After being pushed into a state of loseitude for two weeks by exams and all-nighters on school work, I have been clawing my way out of the inactivity abyss. On my way up, I thought fervently about a better title for Signal. I decided that Resonance was a more fitting title, but I’ll probably change that again as I make more progress.
I’ve also come up with a semi-interesting way to do Resonance’s story. The main player is typical person, no real special powers or something. Then he and a few allies are assaulted by some monster thing. The player defeats it, but then an explosion occurs which propels an antenna tower into him, pinning him to a transformer, and impaling him and destroying him entirely. Several communications towers across the world no longer “work” after this.
The player is somehow given a second chance to live as a magical electrical field thing that has the deceased hero’s form. He initially gains an armored suit in order to disguise his appeareance because he is, by all human accounts, dead. The player is only kept alive by being in close proximity to at least one beacon (that is “broken” by human standards because they no longer transmit communications - but resonate with our player) AND a finite “health” meter.
Initially, things like metallic objects and thunderstorms, adveresly impact the hero by forcibly pulling him along them and getting damaged upon reaching an end. Thunderstorms would displace the player and be near-lethal. Stuff like maybe railroad tracks would “teleport” the player all the way to the other end of the track. Later on, these things will have no effect on the player, but initially, it would help to constrain the player’s exploration in order to teach them some things about the gameplay and it could also make for some interesting story sequences!
The player is motivated by a mixture of causes, but prevailingly a desire to return to natural human form and to explore the scientific mystery they’ve become. Eventually, the player will be capable of returning to their initial human state, but things won’t be the way they were, people will move on, and the player will realize essentially how weak they are outside of their “resonant” form.
In addition, various nit-picky art fixes were made, and I’m still not satisfied. But I may as well just move on for now and animate the damn thing:
Lastly, I made a textbox! A very sexy textbox. Check it out:
Here’s this week’s build, so you can see it in action, and most importantly, hear the really horrible punchline!
Now I’m off. Look forward to more posts hopefully, because the holidays are typically rather boring. Das ist alles.
This week I decided to invest time in the artwork. It was exciting to draw these sprites, and I plan on making more.
To summarize the picture, I made a new hero sprite, a tree monster thing, a crow/oversized black bird, a pea shooter weapon, a sketch of the signal beacon, and a silly and excessively bloody death scribble. I had a busy school week once again, but I think the artwork is still sizable progress, taking that into account. There is no new build yet, but eventually I’m gonna add the art to the game and, well, actually make progress on level designs.
Progress might be going slowly, but I have a lifetime to make it. I have no plans to drop the project at the moment. To my adversaries and you nemesissies, you will fall by my hands! …Just wait a couple years! ;_;
This week I was busy again, but I still made an update. Arguably the worst update that will ever be made during this contest! I uhm, imported some more of my art into the build. And temporarily using Darien’s spaceman-hero sprite to give me an idea of how well it stands out on the game background. I’m still debating between redrawing my sprite all over again, using my flat simplistic sprite as a base, or using Darien’s edit as a base. Anyway, here, look, it’s pretty much the same, but with slightly prettier artwork in the unfinished map!
Yeah, so exciting, right? Okay, see you next week. If this week doesn’t murder me with school work, I will certainly invest more time into coherent updates. Maybe exam time in two weeks might give me the break I need. Who knows?
Yes, yes, I get it. I failed. So hard that you’ve found the need to invent new words to describe it! I am an intense disappointment and I apologize for creating this depressing vortex of not-making-games suck.
I’ve been a horrible combination of busy and lazy. School work and stuff keeps me bogged down, and then my friends keep wanting to do things. Help me ruin my life so I can have free time to make games again! Much appreciated.
At any rate, a small return to progress is being made. I’ve discovered a few bugs with the LuaVerge v3 namespace I wrote, through further development. Support for joystick wrapping has been added. In the signal namespace, I created a “multijoystick” that polls all joysticks connected at once and treats them as a single joystick, and a button wrapper that allows an game action to be associated with both a keyboard and joystick binding simultaniously.
