What are you working on? (Game Making Thread)

[Xilef]

Started the gameplay prototype this evening. Everything is going well so far. By the end of the coming week I should have an app that does random triggers based on how many steps you've taken and what WiFi signals you've walked past and logs those in a daily log.

What I'll probably do is have the first prototype give you some money and recovery items to start off with and have XP increase your attack damage and max HP.

Earn money and XP from monsters, buy recovery items from WiFi signals.

That should give me a very good idea of what kind of adventure your hero would have in an urban environment and set a path for iterating on that. I'll be doing a lot of walking this week!

EDIT: "random triggers" is a bad way to describe it. I have a stance against the use of randomness in games. The triggers will be random for this test, but my plan is to implement a "director" AI that will design a good story for your hero to go through every day. So at 00:00am on your phone the AI should write a frame-work for the day's events and will tweak the story based on your behaviour in the physical world. I want players to be able to game the system if they were to put in hours of research to understand how it works and how they can manipulate it.

 

[Ellie]

Making a battle system from scratch...

 

[corleonis]

Making a battle system from scratch...

sounds fun. what engine are you making it for?

 

[Ellie]

RPG Maker MV. Bit awkward as every action has to be validated by the server.

 

[coyotecraft]

Alrighty. I got Rpgm MV on sale.
Now. Writing out my shit list. What to change first?

 

[coyotecraft]

I've been analyzing the autotiles. I'm fairly convinced they screwed up.

They set it to a slow choppy see-saw animation. 1 2 3 2 1

But a faster straight frame loop , 1 2 3 1 2 3, flows much nicer.

 

[Heretic86]

Dynamic Lighting anyone?
http://forum.chaos-project.com/index.ph ... #msg194701

There is a DOWNLOAD DEMO available on the link above...

(Animated, give them a moment to load...)

Pre Release stage, but some feedback would be appreciated...

 

[coyotecraft]

I've been analyzing the autotiles. I'm fairly convinced they screwed up.

They set it to a slow choppy see-saw animation. 1 2 3 2 1

But a faster straight frame loop , 1 2 3 1 2 3, flows much nicer.

Took me all night but I finally found the section of javascript code that controls the Autotile animation speed. It wasn't a variable or a named function, just some number stuck in a equation for drawing the autotiles. I'm not sure if there is a reason they picked that particular number.
It's easy to replace with a variable though and make a plug-in.

But after changing the loop cycle and the speed, it doesn't look that much better. It's not as choppy, but the water looks like it's moving too fast. I'd have to add more frames for a slower, but smoother, movement.

I'm going to try making a new fire autotile. I tried it once but it was something better off as a event graphic since fire really needs a fast flicker.

 

[Heretic86]

Why not make the speed of the animations of the autotiles an Option? Im sure it will depend on the appearance of the graphics themselves that make things look "too fast" or "too slow", so maybe make it an Option?

 

[coyotecraft]

That's what I meant by making a plug-in.
But with 3 frames, "slow" just means choppy because it's harder to read as motion. I could try to make some inbetweens, but I'm not really up to replacing all the water tiles.

 

[Xilef]

I could try to make some inbetweens, but I'm not really up to replacing all the water tiles.

You could try interpolation so it fades between frames? Or dynamically generate a fixed number of inbetweens by interpolating frames.

 

[Heretic86]

That's what I meant by making a plug-in.
But with 3 frames, "slow" just means choppy because it's harder to read as motion. I could try to make some inbetweens, but I'm not really up to replacing all the water tiles.

Quick question, is there a maximum number of frames of animation in MV?

I agree, lets not get into editing graphics...

Personally, every time I see an Option for something, I feel like I have more ability to make something look the way I want to look. What I was thinking was a way that Users could control animation speeds:

set_tile_speed(tile_id, anime_speed);

Just my two cents. I figured that may allow water tiles to move faster without editing the graphics themselves.

