December Update

Monthly status update:  I have no idea when the next release will be ready.  I'm guesstimating spring or summer at the moment.

K, that's out of the way.  I haven't worked on the game much at all this month.  I've mainly just been enjoying my break, re-reading comments, daydreaming about the game, oh, and actually PLAYING some other porn games.  I've found a few I really like too.  I'll puts some links at the bottom of this post if you're curious.

On the upside, the new computer is up & running.  On paper, it's much faster than the old machine, and in many places it really shines.  However, when it comes time to save my work, it takes forever.  At this point I have to assume there's a bug somewhere that's causing Adobe to hang, or perhaps the virus scanner is going crazy & scanning every block before it allows a write.  Whatever it is, I can see that one processor (or core) is running flat out for minutes at a time, while the rest of the machine sits idle.  I guess Adobe needs to multi-thread the save function?  Frustrating, because I can literally copy the entire .fla file in 5 seconds, but Adobe takes upwards of 5 minutes to save the thing.  What's it doing?

I have been tinkering with something however.  Let me attach a picture below.  See if you can figure it out.  ;P

It's not done yet, but yeah, I'm working on alternate color schemes for each of the characters.  Eventually I hope to have a slider bar so you can make your own color combos as well.  Learning to code this has been both fun & incredibly frustrating.  I'll probably rant about it later.  I like the results, but let's just say that Actionscript2 does not handle setting colors well (imo).

This has also served as a nice time to go back & clean up my lines & such.  The hero sprites were some of the first things I drew for the game, which means there was a lot of draw-erase-draw-erase going on.  It's amazing to me how overly complex some of the curves are because of this.  I'll see what looks like a simple curve, but upon close inspection I'll discover it's being defined by 50 points (should be like 3 or 4).  So, I've been fixing that too.  There's a (small) chance that this will result in a faster game for those of you on older PC's, but mainly this is just about me optimizing where I can.  Damn you OCD!!!

OCD: "You know, you should really set her eyebrow color too"

Me: "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU"


So, what have I been playing you ask?  Let me start with Dusty's Castle.  As far as I know, it's the first game that's ever been finished on the LoK forums, so a big congrats to Gorepete.  Gorepete also added a color slider just before the game was done, which pretty much inspired me to try & do my own.  So I reckon that's a double thanks I owe him.

The next game I'm playing is all Japanese.  The only text I can read says Hikaru Senki, which seems to be what folks are calling it.  I call it 'train your Pokemon to be a rapist', which doesn't quite flow off the tongue so well, but leaves little doubt about the gameplay.  Anyway, I was shocked at how much fun it was.  Game boils down to collecting shit & sexing up enemies.  If you're interested, follow this link.  Be sure to scroll down & read all the menu translations, as you'll need to know how to equip & swap weapons & such.

And the last link I'm going to post is a game called pretty warrior may cry.  Other than the 3D, this is almost exactly what I wanted to do for my next game.  So needless to say, playing this was a surreal experience.  It was like playing a game plucked from my dreams, described to someone over the phone, who doesn't actually speak English.  So yeah, I loved it.  No promises you get the same experience.  ;)

Til next time
DirtyC101

Feedback Loop - Part 2

Ok, I said I'd try to sit down & put the rest of my responses together in some coherent manner.  Well of course that didn't happen, so here's another splatter of responses in no particular order.  ;)


Invincible Escapes:  I'm hearing folks ask for some invincibility when escaping from grapples.  I'm slightly against this, mainly because some of the weapons already grant invincibility with their S attack.  The weapons are balanced around this.  So for example the large 2H weapons are kind of slow in their normal attack & have long recoveries, but they also do excellent damage & have fantastic invulnerability with their super move.  I even tried to set it up so that there's (usually) time to swap weapons after an escape.

So if you're the type who likes to jump into large groups, I assume you're going to pick a weapon with a good super for escaping from being surrounded.  This may be a poor assumption on my part, but I can't quite tell from the comments.  I personally think that if you get surrounded by a large group, then you really should be in trouble, so I'm pretty happy with how the mechanics here are working.  About the only change I'm considering here is granting more space if you die & use a continue.

Game Speed:  On my original computer, the game played at about the right speed when I set it to 20 FPS (frames per second).  What I didn't realize was that the game was actually running at ~14 FPS even in empty rooms, because my computer was really slow.  When I moved to my gaming PC, suddenly everything was way too fast, as the game was actually running at 20 FPS.

So sometime between the last two releases, I reset the game speed down to 15 FPS, which should put the game at about the right speed on everyone's PC.  The problem is a few of you already had nice PCs, and got used to the faster game speed.  So now the latest release seems like it's running in slow motion.  I think the solution here is I need to find the FPS command & just make a slider to keep everyone happy.  In the meanwhile, here's the 0.50 release at both 15 FPS (current speed) & 20 FPS (fast speed):

Current Speed
Fast Speed

If you think the game needs to be even faster (or slower), let me know.  Ideally I'll build a slider into the game to let you pick (assuming Flash lets me change this on the fly).

Arrow Respawn Rate:  Okay, let's rewind back to the previous release.  Originally, your body score moved the grapple bar indicator, and spirit controlled how much damage you did.  Although that sounded good on paper, it turned out I didn't like this system for two reasons.  The first was that Lei Lei's sex scenes ended way too fast, and the other was that you couldn't watch the animations because you were constantly staring at the arrows.

So I re-tuned the system quite a bit, with the intent of fixing both these problems.  Now both body & spirit move the bar, but in different ways.   Body still works very similarly, and moves the bar in your favor if your score is higher than your opponent(s).  Spirit moves the indicator by controlling how often the arrows appear.   So if you want to see the arrows appear quickly, you need to raise your spirit score.

That solved the first problem just fine, but it meant that anyone with a high spirit was still playing the 'watch the arrow' game.  So I re-tuned the arrow game a bit as well.  Now the time between arrow respawns is longer for everyone, but the jump on the grapple indicator is also much higher when you complete a series.  It should play almost exactly the same, the difference is you now have more time to watch the animation.  The message I'm hearing is that folks don't like having time to watch the animations.  I find that really hard to believe, although perhaps what they mean is that they want to constantly be doing something.  I'm more inclined to believe that everyone who is complaining is playing Farah, and don't grasp that the penalty for having a low spirit is long delays between arrow respawns.  I can't prove that though, so I'd love to hear some more detailed responses here.

Character balance:  Folks think Farah is more powerful than the other two.  At this exact second, I'm inclined to agree, although not to the extent I'm hearing.  I'd like to balance this back a bit, without nerfing Farah.  I may further buff spirit in sex grapples, or I may buff the regeneration rate from spirit.  There haven't been a lot of spirit puzzles yet either, which is something I'd like to add.  The key here is I don't want to completely lock Farah out of a section of the game.

Leveling system:  I'm seeing requests for more RPG elements, mainly a leveling system of some sort.  Wasn't planned, but I like the idea a lot.  I'll see if I can crowbar something in here, so that there's yet another advantage to defeating monsters.  In fairness though, there's very few monsters that can be avoided, it's not like you can run around them if they're in your way.  So whatever I do here will be minimal.  I absolutely do not want folks to feel like they have to farm monsters for XP before they can progress.

Damn, that's a long post.  But I think I hit all the big buttons.  If there's something else on your mind, let me know.  I promise I read every comment, even if I don't respond to it directly.

