Candescence
-
Posts
510 -
Joined
-
Last visited
-
Days Won
5
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Events
Posts posted by Candescence
-
-
And just in case you haven't seen the status update and/or got my Skype messages:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/DigimonSprites/HBSTitle200_200.png
Yeah. Geez, I had to rush to get this demo done right on time, and even then, it's got bugs and a bit of missing dialogue, which I'll try and add tomorrow.
-
Well, so I tested the Ranamon animations in-game, and... Well, shrunk down to the size it's supposed to be, it just looks like ass, to the point where she's practically unrecognizable. Well, that's awkward. And I don't have the time to try and experiment with pixel art, so...
I decided to "cheat".
Rather than a direct fight against Ranamon herself, she bails right before you enter her boss room (because Myotismon ordered her to, as he's genre-savvy enough to know when things are going south), and leaves you to fight two drones shaped like her hands while she mocks you with a gigantic hologram of herself.
The hands themselves move into various positions to attack, such as rotating in a fixed position in a circle around you while firing projectiles (requiring you to watch where you're moving to evade), or aiming at you from above and firing downwards while moving from side to side after firing. Zoe/Kazemon is trapped at the top of the arena, and you can free her to make her a co-op/AI partner before the fight ends, but you have to manipulate the arms to hit the teleporters to turn them on in order to reach her.
Still trying to work out an optimal setup for the camera, I might be inclined to just not have it fixed to any particular position, unlike other boss fights, since the arena is so big.
Yeah, not nearly what I was originally planning to do with this one, but that's what happens when you're constrained by a lack of art assets.
-
2
-
-
-
Happens sometimes with images on Dropbox. Just grab the link from the post, it should display properly in a separate tab.I dunno what's going on but for some reason candescence and spacebar, I can't see your images. Well, I can see your big one candescence, the other one isn't showing oddly.
Edit: And now I can't find decent references of Ranamon's legs and feet at the angle at I want. FFFFFFFFFFFFF-
-
Alright, Heroic Battle Spirit's new demo has its basic layout done, along with some visuals and one of its main level gimmicks, though it doesn't look that great right now, still need to find a background to use for it.
Also, something I'm trying to work on for the main boss fight. Since the boss I have in mind has literally nothing I can use in terms of sprites or animations, and nobody's helping me with art, I decided to cheat and use Inkscape to trace various references to create parts I can use to animate in Spriter. Say hello to Ranamon, fellas.
This took hours, and it was tedious as hell. See, this is why I don't do art. This has no right to look even remotely decent, even if it sorta does. And I'll probably have to do it AGAIN if I want to do Calamaramon for the same boss fight, though, thinking about it, that might actually be too early, it might be more interesting to save that for a rematch in another stage. Considering the time I have to finish the stage, that's probably for the best.
-
2
-
-
Well, SAGE is coming up, so I'm renewing the call for help, I mainly need sprites for the miniboss and main boss for the new level I'm making for the new demo (and maybe some other stuff if there's time). It would really be great if I could get some help with that.
-
Finally gotten back to working on Heroic Battle Spirit, and before I work on my new level, I finally decided to properly fix the map system and overhaul it so I can be much more flexible with the level design. Most Metroidvania designs tend to be rigidly structured into specific rooms, considering what I'm going for with this game, I wanted to be able to make layouts that could look much less artificial, as well as dynamically display things such as items, enemies and obstacles, and provide players with other means of being able to plan their route, such as displaying jump-thru platforms.
-
2
-
-
-
C2 doesn't use per-pixel, it uses collision polygons, which makes sense, for sake of performance and physics. You don't get complex collisions anymore, but for most things, that's rarely necessary anyway. C2 also has custom movement, though it doesn't work quite like the Classic version, and you can't do selective collisions on a per-player basis anyway (for collision layers).
It honestly might be easier to write up a custom plugin in javascript using other movement behaviours as a basis. The platform behaviour would be a good base, maybe integrate the bits from the bullet behaviour that allow it to bounce to find angles, among other things.
-
In regards to C2 Worlds, I believe someone tried to port the engine, but it just proved too intricate for C2 to handle, causing it to lag and not even work properly.
