Reviewing my Levels

I did not do much today, but today I noted several changes I need to make to my existing levels.

See this level above? It's the level that introduces a new gameplay feature to the player: Doors. I put a text that hints to the player that the doors' colour codes are not just for fun. I wanted them to know that only the boy turtle can use blue doors, and the girl turtle can use pink doors.

I even put a lock on the pink door because I intentionally wanted to force my testers to enter the blue door with the girl turtle and realise they could not.

Unfortunately, BOTH my testers did not come to that conclusion, asking me respectively:

"37 something wrong?"
"pink door 2nd time cant pass"

"O.o
why one guy can enter the door why one can't
is there a gender difference?"


So apparently, my level failed to do what it was supposed to do. I plan to introduce brown and blue doors in the first level, and for pink doors, I shall introduce them in the level after that, and THIS time, I will only put PINK doors in the level after that, and I will intentionally make it such that the player will USE the pink door with player 1, because player 2 will spawn at a difference place as player 1. ^^

I'm sure the design for the new door level will work, I hope. And I will remove pink doors from this level 36. Seems that introducing too many things at once is kind of bad. I did not expect design issues such as this one to appear, but I am really very very thankful to my testers, Li Hao and Han! If only I had more critical testers. Maybe someone can actually figure out the reason behind the doors' colour codes before I explain it to them. I need to improve on my level design so much more since this game is more about communicating with the player than showing the instructions page.

Things I've done today:
- Improved level editor: Fixed some issues with spikes being deleted even when they are not connected to a platform, Doors now have to be placed on the ground, and will be deleted if the ground below it is deleted.
- Drew the proper sprites and added animation for the GIRL turtle (sprites have to be improved, because Li Hao thinks they still look weird, same with the boy turtle)
- I've also taken a look at some of the save/load features of other games' level editors. I don't think I'm going to use any of those that I've seen though (I've only seen one actually, because I forgot what other games I played before came with level editors).

Level Editor Part 2

I have progressed quite a bit now on the level editor.

Compared to an earlier post, the level editor now has spikes and enemies as a new addition. Previously, making an exit did not actually make an exit, but now it does. Also, I added a seventh button (the one with a red 'X' in the first screenshot). That's the oblivion calibrator. Or rather, it's just a delete button! There are several ways to code a function to delete items on the level, but I thought that the easiest way was to just create a yellow sprite that locks onto the gridspace as above (see second screenshot). When the player clicks, it deletes ANYTHING on that grid.

Also, I have improved the level editor such that you cannot place TWO objects on the same tile. Previously, you could spawn a player inside a platform. That's weird! Spikes are also smart - I disabled the ability to place them anywhere. There must be a platform above or below, and the spikes will automatically change their orientation and will point away from where the platform is!

Now I am working on how to check that a platform does not have any spikes attached to it when I delete them because now, you can place spikes on a platform, and then delete the platform, and the spikes remain there, floating in space. I want to make any spikes connected to a platform disappear.

I also face severe memory leak from my oblivion calibrator (the delete button). Whenever there are spikes on the map, using it will cause some severe memory leak. By continuously using my oblivion calibrator, my memory consumed spiked up to 1051.95MB as in the above screenshot. This is NOT good at all. The game begins to lag when using the delete. I do NOT like this at all. Good thing is, I have found the cause of the problem, and am trying to rectify it.

Other small things I did today:

- All actions cause a text of instructions / descriptions to appear on the level editor

- Text disappears after 3 seconds

- I can no longer create multiple player characters. Only one instance of main player character is allowed on the map.

- Help popup fixed (previously, the spikes and characters covered it) 

Issues I need to fix:

- Delete spikes connected to platform

- Rectify lag

- Find a more efficient way to load platforms in the level editor

- Find a way to export the map so that I can play the levels created in the editor

- Think of how I'm going to save the level data and how I'm going to store them in specific save slots (I plan to make 5 to 10 slots for customized levels, accessible by a hidden room above the level selection screen. I'm also afraid that the level selection screen will become too packed, so I read and learnt to make a side scrolling camera for the level selection screen just to prepare should I ever have the need to do it)

I am considering to use my own level editor to actually generate levels. However, I will need to implement doors and keys for this. Also, it's quite late to actually use my level editor now -_- because at this stage, most of my levels are far too complex for the current level editor to accomplish. I will need to make HUGE improvements to the editor before I can use it to generate my future levels, which frankly speaking...are rather painful to do. I spend a lot of time creating levels. It's not as easy as I thought =(

Level Editor created!

