The Era Of Abyss

Summary:

Ninjaboi's Entry for the February competition. A 2D Legend Of Zelda-esque ( loosely ) game with two player local co-op, a simple quest-line, and a variety of enemies and environments.

The Era Of Abyss

Ninjaboi8175 01 Feb 2015 19:19

I'll try to update this thread often so progress is more visible. I'm also aiming to have screenshots of progress at least every other update so hope that works out lol. I originally thought of doing this project in C#/XNA, but after recently downloading and using SFML's new version ( 2.2 ) and liking it even more, I've decided to use C++/SFML2.2.

===TOOLS I AM USING===

IDE: Visual Studio 2013.
Language: C++.
Library/Engine: SFML2.2.
Simple Graphics: Microsoft Paint.
Added Effects Graphics: GIMP.
Sound/Music: Audacity.
Document Creation: Open Office.
Source Control Client: Source Tree.
Source Control Type: Git.
Source Control Host: BitBucket.

I finished the GDD yesterday ( well, the bulk of what was needing broken down and detailed ) and am working on the code today and hoping to get a playable game by the end of the night. I'm currently only targeting Windows but since this is being developed in C++ and SFML it should be very portable. If someone is running on another system and wants to compile the game after it's finished feel free to ask me any questions for setting up your environment to get it compiled. If I have time at the end I might pump out a Linux build.

The game is a Legend Of Zelda-esque game in a loose description since some things I'll do wasn't really a part of the original game. It features two player local co-op and will support keyboard and joypad input. It has a linear quest line but you can re-visit locations at your leisure. Anyways that's enough talk about it, I'm getting back to work with it. I'll post an update or two today when I have significant work to show.

Re: The Era Of Abyss

Ninjaboi8175 02 Feb 2015 07:00

Well I got a good deal done today. I got over 500 lines of set code ( with probably another 500 I ended up chunking along the way ) and I set it up really well in my opinion. Maybe my best design yet. I created a state manager, template states for each state in the game so far, and have it modularized to the point where I can add a completely new state in by simply 1) creating its template 2) adding it into the state manager's list of states, 3) adding it to the state manager's switches. I tested the code I made so far by getting a sprite to move:

http://dannydmcgill.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Capture.jpg

Tomorrow I plan on finishing up many of the features I hoped the game to have seeing as I spent more time than I thought I would today on the foundation work. I got it to a playable state though so I guess I achieved my goal. Woot!

My minimum goal tomorrow is:

• Create a player class.
• Create a map region class.
• Create player animation template image.

Last edited on 02 Mar 2015 05:25 by rbwhitaker Show more

Re: The Era Of Abyss

Ninjaboi8175 03 Mar 2015 09:23

So I know I just realized I didn't tell many people on the IRC, but not more than a few days ago I ended up halting The Era Of Abyss so I can work out a few things with it first ( what with all the features that I could only half-make ). Most of my work went into stuff I couldn't even see visual progress of it being a game, just foundation work and learning how to implement features I've never made before. Plus the good ol' archaic error messages the VS compiler kept throwing at me, sometimes for things I'm almost certain are SFML library bugs that I should be tracking down and reporting. Given the time-frame and my frustration I decided to go another route. With that being said…

SCARETROPE

A 2D horror game based off of the typical "Collect X [ITEM]" horror trope.

===TOOLS I AM USING===

IDE: MonoDevelop.
Language: C#.
Library/Engine: Unity 4.5.1f ( I really need to update, so many 2D bug fixes and feature additions! ).
Simple Graphics: Microsoft Paint.
Added Effects Graphics: GIMP.
Sound/Music: Audacity.
Document Creation: Open Office ( though this time around I only used it for making short lists of features to implement ).
Source Control Client: N/A.
Source Control Type: N/A. ( I am still very new to Unity, didn't want to screw up my builds my messing up here ).
Source Control Host: N/A.

The game is in a very playable alpha build state. However not everything is perfect and some features haven't been finished so I'm going to list them here:

BUGS:

• Sometimes ( extremely rare ) the pages spawn perfectly inside a tree trunk and can't be reached that I'm aware of. This will be resolved with pre-set spawn locations the randomizer can choose from rather than just anywhere in the scene. Most of the time if it even spawns near a tree trunk it never goes all the way inside it.
• Contact with tree trunks makes the screen jitter slightly which might just be the player bouncing off of it or something. I'll get to work on this one since it's collision in general I'm having that issue with and not just the tree trunks.