DirtyC101

Feedback Loop - part 1

Wow, has it been a week already?  Time flies.  I'm glad to see so many positive comments, means I'm on the right track.  Then again, the simple fact that y'all are here means you like porn games, so there may be some bias in my favor.  hahaha. 

Anyway, what I want to focus on today is the criticisms.  So far they've all been good stuff that I can work with, keep them coming!  Let's start with the easy stuff:

Crawling.  I put this in on purpose to both change the pace & the setting a bit.  Let's face it, my rooms all look & play about the same, so crawling was added to alter the flavor some.  Makes the room 'feel' smaller (imo), and also changes the pace.  Unfortunately, slow doesn't necessarily mean fun.  I'm getting that message loud & clear.  I'll tweak this some.  I think there's a compromise here that will still keep the atmosphere I want without making people dread another crawling room.  I also think I overdid the crawling on the bunny burrows, so I'll simply yank some of that as well.

Exploring the bunny town becomes boring/frustrating.   Okay, this is a gigantic "uh-oh" from me.  The game is supposed to be about exploration, fighting, & fucking.  It sounds like somehow I went wrong with that formula.  What I find interesting is that I noticed the same thing when I was building the game.  I ended up turning monsters off after a while.  At the time, I just figured it was because I was busy testing shit & just wanted to run around.  I think the problem is that the monsters are so prevalent that they're seen as more of a nuisance than something interesting. 

I think simply yanking them from the 'travel' zones will help tremendously.  Or at the minimum, they shouldn't respawn in the overworld zones.  This could potentially cause problems, as you need the gear monsters drop to get past the wards, and you probably don't have enough backpack slots until late into Act 2.  I may need to force additional spawn in other areas, but I think that's a smaller problem that can be managed.

The other part of this might be that the dunecrawler requires 3 parts, but there's absolutely no hint to where they are.  *Spoiler Warning*  The first one always spawns in the elf camp (outside or in tents), the second is always in the Southeast corner of the village (lower left), and the third is always in the Northwest. .  If the guy in the dunecrawler gave simple direction to the next piece, would it have helped the 'fun' of the game?  Example: he says something like "A bunch of Elves stole the regulator I need, I think they ran down that big road to the East."  

That reminds me, the village is set-up so that you're walking North-South, and if you take the road you go East-West.  If he's giving directions, would it be easier if I flipped those?

Slime Boss Fight.  Okay, this was supposed to be an order of magnitude harder than everything else.  To be blunt, I want to give y'all some sex scenes, and an easy way to get there is to force the occasional loss.  This is why the game has multiple continues, and I have no qualms designing monsters to take them away.  ;P  (That's a topic by itself, I'll try adress it more in a later post).

I'm hearing the right number of people saying it's hard, so I think I got 'hard' just fine.  Again, the problem is that hard doesn't mean fun.  In my opinion, the root of the problem is that the fight can only play out in 2 ways.  Either he manages to grab you, in which case you get to watch yourself be locked into a slow grab  --> clothestear+poison loop, which ultimately kills you with minimal sex.  The other option is this run away & attack dance pattern, which, while amusing enough the first few times, gets old around long before he's dead.

So I have some ideas on how to fix this.  I think simply reducing his health some while drastically increasing the damage he does to armor would really help liven up the fight.  Now instead of a series of armor saves, you'd get to actually struggle in the grapples a bit.  He is a boss, so I'm totally down with him completely dominating the hero if he gets his 'tricks' to work.  But it needs to be more involving than it is now.

Okay, that's already a long post, and I have plenty more to discuss.  I'll try to put my thoughts together a bit better & touch on some more points next week. 

DirtyC101

When will the game be posted?

Right now!  Check the sidebar, version 0.50 is out.  It's incomplete in places, and some of the art is just wireframes, but it is very playable.  There's a lot to say, so let me try to be brief.

Re-read the instructions at the start menu.  A lot has changed.

R activates run mode, and down arrow activates blocking.  While running, your defense is greatly reduced. Vice versa when blocking.  Not 100% sure I even want blocking in this game, but given how hard some of the monsters are, it's almost a necessity.  (Feedback here would be good)

If you are dominating a 1-on-1 grapple, extra monsters will not be able double team you.
None of the new monsters have double-team grapples (yet). 
Just pointing both of these out to try & avoid some confusion.

As always, please feel free to mirror this game on other sites.  I have no idea what my limitations are on bandwidth & all, so having the game distributed to multiple locations is probably a good idea.



Lastly, I wanted to point out that now would be a really good time to send me a donation.  I think y'all know I've been having computer problems, and the machine I had been using to make this game is now kaput.  So, I'm going to be building a new computer for the sole reason of making games.  Some folks have already come forward with money (thanks again!), and I figure now's as good a time as any to beg a bit.  To be perfectly clear though: I do not NEED money.  I'll be buying a new machine with or without donations, so please don't think that you must donate for any reason.  Donations would be very appreciated though, so if you enjoy my games, well... now would be a fantastic time to show it.  =)

Thanks Everyone!
DirtyC101





Known bugs:
If multiple monsters drop items simultaneously, only one will hit the ground.

If you are grabbed while using a Staff special attack, the power up sound will continue for a while

Being re-grabbed immediately as the first grab is ending will often cause the grapple bar to remain hidden for that grapple

Large items in the foreground can look funny.  Their tops will be hidden when in dark rooms, and they will often clip the interface bar at the top of the screen.

The code "TowardTheHorde" says it doesn't work when entered.  It actually does, and it works better than it's supposed to (it unlocks both Act 1 & 2 monsters, instead of just Act 1).  Since it's a 'good' bug, I'm going to leave it for now.  Enjoy.  ;)

November Update

Some of you may remember I took a LONG break this spring due to unforseen computer problems.  Well those same problems are back.  I managed to recover the source file, so the good news is I haven't lost a thing.  The bad news is I think that computer is out of extra lives.  Time to build the raft & the bonfire & send it to the great afterlife.  Much of it is 9 years old, so I really can't bitch.  That's like living to 300 in human years.  haha.

For the time being I've re-purposed my gaming rig.  So yes, work will be progressing again shortly, and I still plan to have something out by the end of the year.  Hopefully before 11:59 on New Years' Eve, but it wouldn't surprise me if I'm working up to the wire.

On better & brighter notes, I'm finally working on the sex animations.  Some of them are pretty hot, imo, while others are still off a bit.  For example there's a 69 position which doesn't quite line up right.  The girls are roughly the same height, but the perspective on one of them is always wrong because they're both drawn from the same angle.  Despite being primarily a profile view, there's a slight angle to the view as well.   When you flip one of them over, her perspective is now backwards.  I can kinda work through that by positioning the girl on top as if she's at a different angle, but it's not perfect.  In short, it looks funny.  Still hot, but funny.  ;)

Hahah, I guess it looks even stranger with her still clothed.  But I'm sure y'all know how to fix that by now.  Actually, now that I look closely, it looks like K's armor is partially clipping that humans' boob.  Need to fix that too.

That's all for now.  Fair warning, posts for this month may be scarce.  I plan on doubling down on the game to try & get as much done as I can, which means less time for talking about it.  :P
DirtyC101

Background's background.

Let's fire this one off by saying thank you to everyone who commented on the previous post.  I am well aware that many of you have to make additional accounts just to post here.  So, thanks for taking the time to do so.  I've read through the comments at least a dozen times already over the last weeks, and will likely do so again before I'm done.