Actually, that's because of the exact same issues you described in the Classic version. And even then, C2 has had some impressive optimization improvements, I actually tried the incomplete engine on a whim and it ran at 60 on my four-year-old laptop, which has been running somewhat sluggishly. Still needs a complete rewrite, though, the function system wasn't meant for constant collision detections and the physics are janky in certain circumstances, even if the relatively new collision cells feature might have a factor in the improvements, it's difficult to tell.
-
The main problem is that only MMF2 and Game Maker have proper working Sonic engines for them. Construct 2 would be much more used by fangamers if there was actually a working Sonic engine for it. Same with Unity, really. But few people actually have the knowledge and experience to do it, and Dami's dropped off the map while in the middle of working on the Egg Engine.
It's something of a chicken-and-egg problem, unfortunately. It's why I've avoided doing Sonic-related fangaming development lately, Sonic engines are great, but they are a massive headache to make, especially if you're using a framework that's incompatible with a good chunk of the physics guide.
-
1
-
-
I was using spriter for a few freelance jobs, It's kind of wonky but every update it gets better. I think they recently added deformations as well?
I know they are planning on supporting Construct 2 exporting, but if they could get it to work for Classic i'd be oh so happy.
Edit: Oh, one thing that sort of helped me animate easier was ignoring the bone feature. I'm sure its useful for some projects, but it seems to make everything feel really stiff to me.
'Planning'? There's already a C2 plugin on the forums made by the Spriter dev himself, and it supports most of the new features. Deformation is something that'll be more difficult to implement in existing engines, and deformation is sort of a 'beta' feature, but still.
Bones are more flexible than that, actually, you can move bones and parts independently of each other and stuff, if you need to. And you can move certain bones in the hierarchy without moving others, which is helpful.
-
Well, I've been trying to create a placeholder animation thing for human characters in Spriter, using the existing platformer essentials animations as a base and drawing the parts in Inkscape to create this featureless 'green man' with more realistic proportions compared to the platformer parts (once again using said parts as a base, while redrawing them to conform to the new proportions) - I'd use the default parts, but I'm not terribly fond of their proportions, even the smaller head isn't small enough. The end result ended up breaking the existing animations, so I might as well start from scratch. Oh, and the character I made has a proper animated neck, too. The idea was sorta to create a 'Tron' like character with minimal features.And then I tried to animate the parts. The idle animation seemed to work reasonably well. The walk animation... Eh...
Ya see, this is why I'd much prefer having a proper animation person to work with, haha. Even the parts don't look terribly good!Edit: Tried again, with some help from a guy over at NeoGAF who provided some advice for walk cycles, and I got this, which looks so much better:
-
1
-
-
Alright, time for a SAGE post-mortem.
Well, that could've gone worse, I suppose. It WAS a non-Sonic fangame in a Sonic fangame expo, but there was some press near the end, from sites like Sonic Paradise and TSSZ - the reviews I managed to find were, in fact, rather positive, and fairly encouraging. Overbound mentioned to me that he thought that HBS was among the best in show, which is a big deal, coming from him. And in the Silly Awards, HBS got the "And Now For Something Completely Different" award, which, as a Monty Python fan, I got a slight chuckle from.
Also, it turns out I need some more experience with streaming. Eesh.
Still, I can't help but think that this game was mostly ignored, but every bit helps, I suppose. I'm gonna see if I can't go around some places and show the demo off here and there.
As for what I'm doing now, well, I'm back in university. But I've been working on 'placeholder' animation parts to use in Spriter in Inkscape, and Construct 2's latest beta release just came out, with multiplayer functionality. I'm gonna see about integrating the multiplayer functionality into the engine - I have an idea of how to pull it off, it's mostly a matter of adding functionality to the input system to accommodate the way the multiplayer plugin works. At any rate, I'll see if I can get it working.
-
I don't get why people would design a 'modern' style game in the first place, especially in 2D. Even in 3D, Modern Sonic's gameplay is shallow as fuck, even with the improvements that came with Colours and Generations (Unleashed was just plain bad for at least half the game). I get that people like it, but boosting and quick-stepping isn't interesting by themselves, and the novelty of GOTTAGOFAST has long past and wrapped back around into mundane. If you're gonna try your hand at 'Modern Sonic', for pete's sake, try and make it not mostly shallow, try and do something interesting with it - all the games at SAGE with 'Modern Sonic' gameplay didn't even try to do that.
