Non-Named (More debugging)

[Pingus!]

Looks awesome! Can't wait to see it progress further!

[Filler]

Battle stuff has gotten to the point where basic menu movement is possible. Can't select stuff, yet.



The character sprite bobs up and down in a rather cheap fashion. The "background" is an object, so it can be replaced with other ones in a snap.

And yes, that's a sad chicken. Don't ask why.

[Filler]

Final battle menu revision before I throw this design out. As the GUI feels too confusing for me, and it would be worse for ones who played for the 1st time.



UPDATE: Redid GUI. Looks far less crowded, now.

[Gors]

a typo note, it's "Perform", not "Preform".

i'm not really sold on the slot idea as it feels like too much RNG going on. Though I'd have to see if it's fun to play with this system

[Filler]

Thanks! (I tend to mess up the positions of Rs on "form")

If it doesn't work at all, I'll be throwing it out for something more fun. Maybe you have challenges that are picked instead of gameplay elements? Giving the player a reward for playing good, rather than luck.

Anyhow, I found out how to adjust the things Non-player characters say based on scripted events without hassle, rather than always being the same. (For example, if a player entered a room, I could change what they say, or if you keep talking to them. Or if you do something in a battle). So now I can add a bit more flavour to stuff.

[Filler]

Enemy stuff testing. Everything here is pretty much in a VERY rough state (overworld enemies don't have walking animations other than left/right, transition is temporarily, and the enemy AI is pretty much "point at player direction, then move to it" with no real sense of logic and pathfinding. Also, note that I was able to move on the map transition, which is not intended)

Each enemy will have it's own encounter group inside it. (so when you fight a single chicken/whatever. Other enemies might be in there). Mostly to speed up the encounter animations. As with enemies themselves, they will have different movement speed and AI types depending on what they are.

When you're overleveled (when you're strong enough to eliminate the leader in a single turn), enemies will just stare at you, as you can "speak" to them to battle them, as in-battle, they'll just run away in fear on their turn.

Haven't worked on re-designing battle menu, as the text "NOT DONE" is there for placeholder reasons, like always.

[Filler]

Since OBS is being worthless trash (It kept rendering videos as black 3 second trash unless I compressed it), gifs now look horrible, and I'm so angry, that this might be my last gif of the game unless I know how to fix it.

Anyhow, got he enemy AI and such touched up. The most basic AI will do the following:

-Wander around the premises, and then chase the player if they get close

-Return to their main point if they get too far.

-They will always move the other way if they collide with a wall while randomly wandering.

[Filler]

Man, have I been working on this for awhile.

Anyhow, updated the game recently.

-Touched up menus, so they don't look weird and out-of-place as much as before. They're now also animated.



-Patched glitch when doing a frame perfect execution of going onto a ladder, and pausing at the same time. This caused the pause menu to appear glitched until pausing again.

-Enemy AI has been added, I didn't add the ability to switch to battles due to it's glitchy state. But it's FAR different (if not, more simple) than what I showed in the gif above. Just to reduce bugs and such.

-Chicken enemy has been added, here's a sprite sheet. Came out far nicer than I expected with such a small sprite size.



-Added collision debug can be enabled by pressing Page Up. Just shows some stuff related to how the game works. (This is actually a remain from the former project that shall not be talked about that I disabled. This is also a feature of the Stencyl Engine. Mock me for using it, if you want)



-Minor text, and menu box overlapping fixes.

-Text box graphics enhanced to match the updated pause menu GUI.

-Added variable text on NPCs based on context.

-Various sprite updates.

-Undocumented feature that I might as well add. Pressing O causes the game's speed to change. (This is to test frame-perfect tricks)

-Impossible on Flash, but the controls now auto-detect if a X-input device has been used, and it has a pre-set controller style that can be used. Has not been tested on 360, but XBone. Controls are:

* Left Stick/D-pad - move

* Right stick/ABXY and Start/L1 and L2 and L3 - Main actions.

This control style allows you to play with only the two controller sticks, making it quite a fast control style if your fingers are always griped to the sticks. You could also play with one hand using the D-pad and the 2 L triggers and the thumbstick button if you're in that mood.

