mproxima 3Speak Podcast: Recent Episodes
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Listen and watch the latest videos from mproxima. Hosted by 3Speak.tv. The free speech video platform on the HIVE blockchain.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/obnlwujq
Hello everybody,
Been made some real step foward in development of A Wild Sprite, the system for traversing areas work kind of great as you can see from the video, there are some touches to be added such as more precise spawn of the checkpoint when you are close to an exit but the transition keep track of all the action that the player have done in one room when reentering back as you can see from the position of the bouncing balls or how the movable platforms can be carried over from level to level.
I had to compromise a bit because what I actually wanted was that the player moved the spawn points and if you go and die in another room you still get to spawn where you placed the last checkpoint but I have still not found a way to make that work so for now this is going to be the way it is designed.
I have worked a lot on the first hub area wich is Glass Village on the Tubular Tubes, made some progress but I have still many placeholers, it's a small area but is complex as it will get you to many different places, for now you can go back to the Pipes intro level, Chords Bridge, Unmar Desert, Il Bosco and the Pine peaks. And I'll have probably 2 - 3 more exitsdepending on if Warrior Den is gonna be placed in this room or another.
Spoilery/
The Unmar desert is shaping up to be a nice place to drop some story bits and have an easy exploration the puzzle to get there is not an easy one because you must playaround with the invention of a mysterius figure that is missing from the Glass Village. It's invention the Proto Ball is a very buggy bouncer that will enable the player to break the rocks that block the passage if the player get around the wonky physics of the Proto Balls.
The puzzle though make for a huge reward because here in the first step of the desert you can obtain the Portable Platform Plant(PPP) that can be carried around in the other areas. (I'm not worrying too much about how this can make unpredictable to know where the player can be at any points if some of the power ups or items break the game making an easier or new road for the player I'm really happy as this is the main goal of the game of creating a truly open sandbox platforming adventure)
here in the desert you can find Reno and old guy standing next to some older shacks.
Spoilery/
I'll look to upload this new build in the near future but is not gonna be playable with the browser version, if I want to keep going with the game I need to drop that as it add way too much unstability and constraints to the code.
Another addition that I'm gonna patch in is the game O.R.C.O as a mini game playable in Glass Village, still though I only made the entrance to the game and I think it's gonna take a bit of time to convert Orco game file to play in this game, it's not a big file but the logic is different and I don't think is gonna be easy to change all the logic and change it back.
Hopefully it's gonna be a cakewalk(it won't xD)
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/dxnmsrog
Got my first S rank in Pizzascape. This is the level that made me go damn I love this game. From the reference to other games, the mood and the music inspired from Undertale(bit to close maybe ahah).
The power up that revolve around this level is one of my favorite the armor suite let get you in constant dashing state when you land on a slope.
I will come back to this level for the insidius P rank for wich you have to start a combo and never finish till the end of the level, I could have done it but I missed before starting Pizza Time by fumbling around with controls and taking the wrong route.
Enjoy and have a nice day!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/mraanzon
This week I don't have too much to show for on coding side of things as I'm stuck on the persistence of coins throughout the game world when the player move level to level. Made little to no progress on that front as it turns out I have to sit down and write an array that list all the collectibles and then erase one by one as the player grab them.
So I worked on level design and made 3 smaller levels that change the challenge and have new platform to challenge.
In Doc Lab the theme is this rotating capsule that can connect them self to other creating this floating bridges beetwen the islands. The stage is set atop a giant pixel tree and the player has to districate this sky labyrinth to get to the Doc House.
The level is still not complete in the uploaded versions.The video showcases some of the trick jump you can make with this powerful traversal. (Though I needed to make more then one take cause is not easy to control once you get full throttle xD)
Hopefully in the next weeks I can close the general direction of the game and publish this first World with a progression system.
Have a goodweek everybody!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/yjtotlgf
Been playing this game Pizza Tower wich is a very fast mix of Sonic and Wario games, the small team developed this on a 5 year timespan and it shows by how it is well tought out, polished and maddening insane the game is.
