RubixsQube

[Release] Suddenly the King of France

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* * * * * * * * *
U P D A T E
 
Last week was a lot more work than I thought it would be, but I'm done with a version of this silly game. It's playable, and very silly, and not at all up to the quality of the rest of the games in this game jam, but it's DONE and it MADE ME LAUGH and I got to use a lot of GOOGLE TRANSLATE:
 
https://rubixsqube.itch.io/suddenly-the-king-of-france
 
I can't figure out how to make it play in a browser, or even how to make a windows or mac executable, so for now, it's a .love file, which requires you to go and download/install love2d. It's free, though? Before they try to play it live, I think that I'll have to go and make sure that I can output it to a .exe, at least. 
 
* * * * * * * * *
 
 
 
SO. 
 
I made a game for last year's Wizard Jam. It was my first video game ever! I had a lot of fun, even if it was a silly amount of work for something so rudimentary. (I still kind of think it's pretty darn funny)
 
I want to make another game, even though the next two weeks also feature a trip up to Canada for an all-hands JWST science meeting, and I have like, four or five Big Deal Responsibilities for the meeting! 
 
BUT I REALLY WANT TO PARTICIPATE. 
 
And so I'm going to make a game: Suddenly the King of France, inspired by this name of

, and specifically a
.
 
Last time I used Stencyl, which was kind of a buggy platform for game development. I have enough experience with coding (well, not really game coding, but more like, the type of programming an astronomer has to do) to want to use something that isn't kind of hidden largely behind a UI, and for this game, I'm going to be using Lua / LÖVE under the assumption that I should be able to package up the game for itch.io ( :mellow:). 
 
This evening I've gone through a tutorial to know what I'm getting into, and I was successful enough with writing that little top-down shooter to build up the confidence to go forward with this project. 
 
SO WHAT CAN WE EXPECT?
 
Well, Suddenly the King of France is going to also be a top-down game, possibly set in a castle of some sort. I'm thinking of making some sort of regal Pac-Man style game, but I kind of really want the twist to be that every once in a while a French monarch from the past appears and must be dodged. I need to spend some time tomorrow coming up with a more solid game design concepts (right now it's mostly me giggling as I do some of the sound effects in my head, for people who played Shoot that Pizza, you'll know how much I love the sound of my own voice). Maybe I'll just make a terrible Kanye Zone ripoff. 
 
I won't be as active in this game dev thread due to my other responsibilities, but I want to kind of give myself the push to work on this, for real, even if it zerofiftyone makes an even more amazing looking and playing game with the same name, again.

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So, I've been super swamped with work, but I spent a few hours fleshing out my idea. I think that I've figured it out - I'd love it if you were a character at a huge party in some castle, perhaps you're the butler charged with lighting some lamps before the King of France suddenly appears. You have to maneuver yourself through a series of party guests, apologizing, and if the King appears, he moves through the party, trying to chastise you, and you must escape him and finish your job lighting the lamps, fighting your way through the party guests. You lose if you don't light the lamps before you're touched by the King. You win if you can light the lamps, wherein you are thrust into a party with even more people to maneuver your way through.

 

ANYWAY, I MANAGED TO PROGRAM A LITTLE BIT OF THAT TONIGHT

 

6HvTr1B.gif

 

I'm still having problems with my collision detection, and it makes maneuvering through the other players pretty tough, and I need to figure out a way for the enemies to push each other around instead of allowing their sprites to occupy the same area, ever. I think that once I've done that, it should be fairly easy to have the king come in and make a beeline for your character (kind of like the Ghost in Spelunky). I also need to add in a background (openGameArt.com is fantastic for this), and figure out how to make it so that when the characters walk in a given direction, they face that way (ugh, animations, ugh ugh). 

 

For now, this game jam has already made me giggle to myself, so it's a success in my book. 

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The little "excuse me", "so sorry" text popups give what's happening in that .gif a really surprising amount of personality, and are already grounding the whole thing for me.

 

If it wasn't for those little contrite messages I dunno that I would really be able to tell what's going on, but instead it already feels like a game!

 

This is my way of encouraging you to double down on that, like the more little dialog variations the better, consider triggering different pools of barks when colliding with different types of nobles, or writing a little manager that keeps track of the "bark pool" and ensures a nice even distribution, I dunno.

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I agree with Xeneth, and I hope the King gets the opposite dialogue. Bellowing for people to move out of his way.