Game is progressing along well enough, but I'm kinda at the 'boring' part - I'm drawing backgrounds.  Now, I rather like this part, as this is also when I code the movement between all the different rooms.  So when I'm done, I've suddenly gone from a blank canvas to a world where I can walk around.  For lack of a better term, the game becomes an actual game.  But this part doesn't make for great blog material, as it doesn't generate any news.  There's no new programming tricks I need to try & learn, and the art isn't so hot to be worth really showing off either.  It's just part of the game making process that ya have to get through. 

In fairness, there is actually A LOT to learn just about drawing backgrounds.  It just isn't nearly as interesting as drawing boobs.  ;)

So rather than talk about backgrounds, let me mention something else that's been on my mind:

(As always, ignore the pink boxes & most of the text.  Just there for testing)

There's a lot more gear available now.  So you'll be able to pick the weapon class you want to swing & which armor you want to wear.  But this creates a new problem.  None of the items were drawn with the intention of being mixed & matched.... so the characters can end up looking just ridiculous.  Amoung my friends we'd say the character has been warcrafted, as this happens all the time in WoW.  In the picture above the collar & the gloves are both black, so it's not terrible, but you can imagine how bad this looks with a bright blue hat.  Not sexy at all.

Then again, a mop isn't exactly sexy either, so it's not like I can preach too much here.  But I'm seeing some really terrible visual combinations on items players could use together.  In an MMO, you just shrug & move on.  In a sex game, it strikes me as a much bigger problem.

That's all for now
DirtyC101

Double Post: Elves! + Name your favorite postions

And the last race that will inhabit Act 2 is: Elves.  Woo!

I tried some new stuff here, and I'm really happy with how both of these turned out.  The hairstyles were both deviations from my normal.  The guy's in particular was completely new.  Fortunately, there's tons of 'anime hair' out there if you search, and even a few tutorials on how to draw it.  I do think it's pretty funny - when I was drawing it I thought it looked like shit, but was maybe passable.  Now that I'm seeing it again today, I think it looks pretty good honestly.

The girl's hands aren't quite right, but when I draw the gloves over them, I think it comes out pretty close to what I want.  I might try another pass, but honestly that's can be like an entire day's worth of work, & not sure there'd be enough of an improvement to justify the time.

The only thing that's jumping out to me as wrong is their relative head sizes.  The girl's head is a bigger than the dude's, and their neck lengths are off.  I think I'll probably change the dude's to match, although either would work imo.   It's only when you put them side by side that it looks strange.

So that's what I see.  Really not many changes planned for these two.   If you have any comments or artist feedback, get it in now before I start animating.  =)


That's kind of a short post, so let's move on a bit more.  Here's a picture of all 6 'monsters' together:

A few weeks ago I mentioned that I'd consider requests for sex positions.  Well now's your chance. A few rules before we start though:

1. Your pose must have 4 variations of the same position, and they need to include at least one phase where the hero is dominant and one phase where the monster is dominant.  For example, I could do something with doggy style like:   Phase 1: Hero reaches under legs & gives handjob, Phase 2: Monster grinds cock on ass, Phase 3, Doggy style penetration, Phase 4, Doggy style, anal penetration.  Your suggestions don't have to use the same position for all four phases, but remember that there's no animation between the different phases, so keeping the poses similar is important.  Having them teleport from say a missionary position to a standing one looks wierd (imo).
2. Try to limit vaginal/anal penetration phases.  Single monsters should only have one, and double team attacks can have one or two.  (My doggy style example above fails this rule, which is why I haven't used it yet).
3. All the monsters are drawn from the side.  Try to keep the requests to something I could realistically show from this view.  I'm not completely opposed to drawing the heros at new angles, but I'm not in favor of it either. 

I think that about wraps it up.  If you have a pose suggestion that you think would work best with only one type of monster, feel free to justify why.  For example, I could see the doggy style attack I mentioned with the male bunny more than the human, simply because doggy is closer to how bunnies fuck IRL. 

Oh, & lastly,  please don't be disappointed if I don't use your suggestions, or if I do something similar but not what you had in mind.  I'm a big believer that too many chefs will spoil the stew, so anything said here will get my spin on it.  Should help keep the game coherent, or failing that, at least maintain a thread of commonality.

Thanks
DirtyC101

October Update

Important stuff first: Still no date on the next beta. 

Okay, with that out of the way, my goal hasn't changed since last month.  I'll post something before the end of the year.  I want to get as much done as possible before I put out my next release.  Ideally I'd like to post a nearly completed game for final bug checking, but more realistically I'll be happy if I have Act 2 finished by then. 

So most of this month has been spent drawing.  And that's fun enough I guess, but I get sick of it after a bit.  When I get fed up & have to do something else, I go work on splicing the story into the actual game.  So let's talk about cut scenes.  Originally I wanted to do like a comic book, where there would be maybe a few pages & the screen would slide from panel to panel.  But it's so much easier in flash to just completely refresh the screen, so what I have now is more like a mini-slide show.

Don't worry, there's not that much.  My goal here is to keep them light enough that folks will skim them at least once.   Which is actually the point of today's post really.  K. Fox & Leilei's intro story are both pretty quick, but Farah's seems like it's too long.  So as soon as I remember how to attach flash files, I'll post her intro below.  Take a look, and let me know what you think.  Is this too much intro/dialogue for a porn game?  And yes, I know I'm using stick figures at the moment.  Like I said, this was something to do when I did NOT want to draw more.  It'll get fixed.

The only other bit I've been working on is flipping between the acts.  It might not sound like a big deal, but the main game is set up for combat, with bars & zooming & all that good stuff.  Trying to turn all that off so I can post scene transitions is proving to be much harder than it should be.  heh. 

DirtyC101

Farah's Intro:
You can also download it directly here.


EDIT: This flash didn't fit well in the old layout.  To fix this, I've increased the main column width for the blog.  Seems like something I'll need to do eventually, as I'll likely post full games here at some point.

Manna by Marshal Brain

This post contains nothing about porn at all.  It's simply a post I found that was so interesting, I felt the need to link it.  As an apology, here are two porn blogs you may not know: 
hnyarly.blogspot.com is by another amateur coder like myself, and he even posts here occasionally. 
theknightshinesbright.blogspot.com is 3D picture/movie related, but I really dig his art style.


Today I read a series of posts simply named "Manna".  It's near future science fiction, which I usually dislike.  Or to be more precise, the writer usually fails to get past my bullshit filter.  They will make some 'funny' assumptions in order to get their alternate future world in motion, and my mind immediately rejects everything from that point forward.  Manna's assumptions are so simple though that I really can't contradict them:

1. Corporations are greedy.
2. A computer program with some wireless headsets is a cheaper way to manage minimum wage employees.

From there it snowballs in the usual SF manner, and gets pretty damn bleak.  He 'saves' it with a utopia around the 5th post, but he's got too many assumptions in his dream world for me to accept it.  If you have similar feelings, you may want to stop around the 4th page or so. 

This really got me thinking.  In a world where we no longer have minimum wage jobs, and only a sliver of middle class jobs, what is one supposed to do to earn a living?  I don't have an answer of course, but my mind is still spinning, and probably will be all night.

I actually took a course on Science Fiction once.  One of the points I remember is that Science Fiction isn't really about spaceships or aliens, but rather it's about getting us to think about how our present actions could affect the future.  Marshal Brain totally nailed that today.

