Messages

[Project:]

Project:
Death Wore Endless Feathers - A Cartoon Cyberpunk Adventure Game

Details:
A 90s retropunk adventure game about a lazy hacker and his friends working against The Man. GiP page HERE. It is a 320x200, 8 bit game.

Positions Available:
Currently, I only have one open position I need.

Programmer - I need someone familiar with the AGS plugin system to create a couple of plugins. One being a smacker video player, and the other a modified MOD player. I have very little actual C++ experience, and though I would have loved to create this plugins myself, I don't think I'd be able to do it in any reasonable timeframe and still get my game done.

Smacker Player: I need someone to strip down FFMPEG and use their smacker decoder to create something I can use in AGS. Since my game is in 8bit, I can't use the built in video player (and using FLICs would produce soundless 48mb monstrosities, instead of neat 2mb files). Having it render on the background layer (as a "replacement" background image) would be ideal. It shouldn't be too hard to control AGS's palette from the Smacker plugin (or likewise have the smacker plugin use AGS's palette.) This is very important, as I would love to have animated cutscenes in my game. Someone is working on this.

MOD player: I also need someone to modify a tracker library so that I have in-AGS control of the volume of each of the playable channels, and the speed of the music. I have attempted this before with MIKMOD to no success (I only managed to switch on and off channels, not adjust their individual volumes), so I'm hoping someone more experienced than me would be able to help me with this.

Deadline:
I'm looking to have the prototype finished by christmas, and all the relevant placeholders put in place by then.

Comments:
If you're interested, contact me via PM, or get ahold of me via my email: khatoblepas@googlemail.com. I can't provide any monetary payment, but I could assist with a project artwise if you wish. Thankyou for reading.

My game is 8bit, and has a few palette tricks, I also do a lot of work with palettes for the next version, though it's not finished yet. I could send you a build demonstrating that (it has custom Transparency and junk) if you'd like.

When doing a talk animation, it's important to get the beats of a talk cycle down - both open and closed mouth, with a variety of mouth shapes so that any speech is viable with the animation. I quickly mocked something up here:

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50882197/manateetalk.gif[/imgzoom]
As you can see, the teeth are important to show some harder sounds in there with the softer open mouthed sounds. I tweaked the O to have the snout pinch in rather than compress in it's entirety. The head movements also lend some really cheap dynamism to the animation. It isn't the best, but it illustrates a point.

And I did a quick edit of the face to make the chin look more chinlike (at first I thought it was a mouth!), and the smile on the snout more obvious:
[imgzoom]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50882197/manateehead.PNG[/imgzoom]
All this really does is emphasise his smile with pushed up cheeks, and make his head a little more rounded. The chin becomes softer and less harsh and less of a focus, so the smile on the snout is more noticable.

It's a pretty nice character!

[imgzoom]https://dl.dropbox.com/u/50882197/mannytee_edit.PNG[/imgzoom]

The shape is fine, you might want to give his chest a little more weight (so it lies realistically on the lower chest/belly), emphasise some hips (just to clarify his tail comes from somewhere on the front view and balance him out) and distinguish his cranium a bit.

I think, one other thing, is that he might need to be de-anthropomorphised just a little. Right now his snout looks seperate from his mouth, when if you look at a manatee and other sea mammals, the snout and the top lip are indistinguishable - the snout leads into it. That could be what's going on, but it's a little vague. Other than that, I'd probably give him a rounder face to suit the rest of him. What is this dude's personality?

I'm not sure how doable these suggestions are or if they're already implemented, but personally I would find these really useful!:

- Per channel volume for MOD file playing (plus tempo, speed, etc). I did a really simple one with Mikmod, but the volume control didn't actually work, so it just ended up muting certain channels. This'll be useful for more dynamic music playing. I could just try to remake the plugin though, if I'm the only one that wants it. If it comes to that... is it possible to pipe data from the .vox files to plugins? Could be useful for putting effects on speech, for instance, so you don't have to record a version of "That doesn't work" in a normal room, in an echoey cave, and as a robot. x3

- The ability to turn off the outline of a text input box in a dialog. It's possible in GUIs, so for consistency's sake should be doable in dialogues.

- Nonblocking speech, and playing speech files as audio clips. I'm... not actually sure why this wasn't possible before.