 

It would also be funny if they were in french, "Excusez-moi", "Pardon" and "Désolé" would be good, depending on how much you think that would affect readability.

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What if you can only speak English but the king shouts at you in French? Then it's twice as awkward.

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I think that you guys are all getting at how I want it to be - it's a very simple (read: dumb) game, but I really want the King to be this loud character who speaks only in French, who comes after you. It's very, very rough right now because I'm essentially figuring this out on the fly (I have no experience with lua, but it's fairly straightforward), but mostly I want to set everything up for 

 

While lying in bed before falling asleep I figured out why the characters were moving in such a dumb jittery way, and this morning I also fiddled with the collision detection which now means that when you get too close to one of the party-goers you can't actually move until they get out of your collision box, which means you just continually apologizing. (Perhaps it'd be funny if instead of apologizing it triggered little dumb small talk statements)

 

KucqzUb.gif

 

My next step is to perhaps add in the King and his behavior, and also the little candles in the corner which have to be lit. Also, it should be fairly straightforward to mock up a background image so that the party is not happening in a large black expanse.

 

(I really appreciate the feedback, by the way, especially since it's really a very, very rudimentary game. That's really why I like this game jam, as the positivity of the forum members is super encouraging.)

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MPDCgr0.gif

 

Suddenly the King of France. 

 

I think that maybe I've made him too big but I am giggling a lot so whatever 

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I think he's exactly the right size for the King of France.

 

This looks great!

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Oh man, with the background!

 

Huge king is scary and awesome. If you have general king size design concerns, just leave the "superking" in as a rare 2% chance to spawn or something, so the possibility of giggle preservation is still in there and occurs every now and then as a "holy shit" moment.

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Ok, tons of updates. 

 

1) It's now a game. Meaning, if you get caught by the King, it's game over. If you light the four candles before you're caught by the King, you get to move on to the next level, everything resets, and now there are more party-goers, making it more difficult.

 

2) The character's all look the direction they're walking. I still haven't figured out animations, but for now, it looks fine for the player and the partygoers, but the King looks pretty ominous.

 

3) I added some text in places. I still need to add music and sound effects and also the huge number of King expressions.

 

4) I decided to keep superking. I may just use your MEGA ULTRA KING idea, Xeneth, that's real good. 

 

FjICQmx.gif

 

For a game I coded up in like, less than a week, off and on, I'm actually pretty happy with it. Once again, everyone else's games are fucking top notch (did you guys see that one team got Olly Moss to do the art? Holy crap), but I'm fine with my dumb little thing. 

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I do wish that I could have the various sprites draw to the screen in order of their increasing y position, such that they overlapped correctly, but I don't exactly know how to do that without a shit ton of weird if statements.

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I do wish that I could have the various sprites draw to the screen in order of their increasing y position, such that they overlapped correctly, but I don't exactly know how to do that without a shit ton of weird if statements.

 

I don't know the details of your engine, but, can you not just say something like when y += 10, draw order += 10, and vice versa?

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These are all good suggestions, but LOVE doesn't have a z-ordering, or depth system. I found a tutorial that seems straightforward, but will require me to kind of change how I work with the x and y positions of the various characters on screen.

 

I have a feeling that if any game devs actually saw my code they would call a priest

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UPDATE: 

 

I have finished making the game. It can be found here:

 

xJxGeGo.png

 

It is not super well made, and pretty tedious, and the joke gets old really fast

 

but tough shit, I made a second video game, everybody

 

I feel alive

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O H  

 

ALSO right now I can't figure out how to package it up as an executable on windows or mac, so it requires installation of love2d. (shrug)

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It is on itch.io, here

 

I don't know if the windows executable works, since I don't have a windows machine to test it on. I created it using the 64-bit version of love, and if it doesn't work, welp, I am real bad at creating games. 

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OH Man I just noticed that the game is like hundreds of megabytes because of the audio clips in there. I'm gonna recode those .wav files as .mp3s and re-upload the whole thing so that it is not like, super huge. 

 

Edit: Also, I just got a mac app uploaded to itch.io that I know works. So, bangarang. 

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It works on Windows. It's a game based around one single joke, but that joke is totally perfect. I had two candles left when SUDDENLY THE KING OF FRANCE and then I laughed, yelled "Oh shit" and then freaked out as all the guests got in my way and then laughed again. 

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