Hyrule speculations

Hyrule speculations

*UPDATE* TP map fits remarkably well. Look at Hylia which is almost a direct copy of the Hylia from TP. Also the rivers is somewhat similar, but of course more "natural" in the wiiu rendition.

Observations:

• Thats pretty vast
• Super simple "terrain generation" terrain - very 2008 unity kind-of tech. Sadly
• Not as lush as the E3 teaser
• The horses has superb animation
• Epona looks nice
• Link has pretty cool movement animation compared to previous Zeldas
• When he runs uphill he looks very nice and heavy
• Terrain seems a bit untidy... unlike previous Zelda titles
• I see hylia,death mountain,something that could look like the plateau-y Zora domain from oot, desert,hyrul field.

Gui design for JU inv/stat/prox

Here is the gui design for the inventory/stat sheet/prox

The prox at the top left makes sure that you have a view of the surroundings while fiddling with the inventory.

Tools and weapons are printed on site, and recycled when discarded. This is a very clever way of circumventing the limited space issue of a JU. 

A low fi crap shooter

Cølørs!

A little test thing - with lively JANITR Unit

Basically the JANITR Unit will have fun. Generally. 

In the end you might think the Unit is annoying, but Sovne, the astronaut/on surface crew member thinks its ok, when the Unit is cheering him up.

Janitr with astronaut

I've been busy with GUI the last couple of nights. It's coming on pretty nicely. In the end I want everything to move and react to whatever the player is doing. It is important to me that it looks nice, and as you might realize here is that I just concentrate on the fun part, graphics, look, feel, heck... gui before gameplay, tech and mechanics. 

The goal is beauty. I hope to achieve it. Beauty comes in many forms though, so this will not appeal to just anyone. But that's fine by me.

Hvy unit supports Janitr

I made this. Its the Hvy Unit. It has a soft caring heart, and two sockets for heavy duty tools/weapons. However it has a tendency to refuse attaching non-lethal utils. It's quirky in many ways.

Jant is quite a big bot

Here is the Janitor Unit compared to people ->

This was made with Piskel - a completely amazing pixel art animation kit. Piskelapp.com

Piskel saves out as png and gif and all sorts of cool stuff. Here is the animation as a gif: 

Pretty neat!

Janitor robot

Jant. Or call him what you want

See it move here:

PROXEMIT (almost) 8=>Õ-ing done!

PROXEMIT has been tested here and there - mostly on reddit's weekly FF. It has been insightful. The audience is divided, and that is ok. I can live with that. Some are angry others are happy.

The game is almost done. I certainly don't want to put more time nor effort into it. There are other things that I would love to start working on in my spare-time. So what happens now is that I will wrap it, I will make some of the aspects of it easier to understand, even "serve" the audience some information that I originally had planned to be hard(er) to find. But whatever.

Try the latest version here:

Download Proxemit.exe

Download Proxemit.zip

By the way check this out! It is such a cool app:

Piskel - free, open-source, in browser pixel animation editor

Sound work

 I've managed to almost cover the entire game with sound effects so it's not quiet anymore.

For sound effects I use this site: http://freesound.org/ which is pretty neat for small indie stuff like PROXEMIT. After you have searched for the kind of sound you want, you can filter everything in different categories. What I do is press the "Creative Commons 0" (CC0) button which scrapes away all those sounds that cost money and leaves the "public domain" sounds. I'm certain it can be error prone, but for a small time thing like PROXEMIT I'm sure it doesn't matter - and if it does I don't care about it - and if someone cares about they should tell me to tear out that sound.

For some sounds I've taken a liking to this little neat gadget as3sfxr - It's a free 8-bit sound generator - and it generates god damn everything!!! I love it. When you've made the sound you like export it to wav. Amazing. It's made by this guy - increpare - who has some pretty crazy stuff on his site.

After having found the sounds I want to use, I take them through Audacity - a free open source (I guess) sound editing tool. I'd rather use some high-end sound editing software, but what are you gonna do?

That was a linky post... '_'

Proxemit upd.

Proxemit is now a single runtime executable instead of an installer that asks you to install the game. I always thought that was super annoying and had no idea that alternatives was available. Now I do. 