DirtyC101

Humans!

Hm... okay, maybe not quite as exciting as bunnies. heh.  Here's the human 'monsters' I expect to use in Act 2.  Like before, these drawings aren't finalized yet, so if you have some feedback now would be the time.  I plan to go back & touch them up in a few weeks, once I've got all the opponents drawn.

Look at the waist level for the two characters.  The dude is several inches taller, but his hips are lower.  Unlike the bunnies, this time around I think I made the girl's thigh & calf too long, rather than making the dude's torso too long (although there's some of that too).  I also find it interesting that I naturally put some sheen on the girl's skin, but didn't think twice about it on the guy. 

Not really happy with the girl's breasts either.  They're smaller than the hero's, but something about them looks either too large or out of place.  Again, could be the torso being too short, I'll play with that & find out. 

I will not speak about the guy's hand, other than that took almost as much time as the rest of him combined.  Wouldn't be so bad if I felt like I was either making progress or learning something, but at the moment it's pretty much delete & start over, repeat until I get something passable.  Don't be shocked if he ends up with mitten hands in the next release.  ;P

On the up side, I feel like I really nailed both faces.  The dude has a fantastic blank stare that really says 'Duuuuu', and the girl's hair came out pretty damn well (personal opinion).  Despite the complaints above, I'm really pretty happy with how both of these turned out.  Here's hoping that trend continues.

Oh, & before I forget again, Thank you's to Mr. Jester for the link to posemaniacs.  Used it quite a bit when drawing the dude, and will almost certainly hit it again in the future.

DirtyC101

Bunnies!

This week I've been working on the Act 2 monsters.  I decided to start with the residents of HoppyKin Village.  I think the girl turned out pretty well, although I may tweak her hip/waist ratio a little.  Girl's seriously got too much junk in the trunk.

The dude however was a bit more of an experiment for me.  I wanted to try & make a tall, thin character.  In some spots I think I did well, but the relative sizes of each body part are off.  Like I think the calfs are too short, while the torso is too long, and the thighs came out really really thin.  His hands are also too small, but if I enlarge them, the back hand goes from 'off'' to 'WTF'. 

So, more work to do here, but honestly pretty happy with them so far.  I'll come back & touch them up in a few weeks, once the rest of the badguys are drawn.  If y'all have been just dying to give me some artist feedback, now's your chance. 

DirtyC101

MoreWithTheBugHunting

(Another long-ish post about code.  FYI).


In the beta, there's a bug where if you die & restart while being double teamed, both monsters will become invisible.  I believe I have that fixed.  I thought I was pretty clever & used the state variable (in my case, _root.held) to track how you die as well.  That variable used to only tell if you were held or not, but it has since grown to pretty much capture any state - moving, attacking, grappled, etc.  So having it also track death & death type wasn't really a stretch.  So now when you hit continue, the game knows if there were any grapplers & what to do with them.  But this change brought along new 'interesting' bug.  Being killed by a grapple caused the 'game over' screen to play twice. 

Now, this is not a game breaking bug, so I put it on the back burner as a 'huh, wierd' issue to be resolved later.  I was the mood to do some puzzle solving last weekend, so I picked this one up as a challenge. 

Those of you who are thinking that having one variable track so much is a mistake are on the right track.  Turns out that late in the 'death' code this variable was getting reset as part of a pose change, which was causing the whole thing to reload.  So I reckon the lesson here is watch what your variables are doing.  I'da never found it if I hadn't been tracking the held variable & just watched the hero get killed over & over.  Which made for an interesting night BTW.  ;P

The other bug I found this week was even more subtle, but it's been in the game for a while & man has it irked me.  If you managed to completely shift the grapple in your favor, the whole bar is supposed to shift to your color & the arrow game is supposed to end.  However, half the time the arrow game would continue after the bar changed color.  Now, this was a frustrating bug to track, because honestly I don't peg the grapple meter all that often.  So I'd see the bug, look for it for a few minutes, get distracted, and then not notice it again for a week.

The problem all stems from how I named these variables.  In this case I was looking for a variable called grapplebararrowcheck, which gets set to false if the the bar gets maxed.  The problem ended up being I mistyped the variable in some places as grapplebarrowcheck.  See the difference?  Yeah, I didn't either.  What if I type it as GrappleBarArrowCheck and GrappleBArrowCheck?  More obvious now? 

Up til now I had been purposely using all lowercase letters in my variable names, to avoid any problems with case.  Now that I've made this mistake though, I think I'm going to move to capitalizing the first letter in each word.  Flash already does something very similar with it's commands - it capitalizes every word past the first.  I'm told this is known as camel case.  Yet another smart idea I wish I'da picked up on sooner.  Ah well, now I'm all learned & ready for the next bug.

And believe me, there's going to be more bugs in the next release.  So far I'm only talking about the ones I've actually fixed.  There's a bizarre one at the moment where trying to save the bunnygirl will occasionally spit everyone out into the engine room & lock the game.  I still haven't puzzled out exactly what triggers it, so I'll have 'fun' hunting that one.  Maybe I'll draw some more first.  hahaha

DirtyC101

Getting crowded in here

As y'all know, I really can't draw.  With enough time, I can make something that is 'good enough' by simply redrawing it over & over, but nothing I do stands up to someone who's had some actual training  (and they probably knock it out in a fraction of the time too). 

So now I'm coming to the finishing touches for act 1, which is really just fleshing out the backgrounds.  There's a lot of empty rooms which aren't supposed to be empty, and I'm going through & fixing that.  The nice thing about this is that it's 'just' backgrounds.  So rather than my usual hundred passes to get something good enough, I'm going through & only redrawing each NPC a couple of times.  Basically whatever I can stand in a single sitting.  And y'know what?  It's really fun.  I had forgotten how much I enjoy drawing.  The additional time to make it good (if you call my art good) is such a joykill that I found myself really dreading going through & adding in these guys.  Now I'm playing with poses I would have never even attempted before.  Does it look good?  Not so much.  Hell, some of the perspectives & angles are downright wrong.  But it looks better than the empty room, and I think it really helps set the mood a bit.  For example, here's a before/after full view of the Rec Area:

So yeah, I'm all tickled with myself right now for having the drawing ability of a middle schooler.  What can I say, it's good to be the creator.  ;P  Anyway, I'm enjoying myself & making progress, which is two wins in my book.  Plus this practice will almost certainly help me later when it comes time to draw the next round of monsters.

DirtyC101

September Update

R said... How many acts are there gonna be? And are you going to release any more betas or wait till its finished completely?

This blog is popular enough folks are building accounts just to post?  And one letter names are still available?  Lols all around.  ;P

The game will have 3 acts.  The first act ya already know from the beta, it just needs the final boss & some misc background stuff (which is what I've been working on).  The second act is slightly smaller in length, just because there's less running around/puzzles.  You'll visit Hoppykin Village mainly to gear up, and once cleared you'll probably be bouncing back there occasionally for repairs & upgrades.  (Did I really call it that?  I need a better name.  Sadly 'Shire' is already taken.)  Then the 3rd act is the real meat of the game, and SHOULD be about the size of the other two acts combined.  It may shrink depending on my motivation, but the goal at the moment is a moderately sized area.

