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Hey, I'm looking for some feedback on a game I'm working on. It's a Metroid-like and I'm trying to get a workable look and feel down. How does this look? Criticism / critique? I'm pretty sure the game is going to have to look blocky just because of the way I'm handling tiles, but I want to make it look the best I can given that. Is the appearance passable or is the blockiness a big turnoff? I'll try and get something interactive soon, but hopefully this is enough to get some feedback on already. Thanks!
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Sep 20, 2012 19:03
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I guess that's a bad screen- I have 45 and 22.5 degree tiles done in code, but no visuals for them yet. I'll try and get something workable and show how they look. Thanks for the feedback already, I'll look into adding foliage details / etc too. E:  Slants in place. I'll try adding some brush / foliage / etc now. E:  Ok, yeah, that makes a huge difference. Not sure what to put on the floor though, if anything. More feedback? DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 20:19 on Sep 20, 2012 |
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Sep 20, 2012 19:18
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Lord Humongus posted:I shrunk the darkness sqauares, how does this look? Looking better, but still rough- can they go smaller? If not, what if you made every square touching light be at half darkness instead of full? Kind of an anti-aliasing effect.
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Sep 26, 2012 21:20
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http://www.swfup.com/swf/zvb1.swf Working on an SMT style RPG battle system. Z is confirm and Shift is cancel. Nothing actually dies yet and Defend / Escape don't work, but hey! I think it's coming along pretty well. Next I'll add targeting / multitargeting / proper turn order.
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Sep 26, 2012 23:43
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ZombieApostate posted:Your link is complaining that hotlinking isn't allowed Well crap. Here's a different one: http://www.swfcabin.com/open/1348708374 That's ok, I added a lot since I posted- multiple targets, dying, and a stack based skill system (anyone who plays MtG will know what I mean). I thought an SMT style battle system with triggered abilities sounded cool, so that's what I'm making. You can't actually see that yet, but hey, progress. DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Sep 27, 2012 |
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Sep 27, 2012 02:59
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Stencyl runs atop Flixel, right? I don't know how much control you have, but try making a BitmapData, drawing the squares directly to it, and then setting it as the image for a FlxSprite you just put in front of everything. That would be a LOT faster than individual actors.
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Sep 27, 2012 05:23
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 Elemental weaknesses and related messages are in. Characters can now Resist, Null, Absorb, or be Weak to any attack. I left out reflect because I got into some annoying issues with attacks looping infinitely between two characters that reflected the same element. Next up, I need to award extra turns for hitting a weakness, and add a downed / dizzy status for characters. Defending also works now, leaving items as the last major menu thing to implement. Those will come last, though- I want to get the skill / turn system totally finished first.
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Sep 28, 2012 17:57
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Yeah, I played with it, but the way I have my classes laid out made it a huge headache to track if it had been reflected once already. It made the code way too messy. I might try again when I'm not so tired, but for now I'm happy with it.
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Sep 28, 2012 18:10
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   More screens of my battle system- everything in the menu works at this point. Skill descriptions come up, weaknesses / guard / etc works. The last few things I need are the extra turn system (shouldn't be too hard) and a little status window that shows the HP and discovered affinities of an enemy. Then I can start EXP, inventory + management, and items. Should be fun!
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Oct 1, 2012 20:30
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http://swfcabin.com/open/1349130930 Here's a playable version of the RPG screens I posted earlier. Again, Z is confirm and Shift is cancel. These guys are weak to fire- try it out!
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Oct 2, 2012 01:21
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Depends on how advanced you want to go. If you need access to surfaces and sprite manipulation, its gotta be pro. Honestly, unless you're really attached to GM, I'd recommend something like XNA or Flixel instead. Both are free and are going to be a lot less of a pain than GM once you get over the initial curve.
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Oct 3, 2012 01:01
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  All-out Attacks work and I've started the basics of the actual dungeon crawling. Z sorting works well enough, so now I need to make the player actually collide with the environment.
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Oct 4, 2012 02:04
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I'd be interested in some information on that as well- every Unity tutorial I've tried to use has boiled down to "Ok, to add a Character to the scene, drag and drop the TutorialCharacter object from the included folder and press play."
