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Bluebones’ Curse October 19, 2010

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Things have been a bit quiet around here lately. But that doesn’t mean we haven’t been working.

After we did our public playtest for Hero In Training, we realized that we were a long way from finishing. We need to overhaul several portions, and redesign a large chunk of the game. That left us a little less than motivated to work on it, so we started something new. Six hard weeks later, we are ready to reveal Bluebones’ Curse to the world. (Screenshots and a gameplay video are available at that link.)

We even put together a tongue-in-cheek press release that I’ve been sending out to journalists in the gaming press. I know our game is too small for most of them to cover, but hopefully we caused a smile or two. Here it is:

Pirate’s Cove, Tortuga Island - October 31, 1652 – In
an ironic twist of fate, Bluebones, the most
dastardly pirate to ever sail the Seven Seas, has
been cursed to roam the Earth as a skeleton.  During
a failed attempt to steal a priceless ancient ring,
Bluebones was confronted by a powerful hag, who
gave no mercy to the scallywag.

“Tis a wicked unsettlin’ ting to be sure!  I did nae
know such a ting be possible,” said the scurvy dog.
“This be worse than when ol’ Greenbeard lost his hand
to a mutinous crew and hadta use a hook instead. I
cannae even drink me grog! It goes right through me
to the floor. It ain’t right, I tell ya! How will I
e’er get to Fiddler’s Green now?”

In hushed whispers, local residents suggest Bluebones
might seek out the lost gold of Davy Jones, which
is said will grant the finder his heart’s desire.
It’s a dangerous journey, and time is running short,
as the gold only appears once every thousand years,
on Halloween night.

When asked for comment on his immediate plans, the
privateer just muttered to himself, “Stupid bag o’
bones. Damned, bloody witches.”

Bluebones’ Curse is available on the Xbox Indie Games
marketplace for 80 Microsoft Points.

My new tutorial is absolutely fine. August 16, 2010

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I wrote a tutorial for the Sgt. Conker Absolutely Fine Tutorial Contest.

It’s about how you can record and playback player inputs to generate game replays. Check it out, and let me know what you think.

Player animation changes August 13, 2010

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After posting the last video, I also sent the link out on twitter. Within seconds, I had a great deal of excellent feedback from other indie developers. Some of it was stuff that would never have occurred to me.

For example, the player’s walk animation has been the same for months. I was happy with it, and had moved on to other things. As soon as I linked the video, many developers reported that they didn’t care for the animation, and pointed out ways I could make it better.

We took the suggestions to heart, and made a bunch of changes. He’s now taller, and has smaller shoes, which doesn’t force him to shuffle so much. Also his shoes now bend when they should, so it looks more natural.

I think the results are a pretty drastic improvement, and I’m really happy with the changes. Have a look, and let me know what you think.

It looks like youtube has fixed the slowdown bug, and they’re reprocessing the videos. So if you see anything funny on my older embedded videos, please try back in a little bit.

Moving slowly forward August 6, 2010

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We started work on a new test level. When it’s finished, I’ll be uploading to playtest on the Xbox Live Indie Games, so that we can get lots of feedback. I’ve got a new video showing off some of that level.

We’re having some technical difficulties with the videos we posted on Youtube. The video is running at half speed with distorted audio. Youtube says they have engineers working on the problem. So for the time being, I’ll post my update videos on Vimeo, instead. (I don’t have a paid Vimeo account, so I can’t embed high def, but you can see the high def version over on Vimeo.)

Hero In Training – Progress Update August 5, 2010 from Jesse Chounard on Vimeo.

Sloped platform collision July 28, 2010

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Recently on the XNA Creator’s Club forums there have been several posts on how to handle collisions with a sloped platform in a 2d platformer. I wrote up a short description of the system I’m using:

How to determine if a player is about to land on a line segment:

What we need:

  1. Foot position of the player. (Bottom center of the player’s collision rectangle works well.)
  2. Line segment we’re checking for collisions with, specified by its end points A and B.
  3. Player’s velocity.

