The "Sonic: Edge of Darkness" Thread

[Felik]

So that's how you do it. Yeah there's gotta be a simpler way of doing it that doesn't require 30 plus layers, especially if the game already has 5-10 layers to begin with.

Do be kind and let us know if it works please.

Well you still gotta have 10-15 parallax pieces for water

[StealthyMC]

Hello once again everyone! I recently finished Act 2 and the boss Act for Corrupted Canyon Zone and now I'm able to move on to newer levels. First actual screenshots of Antarctic Amethyst Zone (previous screens were just test levels):

 

 

 

 

I may or may not remove the snow effect, because right now it tends to make the game's fps dip into the 50's a couple of times out of randomness. 

[Stardust Gear]

@SuperBliz, Antartic Amethist Zone is Amazing.

I advise you to change the interior art, because it is a copy or the ground art, with darker hue.

Don't remove the snow effect. Just add a snow background with fixed speed.

 

A Good Zone List:

1. Shimmering Shores Zone
2. Corrupted Canyon Zone
3. Antarctic Amethyst Zone
4. Roulette Roadway Zone
5. Towering Treetops Zone
6. Riverbank Retreat Zone
7. Flooded Foundation Zone
8. Malicious Mineshaft Zone
9. Vehement Volcano Zone
10. Hurricane Heights Zone
11. Letivated Leviathan Zone
12. Supernova Satelite Zone
13. Armageddon Angel Zone
14. B.L.A.C.K Zone

You forgot to show Malicious Mineshaft Zone:

Taken from Sonic Retro, it is awesome design with the mix of Lava Reef and Underground.

Excellent Towering Treetops Zone Design:

 

Do not forget that every zone has 4 acts.

 

Nice Game!!!!

[StealthyMC]

@SuperBliz, Antartic Amethist Zone is Amazing.

I advise you to change the interior art, because it is a copy or the ground art, with darker hue.

Don't remove the snow effect. Just add a snow background with fixed speed.

 

A Good Zone List:

1. Shimmering Shores Zone
2. Corrupted Canyon Zone
3. Antarctic Amethyst Zone
4. Roulette Roadway Zone
5. Towering Treetops Zone
6. Riverbank Retreat Zone
7. Flooded Foundation Zone
8. Malicious Mineshaft Zone
9. Vehement Volcano Zone
10. Hurricane Heights Zone
11. Letivated Leviathan Zone
12. Supernova Satelite Zone
13. Armageddon Angel Zone
14. B.L.A.C.K Zone

You forgot to show Malicious Mineshaft Zone:

Taken from Sonic Retro, it is awesome design with the mix of Lava Reef and Underground.

Excellent Towering Treetops Zone Design:

 

Do not forget that every zone has 4 acts.

 

Nice Game!!!!

Thanks for your comments man. The original post for this topic is a bit outdated, as the Act count has been changed to three instead. Also those zones are supposed to be there, Delta just hasn't updated the first post in a VERY long time, since he's been busy lately.

 

And for the interior art, how do you go about "fixing" it? Delta probably isn't able to do anything about it at the moment, so I'll just have to take matters into my own hands for the time being.

 

What suggestions do you have? Advice from anyone would be great, since I'm not really much of a graphics designer.

[Highwire4]

I think what Stardust is attempting to say is that the foreground and background tiles look too similar and should have a little variation between them. It honestly just looks like a darken filter was slapped over the background tiles to make them fall back into space rather than manually adjusting the color pallet and shading to achieve this instead. There are a few ways to go about making the background fall back more into space and making the foreground more pronounced. You could change the pattern of the background tile completely to something less visually busy and change the color pallet to make it darker. You could also change the color pallet to accommodate a lesser number of shades than the foreground and adjust the shading accordingly which might actually be the quicker and easier option since its kind of like down grading a sprite. Every graphic in my indie game has to have a drastic lighting change and I've found that method to be the most effective and visually pleasing. Its up to you though.

As for the performance issue...Maybe change the snow fall tile to a larger size so the engine doesn't have to manage so many at once? Like from 32x32 to 128x128?

[StealthyMC]

I think what Stardust is attempting to say is that the foreground and background tiles look too similar and should have a little variation between them. It honestly just looks like a darken filter was slapped over the background tiles to make them fall back into space rather than manually adjusting the color pallet and shading to achieve this instead. There are a few ways to go about making the background fall back more into space and making the foreground more pronounced. You could change the pattern of the background tile completely to something less visually busy and change the color pallet to make it darker. You could also change the color pallet to accommodate a lesser number of shades than the foreground and adjust the shading accordingly which might actually be the quicker and easier option since its kind of like down grading a sprite. Every graphic in my indie game has to have a drastic lighting change and I've found that method to be the most effective and visually pleasing. Its up to you though.

As for the performance issue...Maybe change the snow fall tile to a larger size so the engine doesn't have to manage so many at once? Like from 32x32 to 128x128?

