At 4/29/13 09:46 PM, MSGhero wrote: But yeah, mine does too. It won't let me target a 3rd city, it says it's already destroyed.

the 3rd city is too large, you need to upgrade capacitior capacity, or launch a satellite (the tutorial guy does tell you this)

At 4/29/13 09:46 PM, MSGhero wrote:

At 4/29/13 09:34 PM, GeoKureli wrote:

At 4/29/13 09:00 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote: ahahah its done, and just in time

My death ray keeps blowing up and hitting it with a hammer doesn't seem to help.

Is that a euphemism for something else...?

part of me thinks this whole game is a euphemism.

But yeah, mine does too. It won't let me target a 3rd city, it says it's already destroyed.

I think Winnipeg is actually out of range, you need to launch a satellite to get a third city.

It took me forever to realize that the valves are like dimmer switches and they need to be red to cool/function. but then my capacitor blew up and it wasn't even hot.

At 4/29/13 09:53 PM, GeoKureli wrote: I think Winnipeg is actually out of range, you need to launch a satellite to get a third city.

Its not out of range, its a LARGER city, so you need to upgrade capacitor capacity (death ray power) to be able to destroy it

and yeah, we only had 72 hours, so the tutorial isn't as good as it could be

You should really beef up the tutorial, also this.

At 4/29/13 10:27 PM, MintPaw wrote: You should really beef up the tutorial

it was a 72 hour game jam and we used every one of those 72 hours on what we have

At 4/29/13 10:40 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote:

At 4/29/13 10:27 PM, MintPaw wrote: You should really beef up the tutorial

it was a 72 hour game jam and we used every one of those 72 hours on what we have

We understand, it's just hard not to give constructive criticism. Would it anger the ludum dare gods if you kept working on it? do you plan to? I'm always compelled to work on jam projects after its over, but it's better to leave them alone in spirit of the jam, I think.

Random tangent:

I remember playing a game a long time ago, like early 2000's, The game had no instructions other than some indication to use your mouse and drag things. There's water at the bottom of the screen, and things fall from the sky with hooks attached to them and a scale floating at the top. I really liked the idea of a game that has no instructions, I thought that's what you were going for when you first posted it, obviously that would not have worked with the final version, but now I want to try it.

I'm unable to find the game, btw. Too bad, it was neat.

HTML5 is such a destruction. I've made zero progress on my Flash games and only one paragraph on my MWC entry so far.

At 4/30/13 05:47 AM, FlyingColours wrote: HTML5 is such a destruction. I've made zero progress on my Flash games and only one paragraph on my MWC entry so far.

I meant distraction.

At 4/30/13 05:55 AM, FlyingColours wrote:

At 4/30/13 05:47 AM, FlyingColours wrote: HTML5 is such a destruction. I've made zero progress on my Flash games and only one paragraph on my MWC entry so far.

I meant distraction.

What is MWC?

At 4/30/13 08:19 AM, SkyFire2008 wrote:

At 4/30/13 05:55 AM, FlyingColours wrote:

At 4/30/13 05:47 AM, FlyingColours wrote: HTML5 is such a destruction. I've made zero progress on my Flash games and only one paragraph on my MWC entry so far.

I meant distraction.

What is MWC?

http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1337332

At 4/30/13 09:12 AM, FlyingColours wrote: http://www.newgrounds.com/bbs/topic/1337332

Ok.

I finally have a demo that looks cool. I'm thinking about some kind of typing game, where you type the antonym of an "evil" word in order to destroy it. But that's boring unless the words shatter when they collide :D Click to restart it.

I was trying out bitmapdata-based "shatter" effects using perlin noise, but it was too...organic: it would have looked more like chunks were peeling off or something. At first, I had the polygons of every letter in a dictionary and grabbed those, but letters like j would end up too far up, so I just draw a textfield. Doesn't work with any serif fonts that I tried :(

RPG is done, chillin in FGL now. Poop game with Sabtastic is done, just chillin until she comes up with like 20 more medals. Exams done, so I'm just chillin.

