I rented a boat

Started by eri0o, Thu 01/04/2021 15:08:31

Previous topic - Next topic

eri0o

@Crimson Wizard Thank you so much! I would never suspect of that! I tried a bit to fix math3d but I couldn't quite figure out, I ended up making a very trimmed down version of just Vec3 that simply doesn't have this bug - I will eventually fix Math3D itself once I actually release it as a module, eventually.

Anyway, but the change did made the reset/load save error go away!  :-D


Shadow1000

#21
Quote from: eri0o on Fri 02/04/2021 23:09:52
@Shadow1000 Se algum dia quiser conversar por voz sobre qualquer coisa, apenas para praticar, seria divertido!

Topo! Na verdade, o seu inglês e muito melhor do que meu português. Apesar disso, eu concordo e quero praticar.

Quote
Eu adoro seu país, minha experiência mais divertida foi passear de trailer em Banff, Jasper e arredores, inclusive devo voltar lá quando tiver vacinado... No futuro, um dia.

Que legal que você conhece o Canadá! Você tem razão, tem muitos lugares bem lindos aqui. No Brasil também, com certeza...

Por entquanto, quero perdir algumas dicas, tá?


newwaveburritos

This is an impressive game.  I really like the dreamy look of it and I appreciate the source code even if I don't understand any of it.

lorenzo

Spoiler
Oh, yes, I had the old version of the game, that's why I couldn't find the key. (laugh) But thanks to your tip I found it anyway, so I wasn't stuck for long.
[close]
As I said, I really enjoyed exploring the game world and solving puzzles. It was a very nice experience, I don't know how you managed to make it in a month!

Mandle

This looks amazing. I will try ASAP after chapter three of the book I'm finally writing is written.

Shadow1000

Ok I tried again and got the good ending. I'm not quite sure what happened.

Spoiler
There was a bright-coloured box outside the cave and I must have hit something because I ended up with a key on the top right (Is that inventory?) as well as a cube (I have no idea where I got that from) and the gate disappeared and I ended up in the right place to complete the game.
[close]

Anyway, I really like how this game changes how AGS can be used!

eri0o

Thank so much for playing @Shadow1000
Spoiler
theoretically the cube can be gathered from the corner of the lighthouse mountain, you should be able to see it on the ground at a distance when walking up. It can then be use to open a cave where you get the key. If you got both at the same time, you may have hit Ctrl+S, which is the Debug key in AGS to get all inventory items and I left all the debug on because I forgot to disable - you can even Ctrl+x to jump between levels and get stuck outside of a walkable area.
[close]

Thanks also @Mandle and @newwaveburritos for the positive comments and @lorenzo for also playing it!

Someone played and recorded the game in Game Jolt too - they got the bad ending though, but it's alright!
https://youtu.be/gJKY2fz7cfQ

Oh, and I also put the game on my Gamejolt and Itch.io pages:

https://eri0o.itch.io/i-rented-a-boat
https://gamejolt.com/games/i_rented_a_boat/603677

Wyz

Very nice game!
I liked the general ambience of it and was pretty gutted when I got the bad ending; luckily I tried it again and got the good ending, made my day. :-D
Also interesting render technique, quite good you managed to pull that off with just scripts. :)

I do wonder
Spoiler

What is the mysterious cube-shaped device?
And who is B?
Did they lock Julie in there?
[close]
Life is like an adventure without the pixel hunts.

eri0o

Ah, yes those are kinda of leftovers of what I had in mind for the actual ending

well, after watching a gazillion videos about room and old school first person shooters trying to see if someone had made like a non-shooter on them, or something, at the "research phase" of the game development I had .. eth.. ideas...
Spoiler
what if I make a non-shooter that turns out it's a shooter? So the idea was once you got to where Julie is, you Jim, get shot, player control switches to Julie and turns out balloon dude is her arch enemy and you be able to walk around the mountains shooting him and his transformed vehicle in the middle of the screen.

But in the end I underestimated a lot the work in art this would take, and it was not feasible in time for MAGS even though was feasible in script, by lowering drawing distance and throwing some clouds to hide it, it was possible to get a ton of fps to make it fun. In the end it was not artistically possible so I tried to made the ending balloon trip at least more frantic to show that it was possible. :P
[close]

lorenzo

Quote from: eri0o on Thu 08/04/2021 17:06:39
Spoiler
what if I make a non-shooter that turns out it's a shooter? So the idea was once you got to where Julie is, you Jim, get shot, player control switches to Julie and turns out balloon dude is her arch enemy and you be able to walk around the mountains shooting him and his transformed vehicle in the middle of the screen.

