The Gamer's Quarter

[dessgeega]

...or "pillow book" if you prefer.

while my last major game project was veiled in secrecy (and as of this date, still is, as it hasn't been released yet) for sneak attack purposes, this new project is essentially a remake. so i'm going to keep an open development diary (pillow book), updated hopefully whenever i do something interesting!

the goal of the project is: the development of a game strongly in the vein of crossroads/crossroads II by steve harter. it is not intended to be a perfect clone or strict remake. it should play as similiarly to the first two games as possible, but i have my own ideas about game structure and character design. i do want to preserve the sense that the player is "just another monster" - all game rules should apply to all characters (basically) equally.

as per usual, the game is being developed in game maker 6.0, and the spritework is done in graphicsgale.

here's an early demo build for you to download! basically all you can do is walk around the maze (with the arrow keys) and shooting (with Z). (the final game should have joystick support and two-player play.) things that move off-screen will "loop" around to the other side, including your bullets. the player doesn't take damage yet, so shoot yourself all you like!

i'm particularly proud of the particle effects. game maker has a built-in particle effects system, but i usually ignore it. these effects were designed by me, and i think they look lovely.

note that while the walls in the demo appear as individual blocks (like in the original games), in the final game the walls should be unified (as in the mock-up images below). i'm not going to implement this until all of the wall tilesets are done, though.

these images show the graphical work that's been done so far on the project:





while some of the characters will be returning (check out those boots on the purple rubberhead), most of them will be original. the mule and the blue meanie will probably be the weakest hand-to-hand and shooting characters in the game, and allied with each other.

more to come when i have it!
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[Lackey]

I don't suppose you're soliciting volunteer help? I make GM games as a major hobby, and I've spent a lot of time with pixel work as well. I tend not to finish things I start on my own though.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[Mister Toups]

[dessgeega]

[kirkjerk]

I'm delighted to see the progress...maybe sometime I should look into gamemaker...

Unfortunately it doesn't run on my ancient-ish PC but I'm ok on my laptop. (Looks like there are some known driver issues w/ gamemaker games)

I know it might be too early for this kind of tuning, but at some point you should look at how the players are controlled, especially since you already have the "half-step" thing going. Playing around w/ the original (first time I have in months, embarassingly enough) it seems like if you press against a wall or like half a wall at a corner, you start walking whatever direction you are facing (unless it's blocked) until you reach an opening, at which point you start walking the way you're pressing. That's a really nice touch that a lot of other simplistic games miss out, and so they have frustratingly touchy "gotta line it up perfect" factor.

Again, if you're not yet ready for "helpful suggestions" please let us know... but dreaming a bit....does Gamemaker support 4 controllers? W/ USB sticks there might not be a reason to limit the design to 2 players, this could be a 4 player game...possibly w/ even larger arena sizes.

I guess you could go crazy with that kind of brainstorming for enhancements and uses of the basic engine (like monster generators, and then capture the flag variants wheret you're attacking and defending switches that control the generators to make armies of allied monsters...

Are you going to keep general cloaking? Like came up in the interview, I'm not crazy about it, though I got what he said how it makes it more fair, since you're the only monster who sees the whole board, so it was a way to enforce some line of site rules on the player that prevented things from getting too easy...on the other hand, a cloaking beastie type might be kind of cool.

Ok, I've said too much, don't mean to intrude on your very nifty remake ...

[dessgeega]

[kirkjerk]

[SuperWes]

[Lackey]

I work with an earlier version of GM whenever I'm doing a game that doesn't actually use the new graphical effects. This just makes sense to me.

[dark steve]

Gamemaker is one of the few thing I regret using a mac for. It sounds really great.

[kirkjerk]

[dhex]

scientific music?

tell me more.
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[Mister Toups]

I'm a little swamped as far as writing game music goes.

When I finish dessgeega's project I've got two others to deal with.
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where were you when nana komatsu got a wii?

[ApM]

I make music, too!

Someone get me to write music for their game!