Well like I said earlier I'm not too experienced when it comes to graphics and all that, so how would I be able to "accommodate a lesser number of shades" in the graphic? Is this something I would have to do by hand or what?

 

If I can't figure that method out though then I guess I'll just switch to a different pattern and adjust the color pallet. It'd be great if someone could show me a tutorial or something to make the background and foreground share a smaller resemblance. 

 

For the snow issue, I honestly do not know why it slows down sometimes. Like it's very random when the game's fps takes a dip. My only real solution at the moment would be to lower the frequency of the snow particles being produced and reduce their lifespan. If someone has a better method of doing a snow effect, I'd like to know.

Edited May 11, 2014 by SuperBliz

[thevaleev]

I may or may not remove the snow effect, because right now it tends to make the game's fps dip into the 50's a couple of times out of randomness. 

I think I know why. Am I offered one good engine that helped you with effects, right? As I remember, this engine using particles to create a snow, and I think these particles just doesn't deactivating/destroying like tiles and objects.

Edited May 11, 2014 by thevaleev

[StealthyMC]

I think I know why. Am I offered one good engine that helped you with effects, right? As I remember, this engine using particles to create a snow, and I think these particles just doesn't deactivating/destroying like tiles and objects.

I'm not sure if that could be the issue, I think it lies with just too many particles being produced at once, causing the slowdown. 

 

It really sucks though, I like this snow effect, nice and simple :/

[Guest Mr Lange]

Valeev is saying the snow particles might not be removing themselves when they leave the screen or a certain boundary out of view. This is important to check and is a common cause of performance drops. It's very unhealthy to allow things like that to happen.

Also, Highwire's suggestion of reducing the snow by grouping snowflakes into larger images and simply spawning fewer of these images for a similar effect is a good idea.

Edited May 11, 2014 by Mr Lange

[StealthyMC]

Valeev is saying the snow particles might not be removing themselves when they leave the screen or a certain boundary out of view. This is important to check and is a common cause of performance drops. It's very unhealthy to allow things like that to happen.

Also, Highwire's suggestion of reducing the snow by grouping snowflakes into larger images and simply spawning fewer of these images for a similar effect is a good idea.

Well I managed to fix the issue, it was actually because of the lifespan of the snow particles. The lifespan was the main reason why the game slowed down out of nowhere.

 

It may look like I reduced it too much in this shot, but in-game the snow effect still looks pretty good:

 

 

All I had to do was change

part_type_life(snow,300,400)

to

part_type_life(snow,0,100)

No more slowdowns from this point.

Edited May 11, 2014 by SuperBliz

[Stardust Gear]

I see a wierd red rectangle on the ground.

[Guest Mr Lange]

I'm sure he sees it too lol.

Alright then glad it's fixed, that group trick is something to keep in mind.

[Highwire4]

Good to see the performance issue fixed. 

What I meant by 'accommodating lesser shades' I meant reducing the number of shades in the pallet. Sorry about that, I'm usually clearer with my suggestions. 

It would have to be done by hand, but I'm talking about something like this:

These are graphics from my indie game. The one on the left is how the door looks when the lights are off. The graphic on the right is how the door looks when the lights are on. Notice how different the shades and shading is between the two.

I went about making these by first creating the sprite on the right, which uses 3 shades for each color along with an outline color. I then downgraded the color pallet to two shades per color and altered the shading to make it have as dark of shadows as I could. I took the colors from the pallet and made them more like highlights for the object and used the outline color as the dominant color for the shadows. The outline color replaced many of the darker shades that were present in the sprite on the right and exaggerated the shadows more as well. You can get away with this kind of effect with changing the color pallet to 1 shade per color as well, but these sprites have 2 because they needed to stand out more. 

Does this help convey sufficient information?

If you still don't understand, go ahead and do the separate pattern option. Can't go wrong with that.

[StealthyMC]

Good to see the performance issue fixed. 

What I meant by 'accommodating lesser shades' I meant reducing the number of shades in the pallet. Sorry about that, I'm usually clearer with my suggestions. 

It would have to be done by hand, but I'm talking about something like this:

These are graphics from my indie game. The one on the left is how the door looks when the lights are off. The graphic on the right is how the door looks when the lights are on. Notice how different the shades and shading is between the two.

I went about making these by first creating the sprite on the right, which uses 3 shades for each color along with an outline color. I then downgraded the color pallet to two shades per color and altered the shading to make it have as dark of shadows as I could. I took the colors from the pallet and made them more like highlights for the object and used the outline color as the dominant color for the shadows. The outline color replaced many of the darker shades that were present in the sprite on the right and exaggerated the shadows more as well. You can get away with this kind of effect with changing the color pallet to 1 shade per color as well, but these sprites have 2 because they needed to stand out more. 

Does this help convey sufficient information?

