Synnah
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Posts posted by Synnah
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Hello!
So I was initially planning to sit this one out to work on some other projects, but given that it's going to be the final Wizard Jam, that's not really an option! I was working (not particularly hard) on a jam game in Love2D over Christmas, but that never really went anywhere; I did at least make a nice faux-3D tube out of circles, lines and polygons, that looks something a bit like this:
It was going to be a puzzle/platformer where you moved around the tube, and maybe I'll finish it off at some point.
Anyway, that's irrelevant! I didn't have anything that I really wanted to work on for this Wizard Jam; I toyed with the idea of making The Octopus in My Mind, which I've had a vague design for (by which I mean I wanted to apply ragdoll physics to an octopus) for a while, but after scouring the episode titles, I landed on Space Boss: The Lord of Space. My plan is to make a procedurally-generated boss-rush shooter in the style of Warning Forever. I'm forgoing PICO-8 and Love2D in favour of picking up UE4 again, though, so I want to make it full 3D (although think of it like a spherical plane surrounding the boss, and you can move forward or back, which expands or contracts the sphere, if that makes sense. Mostly I just want to mess around with proc-gen stuff, and see if I can make a nice system for creating articulated robot ships from lots of component parts. I'm not really expecting to finish anything (as evidenced by my tube, I've not been particularly motivated recently), but I might at least make something cool.
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Ahhh! Excellent! I'm honestly surprised it's taken this long for someone to make a Dot Gobbler/Katamari mashup. But yes, I don't mind you stealing 'Do You Believe' at all! I mean, I just stole it from Cher.
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Okay, I don't know who's still paying attention to this, but I finished the game! Almost 6 months after starting it. Have a look at this:
So, this obviously got away from me a bit. If I'm honest, I'm not really sure why it took so long; I think it's mostly because some other stuff came up, and after a certain point I figured it had already taken so long that there was no point in just rushing it out without getting all of the features in and fixing the bugs that had plagued me for most of the game's development! I didn't quite get all of the features in, because I wanted Dot Gobbler to have a jumping dash attack (and there's an animation frame in there for it, which isn't being used, and seems pretty wasteful given how precious spritesheet space is in PICO-8 [you get 128x128 pixels for all sprites and background tiles, and half of that is shared with the map]), but in the end I just ran out of space. That happened as I was implementing the enemy fireballs, so I had to start refactoring the code in order to allow them to collide with the scenery and the player. It's tough to fit a game into 15K!
So yeah, give it a try and let me know what you think!
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Hello, yes, I'm still working on this! I was away for an extended weekend, which was particularly bad timing, but I've been frantically cramming features in since I got back. Mostly I've added support for other objects (socks, enemies, sock-changing stations). Here are some enemies, which don't currently do anything except play the walking animation:
I haven't touched up their sprites yet, so they look a bit pants, but I wanted to see what the animation looked like. I've also fixed the issue where Dot Gobbler is being drawn underneath the ghosts, so that's good.
Today I mostly finished implementing the sock-changing stations, so you can now walk up to them and press the X button to bring up the following screen:
It shows which socks you currently have equipped, but I still need to allow you to change between feet and select different socks, and then have the socks impact on your movement. I don't think any of that will take too long. My concern is that there are still movement and collision bugs when you go over the standard movement speed, and I feel like it'll take me a while to fix them. I think all I can really do is implement the systems, and then hope I'll have time to fix the bugs before I release the Jam version on Saturday (I'm definitely going to have to work on it after the initial submission, because I do want to polish it, and upload it to the PICO-8 site).
On 26/07/2019 at 12:26 PM, z_bill said:I like the idea that if Namco had made Pac-Man a platformer, they might've actually made Sonic the HedgeHog like 10 years earlier.
Namco did actually make a Pac-Man platformer, 7 years before Sonic the Hedgehog, and it was... not really anything like it:
I did initially consider making a Dot Gobbler platformer a knock-off of Pac-Land, but then I remembered that it wasn't very good, so I decided to make it a knock-off of Sonic the Hedgehog instead (I still need to implement rolling).
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On 24/07/2019 at 7:36 AM, Zirrrus said:With the outline and the art this is looking very good!
