[Graham]

I think a simpler solution is to have the robots that are generated during gameplay move to a different position than the ones that are there from the beginning. That involves less reworking of existing code.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Alternatively, just have the robots position themselves randomly. Pick a random position, check the position; if it's free, take it. If not, generate another random position and try again. If there is plenty of space, this should operate in constant time.

The previous send all method you described will almost definitely result in some robots overwriting others. One thing you definitely want to be aware of in MZX is how robots are executed. Lachesis wrote a good post describing this- the upshot is that, except in special situations (reverse board scan in robot send), robots are executed left to right, top to bottom. Hence if the robot at 0,5 has a robot id of 17 and the robot at 0,17 has a robot id of 5, the robot at 0,5 will run first and teleport to 0,17, overwriting that robot. If things happened in the other order for some reason, the robot at 0,17 would overwrite the robot at 0,5. There is no way to avoid an overwrite with this method.

[Graham]

Ok that's good to know, thanks.

[Graham]

Back on track with everything. New levels await.

Gave servo the ability to switch between high and low strength bombs tonight, like in MegaZeux proper. Why? Cause it took like 20 minutes, most of the stuff was already in place. It'll be nice to choose between broad and focused explosions. That's all the time I had this evening, I'm falling asleep at the keyboard. Goodnight.

[Graham]

I've been tweaking things for the last few days. I gotta stop doing that, stop chasing that imaginary idea of perfection and just be content to let it be. It's good enough like it is, and if it needs tweaking do it at the end of game design after all levels and story are complete.

I'm probably just introducing new bugs anyway. Changing one thing at this point in the program just add three new bugs I'll find later.

So this weekend no more tweaks, just back to level design. I'm close to finishing up area two and I have a ton of ideas for the next area.

The smartest thing I've done lately was add a changelog. After the last bug I fixed, that required me to hunt through previous backups to figure out what changed, I realized it will save a lot of headache going forward. I'm getting serious now. (Well kind of, for a single person making a MZX game in his spare time.) :-)

This post has been edited by Graham: 03 August 2013 - 06:43 AM

[Dr Lancer-X]

Graham, on 03 August 2013 - 04:23 PM, said:

I'm probably just introducing new bugs anyway. Changing one thing at this point in the program just add three new bugs I'll find later.

I'm in the latter stages of a project myself and I know exactly what you're talking about - touching anything is scary, especially since I've had to squash insidious bugs that appeared due to harmless-looking changes elsewhere.

[Graham]

Yeah it's terrible realizing you can make a simple change that only takes a minute and improves the overall experience and you should have thought of it in the beginning. But you know if you make the change your most likely going to come across some negative effect later on as a result. Then you'll rewrite some bit of code to fix that negative effect but maybe that does something else unintended. Ugh.

[Graham]

This post may be a spoiler, I'm sorry I don't know how to hide spoiler text.

I'm designing level 19. It's a secret level only able to be entered after collecting enough gold floppies. I'm going to make one such level for each area.

I'm having a dilemma. These secret levels pay tribute (an homage if you will) to the games that influenced me when I was younger. To that end, Servo plays through a pretty faithful recreation of the first level of each of these games. There are five such levels planned total. My dilemma is, am I breaking copyright laws and stealing IP? I guess I am cause I'm stealing artwork from these games and putting them in mine. But it's not supposed to be looked at as stealing but rather paying respects to the classics. But I guess the original designers and company's who own such IP won't think so. It's not a problem if I don't charge anything for the game right? If I give it away I should be safe. But what if I want to upload the game to Steam Green Light when I'm done? Will I have to remove the levels or change them significantly? Any thoughts are appreciated.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Graham, on 15 August 2013 - 04:43 PM, said:

This post may be a spoiler, I'm sorry I don't know how to hide spoiler text.

Use spoiler tags [spoiler] [/spoiler]

Spoiler

like this

Anyway, in answer to your question: maybe. I don't know the exact details of what you're doing, but hey, I'm sure they'll go after Super Mario for MZX first =P
Naturally if you're interested in selling the game that changes the whole equation; various developers (like Nintendo) tend to be quite lassez-faire with respect to homages and the like up until the point where money starts changing hands, then they start cracking down. You'll have to make a judgment call.