At 4/30/13 09:33 PM, MSGhero wrote: I finally have a demo that looks cool. I'm thinking about some kind of typing game, where you type the antonym of an "evil" word in order to destroy it. But that's boring unless the words shatter when they collide :D Click to restart it.

That's a lot of excellent news MSGhero! Hope to see your new entries in the portal, especially the typing one. :D

So I could use your guys opinion on a programming technique I've been using that I'm starting to have doubts about. the idea is to have a base class with steps laid out that automatically call the next step. in derived classes I would set timers or tweens (or whatever asynchronous task needed to be done) and supply the super function as a callback for said events. I was thinking about setting my next project up this way, and I'm wondering if its bad practice. here's an example

That's in the base class. essentially the round starts right when the game starts (startGame() is called by the constructor)

Now the round starts after the BG is tweened in from the bottom (so it looks like the camera panned down). This is always how I've done it, but I'm starting to think things might get hairy, and part of me think I only kept doing it because it looked super leet to people who didn't know super functions could be passed as an argument. Any thoughts?

At 5/1/13 09:28 AM, GeoKureli wrote: Now the round starts after the BG is tweened in from the bottom (so it looks like the camera panned down). This is always how I've done it, but I'm starting to think things might get hairy, and part of me think I only kept doing it because it looked super leet to people who didn't know super functions could be passed as an argument. Any thoughts?

yeah, the "super." is completely pointless.
Though i'm not quiiiiite sure what you're trying to do, it's probably because I have yet to have had my coffee.

At 5/1/13 10:15 AM, egg82 wrote:

At 5/1/13 09:28 AM, GeoKureli wrote: Now the round starts after the BG is tweened in from the bottom (so it looks like the camera panned down). This is always how I've done it, but I'm starting to think things might get hairy, and part of me think I only kept doing it because it looked super leet to people who didn't know super functions could be passed as an argument. Any thoughts?

yeah, the "super." is completely pointless.

Hmm I'm not sure you completely noticed whats going on. Setting the callback function to super.startGameIntro instead of regular old startGameIntro makes a huge difference (latter causes an infinite loop). If you meant calling super.startGameIntro is pointless compared to calling endGameIntro, than dismiss this comment.

The reason I started doing this is because you don't have to remember the order in which the setup functions are called, the order is maintained for you and you just have to call super at some point. but the problem is that it kinda goes against how supers normally work and how you would expect to use the function, since usually when you override you call super first which would cause issues here.

I was getting disheartened by the score on my latest entry (was hoping for a 3 or more because of the effort I put into it).

Then I noticed Glaiel's Ludum Dare game, which reminded me that it could have been worse. It's depressing to see someone put so much effort in a game and yet get such a low score, and just because the lack of a tutorial.

At 5/1/13 12:00 PM, PSvils wrote: The GenericScreen has functions initScreen(), loadScreen(), unloadScreen(), disposeScreen(). initScreen() gets called as soon as it's added to the stage, loadScreen() is called when the transition is finished, then unload screen is called as the next screen's initScreen() is being called, and dispose when the out-transition is finished.

I did something like this for the C++ closure engine... hell I even called them "screens". If I do another C++ game engine again (I will) I'm calling them GameState or State instead, cause it makes a bit more sense

the base screen class had the following functions

load/unload
setup/kill
update
render
preload (preload was never used)

a main manager class kept track of all the screens, you would tell the manager class to swap to a new screen and it would take care of calling unload and kill (with some safety stuff there so it couldn't unload or kill a screen that was never initiated or loaded)

the manager also kept track of 2 special screen types, the pause screen, and the transition screen

if the game was paused, the manager would stop calling update on the main screen and instead call update on the pause screen, it would then call render on the main screen, then render on the pause screen (so its overlayed on top of the game)

if the transition screen was active, the game would update and render both the main screen and the transition screen, the transition screen reports back when there's an appropriate frame to make the internal transition (main screen gets swapped). We were gonna play around with fancier transition animations, but ran out of time, so this was just used for a quick fade to black and back.