I found the green holey blocks pretty off-putting(it sort of triggered my trypophobia), the new sprites are very nice, super crisp.
Ah man, sorry about the trypophobia, that didn't occur to me at all! Let me know if there's still anything that's a bit weird, and I can change it.
9 hours ago, phill said:Woah, I don't think I had seen the trees and outline update, this is looking so good! How are you finding PICO-8 to use? I tried it a while ago (like a couple years) but bounced off :/
I like it a lot! There's the initial hump of 'how do I apply the way I make games in UE4 to this', but I spent some time looking at other people's code (One of the example games, Jelpi, was pretty useful for general platformer and collision stuff, and the fact that you can just look at the code of any game that was uploaded to the PICO-8 site means it's really easy to get ideas) and kind of built up a framework for doing basic stuff that it was quite easy to do more complicated stuff on top of (though maybe I wouldn't call the slope handling 'quite easy'). In general, I'm having fun thinking about the limitations, and being creative with ways to work around them. I'm super glad CPU cycles aren't one of the limitations, though, because I am NOT being efficient with my code!
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Okay, big update! I didn't make amazing progress over the weekend (there are still so many systems that I need to implement), but I did a lot of spriting, and I'm a lot closer a finished look. Here, check it:
It occurs to me that there's a lot of brown in the tileset, but I think the background, and Dot Gobbler himself, do a decent job of balancing things out. I'm really happy with how the sprites turned out, though. While the scaled-down versions were pretty messy and indistinct, it was easy enough to pick out the features, and make them consistent across all frames.
Outside of visual stuff, I implemented the start of a system for changing socks (Gobbler's sprite actually has green socks, but they get replaced with yellow by default); I do need an actual user interface for that, along with socks to actually collect, so maybe I'll work on that next. I also implemented the start of a system for rolling, which I'd also like to finish pretty soon. Both of these systems are relying on me to fix a collision issue I discovered when you got faster than the default speed, where Dot Gobbler will get stuck in walls, or walk inside slopes instead of on top of them. There's also a bug where he sometimes does a little hop on landing, which can really mess up your platforming. Not really sure why that's happening, but it's going to be fun* debugging it.
*not fun
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Thanks! Yeah, I'm going to go with a black outline, because he does get lost in it, and because Pico-8 has a fixed 16-colour palette I can't use a similar-but-different shade of yellow to make him stand out. It's easier to do the outline in code than to add it directly to the sprite, however, because the latter would essentially limit me to 14x14 pixels for the sprite, and I need all the pixels I can get!
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Given how much I still have to do, I feel like I haven't made a huge deal of progress this week. I do have basically all of Dot Gobbler's animation frames rendered now (though not all of the actions that use them are in), and I spent today getting my parallax background in:
I still need to add some hills in the background, and I kind of want to have the occasional boat on the water. I haven't quite decided on what I want the environment to be, though. My initial plan was for a forest in front of a lake, with hills in the background, but when I chose non-slip socks as the theme, it made sense to reduce Dot Gobbler's default level of friction, in order to make the grip socks more meaningful as an upgrade, and as such a snowy landscape makes more sense. I'll think about it some more.
Next up, I might tackle more of Gobbler's movement options. I also need to put enemies in at some point...
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It's been a fairly productive second day of the jam! I used the 3D Dot Gobbler as a basis for my sprites, and created a 6-frame run cycle to scale down and import into PICO-8:
I scaled the arms and legs down slightly, to give the face more prominence. I'm just noticing that the upper legs are still way too long, though, so the lower legs are all squashed up. I'll fix that tomorrow. Anyway, I wanted to see what it looked like in-game, so I made a super-terrible placeholder tileset and slapped some stuff in place:
It's not particularly impressive, but given that I didn't edit the sprites at all it doesn't look too bad. I downloaded Pyxel Edit, on atte's recommendation, which I'm hoping will make animation and tile editing a little easier.
