Zez's Devlog

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zez — Sun, 18 Sep 2011 02:23:25 +0000

Inspired by Mass Effect....

Fixed up the camera code, did a little bit more level design. The fixes to the camera code basically happened because due to the speed of the game, and agility of the player character, making difficult jumps (from a platforming perspective) sometimes required me to place platforms further from the player then half a screen length, meaning they would be offscreen when you started the jump, and you couldnt figure out how far you should jump to avoid missing them.
Now, the screen will move ahead of the player in the direction they are moving in, instead of just focusing in on them.
The OTHER thing I worked on, was a rather large boss fight. This thing will likely show up around midgame, but seeing as I usually have trouble figuring out good boss enemys, I opted to just make the damned thing now.
SUPER heavily inspired by the Thresher Maws in mass effect, and will probably force me to re-tool collision code a little bit (I REALLY want the player to be able to run up them, basically.)

Stuffff….

zez — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 17:44:02 +0000

Retooled/optimized environmental code and physics engine. Couple minor bugs fixed (single pixle hang if you hit the floor wrong after a jump, some funky slope collision with some bounding boxes…) I also futsed around with the players running animation, and added in some sort of drop kick thingy (Down + jump)…
Level 1 is being worked on slowly, but currently isnt much of anything…
Bunches of minor plot stuff is done, and my enemy total is now at 1.5 (I have one enemy fully implemented and one with graphics but only partial AI.)
Im thinking I need a new stopped animation for the player on a slope… It looks pretty wonky right now, what with one foot being under the slope and one floating in space… Its a little tricky tho because the engine allows for slopes between 0 and infinity (so, 0 – 90 Degree angles) and Im unsure of what a good way too deal with the player on one is… I could just rotate the sprite I guess….. that would look weird tho.

Whats my motivation?

zez — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 16:26:36 +0000

This morning I made this, its for the first ‘cutscene’ in the game, and basically marks the ending of the super linear tutorial level and beginning of the real game. This is also the point in the game when you gain access too your firearm, and the color red is added to the games pallet (Prior its all shades of blue and purple.)

Productive day thusfar.

zez — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 22:57:30 +0000

I spent the first half of my day up on the roof of my house running new Coaxle cable to get the internet up and running (my Pitbull ate the internet…) and then proceeded too rock the shit out of some save/load functions. Wasn’t REALLY that hard, although I currently get a crash if the levels file doesnt exist. Kind of minor, and easy to fix, but also not something likely to NEED fixing, seeing as there is no reason it should ever come up, unless someone manually deletes the file, and at that point I really dont care if it crashes.

moreeee work….

zez — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 07:45:49 +0000

The Delete function works, and doesnt break undo-ing/re-doing. I spent far to long today trying to make sense of the ungodly poorly documented storage class in XNA, but now it can recognize my live account and find my hardrive… Next up is to figure out how to save and load data. Hero and Enemy placement will happen, and by all means shouldnt be any real work (seeing as I pretty much just need to place vectors instead of futsing around with drawing rectangles and triangles…) but it doesnt strike me as being as high priority as being able to actually save and load levels in the editor…

code grind….

zez — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 22:20:43 +0000

Iv been working on a level builder/editor for Toxterre. It may eventually get prettied up and make it into the release, but for the time being It really just exists to make my life easier. Currently it can make walls and slopes, Has undo and Redo functions, and can switch directly into the game engine for rapid testing. Next up is going to be a delete function, followed by enemy placement, and hero start point placement.

Take Two.

zez — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:27:21 +0000

Been hard at work on a reboot of Toxterra. Total reboot of the art and code, now being written in C# for cross platform deployment.
Thus far I have the basic world framework done, along with a physics engine and most of the player code written. I also have most of the player animations done, one enemy finished, a particle system up and running, some sheet based animation code, and generative cityscapes for the parallax layer. Im thinking this time around, rather then getting bogged down making everything work first, Im going to start by just building levels and writing the code I need as I go/fixing bugs as the arise.

