JLJac on August 26, 2013, 05:04:46 AM:

Yeah, I share your concerns. It seems like the game could be very mechanical and monotonous if you just speared the lizards one by one and then caught flies in peace and quiet. There's no need however to worry about the respawn rate of spears, because they don't respawn at all. Once you've used it you have to retrieve it or go get another one.

The respawn stuff is interesting, and it made me think. I don't really want a megaman style respawn room, because I want to restrict respawning and saving the game world to the hibernation sequence. If I had a respawn like that I couldn't really save the game world, because if you went out again and "deactivated" the room as you describe, there would be trouble. Would objects you've moved inside the room still be moved? Would the room be tagged as visited? Also, as I have a timer ticking when the player moves about, it couldn't really save the game every now or then or the player could get stuck with an impossible save. I could have two different save systems, so you could revert back to the start of the mission, but I prefer to keep it simple and I don't want interacting with menues to be a part of the play experience.

However, I can see two possible adaptions of the idea to fit my game. One could be that there could be shortcuts, perhaps one-way routes, to many parts of the map. That way you could very quickly get to most places, but you'd still have to worry a little bit about going back. The other one is that there could be many different shelters, perhaps one per general area. That could also be interesting because it would save the extra flies you've caught separately. So, for example, you might have 4 spare flies in one shelter and only 1 in another. Whether you survive or not depends on which shelter you go to.

jamesprimate on August 26, 2013, 12:19:08 PM:

i reallly really really like the idea of shelters. i think that would add a continuity element. at least for me as i always get absolutely brutalized by the rain







DAWWWWWWWWWW thanks guys

JLJac on August 27, 2013, 12:46:35 AM:

Hehe I don't really understand how you get killed by the rain, I myself always get eaten... In either case, it would be a lot easier if you were able to shelter in a few different places. Maybe there could be passages of very difficult platforming between those places though... 

Update 164
When the lizards mapped their accessable areas at the start of a level they would take their time, making a single frame that could be seconds long. That would make the music hiccup, which wasn't really making James' work justice. Now I've divided the area mapping over several frames. This increases the loading time for each level slightly, but gives the music a frame update now and then as a reassurance that the game is still running and the music should continue. From what I've seen the music is playing smoothly now.

JLJac on September 01, 2013, 01:45:04 AM:

This is why I'm hesistant. The system suggests a large world, and I want to keep the world rather small, in order to ever relaese it.


Update 165


A slight rainbow coloring, to make it look a little oily-like.

JLJac on September 02, 2013, 12:00:23 AM (Last Edit: September 02, 2013, 04:17:50 AM):

Hehehe it makes you smell smells!? That's awesome, especially since the smells seem to be just right :D


Update 166
Complete makeover of the world map. It's now 7*8 screens big, and contains 3 different save spots...



I'm never finishing this thing am I? 

EDIT: New world seems to work. A few screens make the game crash, and there's one that makes it lag, but over all the structure seems solid enough. Now I need to make a major re-write for the "return to base" functionality, in order to make it work with multiple shelters.

JLJac on September 03, 2013, 12:37:28 PM:

Pew... that puts us at 1 more year... Hope it'll go quicker!

Update 167
Started the transition to the new shelter system, with graphical representations and saving/loading and whatnot. Also, there was an effect on some screens where the sunlight would fade back and forth as if clouds were passing by. When moving between levels this clouds value would reset. Now it's universal, meaning that the sunlight can start to fade out when you're at one screen, and continue when you enter another.

JLJac on September 04, 2013, 03:19:58 AM:

Update 168
Somewhere half-way through the multiple shelters switch. We now have many different shelters, which saves excess flies separately. But we also have some issues, and some unfinished stuff. For example it's unable to start a game without you returning to the menu, it doesn't remember which shelter you saved in, there's a ton of cosmetic stuff and so on and so on. Progress, though.

JLJac on September 04, 2013, 12:11:53 PM:

His stomach was another himself. It's fixed now, but it was probably unpleasant...

jamesprimate on September 04, 2013, 09:11:44 PM:

 

JLJac on September 05, 2013, 02:13:37 AM:

Update 169
Multiple shelters system up and running - functionality wise at least, all the cosmetics aren't done yet. For example the shelters should probably have some kind of animated doors that close, and a more refined look.



