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Work in Progress / Unnamed Infinite Runner (Community Nexus Compo)

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BMacZero
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Joined: 30th Dec 2005
Location: E:/ NA / USA
Posted: 8th Mar 2014 22:43
Hi, all. Working on a (hopefully) quick entry for the Community Compo. It's an infinite runner that gives you just a few moves: jump, double jump, and a punch that you'll use to break through certain parts of the enviroment. Considering adding a kick that would let you slide through narrower spaces.

The game is built randomly on "patterns" that each have a difficult associated with them. The difficulty is modified by the space between two consecutive patterns and their relative entry and exit points. The main difficult will be in planning your moves ahead so you don't get stuck in a bad situation without you double jump or your punch.

The other gimicks will be a day/night cycle as a scoring mechanism and cryptic messages about some kind of plot that will be shown every time you die.

Here's a video of what I got done this morning:


xCatalyst
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Location: Pittsburgh, PA
Posted: 9th Mar 2014 19:40 Edited at: 9th Mar 2014 19:43
Looks good! But, I have some criticism for you.

-There is very little gravitational acceleration. Your character jumps and decelerates at a seemingly fixed speed. Normally when you fall, you gradually pick up more speed; it just looks odd at the moment. So yeah, definitely increase that acceleration. It looks entirely too easy at the moment

-The scrolling is so slow. I could see it getting really boring, really fast. Pick up that scroll speed and add a bit of challenge and fun!

-Your character isn\'t colliding on the floor properly, he is just sort-of floating there, again, looking odd. Maybe just shrink the collision region by a couple pixels to combat that? I dunno necessarily how you are going about your collision, but it could definitely use a touch of fine tuning.

-The contrast of the pure white/ pure black could get a bit disorienting if played for longer than several minutes. I'd suggest using a lighter gray in the background instead of the white to combat that.

But yeah, not a bad start! Keep it up.

danielfalk.net
http://www.youtube.com/user/danielfalkcomposer/
BMacZero
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Posted: 9th Mar 2014 19:47
Thanks for that! I actually ended up reducing gravity quite a lot because it felt too vertical (lots of up-and-down motion rather than forward). I was wary of making it too hard, but if I do increase the speed I can also increase the gravity, so I'll try speeding it up . The difficulty will also be drastically different when I add actual puzzle patterns - these ones are just going to be used for the tutorial.

thenerd
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Location: Boston, USA
Posted: 9th Mar 2014 22:50
Looking good! I'll be watching this! Maybe over time you could increase the speed and gravity proportionally so that the combos still act the same, the player just has to act on them faster. That could be interesting because as soon as the player gets in a pattern you could just give them a little kick and mess up their pattern by speeding it up... heheh

BMacZero
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Posted: 10th Mar 2014 08:24 Edited at: 10th Mar 2014 08:26
Ah, that's a good idea - I could even just alter the game delta time to get that effect, since it might be hard to tweak all those numbers evenly. Though the game might be hard enough not to need any speedup!

In fact, I was just working on the game difficulty. The levels are built by defining a number of "patterns" that are selected at random. So now I'm devising a system that will determine how much space needs to be between any particular pair of patterns to make them actually doable. I also want it to allow patterns to be "blended" close together into one combo, when valid, rather than just letting the player land between every pair.

You can see some of that in this quick video. Game's also looking a lot better thanks to some of geecee3's seamless backgrounds - I just realized I accidentally left the debug grid on, though .


baxslash
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Posted: 12th Mar 2014 12:46
BMac, just letting you know I've been mega busy but those gfx are coming soon
BMacZero
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Posted: 12th Mar 2014 20:08
No problem - splitting my time between a lot of things, myself.

BMacZero
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Posted: 16th Mar 2014 23:08 Edited at: 16th Mar 2014 23:09
I just finished implementing the Day-Night cycle - an important part of the "reward" from the game, as your score is based on the number of "days" you run for.

This video showcases that as well as baxslash's run animation.


All the skies used were created by Grant Clark (geecee3).

ShellfishGames
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Posted: 17th Mar 2014 01:33
That level looks a little easy though.

But seriously, that's a very nice background (transition). Looks really atmospheric. If you manage to get a decent sound design as well, that might make the game quite unique.

baxslash
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Posted: 17th Mar 2014 14:24
I just sent you the rest of the animations. Not sure i'm 100% happy with the run animation yet so if I get time I'll improve it.
JLMoondog
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Posted: 18th Mar 2014 14:07
Hah Bman! That is a pretty cool day/night effect. Should really give the game some atmosphere.

tiffer
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Posted: 18th Mar 2014 18:04
Good work. When you going to show us the runner and the sky transition all together?

Cwatson
BMacZero
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Posted: 26th Mar 2014 15:32
@Shellfish/tiffer - Yeah, I couldn't make it through one day/night with actual terrain . It's better now!

@Josh - Thanks! I'm definitely shooting for the atmospheric feel now, since you guys mentioned it. I'm not sure how that will play off with the fast-paced gameplay, but we'll see where this all ends up.

Anyway, I'm back with another video, all! I cooked up a (sort of bizarre) animation system to use baxslash's spritesheets with, and I've finally got that up and running. It's really hard to get the animations to match rapid player inputs without popping and general wonkiness. A few hiccups left, but I'm going to move on to hopefully the final points: menus, balance, music, and highscores.


baxslash
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Posted: 27th Mar 2014 08:24
I imagine the animation might work better if you use some single frames instead of some of the animations and I notice you are using the run animation when you are jumping. Let me cook up a quick state engine that demonstrates how I would make it look a little smoother... if I get time...
BMacZero
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Posted: 27th Mar 2014 16:09
I see your problem with the jump - I guess it's because I'm playing the start sequence while he's already going up rather than on the ground. I removed that and it does look a lot better. The other thing I thought was a bit weird was the ground punch. Which other ones are you looking at?

BatVink
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Posted: 23rd Apr 2014 10:54
Just 7 days to go before the competition closing date.
Make sure your entries are posted here with the relevant information.
Good luck!

BMacZero
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Posted: 29th Apr 2014 10:00
Just submitted my final game. It's late and there's been a lot of coding the past few days, so I'll just leave this stuff here:





Download: http://www.brianmacintosh.com/projects/dawn/Dawn.zip

Didn't quite get all the animation bugs ironed out, baxslash, but you did a great job with the art! Thanks!

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