Here I am trying to get upper ranks in the first level, now after 4 tries I'm at A rank, looking to get that S or P rank.
Have a goodday folks!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/uolxhanf
So I've been working on this for a while and I'm now getting into laying down some levels/region of the the game. I'm mostly interested in building mechanics and contraption for the player to navigate around and play with.
I'm thinking about making it playable so I could take some hints for the level design and game design as the movement is on the tank control side wich I really like but maybe could take some adjustement.
But in due time I'll make a more in depth post about it.
For now I have the start level and the first area working with exits and entrance, I'm slowly building because I want to retain control on the player and leaving to the choiche of getting lost in a maze of road that may lead somewhere useful or not.
I have not set in stone many of the rules of the game but I narrowed down many ideas that I started with in this project.
Still with no music because I'm not sure if making it all ambient without too much external intervention to immerse in the world.
Have a nice start of the week everybody! :)
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/eeklvccy
Got to play some matches of dota recently and had a lot of fun with good old Earthshaker. While I'm very rusty and landed some akward Fissure I got some really good ones. The internet connection gods though weren't with me as I disconnected twice in this game.
Was a very fun streak of matches with good allies playing and being nice.
Have a goodday and enjoy!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/zcjozncw
Just a little tune I played with much awaited rain of last week.
Enjoy!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/uvvhjyak
A little simulation for a gameplay scenario involving npc villages having them to produce food to survive. Imagining the Boo plains with a somewhat realistic earth like enviroment with animals and plant interacting I wanted to look into this further in a new project in a more basic way(and trying some new platforming moveset).
I would like to make a post on the how the economy system work but it's gonna take much time as it is complex and at some point obtuse and to be optimized a lot.
Enjoy and have a goodnight!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/mvtekbuq
First off going into my 5th year on the Hive blockchain(I bundled up the time spent on what was of this blockchain before the fork from Steem)
I have to say thank you for all the support, Hive has been something that really motivated me in pursuing all this stuff and has made it's influence a monetary resource too.
I could not make a living out of it but it has been a very nice support. Mostly though a thanks to the people of the community as whole. I don't know what the future holds but I hope to see even more interaction beetwen users!
Thanks from Eggo too
Today I want to show you just the first prototype of the rpg system that I will add to A Wild Sprite. It struck me this days as I'm making the first main hub area of the game.
This will be a side thing as most of the features and addition I will make to the game, if one take on the fighting spirit and want to challenge himself to be the best warrior will be able to do it without
using the rpg system. I want to add this one for no particular reason it's just that while I like jrpgs I was never fond of their fighting system but since I played
Vagrant Story something clicked with it strange turn based combat but with a lot of nuances and positioning in addition to stats and damage.
My love then further increased when I played Fallout New Vegas as I felt that this stop the action and choose your skill can be really great if seamlessy integrated in anykind of game.
The addition to A Wild Sprite is totally optional and a secret to be found(it want be available from the get go) will make able to implement many kind of spells and skills
that can be now choosen with no frenzy due to the slow motion effect. It will make the game easier probably and allow the player to broke the game further, but thats my goal to make a game that is made to be broken down to the very core by the player.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/cpdlqbfh
After a long time I came back to A wild sprite project and moving foward with what is gonna take a long time to complete the full idea I have in mind.
But let's not get ahead of ourselves and start with a small change that I'm so happy it finally worked. For the Ropesnails I had used the code from Shaun Spalding tutorials that worked wonders for making this interactable rope point from where the player can swing and jump around.
I dared not modify the code too much because I always encountered some degree of game breaking errors and so they are still imperfect in some way but today I made the first step in the right direction.
In the project I want to add many ways to move around not strictly necessary but for the curious player to explore. I'm adding something strange for a platformer as in a fairy controlled by the mouse(and when I'll make it work by the right analog stick on the controller)
and as you can see in the video for now the first thing that will be used of is to interact with this Ropesnail that stand on this grey circles. The process was very long and frustrating but in the end I pulled the right string and it work perfectly except for one little thing wich is when the player get dragged onto a solid body will be then after pulled through instead of stopping.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/hugzbrmr
The Retro Game Jam is expiring in 2 days and for the first time I have completed the bone structure of the game and I'm pretty happy with it.
