Day ...8? Last Day! (kinda)

Whew, finally submitted my game xP

Go play it on Newgrounds!
Or check out some screenshots and stuff in my Stencyl post!

Anyway, some fun screenshots, because pictures are better than words!

~ Screenshots from ingame play. But who needs screenshots when you could just go play the game, right?

~Garageband music score. So rusty with my music...haven't really touched it since last year and had to slow tempo down a lot haha xD

The game still has some issues but should be playable (it takes me a little under 20 minutes to get to the end. I'm kind of a slow person, but then I do know the location and order of everything, so it would probably even out? xD

There was so much I did end of yesterday/today (took a long break over the weekend for family stuff)  ...and I realized if I tried to write it up, it'd probably take longer than just fixing the things on the spot. Except there were so very very many of these little small things to fix. D: And they're not all entirely fixed, but hopefully all the game-breaking ones were found and corercted by now. Guess that's why they say that last 10 % is hardest?

From here I will try to add in all the extra stuff I had to cut (hopefully more music, some cutscenes/actual storyline, etc.) and optimization for mobile will be in the future. I hope, anyway. Have to decide between rushing to fit it in with the end of my Stencyl subscription or take more time to flesh out the game playing experience before trying to push it into the android platform. Guess I'll see how I'm feeling after I stop hating the game from playtesting it so much.

But all in all, I'm really happy with the experience! It was a ton of fun to attempt a game in about a week, even if I probably should have started sooner for the least stressful method of standing a chance in the game jam. The last time I attempted to make a game in a week timeframe was back in 2011 with Scratch ~ and the result was hardly a playable demo, much less a game! I've come so far in terms of art/programming/scope management that I can't wait to see where I can head from here. I think I'll write up a proper post mortem (always wanted to title something that!) on what really worked this time, what I learned etc...after I get some sleep :P

Day 7: Title Screen Art!

Some title screen art!

Always my favorite part of art-ing is mixing up old elements to make something gorgeous and new :D  It looks so polished, and yet none of it is really new artwork, so it was really easy to make.

Continued level design for futher stages, added enemies.

Day 6: Levels Continue

The game continues. All enthusiasm has faded.

..I feel like I'm writing one of those captain's logs of endless days at sea...but actually, it feels a little like that? xD

I'm beginning to think the game isn't fun enough, or won't be fun with the number of features I have. But I don't think I can afford to add much more to my already-too-large scope, so, meh.
I guess I'll just persevere and hope for the best. Or a miracle.

Changes:
-added spikes collisions health/fade effect/hp bar animation
-moving platform/tile horizontal and vertical
-upgraded Stencyl version to 3.3 (really should have done that earlier probably)
-layed out levels.
^(clearly its getting to me, because I just realized I had spelled it layed. Is that even a word? ._, )

No more screenshots for the short time being because most of what I worked on was (hopefully) crafty layouts that hid coins all over the stages, and I don't want to spoil the locations. But screenshots shall return tomorrow!

At least I will probably have a little more time than expected. Thought I would want to end before Mother's Day weekend, but I think I'll have some spare time on Sunday I can snatch. And the game deadline isn't until the end of Monday, so...

hopefully that's enough time, haha.

Day 5: More Progress

DAY 5:

Worked on level backgrounds and corresponding level design, some artwork manipulation for medal/achievements, added a little green "fireball" for character to shoot. 

Linked a few scenes together so character can travel around little now.

Some level design/tiles in place...no final level design at all yet, but its fun to play around with changing around the tiles and creating different paths for my character to follow without having to code/art/etc. inbetween to change things. Once I get all the elements set up, Stencyl is a little like one of those in-game level editors that larger games sometimes have, its kind of nice!

Day 4: Level Design

Still plugging away.

Added double jump and changed coins so they won't respawn if collected (surprisingly only took a few minutes).

Worked out some rough ideas of level progression/navigation:

Also worked on a lot of random arts,  and came up with some more tiles to match the scenery change I'd like to have, etc.

I definitely have to stop being so perfectionist about having all the right art assets if I ever want to finish this game. I think I'll make a bg or two, a few sprite effects, but stop defnitely myself from adding any more tiles and misc items.

Played with tint effects for darker level and was fairly impressed with how easy it was to work with!

The game lags something awful on my computer and makes playtesting/level forming a nightmare. The funny thing is is plays just fine on my ipad when I use a flash browser to play the swf. So it's probably just my computer. Seeing as it also decided to completely freeze while I had unsaved stuff still open, it's 99% definitely the computer. Hopefully I'll be able to figure it out or work around it tomorrow I guess!

Day 3: The Game Continues

As you can tell from my title...game progress has continued, lol.
This is the part where I start to get tired of a game and want to quit, but hopefully I can push through and keep going!

Fixed stuff from before, adjusted collision boxes and fixed tiles so jumping around seems less unintuitive (before, it looked like you could walk on air and such). Wasted a ton of time on art (even after incorporating some spare stuff I had done before from past game projects), but now I have some basic UI and a second screen where players can check in on their little actor and see stats later, hopefully.

Also added coins and a counter, though I still need to make sure coins don't come back after switching screens. (made it so your actor comes back in the same spot though).

Also, a swf to play:

Click to Play

Will probably stop with the swfs as soon as I make some decent level/gameplay progress, which hopefully will be tomorrow! Really want to get some levels designed to play through and implement some challenge (enemy or health reducing terrain...or both).

Also started the beginning of some music. It's been so long since I've tried to do music and Garageband keeps quitting in the middle of working which is driving me crazy though D:

My computer keeps lagging while trying to play test, and I barely have anything going on. I'm not sure if its the walking/jumping/collisions, since I haven't done so much collision stuff before. Or its just my computer being laggy. Either way, porting this for mobile later (my current plan *fingers crossed*) is not looking so good if its laggy on a computer now.

Anyway...in writing up this post, the screenshots actually don't look half bad. But the game burnout feeling is so real, and it's only been a few days? I think this is why I always start with art, so I guilt myself into not giving up aha xD

Day 2 Continued: More Art

So...haven't gotten as far as I would have liked, but did get more sketch work done on the art side.

Some mockups of potential level designs/interfaces:

I realize at this point I should really have a game document of some sort because there's no way I can do everything I want to...but yolo, haha (is that even a thing anymore? probably not). Might as well try to do as much as I can, and if I crash and burn in the process there's always time for a real effort after the week is over!

Also worked on some spriting...

~so cute :D Hopefully the game comes out semidecently fun, because it would be a shame not to appreciate the little fella. So many frames needed for just walking and jumping, I am not even kidding.

Also started getting some basics of the game structure/program in place. Although I decided to use Stencylforge actions from other users to take care of basic walking, jumping, etc. it ended up being more difficult that I'd though since I needed to modify them (they didn't import for animations correctly for some reason). I have a feeling I'll regret taking the easy route as I try to integrate double jumps and other extra features/blocks into programming I'm not familiar with since I didn't put it together myself, but I guess we'll see.

Click here to play

also, I just discovered the HTML part of Blogger in an effort to embed a swf of what I have so far (really just features my little character, codenamed pipa for now, and how you can jump around with arrow keys and stuff).
Heh. br line breaks brings back memories of endless neopets petpage coding...

Hopefully will be back with more awesome stuff later! :D