#thewakingcloak

[thewakingcloak]

Spacefarer Newsletter: August 2020

I spent the first week of August cleaning up cliff and z-object stuff. Not very glamorous! I was definitely ready to move on, but it had to be done. Everything I mentioned at the end of the July newsletter? I tackled it.

Falling off ledges now works properly. This was surprisingly difficult.

Tile animations on z objects is now handled... 

Building cliffs is much less painstaking now. The objects automatically resize themselves for proper collision, and the sprites are all color- and number-coded.

And more: lots and lots of weird cases and stuff fixed. Cliffs at a “negative z” (below sea-level, essentially) were a whole ‘nother animal. They’re still a little janky, and I’ll have to do more manual intervention for these.

Also, area transitions were only based on x and y, so throwing z into the mix messed those up hardcore.

Once I got past all that, I decided to tackle swimming!

Talk about a switch. Cliffs took me a few months. Swimming took me, like, a couple days. Even the stuff I thought would be hard (falling off waterfalls, slippery momentum, etc.) ended up being more or less built in to the systems I have, lol, so I basically just wrote a line or two of new code for those. Diving took an extra few days on top of that, mostly just because I went back and forth on how to modify the z.

Next came rolling. (You might say we’re on a roll.) This was the first bit I’d copied over from The Waking Cloak project in ages. The Waking Cloak will eventually be built afresh on the ProtoDungeon foundation, but I guess the old code does still have some useful stuff in there!

I did spend an evening converting my mess of move speed/direction/vectors to create a Vector2 struct in 2.3. Structs are a nice breath of Object-Oriented Programming in GameMaker. :) Then I leveraged this so I could easily modify the direction of rolling, jumping, etc. I could have done all this without, but it makes it easier.

“Rolling” in the water will be a dash. Unfortunately, in doing all this, I broke the “slippery” friction on water, which for some reason took me a few days to fix.

Roll cleanup from there involved allowing jumping into a roll and rolling into a jump. For gameplay purposes, these don’t let you jump further or anything, but it adds some usability. Without this, if you press the “roll key” right before landing, nothing happens, and it feels clunky. With this, if you press the roll key while jumping, the character will roll immediately when they hit the ground. It feels really good!

I updated the controls to match the new rolling. Space and shift now both trigger rolls for keyboard, and the left face button does so on the gamepad. This also meant I had to update the control remapping settings (which needs a UX overhaul, I’m breaking a couple guidelines here, but no time for that now lol).

Next came the dash. This only took a few days, since it’s basically the same as a roll, just faster (not shown in the video, I sped it up after recording) and with a cool afterimage effect! I had to take a video instead of a gif to capture the full effect (gif framerate is too low, so it’s much more “blinky”). Anyway yeah, click this giant link to watch, lol.

And then I rounded out the month by updating various tiles and sprites. It was pretty tough to get back into the swing of things, art-wise. Thanks to the Studio Spacefarer Discord server, though, I’m pretty happy with the direction things went.

Check out the “before” in last month’s newsletter.

Oh, also, on the penultimate day of the month, I felt like taking a quick break from all of everything to install rt-shell, a plugin that lets you do debug commands. My previous debug method was a list of hotkeys. It was pretty limited! The new one is extensible (I can write my own scripts), so it’s gonna be really helpful.

[thewakingcloak]

devtober day 1

Got back to work on ProtoDungeon: Episode II in earnest, wrapping up the automatic scaling updates to Greg Banov's Wandersong engine. Hopefully nearly finished with this, which you can see above!

It's some work getting a 1600x900 editor to squeeze into a 320x180 game lol. Here’s what it initially looked like:

[thewakingcloak]

Working on enemy AI for the first time.

Accidentally made a clone that wanders the entire map.

What does it want? Where is it going? Is it hungry? IS IT SENTIENT??

[thewakingcloak]

Mini-update!

Hey all! Quick textish update for y’all. I’ve had the last few days off work and have been working away at The Waking Cloak quite a lot! Pieces are falling into place, and it’s beginning to feel like an actual game.