[dessgeega]

[dessgeega]

so, shield spars are implemented now, too, in anticipation of programming an initial enemy pathfinding routine.

the way it's probably going to work is this:

every time the monster lines up with the grid - that is, not when it's at a "half-step" - it will:

1. check each direction for walls. directions in which the monster can't move are marked off as blocked. the direction the monster has just come from is marked as blocked too - the monster should never about-face (except in a dead end, though technically there should be no dead ends in the game).
   
2. scan unblocked directions for interesting stuff. possible different types of monsters will have a different "range" of spaces they are capable of seeing. spars are the most interesting finds, and the player and other (hostile) monsters are the next most interesting. maybe some monsters will hate a certain other type of monster more than others and go to attack it. shooting monsters won't mark enemies as interesting, because they do not attack by moving into them. they'll just fire a bullet.
   
3. choose randomly from among the directions with the highest value. if there's nothing interesting, this will just mean picking randomly from whichever directions are unblocked.
   

the way it will track which directions are interesting is with a variable assigned to each direction, which will go from 0 to whatever. maybe have 0 mean "you came from this direction, so it's blocked unless there's nowhere else to go", 1 mean "blocked", 2 mean "nothing interesting", 3 mean "hostile monster", 4 mean "spar". though i'll probably set spar to something like 10 so there's room to differentiate between different types of monsters using additional values.

so that's that!
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[kirkjerk]

Sounds very thoughtful. It's hard to realize how many little decisions there are to make in even simple game until you sit down and do it...

Is "moving toward" the same as "attacking"?
Are monsters always moving? (I think so in the original at least)

[dessgeega]

i drew a new tileset. next to it you can see a mockup of how it should look in the final game.



i'm not entirely happy with it and i'll probably redo it.

stages in the first two games are composed of single blocks, whose color and design are chosen randomly at the start of the stage. in xxroads the blocks should be unified walls. each tileset contains 34 tiles (including floor). ultimately i want to have at least eight or so tilesets, one of which is selected randomly for each stage.

here are the first two:


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[dessgeega]

[kirkjerk]

http://www.atariage.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=86424&st=0&gopid=1052140&#entry1052140 - I just found I know the guy (in an online kind of way) who made the XRoads port...

[dessgeega]

so, this is officially now a GENERAL development diary for all of my projects.

i'm tinkering with an idea for a new original game, a scrolling one. instead of flying a ship upwards, though, you descend downwards into a deep pit. it stars (at the moment, at least) rhonda, pitfall harry's niece. she wields a torch. i'm thinking she'll be able to fling fire in the direction she's moving to stun enemies, or to light a stick of dynamite and drop it straight down to kill enemies and blow up walls. there'll be a delay on the dynamite so the player won't be able to overuse it.

ideally there'll be branching paths as in darius; when rhonda reaches the bottom of a section of pit, she'll get to her feet and be able to walk to a cave in either the left or right wall, choosing the next stage. one of the possible final stages will probably climax in a fight with the wumpus. other paths will probably include goblins, moais, ancient ruins, and underwater stages where rhonda dons an air tank.

here's a demo, but it's really only of the lighting effects i've developed. use the arrow keys to move around. that's it.

ApM, would you be willing to do some music for this one? i think it would suit your tastes, and besides i havn't quite figured out what the music in xxroads should sound like - given that the first two games have none.
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[SuperWes]

That demo is neat. The lighting is surprisingly well done. I've got kindof a demo of a game I'm working on, but it's got some pretty complex controls and I've got a lot of kinks to work out. I added in the ability to move left last night, so that was a plus.

Heh.

-Wes
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[kirkjerk]

Heh, a more literal "Pitfall".

I could almost see a nice swinging mechanic with the rope, if it's feasible in Gamemaker...which would also harken back to the original Pitfall!'s gameplay swinging over the quicksand and what not.