-
I'd love to use Construct 2 if it wasn't the most expensive one of the 3 choices listed here.
It's only 20 USD more than MMF2. which I swear had the exact same price not long ago.
That and fact that I really do not care about HTMl5 web game development.
So? C2 can just as easily be used for desktop 2D games, or iOS games, or whatever else. Hell, you can export to the Wii U now if you get your hands on a dev kit. I myself prefer to use the web-game thing for demos, since larger games would be excessive for the web..
-
Hell, if you guys want an example of what Construct 2 can do these days, well...
Granted, I'd be sporting a boner just because it's an F-Zero/SHUMP hybrid with Greek myth influences alone, but the fact that it's made in Construct 2 is just icing on the cake. And it looks so fucking good.
-
1
-
-
Well, the engine I'm working with for Heroic Battle Spirit is sorta based on Worlds except with the regular platformer behavior instead of all the Sonic stuff, with all the variables centralized into one object. I think what would simply be needed would be to put in the needed sensors into a container with that one platformer object, and and make sure their collision routines have the collisions used first before any other picking takes place and only called when required (so you're not calling them for every single fucking thing, which is just overkill), and make sure the movement routines don't run so many times that it goes overboard and eats into the CPU. Because that's pretty much what happened with Streak's engine.
-
Construct 2: great program but still in its early phases.
Not really. Construct 2 passed the 'early phases' quite a while ago, and is overall better than its predecessor, missing a couple of minor features but more than making up for it in others.
The only reason Classic could be considered a viable option is its status as being free, but support for it has been dead for ages, now. It was a neat program, but I'll be the first to admit that it could be a buggy mess, and its successor is a much better program overall.
Construct 2: I question whether this tool will ever have the features necessary for making a collision heavy platformer like Sonic possible without providing a lot of extra stuff yourself. I'm still wary of HTML5. Might be a good tool if you want to do a collaborative project.
I'm not quite sure what you're getting at with the first part (you could be more specific), but making a collision-heavy platformer like Sonic is certainly possible with events alone - the foremost problem is mainly making it work efficiently, the trick being making it work so it utilizes collision cells as much as possible - in other words, using collision/overlapping conditions as top-level picking conditions. Collision cells are a fairly recent addition to Construct 2, but the performance gains are titantic. I'd rather leave the engine-making to someone who actually knows their shit rather than doing it myself, though, personally.
HTML5 has matured quite considerably, there's still ways to go, but the stuff you can achieve with WebGL is bloody impressive. Even Microsoft has capitulated and added WebGL to IE, which is kind of a surprise, considering they've been trying to bury OpenGL for decades. Node-Webkit also works brilliantly as a desktop executable export. Google and other browser vendors have been working like mad to make javascript as efficient as damn well possible for an interpreted language, you could certainly do worse (I've heard GM isn't very efficient).
As for collaborative stuff... Actually, speaking of which, I forgot to add this to the features list, but C2 projects are pretty much built for enabling collaborative projects - the standalone .capx files are basically zip files, and the project folder alternative basically enables stuff like version control.
-
So, Overbound basically asked me to make this thread, and I decided, eh, sure, why not. I suppose a comparison thread between 2D game maker programs would be good.
I haven't used Game Maker or MMF2 in ages, so I think this'll first post will mostly be me talking about how awesome Construct 2 is (it does need the attention, since it's somewhat more obscure than the other two due to not being around nearly as long), but I'll try and give my thoughts on GM and MMF2 from what I remember.
The original Construct was created by a very small team of people (under the name 'Scirra') who used to work on MMF2 addons, who became dissatisfied with MMF2's limitations and decided to make their own program. Incidentally, I hear this was more or less treated as a 'betrayal' by Clickteam, who apparently still hate Scirra's guts. Anyhow, the original Construct was an awesome and promising program, but its foundations were rather unstable.
