2024

September

New elephant which will hopefully get a better drinking animation. The model was changed to accommodate the drinking.



Need to be put in the game but that requires a shift in position towards the hole/water.




On my holliday I've drawn 73 marbles and 66 small trees.
In September I was making a seperate Demo game for the Marble part of Mazeland.
In Mazeland you can earn marbles when solving the puzzles.

You can play a marble game in mazeland where you have to put (5) marbles in a hole.
Maybe a high-score or a (turn-based) multiplayer aspect .. we will see
These are 'just' 53 marbles to start testing the physics engine:

August


Another go for different rocks




Smooth pushing IS possible, but I've to rewrite a lot of stuff again !!!

Using GreenSock Animation Platform, which gives me more control over the animations.

But it is actually a viewport issue that is causing the bad push effects ...




July

Water and Hole Demo




Make the 'default' rocks (rock.png, rock02.png, rock0x.png lighter and semi-transparent pixel at the base




Different rocks


June

This month I've been working on the Engine and an Editor.

May

The results of the LD55 came in and I rated 202th place on Audio. So that investigation time 'paid' out since it was the highest ranking I ever had on audio.
Graphics is a little better and overallit was the highest place I've got : 258th place(from 462).

Starting to work on rewriting engine.
Benchmarked the earlier assumption on animations on iPad1

Benchmark DOM versus Canvas

April

In April I entered the Ludum Dare 55 compo.
I wanted to use the current state of the game engine to see if it was ready for making games

Also, I wanted to test the multiplayer code

Ludum Dare 55 : Summoning Elements


What I've learned:
  • The game engine did not scale well. On laptop screens the lower part of the screen was not visible.
  • Pushing buttons conflicted with the game state where the mouse events where made for game-states and not for menu-states
  • Multiplayer was way too slow when more than 2 concurrent players where active
  • Luckily some twitch streamer wanted to play the game while some other players where watching the stream.
    We ended up with 4 people online and it wasn't responsive anymore


    Conclusion:
  • The engine needs a rewrite to handle all devices and scaling
  • New approach to multiplayer will be a focus on a moveable area where others can't come into the area and your input can be done without server interaction.
    April was used to prepare for Ludum Dare by constructing light-weight-client server code to be used in LD
    Also investigating MIDI and learning some music theory

    March

    When switching players we show a menu where the switchingplayer in appears.


    Attempt to make the player character stand out better. Using borders:

    I find without still better:

    Currently I'm deciding on switching by mouse and zooming using a zoom-bar.

    This needs to be extensively tested during game-play.

    The switching between characters needs a smooth transition.

    February


    Starting in 2023 I've worked on zooming code : worldview display.
    The player is fixed on the screen and all the objects are moving ' with ' the player
    Also, switching between the different characters and introducing the characters is very important.
    If you have a large overview of the level you don't realize what the different characters are. The zooming will help with that

    Also a Javascript rewrite was needed since the pushing animations needed more pixels to overlap the pushed object.
    Just adjusting the sprite with extra pixels gave a glitch on the world view.

    Because we will zoom we need better resolution for the images.
    I had 96x96 images and I need to re-scan all the images to match 256x256 pixels.

    Initial zoom demonstration


    And a better pushing in zoom-state (the previous version had more pushing pixels in larger zoom states)