(Right now though Ronda looks a little Link-ish, if it's not too jerkish to point out)

Of course Pitfall 2 has what is just about THE best music on the 2600... it would be lovely if the music for this could reflect those roots, assuming you keep w/ the Pitfall theme. They had special hardware for that if memory serves, so I'm not sure how well-emulated it is (plus Activision has tried to withdrawl its ROMS from general circulation for use in their own comps)

(Of course I always dug "Gyruss"' Tocotta and Fugue a bit more, but hey)

The lighting effect is good. A few 2600 games sported that, plus it makes me remember this one COMPUTE! type-in game w/ a running acrobat, he had a flashlight as well. But those don't attempt any gradients like you got goin' on, and its very moody and effective.

I wonder what it takes to get into the cellphone game market these days...much of what I've seen from you lately would be FANTASTIC in a handheld device. INVADER would be insanely well-suited for that. I suspect though its marketing that really moves those games, though.

[dessgeega]

[dessgeega]

another demo, this one with scrolling. get squooshed at the top of the screen and it's over! the cracked blocks will be destroyable with dynamite in the final game.
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[dessgeega]

last demo for now.

pressing X drops a stick of dynamite, which will destroy cracked blocks. there's a small comboing system in place, where destroying multiple blocks with the same explosion will generate exponentially larger scores. (the score is shown at the top middle of the screen.) you can only have one stick of dynamite on the screen at a time. get caught in an explosion and you're done!

tapping Z will toss flames. flames will stun enemies (which don't exist yet), allowing you to catch multiple enemies in explosions for big points.

rhonda has been redrawn as well. and some other pretty graphical effects have been implemented.

whew!
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[ApM]

I will totally write music for your new game! The description kind of makes me think of H.E.R.O., which I adore.

I'm off to install the demo on the communal apartment computers, as I don't have a Windows PC of my own! Oh, the deviousness.

[dessgeega]

[dessgeega]

last demo of pitfall rhonda. now there are bats. if you get too close, your torchlight will wake the bats, and they'll flit across the screen. getting hit by one will finish you!

bats can be stunned by flames (Z key) and destroyed by dynamite (X key). they're worth 100 points (x multiplier) when killed in flight, but only ten if you havn't woken them up.

you can also run around on the floor now when you reach it. you can run through the walls, in fact - the cave mouths that are supposed to catch you aren't in place yet. there are also solid walls in the shaft now that can't be destroyed.

this is probably the last update on the game for a while, as most of the rest of the work will be level design (which is the best part). i might make some changes to the chain system, though, to accomodate explosions triggering explosions. expect an update on xxroads when i sit down and code the enemy pathfinding routines!
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[dessgeega]

i've written a preliminary pathfinding script for xxroads, but it needs a lot of bugs worked out.

i've created a first stage (shaft "A") for pitfall rhonda, though it may change somewhat. it has an additional type of enemy from the last demo: bats that perch on rocks below you, and fly directly at you when they are awoken. shafts B and C (the branches of shaft A) will be infested with goblins who climb walls and shoot arrows at you, probably. i'm thinking of making a goblin that shoots flaming arrows which can sever your rope, but it'd be tricky to build a stage around them.

i'm also probably going to get rid of the flames. they're not very useful in practice. this may mean i cut out the delay on the dynamite. i also may ditch the combo system, as it seems somewhat unnecessary. or i might just make destroying blocks worth no points. i don't want the player preoccupied with blowing up dirt.

i should start thinking of a name for the game, too! i'd actually rather the game's title not name the protagonist (that detail should be in the backstory). right now all i can think of are silly plays off of pitfall like "pit!" "pit: fall" and "pitfall: the loster caverns". i am totally open to reasonable suggestions.
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[kirkjerk]

"pitfall rhonda" wasn't a bad name, except it looks like "R honda".

"Pitfell", "Pitfalling", and "Pit: Fall Harder" are other plays on the original.

Actually I guess the connection to Pitfall! won't be obvious w/o a title tie-in.

"Pitfall: The Descent of Rhonda"

"Pitfall: Cavern of Fire", or some other elaborate "Indiana Jones-y" name, "Pitfall: Cavern of the Lost Smoke of the Goblin Tribes"

As an obscure joke, there's a 2600 homebrew (under development?) called "Man Goes Down", a play of "Spike Goes Down" which was a previous Vectrex homebrew. I suppose "Pitfall Rhonda Goes Down" might be a little too blunt..