Next up, make sprites for the following:
- Standing
- Sliding
- Crouching
- Rolling
- Jumping
- Other vague stuff
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This sounds rad, and the road generation looks cool so far. Good luck with implementing a weird mathematical procedure! I thought about doing that for the city generation in my procedural racing thing, but since I'd already written the code to generate the roads, it would have been more difficult to fit something around that than to just write my own thing that wasn't quite as good but did the job. Plus it was daunting!
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Welcome to Wizard Jam, and to the forums! I'm glad that someone's just straight-up making a curling game.
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Thanks! I don't know if Fire & Ice will be something I go back to after Wizard Jam, but it was a good way to learn how to do some 16-bit platformer stuff that you don't see in a lot of PICO-8 games. In particular, the parallax background is an attempt to recreate the parallaxing of Green Hill Zone/Emerald Hill Zone from the first two Sonic games, which should look pretty good once I've got actual tiles and horizontal movement in there.
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Okay, I've finished my slope-handling code! There were a couple of individual bugs that had me stumped, and it turned out in both cases I was just doing something dumb (always pay attention to the order of mathematical operators, kids!).
The code keeps track of the incline of the slope you're on, and uses that to affect your deceleration, making you slide more going downhill. This might need a bit more tweaking, but it feels okay at the moment.
Anyway, with that done, I'll be moving onto my actual Wizard Jam game! I was hoping to implement variable jumps based on how long you hold the button (Current the jump height is fixed), but I can do that as part of the WJ game, and then back-port it to the Fire & Ice demake at the end. The first order of events will be creating a bunch of sprites from the Dot Gobbler 3D model, to get an idea of the number of animation frames I'll need. I'm hoping to keep it to around 16 frames, which is going to be tough; PICO-8 sprites are usually 8x8 pixels, but I'm going with a whopping 16x16, which means I have a quarter of the number of frames available to me, and I still have to worry about map tiles, background tiles (I'm planning some swanky parallax scrolling), and enemies.
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EDIT:
The game is finally finished!
Original Post:
QuoteHello!
This one's going to be a bit of a departure for me, as it'll be the first time that I'm not using Unreal Engine 4 for Wizard Jam. A month or so ago, in order to distract myself from learning C++ for UE4, I bought PICO-8 and started learning that instead. My immediate thought was to make a 90s-era platformer starring Dot Gobbler, but given that Wizard Jam was coming up, I thought I'd hold off for a while, and instead started a demake of the Amiga/ST game Fire & Ice in order to learn PICO-8 and Lua. This is basically where I'm at with it:
I've hit a bit of an impasse recently, trying to get slopes working. I had one approach that wasn't quite working, so I tried a different approach, which didn't work at all (and I still have no idea why; as far as I can tell the maths make sense and it should work, but it just doesn't). In doing that though, I managed to iron out most of the bugs in my original approach. There are still a couple left, but I think I can squish those tomorrow.
So, what about Wizard Jam, then? I figured I'd take the lazy approach, and make re-purpose my existing platformer code, and basically make the Dot Gobbler game I initially wanted to make, but with one of the endorsements as a slight modifier. I landed on 'Polar Feet Adults' Non-slip Fleece Socks', and so will be making a game where Dot Gobbler can collect power-ups to change his socks, which change his movement and abilities. It's not particularly clever, but I think I can make it work within PICO-8's constraints (Remember, I'm limited to 128x128, a fixed palette of 16 colours, and a single 128x128 spritesheet, half of which is shared with the map for some reason!).
I'm not really happy with the title, either. By the end of the jam, I may settle on one of the following:
Dot Gobbler's Sock Quest
Dot Gobbler's Sock Opera
Dot Gobbler's Sock Justice (After this Hbomberguy gag)
Title suggestions welcome!
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I've been chipping away at v1.1 over the past week; it's been pretty slow going, but I've uploaded a new build now. There were two main things I wanted to get in, the first being fixes for the various restart bugs; Nick encountered one of these when he played the game on the stream, but there were at least two more that were revealed as I tried to fix that one. One of them is definitely* fixed, but the other two still happen, just much less frequently than before.
The second thing I wanted to get in was...
... this guy.
