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.

Time for Some Serious Work

HandCraftedRadio and I have began a very strict working festival where we will stay up and work on the game for an inhuman amount of hours. I am attending this years SIGGRAPH conference which will be displaying the latest in digital arts and luckily even a section featuring indie games (HORRAY!) Anyways, I am going to be leaving for there friday and HCR and I want to have a demo done and ready to be passed out to attendants to the conference. So here we go wish us the best of luck and pray we dont die... or worse... die then somehow come back to life but then die again in an even more painful manner.
Anyways, the above is a picture I painted up in photoshop for the game. Ive been doing alot of animations and spending alot of time on each individual animation making sure we have smooth and interesting animation quality. I wish I could share some of my best ones but I am restricting myself so that there is new stuff to be found in the game, otherwise what fun is that?
Also a big thanks to the Moldering dev team for giving us a spot in their blog. Their game is looking really great and we hope to get in contact with them and maybe talk and learn some stuff from each other. Check out their development log at http://devblog.projectmoldering.com/ , some seriously good work going on there! Thanks for visiting and don't forget to tell all your friends (and your enemies too)

PS heres a bunny



-Caliber9 (Nate Kling)

Bug Fighting

I am very happy right now, because today, I went head to head with a couple of my old glitch buddies that I shoved off to the side to come back to later. Well that later turned out to be today, and I'm very proud of myself, because I took those annoying little buggers to school on a bus full of pain. What I'm trying to say is that I fixed some really annoying glitches today.

First of all I got rid of openAL because it was just giving me a headache, and decided to only use the SDL_Mixer. The SDL_Mixer bug mentioned in a previous post, where there was a sound delay, was easily fixed when I realized I was using the wrong version of the SDL.dll file (after a couple hours of troubleshooting). Fixing this then spawned another glitch with the level editor crashing randomly when using it. I'm not sure why the new dll brought this glitch out, but it was caused by a memory problem that I missed in the code, so I guess it was a good thing that it happened.

I fixed a problem with pushable objects in the game from way back in the beginning. Somewhere between the friction levels of each tile and the way the entities update their velocity, an object on top of a block being pushed would not 'ride' it correctly. It would slowly move to the side. This was the worst glitch to fix of all and gave me a major headache and I'm probably going to have nightmares about it tonight, so the only thing I'm going to say is that I fixed it. Ok? It's fixed so let's just move on.

This is probably what I'm dreaming about right now, except in my dream this scene takes place in hell and the devil is poking my brain with little needles.

I also discovered a small glitch in the original platforming code, also something I haven't touched since close to when the project first started (besides slight modifications). I don't like messing with this stuff to much when we are this far along (mainly because one wrong move could mess everything up!) and I thought it was going to take a very long time and be a nightmare to fix but it actually turned out that I was able to fix it in a very short amount of time with not too many problems. So I thought that turned out to be pretty cool and I also awarded myself 100 programmer bonus points for doing such a good job.

So I'm pretty pumped right now about this. The one thing that was very helpful, and I would recommend anyone who is working on a large project to do, is to keep a log of every single time you change something or add something new to the game. I have been doing this for the past couple months and it is very useful when it comes to fixing glitches. A lot of my glitches come from changing something and not realizing how that change affects something else, so when I discover one of these types of glitches, I go back to the last version where the glitch wasn't there (since I make backups of the game and all source files almost every day) , and look through my log to see what I changed since then to see what may have caused it. (Now I'm just hoping the changes I made to fix these glitches didn't cause new ones!)

In other news, we are still working on the Grasslands area we've added in some enemies and are prettying it up a bit more. I'll probably update the video of rescuing the dog once we get the enemies in. Stay sharp!

-hcr