My goal is to have the game done before 2012.  I promise I'll post something playable by then.  Whether it's merely another beta or a full game will depend on how much spare time I have (I could really use some more 3 day weekends).

And to wrap this post up, here's the ending screen from Act 1.  This is how you unlock the cheat codes, so thought I'd show ya your goals.  This is an early screenshot from back when it was full of bugs, and I thought it was neat because I managed to get zero's on everything (which is impossible, as you have to defeat the slimeboss to make it appear). 
DirtyC101

Wiggle it, just a little bit

So, I've been working on the final boss for the first act.  Let's just say that if you like tentacles, you're going to be happy.  And if ya don't, no worries, I believe this is the last appearance for a while. 

So now my mind's on tentacles.  (Not a terrible place to be, really ;)  In the beta, the few tentacles we do see are pretty chill.  They just kinda sit there & rock back & forth a bit.  That doesn't seem right, in my mind they should be writhing & wiggling all over the place.  When I try to do that however, it comes out looking like crap.  I see spazing & just jumping around rather than the wiggle movement I want. 

Which bring me to the link below, which is illustrating the method I'm trying right now.  The actual motion of the tentacle is very similar, but I'm redrawing the outline every other frame.  This makes it seem like it's bouncing around a lot.  It's pretty close to what I'm trying to achieve.  The underlying motion is still rather chill, I may go through one more time & amp that up a bit.  But otherwise I'm pretty happy with the improvement.




(I also posted this simply because I didn't know how to embed flash files into a browser. I seem to have figured it out. Hooray for copy/paste. ;)

DirtyC101

Frustrations Per Second

(This is a long post, and mainly code & theory related.  Just FYI)

So I mentioned I wanted the game to run faster.  There were two more things I wanted to try.  The first is optimizing the backgrounds.  The default graphic type is vector art, and flipping it to a bitmap is supposed to make the game run faster.  It's a pretty simple change, you just add this code to the 1st frame of the clip:

this.cacheAsBitmap = true

I don't quite understand why this works BTW.  It has something to do with vector art requiring more resources when it needs to update (Vector art can also do more, like spin or zoom easily, so vector art is also the safer choice most times).  What I do understand is that the first time I tried it the results were just crazy good, possibly better than the quality button.  Unfortunately, subsequent applications were not so incredible, and often I couldn't see any improvement at all.

So I decided to try & be a bit more scientific about this.  I built a shitty little FPS counter by placing this code in the main loop:

newtime = getTimer()
_root.xxx = _Math.round(1000 / (newtime - oldtime))
oldtime = newtime

There's some variable declarations elsewhere of course, and _root.xxx is just the name of a global variable I use when I'm chasing errors.  With this 'tool', I then altered the background in small steps.  I also reset horde mode to spawn exactly 10 monsters just off from the hero.  And here's what I found:   (I should note that the FPS output was an integer, so the decimal point is my interpretation of how often it was flipping around.)

                                               FPS
Original Background:                    3.4
Bitmap, built from movie clips:       3.9
Bitmap, drawn from shapes:          4.0
No Background:                          5.1

Yeah, that's some shitty FPS there eh?  It's supposed to be 20.  But it does show an improvement with this bitmap idea, so at least it's a step in the right direction. 

The other thing I wanted to play with was optimizing the symbols that make up the bad guys.  I think I've mentioned this before, but there's a simplify tool that will substantially reduce the line count of your symbols (The command is in the main toolbar, under Modify, Shape, Optimize).  I played with this in the past & wasn't impressed, so this time around I cranked it to max settings.  Not as a permanent change, more to see if it would do anything at all.  In my mind, this should be very similar to what the quality toggle is doing, so I was hoping to perhaps find a good middle ground between graphics & performance.  And here's what I got:


                                          Normal Monsters            Optimized Monsters          
Original Background:                    3.4                                   4.0
Bitmap, built from movie clips:       3.9                                   4.2
Bitmap, drawn from shapes:          4.0                                   3.7
No Background:                          5.1                                   4.6

Now call me a pessimist, but the FPS numbers between the normal & optimized are virtually the same in my opinion.  There's no clear indicator that optimizing the shapes improved performance at all.  (This also tells me there's a lot of error in my data gathering ability, but that's nothing new. hahah).  In my mind, it does show a small improvement with the bitmap idea though, so I'm going to keep doing that for backgrounds.  And it looks like it doesn't matter how the backgrounds are built either, which is nice because it means I don't have to change a lot.  hehe. 

So, that's my conclusions from this.  What do y'all think?  If I toggle the quality button to low, the FPS jumps up to anywhere from 12 to 20.  So clearly the quality button is doing more than the optimize shape command.  In my opinion, that also means the bulk of the processing time is being spent on the graphics, not the code.  I reckon that's a good thing, but I'm not sure there's much I can do to fix it, short of 'draw less'. 

DirtyC101

K is for Kwality

So, some of you may have noticed that the game gets slow when there's too many enemies on the screen.  Ever since day 1, I've been convinced that the problem lies in the code.  In particular, I rely heavily on the hitTest() command, which known to be processor intensive.  In order to minimize this, I nest the hitTests under layers of if() statements.  The theory is that an if() statement is quick, while a hitTest() is not.  And if I can get an if() statement to flag false, then I can skip the hitTest() entirely.  Okay, maybe I'm not explaining it very well, but when it was explained to me it sounded solid enough.  haha.

So, did all that.  Actually been doing it since my first game, and I do think it helps.  But it's not enough.  While I was away, Renara (LoK forums) posted a bit about optimizing code.  And that really got me looking at my code again.  Although I knew it was bad form, I often had 2 or 3 onClipEvent() loops running simultaneously, as it was just easier for me to code.  So I went back & fixed that.  And once again, it helped, but it's not the miracle fix I was hoping for. 

What it did fix however is that now when I'm fighting several enemies, if I scroll the screen to hide most of them, the game suddenly speeds back up again.  This made me start thinking that maybe this isn't entirely a code problem after all.  Some of y'all had requested a 'quality' button, which was pretty common in older Flash games.  I really hadn't even considered it, but after digging some I found the commands & figured I'd give it a whirl.  And sure enough, with the video quality set to low, the game now runs great.  And WOW does it look like utter shit.  Enjoy the picture below, it reminds me of like an old 8 bit game gone horribly wrong. 

So for those of you who prefer speed, there's going to be a quality button.  I'm not real happy with that fix though, so I'm going to play with the sprites that make up the monsters, and see if further optimizing their shapes can speed the game up some more. 

DirtyC101

August Update

I'm sure everyone's wondering when the next update will be.  I don't know.  I'll probably put out another beta before the final release, but until I feel I've got something worth showing or testing, I'm going to keep the actual game under wraps.  On the up side, I'm hoping to have the full game done before the end of the year (3 games in 2010 & nothing in 2011 would be pretty lame, imo).  

Let's talk about noise.  What do you call all the moaning, panting, & screaming  that the chic does during sex?  For the sake of keeping this short, let's just say 'voice'  It's pretty much the only noise the characters have during the game, so I think calling it their voice fits.  That's what I've been working on the last few days.  I've never been happy with how I've done this in the past.  The girl's voice has always been called by the animation timeline.  So say whenever there was a thrust animation, the first frame would also play a moan sound.  The problem with this is that some of the animation loops are less than half a second.  In order to keep the sound from clipping itself, I had to cut the voice samples to be shorter than half a second.  Which just sounds like shit, imo.