[PUMAMAN!]

It's the hit hero

PUMAMAN!

"Pu-MA-Man! He flies like a mooo-ron!"

[GetRawBitMapSurface ()]

I'm back in the saddle after making my animated film, and one thing that I'm missing from my game is full motion video. I'm a competent animator, and I can work my way around after effects, so producing animated cutscenes is no problem. However, as my game is in 8bit and not 16bit (a deliberate choice, a lot of effects in my game depend on it being 8bit - and besides, I've created a load of assets anyway so switching to 16bit is not an attractive option.) I can't use the built in PlayVideo command, and using FLC files will lead to my game's size being bloated up beyond any measure and be difficult to sync a soundtrack to. There is another option for me, but it involves the deadly black arts of plugins. I've done a small amount of C++ in the past, and I've written a simple plugin before (to use mikmod instead of DUMB for MOD music, mikmod had bugs in it that stopped individual channels from being manipulated, though, so I didn't continue it.).

The only robust and documented 8bit video codec out there is Smacker, which fortunately for me has an FFMPEG codec. I am a little intimidated trying to write another plugin, though, as my programming prowess has always been really weak. The main thing is getting everything linked together and compiling, rather than the code itself. I'm aware, from reading a couple of tutorials on the matter, that it can be abstracted down a bit and the frame processing can be placed in AGS_PRERENDER (instead of a while loop, like the tutorial says), while the frame itself could probably be either blitted directly to the screen or onto a dynamic sprite. It would be interesting to have a Smacker file play overlaid on the background, so that there is the illusion that the smacker video /is/ the background. I intend to reinstall VC++ and meddle around with this anyway, but if anyone can give me any advice on getting FFMPEG working within the context of AGS, I'd love to hear it. I always get confused around the static linking stage. With Mikmod I just used an external DLL instead, but that doesn't seem too elegant.

As an aside, does anyone know how much faster processing a sprite with GetRawBitMapSurface () is than a GetPixel/PutPixel loop? A few of the graphical effects in my game are depressingly slow with GP/PP, as they rely on checking the pixels directly each loop, which cuts the FPS while they're on screen by about half - something I don't want to happen. If I could open it up a bit so that a sprite can be referenced as an array rather than through AGS the effects should go much, much faster. I'm not sure why that functionality isn't inside AGS itself, but hey, c'est la vie. If I can get that working, I can make effects in my game almost cost-free!

Sweeeeet! I deliberately avoided doing anything more than skimming the animatic stuff so I could get the full impact first. Yo stuff has so much character, now we're all done with school we need to start thinking about collaborating again

Collaborating sounds like an excellent idea. Catch me on Skype anytime, we'll talk! Glad you liked the film

[Mississippi Mud Pie!]

For the past year, I couldn't work on Death Wore Endless Feathers much, since I was working on this instead!

Mississippi Mud Pie!

The award* winning animated short about an alligator that wants a fish. Animated all on paper by myself, my friend Lara, and a bit by our tutor. It was really fun to animate, and I hope all of you guys enjoy it too! Now it's time to get back to work on my game!

*Best 2D Animated Film (3rd Year Bracket).

The posture issues I corrected are mainly because his leg was simply too far back on his body in frame 4 for him to have any hope of balance.  In frame 6, the positioning of the right leg just didn't match the angle of his torso.  Moving his left leg back a pixel or two (or making it larger) would further help with giving him a better sense of balance.

Ah, looks great. This is exactly what I was looking for, thank you! I'll tweak it further and then I'll be able to start animating. Thankyou for the posture correction, too, I'll keep an eye on that in future.

Attempted it again, tried to make this guy's facial structure more accurately fit his picture.

Um, I kind of meant the face picture's hairstyle on the small sprites - not the other way around. x3 Replacing the long blue hair on the walkabout sprites with the short purple hair of the picture. I couldn't get it to look right at a small size, so I asked for help with that.

I'm continuing to work on my game, but I've run into a snag - the hairstyle I intend for a character just isn't working on his sprite, and I'm not sure how to go about doing it. I tried it before, but it just looks like a wig or a Bart Simpson-style unnatural spikes. He is supposed to have short, spikey (perhaps gelled up) hair, but I'm at a loss as to how to make it look -good-, especially on the front and side views. The sprites I got for him have his old hairstyle, which just isn't animatable. So, any advice on how I can apply the hairstyle on the picture to the sprites? And if you find anything totally wrong in the sprites themselves beside that, I'd be glad to hear it, I'm pretty open to fixing things.