Will have this next few days to add an intro scene and some other small things.
The focus of this game and the objective was to create a very simple gameplay loop, the actions given to the player other then the movement are Shooting and Parrying.
The game revolve all around it with the Orks having different kind of projectile that are gonna be shooted at the ship.
I always loved Shoot Em Up but have always been scared of the Bullet Hell subgenre so I hope to have struck a midway ground where you don't have so many bullet to dodge but the added Ammo management to have a different flavour to this kind of game.
Hope you enjoy and if you have some feedback before the realese I am all ears!
ORCO
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/ixyfgrey
A closer look to the Sun Temple a free asset from Unity store made by Sandro T
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/environments/fantasy/fantasy-forest-env...
I wanted to use a cathedral like San pietro or Notre Dame but then I found hard to look for a good file that could have worked with Unity, most of the 3d project are exterior or interiors and so I could not find anything that could be easely ported, then I found this on the asset store and worked perfectly even more so because it's not a religius temple but it has a library/school vibethat I really lov.
I had to strip down the details to the minimum though because the frame rate dipped a lot when you first load the Temple. Now work better but I have still to fine tune it.
This is a shortcut but it's one of the hardest path to follow in the game.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/wblkuixq
Hello everyone,
While all the names and titles are still in the works I made some nice breakthrough to how to shape the game world.
First off I changed how the "arena" works, given that I was not satisfied with the infinite universe trick I changed it to take place around a star at the center that for now can be interacted by taking damage from it's hot temperatures. And the borders are defined by a strong magnetic pull that for now are represented by bigger version of static asteroids(but that is gonna change but haven't found a nice solution to that yet, visually mostly)
Now I decided to go with enemies tiers but not really wave but a more interactive way of doing things, I like that the enemies present here fight each other too and seek for resources as the player do.
The process of making this is not really complex as it is a bit long and I haven't dip in too much as I'm finding the different faction first.
The biggest hurdle that for now I see I can have is making them prioritizing certain action above others.
The tier 1 faction are gonna be
The Gurd Fleet
The Gurd fleet take action just as the game starts traveling their Mother ship in the sector through the portal. They want to preserve the events and will take out any scavengers and factions that want to intervine.
The MotherShip is equipped with a giant laser and send out small hunter ships that shoot tracing missle. They have a great fire power that can also destroy the habitat.
The Green Army
A fleet of soldiers that build their base on green asteroids and start porducing their army. The base is built by the commander ship and can create space tanks that can destroy asteroids so that the space truck can harvest the goods.
The Asteworms
They are born out the grassy asteroids and they chase everybody who come close. This for now is the most incomplete faction but it's gonna be very basic and simple.
After the first tier factions are done I'm gonna work on the weapon tree for the ship so that the player can upgrade his arsenal through the resources collected.
Have a goodday everybody!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/smbwgbci
Proceding slowly on the path of learning Unity I got the hang on how to play music and sounds, it's fairly straightfoward with simple audiosource but when you want to add more then one to an object it start to complicate itself. I'm at that point wich I will need an audiocontroller object because if I add the jump sound and the rolling one to the ball the engine get mixed up and only play the one wich come first in the hierarchy.
Though more complicated it dosn't seem an impossible task.
Now onto the video and the idea running around here is that I really love this simple way of moving around the enviroment, I'm trying around different set ups and thinking about an rpg lite system were the player can enache it's jump power and movement speed. Seeing the trailer for the new Sonic game reinforced the idea, I could not feel any impovement to the formula wich in my opinion has never truly translated well from the 2d Sonic era. The game going open world don't seem to add nothing only divide it's old levels spreading them out an open world.
Now the general idea is there but is gonna take quite a bit because while the coding for the most part maybe done there's a whole lot of sculpting, placing and building to be done and I'm struggling both with the in game editor and blender. Hopefully I will be able to get some effects to get the feel of speed but thats not the focus right now as enabling the player to use this power come first!
