Two weeks remaining!
Thank you to everyone who has participated in the thread so far. And please let me know if any of you need any help at all with putting something together for this collab.
I know I'm late to the party, but I can totally do this. I have a great(?) idea, too: If we're celebrating Newgrounds history, we should make reference to dressup games! So how about a Dressup RPG. (With no adult content, I know.) A very simple idea: You have clothing pieces that give different 'stats', you mix and match them to get the right stats, you send the character off on 'quests', you get more clothing pieces, repeat as needed. And there could be Newgrounds-related 'clothing' like, a Tankman costume, or maybe a giant B you can wear.
I've done every part of this before, so I'm sure I can pull it off. I just need an artist who can create interesting art in less than 1 MB (and 11 days). Should I post in the Collabinator?...
At 6/10/15 01:59 PM, Listen2Reason wrote: I know I'm late to the party, but I can totally do this. I have a great(?) idea, too: If we're celebrating Newgrounds history, we should make reference to dressup games! So how about a Dressup RPG. (With no adult content, I know.) A very simple idea: You have clothing pieces that give different 'stats', you mix and match them to get the right stats, you send the character off on 'quests', you get more clothing pieces, repeat as needed. And there could be Newgrounds-related 'clothing' like, a Tankman costume, or maybe a giant B you can wear.
I've done every part of this before, so I'm sure I can pull it off. I just need an artist who can create interesting art in less than 1 MB (and 11 days). Should I post in the Collabinator?...
Yeah, post everywhere! And let me know if you'd like me to ask around too. I know the API may be over-complicated, so I'll help in any way I can.
Do you wanna take this one, @TricycleLord?
Okay, Super Seal Clubber is pretty much done. Please test it out for me!
Here's mainly what I wanna know:
Is it too easy? Too hard? (As a general rule of thumb, I like to think if you can beat a game on your first try then it's too easy, and if you can beat it on your second try it's just right.)
What score did you get your first time? What's your highest score?
Do the seals react to you too much? Too little? From too far away? From not far enough?
Do you feel like you're in control of the game? That is, do you feel like your score reflects how well you play or can you get a good score by just swimming around randomly?
And here's the most important thing I need to know...
Early on I discovered that I could win very easily by sitting still because seals would just come near me and fling themselves onto the iceberg. Easy fix: you're barely scary at all unless you're moving. But then you could still camp for an easy win by swimming in circles. Slightly tougher fix: if you turn in the same direction for too long, seals will ignore you. But then camping was still possible by doing figure-eights. So now there is a whole ton of invisible complicated processes that detect excessive turning in both directions at once. It's finely tuned to punish campers while not punishing you at all if you play like you're supposed to. And just in case people try camping and complain about how they don't know why seals are ignoring them, I put an extra line in the instructions about swimming faster and straighter.
So what I need to know is whether or not you find seals ignoring you when you're clearly not camping, which would mean you're a victim of the anti-camp code when you shouldn't be. And I also need to know if you've found any way to cheat the system for an easy win.
Thank you everyone!
Just played the earlier version today and the best I got was 1 seal. Played it just now and got 8 out of 7 seals on my first try. The controls are a lot better and the game is overall more fun than it was before. I think you've nailed it, but perhaps someone else finds something wrong with it. Awesome stuff man!
At 6/11/15 05:05 PM, Whirlguy wrote: Just played the earlier version today and the best I got was 1 seal. Played it just now and got 8 out of 7 seals on my first try. The controls are a lot better and the game is overall more fun than it was before. I think you've nailed it, but perhaps someone else finds something wrong with it. Awesome stuff man!
Thank you so much!
To be clear, when I asked what score you got the first time, I meant the first time with this version. Never mind the last version.
I guess there's another thing I forgot to mention...
Were the in-game instructions intrusive? Helpful? Did you find the help button in the game over screen? Did you discover that you can skip the intro animation?
At 6/11/15 05:24 PM, TharosTheDragon wrote: Thank you so much!
np!
To be clear, when I asked what score you got the first time, I meant the first time with this version. Never mind the last version.
Big improvement though, is all I'm saying :)
I guess there's another thing I forgot to mention...
