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professionalvalkyrietrainer · 6 months

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Assignment 3 Development Progress

Welcome to my second blog in my series of assignment 3 blogs documenting my process of going through creating and playtesting my assignment 3 game named Crab-splosion.

Let us start off with a quick recap from last time, in which we created a one-sheet Game Design Document, the MVP description/elevator pitch for Crab-splosion. In the meantime of coming up with those items, my team already begun the process of converting August's platformer into the first prototype for Crab-splosion. However, much work is still need to be done if we wish to have a playable demo done by week 13.

Player

Our work on Crab-splosion first begun with the player model and its controls. Since we already know that our protagonist in this game would be a crab, we headed straight into looking for inspirations for what we wanted our crab to look like. After digging around, we didn't found a royalty free sprite that we are satisfied with so we ended up using a stock image of a crab as our placeholder for the player. Our artist, Jarvis then proposed that he can do some of the pixel artwork that we need for the game which includes the character sprites so he get started on making the sprites. I then proposed the fact that the crab could be green which fits into the narrative that it is a radioactive/mutated crab, hence why he can fire weapons. The team loved the idea so Jarvis did a color swap of the crab and we have an end product that looks something like this:

The player model already have the basic movement controls like moving to the left and right as well as jumping which was inherited from August's previous game. This save us some time when it comes to implementing these features to the player character.

Enemy

After doing a basic texture swap to the player so that it resembles our vision for Crab-splosion, we begun our first real addition into the game which is to add in new enemy types to give the game more variety. When thinking of what the enemy of our game should be, we did some research on the predators of crab and found out that fish is actually one of them. With the game setting taking place underwater, we think that using a fish as our enemy would be appropriate so that's what we rolled with. We then found a placeholder sprite to be used to represent the fish before we can get official artwork from Jarvis.

We also planned to add 3 more enemy types so we get to brainstorming for enemy types. After some careful consideration, we decided that we will add in a flying-type enemy (Flying Fish) that will drop bombs on the player, Shield-type enemy (Shield Fish) that has a front shield that can't be shoot through and a boomer-type enemy (Bomb Fish) that will explode upon contact with the player.

After Jarvis have made some sprites for the different enemy types and August have coded in the necessary behavior for each of the fishes, we have officially had our first version of our 4 enemy types as shown below:

Weapon Types

Weapon types is where I spend most of my time developing this game as I was the one who initially came up with the Rock-Paper-Scissors system, where a certain enemy can be countered by a certain weapon. I believe that having weapons with different behavior and relationships with each and every single enemy would form the basic system dynamic of my game, like how it was mentioned in Chapter 5 Working with System Dynamics of Game Design Workshop by Teller Fullerton. The enemy and weapon will form the core system while other things like player status, control, pickups and level will be based off this core.

The first weapon that we had for the game is actually from August's old game as well, which is a normal projectile that can be shot from the player by pressing down the 'D' key dubbed the Normal Shot. The weapon deals 15 damage per shot and wasn't effective against any type. It is mainly used as a way to dispatch normal fishes due to it being the most economic choice. It can also be use as an backup weapon against other enemy type albeit not as effective. When facing a normal fish which has a 100 health, it will take around 7 shots to kill it.

The Charged Shot is an iteration of the normal shot that can be triggered if the 'D' key is held down for around 5 second and released. This weapon deals 110 damage to all type of fishes and is the ideal way to take out normal fishes that has 100 health. However, the shot will need to be charged before it can be fired so the player will need to avoid the fish while charging up the shot. One feature we implemented into it is the fact that you can charge it while you are using other weapons.

Next up, we have the Laser Shot which is a long laser beam that will be shot out after pressing the 'S' key. The laser shot deals 4 damage per frame to any enemy that is within the shot, one special feature the Laser Shot has is the property to pierce shields which made it the best weapon against shield fishes that has a 115 health.

The Scatter Shot is next which shoots out a set of 5 bubbles acting as the pellet of a shotgun by pressing 'A'. The Scatter Shot deals 10 damage per pellet so it will deal 50 damage to an enemy if all pellets registered. The unique property of the Scatter shot would be its ability to knockback any enemies. This made it counters the bomb fishes perfectly as their behavior would be to charge towards the player when within range as well as the bomb fish's health of 50. Player can then use the Scatter Shot to knock the bomb fish back and avoid taking damage from the bomb fish's explosion.