That's all for now have a goodday!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/sgxnwown
Just a little wip of the soundtrack for the game. I had really fun making this one but I don't know if I'm gonna use it in the game.
I made this under the constraint of using a single synth instrument for making all the sound, it came out really crunchy.
Enjoy :D
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/djppqnsq
Been back to play around the physic engine project(codename Thechariot) and focusing on the golfing aspect of it.
With smaller levels and more focused design I have it up and running on html5 without too much sweat and dips in framerate.
Now I'm working on some tools to give the player a bit of insight on the shot is gonna try such as when the wood is ready to hit the ball again wich is already working by simply connecting the delay beetwen shot with a change of sprite.
The guiding line is giving me a bit more headache because I can easely draw a line beetwen 2 object but I'm still not sure how to project it toward the hypothetical shot direction. I could try to use an orbiting invisible object around the ball but I prefer solving it by code right now.
A great satisfaction has come by following this tutorial by 1up indie that show how to make the grass or other object skew around simulating the wind.
I adapted the code to react as the player pass by and for another cool object that I want to show next time and making me loose time because I love to interact with.
Have a goodday everybody :D
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/iiwktffo
Hello everybody,
a little work in progress of enemy behavior among the asteroids, this one can dodge and keep chasing the player without too many issues it feel a bit artificial for it has only 2 ways of dodging the asteroids and I will look further on the subject to make some more fluent behavior.
It was long time that I wanted to dig deeper in enemies behavior and I kept away from it because I was thinking that would be too much of an undertaking but to my surprise there are some easy solutions. Here I didn't use any pathfinding route as the map is constantly changing due to the random asteroids movement so the enemy has to be prepared to many different situations.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/nleefojt
Hello everybody this is gonna be the last update of Tabbat for now, the HTML5 porting is hellish when the menu system working perfectly for Windows version was pointing to some obscure error that this version could not handle I called a quit.
I have the ideas and the worldmap on the paper and will love to pick it up sometime down the line but for now it would have been a huge time sink.
Here's the playthgrough of the final version.
Next I would love to learn more about other engines and exploring more the Html5 versions for Game Maker studio but on more small scale.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/qqxfrgsj
Work in progress for the soundtrack. The simple drive of intro is something that I really like plus some other parts. There are some segments that I do want to put in but kinda contrast too much with the general theme and step out a bit too much with the atmosphere sound type into solos and stick too much out from the rest.
Will have to play with better volumes and rythimn section.
Hope you enjoy :D
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/fetpolep
Getting a bit of time to play with gamedev finally. I wanted to start up something from scratch to rerereview the basic hopefully one day having a good grasp on them(I probably should check how to make those "Hello word" programs too)
It was rather simple making this work with the basics of Gms 2. This take on the Atari classic Breakout is about having two bats instead of one and the second is mouse controlled, I have a thing in this last year with asymetrical duality as this is the second or third game idea I want to make by having the player control two entities with different skills.
First off I worked on the movement, the red bat, the one controlled via mouse, was rather simple as I just need to track down the mouse pointer coordinates and make follow them. But that would make the red bat move way to fast and it would hard to make it collide properly with the enviroment so I opted instead for having it to follow the cursor at a certain fixed speed so it would not matter how fast one can move the mouse the red bat would take a little bit more of time to reach the point.
The blue bat follow the basics of a top down game so the movement is given to the arrow keys or WASD. Setting up Horizontal speed by having the left and right input in this equation HorSpeed = key_left - key_right and the same for up and down to get the direction the player is moving at a constant speed.
To get the diagonol speed the same as the vertical and horizontal I used this code in the creation event
dagspd = round(spd*((sqrt(2)) / 2))
checking in the step event to use this speed when both of the vertical speed and horizontal speed are used at the same time wich would take you to an 30% increase speed due to Pythagorean theorem application that I can't still fluently explain. The code make you use dagspd instead of walkspd.
