Inexperienced Knights [Update #8]

[Clean3d]

Hello everybody,
I know this thread descended into vaporware territory a long time ago. It's not - I've been working on Inexperienced Knights hard and have made good progress. I also know that's something developers of vaporware say.

What I can say is merry Christmas and happy holidays! I took a bit of the code from Inexperienced Knights and made a silly little themed rhythm game about wrapping presents. You can check it out here. Requires 0.9.0.

I hope to have exciting things to show soon, but I'd rather have something to show that looks noticably different than show something that looks mostly the same and ramble on about bugs I fixed.

Take care!

p.s. As a side note, I had a weird bug in that Christmas game. I load the beats by iterating over the lines of a text file, but code that worked when ran from a folder caused 0.9.0 to hang indefinitely when packaged in a .love file.

Code: Select all

love.filesystem.newFile("beats.txt"):lines() -- Works in folder, not as a .love
love.filesystem.lines("beats.txt") -- Works as a .love

Neat, huh?

[Clean3d]

Hello again!
I've been working hard on IK. I'm currently focusing my efforts on it full-time, in fact. I've ripped apart large parts of the game and rebuilt them, and it feels much more like a professional game. Don't know if I'm going to make my target release date, but I'm working hard to get there!

I've been itching to show you all how it's been coming along, so lets start with that.




Looks kind of like a game, no? Now, here's some stuff I'm having trouble with, if you'd care to indulge me.

• Cinematics
  I've been planning on using Spine from Esoteric Software for the longest time. Now that it's time to start with the 2D cutscenes, I finally read the EULA for their software and I'm not comfortable with parts of it. I could code in my simple cutscenes by hand - they're not complex. That would definitely make me miss my launch date, though, so any alternatives or suggestions here would be much appreciated! Are there any other good 2D animation softwares for Love2D?
• Box2D collision "padding"
  This is an annoying one. Physical shapes appear to have some sort of invisible padding around them that pre-collides with other shapes. You can see it in this screenshot, where the character and chest are actually 'stuck' in-between the rock walls. My conversion between physics and visuals is 1 Box2D unit == 16px. I know Box2D isn't a pixel-perfect engine, but I've had better collisions in other demos, so I'm fairly certain this is a problem with something I'm doing. Any thoughts?
• Gamepad axes
  I wanted to make all the axes and d-pads on gamepads control the directional input, so people would never have to worry about which stick or d-pad to use. My code for doing that looked kind of like this:

  Code: Select all

  function love.joystickaxis(joystick, axis, value)
      if axis % 2 == 0 then
          --Axis is horizontal
      else
          --Axis is vertical
      end
  end
  

  The problem is that Xbox 360 and Logitech controllers make their triggers look like axes. This means their input gets processed just like the analog sticks, and since they "rest" at -1 it causes problems. My solution is to simply use hardcode the game to use only axis 1 and 2. If you think this will cause problems, please let me know, but it's working well so far.

So, those are the problems I'm not sure how to solve at the moment. Fortunately I can let them be while I work on other things, but I'm really at a loss on solving some of them.

I don't want to end on a downer, though. Things are coming along excellently, and I anticipate being able to roll out some sort of (probably closed) beta about mid-March. If any of you are interested, I'd be happy to take volunteers, but unfortunately I can't offer anything in return except perhaps a copy of the finished game.

Still, some of you have asked when the game would come out. I still can't say, but I don't want to remain in beta for too long.

[Rehnrald]

This game looks awesome and seems to be coming along nicely, I look forward to its release. The graphics remind me of old games like Zelda but more colorful.

Also, what do you plan the price to be when you release it?

[Helvecta]

Oh man, this is looking nice. Maybe if we're lucky we can see some footage or something to show it all in motion?

I might be able to help with the collision. The tutorial for the physics engine says:

remember, the shape anchors to the body from its center, so we have to move it

It might be worth looking at to draw the shapes of the collision shapes to make sure they're attached to the center of the body (character). You say it's box2d and since the physics engine utilizes it, I figure this would be something to look into.

Regardless, godspeed with this project!