Were the in-game instructions intrusive? Helpful? Did you find the help button in the game over screen? Did you discover that you can skip the intro animation?
They were kind of easy to miss now that I think about it. Gone before you knew it! I did discover the question mark icon at the end screen, but it didn't scream instruction manual at me. Clicking it could have revealed a list of credits of people who worked on the game. Not sure if it mattered since I clicked it anyway and it showed instruction like I expected.
At 6/11/15 05:31 PM, Whirlguy wrote: They were kind of easy to miss now that I think about it. Gone before you knew it!
Okay, but you figured out how to play anyway, right? So you wouldn't be a player who complained about a lack of instructions.
Do you think I should have the instructions linger longer on the screen?
At 6/11/15 05:56 PM, TharosTheDragon wrote: Okay, but you figured out how to play anyway, right? So you wouldn't be a player who complained about a lack of instructions.
Hahaha you know it ;)
Do you think I should have the instructions linger longer on the screen?
Hmm, how about it disappears when you start pressing buttons?
At 6/11/15 06:04 PM, Whirlguy wrote: Hmm, how about it disappears when you start pressing buttons?
It does disappear when you start pressing buttons. I've included unusually specific code to remove the instruction for each key when you use that key. That is to say, when you hold down up for a second and hold left for like a quarter of a second, you'll be left with the key instructions for right and down. Did it not work like that?
The rest of the instructions are just shown for a few seconds each.
At 6/11/15 06:13 PM, TharosTheDragon wrote: It does disappear when you start pressing buttons. I've included unusually specific code to remove the instruction for each key when you use that key. That is to say, when you hold down up for a second and hold left for like a quarter of a second, you'll be left with the key instructions for right and down. Did it not work like that?
The rest of the instructions are just shown for a few seconds each.
Well, I started swimming immediately when the game started, and that made the instructions disappear pretty much instantly. Maybe you should start with the intro video of the three orcas chasing seals. Then have that one orca show up as usual and show instructions on a still screen while it shows "Z: next", "X: skip instructions", or something like that?
setTimeOut() could be your best friend here, as people may skip text without even realizing it. It could be obtrusive though, now that I think about it.
At 6/11/15 06:22 PM, Whirlguy wrote: Well, I started swimming immediately when the game started, and that made the instructions disappear pretty much instantly. Maybe you should start with the intro video of the three orcas chasing seals. Then have that one orca show up as usual and show instructions on a still screen while it shows "Z: next", "X: skip instructions", or something like that?
setTimeOut() could be your best friend here, as people may skip text without even realizing it. It could be obtrusive though, now that I think about it.
Yeah, I don't want to be obtrusive. The whole idea is that the instructions show up while you're already playing so that they really don't interrupt you at all. If you make them disappear because you've already started swimming, then you already know how to swim and you don't need those instructions.
At 6/11/15 07:20 PM, TharosTheDragon wrote: Yeah, I don't want to be obtrusive. The whole idea is that the instructions show up while you're already playing so that they really don't interrupt you at all. If you make them disappear because you've already started swimming, then you already know how to swim and you don't need those instructions.
That's true, maybe they disappeared because I already knew the controls and pressed all the right buttons / did all the right things.
Or maybe I'm an idiot :B
I tried Super Seal Clubber, and it's a lot of fun! It's the perfect kind of game for a collab like this. I played it a few times and never got past 5 points, but I wouldn't say it's too difficult. It requires you to play it in a certain way, which is a good thing. Also, the button/instruction prompts are great, and the fact that they only show up on the first playthrough prevents them from being distracting.
At 6/17/15 06:27 PM, Whirlguy wrote: Here's my logo for the thing.
Very nice!
Ok, progress update: I'm almost finished with my game, which I hope I can get to a presentable state by the end of the day. Today's another busy day so I might need until tomorrow evening, but I'm hoping it won't come to that. The things I still have to do are sound effects (which should be easy since I'll be using sfxr), music (I'll find a loop on the Audio Portal), level patterns (defined by text files for the most part), and a few more graphical assets. I don't think I'll need to ask for help on finishing graphics; it'll be nothing spectacular but it'll get the job done. The game also runs fine in the tester, for what it's worth, but I'll be sharing the game files in different project formats (.fla and .swc based) to cover more options for integration. When I have a chance I'll upload what I have so far, so I can maybe make last-minute changes to address any feedback.