Part of me was tempted to also add "Veggie" Panino and a Business Guy (I guess ridiculous physics characters are my Wizard Jam jam?), and now that I've laid the groundwork with Dot Gobbler it wouldn't be too hard, but I kind of just wanted to get this out. I'm not sure that I'll go back to developing it now either; I mean, it's funny, but it's not a very good game, and it would take quite a lot of effort to make it good (I'd have to model a horsebag for one thing...).
So yeah, check it out here: https://giraffecat.itch.io/tactical-gamer-chair
* don't hold me to this
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Oh hey, I just finished this! I mean, I say 'finished', it's basically playable, but it's a bit messy. Nick just played it on the stream though, and it went down well, so I'm calling that a win.
(Don't tell anyone the opponents have no AI, they just go in a straight line)
Download it here: https://giraffecat.itch.io/tactical-gamer-chair
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I'm still working on this, but it's kind of slow going. It seems unlikely that I'm going to have anything playable ready for the showcase weekend. Good news is that collisions and ramps are now working. You can also just about see a can of Mt. Dew in that GIF; I need to make that give you a speed boost, and then add Doritos as collectables. Oh, and maybe have a jostle meter so that the gamer falls off the chair if you collide too much. We'll see how much I can get done!
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So I'm making progress with this, but not a lot of progress. Work's been busy and I'm not feeling particularly energetic. However, here's where I'm at at the moment:
I put some placeholder buildings on the sides of the road to make it clear that you're sliding down a hill. I also modelled and rigged the gamer; I didn't feel like spending ages painting vertex weights, so I just made it an abstract dummy. Setting up the physics asset in UE4, while it's now possible, is still flaky, so it took longer than I'd have liked. Also, sitting a character on top of the chair meant that it would no longer slide downhill, so I abandoned the entirely physics-driven movement. What I've got at the moment is super simple; it just moves the chair forward along whatever surface is underneath it, so it can (sort of) deal with the ramps, until it goes over the end of them and the chair just snaps down to the road, causing the physics to freak out. I need to write some basic collision handling (You can just pass through the buildings at the moment), and then deal with ramps properly. I'm thinking I'll do something like set a flag whenever you're on a ramp, and whenever you're no longer on a ramp give you an arc based on how fast you were moving. Oh, that's another thing, there's no acceleration at the moment. Need to add that.
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The good news is that Epic seem to have finally fixed whatever issue it was that was stopping skeletal meshes that I exported from Blender from working with the physics system, so now I can finally have a fully ragdolling Dot Gobbler. I may include him as a secret character, if I have time (along with a secret rideable horsebag).
Stretch goals, though.
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I have thought about having tricks! I could do some basic animations for the gamer in the chair (when I've made them) doing different poses, and then have them flopping all over the place with physics blends. I did also think about having grind rails, but why am I even saying that there's no way I'll be able to make grind rails
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This title stood out to me this year, and gave me an idea for a kind of physics racing game where you sit on a gamer chair and slide down a hill, collecting cans of Mountain Dew (for a boost) and Doritos (for points). Tactics don't really come into it, but whatever. Here's what I've managed today:
As ever, I'm using UE4. The main thing I'm going to have to work out this time is how to have physics-based movement that isn't a total disaster; you can't really tell from the GIF, but the ramps are really flaky. If you're not going fast enough the chair will tip over as soon as it hits them (Something about moving from one piece of collision to another messes with the physics), and even if you are going fast enough there's no guarantee you'll land okay. I'm going to have to look up some vehicle example projects and get some ideas about how to constrain the physics so they behave in a way that makes the game playable.
EDIT:
v1.0 is out now!
v1.1 is out now!
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Daaamn, I've been meaning to do this for a while now! Really interested to see where you go with it. I've got quite a bit of experience with Alexa skills, so hit me up in the Slack if you want any pointers regarding creating the interaction model or the back-end code. I can't see there being any problem with getting the skill through the submissions process, but I would maybe allow for a couple of days..
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Thanks for the kind words, everyone! Progress has been slow so far this week, but here are some progress GIFs:
Animations for jumping, double jumping and gliding are in. Took me a while to iron out all of the kinks in the animation network, making sure that every state was accessible from all of the states it needed to be accessible from, which also meant fixing a couple of bugs in the movement code.
