Official "A Whiff of Steam", the LövelyRPG project topic

[partymetroid]

stuffs

Looks great, Ryne! Good luck with the rest!

Thanks!, I'm going to try and work on a basic character for the dev's to play with as well.

Feel free to ask something specific if it's needed.

Making a placeholding character is great, but I think we should develop the world a bit more before setting the visual style in stone.

*all eyes shift to me*

[giniu]

Making a placeholding character is great, but I think we should develop the world a bit more before setting the visual style in stone.

Actually visual style is decided already and it is in focus, so it's one of 10 things that was voted by community and IS set in stone.

Thanks!, I'm going to try and work on a basic character for the dev's to play with as well.

Feel free to ask something specific if it's needed.

I believe any character for now will do, the thing is what is really needed is something with transparency between legs What might be useful and I think might help is two informations: first, I'd like to remind that one tile represents 1x1 meter and 40 pixels in height is 1 meter, which makes our current character, mr. Blocky about 1.75 meter heigh - second, the style that was decided is for now described by (taken from focus):

• The general stylistic of game will be eastern flavoured realistic comics style, slightly taking from Chinese Manhua comics tradition.
• Tha game is settled in steam-punk world
• There was one stylistics concept made - though it's random picture for now.
• If you want to know more, you can look at current docs, especially first two pages - the focus.

Thanks again for tiles, I will soon try to merge them in and see how they look in game

[giniu]

I have ideas for A LOT more tiles. These are really standard tiles for "outland" areas, not really towns, cities etc.

I tried them, some don't align too well, for tests, try to set a square 4x4 out of tiles and see if you see some visual "edges" inside such block. It should form uniform big square, while on water the tile edges are visible. Other than that, it's cool, maybe details on grass could be made smaller? I think that then, the pattern would be less visible:



Anyway, I think that will little more those tiles will be highly welcomed into Whiff

[Ryne]

In my opinion Trimetric projection looks really ugly. I wish I were here for the voting. Even in the current demo, moving the character around feels really awkward, since "UP" isn't really up, it's a weird angle. I can image playing a game with this perspective and I don't think I would play it for very long. Game's that have already been created in this perspective, like Sim City, favor to it because its point-and-click.

I've even asked a bunch of people from my steam friends (avid gamers), and they agree that they would have trouble playing a game like that.

I really think there should be a re-vote (would probably not make a difference since there isn't THAT many active users on here). Isometric (in my opinion) would be the best for this type of game.

[giniu]

In my opinion Trimetric projection looks really ugly. I wish I were here for the voting. Even in the current demo, moving the character around feels really awkward, since "UP" isn't really up, it's a weird angle. I can image playing a game with this perspective and I don't think I would play it for very long. Game's that have already been created in this perspective, like Sim City, favor to it because its point-and-click.

I've even asked a bunch of people from my steam friends (avid gamers), and they agree that they would have trouble playing a game like that.

Maybe ask them again and tell to take a look at this by all means famous game we all know and have very similar view

and especially at shape of building (walls alignment, seems familiar?) and character facing (they are not facing up nor down, the are aligned to world coordinates like we do, but we have 8 directions and they had 6 directions - anyway Ian is walking in "our up", and Tycho who is standing "our left" of Ian is facing "our up-right" diagonal). Also, we have point and click too already (there are 2 working modes: arrows/wsad and point and click. Space+drag isn't working currently), though there are differences, for example we don't restrict movement to tiles. Also, there are other differences because we designed the projection from scratch, it's property of numbers that made us find similar projection (we have cos(atan(x))=1/sqrt(x^2+1)). There are more games with same or similar view.

I really think there should be a re-vote (would probably not make a difference since there isn't THAT many active users on here). Isometric (in my opinion) would be the best for this type of game.

