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Shantae Swing n' Sway

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Post by MikeHarvey Sun Aug 18, 2013 5:13 pm

I'm giving the score window a fancier background, to go along with the fancier text that will be in game. That was just a temp art I reused since it was already made for the beat meter.

As for the animation system... I was thinking of making Shantae dance once per beat depending on the starting position of the spotlight for that Beat Bar (aka the starting position of the first dance bar within the Beat Bar). This also means that there will be 5 types of dances to represent the Up, Down, Left, Right, and Center position on the Dance Floor/stage.

1st Question: What will you need art wise to work with when creating a demo for this game? I'm not sure how long the animations or the rest the other art like text and menu tabs of the songs will take me, but I'm working on it all now. Also, I forgot to mention earlier that I really like the idea of using difficulty settings to adjust accuracy instead of making extra tracks per song.

2nd Question: How soon do you think you could get started on the programing? I'm thinking that maybe I should just focus on the artwork and animations, since programing has been a very confusing process for me. I'm realizing that I'm not cut out for it sadly, and I'd rather let a pro like you handle it.

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Post by .Luke Sun Aug 18, 2013 7:40 pm

Ah, okay. ^^ I imagine some delicate graphics sitting behind the score's text, then.

Oh, I meant more about the animation system's inner workings, but it's good to know there will be five possible dance moves; that would be a smaller workload for the game overall too. I'm more curious whether the sprites will be single vectors, or animated pieces working like a doll. If you planned on taking the former route, we should have more than enough RAM on most machines to play with for it to not be a problem, even if they were HD-sized. (Unless the animations used a relatively high number of frames, which it might need to stay fluid and beautiful at 60FPS.)

I imagine those would be the only animations of Shantae in-game, besides maybe reactionary movements before and after the song? (Imagine Shantae bowing before the crowd to start, or hopping eagerly to start dancing. She could also be ecstatic if she succeeded, or look adorably embarrassed if she screwed up too much for the win.)

Before I sidetrack too much, yeah, I'll answer those questions.

MikeHarvey wrote:1st Question: What will you need art wise to work with when creating a demo for this game? I'm not sure how long the animations or the rest the other art like text and menu tabs of the songs will take me, but I'm working on it all now. Also, I forgot to mention earlier that I really like the idea of using difficulty settings to adjust accuracy instead of making extra tracks per song.
The bulk of the game's backend (Reading from INI for beat arrangements, timings, executing them on the screen, etc.) wouldn't need any animations beforehand to start work, but when it comes to information on the screen, I can use sprite rips of Shantae's GBC dancing sprites upscaled to 2x as a reference where your own animations are missing; that way I know if the movement system, animation system, elements of the HUD, and other things under the hood, are all behaving together as one. Your own assets can slowly replace their GBC-ripped counterparts as you make them.

Of course, this stage of the engine would not be shared publicly, since it would be guaranteed to have bugs, and visually painful on the eyes.

MikeHarvey wrote:2nd Question: How soon do you think you could get started on the programing? I'm thinking that maybe I should just focus on the artwork and animations, since programing has been a very confusing process for me. I'm realizing that I'm not cut out for it sadly, and I'd rather let a pro like you handle it.
I'm a bit weighed down with art, much the same as last year, but I may have gotten a better handle of it. I've actually supposed to have been working on a Shantae GBC-like engine in Game Maker for TEG since I finished this sheet of Blaze a while ago, but I haven't been wanting to boot into Windows 7 to use Game Maker lately. I did find a way to skin Win7 without patching the UXtheme.dll, so hopefully Win7's ugliness without Aero (Got tired of constant CPU spikes from it.) won't get in my way pretty soon.

There's also the issue of us using different versions of Game Maker as well. If this doesn't go HD, then the whole thing could be handled on Game Maker 5.3a on my end, and with a little effort, it could be ported over to Game Maker Studio, so you can compile the game for MAC platforms as well. But if anti-aliasing in the APNG format is needed, and we need to take the HD route, I'm still strapped for cash to buy Studio myself, so my ability to collaborate would be a little complicated until I'm working.

Granted, the differences in syntax between modern and classic versions of Game maker are virtually minuscule, but when it comes to sprites and views, the differences are pretty obvious in GML. (For instance, view_left controls the x coordinates of the screen by its left border in Game Maker 5.3a and below, while view_x in later versions does the exact same thing in 6.0 and beyond.)

That shouldn't be a problem porting to Studio for your end, though, because I can tell you exactly what lines to patch so the game engine will boot. The really sticky problem will be how graphic assets are called on the inside. If you want the game to boot in a flash, without the annoying loading screen typical in most Game Maker games, you'll have to call all of the assets externally, including the music and sound effects. When Game Maker only has objects and code to unload into memory, the boot time for the program itself is near-instantaneous. (Much like any game coded in C++.) Assets internally can be fast as well, but since they're encrypted and compressed in the game binary, there's a delay in committing it to memory, so loading assets from outside the binary is considerably faster.