Hihi.

Today, as I was working on levels, I thought about whether the game should have a level editor. I wanted to say "no" because it is simply too difficult to throw in a level editor, not especially after I've been adding lots of stuff such as keys and doors recently. Well, but I decided to give it a go anyway.

The coding process did not turn up as well as expected, but I made it and I was completely amazed that I was actually able to code out a simple level editor. At the moment, the level cannot be be saved or played yet, but it looks like it is actually possible to add the player(s) and design the platforms themselves, which is quite 'wow' already to me.

This is a screenshot of the level editor I designed. I do not use any form of level editor to design my levels because as I said before, I sketch the ideas on paper before actually implementing them, but it may seem that I may actually use my level editor to generate ideas. There is also a "help" button at the bottom right which I added. It brings up a popup with instructions. The level editor is currently too simplistic for me to use as an actual level generator because it does not have keys and other sort of stuff, but I was playing around with the level editor and did come up with some neat ideas for subsequent levels.

This is an idea which I may actually use. I was trying to actually create a proper level, but I did not have a "Delete tiles" button like in the screenshot before this one and ended up creating splaces that are completely inaccessible by the player...unless, I added doors! And then I had this idea of a possible level where there are several small rooms (like above) and plenty of doors that act like a maze of rooms. I think I may actually add this level in!

That concludes the level editor for now. Also, I have just bought Photoshop ^^
I am going to make my sprites transparent soon and maybe learn to use it to design better graphics because currently all my graphics are done in Paint. I might still continue to use paint though, to keep the art style standardized until I can learn how to use Photoshop effectively enough to produce something better.

DOORS, and the bugs they caused

I don't believe this. Seriously, the types of errors I'm encountering are absolutely fabulous.

Today, I went to start creating level 36, a VERY simple level that aims to introduce the player to yet another new feature I thought of just three days ago - DOORS!

When I first thought of doors, I was thinking it was actually going to be easy to implement it. Just add some sprites, and if the player touches the sprites and presses DOWN, then move their position somewhere! Haha, if only things were that easy.

I faced two frustrating bugs that I spent three hours trying to find the cause of (well, not really full three hours, because I was so frustrated that I ended up watching the TV and walking around the house really angrily).

Refer to the screenshot below.

The first bug is that when player 2 touches the bottom brown door, she gets stuck right below the door! There is nothing wrong with the spawning position, because when my player 1 uses the door, he goes up CORRECTLY! How bizzare! I spent lots of time and gave up, I decided to make it such that the player can ONLY use the door when his feet are on the ground. Strangely, after adding this requirement, the girl player cannot even go through the door because according to the game log, her feet aren't on the ground!

I did some intensive logging, got really tired, but I finally found that I had positioned my codes wrongly, resulting in the unusual bugs! That's it! And I could not believe this. The game ran well after that! (If you want to read detail on why the position matters, you can read my chunk of text at the end of this post later)



Both players can now utilize the brown door correctly. I am seriously very tired and exhausted now, because I've only had three hours of sleep before going to school today.

What I thought was a simple door concept turned out to be extremely problematic. There is another problem where if player 1 is standing on a door, and player 2 ENTERS the door and pops up on the other side, both players will overlap and one of them will get pushed down until he/she goes off the screen, causing the game to restart. It is rather irritating and I hope to resolve it soon.

For now, I'm just glad that I have finally implemented doors. It is a significant step because if doors are possible, it means I can go on and utilize them in my subsequent levels.

Well, that's it for today I guess. I need to sleep soon because I am really tired.

My mistake
This part is just me explaining my silly mistake. It's not very important to you I guess, but if you want to read it, it's fine.

Apparently, there are two important lines of code regarding collision detection in the above scenario (ignoring all other factors):

FlxG.overlap(player2, brownDoors, openDoor);

This code checks if my player 2 is touching the brown doors and call openDoor() which does the necessary teleportation. Somewhere below that code, I added this:

FlxG.collide(levelbg, player2);

This above code performs collision for my player 2 with the platforms.