I still exist

zez — Mon, 09 May 2011 02:27:59 +0000

I havent updated anything lately. I still exist, I am working a bunch so less fun coding/game making stuff.

Im mostly just posting because Im working on some sort of strategy game movement/pathfinding routine, and over the course of working on it I have typed ‘baby.kill()’ more times then really makes any sense.

and life goes on.

zez — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 23:40:43 +0000

Adobe… is a bunch of dicks. With the release of flashplayer 10.1 my ram and cpu usage pretty much shot through the roof on this game. I spent a good long while (months, infact) attempting to find the new memory leak, and although I ultimately did find SOME of it, and managed to get the game into a state where it was marginally stable, I still couldnt find everything going wonky with the upgrade.
As of such, consider this vaporware, atleast for the time being.

Someday, I will come back to it. I have all the assets saved, and the story written out, and some levels in various states of designed, but the game will need to be re-coded from the ground up, and frankly I dont have it in me to write the whole thing again right now.

That being said, I have another project in the works, a remake of the game “Ninja Assault” from the (HORRIBLE) NES cartridge action 52. Its being done as part of a community project over at TIGSource and is a fair bit along. I would post some screens and all that, but frankly Im lazy.
The game is basically a combination of a platformer (ninja gaiden heavily inspired the movement and pacing in this game) a beatemup (double dragon, river city ransom, battletoads etc) and a more traditional fighting game (street fighter games, most stuff by snk, a little bit of smashbro’s to make up for lack of buttons) annnd…. is fairly playable? Its currently being tested, and has 3/4ths of the enemys done, along with all the normal moves for the player and some tiles. That 3/4ths is not counting bosses, btw, so its a tad bit farther off then it sounds, but the engine works and its pretty fun to wail on mooks, so I consider that a plus.

And the world turns

zez — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 22:44:22 +0000

The past few days, I have been carefully planning out the level flow and plot, based on what order different areas become available, what abilities you could potentially have at different points in progression, and where they exist relative to each other. This is pretty much all on paper right now, but it means I can start actually building levels for this bad boy. Im also in the process of working on the tile set for the first/last and second/second to last areas. That is to say, two levels, that happen to be the first two areas you encounter, and also the last two. Of course, you can only get to so many locations in the beginning.
I have also implemented some code to load the proper tiles based on what area you are in (meaning, I have 3 tile sets, and they will get loaded at the proper times) very exiting, I know. I could have pretty easily just had a new line of code for each level loading, or a new state for each level, but my current method keeps the load time between areas virtually nonexistent, prevents the game from being huge, and uses virtually no system resources, so go me.
I have also optimized some of the affects in the game, based on the fact that I am now on a slower computer, and shiny special affects are now adjusted automatically based on the games performance on your system (basically, if the framerate drops enough to me noticeable when something is happening that is just visual fluff, it doesnt happen.)
I still need to deal with explosions, my plan there is just use some good old fashioned animation instead of the current transformation affect Im using. Potentially this will make the game prettier as well as making it run faster, but its more work for me, and kind of low priority.
Anyhow, the message here is the game progresses, and is pretty close to being a game, and not just an engine.
Its also kind of ridiculously fun to play, despite not really being a game yet.
Oh, I also fixed a minor bug with slopes that was causing players to jump when they hit the top of them.
I also altered the way I handle user input, allowing players to map there own keys for whatever action. Im debating hardcoding an alternate control style as well, but I may not. Basically, Im thinking I might stick in directional shooting controls as an option, like in smash tv or geometry wars. The downside to this is suddenly my game would require 16 keys to play, and this control scheme would only really be feasible with a joystick (In that case, however, left stick could move, right stick could shoot, pressing up on the left stick could jump, pressing in the left stick could use your powerup, pressing in the right stick could use your melee attack, and then I would just need something mapped to the menu,) and flash doesnt have joystick support, so you would need to be using joy2keys or something to take advantage of it. If/when this game gets ported to a console however (Im thinkin Xbox arcade would be perfect for it,) Im fairly likely to include that playstyle, along with the current control scheme, being a hybrid of contra and street fighter.