Well, that's my brainstorming for you, maybe there's something you like...

[SuperWes]

I like Pitfall Harriet but it does involve you totally changing the name of the main character...

-Wes
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[dessgeega]

[dessgeega]

new xxroads demo showing monster pathfinding! watch the mules navigate mazes, pursue spars, and deal with dead-ends and wrap-arounds.

in other news i really like "pitfall rhonda and the lost canon of david crane". i'm thinking of having it as a subtitle though, because it's a bit too ridiculous as a title. which means i need a title. something short, like "PRATFALL: pitfall rhonda and the lost canon of david crane". or preferably something that isn't a play off pitfall at all, because the subtitle has that covered.
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[kirkjerk]

"CAVESMOKE"
"DANK"
"SPELUNKY BREWSTER"

alright, i got nuthin'

[kirkjerk]

Re; XXRoads, it really looks great, captures the mood of the original w/o being a per-pixel copy.

In the random suggestions department:
Can you change the key handling so that you can hold down fire to launch a stream of bullets? Part of the charm of the original was launching a stream down a hallway then scurrying out of the way, or reversing face and taking out the bullets before they hit you...

Also, I strongly appreciate the MULE reference, but right now it's not clear that there's 2 steps of animation w/ your current sprite, it looks like it might be a single frame scooting around.

[dessgeega]

[sawtooth]

[dessgeega]

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[sawtooth]

Hm. I think the main problem is that it isn't mimicking a 4-frame cycle like all the others are. The feet are going back and forth between two positions (and each foot takes the same position as its partner), creating a distinctly two-frame cycle.



But I made that revision, and it kind of looks like the legs are just sprouting out over everywhere every other frame. It does looks slightly better in motion, though, especially against a darker background.
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[kirkjerk]

Damn, I don't have my GIF editing tools at hand, but I think it might be worth trying to draw it without the darker legs behind, just the legs closest to the "camera" and seeing how that looks.

It might be just me though....w/ INVADER, there were some screens where I thought the darker colored background blocks were foreground that I needed to manuever around...

[sawtooth]

I think it might be more worthwhile to remove the two interior legs on my animation, instead. Removing the darker legs from the first animation would give it a sort of unnatural movement, with the two visible legs parallel at all times.
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[Lackey]

You know, it does look something like a catwalker from Empire Strikes Back.
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| Little bird fighting against a bat sect game |

[kirkjerk]

For your viewing pleasure or derision:


The first is the original.

The second is the original but lightened up, currently my favorite...maybe it's just my 32 yr old old guy eyes but I think the problem for me is lack of contrast.

Three is my first attempt, like sawtooth predicted, unnatural.

Four is maybe what sawtooth recommended,a bit of a hack job of three, with a more natural scissor look, avoiding the hippity hoppity look of three.

In "philisophical" defense of removing the furthest legs...the 2 legged creatures so far all have animations where you only see one leg, so the idea is the 2 legs all look like 1 legs at one point, so the 4 legged is kind of distinct because you always see 2 legs. Something like that

Anyway, dessgeega, I hope I didn't offend w/ my suggestion... it's meant in love and admiration of your "stop talking, start coding" approach and general skillful sprite skills. Also a general misconception that my meddling can make anything and everything better.

[dessgeega]

[dessgeega]

and hey, i just finally implemented joystick control.

so here's a question. since the game is to support two-player simultaneous control on both joypads and keyboard, i need to change the arrow keys + Z setup, which spreads one player over the whole keyboard. i was thinking player 1 could be arrow keys + right ctrl, and player 2 could be WASD + ...left shift? someone tell me what works.
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[dessgeega]

[sawtooth]

[Lackey]

[dessgeega]

i took today to work on a SEKRIT PROJECT. almost all of the graphics and coding are done - most of what remains is level design. this project should go more quickly than my others, so huzzah!

i need to draw sprites for the next two stages of rhonda.
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