But in the end I underestimated a lot the work in art this would take, and it was not feasible in time for MAGS even though was feasible in script, by lowering drawing distance and throwing some clouds to hide it, it was possible to get a ton of fps to make it fun. In the end it was not artistically possible so I tried to made the ending balloon trip at least more frantic to show that it was possible. :P
[close]

Spoiler
Haha, that explains some of the weird things found in the game! The twist would've been pretty cool to see.
In the end, though, I like the way it came out. I like that it's a simpler, more "normal" story. Getting lost in an unknown place is scary enough, without having to shoot. ;)
[close]

eri0o



Hi,

I decided to talk a bit about how the maps got made in this game! I did this game during late nights, and my interaction with it was me using headphones and a bright screen.



Slasher and Racoon have set a good theme for this MAGS. The Journey game imagery compelled me to experiment with the idea of something on the horizon that you would walk to and a bit with the idea of feeling small.

I pick Firewatch Talkie as a way to avoid having to draw sprites for the characters, that could also not blend well with the world, and that the world had to be on an island to work in time constraint - the island would give me "natural" walls. On the same day, I saw by coincidence a little guide on Voxel Space engine on GitHub, and it felt reasonably simple to put it up together. Finally, one of my favorite games was Proteus, which had simple colors and gameplay, so I thought I could get away if I had to simplify drawing a lot.

I did this design about obelisks at a distance, and you would had this walk talkie which would need you to collect batteries, so I threw up a super tiny prototype of the idea and showed it to a close friend. He told me it was trash, but he had this idea of a radio tower and you finding a signal opposite to it so that you would walk away instead of close to it. In my head, the aesthetic was reverse Dear Esther, and I liked the little idea.

So at this point, I decided I would make a game where you are on this island with a radio that can pick up signals. I think about how I want the game to work:
  • you walk in basically 2D space,
  • go to a destination you see at a distance,
  • find a goal,
  • reach a dead-end,
  • backtrack,
  • and then you go to an open area where the game can happen.



To make this, I need tools, so my first tool is the software geomorph, it's only available for Linux, and it allows drawing a heightmap while seeing a preview of it in 3D at the same time. Other heightmap tools I found worked with automatic generation of environment, and this was the only tool that I found to handmade things. I made all maps in it first.

Next, I used a tool called TerreSculptor, in which I would use two features: generating a colorset bitmap from a heightmap and previewing a heightmap with a colormap in 3D.

The colorset generated bitmaps would be the base environments which I would then use Krita to draw on top to create the textures, like the river, the little tree/bushes, some tracks in the grass, and so on.



Krita was my main tool when sculpting the maps! Using its interesting brushes and layers, I would test where to place each thing, rendering on TerreSculptor, and much more often, on AGS itself, because I had to walk around and feel the level.

These steps were figured out in the first week of development, with AGS Room Editor repurposed so I could iterate and test ideas.

In the first weekend, I managed to send a build to Heltenjon, with only the first area working. It takes forever for GetPixel to happen, so I throw a CYOA intro just so the games load while you play it - I don't remember if this was already in the first build I sent out. Heltenjon returns to me super quickly, and his main criticism (beyond the game still making no sense) is that the render looks too crap. I tune it until it appears a little more normal, sends him a new build (I think Sunday?), and then he answers me back that this render is a bit more alright. Good, I can work on my game to finish now. I also send MorganW a build, and he gives me input on the CYOA bits as the actual game, which I would try to address - originally, all characters had the same font, text position, and the colors were more similar and this was confusing.

After looking a lot at the first Journey image, I want to put the following experience in the game:
  • You hear about a thing.
  • You see the thing in a distance.
  • You walk towards it and get a reward once you reach it.
And the thing is the lighthouse mountain, and the reward is verticality or the view.



Drawing and testing the position of the mountain ate a week of development. It had to feel natural to walk up the mountain. In the end, a spiral shape gave me an experience that felt like flying down the hill in A Short Hike - and also, this gave me the idea of making the sky that changes with height.

By now, I start to work with sound. I make so that waves sound closer to water are louder and that going upwards on the mountain makes the world quieter - so you wait in silence for the balloon. And I use math from Zelda Wind Waker water to use in the game water. By now, it's half of the MAGS, and I have different interesting experiences but need to make a game.