The ball just bounce around using the colliding event with varius object in the room with the built in event in Game maker that I don't know how they work and so I got a little bit of clipping when the bats come in callision with the ball at high speed.
There are some other stuff and twist on the formula that I hope you'll enjoy!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/prldaprn
The Warrior road or how the first color that join the black, white and gray scale of Wild sprite world(still working on a name for the place).
Been awhile that I haven't put myself through some gamedev time. Many ideas float around but I haven't got the right mindset nor time to work on them.
This little detour won't put me on the track on working fully on Wild Sprite because for what I have in mind for the game is gonna take a long time if I'm doing everything by myself because is what you could describe as an open world platformer, if you try it you could see the world stretching all around the Chord Bridge level with many paths leading to other areas but now blocked(not that there's something right now on those ways).
I want to go very deep in peaceful and neutral interaction with this as I think those a really unexplored territory for gaming and probably much more vast and diverse then what the mainstream gaming focus on.
Don't get me wrong I love fighting in games but I want to go and look what wonders can be discovered under different circumstances.
Having said this the Warrior Crown will allow for an aggrissive playstyle I don't want to restrict player choiche and I want to face this problem that I keep coming to, some of the most snappy and satisfying gaming sessions come out from fighting a particularly good boss or enemy and while you may say that you can't compare a fighting scene with a puzzle solving one I want to take a closer look to the psycological results fromhaving both of this different gameplays interfere and be part of the same world.
That would make a peaceful choiche even more felt and viceversa.
That's all for now the next update is probably gonna be me fumbling wiht 3d modeling.
Stay tuned :D
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/rxeinpel
After many and many hours of no progress I finally made an important breakthrough! So very happy.
I got stuck the longest time after having a rotating camera and movement inputs for the player because I taken the two methods from different schools of coding stuff.
Well actually almost everyone write code differently and have tiny difference in results, so when I was trying to mesh toghether the styles and make the directional movement
to be read by the camera system so that no matter where you facing W or Up arrow means foward, S or Down arrow means backward and same goes for left and right.
I digged everywhere around the web and unity forums finding very useful informations but none that made this work.
I learned a lot because I'm still lost in all the new ways Unity differs from Game Maker studio and the naming conventions still don't stuck with me. This all process had an idea going of
making a comparison post on Hive about the practical differences beetwen the engines, for study purpose and practicing on learning to code.
In the end I needed a solution because I want to move on and play with 3d surfaces and level design and the simplest solution was in keeping the camera I had but loose the player movement script I had for the one in the standard Unity assests. That was a real treasure in the end because the Unity standard assets solved the faster diagonal movement too.
move = (vVector3.forward + hVector3.right).normalized;
this how Unity easily handle this problem with .normalized. I still don't fully get it but it works wonders.
So here we are bouncing around in this new dimension.
Until next time and have a great weekend everybody! :D
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/ubbumaad
So after struggle after struggle I added jump and a semifunctional camera system.
Making the player jump was actually a breeze one thing that I found with visual studio and unity is that scripts are really easy to understand and edit/tailor how you want them to function what I find hard is to make a new functioning one from scratch as I don't understand fully it's tag system wich I think is giving me some problems.
The camera is working well but I have still to adjust it to my need wich is making the control for the game adaptable to the camera position and not to the player. Now as I change camera position the foward remain the same so if I tilt the camera to the right foward become right and it get really strange to move the ball to where you want.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/ukafulbi
Hello everybody!
This week I tried something that I was looking to do since a long time but was always kind of afraid of trying, maybe for the complexity it bring to the table but anyway this is my first dive into a 3d world!
I put Game Maker Studio aside for this project because while it's possible to develop in 3d the tools aren't up to standard and it would take a whole lot of knowledge about coding that I don't have right now. So I set up Unity(wich took more time then the whole project itself due to some problems they have with the new Unity Hub >.<'').
Modifying a scene seems pretty intuitive and texturing and creating object of different shapes is a really easy task.