What you see up top is the calendar. It shows all the days, white days are the ones where the rain stops and you can go out and play. You need at least one fly per day until the next hunting day in order to survive.

White flies are excess flies that are stored in this particular shelter. Grey flies are the ones you're carrying in your stomach.

What the gif shows is: The player enters a shelter. There are already 2 flies stored in this shelter. The player has 3 flies in his stomach. The days go by, and we reach the next hunt. Now this shelter has 1 fly in storage, the excess from the last hunt.

And yes, it's pretty much official that he's throwing the flies up on the floor in order to store them. Go check some biology documentaries, animals do stuff like that 

jamesprimate on September 05, 2013, 08:58:12 PM:

i. love. everything about this. especially the little curling up move, SO CUTE!!! and the regurgitation.

JLJac on September 06, 2013, 07:44:42 AM:

@Artemi, yeah, I think there should be a very violent but muted sound when you're sleeping. There should be a door, which I guess should go into the same category as all the other architecture - it's built by unknown creatures that aren't present any more (it's obviously not the bear creatures, as they are not capable of language. Which I imagine is a must in order to build this kind of stuff). I won't make it a cutscene though, I'll keep the door in-game. Oh, and don't worry about posting, I'm just happy to be reminded that people read this
@James thanks! I'll send you a build asap so you can try it out. Also, do you have anything in mind for the above mentioned rain pounding on the suface above sound? Maybe the same as the current rain sound but with the discant cut out? And thanks for teaching me the word "regurgitation". That's what I needed in my life.

Take a look at the save room. The central chamber is the shelter. To the sides of it you can see the slots where the doors will go. The tanks outside I plan to give an animation where they fill up with extremely high-pressure, turbulent water, in order to give a sense of the intensity of the rain outside. That stuff should probably have a sound as well...

Update 170
This morning I recieved some sweet lizard growls from James, which I've been fighting to implement. It has been troublesome though, for some reason I'm not able to make the magic happen. It's like, you see the lizard open its mouth, and you hear the sound, but it doesn't feel like the lizard is emitting it. I don't quite know what to do about this.

One idea I had was to open the sounds in some software that draws them as graphs. Then I could screenshot those graphs and put them into the game, and make the lizards read the graph as they're growling. Then I could map the openness of the jaw to the latitude on the graph, and hopefully have it look more coordinated. That's a huge big thing to do though, which might or might not solve the problem and which has many opportunities to go wrong. Hm... I'll keep thinking.

JLJac on September 06, 2013, 11:29:28 PM:

@megaboy Certainly, sir. The very little I've seen of your pixels I really like. What do you have in mind?
@Ninja Dodo yeah, that might be it... I've managed to getting it to look a bit better. I'll check out the muppets.
@artemi I always hesitate to animate stuff that's not actually visible... I don't like it when games make bright sprites flow everywhere even for stuff that shouldn't look like that. Like the bees being yellow lines of glowing plasma in bioshock and stuff like that. It feels like they think you're stupid, like LOOKATIT! My game on the other hand is too far to the other side, there's a lot of guesswork, the levels are hard to read etc. So I try to keep the ugly sprites to things I posetivley have to have, such as items blinking when they're in range to pick up. But I could maybe make som slime particles fly out of their mouths...

Update 171
Made the growling look a bit better, and implemented it more completely. The lizards now react by growling to a number of situations, such as when spawning, when spotting a player, when damaged, when injured, and sometimes when bored. The system adapts the growls so that they're modyfied depending on the situation - some growls are short, some are low, some are intense and so on. Different types of lizards also have different growl patterns, which weaves into the different growls system. For example the white lizard is supposed to be the sneaky one, and as such tends to keep more quiet. The blue one, which hates taking shortcuts, will give a growl of frustration upon exiting one. The red one will mostly be quiet, but when it growls it's a big growl. Etc etc.

A positive development is that the growling seems to have made the game a little easier. For two reasons. It occupies the lizards a little bit, they move slower when growling. Previously they meant business, they would just hunt you like cold killers. Now they sometimes stop to express some emotion, which might give you a split second to jump out of the way. The other reason is the factor of communication - this seems to have improved it as a game in general. The growling makes you more aware of what's going on in their heads and where they are on the level. When they spawn they make a sound. When they spot you they make a sound. This seems to somewhat increase the player's understanding on what's going on, which decreases fake difficulty. Now you more often tend to die because you messed up, not because you didn't have enough information about what lizard were where and doing what.