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Oct 9, 2012 16:51
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I'm not one to follow blogs, but I definitely watch videos / check out screens that people post in the thread here. It's kind of like a bunch of blogs all rolled into one. I don't see anything wrong with your content, it's interesting to me- I just won't remember to check another site. Maybe just post some of the content here when you update? "Check out this video of this new feature (link), I wrote a bit about how I accomplished this here (link)." That kind of thing would get my attention, I think.
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Oct 11, 2012 18:45
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Screenshot Saturday! Well, lots of screenshots, shown rapidly in succession. Here are some gifs showing the current state of my battle system in action: This is just some general battling, also shows the enemy taking turns:  This shows the player exploiting the enemy's weakness to fire and netting a team attack for their efforts:  I redid all of the prompts showing weakness / damage / etc, they look a lot nicer now. Everything slides around really smoothly and I love the feel. Anyone who is familiar with the Persona games should have a pretty good idea of how the battle system works- hitting an enemy with an attack they're weak to will net you an extra turn and knock the enemy down. If you down the entire enemy party, you can unleash a team attack that ignores resistances and deals pretty heavy damage. I'm aiming to make this game be a kind of Persona / Pokemon hybrid, where all of the collectible party members are robots. You fuse them by mashing their parts together and the resulting robot will have a moveset that takes elements from both source bots. You'll also be able to build robots from scratch using crafting elements and blueprints. Dungeon crawling will be done from an isometric view and will have randomly generated floors with predesigned encampments interspersed to give you a place to rest and recover. I've got Z-Sorting, collision, and movement working for the isometric view:  It also reads in tile data from an array and lays out the tiles / walls correctly. I'm pretty excited- I've never really done much with RPGs before and this is progressing really smoothly. The battle system is pretty close to done. I pretty much just need to add buffs / debuffs and EXP / item drops at the end of the battle. Item use will come after the inventory is functional, which will be sometime around when I get party management going too. Once the inventory is in, using them in battle will be really easy- they'll just activate a skill that uses the item's quantity as its casting cost. Now I'm going to go work on the actual transition from dungeon crawling -> battle -> back to crawling.
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Oct 13, 2012 18:12
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Gordon Cole posted:Your interface design is great. The animations add a lot to it -- I especially like the tilting effect when a character has a status ailment. Thanks! That's definitely planned- I don't really have an artist, so I'm doodling things as I go. That will come, but I haven't solidified any actual designs yet so I didn't want to get too ahead of myself with the art.
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Oct 13, 2012 20:20
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The White Dragon posted:
This is looking a LOT better. Could you make the text bigger and split it across multiple frames? It looks cluttered like it is, but the font definitely fits the aesthetic way better.
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Oct 13, 2012 23:53
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Made a lot of progress on my game posted above- if anyone wants to try it out, you can download the SWF here: http://www.mediafire.com/?ib5ke5ru1pby2jg Sorry for the crappy hosting, I couldn't find a single upload site that would let me upload and embed a SWF. Z is confirm and Shift is cancel. Item boxes don't do anything yet but touching an enemy should start a battle. Let me know if you find anything weird!
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Oct 14, 2012 00:47
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Just want to echo the above- I want to be interested in your game because I love the old SH / RE games, but every screen is way too dark to see anything in. For comparison: The game is dark, but you can see Harry very clearly, as well as his immediate surroundings. The game also uses more color than one would expect in its environments. There isn't really a lot of grey when the game is darker. It's mostly only grey when you're outside with the fog. Resident Evil is even more colorful, and usually brighter, but they also had the benefit of prerendered backgrounds:  So yeah, I think brightening it up a lot would help. It'll be easier to give direct feedback when the room is more visible.
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Oct 18, 2012 18:15
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Looks a LOT better. Like mentioned before though, a bright flashlight is nice- it adds more contrast to the scene, lets the player see more easily, and also makes the surrounding area appear darker than it actually is. At first I didn't even realize the player had one. Definitely make it bigger and brighter if you can. The environment looks great- are you doing a fixed camera, like RE, or something more dynamic?
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Oct 18, 2012 19:00
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That second shot is a good level for the brightness- I wouldn't go darker than that. That + bigger flashlight should work pretty well. Maybe upload a web player build to show it in motion?
