What are you working on? (Game Making Thread)

[Xilef]

Trying to come up with a really awesome threading system.

I have a lot of delay with loading, which sucks on a mobile device, so I'm trying to speed that up by offloading content generation to threads.

Content generation is one of those things that should have a tiny load time as you're creating exactly the same content every time you load so you should be storing the results for next time you load, this isn't an option as storage data is one of those annoying things with mobile for the end user (Why does this app have 300MB storage??? is a common complaint) so threads is the ideal solution for speeding this up.

Although it is annoyingly difficult to get it right.

 

[luv_kitty12]

About to release my third completed game: Fantasy on Valentine's Day actually. And it feels cool. :3 It's completely finished-only polishing and hunting down silly bugs left. XD

 

[Ellie]

Think I'm going to try and write a good tutorial. I always suck at them because I hate doing them in other games.

 

[Xilef]

I like reading any tutorial, if you write it then at least it's more positive content rather than another PWOYM reply.

Did level of detail sphere generation over the weekend.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XCZS2eUdmp8

Right now I'm working on decompressing PVRTC'd textures on the fly, it would mean reducing how much work is needed to port our content from iOS to Android.

 

[coyotecraft]

I was drawing on paper last night cementing certain things in my head.
Something I've always struggled with doing 3/4 view pixel art is moving it in space. You take a column, tip it backwards, what does is look like?
I need to write a tutorial for this.

 

[Heretic86]

Im playing around with making XPs passage methods more modular so multiple scripts can do many things quickly without too many performance hits. Seems to work pretty damn well, already have 3 scripts up and running! Diagonal Stairs, Events on NPC Tiles and a Downhill Ice. Next up is to take a whack at Moving Platforms. The stairs script also pulls off some nifty tricks to allow both NPCs and the Player to walk on stairs, even ones made entirely of events! NPC's on Event Tiles allows NPCs to move around on maps like the Player does. Downhill Ice is more of an update to an old demo I made that got lost when its host server went kaput. Im liking what I did so far, but not ready to release...

 

[Ellie]

I am working on stuff again, honest.

 

[Heretic86]

Still polishing that Modular Passable script. I decided to do some minor reworking in a couple of things in it, and it resulted in even more cool stuff! Once I release it, you'll be able to restrict movement by Bush and Tile Specific to each Event! Basically, you can very easily make an NPC stay on a Road Autotile, or let a Fish swim in Deep Water that is normally not passable! It just gives you TOTAL control over how NPC's behave. I also threw together a funky little thing I called "Hotfoot Tiles", that could be a useful addon for existing Damage Tile scripts, mostly as an example of how to work with Modular Passable since it will be a Core script. Doing all the Demos is eating a lot of my time. Demos for every single thing has proven to be a total nightmare for me, but good for you as it has helped me find and eliminate countless bugs in these scripts! I also even wrote a quickfix script that takes care of Characters that "Stutter" when they use a Custom Autonomous Move Route and have their Frequency set to 6. I havent released this pack of scripts yet because of how tightly integrated they are with each other, and they need to be Demo'd for people to understand their purpose. Im still working hard at getting this batch finished.

I'll release soon, I promise!

 

[coyotecraft]

The usual excuses kept me from working on anything all month. Been sick, away from home, sick while away from home. My sleep schedule has been extremely irregular.

Even though I've got time to kill, I just ran out of steam. Maybe I'll do some writing. Character/world building.

 

[ZenVirZan]

Picked up DrumLive! again and tinkered for a bit.
The main menu will now layer all pictures in the skin directory named menu#.png and have them pan at the speed according to the number which is nice. Tonnes of easy customisation there.

Seriously putting of multiplayer because I lack the motivation to make it, but one of my friends wants us to play it at our next LAN, so I'm conflicted.

I also made a bunch of new songs.
I'm thinking that I'll have the game ship with no songs, and you'll download the ones you want from the ingame browser. Maybe it'll ship with one or two of my songs as I own them 100%.
I'm not sure what to do about copyright.

What a mess.

Maybe I'll put a disclaimer on the upload songs option when I make it, so that I can't get in trouble and that all uploaded packages are entirely your own work, then I'll upload all of my songs to myself under an alias so it can't be tracked and I can say it wasn't my responsibility.

I think I'm tired.

 

[coyotecraft]

I want more then just a quaint little castle and town square a la final fantasy or dragon quest. I want a labyrinth of busy streets. Noise and event triggers everywhere. People going in and out of buildings. Puzzles based on bureaucratic systems, acquiring permits, licenses, and identification to buy stuff or access parts of the city. On top of encountering thieves, vermin, lunatics and drunks. It's a different kind of wilderness; a dungeon in it's own right.

Also I'm working on eye candy. Some people might call it flavor animation.

 

[Heretic86]

Oooh, detail vomit! I love it!

So anyone want a Boat or Magic Carpet script in XP?

 

[coyotecraft]

Is that the kind of thing that would require a script?

 

[Heretic86]

Yeah, Boats and Magic Carpets are exactly the Script I'm writing. I sent Princess Amy a PM requesting a Magic Carpet character with no shadows, but Im no pro at photoshop and could use some help with that from anyone in the community!

This is my base graphic that Im working with:
http://downloads.chaos-project.com/here ... Carpet.png

Its got a simple pattern and some noise but I think looks terrible. Im lookin for something more RTP style... Anyone up for makin a Magic Carpet so I can use it as a Vehicle to transport the player around?

---

Edit:

That image isn't a Mockup! That is Aluxes (unedited) floating around in a Boat! And yes, you can swap out Aluxes with ANY RTP size character without editing and they can ride the boat too!

 

[corleonis]

gimme 20 minutes

 

[corleonis]

okay, this is actually harder than i thought on the front and back view, gonna be a bit longer ¬_¬

 

[corleonis]

gah! I give up, to animate something like that the dimensions really need to be in multiples of 4 and the image you posted has some really shady dimensions.

it doesn't help that I'm seriously out of practice, but I really cant find a way to animate it that doesn't just look a bit shit.

sorry I can't help buddy... and I started out feeling so confident too

hope a more skilled animator can help you with your problem

 

[coyotecraft]

I went back to a script project to make battle animations more versatile, especially for side-view applications.
It turned out to be really simple to fix the Z layer. So now I can have individual animation cells, such as a magic circle, appear below the battler instead of always on top.

The other thing I wanted to do was replace a cell graphic with the battler's graphic. To hide the real battler and move the double around in the battle animation. I've sorta figured it out.
Edit: I've got it so that whenever the first pattern on on the sheet is used in a cell, in game it is replaced by the battler graphic. All the cell settings carry over: coordinates, blending, flip, opacity, zoom. That only thing that doesn't work is the rotation. The coordinates are a little off too, I think it's related to the ox and oy.

I'm really excited to get this working. Especially the battler animation cell. With this the battler doesn't have to appear stationary, it can get knocked around the screen which you can plot inside the animation tab. With other scripts, if you wanted the battler to move you'd have to do it all by numbers and you can't really see how it'll turn out until you test it.

 

[StrawberrySmiles]

^ That sounds exciting, Coyote! I've been mostly mapping and thinking. :P

 

[coyotecraft]

It's going to take a lot of work make the battler animation cell compatible with other scripts. I need to look at some other side-view scripts and see how they do their own after-image effects. I don't think my method is very effective.

OMG it's so simple. Amazing. Now all I have to do is...