Candescence

Well, the various implementations need to be ironed out heavily, especially character stuff. I'm gonna try and iron that stuff out before SAGE. Anyhow! Some late stuff, but I've been a little preoccupied with other stuff *coughspelunkycough*. It's not that much, but... * Basic damage stuff done for the Digimon chars, no actual HP changes or whatnot, but... Yeah. Trying to work out how to make the collisions work is a slight pain. * Been adding onto the dialogue stuff. I've started using XML as a means of implementing the dialogue menu options and the script - easy to modify, and I don't have to hardcode every script addition into the events, since it's dynamic. The Context and General Actions menus aren't implemented yet, but that'll be easy enough. Now, in another bit of news, I've decided that, in its current form, I don't want to work on the Digimon RPG. It was kinda neat, but now, As much as I really want to restart work on the project (especially since I decided that it would be better to use objects and XML rather than arrays to organize a lot of things, which would likely make things a lot simpler), a top-down turn-based RPG is infuriatingly incompatible with my current philosophy for video game narratives - less cutscenes (as little as possible, even), more narrative presented in gameplay. Turn-based RPGs are great, don't get me wrong (I should know, my most favorite RPG of all time is Chrono Trigger), but I can't really see a Digimon World DS-style game really working with my philosophy. As a result, I want to make an action RPG, but that would likely involve going one step further and making it 3D, since it would be far easier to make a 3D Digimon real-time RPG than a 2D one, due to a ton of models already existing, it's just a matter of animating them, which is also much easier than creating 2D animations from scratch. Of course, in order to pull it off, I'd need to work with someone else, and figure out programming in a 3D game engine - Unity would be easier, I think, and Mechanim would make doing basic/prototype animations much easier, possibly.

Firstly, I'll definitely say that it's quite an excellent game, it's got a fantastic atmosphere, great soundtrack, and it's enjoyable when mainly going from A to B like normal Sonic games. However, I do have my issues with it, especially with the way the more open exploration setup is designed. * Moving around while attacking with the sword feels incredibly stiff, after being used to the tight, fluid movement of Freedom Planet, it just feels jarring. * The 'Metroidvanic' part of the game doesn't feel so well-designed, backtracking feels like a major chore and there's no indicator of whether you're missing any collectibles in a specific area or not. It's certainly curbed my enthusiasm for collecting stuff. Also, the actual level design suffers from the same problem as Sonic CD in which it doesn't feel very conductive for exploring for hidden stuff. * Some mechanics can be slightly obtuse, such as bouncing on two of those 'energy sphere' bouncy things to launch you even higher. * The last power-up feels kinda useless aside from taking out its particular obstacle and the bonus boss.

