Something I had been looking forward to..

31 March 2013

Today wraps up the week of bug fixing and touching up of the game and levels. Fixed some last minute bugs with the editor too.

New Feature / Map
I drew some rock portals. From a comment, it seems that these rock portals I drew were far more impressive than the DOORS I drew for the later levels. If only I had chosen to draw something more relevant than door sprites.

But anyway, these are the rock portals:

 Stone portals original

Stone portals redrawn and tested with environment enabled

It was drawn once, and then redrawn because I had to make the style fit with the rest of the decorations, such as the signboards. That was in case you were wondering why I removed the original stone portals. The pixel-style portals aren't as good looking to me, but the outline I gave it makes it stand out from the level more and gives the feeling that the portal is something that can be interacted with.

Something I had been looking forward to in a long time

I finally started adding more portals, which is the start of adding new levels to the game. I had been waiting to do this for WEEKS! It is the most exciting part, but it will require lots of time and effort as I set a very ambitious goal in the past, and I now have to try to complete this game.

Editor FINISHED

28 March 2013 - Editor FINISHED

Game Level Editor COMPLETE
Today, I completed the final feature of the editor - the ability to create brown doors, blue doors, and pink doors. This is much easier compared to keys and blocks which had my brain fried over the past few days. The only challenge with making doors work in the editor is to make sure that any single door created by the player in the Level Editor is "smart" enough to correctly link to another door that the player puts.

I am excited to see how players use the level editor. Nobody has tested it yet.

Schedule for the rest of the week


Character Design
Currently looking to improve the artwork of the other protagonist(?) character.

I looked up other images of cartoon female characters and noticed that the defining features to make a girl attractive and stand out would be the hair and eyes. So I will be looking to improve that aspect of the character.

Unfortunately, the other issue is how I made the characters extremely tiny, which was a design flaw right from the start that I failed to rectify.A game character of 20 x 10 pixels size hardly has space for me to improve and add details like hair, which is a sad thing too because not much can be seen.

I was told that the character graphics I had were so small that they are comparable to 8-bit games, and even 16-bit games now have larger sprite sizes than mine. It's a waste I can't really change it now. The width of my character is 10, and even Mario is 15!

!!!

Smallest game character... If I ever make any future games, this is the number one mistake I have learned not to repeat.

Editor is finally wrapping up!

26 March 2013 - Editor is finally wrapping up!

Today, I worked on the editor A LOT!

It does not seem like much to some experienced programmers, but the sheer amount of logic and programming necessary to make this work is just tremendous to me.

The above screenshot is the level editor in action. I created some tiles and blocks.
Using arrays to store the x,y coordinates (FlxPoint) of every object in the game, I save the data into arrays, such as playerArrays, exitArray, keysArray, and such.

The editor is also smart in the sense that when you place spikes, they "stick" to platforms in the correct direction. This was accomplished a long time ago, but I thought I should bring it up too. I coded the new "friends" button today, which allows you to place friends on the map. This is easy compared to the blocks, which I had spent hours trying to figure out how to get it to work.

Each key unlocks a specific set of blocks. To save this information, I created an array, of an array, of points, of blocks! And finally, I managed to get the blocks to be "saved" and exported into an actual, playable level!

Before I got this to work, I spent hours trying to make the blocks export properly and showing up, and then making sure that they are able to be exported back into the level editor when the player is done playing his level.

When I saw the blocks finally export properly, I was super happy.

And when you return to the level editor, it re-imports the data back into the level editor. Theoretically, the player could close the game, re-launch the game, and his level will STILL be there! This is a new milestone accomplished. I shall celebrate by sleeping, because it is 8.29AM now and I was up all night fixing the level editor and getting it to work.

After today, I understand arrays a lot better.

I drew a hammer that can be used in the editor to destroy unwanted objects as well.

It replaces the old destroy button graphic.

Other Editor improvements/changes:
player2 can now be created in the Editor and interacts with player1 correctly (able to switch characters, collide, etc)
Updated the instructions panel
Editor now has a background that is in sync with the platform tiles' type
Added UI to the editor's playable level, as well as zoom feature as well
Copied a lot of game mechanics into the editor's playable level (such as ability to collect friends, grow, interact with keys and collide with blocks)

New task to do:
Possibly add a kind of save and load system where the player can create more than one level in the editor, export them and re-edit any one of the exported levels at any time. I will not be touching the editor so soon, so this is probably not going to happen till I develop the other areas of the game further.

Extras:
For those who want to somehow see my messy messy code:

arrayOfArrayOfPointsOfBlocks.png

To some, it arguably doesn't look very complicated in the end, when everything is working. But I'm too tired to think of all that now. Brain fried.

Behind the scenes of the Main Menu

24 March 2013 - Behind the scenes of the Main Menu

The one thing about the art in this game is that it goes through several iterations to try and reduce imperfections. One thing in the game that changed the most was the Main Menu. Yup. If you saw the final version of the main menu, let me just let me show you what the first main menu in the game actually looked like:

Go ahead and giggle at it

The old design had turtles appearing when your cursor rolls over the button.

Well, of course, that was until I looked up the main menu of other games, as well as some screenshots of very nicely designed Main menus found by Li Hao, who felt that my Main Menu could be improved. 

So I went through some of the old pictures I drew in my free time (I have lots of those), and picked a few pictures that I could possibly use as a background. Li Hao saw the following, and he remembered that this image I drew was really good:

He said this would make an awesome background for the main menu

The new buttons did not fit with this picture, so I redrew all the buttons. I didn't have Photoshop at the time, so I made use of Powerpoint. Adapting the colour scheme I used in the Main Menu, I redesigned the buttons.

