loftyloftyloftyloftylofty - Tumblr blog

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Not dead!

Mostly just not really using Tumblr very much.

Progress on Amazoom Blimp Jockey ‘69 is ongoing. A new demo will release tomorrow showcasing the updates to the game engine, which is nearly finished.

This project has really evolved a lot over the last year-and-some-change and I am excited to finish and ship it this year.

...and then I guess I can get back to work on Cat Story or something.

Anyway here’s what the game’s title screen currently looks like.

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Some item sprites from Amazoom Blimp Jockey ‘69

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So this is that sideproject with friends I mentioned.

It’s still in early stages of development, but progress is coming along really fast and I’m comfortable with how far along it is to show it off now.

What do you think? ♥

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rkgk

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Working on a small sideproject with a few friends.

It’s built on top of the CatStoryV3 engine and it’s coming along incredibly quickly.

I am excited because this is a reasonably-scoped project and we’re already almost at the polish phase. Looking forward to a launch soon.

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Artificer Eldritch Cannon

We level 3 now oh YEAH

Token sprite for roll20 campaign with friends

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Some recent sprites for a Roll20 campaign with friends.

Cat Story progress updates: Eventually

Don’t really use Tumblr very much nowadays

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I’m not dead!

Hi

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Happy Thanksgiving everyone

Yall are wonderful

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Quick Update

Moving platforms are working

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I’d call this a successful first test of landing on the ground

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Engine V2: Physics prep

Before I begin rewriting physics from scratch, I’d just like to list off some things that either didn’t work properly before or weren’t supported by the engine that I would like to include in Cat Story.

Moving platforms

Dropping down through a platform

Climbing ropes - specifcally, jumping or dropping off of them (do I want dropping behavior for ropes? I think i do?)

Swimming / floating

How were these things implemented in older games?

How did Donkey Kong Country implement some of these things? Donkey Kong Country (the first game) had working moving platforms but differentiated between water and land levels.

How did Cave Story implement some of these things? Some areas were water or not and the dividing line was the water line. Cave Story had moving platforms too.

How did Metroid implement some of these things? What are the advantages of this style of physics approach with wall jumps?

Was the approach of using box-collide for everything the wrong thing to do?

How do these older games make effective use of bottomless pits? 

How do pits influence design? Camera constraints? 

How do I designate a bottomless pit to ensure there’s no confusion about where I can drop and where I can’t?

How did games like Shovel Knight handle this?

Yoshi’s Island did crazy things with moving platforms. What kind of design would I need to make the player-weight-sensitive windmill platforms viable?

Is it better to use lines for physics boundaries instead? This would make things much more efficient and allow greater control but would require a new suite of mapping tools and a new mentality on making maps.

These are all questions that I plan on sitting down and grinding out answers to today.

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Playin’ around with virtual storefront design ideas.

Once Cat Story is finished I plan on releasing the game on Steam for sure.

I’m also interested in other platforms, but most importantly, I’d like to be able to sell copies from my own site, hosted on my own servers. 

I’d also like to run my own merch and I don’t want to just lazily slap all my stuff into a shopify or redbubble template for a bunch of reasons ranging from personal pride to flexibility and streamlining.

I’ve been examining different video game merch sites and figuring out what I like, what I don’t like, what I use, what I don’t use, and that process has culminated in a new approach to the storefront UI and navigation that learns from the mistakes and design flaws of the sites I’m familiar with.

I’m looking into screen printing partnerships and putting nerves out there to see what options I have to get merch for Cat Story started so that it’s ready when the time comes.

Right now I’m working on a beta shirt design to get a feel for the whole merchant process and to get a real product into the virtual storefront. My hope is that I’ll be able to get a few sales, get meaningful feedback on the site design, stuff like that.

Might be an expensive flop. Might make some money. No reward without risk!

GET BACK TO WORK

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Engine V2: Signals Pipeline

In the old engine, a very huge and monolithic sprite class dictated most of the things happening onscreen.

Most onscreen entities were just instances of the sprite class, which meant that certain types of sprites had more unused data than others.

This included scripted behaviors and special callbacks to hook to ingame events.

There was a lot of overlap between checking savedata and assigning callbacks to particular sprites to link them to different behaviors, and this resulted in a lot of inconsistency between using savedata and relying on the ingame state to keep things synchronized.

In the V2 engine, the backbone of the game engine’s logic runs on what I’ve dubbed the Signals Pipeline, which is just a string vector in the format of label:value.

Instead of elaborate asynchronous callback hooks with templated functions and lots of octopus weirdness, changes to the game state are reflected in changes to an easily-searched table of names and values, which means that unrelated entities have access to the same data.

To keep things consistent, signals are only updated once per frame. All other changes are queued for the next frame to avoid any weirdness with multiple entities modifying the same data.

IMPORTANT LESSON LEARNED FROM V1 TO V2: The game engine state should be readable and writable in one central place and all behavior should be derived from that central authoritative game state handler.

Having to query individual pieces for their individual properties and then adjusting based on those creates a lot of unnecessary complexity, work, and overhead.

GET BACK TO WORK

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According to Longcat's (her real name is Nobiko) person, she passed earlier today at the age of 18

Source

According to Twitter, she was playful and happy and fighting until the very end. It's also worth it to consider that 18 years old is quite old, for a house cat.

I don't know about you, but I think we should celebrate her life. ~16 years ago, the famous Longcat image graced the internet. She was like a celebrity, even across the world.

Rest in peace, "Longcat", Nobiko. You were long, and you are loved.

And please, if you can, have kind thoughts and words for her family during this time as well. Losing a pet is never easy, and losing one so well-known is bound to be stressful. Thank you for sharing her memory with us.

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Some sunday morning monster spirtes