So with a ball and some floors done here we go into making a Monkey Ball clone.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/vgdcjihk
These days I booted up again Little Big Planet 3 and I found this unfinished level called Hurricane Peaks, it was about making it out this lake mountain peaks. I left it there for a change of habits and finding hard to play on console this days and it was not an easy task to make it work but it was a ton of fun and I really wanted to dive in some level design straight while dodging long coding sessions shame on me :!D . The idea was that the level should use heavily the physics engine of LBP3 so that the player could play around and at some point find the solution and the exit out the Hurricane Peaks.
I think the Lbp editor has a lot of potential and so does physics in general in gaming, it still not used as much because it's really hard to implement and mostly is for coreography because level design wise you have to make a deal with yourself that things are not gonna go the way you intended.
For this level I made a creatinator(it's a powerup that basicaly equip the player with and emitter that shoot what kind of projectile you want from rocks to baloons whatever you create can be stored here and then shooted)
that shoot floating bombs and on that I kind of built the level around it with cartoon distruction being the key to the level.
In this video below you can see my struggle of finishing the level for the first time, yay it's doable ahah.
Still need to make some little change because it can get confusing and frustating. Definitly I reccomend everyone that want to make a level with LBP editor to avoid multilayer level I always stuck with max 1 - 2 playable layers and this time that I have used 6 (I don't know why I wanted to try but I just got myself into hell)
I pay with lots of frustating and unintellegible situation. I think the multilayer level design has the most fault in having made LBP just a little niche game sadly.
The level is up and running and if anyone has the game and want to try it can find it by looking for Hurricane Peaks on LBP3 search.
Have fun and enjoy this new weekend!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/opgwtmtk
A new year has come over and with it a lot of new challenges. I toughts that from here on I could go into and finally some level design for the games after having set down a map of revisitable rooms and the main aspect of gameplay layed down but boy I was wrong. Having worked on mainly one room games before I did not have this problem and I could go on just by dragging and dropping resources on the map making some small changes and that's about it, I could focus all my attention to the design and mechanics at play in the rooms. And so now I have to crawl back to that point because revisitable room with changing and destructible enviromen tha have to be traced down and turned off by some constant variable because that's how Game Maker work, every time you enter a room it create it as is in it's creation instance resetting everything unless you set permanet as an option. But that most of the time make the game acting very weirdly and having too many permanet rooms is not reccomended. And so the huge work of tracking down the state of each single instance is a pretty big roadblock as I take almost double the time to make a room and I have to think more sharply and lay down a plan instead of improvising and trying strange things. So here we are 2022 and a whole new deal has to be faced. Does that happen to you too?Sometimes feels way too much like destiny that you won't find the golden gate on the way you want is maybe that the price of having and living in an apperently infinite and full of emergent gameplay universe?
Video is just a little recap of skills and stuff that made into the game, what I'm gonna do next is decostructing the gameplay and strapping the player of many of the skills to give the opportunity to unlock them in the firsts rooms. I want to create some early puzzles that both entertain and teach how to use this early skills!
Have a goodday! :D
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/iqhwluiy
I stuck upon something these days that I'm very grateful of having found now other then later, as I'm very keen to go back to some older project I made and complete them to what I may consider a full game, in my case Heart Commando wich would be the most complex and A Wild Sprite wich has been the most successful one with over 300 download and plays across the board.
What I found is a really simple problem that came out while making close room to be able to be entered back and forth, this is a really small problem if a game has not that much of a scale, Game maker studio permanent room is just a checker that once you have given that propriety to the room it become permanent and all the things that are found, killed or used remain in that state upon rentering the room. But this built in feature creates a lot of issues if used for many rooms and for a big game. Is usually better to give every instance(door, pickup object, enemy that you don't want to respawn) an id or use the one that Game Maker give to the instance once you drop it in the Room Editor.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/jvrfwrkx
Put some work with Game Maker and got playing with light systems, I used the one made by Jobo wich can be downloaded for free from the Game Maker marketplace.
Lighting system are very complex system and for what I understand there are two types RAYTRACING and SHADOWCASTING.