Somehow, player 2 is teleported to the correct position exactly after she opens the door. But as she is teleported in this moment, she somehow falls from the gravity and overlaps onto the platforms, and the second code triggers to push her away. Unfortunately instead of pushing her up, it pushed her down, which is kind of funny because it actually worsens the problem. All I had to do was switch the order of the codes to make sure I always check collision with platforms first. This way the player won't drop below the ground level immediately after teleporting. But it wasn't so obvious to me that this was the source of the problem. I was still thinking it was due to the player being sent to the wrong position and then falling from the gravity. But well, now I learnt that I should ALWAYS perform the checking of collision with platforms at the very top before checking for collisions on other objects. 

This is just one of the many things I learn while working on this project. Thanks to all those frustrating errors that probably show how much my programming needs to improve. I do think I'm getting better though =D

Dang. After typing out my mistake, I suddenly realise that upon solving this crucial bug, I can move on to designing new levels. This makes me excited and happy that suddenly I feel like staying up late to do the levels. But oh well, I think I shall take a break from hours of lifeless programming. I feel like I have no life because of this project. I hardly even play the games I used to play because seeing my own game progress is just extremely rewarding...

Problem with Turtles =(

Today, I am continuing with level design. It is really exciting to do these levels now because the game has more components in it - trapdoors and keys open up new ideas and possibilities. As you can see, I am currently developing level 34. The screenshot is actually an early level 34. The final level has much more stuff in it!

I actually have two phases of when I actually think about how to make the level. The first phase is when I first get the idea. When sketching, I seldom make levels complex - my ideas are rather rough sketches of a few platforms and puzzle elements. 

But when I actually get on to coding the level, the placement of the trapdoors and keys and such, I begin to add more elements to make the level more exciting. Usually when coding, I'm still thinking about the level design, and much of the time I'd have to think about how I would play the level as a player. For example, a level I'm designing now has a pair of PINK doors and a pair of BLUE doors. As the coder, I want to tell the player that pink doors are for the girl player, and blue doors are for the boy player. But then as I imagine myself playing it, I realise that it is possible that the player might think that the colour codes of the door simply tells where you will come out from when you enter it. And at that time, I put the two doors next to each other. Perhaps by coincidence, the player will not find out the actual purpose of me colour coding the doors. That's why I'm now enhancing the level now to make sure that there is no room for error.

I've updated the trapdoor graphics to have that forest feel. When playing the game, look closer at the doors when they animate. The "leaves" will fall and the vines will snap! That was inspired when I thought copy and pasting the doors would be boring and I thought something else should take place when the doors open.

I was actually considering if I should make the metal trapdoors be a lump of thick vines instead, and the keys to be some sort of  "scissors" that will cut the vine, and the animation will play the scissors snapping the vines apart, thus "unlocking" it.

At the moment, I plan to make the keys less golden and have more grime and dirt, with mud stains on them to give it the forest feeling. The idea for making the keys and doors have a forest theme was an idea contributed by my friend Li Hao, who tests my game for me ^^ He's my only tester actually =( and the rest of the people only tested the game once, which was when it was still in early development, having just a couple of levels.

Currently, I have one really tough problem that I cannot seem to solve:
- *Turtle characters are too small

My sprites are actually 10 x 20 each. That is really small! I don't think you know this but, I never meant to have turtles as main characters in the game until it was pointed out to me that boxes (the original "characters") were simply unacceptable, and it would be "disappointing" if I were to make the game have boxes as main characters.

The boxes did not have detail, so I thought a size of 20 x 20 was appropriate. It was only just a few days ago did I finally decide to draw and add the turtle animations. Since the turtles were standing up and took on a rectangular form, I cut the size to 10 x 20. THIS WAS A DISASTROUS MOVE.

I had simply too little space to draw the turtles. I drew them 16 x 32 instead. But the problem with using paint is that the game engine does not seem to be able to scale the graphics down properly because it's made of pixels, which meant that all my graphics were SCREWED. I had to redo a 10 x 20 version of all my turtle animations, and keep the 16 x 32 version for when the turtle is bigger.

It really sucks to have those small graphics. It's hard to draw and hard to see. Perhaps if I had planned to use turtles from the start, I may not have this problem now. I tried to enlarge the turtles now but the problem is that the platforms are 32 x 32. Enlarging the turtles to 16 x 32 means that while their feet are on the ground, their head would already be touching the ceiling! That makes it horribly hard for me to design subsequent levels because I have to leave a two-grid spacing. I don't want the characters to look like they are so tall that they are made to squeeze through walkways that are just the same as their height! They also wouldn't be able to jump with their heads touching the ceiling.