I had a new plan to fix all this.  I was going to make longer sound clips, and loop them based on the sex position.  The problem is now that I have it working, I don't like it.  The sounds don't sync with the motions, and because the voice loops are still fairly short it gets repetitive very quickly.  It may be even worse than the old method, as at least with the old method I could squeeze in some variety with some random calls.

So, I've decided to scrap this new system.  Unfortunately, I haven't figured out what I want to try next.  Voices are very important (imo), and I want to get this nailed down before I make too much more of the game.   I'm sure I'll puzzle out something, but progress is slow when I don't have a target to aim at.   On the up side, I've now got a much better handle on how the onSoundComplete command works (It triggers code when the sound stops, but you HAVE to call a function with it.  That was a bit beyond me when I first started).

That's most of what I've been doing lately, so no new picture this month.  Oh, I did add a run button though.  Technically it works just fine.  However now when you're running you can't go through doors.  Yes, I'll get that fixed, but I thought it was funny.  Crazy code, always doing exactly what I tell it to do.  =D

DirtyC101

play();

My plan was to start slowly, and mainly just work on the drawing stuff to get my feet wet again.  Yeah, that plan lasted about 5 minutes.

One of the problems I mentioned back when the game was posted is that opening the inventory while a grab is ending will lock the game up.  (This is a different bug than the lockup during a scene change BTW, but I think I have that one fixed too).  This particular bug is caused by having two simultaneous gotoAndPlay() calls that point to the same frame.  So, Play + Play = Stop.  I guess that's like hitting the play button twice on your VCR (lol, I'm old), the game pauses instead of playing.

This is one of those bugs that I have really wanted to fix, and every time I came back to it, nothing.  Hours wasted here, lots of checks & BS added, and still nothing.   I just had one of those "fuck, THAT makes it work?" moments, and it's so dumb that I feel it needs to be shared.  heh.  Turns out putting a play() command on the target frame keep the game moving.  It's a dumb solution (Play + Play + Play = Play?), but at this point I'm really happy with a dumb solution.  =D

Why is all this even remotely important you might ask?  Because only some of the weapons grant invulnerability with their S attack.  If you're surrounded & trying to make some room as a grapple is ending, sometimes it's better to switch weapons first.  And now that's finally an option. 

DirtyC101

July Update

July?  WTF happened to June???

Short answer:  Computer problems. 

Longer answer: I have 2 PC's.  I keep one in the living room for playing modern games.  When that gets too old & gets replaced,  I don't throw it away.  I bring it to my room & use it to surf porn & write my games.  If y'all remember from a few months ago, the game was reaching a size where my slower machine really was struggling.  And my good machine was kinda old too, but it's not quite ready for its second life.  So I decided to only buy some key parts for the fast machine, and then the parts that were replaced would trickle down to the porn machine.

And that's when the shit hit the fan. 

So, for the last few months I've really been out of touch in the porn circles.  The good machine has been working great, and I've been happily addicted to some new (non-porn) games.  The porn machine though has been giving me fits.  I seriously think I've re-re-re-re-re-re-re-re-installed Windows XP about a dozen times over the last 2 months.  Everything from hard drive failures to burnt processors to bad RAM, and lately a series of random bluescreens which I *THINK* might be a driver issue, but still haven't 100% nailed down.

Anyway, point of this note is simply that I'm not dead.  And as much fun as Sims Medieval is, there's not nearly enough naked for a game with 'slutty' as a character option.  So I've already started working on the porn machine in earnest again (I'm using it for this note), and I suspect you'll start seeing real posts from me again in another month or two.

Til next time
DirtyC101

May Update

Feel kinda silly calling this an update, because I haven't touched the game since my last post. But, my list of 'busy' is getting shorter by the day. With luck, I'll be back in the saddle again by the middle of this month. On the upside, one of the fun results from all this work is I should have a new(er) computer to work with, so it's definitely not a total wash. haha

There were 2 big bugs y'all found, and wanted to talk about them a bit. (Yay for sorta - code theory!) The first is that the game will lock if you mash buttons during a scene change. That has to do with how commands are sent & executed. If you can imagine, once you press the A button to attack, I have to tell the program to stop accepting further inputs of the A button, or it will keep sending you the the first frame of the attack animation until you let go of the A button. Conversely, the final frame of the attack routine tells the program that the attack has ended, which resets the hero back to the default state. The problem here is that a scene change interrupts the attack routine. The last frame never plays, which means it can never reset the hero. So, the program thinks you're still in the middle of an attack & won't accept new inputs, but it will never get that reset signal because the animation was stopped. This one should actually be a pretty easy fix. Simply tell the end of the scene loader to reset any attacks. Or I could lock the keyboard from inputs during scene changes.

The second is that if you die & continue while double teamed, one of the monsters will become invisible/invulnerable. There were no double team animations until about two weeks before the release. This was the last feature I added, and no real surprise, I missed something. In this case, I simply forgot to tell the continue code to check for a second monster in a grapple. So when you continue, it never properly loads the second monster back. He's still there, but his sprite is 'lost'. Actually, it's off-screen, which is where I 'hide' sprites I know I need but don't want to show at that time. What I find interesting is that some of the hit attacks from this off-screen monster still seem to work normally. In my mind, they shouldn't. (And that is neat, imo.) Anyway, this should be a simple fix of telling the continue button to check for a 2nd grappler & reload them if necessary. Hell, I may not have to even run the check, I may simply tell it to reload two grapplers every time, and if the 2nd grappler isn't there it shouldn't do anything.

And since I like to end with at least one picture, here's one from the ULMF forums that made me lol. One of the guys there hacked the game's variables so that they can be set to anything - note the 859 continues. ;)

Til next time
-DirtyC101

I've got 99 problems but this beta ain't one.

Okay, more like a dozen or so real life issues & commitments that are going to take me away from coding for a few weeks, but that's not how the song goes.  And they aren't all problems either, some of them will be fun.  But, I need to really get off my ass & get to work on them, which means I won't be working on this between now & the release date.  So, hey, crazy idea, why not release now?  =)




*Hm... typical.  Now when I try to open the link it says 'file can't be scanned & try back later'.  Awesome.  Well, this worked fine for my last test.  I'll give it a few hours & see if 'trying back later' actually does anything.
**K,  I removed an extra . from the file name (was 0.30, now 030) and it seems to be working now.  Fingers crossed.
** Fuck. Okay, link is dead again. I really don't know why this time. I attempted to re-link a few times, and it just doesn't seem to work anymore. Dunno if google docs changed their settings or what. Good news is the game has been mirrored to a few sites by now. You can find it on the legend of krystal forums here or on SWFchan here.


I have no idea what my bandwidth limit is, nor if I'm somehow 'cheating' Google docs by using them to host this.  Regardless, please feel free to copy/mirror/host your own copies.   I'd like to keep my bandwidth low, just in case.

I managed to have a lot more done than I expected when I set the release date last month, but there's still tons to do, and some old bugs have cropped up that I thought I had already defeated.  :(  I'll be discussing the game a lot more over the next month or so.  Now that it's playable, there's some ideas that I don't like nearly as much as I had originally hoped (for example, grapples spend too much time playing the arrow game, imo). 

I'm going to make a quick list of bugs that I know about below.  Feel free to add more in the comments section as they appear.

-Thanks
-DirtyC101





Known Bugs:

-Playing horde mode past ~50 monsters can cause some mobs to move twice as fast, or die & stand back up again.