Raytracing cast the rays and when they collide with an object that has the proprieties of casting shadows then creates the shadow.
Shadowcasting work the other way around by checking all the shadow reagions and then after creating the illuminated parts.
There are pros and cons to each methods but by far the most used is Raycasting as is the one used by Jobo in this particular tutorial.
I'm still getting the hang of how it works for now I have only made it work with the game and I have some problems to solve, like how it dosen't work properly with irregular walls and to use to its full potential by creating lights with different radius/intensity and other proprieties like intermittency and global light.
Next up I created some crows for the sake of it. I like how the sprites and flying animations came out but I have still to work on their behavior wich is really basic and I don't like too much the way they fly in flappy bird style going up and down abruptly.
That's all for now have a good last week of the year!!!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/ktftiqao
Just a little theme played on this position that intrigues me these days, it has a feel for a space travel to me but not an omnius and dangerous travel. I was imagining falling asleep during a trip to a new constellatio.
That feeling when someone is driving at night and you keep em company but at some point everything is way too much warm and fuzzy and you let it go yourself into dreams.
Have a good weekend folks!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/guushjic
Finally I have a proper chat box system this is gonna be very useful in many other game and something I would reccomend someone new to game development to learn early even if it isn't needed at first tought.
Still need to work on the sprite box image for the characthers, I'm not sure if I want a portrait of the talking npc or just his words. I feel like that while is really a nice touch it creates a forth wall crack that I don't like so much.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/oiowaijh
Been makng art assets and thinking about level design and some other enemies to add in this first part.
Progress is slow but now after I have added in room switching that works properly and 100% of the times I have
to add only the chat boxes as hard programming wall to climb for this game, the rest is gonna be tweaking and working on the level design(wich is not easy but I love this part!)
The switching room object is easy enough and relay on this Game Maker Studio feature that let you change the Creation Code of a specific instance that fall under a group with same propreties.
Basically I just change the Target Room name and then the X and Y coordinates when the player collide with this specific obj_transition.
Now onto the chatboxes wich I'm still undecided if using an old method I know but is fast to make but take a lot of time to make each of the dialogue or learn a more complex system that once made though make changing and adding dialogue a piace of cake.
I want to make this intro level and then get back to some older game and see if the things I learned can apply on them.
Have a goodday everybody!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/njieulgg
Haven't got many hours to work with this but had made to kind of enemies. A sprouting tree entity that shoot tree projectiles when the player come close enough and a living tentacle that wiphs around when it feels an unware prey.
Very proud of the first one as it works really well and the popping up and fallback down animation works as intended almost 90% of the time. For some reason I still haven't solved sometimes it dosen't do the full animation but I'm happy about it as it looks different from time to time and it's such an improvement since the struggle I had when it did the animation half of the time.
The second one is still rough but the base code and object propeties are all working and ready to be duplicated to another kind of trap/stationary enemy. I'm not sold on the look but I just draw a sprite very quickly and then animated it.
In the video you can see the process of changing the hitbox to something readable and fair. In this next video you can see how frustrating can be when the hitbox is not working properly and can be misread leaving with frustration from the player.
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/lgwweauv
Nights Into Dreams
It was 1996 and games were weird, they still are but now you can find em if you look deeper but at that time I find that the big developer(Sega was a console manufacture at the time) took bigger risk and tried new and unknown territory of game design.
Nights is definitly one that catched my eye the most at the time but by being a kid and could choose so much in terms of consoles I had a Playstation and so the N64 and the Saturn were impossible to try out given that most of my friends at the time had a Psone too.
Well now after more then 20 years later I finally get to try it out due to the release of pc(so many games I haven't played at the time can be traced back easier now thankfully!). While graphically and stylistically hasn't aged so well I can find even today it's magic. Sure it's not gonna be an influential title like Mario 64 or Banjo and Kazoie but the take that Nights into Dreams have on what could be defiened vaguely has a platformer really shine.
