Introvert: The Beginning

Sunday, 30 September 2012 - Introvert: The Beginning

Hello! It has been thirteen weeks since I last worked on Introvert, a personal Platformer project that I had worked on for three weeks before the start of school. It is now my holidays again! (Yay!)

I have roughly three weeks of holidays left and I do not intend to waste it. I began working on Introvert last night. Some of the things I have to get settled is a schedule and a list of the several milestones I hope to achieve in time to come. Unfortunately, I realised that I cannot really do a lot in three weeks. After these three weeks, I have to do an internship that will shorten the development time I have even further.

Today, I researched for some references on how games did their backgrounds. Two games I looked into were Super Granny, a platformer by WildTangent and MapleStory.

I first decided to do the background for the dark forest scene.

BG_DarkForest

I took quite a number of hours, but I did manage to create something rather decent. Although I had never used Photoshop before at the beginning, after 12 weeks I have somewhat picked up a little bit of Photoshop. It is indeed a really good tool. I am currently slowly transiting to Photoshop from Paint. It was really fun creating this picture. Also, it reminds me of the game Slender, which is a horror game. I went to draw a slender guy in the picture (the "ghost" in that game), but of course I deleted it eventually so you can't see him. I also added some fireflies because I did not want this to be scary, but more peaceful instead.

I also went on to create a second background. This one is for the early levels.

BG_Reminiscence

This picture took a shorter time. I also went on to create a third background. (This really is more time consuming than I thought).

BG_GrowingUp

This picture looks incomplete, but the bottom right is actually covered by platforms so I did not draw that area. This background will be used for one stage only, so unless I will reuse it for other stages, it's unlikely I'll fill up the bottom. The top left wall is pretty plain though, and I might add something there. But this is what I have at the moment.

I found many reference pictures that I saved in my powerpoint, but I don't think I want to upload them here. I need to draw at least three more backgrounds:
- Level Selection Stage (this is an actual playable stage so it needs a background)
- BG_WhereWeMet: This will be composed of a happy scenery.
- BG_Melancholy: A scene which portrays the mood of the late levels.



THE 3 BACKGROUNDS ALL LOOK REALLY AWESOME! I am very satisfied with the backgrounds so far. I was complimented that I had drawn them well and relatively quickly, and I was really happy to hear that. There is one problem though. When I tested the backgrounds with the levels, I found that the DarkForest background does not match with the tiles in those levels. The green wasn't the same, and the style just seems so different. The background just does not match with the tiles. I am going to rectify the tiles to fix the problem.

I might have to redo all my tiles in the future.


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After much testing, and a slight recolouration of the forest tiles, I went to implement the backgrounds in the game. I also prepared a code to animate the backgrounds, because there is a possibility that I will animate the backgrounds in the future. Currently they are static and does not look very good to me. For example, the fireflies in the forest background aren't moving. I hope animating the background won't add too much lag. The game is going to have more animations in the future.

What about the TD Game I was working on previously?

Well, I have decided to give up on the Tower Defense game. I wanted to only work on it during my free time. However, I have absolutely no free time to dedicate at all. Since it would take years to finish this particular TD game, I have decided to abandon it. I did create some artwork for fun, but those are purely for fun. If I were to create a second game, it would not be a TD.

Bye bye TD.

Oh one last thing

A friend gave me the idea of making a sequel, and name the different "games" appropriately because this is more of a story based game.

One of the ideas he gave me for this particular chapter was "Introvert: The Beginning". Frankly speaking, I don't think it will be possible for me to create subsequent chapters unless some friends are willing to help me. It definitely isn't easy making this game. I am already very happy with what I have now, but of course, I won't strike off the idea of multiple chapters since after all, it's an interesting idea. I shall focus and work toward the completion of this game.

Tower Defense Analysis

8 September 2012

I was thinking about how the towers in other TD games fired their ammunition. As I thought about creating an ammo that traverses from the tower toward the enemy, I realise that there is a high chance that the ammo would "miss" the target because the target is constantly moving forward. Although the ammo will not miss if its velocity is high enough, what if the game has enemies that move extremely fast? I was thinking about what would happen if towers shot at creeps that moved too fast for them to aim at.

So, I decided to think about the other TD games I played.

GemCraft
GemCraft has an amazing ammunition trajectory. All the towers in the game use orbs, and if I recall correctly, the orbs are actually fired in the OPPOSITE direction from where the creeps are positioned. After firing, the orbs then slow down and gradually turn around back at the enemy, and then go full speed at the enemy. I think the orbs are actually fired in random directions 360 degrees around the tower, but their targetting system is coded such that they will always hit the creep because the ammunition will accelerate toward the target, and will eventually hit it no matter how fast it moves.