I'd be against starting from scratch, really, when we mean whole or part. We decided on focus and to not change it - if we restart too often we reach nowhere. There was already a talk about redoing stuff during story contest. Especially, that 50% of people voted for trimetric (4/8 votes) and other projections had at most 1 vote. And especially that about 2 weeks ago movement up was up like you said, and people was saying it looks strange that the movement is aligned to screen. Looks like different things look strange to different people so I'd say we stay to results of initial poll and world-coordinates movement, not screen-coordinates. I have nothing against isometric really or dimetric, all options were presented to community and had equal chances to be selected, trimetric beaten all of them in poll.

[Robin]

Lookin' great, Ryne. Do you have any experience with steam punk, especially in making steam punk art?

[kikito]

... long text with Fallow screenshot ...

I'm not part of the "Steam team" but I hope you don't mind if I voice my opinion here. I like the look of Fallout very much.

But as far as I know, Fallout was a mouse-driven. If you tell me that there were keys for moving the character up-ish, down-ish, left-ish and right-ish it would make no difference for me: I didn't notice and I would not have used the keys if they were there. To me, the keyboard (or keypad) only works ok if the movement is aligned with the intuitive direction of the keys (up is up, not up-ish).

Whenever I see a game whose keys move the player on non-axis aligned ways, I don't think about Fallout. I think about this:



Just to make it clear: It reminds me the of old times of awful controls and frequent deaths that meant that I had to re-start the level again. I enjoyed those when I was a kid and I could spend 6 hours in front of my Spectrum 48K, but now I would not bare them. I'd rather do house chores.

I'm against re-starts, too. Let me suggest one alternative - offer a mouse-based control scheme for those of us that can't stand up-ish and down-ish keys. With that, I don't really care about the perspective.

If the control has to be keyboard based because of game constraints, then I'd like the player should movement should be axis-aligned. And isometric perspective is easier on the eyes for that kind of movement than Fallouty perspective.

[giniu]

I'm against re-starts, too. Let me suggest one alternative - offer a mouse-based control scheme for those of us that can't stand up-ish and down-ish keys. With that, I don't really care about the perspective.

Tkanks Kikito for your opinion. I agree with you about games with keys only, and using screen movement was one of ideas (Bart once tried to ask on IRC which people prefer, but it did not worked ). Anyway, just as I said before - it's here already - you can use mouse even in current prototype (fixing mouse movement was key element of last coding sprint) And from start, it was designed to offer both options - keys and mouse, whatever suits player

[leiradel]

Whenever I see a game whose keys move the player on non-axis aligned ways, I don't think about Fallout. I think about this:

Didn't Knight Lore had an option to make left and right rotate the character and up walk forward? Or was it another, similar game? Just curious, I'm not saying it's a good thing. Would have to play it again to check, but unlike you the screenshot totally made me want to play it again.

However, what is it that the character can't go N, S, E, W, NE, NW, SE and SW? Up key, walk up, Up and left key, walk up and left...

[Ryne]

Naming one "famous" game (fallout) that used that perspective is one thing, but I can name 100 that use isometric, and they use it for a reason. I can only think of 2 or 3 games that have used "Trimetric", and I just think that it ISN'T widely used for a reason.

Lookin' great, Ryne. Do you have any experience with steam punk, especially in making steam punk art?

Yea, I've done steam punk before. When it comes to characters it's relatively easy (a lot of it is in the color's, lot's of browns, etc). Buildings and scenery are pretty easy as well, there are a lot of inspirational sources that make it really easy.

Also, as kikito said, games that use that perspective are often mouse driven (both sim city, and fallout). Basically if you click a spot on the map, the character would walk to it (in a straight line, if I remember correctly), in Wiff's case, the character has "pre-set" animations/views, so he can really only navigate those angles without looking weird (like in the demo, looks extremely awkward, like I have vertigo or something).

If you think of an isometric game with 8-directional character movement, it feels very... "correct". Up is up, down is down, etc. Then you have the angles in between, so holding "down+left", the character does exactly what you expect him to do.