eliasfrost's Forum Posts

  • I like the graphics very much. Simplistic but competent, definitely adding this to my watch list.

  • Aseprite has a built-in animation preview. It's also pretty easy to use. It's not free but you can get it for $10 at least, which is basically nothing, or you can set your own price above $10 if you feel like it.

    http://www.aseprite.org/

  • I thoroughly disagree. As I've stated above, it will help but it's not a substitute for practice and skill. If an article talk about level design and what benefits certain tricks will have (for example: loop-backs, intuitive color schemes, flow etc.) then anyone who don't know those subtleties of level design will have to learn it the hard way instead of thinking "yeah that's right never thought of that" after reading an article on the subject.

    It might not work for you personally, but I strongly disagree with the notion to discourage people from reading articles on the subject.

  • Sweet. I can see a lot of uses for this kind of system. Super awesome, Keep it up!

  • Pehaps the points in this article don't translate to reality, but this article don't necessarily represent game design articles at large. But it does have a good amount of good points, it all depends on what game you make. This is not the be-all end-all of game design, it's one article, written by a journalist and not a designer.

    Writing music and developing a game are two very different things, believe me I do both. One is about recognizing pitch and having a trained ear, muscle memory and dexterity. game design, not so much. Game design is a lot of theory: psychology, behaviorism, most importantly logic. All do translate well into articles and other written media.

    Post-mortems are some of the most interesting articles I've ever read and there's tons of great information in them. Game design articles can contain great amounts of knowledge and tricks that you can learn of instead of running into the wall yourself and learning the hard way. There was a double fine "dev plays" episode featuring John Romero, it was amazingly interesting and I learned a great deal from it, you should def. take a look. I strongly disagree that you should not seek out prior knowledge, which is part of reading articles and consuming other kinds of similar media (video interviews with devs for example).

    That said, no one expect to be able to perfectly master a skill just by reading about it. Articles are a good tool, a very good tool I might add and will most likely aid you as a developer more than hurt you. It's not a substitute for practice and no one suggested as such. I believe every developer should read as much as they can but be smart about what information is useful for their game. Information is never not useful, eventually. So absorb it all for future reference.

  • Do not read game design articles.

    Why not?

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  • Got halfway through round 5 just by running to the right. I think the enemies need better reaction time, or slow down the player movement speed. I like the concept though, good work.

  • I share that pain too. For the last 6 months or so I've been working on an engine for a cinematic platformer (which started out as a learning project for construct 2) and recently I discovered that the thing I've been building upon, iterating and molding just doesn't work when it comes to making something worthwhile; it was just too damn buggy and unreliable haha.

    So I'm currently rewriting the engine, with all new knowledge and understanding of the engine that I've gathered over the past 6 months of development. And so far it's almost bug free - because I built the engine on the same basic idea as the old one, so fixing any shortcomings was a piece of cake for this one, I'm also writing the new engine so that it's easier to implement new features because it's structured in a much more intuitive way: grouping, functions, compress the amount of variables as much as possible etc.

    And also, agreed with TiAm, those three points: can't stress it enough, I have post-it's everywhere with reminders to "keep things simple" and the like, it's surprisingly easy to fall into old, bad habits. And also: comment early, comment good. Make sure that your code is readable after returning from vacation or long breaks. It's much more fun to work on a project when you don't go "*sigh*.. Aalright, let's take a look" whenever you want to implement some new feature and such.

    Those are the things that I'd say works for me. Often, the hard part for me is not that the passion for the project has died off but that all of the seemingly miniscule problems (like unorganized pieces of code, uncommented code etc) pile up into an unmanagable behemoth that's just too much to care about. So yeah: "organization, organization, simple, simple".

  • Very good feeling you've got. Keep it up!

  • I'm currently rewriting my engine after stumblinng upon a few problems but anyways.

    My biggest flaw was that the engine didn't check for trigger points before performing actions, so for example when you stepped forward, the game would not check if there's even a surface next to you, but instead would check what kind of surface is below you after you've moved. This proved to be a very stupid way to do things when I wanted to implement pits and ledges. As the project went on I had to do some crazy workarounds that would produce countless bugs. Oh well. Lesson learned.

    Good thing I now have a grasp on how the engine is supposed to handle stuff so rewriting it has been very smooth thus far. I might actually put up a .capx for it later for people to see how I personally did it. Maybe.. We'll see.

  • I don't think this is a bug per-se but more like an oversight so I'll post it here, if I'm wrong a mod can move the thread to the right place!

    So!

    When you reload sprite frames from a source it doesn't update any duplicates of that frame in the animation and you can't update them individually since the option to reload is greyed out for any duplicates for some reason. This makes you delete any duplicate frames and re-import and rearrange them. It's not a game breaking issue but it is noticable when doing lots of tweaking with animation frames and such.

    Is it possible that in future updates you can either reload every duplicate individually or that when you reload a frame, every other duplicates gets updated as well?

    Thanks!

  • You could add the objects to a family and do this:

    is [family] on layer? then [family] set collision enabled/disabled

  • It's an issue that has to do with pixel rounding, the .capx that was provided in the thread you linked had pixel rounding on, which disallow objects to be drawn between pixels hence why it stutters. Toggle pixel rounding off and the problem is fixed.

    I used the .capx in your mention and did some quick monitoring with pinning vs positioning every tick. Pinning the object resulted in a cpu usage of 1-3% while positioning every tick gave me a stable 4%, sometimes 5%.

  • Wouldn't it be less intensive to just pin them?

  • allen Since almost all cinematic platformers are grid-based. You lock animations within the timeframe of one step, or of any other motion you want the player to perform. That said it's pretty easy to build you animation system around that idea, whether is climbing, running, crouching, throwing etc. Another important thing is that all animations end on an Idle frame, else it gets a bit jerky.