So, this is a thing I've been working on lately, as part of an effort to build up a mutiplayer platform engine in Construct 2, as well as experimenting with new methods of conveying narrative that don't rely on non-interactivity. I've released a demo for SAGE, with a single-player demo and a multiplayer mode capable of supporting up to four players. As a Construct 2 game, the demo will be playable in all HTML5/WebGL-capable browsers. But, thanks to the power of Node-Webkit, there are also Windows, Mac and Linux executables if you prefer that. Screenshots: Work in progress, obviously, just to note. Overiew Digimon: Heroic Battle Spirit, made in Construct 2, is a fan-made 'expansion' on the three Digimon: Battle Spirit fighting games for the Wonderswan/GBA made by Dimps, one of which, Battle Spirit 1.5, never left Japan. The idea is to include nearly every existing playable character from the first two games at least, hopefully add more fighters from more recent Digimon series (Digimon Savers/Data Squad and Digimon Xros Wars/Fusion) , enable four-player multiplayer, and include a special Metroidvania-like story mode with innovative narrative mechanics that attempt to do away with the need for cutscenes in most cases. The demo is an attempt to demonstrate a basic idea of the direction being taken for both single-player and multiplayer. It's not exactly 'polished', nor 'balanced', but very much playable. Playable Characters In the demo, there are three playable Digimon - Agumon, Gabumon, Renamon and Kazemon, each with unique movesets. Okay, that's not quite true - there's a fourth character, but he's not a Digimon - a special guest fighter for the demo. And since SAGE has passed, it's Sonic. Story Mode Synopsis The first thing you remember is waking up in a cell in a dungeon. You manage to escape, but you find yourself in a castle filled with strange machines you've never seen before that are hostile to your presence. And to make it worse, there's no way out... Without treading a lot of water. And you sincerely doubt you can swim that far. An exploration of the castle finds you battling an old enemy, but even he is subservient to a greater power. Without your partner, you're left alone trying to figure out how to escape the castle, where he and your friends have gone, and who imprisoned you in the first place... Open-ended environments inspired by the likes of Metroid and its many imitators. Multiple characters with different abilities. Sub-weapons that augment your character's fighting abilites. A 'narrative button' that provides dialogue options ala Mass Effect, but in real-time, with an adjustable slow-down effect. A 'look' mechanic reminiscent of old-school adventure games. An adjustable, zoomable camera system that accommodates any number of screen resolutions. A 'fog of war' system that hides unexplored areas, and fogs explored but unoccupied areas. Beware, not all boss enemies will be content to sit around and let you walk up to their doorstep, and some may start hunting you on their own volition... Possible extra for later on: 4-player co-op. Multiplayer Fully-featured classic Battle Spirit gameplay, now with 4 players! (In the future, depending on what happens with Steam Controllers and online multiplayer support in Construct 2, up to 16 players might be supported.) Dynamic camera system that keeps every combatant on-screen. SAGE 2014 Act 1 Demo Download Readme (Please read!) Web Player (Web HTML5, no plugins needed, Chrome or Firefox absolutely reccomended) Executable Download Windows Mac Linux (32 Bit, 64 Bit) What about the future? 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. 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. 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. Also, some of you might be wondering what happened to that Digimon World project from a while back, if you remember it (both demos were kinda crappy, to be honest, but still). Well, it's mostly been scrapped. Changes to my outlook/philosophy on game development and where games need to advance has made the idea of making a turn-based RPG a lot less appealing to me. I like playing some of those, but for the most part, the genre isn't really compatible with what I want to do with the medium. Now, making an action RPG is a whole different story, but it would be incredibly impractical in 2D with Digimon, so in order to make a 3D game, I'd need to brush up on working in something like Unity, and recruit someone who can actually model and animate stuff, and that's not an easy task. But the idea of a 3D Digimon action-RPG is certainly exciting to me, and it's something I'd love to do. Still, we'll cross that bridge when we get to it. Enjoy the demo!

Actually, the tilemap plugin does support collision polygons for individual tiles, so there's there. And to be fair, last I checked, MMF2 doesn't have tilemap support, period

Alright, here's what I've got when trying to tweak the engine: 1. The timescale has been set to 1, because the old way it worked, for some bizarre reason, doesn't stay constant. The movement works slightly better as a result. 2. The pre-movement function calls are entirely unnecessary. Now, removing both the pre- and post- movement function calls pretty much sorta breaks the movement, but removing just one set seems to have no negative effects, making the whole thing slightly more efficient. 3. Now, you'd think just having one set of calls for Player.Reposition and Player.Collision once every frame would be fine, right? So just removing those calls from the main movement group would be fine, right? Nope! The whole thing crashes upon startup if those calls are removed. I'm serious. By all rights, it shouldn't be capable of doing that. You'd think it would simply cause the movement engine to spazz out or something, but instead, it crashed! It would be impressive it were not so frustrating. I'm pretty much calling this engine a lost cause at this point, point no. 3 just makes it seem fundamentally broken. I'm likely going to have to explore new avenues at this point.

Yes, I have been working on stuff in Construct 2 as of late, unfortunately, none of that is Sonic-related, because I've pretty much hit my wit's end when it comes to making any kind of proper Sonic engine really work in C2. My most successful attempt (for reference, the .capx (requires C2 build 151 or later), and an online WIP demonstration) has mainly hit a major snag - performance issues. Oh, the engine works - mostly. But according to C2's debugger (which is wonderful, by the way) the movement routines are taking up an absurd amount of C2 time. This, obviously, isn't ideal. So, at this point, as far as getting any kind of Sonic engine done is concerned, I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place, and any kind of solution (whether it be using a physics-based recreation, a custom plugin, redoing the whole thing from scratch, or figuring out how to optimize what I've already got) will likely involve someone who is far more qualified for this this than I am, because I've come to the conclusion that I'm no good at this Sonic engine stuff at this point.

Call Of Duty: Ghosts is also a boring, boring game that looks boring. Not a good example. And the Hedgehog Engine, quite frankly, is one seriously unoptimized piece of crap, most modern engines these days can do everything it does and do it more efficiently. Not that it really matters. Lost World is still a gorgeous game, not every game has to be packed with minute details - Super Mario 3D World is more visually impressive than most 'next-gen' games, for pete's sake, due to its brilliant art direction.

