phill

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Posts posted by phill

  1. Posted

    1 minute ago, Travis said:

     

    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.

     

    Oh! I should have taken that out, it's the hitbox for the enemy, i.e. where he's actually travelling rather than what I'm drawing him doing. Actually, you've now prompted me to make one of my next goals figuring out how to make the jumps work with obstacles in the middle of them, thanks! :D

  2. Posted

    Review 27/01- 03/02

     

    Goals:

    1. New enemy that jump attacks

    I did this! It actually took way longer than I thought it would, as I had to relearn all my old-ass physics calculations/algebra in general. Thanks heaps to @Lork who linked me to this very good post about how to make ballistic projectiles look nice. The finished product looks roughly like this (sans debug text, and using my CBF assets):

    2. Refactor the enemy ‘type’ system

    I didn't do this! I actually spent way too long trying to fix this tiny little issue which doesn't really affect anything, before deciding that I'd have to completely re-do the way I do stacks of enemies. This probably is going to happen, but I may delay it while I get more important things like the extra AI behaviours going.

     

    3. Building spawning stuff

    I did this! I won't post an image of enemies sitting around not doing anything, but it works, and now I can make a start on trying to get interesting spawn behaviours/layers so the player isn't just instantly overwhelmed with enemies.

     

    Additional Stuff:

    • Fixed an issue where the player walking against a building would cause them to transition between idle and walk states every frame and look like they were having a seizure.
    • Worked on my Wizard Jam 4 game a bit to add in some fun extras for the gang.

    New goals up next!

     

  3. Posted

    6 hours ago, Travis said:

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

     

    Thanks Travis! I appreciate that you guys pushed me to do it. I've already accomplished more in a couple of days than I would in a week. :)

  5. Posted

    27/01 to 03/02


    Goals:

    1. Develop a state machine for a new enemy that jumps to attack the player.
    2. Refactor the enemy ‘type’ system for lifting groups of enemies. I’m currently using a weird maths thing rather than having an array that I can loop through.
    3. Make a building that spawns enemies and waits for the player to attack before moving them all out of their Idle state.

    Goals scratch:
    State machine:

    • Idle: Dummy state for the moment. Will eventually be a kind of pre-idle state where the enemies move around and do little idle animations. Waits for a signal from the building that spawned it to kick the jumper to its neutral state. -> Neutral
    • Neutral: Checks whether the player is close or far away (radii TBD) and either moves to attack or retreat states. -> Attack | -> Retreat.
    • Attack: Sets destination x,y to the player’s current future position in a second. Telegraphs the attack with a circle with a growing radius and increasing opacity. Moves to position with a jump that goes through everything (not sure if jumps off screen, or just appears to be far above everything). Is stunned for a short time on landing. -> Idle.
    • Retreat: Does a short hop directly away from the player. -> Idle

    Refactor types:

    • This one is actually just a pain to explain, so I'll just say it’s definitely achievable.

    Building spawn:

    • Have a list of the types and numbers of enemies to spawn, plus their initial positions, stored in the building. Can use ds_ for this.
    • Then need to loop through the list of enemy IDs to let ‘em rip. Would be nice to maybe have an order function built in so that later I can layer fights a bit better rather than every man for himself. Though I could also achieve this by reusing an old bit of ‘battle circle’ code within the enemy state machine. Which could give them more interesting combat.

  6. Posted

    Hi all,

     

    I was talking with folks in the #gamedev slack channel about how to keep myself motivated and accountable as a hobbyist game developer and they suggested that it'd be a good idea to put myself out there in the public and commit to a devlog. So here I am.

     

    My plan involves weekly goal setting, some brief brainstorming, and then a review at the end of each week of what I achieved. I don't think I'll put up any test builds or anything, but I might do some .gifs. Fair warning that my art assets will be bad, because I tend to reuse random old assets or make them deliberately super shitty so that the look of the game doesn't obscure/compensate for the mechanics.

     

    The game I'm making is trying to be a thoughtful top-down/billboard 2D combat game with a focus on movement and avoidance of attack patterns. I want to layer a roguelike resource management game on top of that, but players won't get to that bit if the inner loop sucks so I'm focusing on the combat mechanics first.

     

    Anyway, watch on as I try to guilt myself into doing the thing that I like to do in my spare time.

  7. Posted

    On 04/01/2017 at 7:37 PM, Ben X said:

    Good streams, thanks y'all!

     

    A suggestion for future streams: as a jammer watching my game being played, it would be nice to get a bit of critical feedback, either while you play or just like 10 seconds at the end, even if it's just "that was cool!" or "that was very frustrating!" I don't know how other jammers would feel about that, but I would guess at least non-jammer viewers would find it interesting too...

     

    I've had some negative experiences with streaming game jam games and giving that kind of feedback. I think maybe because it was a shorter jam and they were defensive of what they could achieve in that amount of time. So I tend to keep my comments fairly positive and surface level for the most part. I'll keep it mind for next time though. Perhaps we could ask for people who want critical feedback to post in a thread opting in?

  8. Posted

    Okay, I think I've added everyone to my auto-host channels and set them to host randomly if you guys are ever streaming at the same time (no favourite children ;P).

     

    My channel is https://www.twitch.tv/fifogamedev, I've been streaming the Wizard Jam entries. I'm hoping to let the good times roll and play through some of the GameMaker gm(48) game jam games once I'm done, and then finally onto a series where I play at least one hour of every game that I've never started up in my Steam library (there are so many of these that I'm kind of scared).

     

    I'm Australian but I tend to stream in the morning and the evening, so hopefully see a couple different crowds.

  10. Posted · Edited by phill
    americoaustraliocentrism

    I'm going to stream tomorrow morning to catch some of the American crowd that represent way more of the people that have participated (than Australians).

    That'd be Thursday 22nd, 10am Australian Central, so Wednesday 21st, 7:30pm Eastern Time, 4:30pm Pacific, and 12:30am GMT (edit: sorry SBM) according to this thing.

    https://www.twitch.tv/fifogamedev

  11. Posted

    I don't have a huge amount to say for myself other than this was, as usual, an awesome jam to participate in. So I'm going to respond to other things people have said.

     

    Length/Being Late: I like that there’s kind of two soft deadlines of the 2 weeks and then the time at which the thumbs stream the games. When the worst thing that comes out of it is that people make their games cooler, I don’t feel like there’s any real issue. Unless there ever is a money/big incentive reward, in which case I imagine there could be two separate classes of jammer (competing/doing it for lulz) and we could deal with it that way.

     

    Awards: If it’s awards that are completely meaningless and have no value so people (including me) don’t stress out about them, sure why not.

     

    Getting Too Big: Something that could be considered is maybe teams/groups within the jam? So say if we have around 60 jammers again, three groups of 20 that are encouraged to at least (important note) comment and encourage within their groups would be cool. So you have a big jam (which is cool) but retain that close-knit feeling (which is cool).

     

    Dot Gobbler: Is awesome.

  12. Posted

    Hey, thanks Ben! I didn't realise I had an aesthetic except for 'what on earth can I do that is simple as heck and doesn't look like complete arse'.

     

    I definitely did not balance the levels/respawn times at all for that first release. I've now made that initial two-colour level full-size and lowered the respawn time so the player can have a bit more breathing room. The one after that is still pretty hard though! Thanks heaps for the feedback as usual, you're a machine! :D

  17. Posted

     

    tl:dw More work on the building system because I hadn't quite got it working into something interesting last time. Some more level design to go and maybe making some objectives not look like dicks.

     

    Edit: Turns out that the audio is a little less loud in the video than I thought. Trust me when I say it's awesome.