I think nobody liked how the button would tilt back when it is pressed

The New Main Menu was awesome and good looking though drawn in Paint. I removed the fake stars, and added animated stars: smallStar, mediumStar and bigStar. It was only after two weeks since the start of the project did I actually incorporate this nicer looking main menu and have the stars twinkle in the background.

It was 3 months later when I started experimenting with the powerful tool, Photoshop. Li Hao said to me before that the buttons could still use improvements, and that they looked "plain". So I tried to use Photoshop to create buttons.

I also drew CLOUDS. And coded them to sweep across the skies every so often

The new "GALLERY" button I added had texture and looked better when put directly above the old buttons in comparison. So guess what I did?

If you guessed "redraw all the buttons again", then you are right. So, I redrew the buttons!

But now, the buttons look relatively good as compared to the menu background. As I evolved to use Photoshop more and more, I decided to see what I could do about the menu. 

bg_menu6.png

Graphics improved! I ended up redrawing almost every single thing. Except the grass of course. MS Paint grass surprisingly looks good. I even changed the tinge of sky colour because I felt the sky was too bluish. 

bg_menu7.png

Graphics improved! Again! The moon is removed in this picture because I changed the moon to be a separate .png after I redrew it. To be honest, the moon was already good looking enough in the old version, but the black outline just doesn't fit the entire theme. If you noticed, I removed the black strokes of almost everything. I also redrew the buttons, because this sunrise sky does not match with the blue buttons.

Thankfully, I don't have to redraw the buttons. A hue change was good enough. Same thing goes for the blue clouds that sweep the skies.

So there it is. The final menu. The Introvert game logo was changed as well, including animating turtles instead of squares after a game-breaking change to use turtles as characters in the game.

If you play through the game far enough, you unlock the sunset background. I added the blue background in the end as well, but not the black one. You can change the colour scheme with the bottom right colour scheme buttons. So I guess, my effort of drawing the blue buttons and skies didn't go to waste :)

So that's all right? Well...

I did a small change today, and improved the wooden log in the menu. Every time I compile and run the game to test it, I arrive at the main menu and I almost always look at the log that seems out of place somehow. So today, I finally couldn't take it and went to readjust it. It was a few minutes of work, but I think it is looking much better! (Left version is the improved log, right is the OLD one I kept staring at.)

I don't think many people would notice this kind of thing though

Secrets
There are a few tiny secrets to the main menu. I'm not sure how many people will find them though, but when someone does, I hope to be able to see his/her reaction!

Improvements

22 March 2013 - Improvements

I managed to tweak certain levels and fix issues in the game (some design issues, but mostly adjusting texts). Also, minor adjustment: I made the text have an outline to make it readable in low-contrast situations where white text against a pale background made it difficult to read. After stroking/outlining text manually, I decided it looks much better and is worth applying across all text in the game.

Better looking text, when compared to without outlines:

I am currently working on making the Editor work as well. To be honest, the editor was very fun to work on when I started, but now, I'm doing the not-so-fun part of it. I have to make sure that the level created by the user is exported properly, so that it is playable, and then I have to make sure that when the player returns to the Editor, the exported level can continue to be edited. The biggest challenge is getting everything to work, and also being able to "save" the level, so it can be edited at a later date.

Long time no see

15 March 2013 - Long time no see

It has been a very long time since I could get time to progress on my game. Progress had been stopped for nearly half a year. Been extremely busy and tied down with so many things. I'm glad that today I have finally been able to continue working on the game after what appears to be months. Hopefully, I will be able to continue working uninterrupted on Introvert every week, and every day if possible.

What I will be doing for the next few days would be to re-adjust all the text size and positions in the game. As I have incorporated the camera zooming function (with Li Hao's help!), each level has its own zoom level to make levels visually better. The zoom is manually set to a certain value, depending on the level. I try to make it as nice looking as possible. But with each level having its unique zoom level, it also means that having a constant text size means the text appears big on some levels and small on other levels since I don't attach text as part of an interface.

Honestly, I hate having to manually play through my levels again and manually set the size and position, but it's something that is on high priority on my to-do list now. Thankfully, I thought of a code that made life easier for me.

This simple line will readjust the font size of all the text that appears across ALL the levels. 16 is the default font size on 100% zoom. On 200% zoom, the font size will be 8. It is inversely proportional so the higher the zoom, the smaller the text should appear to the camera. This works perfectly!

But I still have to change the x,y positions of every level's texts AGAIN! That's something I can't cheat haha. This may seem like a relatively simple task anybody can do, sorta like QA, but I don't know anyone who would bother to help, so I guess I'm on my own!

Blur problem

As I began to go through my levels, I noticed that the implication of zoom led to my text being blurred. I did not like it at all.

I decided in the end to round off text sizes to the nearest power of 2 as it would a bit better with bitmap based text. So most text sizes are now 8, or 16 in the game.

In one such level below, you can see the blurry text (bottom) and the new readjustment(top).

Reflection (Additional info, not development related)
This is just some additional stuff I want to express.

Through this project, I learned quite a fair bit of things. My companion, Li Hao, said that even if I don't manage to complete this game and have an output, I would already have learned a lot. Indeed, I began to realise the consequences of not planning my schedule properly. It led to much delay, which is why I have been trying to tell myself not to add too much content into this game, or it will indeed not be finish-able.

Today is the start of another phase of development. From now till next month, I will focus on fixing whatever flaws exist in the game before adding additional content, like new levels, new cutscenes and bonus content which I had always been excited about.

I kind of reflect about stuff like this everyday, even when I don't work actively on the game. It is quite fun, though I still hate planning because it requires lots of self control and time management. If someone could teach me how to plan a good schedule for me, that would be great. But that's something I have to learn as I go along.