{"assets":[],"author_link":"author\/toranoko\/","author_name":"toranoko","cat":"LD #30","categories":["LD #30"],"comments":[],"epoch":1408932240,"event":"LD30","likes":6,"metadata":{"p_key":"82600","p_author":"toranoko","p_authorkey":"0","p_urlkey":"293332","p_title":"Sender Post-Mortem","p_cat":"LD #30","p_event":"LD30","p_time":"1408932240","p_likes":"6","p_comments":"0","p_status":"WAYBACK","us_key":null,"us_name":null,"us_username":null,"event_start":"1408665600","event_key":"24","event_name":"LD30"},"source_url":"2014\/08\/25\/sender-post-mortem\/","text":"

Sender<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In Sender, you fight off gelatinous beings like flubber, that are invading through portals. In order to make progress, you seal off the portals with blocks that you have to charge with energy collected from killing the flubs.<\/p>\n

My initial idea was to do sort of a platforming tower defense. What was the tower? I wanted to make a 2d Ico, where you protect someone, you hold their hand and lift them up on platforms fighting back monsters and making your way through some sort of dungeon \u2013 that\u2019s something I\u2019ve wanted to do for a while, but I gave up the idea after thinking about the pathfinding involved.<\/p>\n

Tools<\/strong><\/p>\n

Game Maker<\/strong>\nIt\u2019s been a while since I\u2019ve looked at Game Maker, I decided before hand I would try the free studio version. Physics was a nice addition, they should update the room editor, at least a bucket fill, and different shape tools for tiles and objects would be nice. 24 hrs in I found out that i was limited to 10 scripts, 32 hrs in I found I was limited to 15 game objects. If I had known I probably would have picked up Unity. In hindsight though, being limited was probably a good thing during the jam \u2013 \u2013 maybe.<\/p>\n

Used bad coding practices, shameful variable names, a lot of copying and pasting because of the limit on scripts. Fixing bugs was fun, which was just taping the code together till it worked. I don\u2019t think either of those are bad per se during a jam, getting over myself and letting things not be perfect are probably what got me through the weekend \u2013 there are also some cool things that happen as a result of not being entirely in control. Like the enemy ai, the scripts pretty simple, move towards player on the x axis, if player is above, jump \u2013 the way I implemented the shooting, there\u2019s a slight kick up to the player, which results in the enemy dodging shots \u2013 so I went with it.<\/p>\n

Grafx2<\/strong>\nSaved my ass on the autotiling ground. I learned about the tilemap fx when Arachne posted her tile templates on the tigsforums. I\u2019ve since been using feature for creating custom templates and tiles for vagante. So what is the tilemap fx? Basically it runs through your image finding matching tiles when it turns on, when tiles match, placing a pixel will update all instances of that tile. Another cool thing about grafx2 is how you can use patterns from your image as brushes, x y z will rotate\/flip the brush \u2013 there are a lot of repeating pixels in the tileset.<\/p>\n

Photoshop<\/strong>\nI\u2019ve been using photoshop for modular animation for vagante, so I\u2019ve amassed a handful of animations files, that takes several source images as various body parts and accessories. They are linked to the psd file as smart object layers, if I update the source file, it gets reflected across all animation files. I\u2019ve writtened a script also to export spritesheets from all open documents. I think technically these count as content generators as per the rules of the Jam. The source image looks like this:\n\"\"\nI use 1px drop shadows set to \u201cscreen\u201d, with an adjusted contour in the animation files for the linked smart objects, to get nice outline. I do this because if you rotate a smart object that has the outlined pixelated, the outline gets broken.<\/p>\n

Bfxr<\/strong>\nGame Maker won\u2019t play the sounds I generated >:<\/p>\n

Moving Forward<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m really happy with the end result of Sender, this is the most I\u2019ve done on a game solo, and want to continue working on it during the weekends I have off\u00a0and make it something good. \u00a0 There are a lot of ideas I have floating around that don\u2019t fit the structure of Vagante that I want to play around with in Sender. \u00a0I\u2019m looking forward to also working with a close friend on this, I think we\u2019ll have something nice in a couple months.<\/p>\n

And now I\u2019m gonna plug Vagante\u2019s kickstarter<\/a><\/strong>, because it\u2019s happening. \u00a0Considered it plugged. \u00a0We weren\u2019t sure whether it was a good idea to do this LD, but we did it anyways and it was a nice break honestly from the 8 months we\u2019ve been staring at it. \u00a0 Speaking of which Eugene completed his entry also for the 72 hr compo, Irdencore<\/a>. \u00a0It\u2019s an online multiplayer team based king of the hill style space shooter, done with vector graphics \u2013 it\u2019s pretty fun, grab a friend.<\/p>\n

Thanks for reading! You can\u00a0Play Sender<\/a>\u00a0<\/strong>here<\/p>","time":"August 25th, 2014 2:04 am","title":"Sender Post-Mortem","title_was_empty":false}