If you still don't understand, go ahead and do the separate pattern option. Can't go wrong with that.

Okay so I tried out your suggestion and downgraded the pallet & toned down the detail in the tile:

 

 

It looks like complete ass because I only spent like 10 minutes on it and used Paint to do it because I don't know how to use other programs like GIMP and stuff. But am I on the right track or no?

[Highwire4]

Okay so I tried out your suggestion and downgraded the pallet & toned down the detail in the tile:

 

 

It looks like complete ass because I only spent like 10 minutes on it and used Paint to do it because I don't know how to use other programs like GIMP and stuff. But am I on the right track or no?

yeah thats moving in the right direction. It could use possibly a little less detail  or slightly darker colors to give it that extra push backwards into space, but that's already better than what was there before.

[StealthyMC]

yeah thats moving in the right direction. It could use possibly a little less detail  or slightly darker colors to give it that extra push backwards into space, but that's already better than what was there before.

Alright so to reduce the detail just combine colors that are similar to each other? And I'll try again but use darker colors.

 

What program do you suggest I do this in? Or is Paint fine?

[Highwire4]

Alright so to reduce the detail just combine colors that are similar to each other? And I'll try again but use darker colors.

 

What program do you suggest I do this in? Or is Paint fine?

Basically yeah. I sometimes will darken the pallet and subtract 1 shade from it and use the dakest shade of the new pallet to replace where the 2 darkest shades were on the old one, with some adjusting of course, but that should work fine for now.

I personally use two programs for spriting. The first is the image editor in MMF2 and the 2nd is a mac only program called Pixen which is like paint but with layers and animation capabilities.

[StealthyMC]

Basically yeah. I sometimes will darken the pallet and subtract 1 shade from it and use the dakest shade of the new pallet to replace where the 2 darkest shades were on the old one, with some adjusting of course, but that should work fine for now.

I personally use two programs for spriting. The first is the image editor in MMF2 and the 2nd is a mac only program called Pixen which is like paint but with layers and animation capabilities.

Alright so I tried using Game Maker's built-in editor this time around, and I got this:

 

 

Do I finally have it? Or does it need more detail reduction/darker colors?

Edited May 11, 2014 by SuperBliz

[Highwire4]

Alright so I tried using Game Maker's built-in editor this time around, and I got this:

 

 

Do I finally have it? Or does it need more detail reduction/darker colors?

I'd say you've got it. Looks great!

[StealthyMC]

Awesome! I had to darken it a little further because it kinda looked too similar to the foreground in terms of colors:

 

 

Hopefully this doesn't look too ridiculous. Thank you guys for your help!

Edited May 11, 2014 by SuperBliz

[Stardust Gear]

Falling Stalactites in Antarctic Amethyst are excellent, but the screen will look nicer if you add some objects.

Objetcts I should add:

• Ice spikes rather than normal spikes.
• Water
• Freezer Mobiles (like those if Icecap Zone)
• Amethyst rocks to break. (Antarctic Amethyst)
• Snowboarding (like the first mock-ups)
• Floors you slide on them. (like Diamond Dust)
• Snow piles that slow you down (Icecap act 2)
• Crushers
• As many Ice Cap Zone gimmicks as you want.

Add snow effect in the foreground?

I would like a background switch system with interior bg and exterior bg.

 

Awesome zone that freezes my heart.

[Highwire4]

EDIT: Basically I overreacted accidentally to something I thought wasn't okay but apparently was so whoops. Sorry man. Ignore and move on.

Edited May 12, 2014 by Highwire4

[Guest Mr Lange]

I fail to see this as an issue. It can easily be taken as a list of suggestions and I'm sure that's all he was doing, was writing a list of suggestions. Are they not suggestions just because he didn't write "Here are some suggestions"? I'm sure everyone here is smart enough to take these as suggestions and not do it just because he said it. No need to rake him over the coals for this. Suggestion lists are totally fair. That's kind of why the thread exists isn't it.

[Highwire4]

aww fuck. I really didn't mean to rip him a new one, and I guess I'm over reacting at this a little bit, so my bad on that. I dunno, something about still bugs me but I guess its really just me who is bugged by it. I dunno, coming in out of no where with a literal list of stuff you think should be in some guy's game and leaving it at that without any actual reason other than "because it should" just rubs me the wrong way. Like if you pulled that shit to me in real life I'd be a little miffed about it.

Anyway, I really don't want this discussion to get off topic from this so I'm taking this to PMs if it goes any further. My bad man. Carry on.

[Felik]

Awesome! I had to darken it a little further because it kinda looked too similar to the foreground in terms of colors:

 

 

Hopefully this doesn't look too ridiculous. Thank you guys for your help!

Looks good but it's like third fangame I know to use Ristar's snow level graphics with little to no modifications. Not that it's a bad thing per se but it certainly reduces it's originality.