie Games, a simple platformer with a simple twist (I shall not reveal, but it should be obvious enough from the clip )

In the game, player will face some retro platform puzzles like you see in mario, sonic, megaman, etc... except that the player have a few different "moves", like rolling, wall run, wall jump, etc. There's also 2 items (rope and balloon), both to help him reach odd places in the game.

The game will be completed, hopfully by the end of the month (so now you know I'm here to pimp the game), but truth is, I'm also facing some problems I'm hoping someone here can help me out with.

1) Title Safe : I understand that the game GUI has to be restricted within 70% of the game to display on a smaller TV. But putting the current interface within the 70% area just make the game so damn ugly and blocks up every important element of the game. Is there a work around to this? Or should I just ignore whoever that's playing it on a small screen?

2) White Line : Oddly, there's some player white line thing surrounding the player's sprite. Everything else is fine though. My programmer thinks it got to do with the fact that the player sprite sheet might be too big, but I suspect that might not be the reason. I've attach a zoom in, so you guys can have a better look.


A bit more of the game can be found http://rayteoactive.wordpress.com/2009/08/07/vertical-adventure/

[Hima]

The game looks nice! I really dig the graphic style, especially the monster that you keep stomping them lol.  Too bad I don't own a 360. Is there a PC version?

Also sorry that I couldn't help you with those problems   Could the white line happen because of the anti-alias? Or is it because you use 3D function to draw 2D graphic? I must be guessing randomly here 

[rayteoactive]

Unfortunately, the game is set to sell, only on the Xbox live indie games, at least for now. I heard some things about selling XNA games on PC though I'm not too sure how that goes either

Anyway, the visual were done - pixel by pixel in Photoshop, so there shouldn't be an anti alias issue?

[JaJitsu]

Aw he looks like me :3

[Hideous]

I'm gonna guess it's texture filter's fault, actually. It's blending the non-transparent pixels with the transparent ones as well, and the transparent ones are probably white or black so it ends up fading to that. If you can, set the filtering to Nearest Neighbour.

[MaloEspada]

Haha, after such a long time, finally this game is almost complete. I've been watching the progress of this on Pixelation, and now it's got its own develog!

Also I love the horizontal level wrapper!! Just like Kid Icarus  

Best of luck to you guys!
(also, lol at the MSN sounds)

[rayteoactive]

JaJitsu: Ha~ I think we're both cave story influence. Here's a closer shot of Tobe


I can't believe I forgot to mention this earlier.... the art is heavily influenced by Nanakostudio paintings found in her deviantart account. I loves her art a lot, and I decided to pixel the character according to her style of flat head, and chubby limbs.

Hideous: Thanks! I will get the programmers to check if that works.
MaloEspada: Yea, it's been like 8 months now Still... there's lots of work to be done! And the MSN sound wasn't intentional, lol. But whatever works 

[Ishi]

Game looks fun

I'd probably speed up the balloon-drop intro a little judging from the video, or let the player press jump to pop the balloons early and get on with it.

Will keep an eye out for it.

[AuthenticKaizen]

looks really nice.
good work so far. 

[Inanimate]

I like the mechanic, it's like those real old platformers. Is there more than just that one kind of enemy?

Really wish I could play this. 

[rayteoactive]

Thanks! And yea, one of the idea was to create a retro platformer (hence bringing back the warp) with slightly difficult level design, but since the player has more moves then back then, clearing the difficult levels are actually achievable, and hopefully, player gets a sense of achievement doing so.

As for the monsters, there won't be tons of monster variety, but it won't be just one either. Unfortunately, we actually have a deadline. Otherwise, I'd love to spend more time with the monster design

[Derek]

2) White Line : Oddly, there's some player white line thing surrounding the player's sprite. Everything else is fine though. My programmer thinks it got to do with the fact that the player sprite sheet might be too big, but I suspect that might not be the reason. I've attach a zoom in, so you guys can have a better look.

Hey, man, I really like your artwork!

One thing you might try to fix this white line problem: in Photoshop, select the layer your sprites are on and go to Blending Options.  Stroke a tiny 1 pixel black line of 1% opacity around the border of the sprites.  That should do it... if it doesn't, try 2 or 3 pixels.

I've had this problem before, and that's always worked for me.

Okay, back to looking through your blog! 

[hyperduck]

This is looking well smooth, I love it. Subscribed!

[rayteoactive]

Wao~ Derek! Feels great to know Derek came in to my thread

I'm a fan of your games too, and Seplunky is about the only game I play in between my breaks, lol.

And thanks HyperDuck for making me feel good in youtube too, lol

[Hima]

Congratulations on being featured at IndieGames.com!

I hope you can release a PC version in the future, since I'm not getting a 360 anytime soon 

[sloopygoop]

Re: the White Line Problem: On those enlargements, the pixels within the character sprite seem to themselves be blending at the borders of the different color areas.  Photoshop is too smart for its own good when I tweak the size of a pixel art.  Similar things can happen when I select the space around a small sprite like that and hit delete--the borders get a little fainter simply from being next to the space that got deleted.

I made a video in AfterEffects once that I animated with sprites.  Importing the pictures from Photoshop into AfterEffects, I ran into that blurry problem.  I think what I did was to copy/paste/import the sprite frames into Illustrator, enlarge them in Illustrator and save them as new files, then import these new files back into Photoshop as "smart objects" (then maybe save those files, I think as .png's]so that I had vector-based pixel forms to use in AfterEffects.  It's been almost two years since I did it though, and I may not remember that correctly.

It wasn't very efficient, of course!  I think there'd have to be a better solution.  In the final video there were some slight scale-flickerings going on.

But the class was on AfterEffects and I don't know a thing about Flash. :D

[rayteoactive]

Thanks a lot guys! We finally manage to get rid of the white line issue. In the end what we did were to add a 1% opacity black dot in the corner of each frame, and it was gone. I have no idea how that manage to do the job, but according to my programmers, he got the answe for you guys, so- Thanks!

[rayteoactive]

Been working on the logo a bit.


The top version is more or less final, and the rest are minor tweaks / modify that didn't work out. Let me know what you think

[Oddball]

When I first saw it I immediately thought of Toy Story. You might want to try some other colour combos to try and break that association.

[Aquanoctis]

When I first saw it I immediately thought of Toy Story

Gotta say that's the first thing I thought of as well. Don't get me wrong I think they're amazing. Maybe you could use the purple and reddish brown from the small 16*16 blocks in the screenshot on the first page?