[Graham]

That's kinda what I figured. =-/

Spoiler

Thanks for the info.

One of the levels is going to be the first level of super mario 1. Obviously that game has influenced nearly every gamer. I guess I might just have to do like I said and remove it from a "retail" version, if such a thing ever exists. Thanks.

[Graham]

I realize with the amount of things I'm doing in this game, bug testing will be as, if not more, labor intensive than level design. Definitely gonna need some help when I get to that stage I think.

[Graham]

I let my brother play Servo for a little while today to show him my progress. I realized I'm not as far as I thought. Bugs and optomization wise, I've got a long way to go.

As good as the game looks when I'm playing it, it looks just awful when someone else plays who's not familiar.

I guess at some point you just have to say you've done enough, but I'm a long way from there. Fortunately I've done a lot of things right this time around. It's fairly easy to change settings and make optomizations.

[Lachesis]

I think with indie games in general but especially with MegaZeux, there's a huge gap between what we see in a game and what someone else sees. I was playing red between classes and the first thing someone decided to mention was the "box" following the player around on the map...

[Graham]

Lachesis, on 13 September 2013 - 01:41 PM, said:

I think with indie games in general but especially with MegaZeux, there's a huge gap between what we see in a game and what someone else sees. I was playing red between classes and the first thing someone decided to mention was the "box" following the player around on the map...

I'm sorry I'm dense, but what did they mean about the "box"?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Graham, on 15 September 2013 - 10:32 AM, said:

I'm sorry I'm dense, but what did they mean about the "box"?

It's something we just expect since this is MZX and we don't have enough colours per char to do detailed character work while preserving background tiles, but people outside our world aren't sure what to make of the fact that our 'sprites' have a solid background colour.

[Graham]

Lancer-X, on 14 September 2013 - 05:21 PM, said:

It's something we just expect since this is MZX and we don't have enough colours per char to do detailed character work while preserving background tiles, but people outside our world aren't sure what to make of the fact that our 'sprites' have a solid background colour.

Gotcha. Yeah it's never bothered me, but then I know the roots of these games (two color text mode graphics). This relates to something Exophase said earlier:

Quote

when I see this I feel like we should have done some basic enhancements to MZX's graphics a long time ago. I don't mean going with a full on 2D system of expected quality or even three colors per char! or anything like that, just some little tweaks that are easy for existing games to implement. Like per-pixel background scrolling, per-pixel sprite offsets, and real transparency for sprites, all purely as add-ons to the current engine of course. It'd mean a totally different rendering engine and some updates to the sprite collision code but the games themselves would only need very minor changes to take advantage of it. Plenty of MZX games are just fine without stuff like this but I think this game would greatly benefit from it. I know that's removing some of the feel and style of MZX and maybe something no one wants anyway, I guess I'm just throwing it out there. It'd need some activity in the MZX scene itself but really just one very good game like this one would easily justify it, and it could probably trickle down to special-edition releases of some older games.

Maybe it's something to consider. Especially if it helped to draw in new members to the community. But I don't really get a vote, since I don't have programming experience I wouldn't be the one doing the work.

[Exophase]

Well, to be honest I feel like Red "broke the tile" better than Servo does, and it's a lot less noticeable in that screenshot Lancer posted. A big part of that is SMZX mode. But I think some of it is also just down to artistic decisions. The sort of colors and patterns you use in the backgrounds plays a big role in this. Your backgrounds are pretty high contrast and have a lot of sharp lines.

But I don't think it's anything you should worry about changing. It'd probably be easier for someone to just mod MZX for it. Or we could all get over it and focus on enjoying the game ;P

[Graham]

I agree it's less noticeable in Red. Those sprites are almost square and fill there characters in mostly. Servo does not fill the character space nearly as much. And yeah color choice and artistic style played a big role too.

Like I said it doesn't bother me much, I set out to make Servo knowing I'd be sacrificing certain aspects of style and whatnot in order to make it work on MegaZeux. And I just don't want designing it to take me forever, I can churn out a level in a few days with this design. That's cool.