Thankyou!

When designing my game, multiple characters is the first thing I want to have in it. The story, told in part by different people with different mindsets and different values.

So when you're playing as them, why should they play entirely the same? I've seen a lot of adventure games do multiple characters with just a small change in what the inventory is, or a reskinning of the GUI. What if the entire way the game played changed depending on who you are? A simple character wouldn't have a complex text parser, and likewise the noir detective wouldn't have a two button interface. A whole new wealth of puzzles could be used, and the player could really get into the mindset of the character by /having/ to think on their terms.

The main concern I have with this is: Would this annoy people? I'm not thinking of having the game be swapping interfaces on you unless it is necessary - and each interface will have it's own discrete section to work in - you wouldn't be switching between interfaces to solve puzzles. How would you implement it so that the player wasn't confused when they switch between characters and interfaces? Is this an idea that would turn you off of a game?

[I wanna make RPG games with things in it that makes it feel just a little close to a FF game]

I don't think Icey really wants to make a game. Not a true game, really. All of his works have been one step removed from being a rolling demo, because Icey is more interested in advertising and flash and marketing than he is in actual game design. He'll do anything to sound professional, get that extra industry thing in so that he can say "My game has RPG Battle Systems / Multiplayer / DLC / Lotsa Belts"... even if he doesn't actually make a game.

And he hasn't. His battle systems are all surface and no underlying mechanism. Imagine, if you will, a game being a bustling town. Icey sees this town and says "I want a piece of that.". But Icey doesn't make his town have an economy, population, or even have working buildings. Everything's a facade, made of plywood and cheap paint, in order to make something that looks like a town. He markets it as the next greatest town, but noone can ever use it, even if it looks nice, because it just doesn't work. None of the underlying parts have been
made. If you don't look at it from a certain point of view, his, it will look fake and the illusion that it is a town will be broken.

I wanna make RPG games with things in it that makes it feel just a little close to a FF game ... if plays like a RPG then it's a RPG even if there is a part missing, words mispelled, and a few extras that the developer likes but someone else doesn't like.

We keep telling him "make a simple game" but his idea of a game is far, far removed from ours. He will create cutscenes, ancillery material, set pieces with no overarching plot, vast sweeping dialogues that don't make sense to anyone but him. He's creating his idea of what a game should be from his experiences as a consumer. Thinking games are all about the graphics, the secondary advertising, the bells and whistles that industry types like to throw around for more money, cryptic dialogue and epic cutscene battles with flashy moves. I don't think Icey has ever thought about games from the other side, from a designer's point of view. Not a consumer, who wants particular things, but a builder - who thinks about how things can best be implemented and what the product needs. How else do you explain his baffling and infuriating attempts to shoehorn in more bells and whistles into a nonfunctional product?

When you design a game, you have several points of view you need to think from. That of your vision, that of the designer, and that of the audience. Your vision needs to guide your hand when you design, but as a designer you also need to think about how the audience will feel about your design decision. Misspelled words, bad (or nonexistant) mechanics, incoherent plots, all contribute to a poor experience for the audience. Just because you want to include it doesn't mean you should. The old writing idiom is "Kill your darlings". You shouldn't be too precious about your works, as fighting improvement just to keep hold of your pet mechanics or plot points will ultimately doom the game. That's not to say you shouldn't have a vision guiding you - working against your vision is just as harmful. But you should be creative, willing to implement things in a fun and intuitive way, and realistic. Will your audience like this game? What does including this mechanic add? Always cut, never bloat your game. You should try to create a finished game BEFORE you add on features that aren't necessary for it's completion. Otherwise, you just have a stitched together corpse with a party hat.

Now, I don't mind Icey's artwork. It's pretty solid. But I'd prefer to see one small, solid game than a thousand rolling demos of the same incoherent Square-ripoffs that he's been producing for the past millenia. Something that is fun to play, has a nice flow of gameplay, and is thoroughly tested and is robust. I'm sure he can do it, he just needs to stop thinking like a consumer, and start thinking like a designer. All these bells and whistles - drop them like the poison they are. Make a game.