Sorry if this took awhile, but I wanted to get things actually worth documenting. If this link doesn't work, I'll find a new host anyways. Flash link below. (Note: You might need to refresh the page if it fails to load, it can also take a bit, too)

Here

[Filler]

Not really an update related with the game, but I might as well mention.

I've decided that the original idea for this game's story I had was rather... rough. Not just rough. Horrible, horribly bare bones rough. In-fact: I barely planned much out with what I was doing.

So, this means that the story needs a MAJOR re-write to prevent what happened previously. To help cut down on creative thought, I'm going to keep some of the themes I had saved before that may have potential, but I need to mature out the barely-developed concepts and ideas into something worth writing and being interested about.

As with what I had before thinking of a story overhaul. It was a mess, everything was very isolated. And with this, there was no real build up to what I was doing. It was more-or-less a jumbled mess of ideas, clobbered about in such a way that any real event passed could be disposed of later on.

To make this more exciting, this was probably going to end up as two isolated, unrelated concepts being driven onto different train tracks that group up later. As when the two concepts mashed into whole story's structure, it's a cliche train crash. But this action would repeat thousands of times.

Due to this, I've made the "Video Game Story Writing Hierarchy". Something that looks like the dull, horrid work sheets you did early on in literacy classes during the education of your youth. Except the fact it goes over with how details should be arranged in a detailed, simplistic manner to prevent the issue of things being messy, and barely resembling a story with meaning.

This is meant to be used for any game. It's not perfect at all, but it's a step up from just doing something you made up on the spot, as it doesn't keep growing and growing into a butterfly effect that spirals out of control.

Below is a zip of the document in various common text formats.

(PS: I probably made some typos, as I wrote this with no for a whole day without sleep. I did proof-read and spellcheck it a couple times, though)


  Video Game Story Writing Hierarchy.zip (Size: 10.73 KB / Downloads: 146)

[Filler]

I think I've officially lost motivation to work on this game.

It was fun during the start, as I was fooling around and doing stuff. But my passion and interesting has been declining. I feel like I've hit a blockade no matter what I do.

[iyenal]

It doesn't matter, I often lost too motivation on a project, but after some weeks I come back.
Make something else, and you'll see. Maybe you worked too much about one thing.

[puggsoy]

This is an extremely common thing, happens to everyone. I would advise you to not cancel the project, but just put it in hold for a while. Maybe work on some other stuff. After you've had a break your motivation might come back.

Just want to say that the worst thing you can do is prematurely cancel it, you might regret it later on.

[Filler]

Thanks for the suggestions.

As with taking a break, I might do so. As I've been pretty stressed with some current events outside of being online as of lately, and I feel like I need to just have a week off from doing stuff and just relax.

[Filler]

Well, as of tomorrow (later on today). my break/hiatus is done, as I've had an odd burst of motivation to work on gamedev stuff again.

[Filler]

Been working slow, but I've been tackling up some minor issues that bugged me. While this happened, I made a to-do list.

---

Options menu:

• Add option menu pages to add some more options.
  
• Add a GUI position feature (Top, down, dynamic)
  
• Move the gamepad setup menu to it's own menu
  
• Add "quick battle" option (Speeds up in-game battle stuff by reducing reading needs and non-interactive time)
  
• Add an option to restart the controls to it's default settings
  
• Add keybinds
  

Animation:

• Customize able NPC animations
  
• Go overboard and add some idle animations to all playable characters/followers on all all 8 directions
  

Text:

• Allow text to be customize able when a NPC is talked to multiple times
  

NPCs:

• Allow NPCs to walk in the same manner as enemies
  
• Fix bugged NPC look mechanic
  
• Allow corner animations on NPCs when they "look" at player upon making contact
  

Menus:

• Start working on making other menus interactive
  

Enemies:

• Add customizeable enemy quirks to different enemies.
  

Game logic:

• Add lists to store items, enemy encounter data, and player/party data
  

Changes since last revision:

• Enemy's original spawn radius positions are now saved, meaning they'll return to their original positions, even after reloading a save.
  

As you can tell, it's quite a large list. And it'll slowly get larger and larger.