To make a comparison to a game that came later and resemble Nights is Donkey Kong Jungle Beat wich is one of the few recent games that goes hardcore on points collection, combos and multipliers.
Has you can see in the video I'm able to get really so far as a C or B rating in the courses that I haven't tried, they are so replayable and offer so many secrets, paths and interactions that finding the best route is a thing that come after some experimentation and exploration.
What Nights can be described is a mash up beetwen a racing game and a platformer and to honor the developer is that they have done something quiet deep with such simple mechanics.
When you control Nights you have to move on the track collecting enough Links to free the dream part and go back to the finishing lane after completed the 4 courses of a stage you get to the boss wich are a mix of puzzle and skills test.
I still haven't figured out how all the combinations works or what the hell you are supposed to do in the stages overworlds when you use the kids but this game intrigue me more more and I love to come back for some little burst of plays as the stages usually last around 10 minutes each.
Have good weekstart and goodNight!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/utnaaqnj
POST MORTEM
Back to life. After the jam has ended and having talked with other Jam partecipants I kept going as I wasn't satisfied with the final game mode being an arena fighter with no story flashed out.
Starting from the asset from the jam I started laying down what events brought the Bloodseeker sword to life and how the player is brought on the stage as swordman shade, that has been the biggest complaint from reviewers as the game didn't pan out it's intentions properly and I would love so to work on this.
Directions
In the video you can see the starting location and me trying out the potential of the slope collision engine I had in place but not used in the jam due to the often glitchy nature of the collisions, now I with new settings for the collision check and shape it works much better other then getting a bit stuck on steep surfaces(but that may very well be a kinda realistic solution as it dosen't get the game to do strange things like teleporting the player to the next wall in front of the slope anymore, just some quicksand effect easy to get out by changing direction or jumping). The next mayor problem with this is that I have to make the creatures adopt the same collisions as the player as they were all made with flat surfaces in mind.
Updates
For now I added a second attack to the main combo and I really like how it improved the feel of the game as well as the addiction of the sound of footsteps while walking. I want to focus on this atmospheric effects and feel to make the game more palpable other then focusing on structures and mechanics.
The game is still up on itch.io and soon on Gamejolt too to be played in the Jam form with some small patch and is gonna be for a while because it's gonna be a not so small project and the time to work on it is minimal on this crazy november days!
Hope y'all fine and well and hear you soon Devvers!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/pbetdiuh
As the monday wind down and the new week as already started chaothic I found my peace by playing out over the main theme of the song Andrea by De Andrè.
It's a song with beautiful and daunting lyrics in wich they tell the story of how Andrea lost it's lover in the war and how all the many thoughts can go into a mind that have suffered such an unjust loss.
But I leave aside the words and scroll down it's uplifting chords diverging in the many roads they propose easy to walk as easy is to get back to the main road.
Hope you enjoy and have a good night!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/shhkvjpm
Video showcasing some fighting against the first "working" enemies for the gamejam Vampire themed.
Enjoy!
https://3speak.tv/watch?v=mproxima/tgbckqmx
A little update on the Vampire themed gamejam. While I'm proceeding very slowly due to daily job taking up many extra hours each week and leaving me very tired after what I'm aiming now is having something with a working combat system wich would be a nice goal. I don't know if I can put the spin I wanted in the game wich is to have to gain the control of the Bloodseeker sword and scoring points while is in your hand. The idea was that if you lose it other npc can pick it up and use it but I'm very inexperienced with enemy behavior and this would need to have quite some insight on the matter in wich I'm still getting the hang of basic movement and state switching.
I'll settle as the player always posses the sword and have to suck blood from dead demons by pressing down and letting the sword inhale the blood leaving you vulnerable for the time taken for this action.
The level design is gonna be a big flat area where enemy spawn based on the time survived and score reached. If I can reach this 2 points by the 30 of october I would be very pleased!
Some snippet of code in wich I work around having switch statements with Ifs and Else, it's not very efficent but I won't be having many enemies on screen and code rolling underneath so it would not pose a big problem(or I hope so)
Have a goodweek!!! :D