GAMES BY JOHN

Always Be Creating.

[ijohnf]

Stealth Devlog #6: Running Man

Taking a break from coding for a bit to work on my pixel pushing chops! Wanted to emphasize a skull face plate. Using neutral tones to make the main character blend in with the dark background (just enough for those bad ass stealth kills).

Started the animation off by making a quick animation draft (below) and then referencing the frames. Realized this process is WAY better than just diving in to the animation itself.

Several things still need animating:

- Sword Hilt - Head Bandana - Body (rotating back and forth)

[ijohnf]

Stealth Devlog #5: Do You Even Slope

Spent the past week trying to implement movement on slopes, giving up multiple times, and then getting it down in the final hour. That “aha” moment was surreal.

The slope function itself is easy. All you have to do is check whether a pixel in the X-Y coordinate of where you’re moving to is free or not. The hard part is understanding how this works correctly with the rest of your game’s ecosystem – attacks, animations, gravity, friction, dashing, jumping, landing, etc – and then getting all those mechanics to work smoothly all together.

Biggest lesson here is to not give up. Often times the solution is just a matter of looking at the problem from different perspectives. It might not always be the best way or the most efficient way, but by persevering through the problem you’ll arrive at a solution with more clarity on why what you did worked.

Updates:

- Slopes: That’s good enough for me.

Next up, smoothing some bugs from going from a wall to a floor / slope, fixing ledge grabs, and getting a custom camera working (currently using views in GameMaker).

[ijohnf]

Stealth DevLog #4

Updates:

(Dropping “Platformer” from “Stealth Platformer” to keep the title simpler) 

I’ve been trying to get slope movement in, but it proved a lot harder than I thought. Came up with a band aid solution, but it looks really glitchy with the animations. Going to backlog it for now and check off some simpler things on my list before moving back into head banging territory.

Revamped Attack Trails: More objects are drawn to make the trails on attacks appear more fluid. Wish these low quality gifs did it more justice.

Variable Jumps: Player can now tap for a small jump, or hold for a longer jump. Which brings up the next feature..

Dust / Movement Lag from Player falling: There’s now dust when the player comes back down from a jump. When you go over a certain vertical speed, there will be more dust and a movement delay when you land. This takes some getting used to, but could add a different element of strategy to the game.

Jump / Wall Jump Flashes: Threw in some quick flashes for when the player jumps. Looks weird to me at the moment but serves its purpose.

Slopes: Thought I had it solved but plenty more to do. Wondering if slopes would be useful in the game anyways. Most likely going to delegate this to another prototype to learn more about it.

[ijohnf]

Stealth Platformer Devlog #3

Stayed up til 5am trying to figure out a bug! Got it solved after a lot of headbanging and now all is well. Going to be sleeping in hard this weekend to make up for this sleep deficit.

Updates:

Attacking (in mid air, from walls, ducking, and running): got held up by an attack state bug for the past few days but finally got it down. Main problem was that I had image speed set to 0, so the animation would never reset, therefore never trigger the next script. Rigged some cool trail effects when the player attacks, as well as some quick pixel art. Players will be able to stop and attack mid air, making for some interesting platforming tricks. On the Xbox 360 controller the attack is mapped to the X button.

[ijohnf]

Stealth Platformer Devlog #2

Updates:

XBOX CONTROLLER SUPPORT -- a little big victory for me. Just feels so official being able to play my game with an actual controller.

Fixed friction on movement -- realized that friction needs to be a divisor of my speed variable so that there is no remainder. Otherwise player’s horizontal speed will constantly jump back and forth between positive and negative and never end up at 0.

Researching Art -- pretty much set on a samurai jack silhouette style but with pixel art instead of vectors. 

Attack Animation -- Did some quick art but having trouble implementing the attack command. Going to tackle it again later tonight.

[ijohnf]

Charged Up!

Really feeling a lot of creative energy at the moment! Had to dust off Game Maker After devouring Derek Yu’s latest book “Spelunky” this past week. It’s a deep dive into the mind of a game design genius and Derek is especially good at articulating his processes, decisions, and inspirations. Go get it.