I thought about a screen handler at the very end of my RPG when I was adding transitions, but at that point, I didn't want to bother. I already had a state manager, so in retrospect, I could have just beefed that up to handle what was being shown on the screen as well. Added to my list of things to consider earlier on~

At 5/1/13 02:04 PM, PSvils wrote: Mhm, my new idea is to have a full state system, and rather than changing states, I pop and push states. Then states also get a pause and resume function. This would make a pause menu really easy, since you can push it on top of the game state, the game state pauses, and the pause menu has focus.

This sounds similar to how we were taught to handle states when working with LEGO Mindstorm during one of my modules.

We were given an "arbitrator" object which was passed an array of behaviours. It looped through them and queried each state through a method to see if they should take precedence, if so, that behaviours action method was called. Obviously, if not, it would just continue to the next and see if that one wanted to take action.

I actually haven't thought about doing this for game states, but it would be extremely easy to create pause menus by giving it a higher priority than all other screens. Here a snippet from a slide for a graphical example of how we were taught it (probably wont be much use, but here it is nonetheless).

At 5/1/13 02:04 PM, PSvils wrote: Mhm, my new idea is to have a full state system, and rather than changing states, I pop and push states. Then states also get a pause and resume function. This would make a pause menu really easy, since you can push it on top of the game state, the game state pauses, and the pause menu has focus.

One thing I haven't figured out yet though is how to pass information between states in a clean way... :/

Yeah, I had a pop and push system sorta half-implemented in there, the problem is you want your pause menu to render on TOP of the game, not INSTEAD of the game, and transition states need to update and render simultaneously

passing information between them I had a function of the state manager for that using a std::map (Dictionary in AS3)

SendMessage("messagename", "messagedata")
ReadMessage("messagename", bool deleteAfterReading = false) [returns "messagedata", or "null" if no message with that name was found)

At 5/1/13 12:00 PM, PSvils wrote: Sounds like you're trying to do a screen system of sorts. I have a tiny screen library I made, that basically has a screen controller, transition classes, and then a generic screen which I extend.

pretty much, all of this is in my base GameState that extends the basic state which my controller swaps out for menu states or other game states. eventually I'm going to take it a degree farther and have Rounds be a separate class that gets controlled by the states. sort of like states within states. the difference is that states will have assets that are maintained throughout various rounds. but the game I'm working on doesn't really need this yet as there's not a lot of different game modes options.

heard about this and the devs who made it doing some weird things more and more lately.

I bought the game, it's cute and a fun time killer, and I believe worth the $8 I threw down for it.

Anyway, thoughts?

At 5/2/13 12:39 AM, egg82 wrote: Anyway, thoughts?

I think I'd get sick of the irony if I had to make that game.

Here's an interesting article about level design in Skyrim, written by one of Bethesda's senior designers. Read it for the nonsensical images & infographics, if nothing else.

At 5/2/13 12:39 AM, egg82 wrote: heard about this and the devs who made it doing some weird things more and more lately.

I bought the game, it's cute and a fun time killer, and I believe worth the $8 I threw down for it.

Anyway, thoughts?

that game is a ripoff of game dev story

At 5/2/13 12:17 PM, Glaiel-Gamer wrote: that game is a ripoff of game dev story

I've heard that, too, but i'm not certain. At what point does "clone", or "ripoff" become "improvement" or even "genera"?
Everything was a DOOM clone until the whole thing became the FPS genera.
Hell, Roller Coaster Tycoon was based off Theme Park, but nobody seems to think it's a direct clone.

I suppose the line's in different places for each of us, but any way you look at it, it's one hell of a blurry line.

At 5/2/13 11:04 AM, Archawn wrote: Here's an interesting article about level design in Skyrim, written by one of Bethesda's senior designers. Read it for the nonsensical images & infographics, if nothing else.

There is no level design in Skyrim, there's barely any design in Skyrim.

http://www.victordramba.com/ free online as3 editor. I have no use for it but if any of you are coders on the go, check it out.

At 5/2/13 09:34 PM, GeoKureli wrote: http://www.victordramba.com/ free online as3 editor. I have no use for it but if any of you are coders on the go, check it out.

If FD wasn't free, i'd use this. Basically.