Example 02:

Portals

Objective: What if you want to create a Castlevania-like layout/portal system where you exit a layout to the right and want the player to spawn in the next layout on the left?

Info: If you go right or left to exit layouts, you run into an object that triggers a 'go to next layout' or a 'go to previous' layout command. Also, it sets a global variable that is being used for the upcoming spawn event.

Also, nod to the developers: If you turn the Transition to 'Fade', it completely breaks the system so that the spawns ain't working anymore - I still haven't figured out a solution for this. How do transitions work exactly?

Resource:

As for inspiration, without the time altering mechanics, wouldn't you just end up with Mario? Unless you're suggesting every game should have the ability to travel through time, in which case I CONCUR

What? Nobody said we should all copy Braid now - but Blow now stands for creating a great game and making indie game development an attractive business model. And it's not just Blow, it's that general indie vibe right now that's completely inspiring.

I know at least a dozen artists who spent years working on big budget titles delivering high res assets that are now more than interested in delivering art for smaller indie games. And that's a great development.

Braid had quite a large budget though.

Sorry, but that's a cop-out. Braid is good because Jonathan Blow is a smart guy, not because 'he had quite a large budget'.

Blow said that it basically cost him 180k, yes - but he worked 3.5 years on the game (usually, a good programmer alone would cost you more than 180k for 3 whole years) and spend a lot of money hiring an artist to do all the art. Then he also had to license songs from musicians. And there are legal and localization fees.

But the game is as 'indie' as could be. Everything costs money, Blow was just adding up all the time he spent and calculated how much it actually cost him to make the game and a bunch of whiners on various forums bashed him for that.

That's seriously one of the big problems indie developers have nowadays. Even if you're living at your parents and you don't have to pay your rent or your food or shit, the cost is still there. Someone still paid for your expenses, even if you didn't. I'd be very surprised if you could push out a game on XBLA under 50k. Very, very surprised.

Braid is an awesome little game and I'm pretty sure Blow inspired tons of artists and developers out there finding out about this new market.

44) Okay, just wanna know if I miss something about the hotspots - Is there any better way to set them to the same coordinates for all frames? If my Attackcycle has different sprite dimensions (because the sword makes the whole sprite larger) than my runcycle and I need to adjust the hotspot of one animation cycle to the other (so that I don't get jerky movements when I start running after I attacked), how am I doing that? Do I really have to go into every single animation frame of the cycle that I want to adjust and manually, by hand (using the arrow keys on the keyboard) match them up?

Cause that'd be quite terrible. For detailed animations, that could take me HOURS - when all I want to do is to save the hotspot coordinations of one animation cycle and copy them to the next. Or save the hotspot coordinations from one frame and copy it to the other. Especially since I can't playback the animation in the sprite editor.

Just another 'yay!' for a 'fade through black' transition. That'd really be helpful.

Actually, I really like this show:

http://www.bytejacker.com/

It's basically a review podcast that's all about indie games. Pretty cool stuff.

Yeah, I think this thread isn't productive anymore since it's way too heated up. There'll always be topics where one group of people thinks solution A is better and the other group pledges for solution B - in the end, it's not worth getting all mixed up about that.

Personally, if I know the app has global variables, I sorta assume that we'd also have local (the better term actually is layout) variables. Getting to the solution that I'll have to use a buffer sprite and use its private variable would've taken me longer to figure out than having layout variables natively built into the app.

It doesn't really matter right now since we get the same result using both ways, so let's not get all fussed up about it anymore. There are more important things to talk and research about

Interesting. I've used invisible walls so far for this Gotta take a look at your cap in a bit.

43) Platform behavior again.

I'm currently designing enemies and it's kinda hard to define their behavior. What I want to achieve is this: The enemies are patrolling - which means they walk left for x amount of pixels, stop and go to the idle animation, then they turn around, walk x amount of pixels, stop and go to idle, etc. etc.

Very basic stuff. The problem is this one: I want the enemies to move based on the platforming behavior, since it already has all the stats set-up. The speed, gravity, jumping, everything. But it's kinda hard to define right now (at least I don't see how it could be done efficiently) that the enemy should walk from his current position to X:360 and from X:360 to X: 1200, etc.

That also makes it hard to take control over the character in cutscenes - usually, what do we do in cutscenes? We set the player inputs to ignore and run an event, so that the designer can 'take over' for a while.

It'd be cool to have a couple more actions with which we could actually control our characters behavior in form of simple events.

This would potentially also help with the font rendering, right? Cause it won't render font itself, but bitmaps as text.

This would be really sweet, then.

Not in the way this plugin works - cause it's essentially just a sprite with a private variable, but without the memory footprint.

But I still think it'd be cool to have a local variable that's based on layouts without having to use sprites as buffers.

41) It'd be neat if we'd have a 'wait' action in our platform behavior. It'd just freeze the platform behavior for a certain amount of ms and then keep going again.

So if I want to send a guard on patrol, I'd have an invisible wall where he'd 'wait' and set the animation back to idle - then, after a certain amount of time he'd start patrolling again, heading into the other direction. Hits a wall, waits, idle, starts patrolling again, etc.

We could also use 'Wait' for timed stuff in Cutscenes. If Cutscene happens, wait for 5000ms, then move forward, etc.

42) It'd be cool to have a 'repeat last action' key in the IDE. So if I just toggled an event, I could select another one, hit the 'repeat last action' key and boom, this event also is toggled. Should also work with delete, invert, etc.