- Grapple arrows can get stuck & won't respawn until the grapple is finished.

- Immediate back to back grapples can cause the zoom to get out of sync.  I have some catches in there to fix it, but I still managed to have a grapple today where the second grapple was stuck in the wrong mode.  If this happens, just sit back & enjoy, there's not much you can do but wait.

- Immediate back to back grapple-grapple, grapple-inventory, or inventory-inventory changes can cause the game to get completely stuck.  (It's caused by interrupting the ending of one with the other).  If you can't move at all & nothing is happening, you'll likely need to restart.

- Throwing damaged armor on the ground & picking it back up again will heal the armor up to the nearest 25 health.  "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" - old programming joke.

- Sometimes sound will stop, and it will stay off until you restart the program.  Unlike most of the other bugs, I have no idea what's causing this one, I hope it's my sound card.

- If you die during a double-team grab, the second monster will become invisible & invulnerable. If it's the pirate boss this will prevent you from leaving the room.

- Mashing buttons during a scene change can cause the game to lock up.

April Update

April Update: Demo is on schedule for April 15th.





Hm... a bit short for a post. I know, let me blather on about something I learned just this week. Actually, let me back up first. When I released K. Fox & the Magic Sword, the file size was just over 4 MB. About a month later I released version 1.1, and the file size had shrunk to just over 1 MB. What changed you ask? I learned how to compress sound files. The background music was taking up 3 MB of a 4 MB game.

So, this week I've been adding in the double team animations, and the file size has grown quite a bit because of it. Simultaneously, I've been having this 'funny' problem where saving can take up to 10 minutes. I assume the two are related - it's like I've exceeded some file size limit. I've been thinking the machine is hoping into virtual memory, or the hard drive is full or something else along those lines, but nothing is showing up as being obvious. Anyway, about the same time I learned that you can also compress sprites. AWESOME! I thought, I'll cut my file size by 75% for sure, probably even more because graphics take up a lot more space than sound files. This should totally fix my saving issues.

The compression tool in Flash works by combining features together. So a drawing with several small lines converts to fewer, smoother lines. And there's even a slider bar so you can control just how much it smears your work. (For those of you playing along at home, it's under Modify, Shape, Optimize). I didn't really want to change my art that much, but even with the slider set to minimal I was seeing the number of curves get cut in half. So, yeah, I was super excited about this.

I'll skip to the end here. The FLA file (the one I work with) shrunk from 53 MB to 50 MB, and the SWF file (the one you play) shrunk from 2.6 MB to 2.4 MB. So... yeah, not the improvement I was hoping to see. I'm going to keep these changes, as I really didn't notice much of a visual change, and maybe it will make the game play a bit faster as well. But, have to say, not the game changer I was hoping for.

So that's the main thrust of what I've been working on this week. I've also been a bit paranoid that I have a more serious computer problem, so I've been a bit better about making backups & such. So far, the extra-long save times have been the only anomaly. Here's hoping I find the cause sooner rather than later.

-DirtyC101

Drawing is hard...

So one of the many things I've been putting off is drawing the heros at anything other than a side view.  I think we already covered that drawing isn't my strong suit, although whenever I try I feel like I at least learn something.  Regardless, the entire game plays from a side view, so there hasn't been a push to draw more.  This week I started working on the double-team grapples, and realized that a second view/perspective with them facing the screen a bit more would really help.  The first several attemps turned out pretty bad, and in hindsight I wish I had screencapped a few of them to show my progress as I went.  What I have now isn't super-awesome, but it no longer jumps out to me as being flat out wrong either. 

I suspect redrawing the feet at a deeper angle would help a lot.  I also think her torso might need to be a bit longer, as the spacing from her breasts to her belly-button looks too small to me.  I can tell the angles on the torso aren't lining up right, and I'm hoping that's because I'm re-using too much from the side view.  Ah well, more stuff to learn.  hehe.  If one of you has some pointers or a some good references for me, now'd be a good time to post them.

-DirtyC101

Story & Update

I spent a large amount of time this weekend working on the game, and I'm glad to say I made a ton of progress.  All the critical features are now done, so I shouldn't have any problem posting a playable demo in April.  That doesn't mean I'm happy with it yet, but the game now 'works' for lack of a better term.  I think I'm going to set the release date on tax day (April 15th for those of you not in America).  Let's face it, there's not much else to celebrate that day, so figured I'd bring a small bit of joy to everyone in my own way.  hahaha.  There's still lots of smaller features & just general polish I'd like to add, so we'll see how many of those I can include before then.

I want to talk a bit about the story, or more precisely, the back story.  One of the things that rather bothered me about Krystal / K. Fox is that they have personal spaceships, and yet they're running around fighting with their bare hands.  You'd think they'd have something a little more high-tech for weapons.  Some sort of energy weapon or blaster, plus maybe a vibro-knife or a chainsword.

So why aren't they carrying them?

There's a lot of potential explanations here, but in the end I went with the old MacGuffin - they end up on a planet where energy weapons don't work.  I can't even count how many times Star Trek has pulled that one out.  The planet is one of medieval fantasy and is of course inhabited with plenty of bad guys, but also other potential heroes.  So at the character selection screen, you'll have your choice between a rescuer sent to search for a missing spaceship, or a local inhabitant who is trying to figure out what that giant meteor was last night.  I'm hoping it makes for an interesting mix of both sci-fi & fantasy.  We'll see how well it goes together.

-DirtyC101

Sex & Games

Browsing Slashdot, & saw a link to this article:

Why_videogames_havent_grown_up_yet

It's a small piece about how mainstream video games handle sex & sexual relations  (short version: poorly).  It's one of my biggest pet peeves with larger games - either they ignore sex completely, or they bumble around with 'how much skin can we show & still get an M rating?'  Now make no mistake, I have no problem with pin-up quality heroines.  My beef is that the games are clearly trying to sell on sex, but fall short of actually including any.  If you're going to put a brothel in a game, there had better be an actual sex option.

In fairness, selling sex while somehow remaining in the 'not porn' camp is nothing new.  Movies dance this line with every R release.  And somehow they avoid seeming like a preteen's porn fantasy.  Why can't video games rise to the same bar?  I don't know - but it's one of those things that bother me constantly. 

Back to my porn games (which also handle sex poorly, but in the opposite way), Kidan asked me about the stats in my next game.  My goal with this game was to have each character actually play differently.  The warrior should be strong, but perhaps not great with brains or sexual technique.  The wizard should be really bright & should have powerful magic attacks, but probably have low health.   So, I grabbed my old RPG books & started notating which stats I'd want to use.  I was on the dangerous path of building a full RPG, but then I realized that this is supposed to be a porn game.  It's supposed to be light & quick to pick up.  So, I looked at everything I wanted to happen in the game, and I started combining stats together.  I ended up with:

Body
Spirit

And that's it.  I managed to crowbar any action I needed under these two stats.  Body consists of everything a fighter would need (Strength, Stamina, Reflexes), and Spirit is everything else.  Think of it as a combination of both Intelligence & Charisma - it's everything a wizard would need, plus some charm & sexual abilities.  Originally Intelligence & Charisma were separate, but they just aren't used enough in the game.  This made the Body stat far superior.  So for game balance I ended up combining the two.  Which in theory means the wizard is also the best with sexual attacks.  It doesn't quite work out that way, as she doesn't have the strength to maintain an advantage in most grapples, but it does make for interesting play.  Anyway, I made a short list of things each stat affects, I'll copy it below.