So here’s some progress from the weekend:

I’m revisiting an old idea for a stealth platformer that I’ve been wanting to bring to life for a while now. I wanted to keep pushing with Pico 8 since it’s definitely a fun and humbling experience, but I didn’t find it very promising in terms of long term scalability. Derek Yu’s passage in Spelunky about using tools you’re comfortable with struck a chord with me, and GM / GML scripting come natural to me especially coming from a Flash / Actionscript background. At the end of the day it’s about doing what you can with what you have to get the job done.

Stealth Platformer Devlog #1

Player movement with smooth controls (jumping, walking, friction, gravity)

Ledge grabs -- kind of glitchy right now so going to have to play with this a bit more

Ducking -- what’s a stealth game without it

Wall jumps -- set a timer so that player can’t spam jump

Wall friction -- player slides slowly down walls. Lot’s of ideas going off in my head about how player can use this in puzzles

Animations -- some quick pixel art

Mac Export -- super easy to export from Game Maker to Mac

Goal is to slowly chisel away at this project while working on other prototypes to keep learning.

CHARGED UP!

[ijohnf]

Got collisions working in Pico 8! Using flags (fget) and local variables to check if a flagged tile was hit. If it is, then it moves the player back by the same speed so they never pass through it. Pretty janky but it gets the job done. Also have simple camera movement that follows the player.

[ijohnf]

More Pico 8 experimenting over the weekend! Got movement in different directions, maps drawing to the screen, and some random SFX in. Working in Pico continues to humble me (...as in kicking my ass humble). Definitely an exercise in patience and working within constraints.

[ijohnf]

Exploring Pico 8!

Working on a small side project to explore Pico 8, which is basically the game engine for minimalists. The most enjoyable part of Pico 8 is working within the editor’s constraints. You have a minimal tool-set which encourages small but expressive creations.

Right now I’m learning how to navigate the environment, code in Lua (which is relative easy), detect collision, and draw sprites to the stage. Looking forward to taking on this challenge with my buddy @starvingindie!

[ijohnf]

Finally getting down the art for Jumper after 4 or 5 passes! Love the Fez / Tiny Tower style character because it’ll give me a lot of leeway to create all kinds of characters in updates. 

The pass on the right is the mastered version, with gradients on the back walls. I like the simplicity of the left pass, but seemed a bit too plain and might be hard for the player to differentiate between the foreground and background.

And here’s some of the tileset variations I’m working on in pixel. More to come!

[ijohnf]

Having some Jumper pixel art woes. Realizing more and more that I need to simplify the art to get the right aesthetics. Previous versions had a lot of details that the player won’t even see because of how fast pace the game is. Starting to settle on a style though, drawing from both Fez and Meatboy art.

[ijohnf]

Fez Style Art for Jumper

Doing some art tiles for Jumper. Really settling on a combination between Super Meat Boy and Fez -- bright highlights but with more muted colors. Looking to get these up in the playable version soon.

[ijohnf]

Creative Energy

Had a game jam at my place with a bunch of friends over the weekend. It was a perfect storm of productivity, pressure, and excitement. But most of all it was a much needed boost of creative energy. And basically a reason to get something playable by EOD.

My prototype was a wall jumping game called Jumper (screenshots of it on my Android Tablet). Looking to flesh this game out to make it a bit more different than the ones already in the app store.

[ijohnf]

Mega Man’s timeless tutorial level design. Still relevant today.

[ijohnf]

Week 3: Mother Brain

Polished up Mini Metroid a little bit more. I may have to cut this project short since i have tons of ideas in my head that want to be brought to life. Still planning to do a few tutorials a week to beef my skills up! *click the image for full quality HTML5 video*

[ijohnf]

Week 3: PC SNES Controllers!

Managed to get SNES style controllers working in GameMaker! I’m using legacy GM code, so only a max of 2 players can be supported at a time. Can’t wait to get some 2 player platformer action going on.

[ijohnf]

Screw Attack

Did the sprite sheet for Mini Metroid and polished up some of the reused code from Pico Bros. Also some screen shake and lava particle effects ;)