I added a really cheap placeholder beacon transmitter entity type, which is used to calculate the player’s signal strength when the beacon is on-map. Here’s a picture of this in action, not exciting looking at all really, I can assure you:
Get it here, but don’t expect to be amazed in even the slightest way, unless you want to try out the relatively non-exciting joystick input crap or something!
Anyway, back to talking about the beacon entity stuff, I quickly saw they had huge overhead when I was getting about 30fps with only ten signal beacons placed. It turns out the big bottleneck was caused by accessing entity properties from the v3 wrapper. Each reference to self.ent.hotspot_width and self.ent.hotspot_height hurt the performance drastically, because of the amount of magic lookups being done, both v3-namespace side and raw LuaVerge-side.
LuaVerge wraps entities in nested lookup tables that transform all that crap into a native C++ function call, one table being the index, another being the entity’s property (like hotw and hoth). Let’s not forget the global table entry for “entity”, either. On top of these things, I insert even more overhead by creating classes with properties through Lua-side. hot_height is a property that contains a _get(self) function, which returns entity.hoth[self.index]. All the table searching stacks up! So I got around this by storing the hot_height and hot_width locally in signal’s entity extension, which is reasonable considering these things won’t change once the entity is created (unless ChangeCHR() is called). Uhm, there’s some refactoring that needs to be done at any rate. I will hopefully be able to cut the slowdown for most of the read-only entity variables. Things like entity x/y, will still incur an overhead because they need to be writable.
Anyway, there’s my progress and stuff. That wasn’t very exciting was it? See you again soon. I am announcing my return to Gruedorf, and escape from shameville.
Next time, I hope to maybe get all the art drawn so-far actually in game. Then I’ll worry about animating and fixing it all. (Oh by the way, that 255 entity limit in Verge? It’s just silly. I really want to remove that.)
This site really needs a facelift, too. The temporary copypasta mash together until it works and then go back and make it somewhat presentable yet still ugly and apalling and I really could have just made a nicer layout of my own from scratch if I wasn’t too damned lazy in the first place template thing just isn’t doing it for me, and I also want to tie in some non-blog areas to the site, so if in the highly unlikely event I have a lot of free time and I’m feeling adventurous and creative, I might fix it.
Now I need to depart, it is time for me to complete a homework assignment that’s due at 11:55 pm today. Thanks for reading words and stuff!
I’ve been making a LuaVerge middleware code wrapper in my spare time for some time now with the cooperation of Zeromus. I figured this week that the Gruedorf competition would be a fancy way to show off some of the features. It’s fairly spiffy. So I made a sidescrolling engine!
Get it here!
Now I can hear, “This looks kind of neat, but also really useless. What do you actually need a sidescrolling engine for? Why did you even bother porting it to Lua?”. At the moment, yes, it is a VERY useless engine. I put in the basic movement and jumping, nothing splashy. It’s a port of a port of a port of some silly code (VergeC -> Java (trouser engine) -> ika -> LuaVerge). I decided that of these languages, Lua’s probably one of the ones I’m finding most comfortable. VergeC’s crippled, Java’s too verbose, Python’s very nice, but ika’s got a bunch of quirks and a somewhat awful toolset. LuaVerge is nice, since now that I’ve got a useful Lua wrapper, I’ve tackled most of the quirks with using Lua to map nicely to the C functions (like int-to-boolean coercion always being true). Plus LuaVerge means I get to use a fairly nice scripting language, keep some familiar dev tools, and get software raster rendering rather than hardware texture rendering.
Signal is the codename for a sidescroller project that’s been bouncing in my head for months saying “do me, do me!” but I never got around to taking it past the idea stage. The game is going to be set in large explorable two-dimensional world with a nice mixture of action and puzzles. What makes this game different is the player has next to no abilities on their own. The player is in fact, quite frail alone. However, there are transmitting signal beacons scattered all throughout the world that can be interpretted by the player’s suit. When the player’s in range and has good reception, they obtain a variety of abilities and gain physical enhancements to strength, mobility and environmental resistance.