BODY:
Damage & skill with physical weapons
Grapple strength (shifts advantage bar)
Maximum health
Force open doors, climb ropes
Resist poisons

SPIRIT:
Damage & skill with magic attacks
Grapple damage
Health regeneration rate
Solve logic puzzles
Charm / Coerce certain NPCs

 That's a long post, so I'll go ahead & wrap up.  For those of you who are curious about where K. Fox plays into this, I'll simply say she's somewhere in between.  I have her set up as a Monk or martial artist, which requires both stats to some extent.

-DirtyC101

March Update

So let's jump right to it - I'm trying to package up most of the first act into a playable Beta.  Ideally I'd like to have that done by the end of this month.  Don't get too excited though, my original plan was to be done with the whole game by the end of February, so clearly I'm not too good at setting realistic timetables.

I flipped back & forth on having a playable demo at all.  Most demos not only suck, but they suck the life out of the final game as well.  But, I'm reaching the point where all the code is done, and now'd be a good time to check it.  The game isn't 'large' per se, but it is big enough that I don't think I'd catch every possible combination on my own.  So, opening it up to the masses just seems like the right thing to do. 

So that's the 'plan'.  Amazing, eh?  Yup, I'm a schemer.  Those of you who just want to play the demo, come back around the beginning of April.  There's going to be more talking by me before then, so don't be shocked when the next few posts don't contain the game.  I definitely want to make at least one post about the story, esp since I won't have any of the character intros done.  And there's been some 'funny code stories' as well I'd like to share, if you believe in such a thing.

Worked on the first mini-boss today, so let's end with a shot of her just so I can show a picture.  ;)

-DirtyC101

Grappling

Realized I haven't posted in a few, so thought I'd talk a bit about the new grapple system. I liked the old one okay, but there wasn't much too it. Once a grab started, there's not much to do other than wait for it to end. Those of you playing one handed probably appreciated that, so whatever I chose to do needs to keep that in mind as well.

In the old system, there were basically two looping animations, one for if you started the grab, and one for if the monster started it. In the new system I've combined both of those, and depending on who is in 'control' of the grapple, the animation will change. At the moment, the grapple control is divided into four phases - player dominant, player advantage, monster advantage, and monster dominant. I just made those terms up, but I think that gets the jist. Anyway, there's a unique animation for each of the four phases, and damage dealt/received will change based on which of the four phases you are in.

So how do you change phases you ask? Well, the starting phase is determined by who starts the grapple & adjusted a bit by health (a character at low health has a penalty). After that, control will shift a bit on it's own, based on the relative strength scores (Body Stat) between them. Those of you playing one handed will probably stop there, it's 'enough' of a game as is. For those of you playing to play however, there's an additional arrow system, where you match the arrows to further shift the bar to your advantage.

I think that about covers it, so here's some pictures of the four phases vs. a zombie crewman. Oh, as long as you have armor on, the monster can't shift advantage to the 4th phase (Monster dominant). I call it Armor Save. He will of course try to take your armor off to solve that problem.

Oh, & there's still a buncha testing numbers on the screen for me.  No worries, I promise I'll clean all that up before the final game.  hahah

-DirtyC101

Around the interwebs

So, neat thing about the internet is what you find once you actually start looking. Found this site the other day:

kyrieru.blogspot.com

It's another amateur who's making a porn game. Yeah, I know wierd right? You'd think I'd be the only one. har har. Anyway, looks like this dude has some really big plans, and I like his art style. So, if you happen to be into porn games (AKA: if you're reading this), I'd suggest checking him out in a few months.

I guess I should note that there's actually quite a few amateurs or semi-pro's out there making porn games. At some point I'll either make a link dump or perhaps make a sidebar to point to... geez, not sure a sidebar would be big enough. hehe. Well, maybe just my favorites.

Anyway, short post. I was working on the character select screen today, so here's a picture for the curious. :)

-DirtyC101

February Update

So where's that game at anyway? ;P

It always boggles my mind how much progress I have made, and yet how much more there is to go. I'm really just tickled at some of the programming tricks I'm teaching myself as I go. I'm using functions & subroutines, moving to local variables instead of global ones, nesting statements to minimize lag... I even cut the main body of code down from over 1000 lines to just over 600. Really, all sorts of fun tricks that I 'should' be thinking about as a programmer.

And then I look at my to-do list for the game. It's down to 3 pages long, and I haven't even added in stuff for the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th stage yet. There's just so much to get done. I may release a beta at some point, not so much to drum up interest, but rather so I can have a 'break'. I'm having a blast making this, but I don't want to burn out either.

Anyway, some screen shots below to give y'all an idea of how it's coming together. There's a lot of extra garbage on the screen which I'm using to help me decode bugs & whatnot. The green circles, or pretty much anything in pink is just testing stuff, so don't pay it too much attention. And looking at these pictures reminds me that I still haven't settled on a... HUD? Not sure what you call all the interface / display stuff, but one menu is a plain white bar, while another is a poorly drawn paper scroll, & the grapple menu is just floating bars. Okay, I kinda like that one. Heheh. Ah well, one more thing for the to-do list. =)

-DirtyC101

i++ !== i--

(i +1 does not equal i-1)

Those of you who played Beta on the Beach know that the game lags when there's too many monsters on the screen.  As you defeat monsters however the game will speed back up again.  That's partially because the game is drawing less of course, but more because the code is actively clearing dead monsters from the hittest array.  I was honestly pretty proud of how it all worked. 

However, there was one hiccup that bugged me.  It pretty much is what made me decide to release Beta on the Beach.  The game builds a giant array for details about each monster on the screen, with each monster getting their own row.  As that monster dies, that row gets cleared, thus making the array smaller.  It's all controlled by a loop that looks like this:

for (i=0 ; i<_root.BGA.length ; i++)

If you don't read much code, all this does is start counting at zero, and continues counting rows upward until it's read the last row from the monster array (BGA = Bad Guy Array).  Now, the problem occurs when a bad guy actually dies.  I want the array to remove that line to make is smaller.  This naturally shifts all the rows below up one line.  BUT the loop counter doesn't know that the matrix has changed, so it continues on to the next row, which was 2 rows down when the loop started (the next row has moved up to where the deleted row used to be).

If you didn't catch all that, don't worry.  I didn't really put it all together at first either.  And there are ways to tell the loop to backup one level & retest the skipped row.  But if the counter (i) ever becomes a negative number, the loop just freaks & crashes.  The 'best' fix I could find was to tell it never to check row 0 (arrays start at 0 instead of 1), which meant any time the very first monster was killed, I briefly lost track of the second monster.  Not ideal, but I don't think anyone ever noticed.

Anyway, this weekend I finally figured out a more elegant solution, and it's painfully simple now that I see it. 

Run the loop backwards instead. 

for ( i=(_root.BGA.length -1) ; i >=0 ; i--)

Now when a row gets deleted, I don't care about the ones that get shifted, as I've already tested them.  This is probably the kind of stuff they teach in first year programming, so it's not like I can claim to be the next Einstein or nothing.  But I was still really happy to find such a simple solution, even if it is like 3 months later.  If this trend continues, I'll totally have my current Vcam problem solved by July.  ;P

-DirtyC101