So I alternate between polishing the colors and colormap in Krita and placing the final puzzle elements using Aseprite. I also used Aseprite to do detailed corrections in the heightmap.

During the third week, I want to project sprites, have ideas with FPS mechanics, and frantically watch Duke Nuken and Doom Engine videos, but I go nowhere. I make the game menus and the title screen to pass the time. The sprite projection code ends up being a concise ten-line code, and I can't find a good way to deal with z-ordering without butchering frames.

Last week now, I added the final puzzle elements on the island, have both ends, and send a build to Heltenjon. He asks me about adding an objectives interface and can't finish the gameâ€"too little time to work on geometries now. I finish up the writing on the story, wrap up tweaking the ending scene, and finish the game. It was a weird pace of development, but it was done and felt like a game.

Time to work on a new game!

heltenjon

Very impressive glance behind the wizard's curtains. It's fun and interesting both to see how it's done and how the testers' input fits into it.

Danvzare

That's a very interesting look into how you did things. Thanks for sharing.

javixblack

Hi! When the 3d enviroment start, the camera is constantly rotating to the left, is this normal? I can walk and look here and there, but always the camera is rotanting to the left against my mouse's movement.

eri0o

Hey @javixblack, that's not normal, no. Can you give me some information about how are you playing the game? Maybe I could try to reproduce and figure out why it happens for you.

The experience should be moving the mouse moves the camera and not moving the mouse doesn't move the camera.

cat

Amazing work! Also thanks for the insight on the production process.

I need a hint for the good ending, though:
Spoiler
I opened the cave with the message, but I can't find a key for the door. I searched the caves with or without light, accidentally running into the balloon area :-\
[close]

heltenjon

Quote from: cat on Fri 11/03/2022 21:18:19
I need a hint for the good ending, though:
Spoiler
I opened the cave with the message, but I can't find a key for the door. I searched the caves with or without light, accidentally running into the balloon area :-\
[close]
I'm not sure if I remember this correctly now months later, but
Spoiler
how does the message look like without light?
[close]

eri0o

Quote from: cat on Fri 11/03/2022 21:18:19
Amazing work! Also thanks for the insight on the production process.

I need a hint for the good ending, though:
Spoiler
I opened the cave with the message, but I can't find a key for the door. I searched the caves with or without light, accidentally running into the balloon area :-\
[close]

I am really happy you played! :D Not sure I am good in the business of hints, let's see if this works...

Spoiler
the cave with the message holds the key, but you need to look around.
[close]

cat

#38
I completed it, thanks! Nice ending animation  :)

A few comments about the game:

Spoiler

I'm not used to this genre so it took me a bit to get customized to walking around, orientation and what to do. I think it's a nice idea to start in a somewhat restricted "tutorial" area, the radio calls helped to understand what to do next.
I also took a bit until I figured out that the radio had to get 3 bars and that dot for being able to transmit. I thought I might need more bars.

I loved the visual direction of the player, the radio tower, the parted looking mountains you had to go through to reach the first cave. The mechanics to reveal the other branch of the cave was genius. It also helped that green was where I could walk and the other colours meant it was too steep.

The lighthouse mountain looks gorgeous in your map rendering in this thread, but it looked a bit weird when approaching it. I easily found the spiral to the top. When walking, I was afraid to fall down  :-D (I only read afterwards that there is a walkable area along the path). Walking down was very difficult for me, because I couldn't look down as much as I wanted. I had to walk in circles several rounds before I found the entry to the path down.

The good ending was interesting with the interactions, but it would have been better to include a few of those element in the regular game play. I was not too fond of the box to open stuff and the flying key, it felt out of place since the rest of the story was realistic (and still creepy enough).

I found a bug: sometimes ESC wouldn't work. Not sure why, a bit later the menu would suddenly appear on/off/on/off quickly and afterwards it worked again to bring it up

A great game, fantastic what you managed to do in AGS.
[close]

eri0o

Thank you so much for playing cat!! I am happy you got through! I agree with a lot of topics of what you said! I have just one comment to add.

Spoiler
The controls mostly sucks, outside of other reasons, because you can't look up and down, only to the sides. Why is that? I could not figure out the math for looking up and down! Going down the mountain was supposed to be more cathartic but that just got annoying because the controls sucked...

I tried a bunch of ideas, but it never worked. There's even a comment in the code, basically the sprites like the balloon, the radio tower, the key or the door, all went berserk when I tried to make them move up and down with the head and I ended up giving up - so I comment the code out and went on. :P
[close]

SMF spam blocked by CleanTalk