From what I can tell, one of Lost World's problems is that it suffers from what seems to be Sonic Team's irrational paranoia that a single 'core gameplay' will cause players to get bored partway through the game, regardless of how varied you make level design and enemies. It's been happening since the original Sonic Adventure in some shape or form, with the exception of, surprisingly, the Storybook titles, which were were actually consistent with their core gameplay. After 06, when Iizuka started his idiotic 'Sonic only' thing from misinterpreting the fans who wanted an end to this bullshit, we got the Werehog in Unleashed, the Wisps in Colours (though at least they were integrated into the core gameplay as 'powerups') and Classic Sonic in Generations (who was tolerable by virtue of being way more fun than Modern Sonic), continuing their obsession with gameplay roulette via Sonic himself rather than other characters. In this case, it comes in the form of overly gimmicky levels that override the core gameplay in favor of something 'different'. Sonic Team really need to get their heads out of their asses and focus on making the parkour gameplay work with momentum-based mechanics. They had the right idea with the speed tiers and the parkour, but they completely missed a fantastic opportunity.

Well, I'm not an art guy, most of the stuff I'm working with is open-source and mainly placeholder. But still, I put in a bit of work to set up sprite-fonts for Romulus and Alagard with a slight drop shadow effect, and holy crap, Romulus is a huge improvement. I'll use Alagard in places where 'gothic' text would be suitable, but Romulus will be my go-to text for most things for the time being. The spacing isn't perfect, but it's placeholder, so eh. Edit: The spacing in the middle text objects has been tightened up a bit to make them consistent with the others, but I haven't screenshotted it.

Pretty much all the visual elements are placeholders. Could be worse, really, most small fonts just looks terrible. Might try Romulus and Alagard instead, they look swell and still look very readable.

Just a quickie, managed to pretty much fully implement completely custom controls in my engine:

Fun fact: the purpose of copyright has literally nothing to do with ensuring that authors/creators get paid for their creations, which is actually a means to an end. The purpose of copyright is to advance the sciences and the useful arts - in other words, to benefit the public. Seriously, it's right there in the united states constitution. Thankfully, the notion of copyright reform has entered the minds of congress, thanks to one Derek Khanna, who used to work for the Republican Study Committee, who published a policy brief written by him on copyright reform, which went as far to say that copyright violates nearly every tenant of laissez faire capitalism, and makes several suggestions for copyright reform, including expanding fair use to and dramatically limiting copyright terms to a maximum of 46 years, with copyright terms over 12 years being taxed. Unfortunately, the Republicans demonstrated how much of a fucking joke they are when the RSC withdrew the brief after the US Chamber of Commerce and media lobbyists complained, and later fired Khanna, who is still active in trying to make copyright reform happen. There are hearings on reform, but so far most of the people involved are looking at it with the completely wrong mindset, which is worrying.

Haha, I'm not gonna go that far, not tonight (I need sleep), but I've pretty much dropped Classic in favour of C2 mainly because the latter isn't a buggy mess (C2 is usually pretty stable even with beta builds, and rather notable bugs get fixed in a day or so, Scirra themselves have admitted that Classic's core coding is kinda janky, partly why they started from scratch for C2), C2 has almost caught up with it feature-wise and introduced other cool features I couldn't imagine working without (they just need to implement debugging and we're good to go, which they're actually planning to do soon), multiplatform on both desktop and web, and Scirra updates with new features and bug-fixes every week (though they haven't released a new beta in 2 weeks, which implies that they've been working on something big and important). Are you going to get as good performance as you would in a Classic runtime? Maybe not, but it's pretty damn close in WebGL, and it's more than enough for a 2D game on a PC. You'll also get way more value for money than you would for MMF2 and Game Maker, that's for sure (oh, hey, multiplatform and web export all in one package, what do ya know). Classic is pretty much stone dead, nobody's updated it in a year. Though if you want a Sonic engine on C2, you'd have to do it yourself, I've pretty much given up on it, currently working on my own stuff.

The artists here will probably be more interested in this than the non-art people, but I think this is pretty cool. Over at PixelJoint.com, a colour genius has devised some fascinating open-source palettes for pixel-based art. Sometimes, limitations are the boon of creativity. Long story short, the pixel artists may get a kick out of this. The 16-Colour Palette: The 32-Colour Palette:

PAX Australia, to be specific, in Melbourne. That's where SEGA are showing off the new Lost World demo.