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Oct 18, 2012 20:39
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Screeeeen shooooots! Lots of new progress to show. All of the enemy designs are really rough placeholders- I just doodled them in paint and resized to fit in the battle system. First off, I updated the window skins and changed the little arrow into a highlight bar:  I also added health and energy bars to the status windows so that it's easier to tell the status of your party at a glance. There's also a little box that will show status effects. The skill selection screen will now show a little icon next to each move, indicating what elemental affinity it aligns with.  When you select an enemy to target, the window will show what elements they're strong / weak / etc. against. Here we see that this Boxerbot resists all physical attacks but is weak to water. The red bar underneath shows the enemy's current health.  Right now it just shows a fully revealed synopsis of the affinities, but later it will show question marks under elements you've never hit the enemy with. Owning a robot of the same type or hitting it with each kind of elemental attack will reveal its strengths and weaknesses. This is all just the visual stuff I've added- lots has changed under the hood, too. Leveling, EXP, and stat gain are all implemented and working great, but none of that is visible to the player yet. The next thing I'll make will probably be the post-battle results screen, along with a general "status" screen to view a robot's stats / level / moveset. I'll have videos or a playable SWF of this up in a few days or so.
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Oct 20, 2012 20:33
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GM would be a great start for an action RPG if you don't really have any programming experience. If you do have some programming experience, XNA + C# or Flixel are probably your best bets. If you have any questions about any of these, feel free to ask.
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Oct 21, 2012 18:31
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 New playable version- click the picture to play! I added a CRT filter. I think I like the look of it but I'd definitely like some feedback on it. Is it annoying to look at or does it help with the look and feel? Robot sprites are still way temporary. Z is confirm and Shift is cancel. Thanks for taking the time to try this out- I'm excited to be making this much progress! DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 17:46 on Oct 22, 2012 |
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Oct 22, 2012 07:14
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Gordon Cole posted:I'm not sure if you can change the intensity of the effect, but maybe dial it down when you're out of combat? Yeah, I can definitely adjust this. I'll give it a shot and see. Also, it's good to know RoboSkel looks good- I can definitely do other robots at that level of quality, so maybe art won't be as big of a deal as I was expecting. Thanks! Mercury_Storm posted:It would be nice if there was some way to check the turn order, so you can plan ahead in battle. This is definitely planned. G-Prime posted:This seems pretty slick, but for stuff that's not fullscreen, don't hide the mouse from people. Since it's in the browser (I realize this is a demo, but this could apply to your release as well), people may want to switch tabs and such, and that's more than a little difficult if you can't see where you're pointing. I think at some point I'm going to allow the player to make menu choices via the mouse, so this will definitely come too. I didn't think about it being an issue now, though, so new demos will leave the mouse visible at the very least. Thanks for the feedback everyone, it helps a lot!
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Oct 22, 2012 15:31
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Ok, updated the overworld filter- now its intensity varies based on your proximity to enemies. Also fixed a bug where the level up message wasn't showing when it should. http://aarondgordon.com/amt/rpg/RPG.swf Now I can stop fiddling with fun things like filters and actually make a stat screen / turn order display... DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Oct 22, 2012 |
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Oct 22, 2012 17:37
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What are you developing it in?
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Nov 5, 2012 18:27
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Regalia posted:I think you're probably right. It doesn't seem to happen if I run the game without the debugger attached, but then, it is an intermittent "problem". Language and libraries. Really, though, don't worry about it right now- premature optimization is about the worst thing you can do, and you still are two orders of magnitude above a perfect framerate. Just keep going with development and if performance starts to be a real problem after you have everything implemented, then start looking for bottlenecks.
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Nov 6, 2012 17:35
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So a few days ago someone posted this in the GIF thread: It piqued my curiosity and I wanted to try implementing the same kind of Mode7 + Heightmap effect. Here are my results after a few hours of dicking around in Flash:  Click the image to go to the SWF. Space will toggle the depth effect, arrows move. It's not perfect, but close enough where I'm happy with it. Too bad it's so slow.
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Nov 6, 2012 21:00
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DStecks posted:Prematurely optimizing shouldn't be confused with designing with an eye to performance. I've heard horror storied over in the Cavern of COBOL of developers shunning any considerations of performance because the colleges drill into you "Never prematurely optimize!" and "One or two functions usually wind up being bottlenecks", then finding out that their projects run like poo poo and there are no bottlenecks. This is true, but when your target FPS is 60 and you're worried about it slowing down to 1500, I think you're in the green.