Lastly, we have the Missile Shot which can be activated using the 'W' key and shoots out a missile that tracks the enemy. This weapon deals 90 damage per rocket and has the unique property of tracking the enemy. The lock on has a priority on flying fishes which made it a very good counter against them. The flying fish having 80 health is also a reinforcement towards the counter idea as a missile shot can one shot a flying fish.

Now that all the weapon type is introduced, we can get into more technical aspects of each weapon. First off, other than the Normal and Charged shot, every other weapon has an individual gauge that tells how much more shot can be shot out before the player is out and will need to wait for them to recharge. This will be shown within the UI section of the blog as it is more relevant there.

Other than that, another technical aspect of the weapon type that I would like to look into would be how the missile lock onto enemies within the game. Essentially there is a large box called lock on detector that surrounds mostly the front of the player with a little at the back that detects if there are any enemies within the box, and if there's an enemy within it, the missile will then be shot when 'W' key is pressed and the missile will try to make their way towards the locked on enemy.

Pickups

Moving on to the pickups within Crab-splosion, this will be a short and sweet session as there's only two pickups present within Crab-splosion. The first pickup is called the Red Orb. Its a red circular object that gives the player a random amount of Orbs between 14~28 upon picking it up. The orb was originally currency of the upgrade system however the upgrade system was unable to be implemented into our game due to time constraints so the red orb doesn't serve a major purpose now.

The second pickup we had in our game is called a Green Orb that heals the player upon picking it up. It will give the player 20 health points back.

Animations

In order for players to have visual cue and feedback for how they can interact with the game as well as making the game more visually appealing. We decided to add in various animations for the player model as well as some other objects. Credit to Jarvis who made all these animations from scratch.

Player Animations

The player has two sets of animations, that being a walking animation and a damaged animation. Walking animation is to show that the player is currently moving while the damaged animation will be triggered when the player took damage from the enemy.

Bomb Fish Animations

The bomb fish has an animation that has it going all white for one frame and normal in another. This is used to show that the bomb fish is going to explode and as a visual cue for players to know that they should avoid it.

Laser Shot Animations

The Laser Shot basically only has one animation that show the spiral effect that the shot has when it was fired.

The UI of Crab-splosion is mainly made up of three different components, being the health bar, orb count and ammo gauge.

We will start off with the health bar as it is the most straight forward, the health bar is the top most green gauge. When it is filled, it means that the player currently have the maximum amount of health (60 HP) and the gauge will be lowered according to the damage taken by the player. This is controlled using a player health variable which display the length of the bar.

Next up, we have the orbs counter which indicates how much orb that the player had collected so that players can easily keep track of the number of orb they currently have. This works similarly to the health bar where a variable stores the value and it is displayed on the UI.

Finally, we also added a ammo gauge that shows how much ammo remains in each weapon. The letter in front will be letters representing the keys that need to press to fire that weapon which corresponds to the selected weapon. Similar to how the health bar operates, a value will be stored for the total ammo count and that count effects how full is the gauge. When the weapon is fired, a fix amount will be deducted from the ammo count and if the gauge falls under a certain value, it then can't be fired until its filled back up to a sufficient amount.

Level

For our demo we managed to make a total of 3 levels. Level 1 would be a tutorial stage, Level 2 would be a normal stage while Level 3 is the boss stage.

Level 1

The beginning part of Level 1 would be several rooms that act as a tutorial to the basic mechanics of Crab-splosion. Each of these rooms will provide the player with a new system/mechanic that they can learn about and use in the following levels.

The back part of Level 1 is the actual level 1 before the tutorial segments were added in. This level mostly took place on the ground and has a couple of segments that require the player to carefully traverse the platforms so that they don't fall to their death. When players reached the end of the level, there will be a portal that will transport the player to the next level.

Level 2

Level 2 has more of a level on air vibe and features multiple routes that the player can take. If the player is observant enough, they can even get into a secret area and get additional Red Orbs. Similar to Level 1, there will also be a portal that brings the player to the next level through a leap of faith at the end of this level.