I don't remember the syntax for calling resources being any different between versions of Game Maker, so hopefully that won't be an issue, and you won't have to get your hands dirty. However, I can make sure the dummy resources match the dimensions and center of axis with your own assets. Then you won't have to manually touch that code at all, besides to swap out some GIF extensions for PNG ones.

Although as I've said, you won't have to do much more than patch specific lines of code between source builds I send. But if the process is predictable enough, I can make the changes myself before sending the source file, so you wouldn't have do much besides import it to Game Maker, and test run; this would really only complicate fixing bugs, now that I think about it. Hopefully in the coming months I'll be working, and none of this will have to be considered if we want this done in HD.
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Post by MikeHarvey Sun Aug 18, 2013 10:36 pm

About the animation system... I'm thinking single vector images, not doll style. I didn't concider other animations other than the dances yet, but I'll be sure to try and fit the before and after ones in. Maybe an animation of Shantae in the menu screen sitting and waiting patiently while the song is being selected?

I think with all the work going in this project it might be better to have everything being internal now. I don't really mind loading up everything needed for the gameplay. I think I had confused "loading" for "slowdown". I'm not gonna lie, with all the work going in it, it would be a shame if something happened to the external files, that could effect the in game events.

Also, I've been paying close attention to Flash Flash Revolution lately. They have it setup so that a player could sign in and keep a hold of there records or just play as a guest. They even have a forum. To be honest, I would love it if Shantae Swing n' Sway could be online like FFR is...

Which asks the question...

Would it be possible to make this game for the web? Like through HTML5? The best example I can think of a web based rhythm game is FlashFlashRevolution. I highly recommend checking it out if you haven't seen or heard of it.

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Post by .Luke Sun Aug 18, 2013 11:51 pm

I think that's a cute idea, with Shantae waiting for the player to choose the song. And I had no idea know you didn't have other animations planned yet, but given the nature of the game, it shouldn't be more than 8 or 9 animations over all. I also remember the document mentioning her moving about the whole stage too, so would she simply leap to the next spot to dance in, or walk to each one?

Okay, good to know you don't mind the game pre-loading most of the assets. After all the time I've been working with my Sonic engine, none of my external assets were randomly destroyed, since the engine mostly reads the files instead of writes to them. There's honestly a bigger risk of losing everything if the GMK source file gets corrupted, but if you keep backups obsessively, it's nothing to worry about. Still, it's an easily understandable concern, and leaving most of those game resources out in the open probably isn't a good idea anyway; people love to scavenge game content for their own uses, for inappropriate uses or not. While there are tools to open compiled binaries of Game Maker games, or at least older binaries, (I'm not sure if those old tools can read the encryption and compression used in modern versions of Game Maker.) I don't imagine too many people know about them.

This dramatically simplifies how the game handles sprites and resources, compared to external. An arcade game is very simple in nature anyway, so whether it's HD or not, there won't be a vast multitude of resources to load, like with a full single player game. Swing n' Sway would have a noticeable load time, but it wouldn't be weighted down with tons of bloat. I don't imagine it would be a very long time for the game to load on most systems.

I would recommend at least keeping the songs external, since Game Maker make a nasty hiccups when loading up songs for play. (Unless newer versions of Game Maker has the option to pre-load songs?) By having it external, you can manually pre-load the song before you need it to play, preventing the hiccup. And if you have tons of music, like several tracks, the loading time for the game's startup will be a lot longer too if it has to load the entire OST too.

What format do you want the music in, by the way? I typically use OGG because it's a free, open source format with better bass preservation, and can handle higher bit-rates than MP3. (Compare MP3's max 320kb to OGG's 500kb, in my experience.) But if MP3s are all that's available for the songs you want to use, converting them to OGG wouldn't give us the benefits of that come with the format, since they're at the usual 256kb or slightly above. And if there was any transcoding between the two formats, it would water down the quality anyway.

Also, yes, Game Maker Studio does have an HTML5 option for compiling games, if you don't mind the heavy price tag, but not too many tools like Game Maker or Unity have fully mature toolkits for HTML5 yet. From what I'm told, loading times can be a huge pain the neck, for one. Game Maker might be an exceptional case, but I'd ask around the Game Maker Community, (Or search around the forums for related topics.) for a more informed opinion than mine, on how well the HTML5 exporter option handles web content.

Another option would be to setup your own server, if you have a domain, for the downloaded game client to access high score boards and names, but that would probably be a pain and half to create the server's Java script end from scratch alone, then there's figuring out how the game would ping the server and request the appropriate data, as well as sending new data if a score goes above the highest. This is definitely not my area, but it's fully possible.

