xiao's Forum Posts

  • Hey Lucid! Any more work on the engine so far?

    Sorry I haven't posted here in a while. I have much more free time now. I'll have to put up some art in a sec.

  • yeah, the world tilting thing would be awesome but i would probably only do it unless you're going for the iphone... i don't know, you might as well try it out and see how it works.

    yeah that's true. aspect ratio can be a pain though as far as level design goes

    i have so much art i don't know what to show you! lol

  • Lucid - sounds awesome. I suck at programming anyways so I could do the design and artwork, as well as promotional stuff and direction and stuff.

    As far as art styles go - I have quite a few ideas. One is just cartoonish and pleasing to the eye. The other is completely made of shred paper - making the game look like a "collage" and the katamari looking awesome. Another is to clay-animate the entire world. This would look AMAZING but be perhaps more work than it's worth. And the final idea is to go with the retro, 8-bit look. I lean towards the shred paper, with the Katamari being a giant wad of paper (starting out as a crumpled paper ball)

    I agree. Short but sweet is what I'd like to aim for. It should be very polished. Serving as a construct business card sounds great to me. Let's establish a small team and maybe set up a forum for the team to discuss the progress?

    Something important is to determine the aspect ratio of the game. I for sure want to use 16:9 but I'm not sure of the actual pixel sizes.

    What I'd love to do someday is make a game similar to this for the iPhone using tilt controls

  • You guys want to form a little team to try and make this game? I think it's be great fun and an interesting experiment that could test the power of Construct.

    We don't have to but I can't do this stuff on my own and you guys are awesome. haha.

    Lucid - What I'm concerned about is... with private variables or whatever they're called, we should be able to have a large family of pickupables that all add different amounts of size to the katamari, right?

    Well in the final product I'd like the katamari to take up more of the screen than it does now so it'd be pretty important that it moves slower, but yeah I want to at least add the dash move. Not sure if we'll need to climb walls, the game will probably be pretty straight forwards (literally. i mean horizontal) But the dash would be great, with some nice motion blur in there too.

    smashing into things and losing pieces, absolutely. I may just make "junk" sprites that fly off your Katamari so we don't have to deal with actual pieces falling off the katamari. Unless there's an easy way to do this. It'd be nice if there was, so you could pick them back up again.

    Ahhh, the blur makes a lot of sense now. And yeah your second method sounds much easier.

  • updated with zoom out feature, and large area to drop down and get alot of stickies to test out zooming out

    http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1013446/katama.cap

    EDIT: there's a glitch where if you get alot of stickies at the same time your ball starts acting weird, if you press space, you can see it's because more than one ball spawned and the invisible balls are hitting eachother. fun stuff

    This is amazing, I love what you're doing. The zoom seems to work very well and the katamari itself is also working well.

    I noticed that glitch on your last upload. Somewhere, the deletion and re-insertion of invisible balls messes it up. Perhaps you can add a code that deletes any balls that aren't the "main" ball, by allowing no more than one in the playfield.

    Also, the ball rolls too fast and too spinnish, it needs to be slower, more like the katamari and less like a car tire... and one thing that concerns me still is how, with all these events, this is going to work with tons of different pickupable objects.

  • By the "katamari sphere" you mean the invisible one right?

    [quote:1n2t5mi2]The balls dimensions should be determined (somehow) by measuring the inner most pixel diameter of all the objects combined.

    Here lies the problem...

  • May I first say you guys (especially lucid) are my fuggin' superheroes for being so damned helpful! You blow away the Clickteam community : D

    now, ON TO THE KATAMARI! : O

    okay, the problem about the circle enlarging is that it will pick up stuff the katamari isn't touching. So really the only way to do this is to "simulate" the sticking? I guess? I don't know.

    everybody watch the video. my mind is broken. D:

  • I'm thinking of ditching the wobble thing. As nice as it is I've been messing around and I can't seem to find a system that doesn't break the way the original katamari moves.

  • That file isn't working xiao, btw.

    I guess I suck at dropbox. D:

  • I must say, you guys are a lot more helpful than those at Clickteam forums.

    Totally agree - this is like the most helpful community ever.

  • Okay, did all that and we have this:

    https://dl-web.getdropbox.com/get/katam ... w=bea387b8

    Works as it should. What I still don't understand is the ability to have these things (katamaris) grow. I'm not entirely sure myself of how it would work conceptually, not just on Construct. I tried adding the size value of the pickup to the size value of the ball when it picks it up but it didn't work out so well. The ball just awkwardly picked up things way out of its reach. Perhaps it's because in the events, things are still sticking to the red ball and not the green one? (The green one is the invisible one in my example.)

    Also, the grouping problem. As it is right now, I don't see a way to be able to have stuff stick to the ball without needing to code every single object - the group thing doesn't work because the actions apply to the entire group.

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  • it all makes sense

    you'd be surprised how nice the wobble would feel

    load up the original katamari thing I posted

    and stretch the katamari a little bit

    so it's an oval and then run a preview

    it has a nice feel to it

    very katamariesque <---that's a real word, look it up

    That's true, it's a very nice feel.... hmm...

    Well I think that what's most important is getting the invisible circle idea to work, and if it does, then maybe the wobble and oval thing will come next.

    I'm pretty sure the katamari in the original video i posted has no wobble at all and it still functions fine...

    This invisible circle... how can this work? I understand the concept, just not how it would be done.

    The invisible circle needs to be the one picking up the objects, but they'd appear to stick on the real ball. I think this mechanic, once mastered, would fuel the whole game and it'd be easier from there...