Level 3

Level 3 isn't too big of a level as it only includes the boss battle. The boss has three different attacks. That includes a vertical tentacle that comes out of the ground as well as a horizontal tentacle that come out of the boss. Other than that, the boss also has a ink-spiting attack that shoots out a ink projectile that would damage the player.

With that, my development post for Crab-splosion has come to an end. This can be considered my first game that me and a group of friends built from the ground up and I was very proud of what we came up with. After this blog, the game would enter its play test phase and I will be talking about them in my next blog so Stay Tuned!

References:

Fullerton, T. (2018). Game Design Workshop: A Playcentric Approach to Creating Innovative Games. ProQuest Ebook. Retrieved from: https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/qut/reader.action?docID=5477698

#game development #game design

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nomorepixels · 2 years

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Do you think that up scaling art like this is highly situational, and while some older game graphics are improved by up scaling art that was first created as pixel art looses subtlety and the machine more often than not doesn't know how to interpret texture, so often what was clear in the original image gets confused in it's new style

Yes indeed. I have talked about the initial hurdle towards upscaling pixel art in an interview article, the hard thing about training a model for upscaling old retro pixel art is in the preparation of the data model. To obtain a good data pair between what you want the end result to look like, and the lowres approximation of that image that closely resembles the pixel art style from way back then is a herculean task.

You see, the pixel art from the old days are very dissimilar to the pixel art games you see today, mainly because they weren't designed for LCD displays in mind. It's part of the reason why Square-Enix decided to recolour the FF sprites in their pixel remaster series. So for a great upscaling model to be trained, you need a hi-res image paired with a low res image with pixel arrangements and colour palette closely matching the specific console of the title you want to upscale. We do not have the resources to go down as far as that, so in the end all we hobbyists could do is using filters to approximate what pixel art looks like in the low res version. Also speaking of hobbyists, most of us train using BasicSR (or traiNNer as the offshoot is now known) on our own personal computers. We do not have server farms like Google or Gigapixel have, and thus we are only able to train models with small datasets and a modest neural-network node size. We do not have the resource of leaving the computer on to train on the dataset for months on end. Because of this, the accuracy and 'smartness' of the models are of course limited, and as you said, may not know how to interpret certain images correctly. Thus, when using ESRGAN, it is indeed best to use the correct model for the situation to get the best results.

But at least the results look much better than the classical xBR filters, here's to hoping computers will be powerful enough to use them in real time one day.

#q&a #upscaling

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rhythmantics · 7 years

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a collection of doodles; stuff for a 3rd Orre game idea I bounce around sometimes and a couple of OCs

the dream is to one day make a fangame for the orre series

tbh with the way pokemon currently is i don’t trust them at all to handle orre

xd was already Lighter and Softer than colo, and i can only shudder to imagine how much lighter they’ll crank that dial. we might even see shit like...routes...and wild pokemon on them...like??

the orre games had this wonderful moral ambiguity and urban decay that i don’t think pokemon is capable of catering to right now, since they’re trying so hard to have this image these days of this sprawling, kid-focused series. and yeah, s/m’s story got dark and shit, but the game wasn’t marketed that way, and it’s more of a juicy tidbit than the core of the experience.

If a third orre game isn’t unnecessarily gritty and edgy then, like, what’s even the point lol

So i do have rpg maker xp and I do have pokemon essentials and i think i’ve more or less worked out the mechanics i need to have implemented, but i dont think i ahve the time to spare to actually finish it in any capacity because the amount of new assets i’d have to create - tiles, character models, etc - is so massive it would realistically take me several, several months even if i was doing it as a full-time job

so in any case here are some ideas to titillate your interest:

GAMEPLAY:

level scaling across the entire game, across every trainer (possible to turn off for a more traditional pokemon experience). Regular trainers would be set ~3 levels below your team, “strong” trainers (ie cail, rider willie) would be set at your team, and bosses would always be a few levels above. The only place this wouldn’t apply would be Mount Battle, which is, after all, a side challenge. This mechanic would pretty much do away with the need for level grinding except to balance out team levels. reasoning: the orre games are known for their higher difficulty curve, and this plays off it. Double battles also make for very interesting avenues of strategy exploration; with bosses always a little tougher than you are the hope is you might wipe out a couple times before figuring out a winning strategy.