Here’s what’s been completed:

Finished roll attack animations and added roll attacks into the game (I’m still tweaking these and fixing bugs)

Implemented better collision (from a prototype I have; last time I talked about fixing collision, it was in the prototype)

Fixed collisions with NPCs

Fixed a weird movement bug with the sword attack

Dialogue now triggers again, and using a better method (you can’t talk to NPCs while facing away from them anymore, lol)

Fixed tall grass (for one, it would cause the brief screen pause whenever you hit the grass, even if i was cut, and for two, I accidentally made it solid while updating the collision... both have been fixed)

Worked on sketching up puzzles and initial dungeon design for one of the items

Updated the title screen some more and worked on animating a cloak for it

My laptop died, so I went old-school and sketched out ideas. I actually liked doing things this way!

Continued. Started figuring out how the early parts of a dungeon might work!

Animated cloak WIP! Gotta start by sketching out the basic lines. This has been a major learning process, but we’re getting there.

[thewakingcloak]

Baka thinks he knows a lot, but when you set him down in an unfamiliar situation (pretty much any situation), he shows his true colors: he has no idea how anything works, and he has no idea that he has no idea. Sure, Baka’s pretty easygoing, but don’t count on him to avoid putting his foot in his mouth.

True to form, he’s boarded the refugee ship thinking it’ll be a nice tour of the bay area. Little does he know he’s about to embark on the journey of a lifetime!

Pretty appropriately to his character, I set out to create Baka without any direction on what he’d end up looking like. Usually I have a pretty good idea (or two or three) what I want, and it evolves from there. Not so this time! I started off by giving him a magnifying glass, which he held up to each eye. I thought it’d be funny if he was the clueless guy but had the tool most recognizable for finding clues. He kind of ended up with a Sherlock Holmes-style hat, then swooshy hair, then bald, then a receding hairline. And I had problems with arms (as usual).

But something wasn’t right. It was difficult getting the magnifying glass to clearly look like a magnifying glass with only three colors. As a test, I sent that version out to see what people thought without saying what it was. The response was also appropriately clueless: “Wh-what’s wrong with his eyes??” So I went with my gut and scrapped it!

After that, finishing him up became about ten times easier!

[thewakingcloak]

 “I do not approve of this shabby compartment,” is the first thing Roderek was heard to have said when boarding the refugee ship. It’s not certain whether his wrinkled nose is a feature he was born with, or if it’s just something that’s become permanently a part of his face after making disgusted expressions all the time.

He never calls anyone by name or even by respectful titles. Usually it’s “boy” or “little girl”... regardless of age. Roderek’s opinion on everything is always heard, and his way is always the best way. Don’t tell him of your woes, because he’ll either one-up you or utter terrible phrases such as, “Why not get a real job instead?”

I drew a completely different sprite for this guy, decided it didn’t fit (but I’d still use it later), saved it, and then started over. You’ll see that other guy someday!

It’s kind of unfortunate that I wasn’t able to create a making-of GIF for Roderek, since he changed so much. He was originally shorter, with a much bigger head. Maybe appropriate to his character, but it didn’t look very good! He also wore red clothes which my I realized (almost too late) were a ripoff of Ziddo’s original clothes: red with a white belt and white diagonal middle.

So I fixed his Roderek’s head, but it took a long time before I was happy with his clothing. I experimented with different vests (which his old arms [curse arms!] kept covering up). Making him one pixel taller and redrawing his body helped a lot. Got a bit fancier with his clothes too. The wide stride was not on purpose, but I like how it makes him look overly confident. :)

[thewakingcloak]

Starting to use some of the methods real artists use, and it’s definitely made the drawing/animation process so much easier. Here I used references to draw a keyframe sketch and then broke each part out into layers. 

This isn’t actually the final pose I went with--mostly I tweaked the sword position and arms--but making the needed changes were much simpler when I can just mess with the “Arms” layer quickly, or grab the “Sword” layer and rotate only that layer.

I’m almost done with the player combat animations (at least this iteration). As a reminder, I’m on Patreon, and if you support me there (even for just $1/month), you’ll be able to see all of Tav’s combat animations later today--a week earlier than everyone else!

[thewakingcloak]

Meet Opo, the smallest of the turtle tribe! Exuberant and speedy (able to run a blazing 3mph), he tends to talk over his elders and can barely stand still longer than a minute. He longs to leave the swamp and venture to unknown parts of the island... maybe even meet a human!

So when I put up the poll for this week’s NPC, I had a pretty good idea “Turtle” would win. :) Unfortunately for me, I didn’t actually have any of the turtles drawn yet. My intention was to draw the main turtle you meet in the story, but this lil guy came out instead! Oh well.