Same link as before. Source included, the game .swf is still in the bin directory. Working on those things I mentioned now! Gonna do my best to crank this out. Let me know what you think about the game.
I did all I could for tonight. The link I posted in the last post has been updated; it's not quite done but it's pretty close! Worst comes to worst, this can probably be a presentable game with a few changes to the levels, which are included in the zip & are readily editable.
My body/brain power is rapidly draining so I can't give you a fla-based project right now, and FlashDevelop's swc generator is failing on me, so all I can give you tonight is the swf. I also need to give you an icon.
The song I put in was the top (and first) loop I found in the Audio Portal. It works well enough, but I'm not too attached to it so we can use a different song if anyone can find a better one. If you want to replace it in the source, just overwrite assets/sounds/bgSong.mp3. Keep in mind that changing any of the assets (in assets/, not lib/assets_as3/assets/) shouldn't require a recompile, as long as the replacement file is of the same format as the original.
At 6/22/15 02:39 AM, mr-johnson22 wrote: I did all I could for tonight. The link I posted in the last post has been updated; it's not quite done but it's pretty close! Worst comes to worst, this can probably be a presentable game with a few changes to the levels, which are included in the zip & are readily editable.
Hey, really great work on that game. I'm really very pleased with it. The challenge is good, the graphics are good, it's all good. And the API seems to be well-incorporated.
I did notice a few bugs. It looks like when you die and then try again, there won't be any music playing. But more importantly, when you quit and then reload the game in the tester, the levels are all glitched. No enemies show up and the kill sound plays continuously. However, this doesn't happen if you close the tester and then start the tester again.
I'm looking into the code to see if I can fix it, but since you know your code better than I do, let me know if you can think of what might be causing it. My best guess is that your code references the root or the stage in a bad way, which is warned against in the readme guide. So far I noticed you adding the Utilities object to the root. Technically that shouldn't be a problem when we're just loading the swf. I guess I'm worried that somehow root could end up referring to the tester instead of the loaded swf.
At 6/22/15 03:09 PM, TharosTheDragon wrote: I did notice a few bugs. It looks like when you die and then try again, there won't be any music playing. But more importantly, when you quit and then reload the game in the tester, the levels are all glitched. No enemies show up and the kill sound plays continuously. However, this doesn't happen if you close the tester and then start the tester again.
Thanks for the feedback & testing! I fixed the song bug, but I couldn't reproduce the glitchy level/sound bug. In any case, I removed the call to root and now wrap my entire game in a single MainContainer movie clip that can be added to the stage. I apologize for having forgotten the no-root rule! For some reason I only remembered that using stage was a problem.
Since I couldn't make that glitch happen myself, here is the updated source folder (with the swf ready to be tested) you can use to try and find the bug again, doing whatever you did the first time around. It's at a different link so we can compare the two versions. I hope the bug is magically fixed without the root reference, but probably not.
I'll do my best to tie up all my loose ends tonight! I also realized that the swf file size is a bit over 1MB. I should be fine after compressing the song.
Another late night (hopefully the last) and a lot of progress. Barring glitches, the game should be finished except for some incomplete level patterns: waves 4&6-9. They're still just text files, so they're easy to make. (But I was mistaken before, the swf *does* need to be recompiled to pull in changes to embedded assets. I should really know that kind of stuff by now...)
The link in my previous post is again updated. Added to the game are what I've wanted since the beginning: Audio & Art Portal items! They have different movement patterns than the Flash submission items and they shake things up a bit. I also included the game's 600x280 icon and compressed the background song in the fla file (meaning I'm not using the song in the assets folder, which is the uncompressed version) so the filesize of the swf is about 500kB. Phew!!!
At 6/23/15 02:43 AM, mr-johnson22 wrote: (But I was mistaken before, the swf *does* need to be recompiled to pull in changes to embedded assets. I should really know that kind of stuff by now...)
I forgot to ask you about that. The only reason it wouldn't need to be recompiled is if the swf loaded the files externally, which it shouldn't of course.
