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posts dated from: september 2013
I Defeated King Yama
Inspired by the wise Paul Hubans I finally picked up Spelunky for the PC. I played the XBLA version for a little while but I never got very far past just beating the game normally without shortcuts.
At PAX I witnessed Spelunky Video Armageddon in which Colin Northway unleashed secret technology involving robbing shop keepers. His technique has spread like wildfire and it was just the spark I needed to get back into the game.
I've always played the game by not robbing shop keepers because I feared them waiting for me at the exit of each level, but little did I know all it takes is a day's worth of practice to develop some shop keeper murder methods. With my new knowledge on how to viciously murder every shop keeper in the black market, I finally made it all the way to the end of the game and defeated the king of hell after just starting to play the game again 2 days ago.
I even did it without sticky bombs!
Anyway, that was a much needed break from constantly coding and working on stuff. Another reason I started playing Spelunky again was to study how they did tiles, because I'm discovering once again that making tiles in a high resolution is a giant pain. Back to work!
At PAX I witnessed Spelunky Video Armageddon in which Colin Northway unleashed secret technology involving robbing shop keepers. His technique has spread like wildfire and it was just the spark I needed to get back into the game.
I've always played the game by not robbing shop keepers because I feared them waiting for me at the exit of each level, but little did I know all it takes is a day's worth of practice to develop some shop keeper murder methods. With my new knowledge on how to viciously murder every shop keeper in the black market, I finally made it all the way to the end of the game and defeated the king of hell after just starting to play the game again 2 days ago.
I even did it without sticky bombs!
Anyway, that was a much needed break from constantly coding and working on stuff. Another reason I started playing Spelunky again was to study how they did tiles, because I'm discovering once again that making tiles in a high resolution is a giant pain. Back to work!
Dev Log: Example Game Arts
For my upcoming 2d framework built with C# and SFML I'm building an example game that at first was going to be a super quick project, but when it comes to art I'm still a little stumped on what the best workflow is going to be.
The game is going to be a little simple platformer, and if this were pixel art then I would have no problem just jamming out a bunch of pixel art for it... but with high res comes all kinds of problems.
I usually have used GraphicsGale for pixel art and animation, but now with high res Gale is no longer a very viable option. There's animating in Photoshop but it's horrible for animating. I really wish the animation options in Photoshop were better. There's tools like Spine and Spriter, but they're more for 2d bone animation and don't really help at all when it comes to frame by frame hand drawn animations.
There's also the problem of tile sets. With pixel art comes a very limited canvas site and color set per tile so making tiles line up with each other is a relatively simple task. When the resolution of color and canvas size increase then it becomes more and more of a pain to make each tile line up. I tried this with Snapshot but eventually I gave up and just faked using a tile set by making a bunch of independent images about the size of a tile and just stamped them on top of each other. Unfortunately right now that isn't an option for this game since I'm using Ogmo Editor as my level editor and strict tiles is probably my only option.
Here's a quick sketch of what I want the game to sort of resemble and I can already tell the tile set is going to be a nightmare because of the bleed of certain tiles (like grass, even stones have bleed, argh!)
So that's where I'm at right now. I'm continuing to chip away at code somewhat as I think about how to possibly solve these art pipeline issues, and I expect to be done with the example game sometime next month along with the first public release of the framework.
The game is going to be a little simple platformer, and if this were pixel art then I would have no problem just jamming out a bunch of pixel art for it... but with high res comes all kinds of problems.
I usually have used GraphicsGale for pixel art and animation, but now with high res Gale is no longer a very viable option. There's animating in Photoshop but it's horrible for animating. I really wish the animation options in Photoshop were better. There's tools like Spine and Spriter, but they're more for 2d bone animation and don't really help at all when it comes to frame by frame hand drawn animations.
There's also the problem of tile sets. With pixel art comes a very limited canvas site and color set per tile so making tiles line up with each other is a relatively simple task. When the resolution of color and canvas size increase then it becomes more and more of a pain to make each tile line up. I tried this with Snapshot but eventually I gave up and just faked using a tile set by making a bunch of independent images about the size of a tile and just stamped them on top of each other. Unfortunately right now that isn't an option for this game since I'm using Ogmo Editor as my level editor and strict tiles is probably my only option.
Here's a quick sketch of what I want the game to sort of resemble and I can already tell the tile set is going to be a nightmare because of the bleed of certain tiles (like grass, even stones have bleed, argh!)
So that's where I'm at right now. I'm continuing to chip away at code somewhat as I think about how to possibly solve these art pipeline issues, and I expect to be done with the example game sometime next month along with the first public release of the framework.
Dev Log: Atlases
Getting ready to head back home to Phoenix today after two weeks of being in the Northwest! I went to Seattle for PAX then up to Vancouver/Richmond to hang out at Indie House, and now I'm back in Seattle for a little bit and I fly out tonight.
During the week I was in Indie House I got a lot of work done on my upcoming 2d framework. One of the major features that I managed to get in is texture atlas support. Texture atlasing is pretty awesome and I'm surprised SFML doesn't have any cool built in support for it, but basically it's a way to pack all of your image assets into as few textures as possible to use in the game.
I'm not super well versed on this kinda stuff, but apparently one of the most expensive things a video card has to do while running a game is switching which texture it's using to draw. So if you have a game that has 100 different sprites on 100 different textures, that can get kinda rough for the video card. However, if you can pack all those sprites into one texture and use just that one texture to get all the sprite data from, the video card only has to render that one texture (hopefully) so the performance is greatly increased.
This task had been on my to-do list for awhile but it wasn't until Saint requested it that I felt motivated to actually get it working. He was working on a little game in the framework as a test and it was super motivating (and also scary) to see someone using the framework! Right now the framework only supports the Sparrow/Starling export from Texture Packer. I'll leave support for more formats up to individual users after that.
I'm still busy working on my example game for my framework that will hopefully be done in a week or two. The major tasks for the rest of the game are just art, so I just need to buckle down and draw a whole bunch of stuff. Once the example game is done I'll be taking one last look at everything and then I'll make it public for anyone to use. There are some parts of the framework that are a little weird since I learned better C# programming practices as I coded it, so some of the earlier stuff probably needs some revisions, but aside from that this thing is almost ready to go!
During the week I was in Indie House I got a lot of work done on my upcoming 2d framework. One of the major features that I managed to get in is texture atlas support. Texture atlasing is pretty awesome and I'm surprised SFML doesn't have any cool built in support for it, but basically it's a way to pack all of your image assets into as few textures as possible to use in the game.
I'm not super well versed on this kinda stuff, but apparently one of the most expensive things a video card has to do while running a game is switching which texture it's using to draw. So if you have a game that has 100 different sprites on 100 different textures, that can get kinda rough for the video card. However, if you can pack all those sprites into one texture and use just that one texture to get all the sprite data from, the video card only has to render that one texture (hopefully) so the performance is greatly increased.
This task had been on my to-do list for awhile but it wasn't until Saint requested it that I felt motivated to actually get it working. He was working on a little game in the framework as a test and it was super motivating (and also scary) to see someone using the framework! Right now the framework only supports the Sparrow/Starling export from Texture Packer. I'll leave support for more formats up to individual users after that.
I'm still busy working on my example game for my framework that will hopefully be done in a week or two. The major tasks for the rest of the game are just art, so I just need to buckle down and draw a whole bunch of stuff. Once the example game is done I'll be taking one last look at everything and then I'll make it public for anyone to use. There are some parts of the framework that are a little weird since I learned better C# programming practices as I coded it, so some of the earlier stuff probably needs some revisions, but aside from that this thing is almost ready to go!