On the subject of scores, how would the locally kept version of the game save game scores? I'm thinking about researching, and asking around, about using a basic, encrypted binary file in the working directory for storing score numbers and names, since you don't want people opening an INI file to edit the values themselves, especially if unlockables or an online leader board is attached.
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Post by MikeHarvey Tue Aug 20, 2013 2:27 am

Hmmm... I didn't think about how the scores would be kept... I just asumed it would be a save file or in the case of an online game, an account that players would have to sign in for. I'm starting to realize that there's a lot of things that i didn't consider.

On the topic of saving, log-ins, and making this a web game... I've been looking at videos on youtube about making web games with html5, but its WAY over my head. I could talk to a friend of mine thats really good at making websites and knows about web design, domains, and applications. I've been thinking about getting him on board with this project for a while now since he also has a better understanding of music than I do.

One thing that keeps popping in and out of my mind is making this a "Facebook Game App", but I know for sure that WayForward would not only have to back this fan game (which could happen) but I believe they would have to create the Facebook app themselves. Im' not sure what there policy on that is (if there even is a policy for this kind of situation). I guess it wouldn't hurt for me to ask...

2 more things...

About controls (mouse, keyboard, joystick, and touch controls)... I know I wanted to focus on just the one control scheme for the first demo, but I can't help but wonder how keyboard, joystick, and touch controls would function in this game. I guess talking about it now would be better than later.

Finally, what do you think of this rough animation? I know the upper body doesn't move much, but I'm going the tackle that head on in the final version. It would be much easier for me that way because most of the upper body movement (like hair, arm, breast, etc...) would simply bop up and down or side 2 side. This is my first complex animation (aka something more than just a shape tween or text tween).

Shantae Swing n' Sway - Page 2 Dylusz

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Post by Paragon-Yoshi Tue Aug 20, 2013 4:24 am

Interesting talk between you two.
Entertaining to read all this. Kitty Face


Awesome animation, Mike.
Be sure to hone those skills.
I can clearly see you as an animator. Extra Smile
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Post by MikeHarvey Tue Aug 20, 2013 9:45 am

Thanks! I got a long way to go before I can really call myself an animator, but I'm making progress. I'll work on the final version this week.

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Post by .Luke Tue Aug 20, 2013 7:10 pm

MikeHarvey wrote:Shantae Swing n' Sway - Page 2 Dylusz
I'm kinda tempted to showcase that on the Fans Portal's blog, because that is so full of squees. Like, more cute than I was expecting from seeing this in animation. The charms of this art style really comes out when it's in motion.

MikeHarvey wrote:2 more things...

About controls (mouse, keyboard, joystick, and touch controls)... I know I wanted to focus on just the one control scheme for the first demo, but I can't help but wonder how keyboard, joystick, and touch controls would function in this game. I guess talking about it now would be better than later.

Finally, what do you think of this rough animation? I know the upper body doesn't move much, but I'm going the tackle that head on in the final version. It would be much easier for me that way because most of the upper body movement (like hair, arm, breast, etc...) would simply bop up and down or side 2 side. This is my first complex animation (aka something more than just a shape tween or text tween).
Yeah, tackling portions of the animation one limb at a time is one way to do it. ^^ That's kinda how I handle my own animations too.

As for controls, perfecting keyboard controls initially for testing would be best, because the mouse might be less predictable to implement, but those controls will come in line right after making sure we can debug and test the game properly with keyboard keys. Touch devices, on the other hand, I don't have a tablet yet, so my experience with them is close to nothing for the moment, although it should act as a general pointing device by finger use, (It's a different story with the pen.) so having usable mouse controls will be a desirable side-benefit for tablets and touch screens.

MikeHarvey wrote:One thing that keeps popping in and out of my mind is making this a "Facebook Game App", but I know for sure that WayForward would not only have to back this fan game (which could happen) but I believe they would have to create the Facebook app themselves. Im' not sure what there policy on that is (if there even is a policy for this kind of situation). I guess it wouldn't hurt for me to ask...
While Facebook would be easier than hosting your own domain, and updating server-side code on occasion, I cringe at the thought of it being posted on there. WayForward certainly isn't a major publisher, but the barriers of getting a game pitch through the door may not be legally possible for the average fan. Here's an email that was sent to Andrew75, when he offered up his recreation of Sonic Xtreme to SEGA. (Sounds foolhardy from the get-go, but his proposal made some shred of sense in context, or at least the proposal itself did. He was playing with fire on Retro to suggest Kickstart funding it, obviously.)

