Lepton's Quest Sorta Done-ish

[rustybroomhandle]

http://indiesquish.com/leptons-quest/

The Ludum Dare game I mentioned elsewhere in this forum has now been finished. Well, mostly. I pretty much just brought it up to what the intended scope was for the competition.

The story is still completely linear, loads of animations can be added, some descriptions and commentary from the main character could also be added.

I'll make a post about streamlining workflows later on. For future LD projects I will be using a tool I am currently working on that makes it easier to add areas to scenes. It's web-based and I will make it so that anyone can use it. At the moment you can load a backdrop and .flo file, then add your areas and move/resize them on screen. The "walk to" coords can also be defined by dragging a marker around.

It's going to be a bit centered around me own habits, ie always having a character walk a few steps when entering a scene, but it's just php/mysql so I guess anyone will be able to adapt it.

It creates code that can be cut & pasted. All areas go in a sub... ie. "sub bedroomAddAreas()" and all the relevant object types are created with some predefined actions in there.

Anyhoo, next LD will go a lot smoother!

It was interesting to see how SLUDGE handles the massive sprite-banks this game has, especially the battle animations. The main character's battle animations is 30MB, weeee!

[Trumgottist]

Congratulations! (I'll look at the game later.)

It was interesting to see how SLUDGE handles the massive sprite-banks this game has, especially the battle animations. The main character's battle animations is 30MB, weeee!

Did you notice any issues with that?

[rustybroomhandle]

Did you notice any issues with that?

They take a noticable second or two to load into memory, but play smoothly once they have. In the case of the main character's battle animations, it only hiccups at the first encounter and is fine beyond that. The project is set to 20fps.

[BigMc]

Here it took closer to a minute. Is it possible to load the animation at startup? Also, did anybody else have issues with the video playback (sound stuttering)?

EDIT: When the animation is loaded, the memory usage increases by circa 500 MB so that my memory became full and other things had to be written to the hd first.

[ad7venture]

It took a long time to load animations on the first chicken, but after that, it didn't take any.  The fights improved the game quite a bit, however, I died while I still had two hearts left and felt sort of cheated.  Also, there is no way to get to the menu or out of the game that I could see once in it.  Pretty nice improvements all in all.  Kind of interesting because I'm replaying Betrayal at Krondor right now, which I think was one of the best rpg's ever written.  I think they work better with a story and turn based fighting like they used to do.

[rustybroomhandle]

I can't find any built-in way to preload animations, but what might work is a loading screen with all animations being loaded/played somewhere hidden.

As for dying with two hearts. That's prolly just the dying happening before the hearts update to reflect your deadness.

I doubt I'll be fiddling with this much more in future. It was quite educational though. I'll try and finish the tool I mentioned to make the creation of screen areas easier. 

Preview:
http://i.imgur.com/h4hPu.jpg

[Trumgottist]

Also, did anybody else have issues with the video playback (sound stuttering)?

I didn't have that, but I got stuttering sound in movies (and mod-music) today when I upgraded to the latest Alure. Maybe that was the same issue you had, as Linux has been on the later Alure version for a long time, and it's only I that's a bit behind?
Lowering the update interval took care of it. (As you know, I'm now rewriting the sound system anyway, so things will change, but I found it interesting to note.)

[BigMc]

Yes, I used Alure 1.2 all the time.

[xenogia]

Also, did anybody else have issues with the video playback (sound stuttering)?

I didn't have that, but I got stuttering sound in movies (and mod-music) today when I upgraded to the latest Alure. Maybe that was the same issue you had, as Linux has been on the later Alure version for a long time, and it's only I that's a bit behind?
Lowering the update interval took care of it. (As you know, I'm now rewriting the sound system anyway, so things will change, but I found it interesting to note.)

Just to let you know I had sound stuttering in the video playback.  But that could be due to this severely underpowered work machine.

[Trumgottist]

I've not finished work on the new sound system I mentioned above. (On my computer, I don't get any sound at all from movies at the moment.) But it will be fixed in the next version. (No, I don't have any estimate on when that'll be.)