The Art of Dying - Platformer (GAME RELEASED!)

DoorKnobHandle · Fri 25/10/2013 16:39:52

The Art of Dying

The Art of Dying is a small new game I've been working on for about a month. It's a platformer made in AGS of course! The idea is to start with easy levels and then ramp it up to pretty ridiculous degrees of difficulty. I'm doing everything including art and animation except for the music! The game features an ingame level editor that's easy to use and should hopefully result in a couple of self-made levels by you, the players! The way I am presenting the game is with several short Youtube videos that focus on a particular aspect of the game - here's the first one talking about movement. Please check it out:

The Art of Dying - Dev Diary Entry #1: Movement
[embed=640,390]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_WmTg8Az9k[/embed]

The Art of Dying - Dev Diary Entry #2: Attacking
[embed=640,390]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np4ixRjp5w4[/embed]

The Art of Dying - Dev Diary Entry #3: Enemies
[embed=640,390]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kD2iZJ7qs4[/embed]

The Art of Dying - Dev Diary Entry #4: Editor
[embed=640,390]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_5ryKGxWkM[/embed]

Please let me know what you think! I'd also like to get an idea about how much interest there is in the level editor. Stay tuned for further video updates, I'm going to produce them in very regular intervals. Keep a close eye on this thread and/or subscribe to my Youtube account to stay up-to-date. The next one is going to focus on how attacks work in the game. More and more information will be revealed about the whole game with each video.

Stupot · Fri 25/10/2013 17:17:11

Cool stuff, man.
Looking forward to the next video :-)
Are you planning any live dev streams a la KTX-1?

selmiak · Fri 25/10/2013 17:30:59

Cool Beans! Hard gameplay in jump and runs? Count me in! I'm lLooking forward to more videos with funny explanations and more gameplay. And I'm interested in the backstory how the cop got the sword instead of a gun

DoorKnobHandle · Fri 25/10/2013 17:55:42

Thanks! Stupot, I'm not planning livestreams, no. The coding is pretty much done so there's no point in starting now anyways. Streaming takes a huge amount of work, The Art of Dying is something I'm development whenever I get an hour or two of free time inbetween work sessions.

Selmiak, I can't promise much backstory but we'll see! Glad to see that I caught your interest with the project!

The next video will be uploaded within 24 hours and, as I said, it will go over the various attacks in the game!

Fitz · Fri 25/10/2013 18:28:28

A level editor is a GREAT idea! User-generated content is a way of involving the players rather than them being just passive receivers. It's what made Minecraft the goldmine that it is. Oh, if there were a way to do that in adventure games!

Andail · Fri 25/10/2013 18:32:37

Cool stuff, DKH!
While it looks pretty straightforward for a platformer, the fact that you've made it in AGS is pretty awesome. I also like the development video thing, quite educational

Secret Fawful · Fri 25/10/2013 18:35:36

It's great to see that you've gotten the most important aspect - movement - really, really precise. It looks fun to control.

DoorKnobHandle · Fri 25/10/2013 19:08:43

Awesome, I'm glad to hear that you like the video idea! Fitz, let's hope the build-in level editor takes off only 0.001% as much as Minecraft did! I'd just love to play levels made by other people in my own game! Andail, it is indeed a straightforward platformer, I'm not really focusing on innovating with this one, I just want it to be a good, solid AGS platformer. Secret Fawful, I really hope I did get it right, it's indeed the most fundamental thing to get right in a platformer, for obvious reasons! I personally think it's very fun to control, both on keyboard and gamepad!

Crimson Wizard · Fri 25/10/2013 19:19:57

Very smooth movements, indeed, that's the first thing I noted in the video.

selmiak · Fri 25/10/2013 19:30:30

one very important thing for platformers: don't use the Y/Z keys because of qwertz/qwerty keyboards, rather use control and space.

Do you have a 'story' in mind, like levelthemes and sublevels like 1-1, 1-2, 1-3? The reason I'm asking this is another question: is there any chance to get a userlevel into the main game?

DoorKnobHandle · Fri 25/10/2013 21:23:09

Thanks, Crimson. I hope it's not too smooth, I really want precise and tight controls!

selmiak: the keyboard currently used A to jump, S to attack. This configuration is only a problem with French keyboards. I'd like to implement rebindable keys, hopefully I'll get around to that. Otherwise, I'll make a universal key binding (or just make players use a gamepad haha)!

Right now I'm planning to just 'ship' the game with a bunch of levels that you can play as a campaign, one after the other. But those levels wouldn't be encrypted in any way. You could load them up in the editor and edit them etc.

Igor Hardy · Fri 25/10/2013 21:28:47

Looks great, Jan - very fluid and fun.

Was there any extra challenge to make the controls this precise and responsive within AGS?

arj0n · Fri 25/10/2013 21:39:30

A platform sidescroller? I love platform games. Awesome job!
I had 2 questions during he video that got answered: the double jump and xbox-conroller-for-pc support.
Great you add the sliding too (reminds me a bit of 3 great classic platform games that used that too: titus the fox, prehistoric2 & blues brothers).

As for the editor: yes please ;-)

DoorKnobHandle · Fri 25/10/2013 21:48:59

Ascovel: Good question! Not really, but I did increase the framerate of the game to 60fps via GetGameSpeed(). It's absolutely important that the game runs at ~60fps and not just the default 30-40, this doesn't matter much for more static point'n'click games but for an action game like this it's vital. Apart from that, I just detect the frame in which a key is pressed with IsKeyPressed() and a boolean variable per button and then perform the actions. Nothing special!

Arjon: Thanks for the interest! The sliding will be explained further in the next video on attacks! I'm also glad to hear that you're also interested in the editor!

cacaro · Sat 26/10/2013 15:05:28

AGS platformer + ridiculous degrees of difficulty = instant win.

Will play when it's out.

kconan · Sat 26/10/2013 15:08:43

Awesome stuff! I'm looking forward to seeing more of this one.

Khris · Sat 26/10/2013 15:17:22

Looking awesome, can't wait to try it!

DoorKnobHandle · Sat 26/10/2013 16:22:51

Thanks for the nice comments! Here's the promised second video talking about attacking:

[embed=640,390]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=np4ixRjp5w4[/embed]

Take a look and let me know what you think! It's getting a bit more interesting now! The next video will introduce the various enemies in the game!

Fitz · Sat 26/10/2013 22:01:37

Nice! You really put a lot of thought into the game mechanics. Looking forwards to more dev diaries, might learn a thing or two in case I ever try to make a platformer myself!

DoorKnobHandle · Sun 27/10/2013 09:55:43

Thanks Fitz! I think it's important to really go into detail when designing games, I myself made the mistake of not doing that way too many times. Also, please do make a platformer - we need MORE AGS platformers!!