Done on 7 April 2013

I’ve once again tried to better the graphics. It is really hard because a character size of 20 x 10 means I cannot add details that I want to add. It’s a torture trying to make a bunch of pixels look like hair. It took me a few hours to finally get it right.

20 x 10 pixels
Very first version:

Third trial version with hair improved:

Final results at the end of today (addition of red topwear and skirt):

32 x 16 pixels
Very first version added hair, but a comment told me she looked very old:

Second version (final version so far?): Changed hair, and widened the skirt.

Hopefully this will be the final time. Afterall, it’s hard to notice any changes made on 100% zoom.

Other graphic changes done in the past week (hopefully for the better):

 Trait icons (sort of like buffs):

6 April 2013

I worked on several new levels today. The playable levels now goes up to 49, and I am now working on level 50, which is one of the important core levels I had in my sketches. Due to time constraints, I might be cutting down the maximum number of levels in the game to 60 too, which is a good thing. The game has far more levels than I intended.

New feature: Spikes can be destroyed and plays the following animation:

I kind of love animating objects, so this was really fun to do. It plays at 12 frames per second.
There is only one level that implements this kind of dynamic spikes. It is possible to code it such that all levels use this new destroyable spike, but that will take some time to implement, so I will not be doing it yet. I am pretty excited to see what people think about it.

Another simple recolouration I did a few days back is this shimmering purple key. It’s different from the other keys because it can only be collected by two players simultaneously. Rather than a change in colour, notice the key will turn darker and lighter as it rotates, which is another stark contrast to differentiate it from other keys. Moving on from MS Paint has allowed me to do cooler stuff like this.

A new level background which was resized from my original night city background drawing for a bonus level.

5 April 2013

Time runs short on my schedule. Although I have already more levels in the game than I initially planned, and more quality than I ever had, it also meant that I had also spent more time developing the game.

I am now focusing a lot more on the quality of the level, rather than the quantity. I’ve been doing a lot of fancy stuff with the game (and in the process, encountering the strangest bugs ever).

It isn’t easy frankly. But well, I hope to see the light at the end of the tunnel soon. For the past few months, the game was stuck at under 40 levels, with missing levels in between.

It’s now Friday and at the end of the past 7 days, I’ve created 9 new levels and 1 bonus level so far. The game now runs up till level 47. 3 of the levels are fully complete, aka fully decorated, with texts and free of glitches. The other levels still have to go through touch ups.

My aim is to complete all the levels by 20 May. I challenged myself to fully complete at least one level a day, and any extra time has to go into developing the next level.

Anyway, today I created this mini-conversation that occurs on one of the levels. I felt so excited when I got the speech bubbles to work with each other, so it looks like a conversation.

Notice in the screenshot that the two turtles are not facing each other, because players can freely move their characters while the conversation is going on. (Although it is easy to stop the player from moving them, so I can just arrange them for this conversation, I want to give the player freedom of movement even while a conversation is going on, as well as ability to skip it).

So one small detail I added, was to make them automatically face each other. I don’t know how many people are paying attention to small details like this, but those who do make the tiny bit of extra work worth it!

AI Levels are fully working AI ! YES!
It took me up till the wee hours of the morning, but the levels with AI are fully working. So far, no glitches were found.

Introducing the Grim Reaper v0.10
(Hello and welcome to the Grim Reaper v0.10. He watches every death you make in the game.)
I was also trying to be (yet again, crazy), so I coded a sort of statistics table thing that shows how many times the player dies in each level.

This will be useful to generate precious data from any people who are free enough to test the game for me.

I think the “instructions” in the picture are pretty clear. I only played the game for a few seconds to test this statistic table. It’s fully working across deaths on all levels. I can’t wait to let someone try this. And I am most curious about which level is the hardest, and which levels they die a lot on! Nobody has seen this table yet (actually, nobody has seen much of this game).

If I have time, I will implement this. But seeing how I made this for testing purposes, it will probably not make it into the final game as a feature due to lack of time.

3 April 2013

AI
Today I added what seem to be the two most tedious levels to code. In Levels 41 and 42, the girl player is able to move by herself! The colourful picture below shows me mapping the zones through which the player will traverse through, and based on which zone the girl is in, direct the girl in a specific direction.

Here’s a picture of my level design fail too:

But today, it occurred to me that those 4 lines of code can be summarized in one line. I feel so silly because the if-else statements were really so troublesome to type and I had been doing that for so many times, only to realise now that there is a shortcut. This has got to be a really basic thing that I overlooked! Oh my…

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:

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.

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.

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.

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:

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:

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!

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.

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.