All the fighters in a tower

I've created the tower sections along with the fighters and items that can be placed inside them. Most of the towers have three different states, normal, armored and heavily armored, the only section that's different is the spiked tower which just has basic spikes and advanced spikes. The different fighters each can be placed in a tower section, and these will be used to damage the opponents towers.

New and old

For the board game I'm creating for class I had designed a board yesterday night however after play-testing other people's games and taking a second look at mine I decided I really needed to go over and simplify what I had. So after some sketches I came up with something that's much simpler and what I hope turns out to be better. Something that I've found out after making several games over the past year is that when you're first designing a game it's easy to add a lot of rules that you think are fun. The board then tends to evolve in order to accommodate all those rules, however when other people play the game the rules are difficult to pick up and the board can sometimes be confusing since they other have the rules to explain everything. I find if you then pick out all the key concepts that you really want, and try make the board and rules as simple as you can while still keeping those key concepts, people can have fun playing the game without being bogged down by unneeded things.

One thing that I've found helps when you're making a game is to have every rule explained in detail with an example, all labeled with a title that allows players to find the rule they're looking for clarification on easily. You should also have a quick-start set of instructions that allows players to get right into playing without having to know all the rules. Then when the players have a question about the rules they can read the ones they need to in detail.

This is the older board

This is the newer board

Time for some survival

So I haven't gotten around to making any more cards for the triple S game, however I'm now back at school for another semester in order to get my Game Design degree. I have three major projects until April so I'll be updating this blog with the progress I'm making on those. That being said I've designed 18 cards for a board game that is one of the projects.

It's all about making sure your tribe survives the longest on a island that is prone to many natural disasters. You can build structures that grant bonuses to your tribe, however you need resources in order to build them. There are three technological ages that the island will go through, changing after a certain rounds have gone by, a round is made up of every surviving tribe going once. The ages are Wood, Stone and Metal. An example on how building things goes is if it's the Stone age, you can build anything that's Wood or Stone as long as you have the necessary resources however you can't build Metal things even if you do have the required Metal resources.

There will be places that these resources can be collected on the board by each tribes group of explorers. If they're within the general area of a resource, indicated on the board, the group gathers one of the resource however if the group is right on the resource than the group gathers five of the resource, divided by the number of groups that are on the same resource.

I'll go into more details as I'm producing the game however that's a general overview of some parts of it. Here are the building cards that can be bought with the resources:

Guess it's all about the flesh color

So I had some more time today so drew up three cards for the card game I'm developing.

 Name : Weedle The Needle

Speed : 5

Strength : 3

Sexy : 1

Uncommon

 Name : Surly Mop

Speed : 2

Strength : 2

Sexy : 2

Common

Name : Tonne of Flesh

Speed : 1

Strength : 4

Sexy : 1

Common

And then things get artisy

I'm nearing the end of major programing, I still have several things I have yet to build and some parts of the code I'll have to rebuild for better performance however the majority of it is behind me. I got the stat bars art redone, still rough but it now is more along the lines of what I want. I also redid a lot of the buttons with roughs of what I'd like the final version to be. On the instructions page I did some basic color fills for the book, just so you can't see through it. I also updated the instructions page background and redid the art on the garbage pile, rabbits foot and skateboard.

Some bugs that I fixed included the savings box not being killed when the rest of the boxes were. I had an error where the first and second jump power were getting reset to 15, I found a place where I had hard coded that number earlier before I had tweaked with it. I had an error when the percentage that was being saved on the lives wasn't showing up, turns out my math was a little off. I had some trouble with hit detection and  the man hole however once that was working it wasn't a problem. I also has a bug where you could super-fall at a moving cart and either phase through it or go about half way before shooting back up, this was fixed extending the detection rage and changing a multiplier to match that of the max fall speed multiplier in super-fall.

Some things that I've added are manholes that appear in the later levels, they are open to different extents depending on the current level, their position on the screen is also randomly generated ever reset. I added in darkmatter which is needed to super-fall, and it can be purchased along with other equipment at the shop. I added in a falling animation to the manhole along with a rough running animation to the rubbish. Finally I added the feature of being able to continue if you currently have extra lives, this unpauses the level and spawns a new rubbish. This would allow people to not have to replay a 2-4 minute level if they did near the end or got a really sweet drop of good garbage.

