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[devlog] hopefully a game

A topic by bananamilk created Jul 17, 2016 Views: 633 Replies: 12
Viewing posts 1 to 8
(1 edit)

hi!! i have absolutely no experience making games and i'm joining the party over a week late ; v;
i love rpgmaker games and would like to make one but alas i have a mac so i'm using Stencyl
as beneficial as the tutorials would be i am incapable of .. staying concentrated on them.. and so i've been struggling for the past day trying to get in basic rpg-style functions myself :,)

last night: scribbling out a v e r y temporary sprite and tileset and getting the little guy to walk

today, so far: making a lil box in front of him to detect if he can speak/examine stuff in front of him (i dont think this is how actual rpgs do it?) and making a prompt thing pop up when he can; putting off figuring out how to do dialogue/text.....

-- TO DO --

  • dialogue system
  • menu/inventory
  • map transitions
  • figure out quests? conditions to make story progress u kno
  • actual characters/plot/assets but that can wait till the game works lol


(hopefully, if i get anywhere near finishing, the graphics will look nothing like this at all)

Host

ohhh i love your art so far!!! i've actually used the square-detector myself so i couldn't tell you if that's right or wrong (it served my purpose fine!)

THank you!! it seems like itll work fine so i shall hope for the best :>

Submitted (1 edit)

I tried using Stencyl but I couldn't wrap my head around its lego-block "coding" system, which made me sad since it seems like a pretty solid tool. Kudos to you for powering through it.

A square detector seems like a perfectly fair way to go around it. You need a way to confirm "is there a thing in front of me?" A box in front of you that detects if there's a thing seems like, well, the solution.

Your trees seem... upset.

ty! yeah the block code interface is taking me a while to get used to but it seems pretty flexible for doing stuff at least
and lol the trees.. i'll see to their emotional state someday..

Submitted

hey this looks neat!

UPDATE


after many grueling hours of failed attempts i can now pass in a list of text and have it display one line at a time when you press Z !!!!!
(ended up moving the dialogue testing to a separate map to make it easier on myself)

some things i tried that didnt work out:

> Stencyl's draw functions include putting text on the screen so ofc that's the first thing i tried but those were impossible to use so i switched to labels (a rly nice dialogue extension exists for Stencyl but the repo for it isnt working so i cant install it!!!!!!! anger)
> it's cute when the text 'types' onto the screen itself so i thought i could try that by converting each line of text into a list of characters and have it print each character one at a time but that got convoluted fast so i dropped it for the time being since it's purely decorative

one thing i'm angry about right now!
obviously if the text is going to be on top of the player screen, u gotta have a text box to put the words in right? so i tried doing that multiple ways using a text box object with a plain rectangle sprite, drawing a rectangle with the draw function using the dialogue object, same thing with a new object, but i can't get the box to disappear with the dialogue after it's finished. most of my attempts involved basing the text box's visibility on a boolean (is dialogue happening? t/f) and the logic seemed to make sense to me but somehow the boolean wasn't changing to false at the end of the dialogue idk man!! suggestions are welcome as i continue to fight this very sad and small problem (i wouldve expected the text part to take longer but somehow this little rectangle is giving me more issues lmao cries )


NEXT
if i figure out this text box thing then next will be getting the dialogue system to work with the actual player pressing Z in front of an NPC and setting conditions for what dialogue is shown!

(+1)

UPDATE


first off, i found out the problem with the text boxes from before! it was a small easy fix but i somehow didn't notice the problem before. basically when passing in lines from a dialogue list i forgot to set the last line's index as (length of dialogue list) - 1
also i somewhat understand getting/setting attributes between actors in Stencyl now so that helps in doing stuff!!

and now the most exciting thing!!!! (tho my excitement is dulled bc it is the middle of the night and i am Exhausted TM) i think i have a very very basic simple dialog thing working now! not really sure about its scope though - i havent tested it with multiple npc's and conditions yet :

i didnt start this game till i knew i had consecutive days off because i get really wrapped up in projects and will just devote 90% of my time to them... that being said the past 2 days have whooshed by and i havent left my laptop for more than 10 minutes at a time omg... and figuring out the right programming is so frustrating when u cant get it but when something FINALLY works .. it's like.. gl ory GLORY HALLELUJAH and those moments have been nice ( ´ ◡ ` )

right now all the graphics and dialogue and maps and positions and basically everything is temporary because i'm still focusing on implementing actual working rpg functions but the further i get with that the more i realize that starting off with the assets i plan to use would have been ..much more efficient... so i don't think i'll be able to get to any actual plot/storyline by the end of the jam but i will still hope to have at least one map where you can just explore and interact with things!


NEXT
more testing of dialogue and maybe making a lil inventory!

Submitted

I can relate to the joys of seeing something finally work after some tedium. I guess programming isn't quite like art or music, but the thrills of creation are there all the same, you know?

Of course, there's also the similar feeling: the uneasy feeling when something works but when you examine the code you aren't sure why it does...

A 'tech demo' of wandering and interacting is still impressive work, especially for a week's time and learning your tools from scratch. You should be pleased with yourself.

yeah that feel man..
and thank you for the encouragement!!! <3

another quick gif bc new placeholder npc for testing and also it should not be spinning like that lol

Submitted

looks pretty good to me

Host

great work figuring out the dialogue stuff!! it can be tricky to remember that sometimes arrays + other stuff will start with 0 but once you do it a couple times you start to get the hang of it. this is looking awesome!