Make. A. Game.

No DLC, no multiplayer, no fake battle system with no underlying mechanics, no hour long incoherent cutscene, no "one click and you're finished" gameplay, no final fantasy characters, no japanese name you ripped from google translate.

Game.

Reading their list of the advantages of modular animation, I feel like that system is more suited to platform and rpg games, where there are a lot of characters engaged in a lot of action.

In adventure games where only one or two characters tend to walk anywhere, and most of the animations are about expressing attitudes or emotions, I don't think it would offer as much.

Ah, but think of the opportunities for making more complex animation from smaller sprites! Giving someone a different stance (held frame) while their head still talks, talking while walking (Bud Tucker style - he even chewed gum while walking, something that not many adventure game heroes are able to do!), or putting different facial expressions on the characters themselves while not bloating out your game with thousands of redundant pixels.

Close up shots could still benefit from this limited animation, and be done ten times more elegantly than the current method.

You could change the character's clothes independantly of their mood, they could dance and still be able to talk.

The advantages of this system isn't just for Rayman-style animation, but a whole spectrum of animation-saving processes. Who needs to add in seperate "blink" frames and mess around with custom talk animations and unwieldy views for Sierra portrait  talking, when you can just composite all you need in Spriter, and do, say

Code: ags

vGraham.Mood (MOOD_ANGRY);
cGraham.Say ("I am very angry!");

And you add new #defines and moods directly on the artist's side, and not on the programmer's side where they have to use up new Views to change something as insignificant as an eyebrow. Heck, if the lip sync tech in AGS was improved, you could leave it to the lip sync dude to note which lines are which mood, and change it appropriately (coincidentally, a lip sync editor in AGS would be badass as hell). Done totally procedurally, no changes or custom Say command with complex animation code required.

I'm just blue-sky thinking at the moment, but the possibilities are endless! Most of these could probably be done in a few hundred lines of code and several sprite slots, but Spriter may prove to be much more elegant in practice. The prospect of easy-to-do reusable limited animation intrigues me!

I tried it, too bad it won't work with my custom say functions


- Alan

Would it be possible to have the plugin have a setting to include custom say functions? If it can detect Say, then how much of a stretch would it be to have it include other functions of the user's choice, other than Say and Display?

This looks amazing! I was missing an in-ags way of handling speech. I like that it tells you whether a file is there or not, and what to name it. Can you edit the lines from this menu, or do you need to go into the script itself to do that?

In all, this looks very snazzy. I'd certainly find use for it!

Shut up and get on with it.

Truer words have never been spoken. Talking about a project too much can kill it, since people get bored with conjecture, they want substantial stuff! And how many times have you talked to a person who goes on and on about writing The Great American Novel, but have yet to put down a single word of actual drafting? Perhaps there's not much demand for your personal pet project. Instead of constantly talking about it, show them a finished product they can get their hands on and devour. Show them, don't tell them, how great your game is. If people are skeptical about multiplayer (which I think they are), give them something to prove them wrong. Talk is cheap. Games aren't. This is your baby, not everyone elses'. They don't have the same connection to it you do. They don't feel the same enthusiasm about this specific concept, it's your game and you need to provide the enthusiasm to finish it. Noone else is going to do that for you.

In other words...

PS: Graphical adventure games have never been a very multiplayer experience in the sense you want. RPGs, FPSes, RTSes, etc, are completely different beasts and the multiplayer elements are very easy to implement. Just because people want multiplayer in certain genres, doesn't mean they want it in all of them. If you want it, sure, go ahead and make it. But don't expect people to jump on it, as adventure fans aren't known for their massively multiplayer addictions. You want to make them want MP? You make a good game. You don't try and convince them with words. Words don't work. Only games work.

These are the loveliest sprites. I hope you make a game with them!

I plan to! Unfortunately the art is practically the only part of a game I can do competently, and short of replaying all of the games, I'm not sure I remember all the things in the OSD universe, like the name of Dennis' sword and spells, or what Hansel is supposed to look like. Is that kind of stuff mutable between games? I kind of wish there was an OSD bible I could look at. I know I'm taking this too seriously for what is a silly JRPG parody, but I'd like to be consistent with the rest of the OSD series. x3