Don't be alarmed though - you still die a lot.

jamesprimate on September 07, 2013, 11:24:02 PM:

ahahah 

this SFX system sounds absolutely amazing! it is exactly what I was dreaming about when playing with all those growls!

I have been thinking about your idea to graphically map the sound waves and match them to the lizard jaw movement, and if you still want to do that I think I can do a large part of that work fairly easily (if somewhat tediously). its at least worth trying  out with a few and seeing how it looks! let me know if there are any specifications you would need these "maps" to adhere to and I'll get on it (I'll email you about it too, just happen to be here now and thinking about it)

also, you've probably already thought of this, but a simple thing to increase the localization of the sound would be to have the position of the lizard/whatever be attached to the sounds position in the stereo field. it might work even better with the sounds in mono (rather than the tight stereo versions I gave you).

JLJac on September 08, 2013, 02:56:59 AM:

@ James - I'll be sending you an email, with a new version included.

Update 172
Implemented the sound wave readign system I mentioned yesterday. I open the sound files in soundbooth, make screen captures, and create 300*80px monochrome images of the sounds. A script then goes through all of those images, and creates a 300*1px image with 16 bit colors. Depending on the height of the wave in the previously mentioned image the corresponding pixel on the very thin image is given a color between (0, 0, 0) and (255, 0, 0) where the amount of red represents the volume. A looooot of manual work...

When the lizards growl, they keep track of where in their sample they are, and read the corresponding pixel color on the volumeMap, as I call the thin images. The redder the pixel, the more open jaw, the brighter the color of the head, and the more shaky motion.



It looks a lot better, at least to me. The problem is that the system is not very dynamic, if James decides he wants to modify the sounds I'll have to sit through the entire process of screen capturing etc again - and there's a lot of room for errors to occur.

JLJac on September 09, 2013, 01:15:02 AM:

The level editor makes these rainbow maps, which are kind of nice so it's a bit of a waste that they're not visible in the game:




Small fragments of this is visible in the final level, primarily around the edges of stuff.

The rainbow map is displaced by a depth map - that's why you can see the three dimensional shape of the level if you look carefully.

JLJac on September 10, 2013, 06:15:10 AM:

Yeah, I know - the sounds aren't actually growls, it's just my bad english

Update 173
Started animating the shelter door.



It might not look so amazing, but I put my hopes to the sound, some heavy mechanical clicking and clacking ought to give it that solid feel.

JLJac on September 11, 2013, 07:16:40 AM:

Update 174
Made it so that a lizard can change color after it has been created, not just on creation. This allows me to have a "random" setting for the custom mode, where every time the lizard dies it spawns as a new color. If you set all four lizards to "random" and enable lizards respawning you can fight a continuous onslaught of different-colored lizards.

The challenge with this wasn't to change the lizards graphics and stuff like that, removing some body parts (such as antennas, tounges, extra long tails) and creating some was fairly easily done as well. What was troublesome was how the lizards had mapped what areas were accessable to them upon spawn, and that stuff needed to be re-mapped, ingame.

I had some pretty funny and pathetic scenes when lizards that weren't able to climb walls thought they were, because they were respawning after a lizard that had mapped all the wall tiles as accessable. They'd scratch at the walls and wiggle around, without getting anywhere.

Luckily I had rewritten the area mapping recently, when I split it up over several frames in order to make the music play consistently. This more dynamic area mapping system could pretty neatly be tied in with the problem at hand. The only modification it needed was for it to be able to work on many lizards simultaneously.

Now, if a lizard is set to "random", and you kill it, it'll pick a new color. Then, before actually respawning, it will map its accessable area fairly slowly (10 bucket-fill steps per frame) while the game is running. It won't spawn until it knows what tiles are accessable to it, with its new and current color.

The wall climbing lizards (blue and white) have several times as many tiles available to them as the floor crawlers, and thus it might take a little longer for them to respawn. On most levels it doesn't seem to exceed the standard 100-tick wait for respawning though, so mostly you won't be able to note the difference.

JLJac on September 12, 2013, 12:16:23 AM (Last Edit: September 12, 2013, 01:12:55 AM):

Update 175
What do ya'll think of this?



I'm not there yet, but maybe I'm moving in the right direction?