MDDN 243 Post-Submission Reflection

It was unfortunate we were unable to produce a fully functioning game. The bugs Stencyl kept throwing were beyond our abilities to fix without removing large portions of the game, which unfortunately left us with little to show in the end. To give a clear representation of what the game should have looked like, Mark and I created a bunch of screenshots from the assets we had created to be used;

Load screen

In-game 1

In-game 2

In-game 3

In-game 4

Pre-boss

Boss explosion

Despite the disappointment I fell that our game did not make it out the other side as we intended, I take comfort in the fact that the visuals we produced looked gorgeous and were coherent with the game narrative and metaphors we wanted to convey. The basic demo that we were able to produce lacked the complexity that I initially intended to be in it so it was hard to gauge how enthralling the interaction of the game actually was. Regardless, this whole project has been an intense learning curve for working in groups, in terms of organisation and management. I look forward to next year where I hope to take what I've learned and apply it to maximise the output of myself and whatever teams I happen to be a part of.

Final Touches

Well it is a crunchy time indeed. In an attempt to remove some a particularly nasty bug I had to go through and resize the sprites for the boss... again. As well as adjust some of the other sprites we did, I created a quick loop for Voodude when the explosion goes off behind him.

I also made us a new team logo (considering frujus are a legitimate thing, at this point in time I can't even remember how that became our team name in the first place) and title.

Boom! Now all I can do is wait...

Slice n' Dice

To exterminate a bug Stencyl was throwing us I needed to cut down our sprite maps for the boss into itty-bitty bite-sized pieces. The death animation totals over thirty individual 3x3 spreads something like this;

Also, the final part of the death animation now looks like this;

These final four frames are loop-able so he can just chill on the screen long enough for the player to feel badass, then it can fade to the endgame screen.

Extermination

So this is where I've been for the past couple of days;

Each steam cloud needed to be placed lovingly and by the end of part six I was working with an ungodly number of layers. Anyway, for Stencyl's ease the death sequence has been split into the different segments. Chris, Mark and I met up today to discuss what visuals needed to be done to be implemented into the final product. So far all that seems left to animate is parts of the background, an explosion flash (both on Chris's list of things to do), text and screen animations for the pause menu (Mark), and the last part of the death animation (your's truly).
I plan to have his arms go limp as his head will have disappeared in the flash, leaving behind a steaming hole. The whole screen can fade to black, on which the end screen can be displayed. At the moment I'm thinking all that will be necessary is a congratulatory message for the player, a final soul count and a return to main menu button. Anything more and I feel we're pushing ourselves to much for time. I also have a fair bit to do that isn't animating to get prepped for our presentation Friday morning. Work work...

POP! Goes the Forest Spirit

So here is our "hit/hurt" sequence:

It's drastic but it makes it clear that you've been hit, which is important if the game has intense pacing. The re-spawn is rapid though, allowing players to return to the action quickly. The simplified version would be for the one-off event where the player is struck for the last time with no energy left in the boss fight:

I also did a basic animation for the start game text for the main menu to test what it would look like:

I will need to see it against the actual menu to gauge whether or not it is fluctuating in opacity too rapidly.

D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-drop the Boss!

Bwhaaah! Bwhaah! Di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di-di whump whump! And that's the closest I've been to dubstep for a long time now, and yet I'm totally okay with that.

This has to be played at 10 milliseconds per frame to look realistic so it is definitely the smoothest animation in the game. I may remove some frames to shrink the image just for Stencyl's sake if it's too intense.
I also put more sparks into the saw animations and a sweet flickering drop-glow so liven it up a bit. The "attack swing" anitmatino of the spider happens so fast that the sparks are only visible for 0.1 of a second but what it does add makes a difference.

I'll add a shadow underneath it next but in the meantime I had a go at coding to take a load of Andrew. Here is the basic experimentation with getting a key-oriented menu screen.

As far as I'm aware this works fine. It is very basic and doesn't do anything but shift between scenes based of the position of the cursor (soul) on the screen in predetermined places. The preference of this method of input over a mouse gets the players used to using the keys to navigate right off the bat.

Gettin' Shady

I don't even want to know how many frames are in this one, but each now has a little shadow;

My goals over the next couple of days is to get the boss drop-in animation to scale, add some more sparks to the saw sprites, do a hurt sequence for Voodude and put some shadows under the saws :I

Swing Batta Batta

Here are the basic attack sequences for the spider. This gives him something to do that will keep the players cautious.

I added some blur frames to the boss' drop in sequence so when he appears he can be scaled as though he is flying past the camera.

We did try this in Stencyl however, and it didn't quite work with the scaling code so I'll have to animate a shrinking fall animation separately. Ah well. Something to keep me busy for the two week faff...

Just So... Angry

And we have ourselves an anger cycle;

If we do things Crash Bandicoot style and have it that you have to evade his attacks in three stages, each stage could be marked by playing this sequence. It may pay to figure out a way to make his glow more red each time so the player knows they are making some form of progress.
Today Chris and I tested the animations to see if they looked just as good when the sprites are shrunk to half the size when saved from photoshop and scaled in Stencyl. Our aim was to make it so Stencyl could handle importing them easier, and so far they look pretty good. Whether or not this will translate to the projector screens as smoothly is yet to be tested.

Suddenly... Spiders

Hopefully when this happens the kids will be like "oh snap". What do you call a steampunk spider anyway? A "stunker"? "Spunker" just sounds dirty.
Anyway, here is the laugh loop;

This can be used as a taunt between attack cycles and after his drop-in animation.

The Spider Goes "Buzz"

Here are the most recent sprites I've managed to crank out. The saw is broken into three parts, the middle section being a loop-able set so that the saw can take out a lane for as long as desired.

Saw grind loop

Saw lower

Saw retract

I've also managed to do the drop-in animation for when the boss appears. The initial blur is for him coming in from offscreen. We hope to have the screen shake when he lands to add to the atmosphere.

I plan on having an "anger" animation that plays throughout the fight as you defeat him. I'll probably need to do a death animation as well.

Smashing!

I really should have posted these when I finished them but this weekend has been hectic. I'm actually working on the buzz saw version of this at the moment which will strike down and spin for a while, taking out a lane while it does. The piston would be a relatively simple attack to dodge on its own but when combined with others it could become quite challenging.
As far as other concepts go with Soul Furnace, I'm considering alternative ways we can utilize the souls collected from the level prior. One idea in particular that I like is the player is able to move on to the boss once they have collected 100 souls. These souls could then become the player's health for the boss encounter. Each hit the boss delivers deals damage that removes a certain amount of souls that the player cannot recover. Once they are out of souls they have to restart the level. Whether or not souls appear during the boss encounter is something we'd have to realise through playtesting.