So, Scirra started over with a much more solid foundation, and took something of a gamble - the original Construct used DirectX, but Construct 2's initial export option was HTML5. Yeah, that got a lot of WTF reactions back then. But Construct 2 has greatly matured as a program, much like HTML5 itself (especially with the adoption of WebGL), which is rapidly catching up to Flash (and Javascript interpreters today are much, much faster than Actionscript), and C2 is capable of exporting to a whole bunch of platforms with no additional cost. And C2 is rapidly updating, usually at on a weekly schedule.
- Let's get this out of the way, first - there is a desktop executable export option. It's multiplatform, in fact, using Node-Webkit, and it supports all the latest features of Google Chrome (in other words, usually pretty much ahead of everything else or equal with Firefox), and usually faster than a browser.
- The layout editor is very much MMF2 in style, but easier to understand and more flexible, with an in-built parallax system. And it has long aped GM's sole advantage over other game makers by implementing a tilemap feature that's compatible with Tiled. Oh, and C2 can import layouts from GM, too. You can zoom in and out, show parallax settings in the editor, use a custom-sized grid (which can snap objects to it), change the Z-order of various objects, and so on.
- You can basically have any number of layers, each with their own settings, including parallax, opacity, effects, scale, background colour, and so on.
- C2 has dozens of 'objects', from regular sprites, to tiled backgrounds (an extremely efficiently-rendered object that tiles a single texture along its size), tilemaps (they act like any other object), particles, 9-patch, sprite-font, etc. There's also more global objects, such as input objects (mouse, keyboard, touch, gamepad, etc), AJAX, audio, arrays, XML, and so on.
- Like MMF2, C2 has in-built behaviors, ranging from movement types (platform, 8-direction, car, custom movement, rotate, sine, etc), physics, turret behavior, pathfinding, line-of-sight, wrap, fade, flashing, solids, jump-thru, and other cool stuff.
- With WebGL, you can apply any number of different types of effects to an object, and there's a lot of built-in effects.
- And, in javascript, people can make their own plugins - objects, behaviors and effects, such as the Spriter and Magicam plugins.
- The event-based system is inspired by MMF2, but it's built more like the logic of actual code. C2's event system has sub-events, loops, FOR loops, ELSE, OR, functions, object picking, groups and comments, among other things, while staying fairly readable, and individual events, conditions, actions and groups can be disabled.
- Construct 2 uses event sheets independent of layouts - layouts can have their own event sheets, but any event sheet can be used with any number of layouts, using an 'include' system, like actual coding. Basically, with your core gameplay events, for example, you can modify some events, and the changes will affect all the layouts that the event sheet is included in.
- Objects can have any number of variables. Seriously, no variable limits. They can be numbers, text, or boolean.
- Construct 2 uses 'families', which are basically the equivalent of object-oriented programming. Families share stuff like variables, behaviors and effects, and families can be referenced as a whole in events (for example, shooting an object in the 'enemy' family merely requires an event for just enemies, not individual events for every enemy). Objects can also have 'containers', which can be used to spawn multiple objects simultaneously - when an object with a container is spawned, everything in that container is spawned along with it, and the same goes for when that object is destroyed. Containers also can enable picking instances in an instance of a container group.
- Performance-wise, javascript does have its limits, but it's a rather optimized engine. I've heard GM and MMF2 aren't terribly optimized either, so, yeah. Not everyone will get great performance due to certain GPU drivers being a bitch, but as long as you have the latest graphics card drivers, it's fine, more often than not.
- Positional audio is supported. Yeah, that's a thing, not all browsers support it, but it's there. Unfortunately, as for audio formats, if you want to support Internet Explorer and Safari, you'll need to also have sound files in AAC format as well as OGG, which is rather dumb.
- Collisions are polygon-based, which is something of a necessary limit, but per-pixel collisions aren't exactly that much better anyway. On the bright side, you can display collision polygons in the layout editor, which is cool. There are also 'collision cells', which massively optimize collision checks (so only objects within an object's collision cell are checked), though you have to have collision events as top-level events in order to use collision cells.
- There is a full set of debugging features, including a debugger, break-points, and so on.
