Gamedev Lounge 0010

[puggsoy]

Well seeing as he called it a pixel art editor, I'd wager it's for editing pixel art.

[Mag]

@Yamcha/puggsoy - Pretty much, this project was originally started as a Voxel editor that would work similar to minecraft when placing voxels, but I decided to expand it to include pixel art as well.

Basically, the goal is to create a cross platform pixel/voxel art program for PC/Mac/Android/iOS/Win8/Win8Phone/HTML5 that will provide the user with the easiest, fastest, most professional means of doing pixel art, while at the same time, not compromising by making the other platforms lack features like you see with ports. Every platform will have the same exact experience, so it doesn't matter if you perfer using your mouse, or you want to do some rough work on your tablet to finish it on your PC, it's all going to work.

Some of the upcoming features:
- Full color control, edit in HSV, HSL, or RGB color formats, all in multiples of 255, just like in MS Paint and the Windows Default Color management tool. One of the most annoying part of getting a new program is that they're always using percentages, which make sense, but as pixel artists, you're used to the old format of 0-255. You can change it back to percentages though if you want to learn the new stuff. ;D

- Infinite zoom, you want a pixel to fill your entire screen? Go ahead!

- Pixel Precise brushes. You'll see exactly what your brush stroke will do before you press the left mouse button, letting you be ultra precise. You can also input your own brushes, have them be animated or colored, whatever you want!

- Layers, folders, and blend modes. No longer do the Photoshop artists get to have exclusive access to the burn/dodge brushes that are so popular with digital paintings, you can do them too!

- Animations similar to working with a game engine or Flash, with automated common effects. Want to make an animated pixel comic, with this, it'll be easy.

- Voxel mode, edit your pixel art in 3 glorious dimensions (kinda like Minecraft, but more for artists. )

I'll post an alpha thread as soon as I can get more of the bugs kinked out and finish up with features. That screenshot I posted was from an earlier build, now I'm disabling those buttonized sliders by default, and letting you choose if you want them or not. They look good and everything, but I want this program to be functional and beautiful, not just one sided.

[Gors]

I had a random game idea, I fear I'll sound like Peter Molydeux but here it goes:

You are a very famous thief in the city, and you can't wait to attack the next museum to steal all the goods! There are a lot of security guards protecting the loot, but fortunately you have some stealth skills and if needed, you can shoot them with your shock gun to paralyze them without great harm. The only downside? You are a human, and you can't carry everything inside your bag!

---

Basically, it's a mix of stealth game with puzzle elements. You control a thief inside an art museum to steal all the rare jewels, sculptures and paintings and leave the building from a predetermined exit in the shortest time possible for a lot of points. You get a star ranking depending on how well you completed the level.

The twist is, you cannot carry everything in your bag at once; only 5 may be inside the bag at a time. Also, like if that wasn't enough, some items are heavy, which makes your movement slower and with poorer reaction time. You can drop items at any time to make the bag lighter, regaining the speed. You can then recollect them at another time, adding a strategy factor. though, items left behind can be picked up by guards and carried to their original places, hindering your progress. Also, jumping from a high place or mishandling the bag may break and destroy your loot, lowering your score.

You can shoot enemies with a shock gun. It doesn't kill the guards, and they will regain their senses after a time. There are items you can pick up to help you in the way.

[Bombshell93]

for some reason it makes me thing of a per-step timed game, each step you take counting as 1 time and the weight mechanic would increase the time increment by 1 for each you carry. a lot of games neglect this sort of thing but its good for logic puzzles, allowing you to plan your path out so you could potentially perfect a level on your first try.

[puggsoy]

Not to mention if it timed you in real-time that would cause a lot of people to rush through levels and get as many things as quickly as possible, and just shoot down all the guards, removing the strategy factor. Like Pikmin for me.

I agree, if anyone makes this game try and make any "time" element depend on the player's actions and not a constant clock.

[Gors]

Easy, limit bullets to have a slow shooting ratio and being caught by guards is an instant death. Not to say you also could punish the player by giving them a poor score if he decides to use brute force too much. Or any of the mistakes punish you with a time reduction, etc.

logic time might work, too, but I am not a fan of it. I like when the variables are more directly related to your skill than steps you take; if I went by your idea, this would mean standing on the same spot would not decrease the time because it only decreases when you take a step or do an action. A constant time would entice the players to go as fast as they can. This game would be a balance between being fast, rewarding but really difficult and risky, or being cautious, slow and less rewarding.

Of course, this is still all in my head so I don't know which system would work the best. In theory, the game would look like this:



But I'm still thinking whether to make it a sidescroller or a top-down view.