Singing is in. Currently it's just a thing you turn on or off, but it will be tied to the actual gameplay mechanics... soon, hopefully. I've had less time to work on things than I'd have liked this week, and I've got social stuff tomorrow and on Saturday, so it's going to be a bit of a push to get everything in by the deadline, but I'll do what I can!
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Ah, so Unreal's animation blueprints have two components to them; the Event Graph, which you use to control the logic of the animations and do things on a frame-by-frame basis, and the Anim Graph, where you set up a series of state machines to control how to move from one animation to another with conditions like 'when the walk speed is greater than 50%, transition from a walking animation to a running one' and 'at the end of this animation, return to the the idle animation'. In the Event Graph for my raven's animations, I have code for picking one of the head positions at random, but there still needs to be a state machine saying that you can move from any head position to any other head position, which is what that massive mess above is doing. I did think about just having two states, each of which selects a head position at random, but on the surface it looked like that wasn't possible. The system seems to be set up such that each state is a single animation, but I might be wrong about this.
[Release] Pause Screen From Battletoads 2!
in Wizard Jam
Posted
I have a lot of fond memories of the first Pause Screen From Battletoads; it was an early indicator of the kind of cool, weird, unique stuff that could come from Wizard Jam! I just played through the sequel, and I really enjoyed it. It was every bit as surprising and unexpected as the original;
In particular, while I'd seen your 3D Bone World before, I wasn't expecting it to turn up here! As Atte mentioned, the transition from the previous section to Bone World via the YouTube video worked really well.
I have a few thoughts about the game that are largely inspired by having watched all of Petscop (and a series of analysis videos) recently. I don't think there's going to be anything particularly spoiler-y, but I'll hide them just in case:
I've been really into the idea of having stuff hidden really deeply in a game for quite a long time; the touchstone for this is how Warren Robinett hid his name in a secret room in Adventure (which was the only way to get credit for his work at the time), and within a few weeks of the game's release some kid had found it and written to Atari about it. The idea that if you reach a large enough player base it doesn't matter how bizarre or inscrutable the method of finding something hidden in your game is, there's a chance that at least one person will. I've thought about this idea a lot; not to say that anything I make would reach a large enough audience, but even just making something that and no-one ever seeing it is a cool idea to me.
I don't know if you've seen Petscop, but I recommend watching it if you haven't; I feel like it would be your kind of thing. The basic premise is that someone finds an old unfinished PlayStation game, and is given a cheat code that grants them access to a whole new area of the game that requires more and more exploitation of broken game logic to progress through it, and becomes more and more unsettling as they do. The inscrutability of the Pause Screen games feels a lot like that to me; it's a hard balance to strike when 'breaking the game to find hidden stuff' is your primary mechanic, and you obviously don't want people to completely bounce off it, so you have to nudge them in the right direction in a way that Petscop has the luxury of not having to do. Petscop is presented as a kind of 'found footage' thing, but it's no secret that the series is an art project and the person making the videos made the game specifically for it, so they can do things like have the game require you to stand in one spot for several hours in order to progress, and then cut to the relevant parts of the footage so that the viewers aren't bouncing off that in the way that they obviously would if they were playing it themselves. I think you've done a good job of capturing that feeling, though, and there were several moments where I felt like I was cleverly subverting the mechanics in a way that was unintended (though clearly it was).
I still think a lot about doing a kind of Frog Fractions 2 thing and making a fairly straightforward and inconspicuous game that has a whole different thing inside of it; you carry out a (mostly) untelegraphed sequence of actions and suddenly you're inside something else entirely, with its own set of inscrutable rules, and which is a lot more akin to Petscop. The idea would be that (I guess similarly to Fez), a community builds around it and solves the mysteries of it together (in the way that they unravelled the story of Petscop, but this time they're the ones figuring out how to progress through the game). But man, I don't have the confidence that I would be able to make that happen, and while I did say earlier that it would be kind of cool to make something like that and for no-one to ever find it, I don't think I'm at a point in my life where I could spend a year or more doing that, and not be absolutely crushed if it failed.
Just some thoughts, anyway! Thanks for making both of the Pause Screen From Battletoads games!