2013 - 2 - 27 / 12:19 pm / general
Lyle in Cube Sector Any% Speedrun
Now for something completely different!
Sometime over the past month I was inspired to do a speed run of a game but I couldn't figure out exactly what game I wanted to do. After some soul searching I landed on Lyle in Cube Sector. Lyle is a game released in 2006 and was one of the first "indie" games to really blow my mind. It was a complete metroidvania, and it was made in Multimedia Fusion which I didn't think was possible. Lyle would later go on to inspire me enough to actually finish my next game, which turned out to be Bonesaw: The Game.
If you've never played Lyle you should totally check it out. The game is a bit brutal at first. Everything hurts you, enemies are complete dicks, and you don't have a lot of health to play around with, but it's definitely worth sticking through all that and getting to the end.
Now I'll get back to work!
2013 - 2 - 25 / 2:13 pm / games
Dev Log: Platforming Camera
Chipping away at things in my remake of my Global Game Jam game. Now that I have more than 48 hours to make the game, I've been taking some time to figure out some things that I've been neglecting for the past couple years of making short form game jam games.
In Offspring Fling, there is very little scrolling. I think only one level actually scrolls both horizontally, and vertically. On top of that there are still only a few levels that scroll at all. This means that I didn't really have to worry about a complex camera, I just have the camera follow the player with a little bit of a drag and it works out mostly fine.
For this new game I'm working on, there's a bit more platforming, and almost every level will have scrolling in it, and there will be some big and open rooms... so I want to have a better camera system in general to handle platforming.
What do I mean by this? Take a look at this breakdown of the camera system from Mario World.
This kind of camera system is pretty crazy. There's a lot going on behind the scenes to make sure that the camera is showing the player exactly what they need to see. This is definitely one of those things where if you do it right, nobody will notice you're doing anything at all, but it is incredibly difficult to get this kind of stuff right.
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2013 - 2 - 23 / 3:25 pm / general
Screenshot Saturday: Web Stuff
This week I took a short break from video game coding to crank out some web tools for a table top RPG that I play with some local friends. The screenshot above is part of a combat manager application that I wrote in php. It's main purpose is to manage all of the NPCs in a fight so that the game master doesn't have to keep flipping through a binder full of different pages of enemies to keep track of what's going on during the battle. It should make our games go along a lot quicker, although some people really like to have physical dice make all the decisions. When you have a battle involving 15+ characters though, dice rolling can get tedious pretty rapidly.
Now back to game development!
2013 - 2 - 20 / 10:49 am / tutorials
Colliding with Slopes?!
In my last blog post I talked a little bit about how I've implemented slopes in my latest project, but I only talked about how I was actually importing them from Ogmo Editor into Flashpunk and not about how I'm actually using them for platforming. In this post I'll attempt to explain how I actually use slopes in my movement system, which means my platformer characters can walk up and down them without any problems.
The first thing to keep in mind is that all of my slope code only really works with slopes that increase or decrease by 1 pixel. I could rework some of it to make it work with a step of any size that the programmer could define, but for now 1 step is all I really need.
Pixel Sweepin'
The first thing to know is how I actually go about moving my platformer characters, and other moving objects around my game world. I use a method that I refer to as pixel sweeping. Basically whenever an object moves in my games, I move it one pixel at a time and check for collisions at each step! This might sound a little crazy to some folk, but this is the most reliable way I've been able to do stuff like platforming and other moving objects and still collide with even the tiniest pixel of a floor or wall. I've been using this technique since the very beginning of Bonesaw: The Game.
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2013 - 2 - 18 / 12:42 pm / games
Dev Log: Slopes and Slopes
Still working on the re-make of my Global Game Jam game! The most recent development I can talk about is this:
Look at those beautiful SLOPES! I haven't actually done any platforming with slopes since all the way back in 2009 when I first made Jottobots (and before that, Verge.) This is my first time doing slopes of any sort in Flashpunk. There were a couple of hurdles to get over to get them working smoothly though.
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about
Hi there, my name is Kyle, and I'm a 27 year old kid with adult powers. I'm making video games and living the indie game developer life in Tempe, Arizona. Here you will find my thoughts, games, websites, doodles, and other stuff like that. I worked on Snapshot, Offspring Fling, and a whole bunch of other games. If you want to get a hold of me use the form on the bottom of the page, leave a comment, or just tweet at me. I try to post three times a week. Thanks for stoppin' by!
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