[puggsoy]

Personally I'm just against a time limit since this is the main downside of Pikmin for me. I mean OK, 20 minutes per day is OK, but a limited number of days as well makes it a game where you feel that you need to spend every second of your time working to reach your goal. I think this would be even worse in your game because it seems like a real tactical and strategic game in which you would plan and time your moves. I'm visualizing the GBC version of MGS, which had no time limit most of the time (there may have been one or two rooms that had to be done quickly).

What would be good is a time-trial mode, which could reward you with some sort of unlocks (or just high scores), so that people can try to do it as quick as possible if they want. But in the main game I think it would be better if you let people not have to worry about finishing it as quick as possible. Or at the very least, don't let it matter how quickly you do it, just give a specific length of time you're allowed to take (e.g. you have 10 minutes, if you finish it in 1 you don't get more points than if you finish in 9).

This is personal opinion of course, personally I prefer not feeling too pressured. It isn't a bad thing necessarily, but this looks like a strategy/stealth game, which I wouldn't like to play under time pressure. Plus no time limit lets you experiment with different techniques or paths, which I always find cool.

As for view, I'd vote for top-down (again since I'm imagining MGS). Side-scrolling could be interesting if you do it properly though.

[Kami]

Random Fatal Glitches, Why.
This is what I sometimes dislike about coding networking support, Unreasonable glitches that happen when they are normal not supposed to happen.

[TheShyGuy]

Err i doubt its not your fault. Most of the time when i see someone post something like this, its their fault =/. Err not trying to troll..............................Maybe you should take a look at the documentation for w/e you're doing?

[Phaze]

Random Fatal Glitches, Why.
This is what I sometimes dislike about coding networking support, Unreasonable glitches that happen when they are normal not supposed to happen.

That's programmin' fer ya.

I'd recommend taking a break from trying to fix the problem for now. Just think about it for a day or three. A solution will prob'ly come to you.

What is the problem, anyway? Sync issues? Something else? Explaining might help.

[Bombshell93]

funny thing about programming, the big problems are always made by little mistakes! and the smallest mistake takes the longest to solve!
this may not be relevant to networking but in my engine I had a horrific saving glitch where when loading it would be out of sync with the file and break a loading loop, its bugged me for weeks! it was 1 unwanted if statement I'd forgotten to remove.
ofc by now I've got it hammered into to my head "its always the little things".

[Kami]

Random Fatal Glitches, Why.
This is what I sometimes dislike about coding networking support, Unreasonable glitches that happen when they are normal not supposed to happen.

That's programmin' fer ya.

I'd recommend taking a break from trying to fix the problem for now. Just think about it for a day or three. A solution will prob'ly come to you.

What is the problem, anyway? Sync issues? Something else? Explaining might help.

Well it seems my friends network crashed while some code was being executed that involved server data saving, and it screwed up the whole file by corrupting the dang thing, so I had to go back to my last backup and recode the last 50 or so lines of coding, and now I am going to have to make sure I add some extra protection with the data saving as it wasn't able to handle the excess unrecognisable data that came through. So I'm now going to have to add a sort of a "surge protector" to it. Yay... The plus is that I know about that loophole before I released a public test, and should be able to fix it befotre a release.

[Phaze]

funny thing about programming, the big problems are always made by little mistakes! and the smallest mistake takes the longest to solve!

Oh, what's that? You typed ">=" instead of ">"? Enjoy spending 9 hours looking for the bug

Well it seems my friends network crashed while some code was being executed that involved server data saving, and it screwed up the whole file by corrupting the dang thing

Aauughh. Terrible. We always take the little things for granted until something shows us how fragile it is. Not strictly coding related but I remember when the power got cut while I was running a game server.

The entire world became an unrecognizable mess. I didn't have a backup

[Mag]

Well, I've got a build of that Pixel Art Editor, and I could really use some testing to see how it does with various graphics cards. This Pixel Art editor was made with a game engine, so there's bound to be texture errors for some graphics cards that I'll have to stomp out.

Download (2 MB)

The only thing that works at the moment is just drawing with the pencil tool, as well as changing colors, but alpha isn't supported yet. You can zoom in and out, as well as resize the viewport. Let me know how it works if anyone gets the chance.

EDIT: Patched to include panning with the Middle Mouse Button.

[Mr. Jam]

pretty soon I'll have to take my simple mind, and learn advanced c programming to make a homebrew game for the ds

I still can't even make a working game yet


I'm not too bad with gamemaker, but it does a lot of the hard work for you like actually running the game...

although the games I currently have published on yoyogames are rather outdated and lazy...