Beta feedback is way helpful. I’ve been fixing a handful of issues in the game – some technical, some narrative – and it’s feeling that little bit more complete. All the game needs now is some artwork and text for the ending cutscene, some artwork and music for Arcade Mode, and I’m considering just a handful of achievements for the game as well.

I’m not sure whether I should talk about stuff from towards the end of the game on this blog. Would I be spoiling stuff? Maybe! I’ll talk about it anyway!

Continue reading »

I’ve been busy over the weekend! Bit of a mixed update this, with very little visual stuff. I added character portraits to dialogue, and then I removed character portraits from dialogue. I added save game support, and put in an arcade mode. Combat got a fair bit of tweaking as well.

Here’s the faces. BUT THEY’RE GONE NOW:

Turned out these distracted too much from the action on screen, and they’re a bit naff and JRPG. It was fun learning to draw them though.

Arcade mode currently looks quite similar to night-time combat. There are some rule differences… namely, there’s a time limit, and you hit people until money comes out. I’m not sure what the subtext is there.

Speaking of combat, the AI behaves much more sensibly now with a variety of range and behaviour tweaks – they won’t chase you half a mile any more, they’re too lazy.

I’ve also started giving the player health back mid level. The longer stages were brutally hard – you ended up carefully watching your health bar, trying to mete out damage efficiently before you wiped out. To fix this, I reduced the amount of health the player has and now give you some back when you scare someone off screen or knock them out. The feel’s now much more immediate, since you can die more easily early on and you’re not quite so doomed later. Definite plus.

So that’s what I’ve been up to!

I know I said I’d stop on Sunday, but eh; an arcade mode was a good suggestion, and feature creep can be worth it 😀 The game’s fundamentally done now, apart from a few loose ends that need tidying (and Arcade Mode’s going to get its own quick unique backdrop and soundtrack).

It’s now in beta testing for difficulty/usability tweaks, which may run on a few days. I’ll try to avoid starting whole days’ worth of new work on the basis of testing; it should just be a few hours here and there until it’s done now.

Phew.

I got rid of health bars. They were in the way.

Combat looks a lot slicker now, with the AIs communicating stuff by text and icons instead of a slightly wonky health bar. I’m not sure about how it feels – it was nice seeing that bar go down, I’ll be honest – but I think it’s a net win.

Besides that, I’ve been filling in background for the ending cutscene.

Continue reading »

I’ve fixed my Flash preloader tutorial. You can’t easily get a version of Sam HaXe that will set the SWF header properties (resolution, framerate) for you, so I wrote a command line util to do that bit after the Sam HaXe resource build. Much better.

In actual game terms… I’ve added barks. Barks are when AIs shout out something incidental to indicate a change of state (or just to be funny/awesome).

Continue reading »

Spam is amazing! “I like wootfu.com. Bookmarked for future reference. LEGAL STEROIDS”

Subtle. Anyway. OH GOD ART TAKES FOREVER

Above the dresser? That is Art. When you hear the buzzer, stare at the Art.

One thing I’ve found with pixelling that makes it totally unlike programming: distractions help me. It’s kind of funny – I always used to draw stuff when I was bored in school, to keep my brain awake enough I guess to half-absorb what was going on. Turns out the same’s true in reverse, more or less, and having something on in the background stops me getting bored while I’m drawing stuff for hours on end. Today’s E3 presentations have been filling this need nicely.

Course, there’s a downside. Today, I realised I’ve finally become a cynical old bugger who thinks mainstream games are rubbish. True, Microsoft and EA’s E3 presentations are always going to cover the most whitebread games available in the most shallow possible way, but I don’t think I saw anything new there I wanted to play.

That’s a little bit sad. Maybe I’ll rent Gears of War 3 once it’s out and just get drunk enough to enjoy it.

I’ve been waylaid by germs since Wednesday but I fought through the pain (at least this evening, with plenty of Lemsip) to finish the B&B exterior scene and code the full intro sequence.

I’m sort of happy with this scene now.

I am really looking forward to calling this done and getting on with something else. I think I’ve given up entirely on trying to predict when I’ll finish it due to massive, apparently unending scope creep, but it’ll be soon. SOON

And now I’m going back to bed.

Well, the artwork from the last post is in the game now as a fancy scrolling-parallax title screen. I’ve been working on the remaining backdrops I need to be happy with the game, and I’ve hit a little trouble.

Drawing the van driving along gave me the idea of setting all the cutscene action and some intro/ending stuff in, or in front of, the bed and breakfast where they’re staying. The front of it’s maybe 80% done:

…and now I’m agonising over feeling like it looks a bit crap, and wanting to redo the park graphics to fix some issues there, and wondering whether I can simply move the cutscenes I’ve already got into these new backgrounds without changing the tone of the thing and having to re-script them and possibly redo their music. I’m basically struggling with art direction and the narrative flow of the cutscenes, whether it’s obvious how the locations link up and whether the transition from each to the next gives the right impression about the passage of time and movement through space.

But the main thing is that this backdrop’s mostly done. 🙂 I can probably finish it up and do the only other whole new backdrop, the room interior, tomorrow. Once all this stuff is actually in game, I can start making decisions about what I need to iterate on without worrying too much.

Vigilance has definitely taken on a life of its own. Fully realising it means tackling all these issues, which is stressful, because I’m out of my comfort zone 😀 but it’s great for the same reason. I think I’m going to feel much more confident in my pixel art when this is over!

I’m starting to really enjoy this pixel stuff.

Here’s a panoramic version, and here’s the music that’ll go with this once it’s animated and in game.

This is the mostly-final artwork for the title screen, showing Marcy and Justine driving their van through the countryside in the wee hours of the morning. They’re quite dedicated.

I’m getting a bit worried that the fairly muted hues here will clash horribly with the brighter colours during the daytime scenes, but maybe it’ll work fine in practice! As for implementing this, I’ll need to break it up into multiple layers for parallax scrolling and make sure each of them loops well.

This is roughly half of the artwork remaining for Fear Is Vigilance, so I’ve got maybe a day more of pixelling and several days of programming ahead before it’s done. On with the week 😀