sa-game-remake

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Are you concerned about potential problems with Scholastic because they own the Spirit Animals IP?

I mean, there's always a chance they'll take offence. My hopes are that since they're not currently doing anything with the Spirit Animals IP, they have less reason to be super militant about enforcing things. We wouldn't be stealing traffic from the original game or the official Spirit Animals forum, since neither exist any more, or even stealing the time people could be using to buy and read a new Spirit Animals book.

The remake being under a different name to the original game, so it's not so easily confused with something Scholastic's sponsoring, and clearly announcing itself as a fan project that's not taking any money, should also make it less of a threat/infringement. On the other hand, they might feel they have more of a responsibility to be sharp-eyed because it's a kid's franchise, and they want to protect kids from fan servers for their potentially inadequate moderation standards.

Basically, can't guarantee anything. Some fan-servers of dead online games have a good run, others get taken offline in a snap when the original owners spot them. Maybe both.

#announcement of a movie/tv show like some people are hoping for might change things re: how much Scholastic would care #I'm fingers crossed neither happens but other people might think different. I'm not much of a movie person anyway. #thanks for the message!

[sa-game-remake]

what was ur fav thing to do in spirit animals

I was a big fan of the multiplayer (not 2v2) mode, with four players against an increasingly overwhelming tide of enemies. Had a real poor-quality internet connection at the time (insert jokes about Australian internet here), would keep dropping out of the match. Probably wasn't much fun to be my teammate, oops.

What's everyone else's favourite parts of the game?

#thanks for the message! #passing on the question just for fun #information requests

[sa-game-remake]

happy new years :]

Cheers, and happy new year to you all!

#thanks for the message!

[sa-game-remake]

Heyo! Will you ever make enemy-only animals (Like the orb weavers and vine snakes) possible spirit animals for the player? I know it’s a bit of an endeavor.

Could even alter some of the guardian models to make normal versions, if rhinos, elephants or scorpions are more your type

Yep, that'd be possible.

Two options: 1. Plonk 'em in the spirit animals select screen with a disclaimer: "This animal may not have full animations, and equipped animal armour will be invisible." Already, there are some spirit animals that have smaller and more generic animation sets than others (eg all of the newer/non-komodo-dragon lizards sharing the same animations). Never on a character I played, but I remember that for a long time the horse(? I believe.) armour just didn't show up. You got the armour bonuses but the horse just looked the same.

2. Make an animation set and animal armour models for those enemy animal types before allowing them as spirit animals. Obviously this is the more-intensive option!

#thanks for the message! #I'll put this onto the game extension suggestions list. That list will then be ignored until the game's up and running in its original form #(...if you people aren't desperate)

[sa-game-remake]

is there anything you're planning on changing from the first spirit animals game (model changing, etcetc)? or are you trying to make it as accurate as possible

I'll make it as accurate as possible, at least initially. That'll take out the extra aspect of making design decisions as well as getting everything working, so should make things smoother.

I am recording people's suggestions for game expansions/extensions, though (like the expanded spirit animal roster suggested in the message I'll post right after this one). Whether those get implemented directly into the game, or we add an Original Game/Updated Game game mode toggle - unsure, so far. We'll see.

#this is a very late reply #thanks for the message!

[sa-game-remake]

Hi!

Just wanted to check in and see how you're doing, it is important to take some time to focus on yourself over your workload

Hope you're doing well bud

:)

Cheers mate. Yeah, I up and vanished for the last 6+ months, but from this first month of the new year I'll escape have a bunch less commitments. We'll get this project back on track.

#thanks for the message! #status update

[sa-game-remake]

Just saw this and this is so fucking cool! What are you working on now, if you wouldn't mind sharing?

The last thing I was working on was exporting animations from the old game in such a way that they could be played in three.js. Mostly, this worked quite easily. The difficulty was the player's animations, because unlike most of the animals, enemies, and other humans in the game, the player dares to be customisable.

