microhorses!

News & bits about an in-development horsie game. Follow to not miss out on the release!

[microhorses]

World shading is also go. C64 on your grandma's BW TV microhorses

[microhorses]

lmao. when you have to go hand out hay after a sleepless night

(full disclosure the shader is not mine. i'm just checking out what shaders can do)

[microhorses]

World shading is also go. C64 on your grandma's BW TV microhorses

[microhorses]

And now, for the main moment i've been rebooting the whole GUI subsystem for, aside for the zoom in zoom out - the WORLD TONER

The moment the whole world's colours shift is when the toner gets applied. Note that it doesn't tint the cursor and the user interface; it was impossible before and that's what initiated the GUI system overhaul. This is not exactly a shader, but shaders can be applied in the future without collaterally messing up the user interface, too.

Night looks so much more nightly now!

[microhorses]

Done with the fullscreen! There's some messed up maths under the hood that might bite me later, but for now it works and is not complex, so rewriting it will be easy if needs be. Apparently, game maker GUI surface is not clipping mask'd to the game surface size - that's why in a recent video there's stuff protruding "outside of the game". That's all GUI. The only solution was to buff out the frame before displaying the whole game by drawing 4 big rectangles hiding all the garbage. As a bonus, those rectangles can be decorated, so behold: pink! This is definitely something i want to expose to the player for changing.

[microhorses]

when the micro horses are actually micro scopic

trying out adjustable integer scaling of the entire game. all the screenshots and videos so far have been of the game scaled x4, but now i implemented autodetection of best integer scale and user-selectable scale setting. for funsies, this one is x1 scale, aka the game's actual 1:1 size. So cute! It's almost like a DS screen

[microhorses]

i am trying to make fullscreen work. life is full of adventure. you can see a bit of a behind the scenes! it's so cool. not all stuff stops being drawn while being outside the viewport, it turns out

[microhorses]

microhorse cuddle pile alert!

(their need meters are low for debug reasons, don't worry)

[microhorses]

Look, microhorsie microfriends now run together for fun! Naku approaches Hora and hints she'd like to trot together, Hora is up for that, so they do a little running - how cute is that? I programmed this after i saw actual horses play in a similar way ♡

Not only is it adorable, but it's healthy, too: running with friends replenishes a microhorse's urge to move around, slightly raises bond with the other horse, and - if the horsie who decided to run was slower than their friend - raises their speed a little bit, that's what the blue icon signifies.

Note that the first time they run Naku visibly falls behind, but the second time they're almost even! Actually, in the final game this training effect will be much slighter, i cranked it up for the show.

If the horses are on bad terms or the other horse is feeling moody, they may reject the proposal to run, though, so take note of who gets together with whom and place the horsies accordingly so that they help each other grow and have fun together <3

[malicedafirenze]

hey hi hello microhorse person I absolutely love this. Please know that people on the discord server and subreddit around The Mane Quest (see here) would absolutely love to see your microhorse game dev shenanigans as well in case you're up for posting any clips there!

[microhorses]

Oh? Would they?? I will check out, many thanks ☆

[microhorses]

good news everyone

you can now pat the micro horse

[microhorses]

UPD: i did iiiiit here we go! This whole ordeal was.. to make the emotion sprites go behind the horizon precisely along with the horse, while NOT being a child object of real world stuff like trees to be excepted from shading etc, while having a fixed rendered depth that's synced to the horse, and such and such. Harder than i thought it would be. But now everything works as intended. Small detail each day has to equate to a big picture at some point, right. right?

[microhorses]

OK now THIS is some proper glitching. i'm this close to figuring out correct emotion drawing routine...

Also: posting this from my new old mac that was lent to me for some time, which is a big deal - microhorses comfortably developed from my actual worktable and not from a laptop given to me by my employer, connected ad-hoc without a proper mouse or keyboard!

[microhorses]

WOAH

Trying to fix emotion animations being all weird about the barrel perspective and. yeah! Love when my game glitches out like NES/SNES stuff - that's the best. This one is relatively boring though cause it's just a sprite part draw call going in the 'wrong' direction height wise and reading the raw texture page. it's not glitch glitch. but still

Funnily, the very last upper parts of those glitch pillars are stock horse sprites themselves. They seem like a bunch of coloured stripes over white - but that's cause they're chomped into 8x8 squares and the stock horse sprite is, indeed, white with colorful zones on top to dynamically colour later.

[microhorses]

ok i think i finally nailed this stuff down and can go do other tasks ♡

not only did i fix the horizon zoom-in shift bug today, but i also split the hills sprite into 3 pieces (the 3 hill ranges were in the same layer before) and now we have upgraded super-duper three-layer parallax scrolling!

also fixed the sun shifting all weird and now the transition looks how flipping the camera from more top-down to more parallel-to-ground angle would look like, more or less.

decided against pixelating the mountains at zoom, i actually think the fact that the horse pixels are big and horizon pixels are small accentuates the zoom effect really well!

now to fix a bunch of subsystems that i broke with my amazing gui and zoom update. ha ha ha!

[microhorses]

what the HECK. i accidentally produced a supremely weird effect by sort-of-misusing draw surfaces. The hills sprite cannot be drawn at subpixel level if i'm using a surface.. so it crushes itself down dynamically! This is sort of amazing because there's no weird feeling that the world along with the horses are 2x pixel size but the hills are still 1x. Might dig around and find a way to keep it. But not before i figure out how to keep the geometry of this whole ordeal intact - it's getting kinda stupid how the sun can't stay in one place during zoom!!

[microhorses]

Good news: i got rid of the cursor jitter on zoom!! The cursor is now pixel perfect all the time. Also most menus work again as i move their operation to the new GUI subsystem. You can zoom in on your horse eating an apple, very very cute <3

Bad news: the stable Facking Ecsplodes

[microhorses]

I am slowly chipping at the zoom in/out orderal, though. I managed to put most of the GUI on new rails somewhat successfully, so now it doesn't fly away and stays (somewhat) functional during the zoomed-in state. It also now allows going into the corners while zoomed and autopushes you away from them when unzooming.

I had to turn off the hills parallax for testing - it messes with the camera for now. But i did get the hills to stay the same instead of getting zoomed to dial down the outlandishness of the transition a little. The world barrel ultrabend, which is the main feature, still happens - it's just now things are a bit less nauseous.

Or do you think i should've kept the enlarging horizon line to immitate a drastic lens change? :D

[microhorses]

i started working on separating the gui elements to a separate gui layer to make the world zoomable and shadeable and. oopsie doopsie i think i screwed up the entire gui subsystem :'D it will take a while to untangle its spaghetti so. sit tight while i don't feed you any good update

(the cursor is where the physical mouse is, the red cross is where the game THINKS the mouse is, so i'm pointing at the calendar without pointing at the calendar. Ha ha ha)