As you move around, some signals die out, while new ones are received. Environmental factors like thunderstorms or magnetic fields will interfere with the player’s ability for reception. Strategy comes into play as you maintain the signal beacons in order to advance, applying repairs, enhancing signal strength, pushing the beacon to another location to get it past environmental factors, or into range. In some areas, signals broadcasted by the beacons can be switched with another beacon’s power.
The signal you receive is interpretted in digital “levels”, where a low level denotes bad reception, and a high level denotes a great reception. As signal levels increase, so do the powers. Your physical appearance will fade in and morph as your strength increases, and you will also be able to see when you’re at risk of losing strength and abilities by a “static” distortion effect on various artwork. This is going to take lots of artwork layered on top of each other, but it’s almost essential to get a nice in-game display. I wanted the game to have a very minimal HUD, since too many little icon things on screen easily get distracting and confusing. Physical appearance changes, on the other hand, make it easier to see, and keep your eyes on the player in situations where it counts, like if there were to ever be an area with both signal interference and intense action. I was thinking when the game was paused, I’d give a more detailed view, but when the game is in action and you have to constantly monitor several factor that can get annoying. That way, you get the best of both worlds.
So what would be on the HUD? Probably just a minimap, your health which fades out when it’s not being affected, and (perhaps) the player’s weapon reception when it changes.
The game is going to try to keep exploration fairly free and non-linear, limited more by your cleverness than story factors. I’d ensure that hopefully the game can be beaten without getting stuck often, but have several rewarding things for those who go out of their way and explore the world in greater detail. I want to have puzzles, but I don’t want people to hate me for unbeatable puzzles in areas that are essential to completion of the game. I also don’t want frustratingly impossible action in the main portion of the game. I think challenging puzzles and intense action will have their place as side-quests, and I will try my best to make it interesting and rewarding enough to inspire the player to get through difficulty. Maybe an unlockable ending or something, but I’ll make sure that the player can actually go back if they missed something, because nothing pisses me off more than New Game+. I mean, it’s a cheap way to force replay. There are some things I don’t want to do over again. I mean, I love rewards. But please don’t make me replay the game just to get them. I mean, sure, I’ll replay games I really liked, but these are exceptions. If somebody wants to play my game once and get everything and be done with it, I want to leave that as an option. None of this stupid starting over and repeating painful game areas over just to get a goofy prize.
I don’t really like backtracking either, so it’s going to be minimized to a reasonable amount, because as nice I think my maps could be, I think variety is important. Exploration implies backtracking to an extent, but I will try to have multiple routes to locations, and make sure that you don’t go back and forth too often. Metroid and Castlevania both do well for the most part, but you can find the odd area where you have to do frustrating backtracking because you fall down a hole or something stupid. I want to avoid punishing the player wherever possible.
Oh, and here’s some old artwork I drew a while ago, but I’m not sure how much of it will actually be used for this project:
The mockup’s especially out of date, because the HUD’s way too cluttered for my tastes, and it doesn’t use the grass or water tiles I made. The grass tiles were going to have dirt tiles underneath, but I couldn’t find a satisfactory texture that had enough realism and tiled well. The water tileset has an example of the old dirt I had, but it’s too simple and flat in comparison to the bushy grass.
Darien drew this very sexy edit of my sprite:
I’d bug Darien to actually give me a hand on the project, but I know he’s busy with school overseas in Ireland. I could modify his sprite, but the problem is, there’s no way in hell I can animate something that large in efficient time. If I did anything it would most likely look ugly and unsatisfactory to me. Meanwhile, my hero sprite is too flat and not worth the time to animate. I’d rather use my weekly updates for code and design than drawing because I’m sufficiently bad at artwork.
Anyway, I’m done blabbing for now. If you are a talented pixel artist, drop me a line. I’ll want a hand with this project, because artwork is a big time-consuming ordeal for me. I’m also looking for a musician, ambient in the deserted map areas, but bombastic and epic in the action-filled areas (possibly with chiptunes). Comments? Concerns? Criticism?
See you next week.