Future Features:

• Player's character animation will have "stopped" animations or paused animations when not moving. Currently they are set to always perform the directional move animations.
• Location Markers such as broken cars, different tree types or formations, debris, etc to help identify where you are in the map.
• Pre-set spawn locations which will most likely make use of several location markers ( note: not all pages will spawn at markers as that would make their locations a bit too easy ).
• Options and Credits button functionality and appropriate content for them. I might remove the options button and forgo the content for it in trade for using Unity's start-up options window if I can't see any additional options I want to have available and I can get the custom input worked out.
• Animation at the main menu to the right of the buttons. I saved some space for a nice animation I wanted to do on the menu but due to time constraints I instead focused on game-play.
• Identifiable level bounds such as a fence/object impeding player movement outside the play zone or have the camera have bounds. I tried the camera bounds it was taking a bit to figure out how Unity handles things so I stuck with limiting player movement.
• Success and Failure scenes since right now the success scene is a static image while failure just sends you back to the main menu.
• An icon for the game because I don't want to leave it as the default.

Once those bugs fixes and features are done this game should be exactly where I wanted it. If I feel interested I might add more levels, different monster types, or whatever. Those were just what I wanted to make this game feel it's no longer in alpha.

At long last, screenshots and a download link:

http://dannydmcgill.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/MainMenu.jpg

http://dannydmcgill.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/gameImage1.jpg

Windows (x86) Download: http://www.mediafire.com/download/y2h5ri6q2lyvv39/Scaretrope_Alpha_Build_Windows.zip

I have both Mac and Linux builds done but didn't upload them yet. There's a README file with controls, but it's just up and down arrow keys for menu navigation and W, A, S, D for in-game movement ( plus Escape for quitting ).

Well guys that's it for me right now. I learned quite a bit this month, several knit-picks of C++, several more useful SFML classes and functions, how to implement several new features such as animation and mob management, got more comfortable in GIMP, and of course finally picking up Unity for more than a few hours and not giving up on it. Tell me what you guys think of the game so far and maybe try and help me add on to it with some suggestions. Also if you were looking forward to The Era Of Abyss, don't worry! I will be hopefully making the transfer to Unity for the game if I end up feeling it is the better tool for me to do the game in. If not then I'll either stick with C++/SFML2 or maybe try a different library/engine.

Last edited on 04 Mar 2015 01:35 by rbwhitaker Show more

Re: The Era Of Abyss

Brett208 06 Mar 2015 04:29

Ninjaboi,

I was looking forward to seeing what you came up with for the zelda-like game as I've always appreciated local coop games. Perhaps for another competition?

Scare Troupe turned out well. I've never seen a downloadable Unity game before as I usually see them as online games inside the browser. It was easy to load and had no issues though. Only issue is it is tough to tell which part of the map I was on because the trees all look the same. If you continue work on it, maybe consider adding more features to the map that help distinguish different regions to the player so they can tell a little easier where they have searched.

-Brett

Re: The Era Of Abyss

Ninjaboi8175 07 Mar 2015 08:20

Hey Brett!

Yeah I think I'll pick up the zelda game at a later time, possibly the next competition. Local coop is cool with me as well since I often don't like fiddling with finding a stable server to connect to in several games or that my ping isn't the best given where I live. If you plan to stick around the community here like I plan on doing then no doubt you'll see it get done one way or the other. It really was an awesome learning experience for what I was doing building the framework up for the game, but I simply picked up too many new concepts for the month-long deadline and I knew whatever I would release wouldn't have been nearly of quality worth posting about ( in my opinion ).

I do intend to add the features and correct the bugs I described in my previous post for Scaretrope, one of the features being location markers to help the player identify where they are in the map. Examples of location markers are cars, windmills, wells, houses, etc that vastly differ from the normal environment. The complete random spawn of the pages would also be reduced to a randomizer spawning them at any of the location markers since that's both the simplest way to make sure they spawn properly and that the player isn't running around in lines trying to find the pages.

Unity supports tons of different platforms to target, I chose to avoid the browser since I read a few forum posts about how people have very negative views on Unity browser-based games. Whether it's due to them needing to keep an updated Unity plug-in/extension for their browser or if somehow the quality of how Unity targets it is sub-bar I don't know. So I took the safe route with just targeting the three that I did since Unity makes it simple to do so.

An interesting bit you might find funny is that the main character you play as in Scaretrope was my basic "Player 1" for the zelda game I was making. Since I really wanted to test Unity 2D's animation and sprite atlas parsing it made sense to use the animation I already created. I chose the art style since 1) I'm not an artist like many programmers 2) It's a reasonably simple style to draw and animate 3) It allowed me to not have to invest a ton of time in sprite atlas creation and therefore 4) Make more content in the game such as more monster types.

I'm so far very happy with my Unity experience so far, and since after I updated my ( quite old ) version of Unity after releasing Scaretrope's alpha build I now have tons of bug fixes and better 2D tools since my older version was when they first started introducing Unity 2D. Though I didn't think too carefully and updated Unity before finishing Scaretrope so I'll have to check and see if my new version of Unity can open or convert my older project files. If not then I'm fine either way since I can just move on since Scaretrope is a fully playable game where it is and it served its overall purpose.

So thanks for playing my entry Brett! Don't worry I'll eventually tackle the zelda game, possible with Unity 2D.