As everyone knows, sushi has healing powers. Most types of sushi will restore 1 hit point when eaten.
Nigiri にぎり
An oblong shaped slab of sushi rice topped with certain types of fish or egg laid neatly over the base. Sometimes nigiri is held together with a strip or “nori” seaweed.
Maki まき
Maki refers to rolled sushi, either with an outer layer of sushi rice or wrapped in nori. The filling runs through the centre of the rice, and can consist of many things from raw fish or meat to bean curd.
Gunkan Maki ぐんかんまき
A roll of nori filled with sushi rice and usually topped with fish eggs.
Temaki てまき
Hand rolled sushi wrapped in a cone of nori, with the filling of fish or fish eggs popping out of the top!
Onigiri おにぎり
(strictly not actually sushi…)
Onigiri refers to Japanese rice balls, often shaped in triangles and wrapped in nori. I’ve included this here because like sushi, onigiri is a food that looks distinctly Japanese!
Based on yesterday’s speech bubble designs, I’ve spent today working out some other interface elements. Apart from the game’s main menu (and potentially a separate pause menu), there are two main GUI elements which will keep a consistent style throughout the game. One of these is the HUD (Heads Up Display), and the other is the game’s inventory.
The HUD
I was previously using a placeholder HUD which shows information about the amount of flowers collected and the player’s health. The reason I placed this here temporarily was mainly as a debug object for me to test when damage was being taken and how well the flower collection ds_list was working. In the finished game, the HUD will be a quick insight into level progress, showing the same information just in a nicer graphical style.
I’ve had a quick look into how other Indie developments have incorporated HUD systems and found that they tend to be very basic, using simple icons and in some cases text only. This example from Ninja Senki is a very clear way of displaying information which doesn’t get confused with any other element on screen.
So, simple is good. There doesn’t seem much point in clogging up the screen with pointless graphics unless they are meaningful or relevant. The HUD should be concise and to the point, so that the player can glance at it quickly and get a good impression of the information displayed.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past has a fairly complex HUD system, but enforces clarity by using unique icons and indicators rather than using text.
Key:
The Green Bar (far left) represents special ability charge levels The Bow Icon (left) represents the secondary item equipped The Green Gem icon represents the amount of rupees the player has The Bomb icon represents the amount of bombs the player has The Arrow icon represents the amount of arrows the player has The Heart Capsules (far right) represents the player’s hit points.
This sounds complicated to explain, but each feature is added into the game gradually, allowing the player time to get to know the HUD and where to look for info. I’ve kept this in mind whilst designing my HUD object, even though mine will only display two pieces of information! Originally, I wanted to swap my HP figure for a sliding health bar, but keep the flower icon to display info on how many flowers had been collected. Giving it some thought, I’ve moved onto a health system which is more like Zelda’s heart capsules. Because Hana will only take 5 hits before “dying”, and each obstacle deals the same amount of damage, I thought it would be more appropriate to create an image which shows each individual hit point. You can see my thought progression in the sketches I did this morning…
I’ve tried to keep the window shape and style similar to that of the speech bubbles, which will now be a consistent theme throughout the GUI. I’ve added the character profile picture partly as a way of indicating “this is player health and partly because of some advice from I found in a forum about pixel art games- A 16×16 pixel character is an extremely distorted version of a character design, and showing a higher resolution image of the character somewhere in the game acts as a little player gratuity. On the right hand side of the image you can see a rough design for a menu/inventory, where I’m thinking of using an even large character image, based on my main concept art for Hana.
The size of the “high-res” head-shot is just over 32×32 pixels, twice the size of the entire original sprite. This took an unpredicted amount of time to create, because of the increased opportunities for detail in the drawing! I wasn’t originally sure what I was going to use as a representation of a hit point, but liked the idea of using something rounded. In the end, I’ve gone for a Japanese coin look!
This now sits in place of the old HUD, the only real similarity is that I’m still using a string of text to display how many flowers have been collected.
The Inventory Menu
I haven’t managed to fully design the inventory yet, but I’ve planned out everything that should go in it! Information like:
An even higher resolution character image
Character health
Health restoration items collected
Flowers Collected
Petals Collected
Perhaps a little info on level (at least some indication of which level the player is currently on!)
After getting to grips with the enlarged head image that I drew earlier, I thought I’d work on the full character image first! As the menu is likely to take up the majority of the screen, I’ve created this image at a height of 100 pixels (which is scaled up to 300 when displayed in the game). This is basically a pixelated version of one of my previous sketches.
To give you an indication of size relative to the game sprite and other elements, I quickly whipped up this scary little image where I placed the new drawing into the game:
As a slight side-track to my main objectives today, I spent a little time refining and reworking some of my quickly made “enemies”.
This is the new animation I’ve come up with for the deceitful blossom. I felt that the best way to animation the flower was to give it a stalk and plant it into the ground, as this gave the blossom a base to pivot on. It looks infinitely more menacing than before, potentially raising awareness of its presences.
