Travis

Sorry to hear you were having a rough time, but it seems like you chilled out and have recovered, which is good. Making more progress!

Since we're talking Icy Hot, I will tell you that I prefer BioFreeze to get more icy and more hot. Also, it is possible to OD on IcyHot!

The clock that I added, and is shown in the gif in the previous post, was so that I could have a light implementation of a day/night cycle. My original plan was to have you be able to explore at night, but that idea is getting cut by the production company. So, I still wanted Moby go home at the end of a day to reset things. Also, because if all goes well, some of the environmental elements will change based on time, but I haven't done that yet and we'll see. Anyway, here is a short gif showing Moby getting beckoned back home and sleeping. I think this has a good gameboy feel to it, and I plan to have night come slowly enough that this won't be annoying. You should be able to walk across the map a couple of times in a day.

Among other things the last couple of days, I've been adding some details to the inventory screens. I still (think) I want to add a text box beneath the small sprite picture, but for now, here is an example. Look at the detail on that photo!!

You should continue sharing this. Phenomenal.

Those all look pretty good to me, but I'm no artist or art critic.

These mechanics are sounding really interesting. Looking forward to you getting things hashed out.

Thanks, phill! I hope people enjoy exploring with Moby once I am done. This might be hard to pull off with a GB aesthetic and my capabilities, but dammit, I'm trying! An update for today: I made a short video of the opening menu as it stands. Mainly to show that I spent a bunch of time getting the screen and controls menus the way I wanted. One criticism we had during the jam was that using the Z and X keys were kind of awkward, so I wanted to allow people to change how they controlled the game, but still keep that simulated GameBoy feel. You can change the buttons to any letter, number, or a select other set of keys (enter, tab, etc). You can also pick between WASD and arrows to move. I didn't want to let you just go nuts with how to perform movement. So, the menu shows fiddling with all of these things and hopefully keeping you from doing something impossible, like using the A key as a button when you also have WASD as movement controls. A lot of this could have probably just been simplified or left in the Unity default GUI at the start, but I really wanted it to feel like a GameBoy game. The title screen itself is coming along. I'd like to change the logo a bit, I'm just not sure how yet. I now like how Moby walks in with the title behind him. The border fading in is OK, but definitely not something a GameBoy could actually do. I probably worry too much about those things, but I will likely change it to fading between the four colors in the palette or dithering into place with a few frames. We'll see. The birds tweeting may or may not stay. It might be a bit irritating. Jon's friend made an awesome track for us at one point after the jam, so I need to locate that and give that a shot. Only funny thing is that there is no music anywhere else in the game, but that will probably be just fine. On the screen settings, OBS has issues when I change the window size, so that's why the 6X version is still seen when you change to 4x. That is only in the video. Also, there was no way to show going to full screen mode as well. The full screen mode seems to work nicely, although since it isn't a clean multiple of the GameBoy resolution, it gets a little blurry--unfortunate. Anyway, this was a big boring post about the menus!!! Next time will hopefully show more #content.

The thing I always remember most about Snagglepuss wasn't the "exit stage left" line, but how he would use an adjective, then a synonym and say "evennnnn". It's hard to explain, but you can hear it in this video. "The cage door is open. Ajar, evennnn." And a couple others in there. Also, now I know that searching youtube for Snagglepuss isn't the best of ideas. I really enjoyed the whole first episode and I'm looking forward to what's next!

I don't have too much progress to post about, but for the sake of making this somewhat of a habit, I will post a small update. I finished toning down the grass tiles, per osmosisch's suggestion. This took a bit of time since there are quite a few transitions between grass and dirt/water/whatever. I think it made a big difference, even if it needs further tweaking. I've also been burning down a todo list of minor quibbles and things to add. Some are dull, but make a big difference like adding little UI sounds at some important parts. I also decided to add another glint type. For a while, all of the bugs and any other items that had a glint all sparkled in the same way. I think they should appear a bit different, mainly so if you decide you don't care about collecting bugs at the moment (or ever), you can just ignore those. I made a slightly different animation and set the spawning code to turn on the correct animation for bugs when appropriate. I might change these, but for now, they are serving their purpose in their lo-fi granduer. The item glint is on the left and the new bug glint is on the right. I hope it looks a bit buggy. I might add some random element to it. The item glint rotates randomly, although you can't tell from that gif. I'll try to show something a bit more exciting next time, even if it isn't something new. Although there aren't that many "exciting" things going on in this game, which is sort of the point.