- The price for the standard edition is about the same as MMF2. But unlike GM or MMF2, you don't need to pay anything for additional export options - you can export everywhere right out of the box.
- Did I mention online multiplayer is going to be implemented over the next set of updates? Yeah. that's gonna be a thing.
Construct 2 isn't perfect, but aside from some minor plugins and maybe performance, it's pretty much better than its predecessor in every way, and much, much more stable. I loved Construct Classic, but holy shit it could be a buggy piece of shit. Construct 2 is well worth the asking price, not bad for a program whose development team basically consists of one dude and his brother from Britain.
Construct 2 doesn't have a Sonic engine yet, though (not for a lack of trying, it's just that the main attempt at doing so turned out to be incredibly inefficient, event-wise, and the way it's built makes it unable to take advantage of features such as collision cells), but hopefully that will change in the future, I've pretty much given up on trying, hence why I'm focusing on non-Sonic stuff for now, myself.
Game Maker
Okay, my thoughts on game maker (don't really need to elaborate on features, since it and MMF2 have been around for ages and widely-used) - it's not very good. The various design decisions are frankly, incredibly strange, the level editor is rather limited in what it can do last I checked, the built-in event system is garbage, and you need scripting to get anything done, which is not necessarily a bad thing for people who actually want to learn to code, but for people who don't want to deal with programming, that's kinda bullshit.
Multimedia Fusion 2
I consider MMF2 to be Construct 2's older cousin for multiple reasons, but what turned me off from MMF2 was its event system. Holy shit, compared to Construct's, it's almost incomprehensible for anyone who hasn't looked at it before. Granted, that might be slight hyperbole, but trying to study Sonic Worlds' events and figure out what exactly everything did and how the logic worked was just painful. Oh, and there's no 'include' feature for large groups of events, as far as I know, which a huge deal.
I imagine other people will have different tastes, however, so, yeah. What do you guys think?
-
2
-
Alright, going through that video right now, and it's a good opportunity to tweak some things for the newest build I'm uploading...
- You broke the VS menu. How did you do that? I'm actually impressed XD Also, there wasn't actually a 'back' button before, which was a slight oversight, it's now the escape key.
- The readme is in the zip files and has an online link in the game page. It's amazing how so many people don't bother to read it before they do anything xD A copy is now in each game folder just in case. Oh, and you can rebind the keys in the options menu.
- You actually came across a couple of bugs, including the 0 MP bug that didn't reset the regeneration if blocking is used when MP is 0, and a bug that basically renders you invincible in certain circumstances. I've fixed the ones I could replicate in the newest upload. So, yeah, don't be so reckless when engaging the enemy, anymore, because that'll just get you killed VERY quickly XD
- I've also thinned the hitboxes on some of the characters somewhat.
- You can actually drop down through the platforms by pressing down+jump. Which is in the readme as well XD Speaking of which, I've changed the platforms, the new setup looks nicer and easier to traverse, I think.
- Yeah, a few of the names/terms might be a bit confusing to those who don't know much about Digimon, but I tried to write things so it was fairly easy to infer what they were (Chrome Digizoid obviously being some kind of tough metal, etc).
- Oh, and you should probably check the dialogue menu regularly, because you can converse with Devimon while you're exploring and during his boss fight.
- The axe can be thrown, it's 'F' by default, if I recall correctly, it drains the blue meter, which doesn't regenerate.
- I know the placement of the 'fog' isn't exactly optimal. I'll probably tweak it considerably over time.
- I have been thinking of modifying the way the moment works, the way things work now is actually very much like how the original Battle Spirit worked. Probably should remove the slight delay on landing, at least. Oh, and there's a run button, by the way, it's shift by default.
So, yeah. I'm not sure if the Windows and Mac executables are properly updated, but they should have the bugfixes, at least.
-
So, as detailed on the SAGE page for Digimon: Heroic Battle Spirit, I'm looking for someone who can help me with art and animation for the game:
Well, what happens in the future is going to be a bit interesting. Right now, with this demo, I’m pretty much limited entirely to existing game assets (and not just from Digimon games) and open-source assets, which are both neat, but they have their limitations, and they can easily result in clashing/inconsistent art. Long story short, if I want to really complete this game as I envision it, I’ll need help. Aside from presenting a demo, I’m using SAGE as a platform to advertise for artists and other people who are interested in making this whole thing work.