After seeing the flower in the game, my immediate reaction was that I wanted to jump on it to destroy it- in a Super Mario fashion. I’ve always said that I wanted obstacles to be “evade only”, but this so far has led to boring sections of gameplay and not a huge amount of variation in play strategies. So I though I would give it a go, except that by jumping on the flower the player can only temporarily squash and disable the flower- it will eventually pop back up. During the time it is “squashed”, the player can walk over it and not receive damage- otherwise damage will be taken if the player approaches the flower from the side rather than from the air.
Coding for this has been quite a challenge for me, as there are a lot of parameters to set up in regards to when the player takes damage and when the player is fine to pass by, but I’ve come up with a unique system which unfortunately cannot adhere to me previous obstacle parent object.
When the flower is in its normal state, I’ve created a variable that states that “damage” is true (damage = 1;). When the player makes contact with the flower, damage is taken. If the flower is approached from a greater y value or the flower has been jumped on, the value of “damage” changes to 0.
if damage = 1 && y>obj_player.y {
damage=0;
obj_player.vspd = S_JUMP_SPEED;
sprite_index=spr_flower_squash;
if damage = 0 {
alarm[0]=90;
}
}
The alarm sets an amount of time that damage remains at 0, before it is reset and changes back to 1. The flower will always reset after 90 steps, giving the player just enough time to occupy the same space as the obstacle. This is handy for jumps like the image above, where jumping over the flower would be impossible.
As promised, I’ve also changed the suspicious-looking sprite for the swinging spike plant object. This is not a finished version, but represents what I’m hoping to do with the new sprite. Before, I was using Game Maker’s draw function to draw a line from a connection point to the spike plant and used some maths to give the object velocity. This looked fine in my opinion, but the problem was that the collision mask remained static, no matter position of the drawn sprite. I had the option to create a custom collision mask, like I have done for the Hello Mushroom object, but id I was going to do that then I figured I might as well make my own swinging sprite. This sprite covers a similar distance to the previous sprite, but I think it may move slightly slower. Unfortunately, unless I do a whole load more tweening, the animation will never look as smooth as before, but it may fit in better with its surroundings. All issues with the collision mask are naturally fixed.
To begin designs for user interface, I’ve started up the style I want for graphical elements with these speech bubble text boxes. These simple square boxes are designed to float above the character speaking or thinking, and display mainly images depending on what it is that they need to communicate. The idea is to keep dialogue to a minimum- due to the communication problems associated with foreign languages. I was mainly inspired to use speech bubbles in this way by the anime short Cat Soup, which uses a lot of visual techniques to represent dialogue.
This isn’t the first time a similar technique has been used in a game. The hand-drawn Indie game Machinarium doesn’t have a single line of dialogue, and uses images and animations in speech and though bubbles to provide the player with gameplay hints and set the story.
I was initially thinking of using a very simple square design, but at the last minute came up with the swirly square design based on the “auspicious cloud” design. The design sort of evolved as I worked out what worked best in a small space with the swirl in the corner.
In Game Maker, I can use one image as a parent object for all “dialogue”, and simply change the content of the box using a sequence of sprites which appear to be inside the box. I tested this on the pacing cat I created yesterday, making sure the box followed the cat. This was simply done with one piece of code with makes the x value of the box the same as the x value of the cat:
x=obj_maneki_neko.x;
I then incorporated a timing system to time the image in and out based on a set time, so that the cat periodically thinks about fish- as long as he pacing and not following the player.
I’ve also created another example of a very small dialogue sequence for the newly placed character-the Shinto Priest. This polite character stands outside the Ryokan and bows as the player passes by. When the player gets within a certain distance, the speech bubble appears displaying the objective and the amount of blossoms needed for progression, although I’m not sure how effective this is as a method of instructing the player in the initial level.
What happened to week eight?? It was definitely there, but I must be getting lazy at making progress flowers.
This week my focus is on the little interactive bits that make videogames what they are, which includes working on menus and non-playable characters (NPCs). As part of my feedback from last week I was told to not move on to create a new level without finishing this one, and while most of the graphical elements are in place, its lacking occupants and and a real start to the game. The little photo above shows the little progress I’ve made with the new level over the weekend, although it’s much easier to draw on tracing paper in good light so I’m going to have to start putting some day-time into drawing it.
Today I began work on the first character that the player can interact with, the Maneki Neko. Ultimately, I’d like the game to begin with a short cutscene and the cat awakening Hana in a foggy dream-like state, and this may even be possible now that I have some extra animations. My plan is to look at the Spelunky source code to work out how the opening cutscene has been programmed, as I’ve had some problems working Game Maker around cutscenes in the past.
My first task was to create a walk-cycle animation for the cat, which somehow proved much easier than animating only two legs! I kept the leg length to a constant 2 pixels and tried to use as few frames as possible, as this animation won’t actually be seen much in the game at all. I used this video for reference, although only picked out the more “essential” frames.
The human walk cycle I developed uses eight frames, four for each leg forward. I ended up only using four for the cat, as it easily gives the illusion of having either foot in front of the other!
