#anodyne game

[joshnekuu]

if I had a nickel for every game i'd played where the silent protagonist has a green haired friend who's name starts with B and is named after a plant, that haunts you through the game as a shadowy figure while you try to rescue them, only for them to turn into a boss you have to fight, i'd have two nickels. Which isn't a lot, but it's weird that it happened twice.

[shalmonsdraws]

happy 10th anni to anodyne!

[halluciniwaynia]

does a silly little dance

[p5a]

young anodyne

[chrysaoras]

Maybe...friends?

[cosperclick]

After quickly finishing Anodyne, I’m immediately in love with Anodyne 2

[perfectlyinadequate]

[bryce-bucher]

500 CALIBER CONTRACTZ Post #12

Dialogue!!!11:

The main thing I did over the past week or so was put together this dialogue system. The system itself was fairly easily to implement, and I think the only interesting part of the process to share is how I went about making the UI. As per usual, I wanted to have a cool mechanical feeling ui, but at the same time a friend of mine suggested an AOL instant messenger inspired chat window. I loved both of these ideas so I decided to combine them into a screen that pops up and contains the aim-like window. The modeling process for the screen was similar to how I went about making the other two bits of ui that are on screen in the above photos, but I decided to include a VGA port.

VGA PORT:

I didn't originally plan to include a VGA port, but I was in the middle of researching monitors and accidentally left a window open on my computer that just had a big photo of one and I went "wait a minute.". With my final two braincells I suddenly decided to slap together a model for the port which I ended up being proud enough of to, for some reason, make an entire section for it.

Sorry if any of the above sentences read horribly. I am going to need a third braincell if you want this stuff to be coherent. Anyway, Blender is so cool. Using the array modifier to make all these lil squares for the holes in the port is just such a satisfying process. I've come to really like makin pre-rendered assets like this.

New Movez:

This is actually a pretty big inclusion, and I probably should've ranked it in my mind above the VGA port. I added some new movement options to the game!

Firstly, I added this melee move where you swing the back of the sniper forwards to propel yourself a bit. It is mainly useful as a bunnyhop that allows you to conserve momentum.

Next up I added this kick that happens if you melee while in the air. It's basically just the one from mario64. It lets you gain a little bit more height and distance. It also becomes way more effective if you have a lot of momentum. A good tool for correcting jumps and reaching new heights.

Finally, we have the big schmovement slide. This slide gives you a huge burst of speed that you can jump out of in order to send your self flyin. Surprisingly, it didn't really break any of the level design and ended up being a really fun addition imo. In order to perform it, you have to do a ground pound and then melee as you hit the ground. Also, I feel like I basically stole this from pseudoregalia. Played through that recently and it has been a good source of inspiration.

Nova!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!:

This is a cameo skin I've been really excited to finally make myself put in the game. Anodyne 2 is a really important game to me, and I love it much. I'm really happy tha folks at analgesic let me put her in here, and I'm p happy with how her model came together. If you haven't peeped the Anodyne games I highly recommend them. The first one was a major inspiration for parts of Fatum Betula.

Conclusion:

Lately I've been playing this game way too much. It has made it impossible for me to tell if it is fun or well designed. Some problems cropped up during playtesting that ima need to address, and I hope that it all comes together into something that one could say is "fun and cool". I think takin this weekend off is gonna do my brain good. Oh yeah also I feel like I should advertise that I'm still doing commissions if anyone is interested. Anyway, have a good 1 and enjoy urself.

[indiegamesoutofcontext]

[cyphyree]

Indie Games & TTRPGs Bundles for Palestine!!

Get 373 games--including A SHORT HIKE, MOTHERED and ANODYNE-- for $8 until April 28

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Both will sent proceeds to the PCRF - Palestine Children's Relief Fund, "the primary humanitarian organization in Palestine, delivering crucial and life-saving medical relief where it is needed most"

Please share to help both reach their funding goals!

[kalechipslives]

Palestinian Relief Bundle is now LIVE!!

Reaper’s Goodbye is a part of the bundle, so try it if ya haven't!

Drop $8 and get 373 games, what a steal. All proceeds go toward Palestine Children’s Relief Fund. We’ve almost reached the goal, so please drop by!! Like seriously, we're SUPER close to the goal! So go! Right now!!! I believe in you!!!! From the river to the sea!!!!!!!

Click this link to get a buncha good games for a good cause.

[rustybottlecap]

There is something about Goodbye Volcano High's gameplay that really fascinates me but I'm not seeing it being talked about a lot even in positive reviews, probably because it's not stated outright and may take more than one playthrough to notice it's happening.