Many changes has been made as well, to ease the learning curve a bit. A couple of testers misses out on things that I thought was obvious. We learn all sorts of things every day, all the time, along the way. I'll make sure to post Proxemit on reddit.com - Feedback Friday(FF) again, to collect even more feedback.

FF persuaded me to play other similarly small super indie games, and give feedback on them as well. I tried a couple of quite nice games and the more I play what is being made in the corners of indie land, the more I'm certain that Proxemit is "ok" for unspecified niches of the gamer demographics. That makes me happy, and not something something.

You can get it as either exe or zip here:

(exe requires you to do trust the download - zip requires an extract)
Choose your poison!

Download Proxemit.exe

Download Proxemit.zip

Auto Multi Tile Placer - fancy

I hit quite a problem the other day when I started to integrate a **** into Proxemit at the end. It desired for me to place tiles relative to each other. The easy solution was to have only one kind of tile, and I did have only one kind of time for a short while.

It looked something like this:

But that was to absolutely no satisfaction. So the only reasonable thing to do was to spend the entire evening coding an "intelligent" tile placer. Which sees corners, straights etc.

The way I did this, though hacky, I guess, was to have a thingy place hundreds of tiles in a pattern derived from a 32 x 32 bitmap that was actually the blueprint for the ****. So if the bitmap had a pixel at a given position, the thingy would automatically place a "block" at that position relative to the grid size of the game.

A pixel at position 3 x 5 in the blueprint bitmap would result in a "block" being placed at 3*32 x 5*32 pixels relative to the ****. Pretty cool. And simple. Hacky.

When all the needed "blocks" had been placed, each "block" would then run their own little code. That code basically checks its surroundings. First in direction 0, which is straight to the right. Then direction 45, which is upper right, then 90, which is straight up, etc.

Each time the "block" saw another block it would count +1 in a variable called "blocks", each time it didn't see anything it would count +1 in a variable called "voids".

After having gathered the needed intel to form a sort of matrix of where there were blocks and where there weren't, it would determine in which average direction there were blocks.

Average direction of "voids"/"blocks" in degrees:
1: 247-------------2: 270-------------3: 315

So if the little block saw 5 blocks to the right,45,up,135,left it would have an average accumulated cluster of blocks in the direction of 90, or straight up. So the void would naturally be at 270, or straight down. After that assessment it was just a matter of "skinning" the individual "blocks" with a corner graphic if it was at a corner, or a straight graphic if it had neighbors whom desired it to be straight. 

The result looks a bit like this - 

- but not really, you'll have to play the game to see. -_-'

The ones inside the shape are a bit misleading, they are actually to be skinned black, so they are present but not visible. 

I know it is not very groundbreaking, but I felt like a freaking god when I nailed that one!

Auto tile placer works. Happy smiley. Numbers just debug. I feel like a freaking god! pic.twitter.com/pFxckqgNjs
— Andreas I\I Grontved (@andreasng____) March 20, 2014

Proxemit shuffles along

Over the past days I've managed to nail some pretty cool things.

For example a script that interprets the surroundings of a block, and determines if it'll be a corner, a straight or a single block with no neighbors. A script like this might not be a big deal for average coders ~~~ but I freaking feel like a god!!! I'm totally pumped up - if coders feel like this every time they manage a problem, nail a task, over comes an obstacle - then they got the best job in the world.

Here are some grabs from the development. To finish Proxemit a couple of rooms utilizing the block script is desirable.

Proxemit playable updated

Check it out:

Download Proxemit.zip

---

Proxemit still alive

Proxemit is coming along nicely. Most recently I've added a little intro, where a "rat" finds you and releases your pod from it's locks in the floor just before a sentry turns up and chases the rat away.

It is insanely hard to figure out if this is actually a real little indie game or not. Till now I've only been thinking about it as a "nothing" that maybe a couple of people would ever experience. But looking at the catalogue of different indie bundles I'm slowly starting to think about Proxemit as a viable though short indie effort.

My further plan is to, when I have time that is, to add maybe a couple of more rooms/challenges, such as a couple of different lock mechanisms and ultimately a boss of some sort in the end. If there is cream for the crop then a sort of "end" would be nice to have, but I can surely figure out a way to wrap it quickly if that would be necessary.

