there was a time when the novelty of getting everything for free was a big deal, but I definitely think that the current culture of the indie games scene (and indeed a lot of other artistic scenes) has moved past that. people want to show their support. they ENJOY it, it makes them feel like part of the process, champions of their preferred art form, and that is important to them.. the insane success (and excess!) of kickstarter funding is vibrant proof of this. every day my twitter feed is assaulted by hundreds of my friends rallying around one new project or another. it means something real to them.
think of it this way: for a normal person who enjoys videogames, how else would you be able to influence what sort of games come out? they're not paying out of some sort of charity! they are paying because they enjoy it and want the developer to make more games, perhaps in that style or with that unique aesthetic. and fellow creatives want to celebrate their fellow developers successes as well, much like you would buy a friend or colleague a beer or cake for their birthday or some special occasion. as is evidenced by this thread, your friends want to take you out for a beer, let them
If that's the case, then that's amazing! I guess you're right in that the gaming world, especially the indie one, is very different today.
And if it's like you say, that people want to give money to the projects they enjoy, then I'd certainly enjoy recieving some of that money. If not for anything else, at least because it would be proof that people enjoyed my work
Still, I remember when I was a kid and me and my friends used to play games during lunch break - if you had to pay, or if there was any kind of hassle, we would simply treat that game as non-existent. We played only stuff like Liero, that you could download in less than a minute and be playing in less than two.
I don't know... In the end, I'm pretty much decided in that there will be a way to download and play the game for free. But if there are people who want to give me some money, there should definitely be some way for that to happen too.
James, you and I have been talking about this before, but I don't remember what we settled on? Donations?
Update 142 Made it possible to re-map the keyboard controls. The excitement! Still it's cool to see how these things are coming together. I could make my way through the menues with the mouse, change the controls for player 1, make my way back with those new controls, start up a custom game, hit esc, see how the menu reacted to player input, go back to the menu, etc. It's a flow of... working stuff, which seems awesome in comparison to the separate shards this project has been up until now.
James, you and I have been talking about this before, but I don't remember what we settled on? Donations?
i think we talked about it for a bit, but then got bored of talking about it, and were like "eh lets talk about this later", haha.
i think donationware is a really cool way to do it. i also like what hofmeier did for Cart Life, where there is a freeware version, then some bonus $ versions that include extras and memorabilia. that might be too much of a hassle, but i like the idea: http://www.richardhofmeier.com/cartlife/
basically im saying that because I want a rain world creature plushie doll
@Jubjub: Thanks! @James: Hehe I promise you, if this brings in enough money to make a stuffed toy, then we'll do it, even if it puts us back to 0! Plushie dolls always pay back tenfold, rule number 73 of capitalism.
Update 143 Work has totally flooded me these last couple of days, which is, for some strange reason, no only a bad thing. When you can't get the time to work on your own projects you tend to be thinking about them in the back of your head, and when you suddenly get that one hour of precious free time you make power progress
Yesterday's power progress included hooking players up to their controls, changing the input system so that hard-coded uglyness was taken out (at one point I just wrote "if keyPressed("K"), completely ignoring whatever controls the player had set up. Seriously.) and making it possible to activate and de-activate players for the custom game type. For the first time ever I spawned four players on a level:
(Player colors are subject to change, perhaps)
It seems to work. Then there are of course two different kinds of "work", one means "doesn't stop and throw error messages in your face" and the other means "plays well and is balanced enough to work as a game". The second of these I know nothing of at this point. But the lizards don't seem to be too confused, at least.
Next up is game pad support, which is going to be interesting as I'm in africa and I don't have a game pad. My idea is that I'll copy the code line by line from Block Towers, and then send a version to James to try out. We'll see how it goes. Worst case scenario I'll have to postpone the game pad stuff until I get home in two months.
I think the fact that I actually accept that the game will not be finished and released in eigth weeks time reflects some kind of new found maturity - the last year I've continuously been beliving that I'm in the last two weeks of development. Still, at this point it might be a reasonable estimation to say that the remaining devlopment is closer to two months than it is to a year.
Yeah, you're absolutley right, it shouldn't be too anime. I don't want it to look like a pikachu clone.
(Pikachu clones)
So this is what I did - 10 and 15 had a baby. Then I refined that some, and then I slanted the eyes. For the last one I changed the nose (good) and the jaw (not so good).
Still need to make it less anime... The creature in the game is not exactly cute, it has more of a strange, blank expression. If anything I want it to remind of a 1930's cartoon, I'd like it to have a tiny touch of this:
So... how can I make it less pikachu?
Hehe @Jubjub, I know that the artist should leave the interpretation to the audience, but this time... I'm sorry it has never been a mouth, it's a nose
Somehow, I have never seen this project until now. I just read through the first 18 pages + the last few, and I'm feeling a little blown away.
The effects look great, from the hanging chains and wires to the light bloom that you have in some pics. Gameplay of course looks amazing as everyone has pointed out, I love how the animation blends into the actual mechanics, which look very fun in their own right.
I think the decision to go with a hub world won't have as many downsides as you predict (or at least, predicted). Maybe the time of day and such won't be able to change, but by manipulating the tile set you can still get a feeling of progression - one area is more or less stony/industrialized/etc.
Also, I tried the runnMaze2 demo, but it seemed kind of glitchy. I couldn't figure out how to jump with either player (tried all the usual candidates), and with the brown character, movement was mapped to ESDF instead of WASD, which - if intentional - seems very, very unwise.