Let’s get to it:

  1. Is the player moving down? If not, we can stop here.
  2. Is the player’s expected position (foot position + velocity) within the horizontal region of the segment? If not, we can stop.
  3. Calculate the interpolated Y position on the line segment of the player’s X position both before and after the move.
  4. If the Y position before moving is above the segment, and the Y position after moving is below, then the player is landing.

And today I’ve put together a quick sample project to go with that. You’re welcome to do whatever you want with the code. (License – Ms-PL.) I hope it’s helpful. Feel free to hit me with any questions.

Boss fight! July 6, 2010

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We’ve added the first boss fight into the game. Bossfrog is a giant version of the existing frogs you’ve seen before. After taunting our hero, he proceeds to try to stomp him into the ground. Twice during the fight, he’ll roar with anger and summon a bunch of his minion frogs to join in the battle.

Here’s a video:

Enemies! June 3, 2010

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I’ve gotten two enemies into the game. I also added boomerangs that the player can throw to attack.

Bullyfrog is a frogman who simply runs across the screen. If he reaches the edge of a ledge, he’ll leap to the next ledge. (If he can reach.) He’s really quick, and not very easy to dodge. I think we’ll do a palette swapped version of this character who is a bit tougher and will stop to throw projectiles at the player.

Spikey is a big spike covered block who waits for the player to get near and then smashes down trying to squash them. I added a neat screen shake effect when he hits. He’s completely immune to boomerangs, they just bounce off of him.

Changing directions May 21, 2010

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In the last few days, I’ve been looking at the best way to start putting the art into the game. For characters, the new animation system seems to be working really well. For the static background elements that Mollie has been drawing, however, the tiled system aren’t really cutting it. She’s put together a bunch of separate little texture elements, and the only decent way I could have gotten them into the game would be to composite the graphics in photoshop, and then break them down into tiles and add them to the game. While that would work, it would mean a large number of tile sheets, and it would be very cumbersome to edit levels.

I was left with two options:

  1. Add the ability to attach textures to the custom objects in Tiled.
  2. Change to a different level editor.

Option one sounds reasonable, and the source code is really clean and pretty easy to edit. But I’d need to add a bunch of functionality to support rotation, scaling, and draw order for the textures. It would take me awhile. After spending so much time on Demina, I’m very tired of working on tools. I want to write my game!

So I asked my friend Google for help, and I wound up finding Gleed2D. I’ve spent a few days playing with it, and it seems really nice. It supports all of the features I was looking for. It has support for a few primitive types, so you can set up region boxes, or collision polygons pretty easily. You can attach custom properties to any element into the editor, so the automatic game entity creation system I used with Tiled works perfectly without much change. It also has support for parallax layers right in the editor. Nice!

There is a pretty big drawback to Gleed2D, though. The creator uploaded a flurry of updates during July of last year, and then went silent. On the forums (if you dig through the heavy spam) are a bunch of requests for updates or access to the source code. But there’s been no response. This isn’t an insurmountable problem, since the editor is in an easily usable state, but it still stinks.

It took me a little while to get it up and running, since I had to rewrite the collision system to allow for slopes, but it’s looking pretty nice. Here’s a new work in progress video. (The graphics are just random stuff I had lying around.)

It moves! May 17, 2010

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Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve been working on a new animation system. Instead of using traditional 2d animations (where you replace the entire image each frame) I’ve switched to using a keyframe based skeletal animation system. While not the norm, this isn’t an uncommon practice (the same style was used in both Aquaria and The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai). Strangely, I was unable to find a good tool for creating the animations.

So I made my own, and I made it open source, so anybody can use it. It’s called Demina.

Using it, we’ve managed to make a little progress, and I can finally show you a work in progress video. There’s not much to see yet, but now that the animation system is usable this game should really start taking shape in the next few weeks.

More concept drawings May 2, 2010

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I’ve got more concept drawings to share. I’m super thrilled about how these are turning out. These are the enemies for the new game.

Comments are welcome.

Enemy drawing samples