Grand Feather

Finally we have a name for our game...


With awesome new art by our good pal, Gutter. We have been working a very long time on coming up with a good story for the world the game is set in, and we finally made one that we are both really happy with. The name Grand Feather has to do with the main story line, and the history of the game world. It refers to the majestic birds who live on and protect the island that Jack, Roger, and the 3 peg-appendage Captain land on at the begining of the game. They originally are forced to land there when Roger (Jack's dog) jumps out of the airship after a bird that flies by. They eventually get mixed up in the middle of events that are taking place on the island and eventually do enough things to make a game about. Don't worry there is way more story and a lot less generic events, but I do not want to explain all of it before we have more of the game completed.

We also have a new video.



Yeah, it is still the same grasslands area, that we have been working on, but almost all the graphics have changed since the last video and I thought that there should be a video of what the game currently looks like. We pretty much have all the graphical components of this area done and are moving on to the next ones, which are way more interesting.

So the game is really coming together, and now that we have a complete story in our minds for this thing, it no longer feels like the development of this game is going to come with us to our retirement homes. We have been working a lot on it recently and have been making a ton of progress so keep checking back for more updates! (And don't forget to drop us a comment!)

Friday Night is for Partying?

Wrong. Friday night is for working on video games. For the second Friday in a row (and probably more to come) we have been having game jam sessions from about 5pm to somewhere around 7am of almost pure non-stop game development madness. I keep coding until I get so tired that I start making stupid mistakes and would probably do more harm than good to the code.

Me around 5am. Mmm I miss all of that food I don't have anymore because I ate it.

And we also have a new SharkArm work station, which is pretty much the same as our old one but rearranged.

Those long hard flat things on four legs are 'tables' and we use them to set things on.

So lot's of new stuff being added to the game. We have been working on the story and main design of the game a whole lot recently, which I will go into more depth probably next post. I've also been coding in the cutscenes, which has turned out to be a very very time consuming process because we have been tweaking them so much to get every scene perfectly the way we want it. It's a lot of fun though, and I highly recommend it to anyone who programs for SharkArm. They are turning out really well so far for the most part, and I even almost released a video of the opening cutscene. Then I realized that it needed to be changed completely so I'm going to pretty much scrap the entire thing and redo it differently.

My favorite part about programming these huge projects is when you realize that huge portions of code that cost you hours has to go. About a week or two ago I was facing a problem that had to do with the draw order of the front tiles and the entities on the screen. Whenever a front tile was placed on a solid tile you can jump through, the player's graphics would be shown in front of the solid but behind the front tiles and it would look strange while in the air. Like this:

I don't really know if you can tell what I mean from the picture, it's a bit hard to explain, but in order to solve this problem I wrote this sorting algorithm for sorting all the entities based on their Y values and the tiles so that they would be drawn correctly and the front tiles would only be draw in front of the player when they are below the player's feet and did all this complicated stuff to get this one small problem to work right. It took about 6 hours. Then, the next day I figured out an insanely simple solution to this problem and fixed it a lot more efficiently that way, and threw all the work I did the day before in the trash can. You have to know when to part with code, even if you put a lot of hours into it. Same thing with your dog after you realize training him to fight in a kickboxing tournament would not score him a lead role in the next Air Bud sequel.

Yeah, ok he's a dog that plays basketball, soccer, and beach volleyball, but kickboxing
is too unrealistic? Get real Walt Disney, a dog roundhouse kicking a 300lb fighter
could totally happen, and would sell more tickets than you could ever dream of.

We've been trying to add in a whole lot more companions to the game, so we can see what kind of different gameplay elements we will be able to add in to each of the levels. And because it's totally awesome. I also just put in our first rideable companion, Rake, who can suck things in and blow things away. He is used for pulling in and pushing out blocks, to make bigger jumps and that sort of thing. I suppose he would be good for helping you blow out your birthday candles as well.

Jack riding Rake. Arif the fire bird and Roger the dog following. Tree.

Alright so there will be a pretty big update real soon, where a long awaited announcement will be made? What could it be? You'll have to find out. And I'm going to have another video out really soon because I realized how long ago that last one was made and how much different everything is. Almost all the graphics have changed and there are actually enemies in the game and things that move!

Oh yeah!

Stay tuned for updates. Real tuned.

Upcoming Designs

Oh how the time flies by and no posts are made to this blog, such a sad thing. Well heres a new post. Some concepts for the game and one of those concepts realized into pixel art (not going to show you the animation or explain him yet though)

I started working on some ideas for housing for the creatures who inhabit the island. We are trying to stay away from any kind of cliche designs, and if we do use a common game convention we are working hard to make it unique.

These are some quick enemy designs I drew out tonight. Im trying all different kinds of shapes and trying to stay away from common enemy designs.
And one of the concepts colored in and already in a pose holding an innocent rabbit by the throat.