Other problems I face in the code:
- Player will overlap onto the blocks when they hold a directional key, and when they jump while overlapped, they will collide with the door above, as though there was an invisible ceiling

One possible enhancement (I have many, but I will just name the one which I think has the highest success rate for me to implement):
I thought of decorating the map with some cool objects, such as perhaps a tree with falling leaves, or grass that will sway, and putting these occasionally around the map to break the monotony of how everything seems so conformed to grids and how uniform everything appears to be.

My reflections (Note: not game-related)

As I am staring at my project, at all the codes, running the game and testing the things I just added, there are times when I can't help but just stand up, walk around the house, look out the window, or enter my dark and silent bedroom. Then I'd come back and sit down before the computer, thinking about life again.

I think about the past, and of course I thought about the day when this idea came to my mind, the very day I told myself that I needed to make this game, and try my best to complete it.

It's been two weeks of almost lifeless programming.

Have I achieved what I set out to achieve?


I also begin to wonder whether I will be able to finish this project at all. I'd say "Yes I can!", but in one week's time, school will start and we have to work on our Major Project.

I predict it to be a very stressful time when we have to really slog and put a lot of effort into. That is quite bad since I may not be able to work on my own project as much as I can now when the holidays still last.

I also start to think that perhaps I should have begun to realise that I should not have waited until my third year to start my own project. All this time, I had waited, thought that by the end of three years, I would be able to make my first working game!

I was wrong.


At the end of two years of school, I had come to a realisation. It was not a surprising one, but it was just something I had to accept.

Accept that even after another year of studying, I would not be able to make a game at all.


Maybe I should have started learning by myself sooner, perhaps...when I used to have more time, at least I could put the time to better use.

As if things aren't bad enough, there is another distraction in July aside from Major Project. I've actually been looking forward and preparing for July (to play a game), but well...it seems that I might have to choose between working on this project, or playing the game which I have actually been anticipating for a few months. No doubt after waiting for so long, I would want to play...but now with this project in the way, I know that I have to sacrifice one thing, no matter what choice I make.

But back to flash games, I think this might probably be the only flash game I can create - the first, and only. It kind of saddens me a bit, because I actually had ideas for other games too, but at least I think if I were to choose any one game to make, I'd say I made the right choice of making Introvert. I have never had such a strong desire to create a flash game until I got the idea for Introvert. A desire so strong that it could make me so eager to see its completion.

I reflect endlessly as I work on this, the evening passes like a breeze, the nights turn into mornings, hours pass by swiftly that in just a few hours from now, when I look out my window, what I expect to be a black sky, would instead be a blue morning sky.

I guess that's all for my reflections. Now...it's back to coding.

Blocks and Keys!

Today, I got around to somewhat completing the key sprites and implemented the block opening sprites, both of which are now animated at 9 frames per second, which I think is the threshold for me and it also seems that 9 frames per second is something I should aim for since it seems to look rather smooth. I initially wanted the key to just hover up and down because that was easier, but then it meant that I had to change the sprite from 32 x 16 to 32 x 32. So I just stuck with this and did rotation, which is actually quite fun, and it also makes the key look a bit more 3D.

I had a problem with the blocks not disappearing after it was done opening but now it's solved. I had to check if the animation was finished in update, then destroy the door. I also encountered a problem where if the character holds down the LEFT arrow key and bangs against a wall of doors, he will not be able to jump all the way up as though something were above him. This is a very irritating problem I face sometimes. I added a "repulsion" effect that will repel the player away from the blocks. The repulsion was weak at first and this made the player jitter (vibrate along the edge of the wall), but I made it stronger so he will actually rebound away when he bangs against the blocks. I don't really like the rebound, but I think it looks better than having the character jitter.

Notice all my pictures never have a white background - that's because I don't have photoshop or any transparent tool >< which I hope to get soon so I can finally make all my sprites have a transparent background. Now I'm just making multiple versions with different background colours if I need them.

I am creating levels 30 and 31 today, and also hopefully within these two days, I will get to adding the actual turtle character, get its animations to work and make sure there are no bugs with the character. Now, my character is a a solid red rod!