The only time the ammunition does not hit the target is when the target is killed by another tower, OR is banished (reaches the end of the path). Because they use magical orbs and not "bullets", it does not seem stupid for their orbs to disappear in mid-air. I cannot apply this technique to my game because I use lasers and bullets in some of my towers.

Bloons
Bloons is rather different from most other TD games I see. It has actual collision detection. If the monkey shoots a dart and misses the bloon it is supposed to hit, the dart does not just disappear. It continues moving on until it hits another bloon behind, or until it is out of the screen. It only disappears if it collides with the creep.

I don't think collision detection is something I want to do because it can be quite irritating for the player if an extremely fast creep spawns and starts ninja-ing its way toward the end, dodging all the bullets like in Matrix.

Some other miscellaneous games
There was this TD game I played long time ago that used towers with muzzle flash. The towers just have a flash at their muzzle and it looks like they fired something. But there are no bullets. This is possible something I can use for some towers. It does save some work because I don't have to do bullets, but eventually, I cannot have every tower in the game look like they aren't shooting anything. So, I decided to look up one game instead of just recalling all the TDs I played.

Flash Element TD 2
This is one of the earliest TD games I played. I liked it very much and I decided to try playing through it. Their towers shoot ammo as usual but they always seem to hit the creeps because the creeps are kind of slow compared to the speed the ammo are travelling at. Then, I started to become more observant when the faster creeps appeared. I noticed that no matter what, I could not see any "misses" or any ammo being wasted.

I felt like using FRAPS and recording the gameplay to observe it frame by frame what was going on, but it beame quite obvious to me after another minute of observation. The ammo would still ALWAYS travel toward their target even though it is not meant to be. It looks like the bullet they shoot are heat-seeking and curve toward the target. Indeed, most TD games probably incorporate this, and I should have guessed so from the start. With that, I think I have an idea how to create the ammo now.

Today, I tried to do a screen which manages the towers that the player owns. Basically I was aiming to be able to select towers, navigate through the inventory of towers and have the game print out the statistics of those towers, such as their health and damage values.

Second Game in Progress?

Monday, 3 September 2012, 5.05AM

I have school in 3 hours' time. But here I am awake, yet to have my sleep. Why?

I've just begun on a new project that I created on Saturday! It's called "SWTD" and is a tower defense game. This game is the reason why I wanted to learn how to develop games. Unfortunately, this is a rather large-scaled project and for me to attempt to try to build it on my own without a development team or friends is really hard.

It has been a long time since I returned to coding with AS3 again. I had slight issues recalling how to create my first project and how to set it up as well as creating the first main menu screen, but after an hour or so coding the first screen, the rest just came naturally. I also drew LOTS of stuff with photoshop. Planets, space scenes, buttons and GUI. I am still rather new to photoshop and my friend praised me, saying that I managed to do this much in two days. He also said that my art skill has increased since the last time when I worked on "Introvert". I was really happy to hear that!

I really don't think this is a game I can eventually release, but I have been extremely stressed and depressed lately, and had the motivation and urge to attempt to create something apart from "Introvert", and so, "SWTD" was born.

I have managed to get quite a lot into the game in just two days.

On Saturday, I drew an awesome main menu screen as well as several projects. I also got several screens up, including the: Level Selection Screen, as well as a Skill Tree Screen.

I also added 4 skills in the skill tree screen and they can be purchased and upgraded. They work fine. Saturday is a mad day because I was crazy enough to sleep at 7am (and woke up at 3pm the next day).

On Sunday, I managed to create a scrolling transition effect for the level select screen. It looks like as though there is a camera and the player can "explore" this galaxy.

I also created much of the interface on these two days and I am highly impressed with the UI and buttons I have created thus far. I wanted this futuristic feeling and I am sure that I have managed to deliver it.

While I am all excited about this TD project, "Introvert" is still my main project as that is the game that I am very sure is completable. This TD on the other hand, will most likely just be a project I will work on when I feel like it since it is highly impossible to be something able to be released with just me working on it.

Some problems I faced were trying to scout for a futuristic font, as well as a bug with the transition which causes the transition to jitter if the player taps the arrow keys too quickly. This has been partially solved though.

I am currently facing a huge problem with my code design. Because of the scale of this game, I need to sit down and properly think of how to code the game, where to place the files and such and how to link them.

I have a Hero, an Inventory, a BlueprintsManager, and Turrets themself, and Turrets can branch out into different classes such as "Ice", "Splash" and "Dual Shooting". It is really complicated that I can't just jump in and begin coding immediately. I did not really expect to get hindered so much by design.

It is now 5.24am and I am done with this post. I should begin to shut down my projects and tabs and begin to sleep.