Carts hurt

Today I was mostly working on getting  the shopping cart up and running, but I also worked a little bit on the garbage generation system. While I was doing a test run I noticed that I was sometimes getting ten or more bad garbage in a row. I found this became frustrating  and boring very quickly so I knew I had to make it so that a good garbage would drop every few bad garbage, making sure there was always a goal on screen for the player to work towards. I had to partly rebuild my garbage generation system but it's defiantly for the better now. I was using a while loop to try and generate a piece of garbage, if the garbage selected was too expensive then it tried again. One problem with this was that only the good garbage had a chance of being rejected since the bad garbage doesn't take away from the remaining points for the current level. I fixed this issue by moving the while loop to inside the good garbage generation inside the general garbage generation function. This way if the good garbage was too expensive it would try for another good garbage instead of possibley spawning a bad garbage instead. I also put in a counter that, after four bad garbage have spawn makes it so it automatically spawns a good garbage next, just in case the random numbers keep coming back bad garbage.

For the shopping cart I have it so if your at the front and it hit, the cart bouncing back some and your rubbish is pushed the other way for a second. It also takes away one health when it hits. I get around having to make giant leaps over the whole cart I added in that if you land on the top of the cart it bounces you up to near the top of the screen, you can't jump any more after that but you can fall quickly if the down arrow is pressed. In the video that's posted the bouncing off the top of the cart hadn't been added yet.



The last thing I add is that once a jump is started you can only travel in one direction. After coding it though I didn't think it was as fun to jump around so I've commented it out for the time being, however I might change my mind after I've tweaked with the jumping some more.

Select Your Side

Today I've spend about 3-4 hours working on my game, I've gotten the double jump working, bad garbage can now hit and kill rats, and the level selection page is working.

For the double jump, I was having a hard time getting it to do what I wanted, but after taking a look at the code I've been trying to use I realized something, it would be far easier so just delete the guts of the function and start over. After looking back I saw just how complicated I had been making it, when in reality I was able to cut down between 5-10 lines of code and get it to work perfectly.

When I wanted to get the garbage to his the rats as well as the rubbish I first didn't think it would have to be done any differently then the hit detection I have for the garbage hitting the rubbish or the rubbish hitting the rats, however after did some thinking I had to consider that all the garbage and rats only has two targets they were looking for, one is the single rubbish and the other is the non-moving ground. This was easy enough to do if I just kept track of the rubbish's current x and y, along with it's height and width, but since there could be multiple rats and bad garbage I had to think of a different way. I ended up making a 2D array, with each position containing a smaller array containing information about that particular bad garbage. It has it's current x and y positions, it's width and height, if it's been removed from the screen(I used a Boolean) and it's name. This allowed my rat, every time it tried to move, to scan through this array using a while loop, checking to see if it was currently colliding with any bad garbage that was still on screen. The rat kills itself then modifies the array referring to the garbage that hit it, so when the garbage updates it see's that it's collided and shouldn't be on screen anymore so it kills itself.

The level selection page wasn't that much extra work because I've been coding this game so far so it works off what the current level it, so all I have to do when a different level is selected, is to then assign stats.currentLevel to the number of the button clicked. I did have a few problems trying to catch the event that was dispatched when a level was clicked but I was able to fix this by having my map page listen for the buttons on it, then dispatch it's own event to the main page controller when something was clicked. In order to place all the different level buttons using code but without taking too much time I ended up using 2D arrays again with a while loop. Each array inside the main array just contains the x and y position of each level button, this way all I have to do is change those two numbers, which are all in one location, in order to get the buttons to move around. I'm starting to use arrays more and I have to say they really cut down on not only the lines of code that I have to write, but it also makes it easier to go back and make changes later, if you arn't a big fan of arrays I'd really suggest finding a few tutorials and trying to slowly incorporate them into your projects, before long you'll hopefully find them as helpful as I do.

Let the trash collecting begin!

Over the past few days I've finished up the shop screen for now, adding in a pop-up window for buying your lives, stats and equipment. This shows what your saving if you've bought the bargaining chip and what the total cost is going to be. I've also made quite a lot or progress on the main game, the rubbish can now jump, can only move between two boundaries that I've set up, and he also has has health. Good and bad garbage falls from the top of the screen, so many good garbage fall on each different level, and the number of bad garbage that can fall is based upon that number. It currently counts down the number of good garbage left to fall, the amount you've caught and the ones you missed. Also when you get hit by a bad garbage your health goes down.