On a final side note, it turns out a game I've been working on for the past month-ish is very similar to this, with the notable exception that yours is far better. :/ Oh well, I guess it will give me some ideas on how to make my game, ie, avoiding the stuff you're already doing - I don't want to make a total ripoff.
edit: Jump is K/Q? Why...
Sorry about the unconventional choice of keys... When I made that thing I was too lazy to look up the key codes for stuff like shift and control, so I mapped all the controls to letter keys instead The actual game has customizable controls.
I know that the game is feeling a little bit hacky, and that's sadly just the consequence of me not being the best programmer and my software being old and limited. This game will be far from perfect, but I hope people will be able to look past the sometimes amateurish execution and appreciate the things I have accomplished and am proud of. To me just making a game is an accomplishment in itself, be it with glitches and hacks.
On the hub world stuff I've solved it in a strange way - there's an area in the middle of the map that's underground. Around it are different areas, with different sun/weather conditions. You can't pass from one area to another without passing through the underground area. That way different times of day/weather conditions can exist, but you never have the super-obvious thing where you go from one screen to the next and the weather changes, as the underground always works as a buffer. It's a stretch, I know, but I have high expectations on my audience's willing supspencion of disbelief
I wish you the best of luck on your project, and am much looking forward to seeing what you're up to. Will you be starting a devlog any time soon?
This is the most amazing thing I have ever seen, why have I not heard of it until today?! All the animations are so smooth and delicious!
By the way, I read way earlier in the thread that lizards do a sort of head vibrate with particle effects to indicate they heard something? If they still do that, why not make them cock their head up and listen,
?
That sounds way more readable.
Thank you! When it comes to the body language of lizards, I too would like for it to be subtle like that, and believe me, I'm the first one to get involved in tiny little details! However we're talking about very small sprites here, and when a player is moving around they're not currently looking at the lizards, but at their own avatar. I had to make what's going on in the lizards' heads more loud and obvious, why I added the particle effect. That said, a lizard that hears a sound will change the angle of its head and freeze for a moment before setting off to investigate.
Sorry, no. Not unless the game reaches a level of success where someone else re-codes the whole thing for xbox or something
Update 145 We now have a fully functional, and not too ugly-looking, options menu. You can set advanced graphics on and off, you can set the music and sound volume, you can change the screen resolution, and you can change the input for all four players. The icons for the buttons are not done, they should look like something sensible and not right pointing arrows. Speaking of which, can someone come up with a good symbol for "Define keys/joystick buttons"?
Except from defining keys you can also define the joystick input, which has its own screen which was a horror to create:
Here you can not only define the buttons, but also test them, so as to not have to start a game everytime you try to find out which is button 14.
In theory we have a working 4-player game with customizable joystick support. In practise I have no idea what we have, as I'm far away from home and don't have a joystick or three friends to try it.
btw this pink color looks a lot like white. and... it's pink! is this color option more or less set in stone? how about some other choice in it's place, like gray?
The pink was a temporary thing, but then it kind of stuck. But you're right, I might need to think twice about it. Gray is no good though, as the backgrounds are grey.
If you need any extra help, I've got 4 wired controllers and people to play it with.
Maybe... I'm always hesistant to sending the game to people I don't know, but your offer seems very tempting... However, James needs to check two things first: That it recieves Joystick input at all, and that it's possible to move the character with a joystick.
just emailed this to JLJac, but heck, since people are interested why not loop everyone in?
"Yessss, joypad/joystick works! Controls are a pretty fluffy (as you assumed, anything other than a direct up/down/left/right on the pad makes problems), but the stick moves the lil guy around and i was able to change buttons and such. Not bad considering you are doing it blind!"
also, he has a really impressive amount of customization for controls and sandbox mode. you can basically do... anything.
Yeah, sandbox mode is gonna be fun. It'll keep track of flies caught, eggs captured, lizards killed and so on, and just present the numbers without choosing an official winner - that way you can play with/against each other towards whatever goal you agree upon. It'll allow you to play on any map against any lizards, and you'll have full control over all the settings.
Update 146
Buttons:
And a little animation for the player:
This one is not going in the game, which is animated with programming, but is for the menu. The custom game screen has the four players standing at the bottom of the screen, and they can be clicked to switch between awake and sleeping to determine which players are in for the game. This is the transition animations between awake and sleeping.
In other news I moved the player colors from being hard coded in the player object to being defined in a list at startup. This means that they are now teoretically completely customizable, though I doubt I'll let people set them with RGB-parameters, liero style. Maybe you will be able to find a collectable in single player that unlocks new color choices? I don't like things like that too much as they're slightly out of canon - it's hard to tell whether they are actually supposed to be part of the world or if they're a gamey thing slapped on for the players. But it does add a little replayability.
I became a little bit tired of all the menu stuff and spent a few minutes adding a new object, a bait. Basically it's the same as a rock, except you can't throw it for damage and when it sits on the ground it attracts flies. It's funny how easy it is to add stuff like that compared to how annoying it is to just add a new button in the menu. The bait likely won't have a big role in the game at all, but maybe it'll be somewhere on the single player map just for fun.
— 
Still it's cool to see how these things are coming together. I could make my way through the menues with the mouse, change the controls for player 1, make my way back with those new controls, start up a custom game, hit esc, see how the menu reacted to player input, go back to the menu, etc. It's a flow of... working stuff, which seems awesome in comparison to the separate shards this project has been up until now.
The actual game has customizable controls.