Lucky egg given early but no exp. share.

higher catch rate on shadow pokemon - since the game would start you out at lvl 25 and honestly this is just an anti-frustration feature

Again, level scaling can be turned off for a more traditional experience, but the idea would be that the levels would get pretty high pretty fast, and by midgame you’d be going up against lvl 55s and stuff (just enough to start encountering some salamences and flygons), hopefully ending the game in the 80′s.

Pokedex -> strategy memo, and seen = obtained. Strategy memo actually contains opinions from the player character rather than just standard “animal facts” type stuff.

No routes! Just cities! Pokespots still in effect to limit the player’s pool of usable pokemon.

Missed pokemon integrated with pokespots or maybe made un-faintable so you have to catch them because i’m really not that good at programming guys

SETTINGS:

Orre is a cold desert. I know technically it’s based on the Arizona desert, and I’ve been there, but friggin look at the fashion, these people would all get heatstrokes in a matter of seconds.

So to that end, my orre is actually based on the Atacama Desert, whose topography not only resembles Orre’s (volcanic mountains on one side, ocean on the other), but is a cold desert (with daytime temperatures peaking around 60 degrees F) and is considered the driest desert in the world, with some places having not seen rain in centuries, having been compared to Mars in regards to how uninhabitable it is.

you know, like how apparently wild pokemon can’t survive in orre except at the pokespots.

also the orre colosseum looks just like the atacama hand and i dont think that’s a coincidence

canyons, oases, underground rivers and deep underground cave systems, forests to the northeast and a coast that’s actually somewhat habitable via fog collection

THE UNDER IS BACK

gateon renamed Io Port (the japanese name) to go with the gem/mineral naming scheme of the rest of the game. Plaque added outside lighthouse reading “Io Lighthouse” (GEDDIT)

cipher key lair being torn down by reformed eldes, working with lovrina and gorigan, in order to create an amusement park, hopefully to be an international tourist attraction of the more innocent variety than realgam

Areas given a name. Desert is orre desert, northwest forest is Tempor Forest, mountain range is Kabla Mountains, keeping in line with Eclo Canyon

A new town named Appoak, one of those aforementioned fog-collection coastal villages, which has the distinct honor of being the place you buy your wildflower seeds, which are often scattered in the desert as funerary rites because it’s kind of hard to build a grave out there and this is a tradition that natives of orre held long before the settlers/miners came in and which has overtaken the settlers/miners’ traditions, especially during and after the starvation riots that happened after the majority of the mines ran dry and the companies stopped sending their support to the workers that were now effectively stranded in one of the harshest environments on the planet.

Dead were littered on the streets, no one had the ability to bury them all, and so the tradition of scattering flower seeds instead of erecting graves that would simply be wiped out in the next sandstorm (and have you ever tried to dig a hole in dry sand) became popular since it felt like more closure

Anyways Appoak cultivates desert flowers year-round and sells the seeds and performs funerary rites, as a result it’s considered something of a sacred locale in that no one wants to mess with it because you have no idea who you might be pissing off whose loved one was buried with Appoak rites

CHARACTERS:

Michael, 5 years later, now 18 (in xd he’s called an “unknown teen” by ONBS and honestly he’s so short that i’d feel bad if he was older than 13 at the time of the game) is your player character! Trainer class Lab Kid, with a cool hover-scooter, who is now officially a staff member at the Lab HQ as a result of reaching adulthood (though he’s been helping out with field research long before that.)

Your starter is a sylveon, level 25, because this Michael is not a blank-slate character, and sylveon is both in character and doesn’t conflict with any choice of eeveelution from the first game. In fact, this michael made it through the entirety of the first game without evolving his Eevee, like an absolute madman.

Lily and Jovi start the game off overseas giving lectures on shadowfication and purification, mostly so that i don’t have to create their sprites. But also because them leaving is an excuse for them to take all your pokemon from the first game with them, for “demonstration purposes,” leaving you with just your eeveelution and maybe some second pokemon-i-don’t-know-what-yet-probably-your-choice-of-any-starter so you can hurry up and get to the double battles without sacrificing an ability to make a choice on your starter.