The level is finished once you either get hit and lose your last health, or once you've collected the last good garbage/let it fall to the ground. If you died or didn't meet the required good garbage points/ catches for that level then it only shows a 'try again' option and a 'level select' option, other wise if you've beaten the level then it shows a 'shop' and 'inventory' button as well.

I've also gotten some rough art done for the good and bad garbage, so it's easier to tell whats dropping while I'm building the game.

I'll update with pictures later.

Life's really just garbage

Today I worked on the lives page in the shop. I ended up adding several more stat boxes, one for current lives, cost of new lives your going to buy and the percentage saved with your bargaining chip. I also added a button for purchasing your new lives, along with several constraints. One constraint is the fact that you can't select more new lives then you currently have the garbage points to buy, and you each new life price is based upon the current number of lives you have plus the current number of new lives your trying to buy, this way someone won't just stock up on 100 lives at the start, it'll cost far too much, and the less lives they have 'floating' while they play the more points they'll have for buying stat upgrades and equipment.

And the fights just keep getting better

So combat is moving along at a good pace, tomorrow should really be an interesting day. I was able to fix a bug so that all the weapons work for attacking the zombies. I also fixed an issue with the zombies blood, it was going out of sight when the zombie still had a few hp left. The problem was that the blood extended far enough past the bottom of the heart, so when the hp was at 1 or 2, it was just below the mask that was hiding the blood. I just had to go in and make the blood a little smaller and move it up some.

I got the experience bar at the top working, it adds the total experience that the player is going to get during a battle, filling the syringe up as more experience is gained. When the user is finished the battle, it fills up the rest of the way and injects the experience into the heart, I still have to clean up the animation a little and make it fill up quicker. I fill up the syringe using a timer event so I just have to shorten the delay on the timer.



One of the final things I was able to get working tonight was the button for eating your foodstuffs. When pressed it checks to see if the player has any foodstuffs left and if they do it plays the eating animation, then fills up their heart and restores all of their hp. When it's clicked all the event listeners are also removed for the weapon selection, and the two selection fingers are still moved.

Lastly I added some blood effects to the zombies attacks along with the zombie students death animations, this was done with frame by frame and the onion skin. I also got the blade and blunt weapons for the player to show blood, but the guns aren't working yet.  Tomorrow I'll be aiming to add in some smoke cover for when a new chibi appears, fix up the experience bar so that it's fully working, add in place that shows your level and an animation for leveling up. If I have time I'd also like to work some on the zombie AI so that it chooses it's attacks more randomly and that it's stats are a little more reasonable.

Nothing like a ruler to the face

I've been working away at the combat and have run into some very annoying problems, covering just about every part of my combat so far. However as of right now the player can start combat, a random number of zombies stumble into combat, if there is more then one it shows a chibi of the waiting zombie type. The player can select both their melee and gun, and once both choice are accepted the player does it's two attacks.

If the zombie is alive at this point the zombie then picks the attack it's going to do, or possibly even heal itself, and then plays the corresponding animation. The player can kill the zombie resulting in it's death animation and if there is a waiting chibi, it will walk forwards to take the previous zombies place. Once it gets to the right location, it stops moving, one of the three possible zombies from the chibi's zombie type is spawned and the chibi is removed. It then checks to see if there is another zombie waiting, if so it then adds another chibi and combat starts again.

Tomorrow I'm going to work on adding in the 'snack' option for players to heal themselves along with fixing the zombies healing so that it is fully effective. (See video for glitch)

I think you lost an arm there....

Working on combat, I have a lot of other projects on the go now so it's not going as quickly as I wanted. The zombie that appears is randomly selected however it's only currently from a list of three. A function is then called inside the enemy class that assigns all of it's stats like attack strengths, hp and lvl.
I was able to get to so that the player can scroll through the weapons they currently have, select which they want then attack. It plays the corasponding animation and the selected weapon appears in their hand. The 'blood level' in the zombies heart also goes down depending on what percent of it's maximum hp it's currently at. After the melee and gun attacks have been made it plays a function in the enemy class that; using data like it's different attack strengths, it's current hp, the players current hp and a bit of random math; chooses an attack and plays that animation for either it's ranged, melee or healing. I'll update with a video later :D