    Perhaps the circle should not be a physics object at all, but rather a platformer object that is somewhat "bouncy"? I'm not even sure if the katamari has physics on the video..

  • Okay, checked out the example (and I've been reading the wikis.)

    This is closer to katamari goodness, however the ball has now become a nightmare to control and sometimes has a habit of just shooting off into the distance at top speed.

    Also, the grouping thing will also be a problem.

    I think I can think of a way to solve a few things.

    Referencing the original katamari video I posted, the ball seems to move as an invisible circle like you mentioned, not literally moving using every object as an actual attatchment. See how lots of the objects on the ball lay behind the floor background? So it seems that your first example would work better.

    Perhaps there is a way to simply "paste" on anything you pick up to the ball, and have an invisible ball that follows your visible ball. This invisible ball, if say, is 5cm, picking up a 2cm object, no matter its shape, will become 7cm, but the original ball does not grow. So you have a "pickup area" ball and the physical ball that the player sees. I think this would also take care of your grouping problem, as no object would have to stick to itself - everything is sticking to the ball, creating the illusion that the things that stick to the ball are sticking to the other things on the ball, but really they're just sticking to the ball. And you wouldn't have to deal with a lumpy, erratic moving ball (which would be cool because it's like that in katamari, but not so cool in this version because construct's physics aren't entirely stable.)

    Perhaps if there was some way to make the inivisible ball stretchy, or liquidy, odd objects would cause a satisfying limp for the ball - but this is probably more effort than it's worth

    So theoretically, nothing has to have physics except the ball. Everything else can be moving on its own path or whatever. Watching the 2d katamari video, I don't think anything but the katamari has physics (although I may be wrong, I wasn't looking out for it when I watched it.)

    Does that make any sense?

  • Okay, got the family thing down. Although will this method work?

    Say the katamari is 5 cm. you pick up a 2cm object and now your katamari is 7cm.

    Will construct still think the katamari is 5cm, because the katamari and the object are only hinged together, but not considered the same object? In MMF2, I'd fix this with flags.

    Also, what do you mean double hinging? I know how to hinge, but the object doesn't roll with the katamari once hinged, it just makes it drag awkwardly.

    Right now, it's like this:

    <img src="http://img244.imageshack.us/img244/1362/code.png">

    All I changed was the grouping thing, no hinging or anything fancy. It only picks up things at least half as small as it is, which is good. But it's still far from what we're trying to achieve - the ball needs to roll on what it's picked up, not just pasting images of what it's picked up to the outside of the ball.

  • I'd suggest the second one, although you might need to do what they did in katamari, and have smaller versions of each sprite that you load up as it gets bigger to save vram, also maybe something using canvas to paste all your sprites to everytime you get a major zoom , so you're not keeping track of the rotations of hundreds of objects

    imagine that you made the exact same red circle, without physics

    and you made a pink circle with physics the exact same size, but set to invisible

    every frame you told the red circle to set it's location and angle to the invisible pink circle

    so far it behaves the same, but when you pick things up, you figure out a math formula that will change the shape of the invisible pink circle so that it circles the redball and the junk, and you'd have to find other formulas and expressions to position the ball on this new pink one, but the idea would be something like this:

    Yeah, I was thinking the same also with the smaller versions of sprites. If this is anything like what I want it to be like, there's going to be hundreds of objects and I'm not sure if people's computers could handle it. But I am very new to construct and I have no idea how to use canvas to "take a screen shot" of the katamari when it goes through the zoom process so that we're not rolling the actual ball anymore.

    I'm very new to Construct but I'm well-versed in MMF2 and I've been using it for years. I very recently switched to construct because it seemed much more powerful.

    The pink ball is a great idea, but I'm not well versed enough in Construct to even start thinking about how to code something like that... I'm sure someone could do it though. I need a team of people for this game, I'm thinking.

    Hmmm this might be doable with straght physics objects... using two hinges per object instead of one would effectively "weld" it to the new object... in theory.

    I might have a tinker later with some ideas and see if I can figure something out. I love the Katamari games (no pun intended), so it would be fitting to have a Katamari clone made with Construct.

    ~Sol

    That was my initial thought, although I couldn't find a way to get the objects stuck to the katmari stick to each other. See, an object that is stuck to the katamari needs to pick up other objects that it touches. But the objects can't stick unless one of them is stuck to the katamari, otherwise you'd have objects stuck together everywhere. So we need something like this...

    If the katamari touches an object...

    If object is smaller than katamari...

    Stick the object to katamari

    Turn on variable "stuck" to object

    If variable "stuck" is on...

    On collision with new object...

    If new object is smaller than katamari...

    Stick new object to object

    Turn on variable "stuck" to new object

    I'm actually working on a lot of art and sound for this game and it's going to have an interesting paper cutout style, or perhaps a retro one. But if anyone is interested in joining the team with me and helping with coding, I'd love it.

    Another important feature is that every object is assigned a size, and that the katamari automatically picks up anything smaller than it. This way you don't have events for EVERY OBJECT that the katamari picks up. Something like this.

    (Object is 5cm, size is a variable. Katamari is 55 cm.)

    If Katamari size is > than object size, pick up object.

    On collision with object smaller than katamari...

    Stick object to katamari

    Add object size variable to katamari size variable.

    So the katamari should now be 60cm.

    However there is a problem with this too (other than the fact that I don't know how to code it.) The katamari needs to only pick up objects that are at least 40% or maybe 50% smaller than it. You don't want a 200cm katamari picking up a 199cm object.