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Post by gredler on Oct 15, 2019 0:37:30 GMT
Hoping to post some updates soon, but figured I'd bump this to let people know DK and I have not lost interest and are still trucking along with progress. This dude didn't make the cut, so I figured I'd post him here
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Post by paranoiadragon on Oct 17, 2019 5:41:33 GMT
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Post by DarkKobold on Nov 7, 2019 6:21:41 GMT
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Post by Deleted on Nov 7, 2019 7:28:45 GMT
Looking great!
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Post by spenoza on Jan 22, 2020 19:37:24 GMT
You guys have anything new to share with us? I know you've had your heads down working pretty hard.
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Post by gredler on Jan 22, 2020 19:44:48 GMT
I hope so, yeah. I am not good at recording gameplay footage, so DK usually handles that. The above vacuum level now has the meat of the beat em up style gameplay area implemented and arted out. Sound effects suck, music during gameplay is non-existent, but I think we are about ready to show off the core gampeplay and level of quality we hope to have the game arted to. What has been shown so far is mostly boss stuff and early video the core beat em up gameplay was shown before we had very many enemies or animations done - and DK has gotten the gameplay a lot more fluid since that demonstration video as well.
I have begged him to not show the gameplay until I could redo the tiles, since the tiles were initially not designed to be used for a belt scroller they looked especially repetitive and boring. I am happy now with the background (in the fighting section of the vacuum level). So hopefully we can show something off very soon
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Post by spenoza on Jan 22, 2020 19:57:43 GMT
Do you think you guys will do any placeholder music until you make arrangements for unique tracks, or just no music until there's music? By placeholder, I mean some public access MIDI files massaged into Squirrel just to have something there until you figure out your game plan.
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Post by gredler on Jan 23, 2020 18:45:14 GMT
Do you think you guys will do any placeholder music until you make arrangements for unique tracks, or just no music until there's music? By placeholder, I mean some public access MIDI files massaged into Squirrel just to have something there until you figure out your game plan. Please note, sound is a more sensitive subject than any in forum afaik so I do not want to go far into this; discussing this feels like poking the pimple on the thorn in the side of the bear. I appreciate all the work everyone's put into the tools, and I am not trying to speak negatively about any of them - but feel I should explain our state of sound The process of taking MIDI to MML is time consuming even when you design the MIDI to be converted to MML later (as DK found out when he converted Lukester's brothers song from Midi to MML). You have to break it into macro/repeatable bars, it needs to be limited to 6 mono symphonic channels, and be designed so that one or two channels to be dropped out for sound effects. This is not even taking into account adjusting the syntax of the MML to match the squirrel converter, since each MML generating application has its own additional markup added from its design choices. We haven't spent that time making placeholder music because partly because the majority of midi's we've found are too much work to clean up and add in as a temp object, and we don't want to spend much time on placeholders as this is hours long process per song, not minutes (for us, might be faster for others?). The two songs we have implemented are Vacuum boss - Original song exported as midi by jfrost and converted to MML by DK Shower boss - Original 'song' created by me in MML after hours of frustratedly trying to convert googled midi's into placeholders. The best way, in my eyes, to handle this music thing is to plan the midi out so that when you convert it to MML there is not a ton of surgery needed to make it usable in game, but even that takes so much time that we have been holding off until we get somewhat completed songs by Jfrost (vacuum boss posted a few months ago).
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Post by DarkKobold on Jan 23, 2020 18:46:10 GMT
Do you think you guys will do any placeholder music until you make arrangements for unique tracks, or just no music until there's music? By placeholder, I mean some public access MIDI files massaged into Squirrel just to have something there until you figure out your game plan. #1, Its hard to find Monophonic, 5-6 channel midis that are publicly available. Its not like they get organized that way, so you have to pick a midi, open it, check, and move on. #2, The amount of time to "massage" a MIDI file from 3MLE to Squirrel is not trivial. It takes me 1-2 hours of pure, painful grunt work to do it. If it has no prayer of being in the final game, there's little to no motivation to spend that abysmal time and effort. 3MLE's compactor actually totally corrupts the midi for squirrel, so you have to export the exact music data, remove a bunch of garbage text from each bar, figure out what is "compactable" and then compact it. We've had a song for the bird boss for months from Jfrosty, it's not in game now because I dread the process. Its mind numbing. I want to write a text parser that would make this process easier. One that identifies common strings, and makes the most compact MML. That is also not any fun though. Programming new game assets is. That said, with a utility like this, it would take seconds instead of hours to make TG16-worthy sound tracks from midi to 3MLE to MML to squirrel, which would allow for better iteration from any musician. Writing a text parser that tries different lengths of strings to compact (basically music compression, lol) would also be f'ing abysmal.
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Post by DarkKobold on Jan 23, 2020 19:03:52 GMT
As promised, a video! This shows 3 new enemies, our active backgrounds, and a whole host of other things since the last time we publicly shared a beat'em up video. The big reveal is coming next video.
We currently have 14 enemies with full art and coding, with 2 more in the works. We'll be showing a few each new video, as Gredler finishes backgrounds.
We plan to keep the final level a secret through the entire release process.
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Post by spenoza on Jan 23, 2020 20:10:55 GMT
Are the sunglasses a reference to Three Blind Mice? Pretty awesome, either way. I gotta say, though. Throwing fireballs from off-screen is a dick move
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Post by DarkKobold on Jan 23, 2020 20:35:15 GMT
Are the sunglasses a reference to Three Blind Mice? Pretty awesome, either way. I gotta say, though. Throwing fireballs from off-screen is a dick move Yup, originally we had a Mario Bros Arcade style level, which was going to feature blind mice, see below. And yeah, especially how that video went, we decided this morning that off-screen attacks are a no-no. We'll be adding code to prevent that soon. The AI needs a bit of a tune up still. Hitboxes aren't perfect either. Attachments:
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Post by Black_Tiger on Jan 24, 2020 5:37:12 GMT
Wow, I literally exclaimed "nice fucking title screen". And then had a similar reaction to the stage select screen, stage intro screen... but was still surprised at how polished the in-game content was. It feels very professional now and not like a work in progress. I'm glad that you guys are taking your time to make the game you want (under the constraints of current PCE dev).
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Post by paranoiadragon on Jan 24, 2020 5:50:35 GMT
👍
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Post by Deleted on Jan 24, 2020 14:12:04 GMT
Are the sunglasses a reference to Three Blind Mice? Pretty awesome, either way. I gotta say, though. Throwing fireballs from off-screen is a dick move Knights of the Round has enemies that attack off screen a little. Otherwise you can keep them off screen by mashing attack.
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