SEGA wrote:
Jeff, May 30 11:09 (PDT):
Hello,

We appreciate the creativity and effort of all our fans, but unfortunately we cannot directly accept unsolicited proposals for games or other products from the general public. We hope this doesn't discourage you from pursuing your goals as an artist or designer.
However, if WayForward is more open than SEGA is, I'm sure the Game Maker version would serve as a nice, playable prototype for the pitch, since, knowing their technology standards, they'll want something more under the hood than what we can accomplish in Game Maker, especially if it wound up becoming a standalone digital release online, not just as a mere HTML5 game that takes a headdesk's worth of time to download and run. They'll likely reinvent the wheel with the same assets and then some, I'd think.

Not sure how much creative control you'd have at that point, though; there's no telling what will happen when you send it to them, or someone inside WayForward more approachable than the company email.
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Post by EdwardFalcon Fri Sep 06, 2013 3:12 pm

This song needs to be added to the set list XD


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Post by .Luke Sun Sep 15, 2013 7:56 am

Is that a Michael Jackson song? Twisted Evil 

Anyway, that song might be playing too slow for the project, however. Harvey's mostly looking out for the faster songs that maintain an average of 120BPM, if I recall correctly.

Also, I've recently been playing tons around with strings, and I realized that I won't need an INI file for storing rhythm combos. This means your entire game project can be stored internally, with nothing that can be tweaked from the outside. We can store all of the characters in a string, (Imagine a human readable '^<A>vB>^', converted into real values that the computer can read, like so : '13542631'.) and read them by increments of one character at a time. So on the controls side of things, we can record what moves the player is performing, and if its converted real value matches the required command, (Also a number stored in a real value.) it triggers a successful combo.

Here's an example of what I've got right now, fiddled with to represent how this can also be applied to dance transformations in a normal Shantae platformer, and this code works.

Code:

//Dance Bar
if Player.dance=1 {draw_sprite(spr_dance,dance_timer,view_left[0]+74,view_top[0]+128)
dance_timer+=0.042 if dance_timer>3 {dance_timer=0; combo_allow=0; Player.dance_move=0;}

//If we are dancing, record the dance moves being used.
if dance_timer>1 and combo_allow=0 {

switch (Player.animation) {
case 19: {dance_position=0;  combo_allow+=1; dance_move=' '; dance_combo=' '; break;}
case 20: {dance_position+=1; combo_allow+=1; dance_move='1'; dance_combo=string_insert(dance_move,dance_combo,dance_position); break;}  //Dance Move Up
case 21: {dance_position+=1; combo_allow+=1; dance_move='2'; dance_combo=string_insert(dance_move,dance_combo,dance_position); break;}  //Dance Move Left
case 22: {dance_position+=1; combo_allow+=1; dance_move='3'; dance_combo=string_insert(dance_move,dance_combo,dance_position); break;}  //Dance Move Down
case 23: {dance_position+=1; combo_allow+=1; dance_move='4'; dance_combo=string_insert(dance_move,dance_combo,dance_position); break;}  //Dance Move Right
case 24: {dance_position+=1; combo_allow+=1; dance_move='5'; dance_combo=string_insert(dance_move,dance_combo,dance_position); break;}  //Dance Move A
case 25: {dance_position+=1; combo_allow+=1; dance_move='6'; dance_combo=string_insert(dance_move,dance_combo,dance_position); break;}} //Dance Move B

}//End of Dance Animations Check

//If we have played the right arrangement of moves, activate their assigned skins.
dance_skin=real(dance_combo)
switch(dance_skin) {
case 34: {Player.dance_transform=1 Player.dance=0 scr_dance_flush(); break;} //Monkey Form Transformation
case 32: {Player.dance_transform=2 Player.dance=0 scr_dance_flush(); break;} //Elephant Form Transformation
case 35: {Player.dance_transform=3 Player.dance=0 scr_dance_flush(); break;} //Spider Form Transformation
case 36: {Player.dance_transform=4 Player.dance=0 scr_dance_flush(); break;} //Harpy Form Transformation
}//End of Skin Activation Check

}//End of Dance Check
Notice that it's clearing the dance_combo string with an empty one, and restarts the reading position for character insertion, when Shantae is idle. However, if Shantae triggers a dance move during the window of opportunity that you're allowed to start a dance move, (i.e, the highlighted star on the HUD.) this check is not started yet, allowing Shantae to type in more numbers into the string with each dance move.

Then, outside of that code bracket, it's also checking with another switch statement to see if Shantae has the right characters typed into the string. (Which is all typed in numbers, and converted back into a real, readable value for the case statements.) If she has, the Player object is told which transformation it should be given with a real value, stops its dance check variable, and starts a script that effectively resets all of the dance variables in this code snippet, causing it to stop until Select is pressed again.

Once I'm done with a points commission, and another small project, I can't wait to fully throw myself at the engine for this game.
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Post by EdwardFalcon Wed Sep 25, 2013 12:37 pm

.Luke wrote:Is that a Michael Jackson song? Twisted Evil 


No, it's by Prince, and I suggested it because I think the song is sexy and Shantae would look good dancing to it Wink


How about this one?


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