Anyway, your logo looks great, and the updates to the game are great. The glitch is still there, though.
Please follow these steps exactly to recreate the glitch, because I'll be very worried if it works differently on different computers. I invite other people to do this too. Put the tester in a new folder to reset the local shared objects, wiping the saved data (I just copy-pasted the bin folder and it automatically named it bin - Copy). Run the tester. Load the most recent swf of your game. Click play. Get to wave 4 or so and then quit the game but don't close the tester. Without closing the tester, load the same swf you were just playing. Click play. Select any wave, and play it.
I have another theory about why this might be happening. Perhaps parts of your game aren't destroyed properly in response to a gameQuit event. I'll try to look into it, but again, let me know if you can think of what might be causing this.
Another glitch: when I get a game over, all the waves become available in the wave select, just like when I run the game without the tester. So I skipped wave 9 and played wave 10. Since (I think) that didn't count as a win, I figured I had to beat wave 9 to win. And I don't know if this is related, but after I did that wave 9's scores were fixed at 0/0 and 0/0, even when I played wave 9 by starting on wave 8. Does that mean you can't improve your wave score? Are they just fixed at the score you were at the first time you got to the wave?
And I'm not sure how the wave scores are supposed to work to begin with. You'd expect them to be the score you got on that specific wave, but the score that's displayed on the wave select screen looks like it just displays the score that you were at when you started that wave.
Also, it might be nice to click to skip the game over sequence, but that's your call.
At 6/23/15 10:56 PM, TharosTheDragon wrote: Put the tester in a new folder to reset the local shared objects, wiping the saved data (I just copy-pasted the bin folder and it automatically named it bin - Copy). Run the tester. Load the most recent swf of your game. Click play. Get to wave 4 or so and then quit the game but don't close the tester. Without closing the tester, load the same swf you were just playing. Click play. Select any wave, and play it.
This is really weird...I still can't reproduce that problem. I even downloaded the link zip to ensure it was the exact same version you're using, and nothing strange ever happens. I followed your steps exactly:
-Opened the tester and load the game swf, all in a fresh working directory.
-Played the game to wave 4.
-Quit with either double-ESC key, or through the pause menu (Z, X, X).
-Reload the game and play it again.
I'm always able to play the relaunched game without it glitching out. I looked through my gameQuit handler (xj.GameScreen.onQuit) and it does indeed remove all listeners and stop all sounds. I can't say I have any idea what's going on here! :( If someone else can test this out, it would be a big help.
Another glitch: when I get a game over, all the waves become available in the wave select, just like when I run the game without the tester. So I skipped wave 9 and played wave 10.
This was just leftovers of some debug settings. Thanks for pointing this out; it's fixed now. The wave scores don't get reset to 0/0 anymore either, probably because of the same fix. It is possible to improve your wave score on later playthroughs.
And I'm not sure how the wave scores are supposed to work to begin with. You'd expect them to be the score you got on that specific wave, but the score that's displayed on the wave select screen looks like it just displays the score that you were at when you started that wave.
Yes, the wave score is the score you had going into the wave. This way you can't increase your score by purposely losing and getting a few more points each time.
Also, it might be nice to click to skip the game over sequence, but that's your call.
I like having the long game over sequence for some reason...it's make you pay for your bitter defeat. :P
Last but not least, link to the near-final version. Everything is finished except the fix for that weird bug. I took the time to make a standalone fla for the project (CS4's compiler is different from the Flex SDK in dumb ways, so I actually had to make changes to make it work), so you should be able to compile it with CS4 now. This means you can import my game assets in the master fla if it's the better option, especially if the bug is caused by loading the swf at runtime. Keep in mind that NG20 Collab.* contains all the game's Flash resources; NG 20 Collab Standalone (exported as ng20_xj-cs4.*) just wraps everything into a single compilable fla file.
Also, since my game has a fla now, it can be exported as a swc (FlashDevelop's swc exporter is still crashing on me, don't know why). Instead of manually merging flas or importing swfs to the master fla, a good option might be to import my game's swc as a library, since there'd be no runtime loading and you could access the movie clip containing my game (xj.MainContainer) directly, since it'd be in the classpath.