Another Grasslands Tileset Change and Background Update

Well, this is about the 4th time we've changed up the looks of the Grasslands tilesets, this time the ground fades to black. We are pretty happy with the looks of it and will probably keep this one, at least for awhile. The background layers have also been updated with more detail, but they are not 100% finished yet. Here's a shot:



All of our screenshots for a while now have all been relatively the same with the same tiles, but hopefully we are about finished with this zone and will move back to some fresh new interesting locations that we haven't worked on for a while.

The new tiles make the tiling system a bit more complicated when making the levels with the editor. We have to select the correct tile so that each ground tile transitions smoothly now instead of just having one ground tile that we can just paint over everywhere. There are also a lot of different situations that a different tile is needed and it is difficult to create every single tile needed. I'm debating whether it would be worth the time to edit the level editor so it will auto-tile the ground, select the correct tile for each situation based on the tile types around it, or just continue to do it manually each time.


Another big thing we are working on right now, still, is the main story. We are coming up with different backstories for the locations and different characters and trying to put together a complete, well thought out, story for the game. We've been brainstorming and pushing around different ideas for awhile now and I think its starting to finally come together nicely. Who knows, we may even come up with a name for the game soon!

Bug Fighting: Part 2 and Massive Work Session Update

Alright well, there hasn't been an update in a long long time, but we have accomplished a lot since the last post. We had a three day working session where we worked on the game pretty much non-stop from wake-up till sleep-down. We were trying to get a demo version of the game done to get to some testers so we could get some feedback on what we have so far. Everything was going really well and we made a ton of progress on the game and came so very very close to finishing the demo. The big problem came when designing the levels in the game. I was reintroduced to what soon came to be known as my mortal enemy, a small little bug where the game crashed when loading a different level in the game about once every 20 level loads. It was a very uncommon occurrence so whenever i ran into the glitch earlier i just decided that i would fix it later or that it would magically disappear or something. Well, I figured the time has come to finally get in there and fix this glitch before we released this demo for testing, and that is when the development of the game came to a screeching halt. Well, it was more like a screeching halt, and then smashing into a guard rail, and then flying over the guard rail off a cliff, and then landing on some big pointy rocks, and then having the car explode, and then waiting for the paramedics to come pull us out of the burning car, and then having the paramedics beat us senseless. We went from the most productive times in the game's history to the least productive times.

I better not catch any of you guys stealing this source code and selling it to Blizzard.

Yeah, so this glitch was bad. It was like the Adolf Hitler of bugs. I don't want to go into too much detail because that would require me to relive trying to fix this thing, but it had to do with memory corruption, which is the worst kind of glitch to fix. Luckily, I do not have to deal with this all that much since I am very careful with this type of thing while coding it, thanks to lots of ugly experiences with these types of problems in past games. Memory corruption can have some really wacky effects in a game and it is really hard to pin point the problem in the code because often the symptoms do give you a lot of information as to what is causing it. For instance, memory could be corrupted early on in a program but you may not feel the effects of this until later on when that memory is accessed again. This one crashed on level load. Rarely. Very rarely. Probably once every 20-30 level loads. This was the worst part because it was so hard to replicate and gather data as to why it was happening. There were times that I found some sort of piece of code that looked like it may have been the problem, and then once I fixed that I would have to play the game for about 20 minutes to see if would still crash. That was the most time consuming part. It would never crash until the exact moment I said to myself 'Well, its not crashing, I guess its fixed,' and then BOOM crashed again. I spent a lot of hours trying to fix it and ended up going over most of the code in the game checking for errors, which turned out to not be a complete waste of time because I was able to fix some other problems that I didn't notice before.

Anyway, this glitch thing was very demoralizing for me and I tried to take a break from trying to fix it and work on some other stuff, but every time I started to work on something I ended up on a mad hunt trying to find it. After about a week and a half I was finally able to end its reign of terror terror when I finally used the debugger. I never really use debuggers too much and pretty much forgot about it, but when I ran the game with the debugger, an error window appeared each time I switched levels even though the game didn't crash which allowed me to find out if my fixes worked without wasting a half hour of running around the game world waiting to see if it still crashes.

This is what the game looks like now. Some tile updates (which are just about to get reupdated soon)
and some little flying birds.

As for the updates in the game since last time, we added in a whole lot more enemies, some friendly creatures like birds and rabbits, and a lot of other tweaks and little details. We also have a general idea of where the story is going and pretty much everything that is going to happen at the begining of the game down.

We are still planning on having a closed demo finished soon that we will send out to those of you who would like to help us test the game. If you would like to be a tester, send us an email or leave a comment down below. We could really use your help!

We'll probably have another update in a few days, with some screen shots, new graphics, and made a video or two.