Well, I have very limited experience with audio stuff, but with some googling I was able to get it to work. I used Audacity and then used a Nyquist Prompt from the Effects menu. If you put in "(quantize s 4)" or some other multiple of 2, it at least simulates this effect. Do I really know what I was doing? Definitely not. I just found some random guy saying this would work online and it was already built in as opposed to everyone else who was suggesting to download extensions and things. It at least sounds right. Whether it is technically an 8-bit sound now or not, I am not sure. I would like to understand what exactly I did, but I decided to move on and avoid one of my many extended tangents... If you need to do this, I can explain more thoroughly. There are probably other ways too, but this did the trick!

Eatable cheese or GTFO

For now, I toned down the grass by changing the darker green to the next lighter green. I didn't change the pattern or anything yet, but this definitely looks less busy. I also worked on some minor updates to other sprites and things in between placing items and other environmental sounds around the world. Most of the sounds I am using, I got from a fantastic 8-bit sound package on the Unity asset store. It doesn't give me 100% of what I need, though. The slack channel helped me decide to bitcrush a real crow's caw to make it sound 8-bit, and that worked out really well. Now I am struggling with getting water noises. There are a good amount in that package and elsewhere that simulate waves, but I have a stagnant swampy pond and a stream, not an ocean. I have one that works sort of adequately, but I am not sure I am happy with it. I tried to bit crush some real stream sounds, and well, that just crushes it to a couple of blips. I also tried making sounds in a couple of other tools, but that is a skill set I don't think I have time to dig into right now. I would like to "finish" this sometime soon, after all. As far as placing items around the world, I have created several doo-dads and things that Moby can discover during his explorations. I am trying to walk a line here of keeping a GameBoy era feel to the associated text and any implied/environmental story telling, but still make it interesting. I have changed the text on several items many times in hopes of doing this, so we'll see how that comes out. In the gif below, the animation seems to have picked all the frames other than the ones showing his feet moving. Oh well, the point is the text, I guess.

OK, that's good input. I can tone it down. Thanks!

Whoa, I missed the speed painting update a while back. I was going to tell you which one I liked the most, but couldn't decide. They are all really good in their own way. That greyhound is also fantastic!

Ha! I guess it does look a bit cabbage-y. I think if I cut down on the shading between segments it would probably help. I will mess with it some more! Thanks for the input and thanks for reading! I guess I should also say that I am no artist, so the art assets are what I'm most nervous about showing. If you like the way the main character looks... I didn't make him. Luckily a nice guy I used to work with was in school to become an animator at one point and he drew Moby for us during the jam. I could probably hassle him for more help, but since I am/was never too sure how extensive any of this will be, I haven't asked. We'll see how it goes.

What I have been working on lately, in general, is fleshing out the world that Moby is exploring. While figuring out what all should be placed in this (now quite large) area for him to traverse, some of the sprites we had used for the jam started to have issues. As I am placing sprites in front of different backgrounds, they just get washed out and lose definition. The best solution I could come up with for this was to make some of the nature sprites have a more defined look, which will make them a bit more cartoony. I really like the more natural look of the original sprites, but with 4 colors, they just don't show up adequately. Some of the sprites I had made already had a pretty defined, more cartoonish look, so this will also keep things consistent. I think I finally have our three tree types looking consistent. I will probably keep tweaking them (especially if you tell me to), but they are coming together. In the images below, the old tree is on the left, the new one on the right. The new versions allow for good visibility in front of all backgrounds, and when overlapping other trees of the same type. The biggest difference is in the original tree in the first picture that often looks like just branches when placed in front of most backgrounds. Hopefully these and the other sprites will still feel natural enough when Moby is out poking around in his backyard!

My only guess is it's old enough to where that wasn't around or at least common? That would be pretty old at this point, though. Or he only talks to blackberry devs.

I'm enjoying these posts! As someone who started with ACV, I'm enjoying reading the history. I tried AC4 for a bit, and I couldn't handle those controls--and I'm sure they were a big shift from the previous games at the time. I adored ACV despite its ugliness and other problems, but I doubt it's much fun now without a big online community. Hopefully there's still something there worth playing. (Same goes for Verdict Day.)

A great teaser! Looking forward to the new show.

I love in the spawning gif how the orange ones hang back while the rest charge and then they pounce. Cool. Cool.

Crap, I can't remember. It was the goofiest voice, though... But it was well done and serious goofy, not like a guy making a crazy voice. Top-notch. Sorry I can't remember what he was saying...

What is this guy doing? He has the best voice of all. I stood watching and listening him for a LONG time when I played.

This is looking really good. My only comment would be that the shadow (I assume that's the rectangle) should be getting smaller while the blob is getting bigger. I only noticed this after being hypnotized by the gif for a long while.

Glad to see you've started this! I'm excited to see images and read updates of your progress. Best of luck!