[Graham]

Free time= work on game VS. watch a movie, play a game, read a book, ride bike, do chores, work on car, clean yard, shower? Work on game!

[Graham]

Ok, so I'm super excited about what I'm doing in my game, but to talk about it would ruin some of the game's secrets. If anybody want's to see what I'm doing, knowing full well it'll ruin some of the excitement when it's done, then hit me up. If you'd rather wait and not have it spoiled that is just as well.

P.S. I'd love to have all the levels designed and done by the end of this year, though realistically that may not happen. I am making good progress though. CJA, How's that music coming? Just kidding, I'm sure you are very busy with school right now.

[Graham]

ARG! It's so hard to work on animating an enemy character when Skyrim Dragonborn DLC is sitting there waiting for me to explore Solstheim. Oh well, I got an hour worth of work done, it's something at least.

[Graham]

And then it crashed, and I realized that I had not saved it since opening MegaZeux, about an hour ago. Ahhh! Blast, I hate doing things again. I'm going to turn automatic backups back on. This is the second time MegaZeux has frozen at random on this new computer, Window's 8's fault no doubt.

[ThDPro]

I try to keep a backup zip of every day i make progress as well as a 255 (round numbers! that's why) backup folder. That and the compulsive save-9-times-upon exiting the robot editor or before pressing f. I think that habit is leftover from 2.51, where saving once simply wasn't enough.

One of my production mentors told me once that if it isn't in 3 different zipcodes, it wasn't saved. He was right.

[Graham]

I do make nightly backups in the form of incrementally numbered zips. And I normally save pretty often, like every time I go to test something. I just got lazy or was too tired to notice I hadn't saved in a while.

[Graham]

I also email those zips to myself and upload them to a thumb drive. I am paranoid about losing all the work I've done.

Additionally, all the backups have allowed me to go back and restore files and bits of code I messed up. I also started a changelog within the game that references which zip number an addition took place in. I actually used it last night to restore a palette file I had modified.

[Graham]

Something wonderful happened this evening, I fought past the urge to not make any progress in my game. Normally I go through phases where I switch gears and start doing something different for a while. If I'm wrenching on my car a lot, I may switch to playing games or working on MegaZeux. I have not figured out why I feel the urge to do that, but it really hurts productivity with what ever I'm doing.

Right now I really want to keep making progress in my game, I feel it's important to stay focused if I'm going to finish it. Unfortunately I've felt lazy and hadn't made much progress this last week, and I really wanted to play a game tonight and not think much. I'm still going to play a game, but I was able to sit down and work on my game for two hours. It feels really good, I actually didn't want to quit. I found joy in it and that's important. Yay!

[Graham]

On another note, I want to thank CJA. I am really happy with the music that he's been doing for the game, it is turning out awesome. it's exactly what I wanted, really. I can't wait to play this damn game with all this beautiful music to back up the retro 8 bit feel of the game, man it's gonna feel like you are playing it on a Nintendo, well almost.

[Graham]

CJA's post about great MegaZeux bosses got me thinking. I don't have any bosses in my game because I've never enjoyed boss fights. I've always taken them as obligatory. I was going to include them until I played Fez. That game did things so much differently that it changed the course of my game dramatically. It's about solving puzzles, not manual dexterity. It doesn't matter if you die a thousand times, you'll always start back immediately before you died. It's not about staying alive, it's about surmounting a puzzle. Braid was similar. I wanted my game to be more like that.

I have some enemies to add to the challenge a little and make the world seem more alive, but passing them isn't the goal, getting through the level with limited resources is. So no bosses, just puzzles and obstacles and resource management. No fear of losing progress, just a wall you can't immediately seem to be able to scale. No extreme hand-eye coordination (well maybe a little, it's a platfromer too after all).

Yeah that's it I think. Thoughts?

[Dr Lancer-X]

That's fine. I don't think bosses would suit this kind of game anyway - attempting to fit them in could easily do more harm than good.

[Graham]

That's what I figured too.