Wes is in the game and he is an asshole and you will love him

Cail actually serves a plot purpose

Cameos from all your favorite admins and named characters from Colo/XD, most of which remain unfought until either late or post-game (because the focus is on the new story, you know?)

Miror B and flunkies at Io Port, the proud owners of a popular and, more importantly, lucrative new ludicolo dance act.

Eldes, trying to make up for his past, sponsoring an amusement park being worked on by Lovrina and her brother, with Gorigan overseeing the construction. Snattle offhandedly mentioned as having been elected governer by default (no one else was running) and helping with greenlighting these projects since he and eldes are, apparently, sand-golf buddies and eldes has been twisting his ear for the greater good

also eldes wears a dress shirt with hawaiian print on it

Dakim lives on mt battle now

not as, like, part of the mt battle challenge. he just . sorta. lives there.

Venus is now the onbs weather girl and onbs can’t decide whether they like her or hate her

the jail squad: greevil, nascour, and evice. They’re poker buddies. orre jail for the rich is basically a retirement home because orre is ridiculously corrupt.

ardos? ein? well...

PLOT

So, your field assignment is to collect samples of M18 - also known in Almia by the name of “Dark Crystal” and sometimes colloquially referred to as “shadow crystal” in Orre - for research.

As you probably already assumed, this stuff works as a catalyst for shadowfication and Orre happens to be supernaturally abundant, though it having been strip-mined out by cipher during the last two cipher events has made it much rarer (and it’s theorized by NPCs that the return of wild pokemon may have something to do with the lessened M18 presence).

touching it initiates a small flashback cutscene, as it’s apparently transformed from normal quartz into M18 by the abundance of negative feelings somehow (again, you’re collecting it for study) so that’s how we get some nice backstory about michael’s dead dad (who isn’t eldes, sorry guys, he’s a guy named Prof. Taiga because - haha - Taiga Lily) and other characters

Somehow this investigation leads you to the first rumblings of a resurgence of cipher, who is also collecting M18, though for much more nefarious purposes

So, anyways, in XD, when you beat ardos in the orre colosseum, he sent you a creepy-ass email declaring that he’s basically gonna stalk you forever and kill you during cipher’s - what, third? - third coming, which he’s totally gonna do. Sequel hook! which comes true! because HELLO, your opponent is Ardos, who’s been working in secret this whole time, plotting your demise.

Also ein is there, which is important because...

QUICK HEADCANON BREAK

In colosseum, Cipher specifically targets Celebi because they know celebi’s power is directly tied with undoing shadowfication. (Material in-game suggests that celebi has been responsible for purification for generations of rui’s family, which means cipher didn’t INVENT shadowfication, but they did create a method for doing it ARTIFICIALLY)

However, in XD, cipher doesn’t target agate at ALL. they never even step foot in it. In fact, they’re so woefully underinformed about purification that they feel the need to kidnap Prof. Krane over it.

How does that happen?

Well, we know cipher in game 2 is the main branch, and cipher in game 1 is actually just an orre side branch. Whose only real plan with shadow pokemon was just to rig up really exciting and morally inexcusable colosseum matches for rich people to bet on. No world domination in game one!

So my theory is this: Cipher orre branch created shadowfication basically on a whim and tried to make money off it, which you stopped. When you stopping it attracted attention, cipher main branch had to take notice, and realized that, hey - fucking shadow pokemon ,fuckin world domination, right??? so they promptly took over all of cipher orre branch’s operations and replaced the old personnel with new ones from main branch, while forcing them to hand over their research.

Ein did not take being fired well.

In fact, he took it so poorly that he made sure to destroy all his information on purification before handing over his research.

Cipher in game 2 has no idea the connection between Celebi and purification.

BACK TO THE PLOT

Because Ein has been re-hired by Cipher, he brought with him his knowledge of purification.

They know about celebi.

Also wes is there? He plays a major role, mostly after it’s revealed he’s actually a cipher admin.

...His eevee and espeon are missing.

time travel shenanigans idk

it rains at the climax for the first time in 10 years!

this is a wip

if this is interesting to you guys lmk! im always open to talking about it more in-depth or hearing ideas. hahah...

#pokemon xd #pokemon colosseum #prowler i think is the name for that trainer class #stalker or tracker maybe

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monstercomics-blog1 · 7 years

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