Primarily, I’m looking for an artist(s), an optional plural, because I intend to redo as many assets from scratch as possible, from level art to character animations. The existing assets are great, but I don’t really want to be restricted to what there is right now, if I want to expand the gameplay, for example (the existing sprites were designed for a rather simple fighting game, let’s be honest), not to mention I want a consistent art style across the board, which is important. And I’d like to be able to have higher-quality art assets, which would be neat. Oh, and let’s not forget additional characters – Masaru Daimon/Marcus Damon was supposed to be the single-player main character, not Agumon!
What I’m mainly looking at for animation work is the program Spriter, by Brashmonkey. It’s tech that is similar to what is used in games like Rayman Origins/Legends, and anything Vannilaware’s done (Odin Sphere, Muramasa, Dragon’s Crown, etc), and when the tool is used properly, the results can look superb. As well, animations can be created and tweaked much more easily than traditional animation, scaled better, enables character customization, heavily reduces RAM usage, includes support for stuff like collision rectangles, and already has native Construct 2 support. I like traditional animation as much as anyone, but I’d like to save my time and my artist’s time when it comes to creating assets, animations, and iterating on them. If nothing else, Spriter is great for easily prototyping animations.
I'm not sure if any of you fellas would be remotely interested in working on a non-Sonic title, but it's worth a shot. With only existing game assets and open-source stuff to work with, and with me not being very good at art stuff, this is pretty much my only avenue for being able to have the game's art in a unified and consistent form. Plus, it would enable me to modify the gameplay and characters, and make new ones.
Right now, I'm looking at Spriter for doing character animations, mainly for practical reasons, including easy iteration of animations and less RAM usage, and a whole bunch of other cool features (hitboxes, character customization/skinning, animation blending, among others), and it has a native Construct 2 plugin (which is due for an update to bring it up to date with Spriter overall). Traditional animation is nice, but I do want to make it easier on myself and whoever's doing the animation work. Spriter also works well for effects and, say, menu animations, depending on how you use it. Oh, and it's cheap as hell right now.
Also, I would like someone to help out with music and sound effects, since I'd like some more original tunes and some Digimon remixes.
But, yeah. If anyone's interested in helping out, just drop me a line via PM or something.
-
Well, someone had to make a topic sooner or later, I guess I'll be the first.
Compared to some of the other titles at this year's show, this one is somewhat modest, and it's one of the few non-Sonic games, but I did what I could to make up for that. I hope you guys enjoy it. Hopefully there won't be too many issues...
It's also an opportunity for me to basically signpost a request for assistance on making assets (art, etc.) for this game, since I don't have much to work with. I'm not sweating it since I'm not getting my hopes up, but we'll see, I suppose.
-
So, a status update... I uploaded a couple of videos a few days ago, for starters, which I posted in the screenshots thread.
Also, Kazemon is now playable, and I've replaced the dialogue font with something more readable.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/Screenshots/Kazemon.png
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/919275/MultiPurposePlat/Screenshots/NewSpritefont.png
So, like I said in the text of the revised opening post, I will very likely need an artist to work with, not only for aesthetic reasons (establishing a consistent and higher-quality art style) but also for gameplay reasons. Hopefully SAGE will provide this project enough exposure for someone to be interested. I'm not getting my hopes up, but we'll see.
And I'd probably like a more original soundtrack, too. Maybe a mixture, there are amazing tracks out there I wouldn't mind slipping in here and there, though. But remixed versions of certain music from the various Digimon anime series past Tamers would be fantastic, too.
Digimon: Heroic Battle Spirit (New Demo!)
in Game Project Showcase
Posted · Edited by Candescence
DAH BOOTH.
Just note that the new demo has some awkward issues here and there, and trying to fix them has been utterly infuriating. I've only just updated the web player version with the last missing content, the desktop version will come a bit later. Most of these issues stem from the save system, try and avoid using it if you can, it's not that difficult to avoid dying anyway.
But, yeah, enjoy! I hope I didn't break the game too badly with the changes.