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Nov 6, 2012 23:34
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DeathBySpoon posted:So a few days ago someone posted this in the GIF thread: Just realized I could do a lot more with the heightmap than I had going there; click this image to check it out again for a much nicer looking one, including some pretty rad grass:  E: You might have to Shift + F5 on Chrome to get it to reload the cached version if you saw the old one DeathBySpoon fucked around with this message at 02:02 on Nov 7, 2012 |
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Nov 7, 2012 01:58
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I added a sort of pre-battle window that lets you view turn order, escape, or decide to engage the enemy. The CRT filter is much heavier while you're in this window, and fades when you decide to fight. You can access this window by pressing cancel (left shift) on the main action menu. Also redid the targetting square and updated a bunch of tiny things here and there to match with the look and feel a bit better. I also added the ability to miss attacks, as well as critical hits on physical attacks. Critical hits will down their target, much like hitting a weakness.  Lastly, I added a detailed status screen! It's not complete yet- in the final version you'll be able to select moves and see their full description and information. You can see this screen by selecting a unit in the Turn Order menu. Movesets also aren't implemented yet, so no actuall "next skill to learn" is displayed. The gap on the bottom will have a small text box that describes the highlighted item.  As usual, click any of the images to play it. Z is confirm and left shift is cancel.
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Nov 7, 2012 22:17
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Vino posted:Hello goons. Behold my weak attempt at a Minecraft clone! Wow, this quickly went from  to  . That's awesome!
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Dec 6, 2012 16:58
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Yeah, that looks amazing. I have no idea what direction you're taking it, but I would love playing a Twisted Metal style game where you built vehicles. Destroying other people's creations would just be too fun 
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Dec 7, 2012 17:38
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Man, I need to get back into the swing of things and make some progress on my game. I've decided to rip out all of my attempts at programmer art and use the barest representations for objects possible. I'm going to try making it fun to play like that first, and then later I can go back and prettify it all I want. Has anyone in here made a full Metroidvania? I know exactly what I want design-wise, but I'm curious how others have approached the development order. Right now I'm focusing on finishing player upgrades and all possible moves / things they can do in a test room, and then I can start designing the environment based around that.
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Apr 12, 2013 19:55
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So Ludum Dare is coming up this weekend- anyone going to be participating? Right now I'm trying to decide whether I want to use Flixel and make something easier for anyone to play or just stick with XNA where I can make something better and faster.
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Apr 22, 2013 18:18
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Player movement is finished in my Metroid-like! Here are some crappy gifs of it in action:  Sorry for the filesizes. Visuals are all placeholders, but it shows off most of what I have so far. I say Metroid-like and not Metroidvania because I think too many games just take the rough map system and then try wacky new things with it. Instead, I want to boil Super Metroid down to its purest form and refine it as much as I can, while staying faithful to what made it fun in the first place. I could rant on right now about what I think that IS, but I'll save that for another time. Instead, just look at the pretty movement! I'm getting close to the point where I can actually start designing real environments, and that has me pretty excited.
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Apr 23, 2013 04:03
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C# with XNA. I started it before Microsoft killed it dead, so I'll probably just port it to Monogame later if I really need to. Right now I'm content to chug along in XNA, though. It works nicely enough with Winforms that I have a pretty nice map editor completed for it too.
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Apr 23, 2013 04:16
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Unfortunately, I'm not very familiar with Clickteam's products, but if you want an easy way to put together 2D games I'd give Game Maker a shot. It's priced similarly and actually lets your reuse your code in a (mostly) sane manner. It's what I learned on. Having the ability to write code instead of drag and drop when I need to is a great learning tool, as you can gradually transition from just using the logic blocks to writing your game code entirely yourself. I took a video of my game after doing a little bit more work on it- destructible blocks work now! I also started drafting some music for it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzxqvQ2w6NA
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Apr 23, 2013 08:46
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TheOrange posted:That looks pretty great, out of curiosity what do you use to capture the movement physics from a game like Super Metroid? Just a lot of playing and tweaking numbers until you get something that matches it? Thanks! I've just played Super Metroid a LOT, so I feel like I've got a pretty good understanding of how Samus moves. Outside of that, any time I wasn't sure about how the player should move in a given situation I'd load it up and compare. I'm not aiming for it to be identical to SM's movement, but I do like the general approach they took. I'm glad it gets that across!
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Apr 23, 2013 20:55
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