I love how you guys are dismissing the show on the very premise alone. Any premise can work, if the people involved do it right. The Social Network, a movie focused entirely around the founding of Facebook, could've been, by all rights, a boring as fuck movie, but it's a masterpiece. Likewise, MLP: FiP earned its fanbase through great writing and characters. Tuah pretty much nails it on the head, really.

And "outrageous" basically means in this context, "GROWN MEN LIKING A SHOW FOR GIRLS?! ABOUT MAGICAL TALKING PONIES?! THIS CANNOT BE!" Amazing what good writing and well-developed characters does for a show, really. And it doesn't seem to be the latest show to completely subvert normal expectations for a western cartoon of its type - anyone seen SheZow? Moviebob did an episode of The Big Picture about it, it's basically about a male pre-teen who inherits the secret identity and superpowers of his aunt, in the form of SheZow... Who is traditionally a female superhero, complete with an extremely feminine costume and gear. The whole thing is practically a piss-take of female superheroes in general and how many of their standard traits are really kinda lame, among other things, but somehow it caused an uproar among anti-LGBT groups even though it actually doesn't address any issues of transsexualism or homosexuality whatsoever. Oh, and it ALSO just happens to be on the Hub (though it's actually an Australian import, now I can feel proud of my own countrymen for taking on such a ballsy concept).

For the record, the stuff this guy has actually done for MLP has gotten a rather mixed reception, his writing is considered rather middle of the road as far as the writers for that show have been, nothing terrible, but nothing amazing, either. Long story short, using his work on MLP as a positive example isn't exactly great when he's considered to be a somewhat debatable writer by that show's standards, and the fanbase doesn't have low standards by any stretch. So, yeah, it's best to wait and see if this'll actually be good or another trainwreck like Sonic X. Edit: And just to note, I do understand that the fanbase for MLP itself isn't exactly the greatest (no fanbase is, really) and some fans can be just plain obnoxious about it, but the show itself really hasn't committed any 'crime' other than being probably the only western girls cartoon that can be enjoyed by people outside of its primary demographic, by virtue of being genuinely entertaining for the right reasons, an art the Japanese have already long mastered. It's hardly the most amazing thing ever, but considering a show of its kind is such a rarity these days, it's not really surprising that it's built up the fanbase it has built, and I've seen some pretty amazing stuff come out of the fanbase, so, yeah.

Just a quickie with Gabumon.

I kinda agree with DW on this one. This particular style seems very suited to providing a more beefy game. The problem with Unleashed, Colours and Generations is that those massive fucking setpieces seriously restricted the amount of content that could actually be provided. Generations is criminally short, and doesn't offer much replay value. Also, according to previews, the boost seems to be gone, and Sonic now has manual 'run' and 'roll' buttons on the triggers, enabling the player to better control Sonic's speed, enabling the parkour stuff, and other things. Honestly, I think this is great, they're moving away from the shallow formula that Unleashed set up and towards something far more flexible and much more conductive to gameplay that doesn't involve turning Sonic into a race car, so to speak. Yes, it looks very Galaxy-inspired, but considering I love both Galaxies to bits, this isn't exactly an issue for me. Consider me cautiously optimistic, and I hope we'll get a demo on the eShop come E3.

An update on my Digimon platformer, now that I have a slight reprieve from uni assignments: Renamon is more or less fully functional (though the lack of a unified animation base makes it harder to properly animate her right), and I've also implemented a character select similar to Battle Spirit (the thing in the middle is supposed to flicker). It should be easy to implement other characters, the arduous part is getting all the individual sprite images ready. Also, I added a border much like in the GBA version of Battle Spirit, which I think is a neat touch. It can be resized, too, which is handy.

My personal take is that the only reason they're using 2.5D is because the 3D gameplay simply doesn't stand up on its own two feet, and Sonic Team knows it. The 'Modern' style of gameplay is mostly inherently shallow and is a dead-end design wise. 'Classic' gameplay in 3D is certainly workable. You just need to give Sonic tight control and adjust his acceleration so he doesn't go zooming off all over the place.

I'll probably continue the RPG in some fashion later, once tilemaps are implemented in Construct 2. Recently full-on save states were implemented, which makes saving and loading damn near everything in an RPG utterly trivial, which is pretty exciting, really.