[Jimanzium]

This project is coming along nicely, and it's great to see something so polished being made with Love. Have you considered making your own animation editor? I made something of the sorts for a project of mine. It'd possibly be quicker than hard coding, and would make something looking much better and would make updates/tweaks easier. Also, I'd be very happy to be a beta tester. Great work so far.

[ejmr]

The first two screenshots immediately reminded me of the AD&D Gold Box games, and in a good way, heh. Also I feel any game that uses a pig as a menu cursor deserves my attention.

I don't want to end on a downer, though. Things are coming along excellently, and I anticipate being able to roll out some sort of (probably closed) beta about mid-March. If any of you are interested, I'd be happy to take volunteers, but unfortunately I can't offer anything in return except perhaps a copy of the finished game.

I’ll happily volunteer to provide any beta feedback I can. Great work and best of luck either way

[davisdude]

I'll do beta too. I'd love to help with the game. It looks great!

[Clean3d]

Wow! Thanks for the replies, all! Very encouraging to know the game at least looks neat. ; )

Rehnrald: Probably less than 10 USD. Probably.
Helvecta: Thanks for the suggestion! Your reply made me dig into that months-old bug, and it's solved! Turns out love.physics.setMeter defaults to 30, which messed everything up. Another bug down.
Jimanzium: I've briefly considered it, but for me that could take more time than doing it by hand. I researched parts of the Spine license that I disliked, and I may go ahead with it anyway. You don't get everything ideal all the time, and I've only got so much time.
ejmr: The pig has a small role in the "plot" now, instead of being simply a menu cursor. I'm glad you like it!
davisdude: Excellent, thank you!

So, I get to do an actual screenshot Saturday!

Most of this week's work was engine related and bug fixing, but I did add some new trees and health pickups now spawn out of the small chests. Seems like gameplay always gets pushed back for stuff that isn't as fun, like the in-game menus I have to remake. Regardless, I'm knocking those things out of the way pretty quickly, and then I should be able to flesh out the levels and make things fun. Making a video before that wouldn't be that interesting.

Thanks again for the positivity, everyone!

[Clean3d]

End-of-March update! No screenshots of the game for now, since most of the changes that happened were backend stuff or animation, neither of which give me new art to show off.

Most notable changes this month:

• Swapped ATL for STI
• Hacked in animated water. Player(s)/enemies/etc can get submerged in it.
• Scene transitions
• 2D pre-level cutscenes are in. More on this in a moment.
• Win/fail screens are functional.

With these changes, I think I can finally shift focus to creating content instead of an engine. I've been telling friends/family this moment was just around the corner for (months?), but it's finally here for real. I'm pretty stoked.

Regarding the cutscenes, I decided to skip the Spine license after all. I'm pretty happy with the solution I've got now, though.

This is a screenshot from within Blender. The layers are Empties with an Image style. Their animation keyframes can be exported with a small Python script to a block of text that looks like a Lua table. I have a player written for Love2D, and it all works reasonably well.

Beta
I have the game at a point where I could conceivably launch a beta. It wouldn't be pretty or very fun yet, but it could happen. Before that can occur, though, I need to establish a company to run things through. I've been working on this, but it's a new set of challenges that just take time to work through.

When I get that done, though, I will likely be running the beta through Desura. It provides a framework for me to push out updates and distribute keys, and keys will provide testers with a finished copy of the game when it's done. I'm open to suggestions, though.

Music
Another thing that happened this month is that I got an Alesis Q88 keyboard to make the game's music with. It's not fancy, but it's enough for me. I've been working through musictheory.net and playing with software, but don't have finished tracks yet.

In case you're interested, I'm composing the music in Linux with Rosegarden. It took me a while to figure out how to hook up Jack, Qsynth, and Rosegarden, but it all works now and has no detectable lag - something I haven't been able to achieve in Windows 8.
Once the piece has been composed, I'm going to rescore it in Famitracker on Windows. I'll be making the tracks twice this way, but I hope the flexibility Rosegarden has will save me time in the long run.

Anyway, thanks for reading!

[davisdude]

That's awesome! I don't really make music, so I can't help you there. I'm glad that you can get to more fun aspects of play! It's no fun developing the boring things! Anyway, I hope you do well with your project!