Afternoon all,
I cannot believe it’s been ten days since I last posted about this. I suppose to a large extent all of the days in isolation blend into one, but still, ten days?!? It seems like only this weekend I was hammering away at sprite work and crying big fat tears over the footprint bug. Oh well. I hope you’re all washing your hands and keeping strangers out of your house at all costs by threatening them with the pointy stick you keep by your front door, as I am.
In something of a break from an extremely new tradition, I want to show you the current gameplay footage at the top of the blog today.
Hide And Weep
So, last blog I said “I need to liven up the gameplay and I think that should be the next thing I tackle. I originally thought of Polar Bears as a roaming threat that you’d need to run from, but I’m not sure that’s the way to go.” Kindly read that in a sexy voice to emulate my own. I’ve since decided, more through a lack of alternatives than anything else, that bears are indeed the way to go, but I haven’t implemented them yet. I decided instead to get everything in place so that we could deal with bears when they arrive, aka hiding. You’ll notice in the video that there are now snow piles in front of the fox that she can hide behind should a bear turn up, but this has thrown out another bug that I currently have absolutely no idea how to fix. Let me explain:
Here is pretty much the only block of code in the “obj_snowpile” object, aside from some debug stuff. It should be incredibly simple. All it’s doing is saying “If the player is in the vicinity of this snow pile and is lying down, then they are hidden. If not, they aren’t hidden.”
And here is literally the only block of code inside the “obj_snowpile_spawner” object, which randomly spawns these snow piles throughout the map at the start of the game:
Again, this should be a piece of piss. Anyone who’s done any sort of javascript, GML or java tutorial will be able to tell you how a for loop works. Essentially this is saying “Make 10 snowpiles at random x coordinates throughout the map”. Yet somehow between these 2 tiny bits of code, we have a problem. Somehow only 1 of my snow piles actually hides the player while the other 9 do not. If anyone has a solution to this, I’m all ears as I’ve tried a lot to get this to work and I’m shit out of luck so far. I’m considering doing away with these pre-created snow piles altogether and instead having the snowpiles form around the fox whenever she lies down.
Stars 🙂
I put stars in the sky. They fade in when it gets close to nighttime and fade back out as the sun’s rising. Looks pretty nice.
The Spotlight
This is the biggie really. Cast your mind back to my concept blog and sexy that voice back up for this one:
“The primary loop of the game, or your goal from second to second, is to listen for, locate and dive for food while evading predators. You’ll accomplish this with the help of your extraordinary sense of hearing – In gameplay terms, the slower you’re moving, the more obscured the visuals of the game will become but the more you’ll be able to block out the background noise of the tundra and hone in on the sounds of your prey, which will be highlighted visually under the snow, perhaps with the help of a highlighted circle that lets you know generally where the sound is coming from.“
So this has been on my mind for a while. Currently the visuals of the game didn’t suffer like I’d originally envisioned and I wanted to correct that. The whole point of this game is meant to be hearing food under the ground and diving for it based on a vague idea of where it might be. So hit by a flash of inspiration at about 1am over the Easter weekend, I watched tutorials on creating a spotlight by creating an extra, darker surface that overlays the game and can be punctuated by various sizes of circles of light. I grafted and tweaked and eventually, Hey Presto! I fucked the aesthetic of my entire game.
I don’t think the spotlight will survive my recycle bin much longer but thought I’d include this for completeness’ sake. I want this to be a “warts and all” sort of blog after all so that I and any poor sods who try to follow in my footsteps can at least learn something from all of this. I do still want to make the visuals suffer more so that emphasis is placed on hearing food, but I’ll have to keep thinking about how to make that happen.
In Other News
For myriad reasons I’ve had to dump a laptop, switch to my old desktop, recover and then upgrade that desktop in recent months so in all the excitement I’ve only just had chance to redownload Github and my source code for Flight of the Bluebird and Player Power. It was genuinely an extremely nice feeling playing them both again for the first time in probably 6 months so I thought I’d just mention that. FOTB is still such a mess of ideas that I doubt I’ll ever go back to working on it, which is a shame as with fresh eyes, I reckon I did some fucking impressive things with that game. But after To Spring is completed I can focus on finishing uploading both it and Player Power to Steam. I’ll keep you updated on that once it starts rolling.
I’ve recorded a 17 minute video of me playing and commenting on the carcass of Flight of the Bluebird, sort of giving my thoughts on it and dissecting it a bit. I’m more of a writer than a talker, but if you’re interested, give it a watch.
Next time, bears. I promise.
Scrub those sausage fingers with a wire brush.
Cheers,
Dave
Games By Franjo 