 

[coyotecraft]

a plug-in can change the tile sheet format to anything.
And MV runs at ~60FPS

@Xilef: Idk. I'd done that in Flash with other low framecount animations. It helps a little, but it doesn't beat a true inbetween frame. Sometimes I can warp/morph/transform a thing.

 

[AceOfAces]

-Bug fixes.
-Most of the NPCs have dialogue.
-Writing dialogue.
-Added Jump List to the launcher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3g5icEKfBk

 

[Xilef]

-Bug fixes.
-Most of the NPCs have dialogue.
-Writing dialogue.
-Added Jump List to the launcher:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x3g5icEKfBk

I'm actually quite impressed by this. Games generally fail 100% to integrate with their platform's environment, this is particularly true on mobile, but desktop operating systems also have this trouble.

The Jump List is a really cool, clever way to do OS integration. I wish more games would have something like that so you could launch in safe-mode there and then, or windowed mode, or straight into an online lobby, or load first save file.

OS X particularly has a lot of fantastic OS integration possibilities that games fail to take advantage of.


What I'm working on; Spent 2 and a half hours trying to work out why notifications were failing to post for my game. Turns out I had disabled them many weeks ago on my test device because the last set of testing annoyed me...I am an idiot.
But now the notification system is at a usable state, so it's time to implement the actual game (The excursions).

 

[coyotecraft]

Contemplating a Monster Capture system for MV.
I think it should easy to save Enemy Stats as an Array and then just copy them over to an Actor.

But Enemies don't have Levels, or EXP curves, skill growth. I can only speculate what people would want out of the system. Maybe I should just leave changes like the Max Party Members to other plug-ins.
Monster Capture. Monster Trainer. Monster Evolution. Guardian Force. Animorph. Trans-fur-ance

 

[coyotecraft]

Assuming you could only capture 1 of any type of monster, You could just have the monster entered in the Actor database already. It would be a simple common event call. No scripts or plug-ins necessary.

meh, talked myself out of doing it.

 

[ZenVirZan]

Contemplating a Monster Capture system for MV.
I think it should easy to save Enemy Stats as an Array and then just copy them over to an Actor.

But Enemies don't have Levels, or EXP curves, skill growth. I can only speculate what people would want out of the system. Maybe I should just leave changes like the Max Party Members to other plug-ins.
Monster Capture. Monster Trainer. Monster Evolution. Guardian Force. Animorph. Trans-fur-ance

unfortunately, id say the best way to do it would be to re-write as much as possible
last time i tried to do something similar to this i only realised later on that using Game_Enemy and stuff has actually screwed me up more than helped me

 

[Xilef]

Some interesting things have happened.

One issue I'm trying to resolve is not being able to continue a player's adventure whilst they are on a bus/train (laws of physics are playing against me here). I've got a solution, but it's separate from the pedometer system that I've built my game around and frankly it makes the pedometer pointless as this new system can work without it.

It also means the game-events are more consistent, so people who are running constantly will get the same amount of events in the same period of time at the same rate as people who are driving about in their car.

Right now, I'm refactoring away the test code I wrote for all this. Trying to split things into modules so building this game is a less daunting task. I'll be splitting the project into two halves; Excursions and Dolls. The excursions is the game-play, where the meat of the action happens, and that's something I'm most uncertain about so that's what I'm working to complete first. The dolls I consider a solved-problem; character customisation has been done loads in the past and I don't need to look far to find good and bad examples of these systems. No discovery needed - but it's frustrating as 99% of the visual feedback for the game is in this half, so progress would be most obvious when I hit that half of production.

Guess this post became a status update. Had a non-productive day yesterday as I was trying to break down the massive work-load and solve the problem of the general theory of relativity being a bitch to my project.

 

[Byron]

I'm doing a battle system prototype in C2.
So far I've got as much as player can attack, but there's some issues with having the turn order change over, as the menu kinda never becomes inactive, but it's also nestled in a web of other variables, and I think it's something to do with a variable not changing because somewhere else it's being set to a different value so I'll have to go through it tomorrow and figure it out, but I got shit to do then so ahhh.

Anyway, here was an early, innocent build of it.

'sall good...