Merry Newyear

This year will hopefully incompass good things.

Proxemit Playable Updated

I updated the playable version of Proxemit. The build has all the fixes and suggestions from test session #1. Content-wise there is still a way to go.
I'd love to double the number of levels, add an enemy of some sort - a sentry maybe, which lies dormant until triggered. When triggered it'll chase the player down. A final upgrade will aid the player towards the end - or I'll settle with a fast reloading ******** which is already in the game, but not used as a weapon.
Another enemy (or the sentry) could also scan the surrounding area with a laser which hits the invisible walls. The beam rotates and therefore there'll always be a safe area where the player can move. If the laser hits the player the player dies and the level restarts.
The game is also in dire need of a proper ending.

Anyway grab it here:

Download Proxemit.zip

~ ~ ~

Proxemit miraculously works

Proxemit - which I've destroyed some months ago, after applying changes and fixes from playtest #1, now works. Somehow it is impossible to recreate the fatal bug, so I'll calmly look the other way, and ignore my hunches about what and where it was. Fingers crossed that it'll stay on the other side of the river... Shouts* Laughs*

Anyway, let's talk about how I save progress in Proxemit!

I'm saving everything in small ini files. Hush hush. I know ~ you don't have to tell me, but please do if you absolutely must, I'd love to hear how to do it properly. 

So every orb you pick up, tells the game to open an ini file, then look up the orb by adding together the orbs x and y coordinates only to use it as a sort of unique ID. Every ID is stored under the levels individual ID, so some orbs might have the same specific ID, but combined with the level ID, no orb will share the same. 

An orb in level_1 placed at 400x, 500y, will then be easy to find by going through the ini (the ini read command does this automatically) to locate the section which is called [1] - for level_1. Then the game will check for an ID called 400500 and see if it is equal to 1. If it is 1 the orb will be deleted and a "dead orb" will be placed in it's spot. If it does not exist in the ini, the game will register it, for later use. When first registered the orb will get the value of 0. So it does exist in the database, but it has yet to be collected by the player. 

I do the same with exits. When an exit has been activated it's variable "open" will be set to 1. Then when a level ends by the player going to the next/previous, a special "level end" event will register in the Exits.ini if the exit is open or not. 

The reason I do it this way is to effectively make the objects register them selves, and leave me out of it. I love the fact that, with code, this is possible. Every object that needs registration has been programmed to do this. Gamemaker is a trooper when it comes to these kind of things, because it has the ability to check an ini, if it doesn'e exist, it creates it. The same goes for the "posts" inside an ini. It creates them if they do not exist.

~ ~ ~

The failed remains of Proxemit

Proxemit ~ my game from early 2013, which I completely destroyed after the many fixes and applied suggestions from my good friend Martin Fasterholdt, who play-tested it a couple of months ago, should be fixable some way or another. I'm desperately trying to pick up the ashes and debug and debug_message my way out of the problem. A problem which I do not have any understanding of.
All I know is that it is some sort of infinite loop, but it is super hard to find, since GameMaker does not give me much to go on. However the few times that I've miraculously gotten info from GM it has been very helpful, but when I fix what I thought was the problem nothing changes. Proxemit remains unplayable ~

BUT - the now dated, yet playable older version is still available here ->

edit: It's a lie, it has been replaced with a newer and working version.

Download Proxemit.zip

If you play it, please get back to me - tell me what you think. Also keep in mind this is an early version, some features are not polished, and amount of content is at 50%. Yes in the end it will be a short experience. The reason for that is that the concept is pretty "hard" and might not be entertaining for a longer period of time, not without expanding it beyond it's original scope. Which of course is a possibility, but why not move on?

~ ~ ~

It works! Finger That Shit is alive

I got it to work. The SDK and NDK and whatnots were somehow out of date. What I didn't realize was that in the SDK install manager alot of things was depending on things that was "missing".

Anyway now that I got the device testing in Game Maker to work, I got to test my awkwardly stupid touch game idea. The concept works almost as I expected, however my phone and therefore my testing device has severe lag on the touch inputs, which results in the "buttons" being moved around is half a second late. It's super annoying!

A couple of stages more, and then I'll be off to another idea, that I got on my way home from work today. - A racing/driving game ~ also made for touch devices.