The player is a single (invisible) animation skeleton wearing multiple mix-and-match 3D meshes (whichever head and hair belong to your character, the particular combination of armour and gloves and cloak you are wearing). The old Unity game combined those meshes into a single character model before animating them in a way that is not exportable. I was able to export all of the player animations with the animation skeleton, but then ran into the issue that three.js would duplicate the skeleton each time a 3D mesh was allocated to it. I'd tell the skeleton to play the 'wave hi!' animation and only the boots would move.

Once it's prevented from duplicating skeletons and I worked out three.js's AnimationGroup system, the animations play perfectly.

#thanks for the message! #sa game remake #status update

[sa-game-remake]

is there anything you're planning on changing from the first spirit animals game (model changing, etcetc)? or are you trying to make it as accurate as possible

My initial thoughts were that I'd do my best to match as accurately as possible, except that I'd improve the cloaks so that they looked a little less like mere capes. Now that I've got access to the art assets, though (and this past ~month's progress has been me getting a hold of the animations in a format I can actually use - I'll be posting an update on that once I can sit down and record a clip of some good visuals), I've put those plans aside and am planning on as direct a reproduction as we can in terms of art and gameplay.

If anyone's got any pet peeve change requests or quality of life improvement idea updates, though, that's the sort of thing I'd have no problem to slip in there. Let me know.

#thanks for the message! #sa game remake #information requests

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heres another one!!

https://youtu.be/__go2b7o1Ps

They have a lot of soundtracks on their channel as well, if you need

Brilliant, thanks for sharing that.

#thanks for the message! #original spirit animals game

[sa-game-remake]

in case you need it, i found videos from a few months ago of someone playing Spirit Animals (offline I think)! There's more SAgame stuff on their channel, too!

https://youtu.be/Ho2c3hbZAfk

Cheers, thanks for sharing that! Could end up a really useful reference.

#thanks for the message! #original spirit animals game

[sa-game-remake]

what would u say the hardest part of remaking spirit animals has been so far?

Of what I've done so far, the hardest part has been the decompilation of the old game. It's very easy to get something that nearly works - something that can extract the animations, but only in a game engine-exclusive format; something that can pull out the code scripts that make the game run but can't work out which game object each script belongs to.

And unfortunately, with computers, 'nearly works' is pretty close to useless. The old game, decompiled, has a little over 35 000 files, which is a few too many for me to go through manually and fix all the way, if I even knew how (gotta admit, at some points I've considered trying).

As of this month (only!), I finally have a decompilation of the old game that - well, that doesn't run, but that is together enough for me to export the assets and read the code I'll need to recreate the game. I tried out about 5 different decompilation tools and opening their results in about 4 different versions of Unity. In the end, I used a newer Unity version (the versions the game was developed in don't have the ability to export assets!), and quick-fixed the ~400 compilation errors in the code to convince Unity that the assets were not-broken enough that it should let me export them.

(For those without much computer knowledge: there are two main categories of errors: compilation errors and runtime errors. Compilation errors are things that would crash the program that the computer can spot before running the program and crashing, and so it'll refuse to run the program. Runtime errors are the other kind: errors the computer can't predict in advance but will cause it to trip over its own feet. (These are categories (mostly) distinct from bugs, especially in the 'video games bugs' category, which is (mostly) a term for when the computer thinks it's running fine, but it's doing something completely different from what you wanted it to do.) What I've done here is just hiding the fact that the game's broken from Unity; converted all those compilation errors into code that looks fine but'll probably fall apart if you try to actually run the game. This is bad practice and usually you'd be trying to go the other way: have all your errors be compilation errors, so that by the time you fix them and your program is able to run, it will run flawlessly.)

Second hardest thing is that I didn't know anything about the web before this. Setting up the website at keeperofgreenhaven.net was not hard, necessarily, but was a bit brain-melting learning everything I needed to know.

#thanks for the message! #sa game remake

[sa-game-remake]

Status Update: Better-Looking Runner Game

See this update on the forum

Here are some side-by-side comparisons of the old game and the prototype, featuring the improved graphics. There's a few things that distinguish them - I believe you can tell which is which.