The tricky part was getting the cat to walk on his own, without player input. The game’s main character relies on the intelligence of the player to not walk into walls and avoid obstacles, but the cat would have to rely on a set of calculations in order to move around. There are several ways you can achieve this in game maker, but several that became unavailable to me because of the nature of the movement.
I wanted the cat to constantly pace from left to right, turning back on contact with a wall. I also wanted its behaviour to change when in close proximity to the player, so that it follows the player briefly. Luckily, I found an example that someone had already made that has a similar thing- except that the pacing objects are enemies which move to attack when in proximity with the player! You can have a quick look at that here. Based on the code from this example combined with the movement mechanics which came with the grandma engine, I came up with this little bit which makes the cat pace while the player is far away:
This basically sets up a timer which which turns the cat around after a certain period of time. The “counter” moves up in intervals of .25 until it has reached 60- in this time the cat will move left. After from 60 until 120 the cat will move to the right, and at 120 the counter restarts from 0. This is only while !can_see, which is while the cat “cannot see” the player.
While the cat can see the player, I’ve simply set a constant speed in the direction of the player. This speed is faster than its previous pacing speed, but not as fast as the speed of the player. As long as the player is moving, the cat will never catch up!
There are a few more lines to prevent the cat from walking through walls and an image_xscale code which turns the image around when walking left. Otherwise, this code is the cat’s brain. It’s not perfect- for example, if the player stops then the cat will just continue to walk past until it begins pacing again. I don’t think this is much of an issue for an object that only appears in the first room of the game!
My quick play-test session on Thursday left me with quite a few things to think about. It’s been a couple of days since I last posted any progress, this is mainly due to time spent looking into new ideas and ripping the internet apart looking for decent sound effects.
Feedback and Solutions
1. “There are too many collectible items. Lower then amount of flowers needed to proceed to the next level, or players may get stuck and frustrated!”
I always intended for the levels of Hanami to be an explorable open world, meaning players must play extra attention to avoid being lost or confused. But this is a very good point. At the moment, you must collect 30 blossoms in order to progress, which is quite a lot. If a player cannot locate just one of these flowers, then they are stuck in that level forever. My solution is to keep all 30 blossoms in the level, but allow the player to progress after locating just 10 of these. In the next level it will be 15, and the third level will be 20 to increase difficulty. There will be a specified bonus for locating all 30 flowers, but this may just be something minor like a high score or alternate game ending.
2. “It’s a bit quiet…”
Yes it is, and it’s about time that it was a little louder. As I’ve mentioned, I’ve spent about four days looking through various downloadable sound effects trying to find suitable sounds. I’m pretty sure I’ve settled on a footstep sound, jump sound and running water sound so far. More info on this to follow. My issues with incorporating these sounds have been with the Supersound.dll I’m using to play .ogg format sounds, but as I’m new to using the system I think it’s just going to take some getting used to. As for background music, everyone present at the play test agreed that it should be something “gamey” but calm- and obviously something that sounds naturally Japanese.
3. “Dying is annoying”
Upon “dying”, the game is currently completely reset. This includes my datastructure list which holds information about collected flowers, so when the player runs out of health all the flowers reappear and that player must start again from the beginning. Firstly, I will create a “death animation” which gives the player time to come to terms with a limited amount of lost progress, and secondly a will create a memory system which takes the player back to a point in the game without loosing progress. One suggestion was to use a certain amount of “lives”, which are reduced when all hit-points are lost. Loosing all hit points in one life will result in loosing a small amount of progress, but loosing all lives will result in a game restart (or perhaps a level restart!) I will probably work on this when I improve my current HUD system.
4. “Where’s the end of the level? Does it ever end??”
Yes, it does. In fact, the end is of the level is reached if you walk in a straight horizontal line from the beginning of the level. Perhaps I will signpost it better, or make objectives MUCH clearer when I add NPC help and input.
5. “The graphics are really good, but they need finishing.”
Well, obviously. I’ve actually spent a chunk of this weekend filling in the level grid with rock edges, which has resulted in this:
I still need to fill in vertical walls…
6. “The lights look great and even make the retro style seem more contemporary, but the level still feels really dark.”
There are a couple of solutions to this problem. Either I can make the ambient overlay a lighter colour, or make my lights larger so that they affect the overall brightness of everything around it. The ambient overlay is probably the key to the success of the lights, so I will probably try to extend the reach of the outdoor lights.
My own personal feedback: character animations don’t overlap well…
This hit hard when I found this video demonstrating some of the character animations for a game called Trixie Treasure, which is currently in development. The animations here are so seamless and natural- I’m not even sure you could accomplish this level in Game Maker.
I especially commend the ladder climbing animation, which unlike mine, takes into account step size and arranges the character’s limbs accordingly :S
I tried to use this as a basis for a new ladder climbing animation, although My ladder steps are MUCH further apart, and making them closer together doesn’t work so well aesthetically. I could make it work better if I reduced the width as well as the step size of the ladder, but I’m not sure this is a process worth going through at this point in time. Still, I updated my animation to seem more life-like. I also want to incorporate some sort of ladder hang frame, instead of allowing the player to move left and right while climbing ladders.