(fallback media link)

The features I've added include appropriately shiny textures on the coins and powerups, the fortress in the distance obscured by fog, and of course the appropriate transparency on the light rays falling on the track. None of these wanted to play along with my perfectly reasonable goals, which is a partial explanation for how long it has been since the last update.

(fallback media link)

There will still be things being tweaked from this prototype for the final graphics: making the lighting brighter and yellower, raising the water level so less of the cliff is visible (hopefully this will also stop the bits of reflected sky peeking through at the edges of the cliff). There should be leaves falling gently around the player, and clouds moving through the sky.

(fallback media link)

The path in the old game curves occasionally (see the background of the above water-crossing screenshot), a mechanic I'm not quite sure how they pulled off, considering how straight and rectangular all the tracks are. Working that out may be a late-term goal of this project.

In the meantime, of course, there's a key part of the graphics missing: animating the player and animal!

#sa game remake #status update #sa runner game

[sa-game-remake]

Is there a version I can download on my iPad?

Of the old game? If you downloaded the game in the past, you can go to the Purchased tab of the App Store and download the app again. There's some evidence that either new devices or new iOS versions don't play nice with it, so it's not guaranteed it'll open and play.

Even then you can only play on Guest mode (no multiplayer, only one character). That's inevitable since the main servers no longer exist, so there's nothing to log into or anything to organise multiplayer.

Of the remake? It's not playable yet, but since it'll be a website (most likely game.keeperofgreenhaven.net), it should be playable from any device that has a web browser.

#correction: web browser with HTML5 <canvas> capabilities. You'd be hard-pressed to find a web browser without though. #HTML5 is 2008. Even Internet Explorer has canvases #apologies for delay

[sa-game-remake]

Status Update: Runner Game Graphics Tests

See this update on the forum

(fallback media link)

The last update on the runner game development progress was showing that all obstacles, coins, powerups, and track terrain & backgrounds could generate and would scroll like an endless treadmill below the runner. The screenshots, though, showed overly stark colours and a blank background and beams of sunlight rendering as solid black bars.

Next steps have therefore been to test out options to fix the graphics so they better match the old game, and are more pleasant to look at. An updated prototype showing improved graphics should be the next update.

The test environment screenshot above shows you some of the graphics I've been working on. The decompilation of the old game has successfully revealed the water shader they used, but three.js has a built-in water renderer (play around with it here!). This is a simpler water shader than the old game's one in some aspects (it has no fresnel), but to an initial scan looks perfectly fine for the background of the runner game.

I identified the position and colour of the main light source in the old game (here represented by the square and line), and found a lighting setting I needed to tweak based on the particular 3D model format I'm using for the background decorations. That results in the much less aggressive wood and leaf colours you can see in the island on the right of the image. three.js lighting automatically renders with shadows, as you can see here, whereas the old game appears to not bother. Shadows are computationally expensive, so we'll see if that ends up being a problem.

A few options were tested for the beams of light that fall across the track. There's a couple of ways to make a material that's partially transparent, with gaps in the light-beam pattern. A material that's affected by lights and shadows, like the rightmost one, doesn't make much sense for a beam of light. The middle beam was a method that's easy to implement, but distorts the colour. The leftmost beam is the approach I'll use. It keeps the colour a nice bright gold, isn't affected by other lights and shadows, and doesn't require excessive computational power to render.

#sa game remake #status update #sa runner game

[sa-game-remake]

Forums now online!

The keeperofgreenhaven.net Spirit Animals forums I've been working on are now open for registration. The forum can be accessed at the keeperofgreenhaven.net website or in the Discord server linked below.

Find the web forum at: https://keeperofgreenhaven.net/forums/

Find the Discord server at: https://discord.gg/VgJAaB9ND7

Come check it out!

#forum remake #progress update

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Forum will open in 12 hrs...

#forum remake

[sa-game-remake]

Status Update: Nice to meet you, MirrorerMachine

I've actually had a name in mind for the forum/Discord syncing bot since the beginning. And it's got a face, too.

MirrorerMachine is a Discord bot that does the synchronisation of a Discord server and Simple Machines Forum web forum. It's now fully-functional: you can see it working in the two examples below.

#forum remake #status update