One of my favorite things about indie games is when they take a game mechanic or habit on the part of the player that we take for granted and put a spin on it related to storytelling. For example, Undertale expecting the player to instinctively gain "exp" to increase their "Lv"; Omori with the status conditions during battles being emotions (or lack thereof) that carry several implications throughout the story; and Anodyne knowing full well that the player will want to find every secret hiding in the game to the point of providing them the means to do so on a silver platter and simply letting them wallow in their obsession.

Goodbye Volcano High is at its core a visual novel. In visual novels you usually follow the story along, making decisions by picking options out of a list, that lead to different scenes and endings. Often, these decisions involve what the playable character gets to speak aloud in-universe. This is not the case with Goodbye Volcano High. When the protagonist Fang is asked a question, and the player picks an option, what Fang speaks is usually not the same as what the option says, altough it's usually the same basic idea. Sometimes, even when the options are very different, the inmediate outcome and dialogue are the same, yet the symbol that indicates that a decision has been made still shows up. Sometimes the options suddendly change their wording or become unselectable or behave weirdly. Why all this?

Because in this game the options aren't a call to action, they represent what Fang is THINKING and FEELING. Internally. And not just the options, but the basic mechanic of selecting them itself too. When you select an option, you are choosing what thoughts and feelings Fang accepts and internalizes, regardless of wether they act on them or not. When you so much as hover over an option, you are still making Fang think and consider that option, wich may have an effect on the options. As in, the character ends up displaying stuff like doubt, anxiety and bargaining in the form of the options changing their wording or becoming unavailable. If Fang is overly exited or nervous, the options may change constantly. Sometimes the options require more effort to select. Or they look a certain way. All these things and more play into a core idea.

In theory, when it's not skill-based, choosing the "right" or "wrong" option in any game is not exactly hard. Sometimes it's very obvious what choices will lead to the good and bad endings, and choosing becomes a matter of preference or completionism, the player becomes an spectator. Goodbye Volcano High works around this by aiming to put the player inside Fang's mind and make the most of it, with choices that should be obvious becoming hard and confusing through Fang's personal filters (is an option the wrong one or only feels like it because it requires more effort and looks scary as seen above?), and little things that players may do out of instinct ending up translating into in-universe habits that may be unhealthy (hovering over different options equals overthinking and doubting and thus the options may change). That there is sometimes a timer also plays a factor. And all this pays off through the game's other big mechanic: the affinity chart.

It's nothing new to have the player's choices affecting the protagonist's relationship with other characters. But as mentioned, in this game the choices are internal on the protagonist's part, and may result in seemingly the same outcome. How, then, can the choices affect this chart that represents how close the protagonist is to the other charcters? Because much like the choices, this chart is also internal. It represents how the protagonist FEELS about the other characters, or at least how much they are willing to open up to them, regardless of what's happening on the outside. And depending on that is that Fang may be willing and capable of speaking sincerely with them during certain moments of truth.

I haven't confirmed it myself, but there is word that the game also takes note of how the choices affect Fang themselves. It's not hard to believe, seeing as how some choices don't involve other characters, but reflect purely on Fang's self-esteem and being nice or harsh on themselves. Being on good terms with others doesn't change the fact that you need to love yourself.

And all this factors in the end.

Visual novels tend to let you make choices to get different endings. Goodbye Volcano High is about teen dinosaurs coping with the threat of an asteroid that may destroy the planet. We know that an asteroid hit the planet during the age of dinosaurs. The asteroid may be unavoidable. The end may be unavoidable. But by being you through the gameplay, the game lets you choose how to face the end. You can make it bitter, bittersweet, and even sweet.

[pixiecatsupreme]

The Anodyne Fan Remake is finished and the full version can now be downloaded!

[amethystsoda]

Anodyne 2 OST insert scans + Kitty on Fire Records shipping package stamp

[chrysaoras]

Some icons I made years ago for my partner and I after we finished Anodyne! 

[sephdb]

Glitch deep-dive: Hotel boss gate skip

On Jan 15th 2023 a new user, thezorazora, joined the Analgesic Productions discord and shared a very intriguing twitch clip of them playing Anodyne(2013)'s iOS version and clipping past the gates blocking access to the boss.

Normally to get to the boss of this dungeon, you'd have to explore across all four floors to get to both sides of the lower floor and disable the two sets of gates in that room.

All you need to trigger this glitch is to take the elevator from floor 3 to floor 1 when both sets of gates are still up, and a bit of luck(as I'll explain later in this post). If it fails, just take the elevator back up to floor 3 and try again. Success rate is about 50%, even with frame-precise inputs.

Deep dive on how exactly it works under the cut!

So, what's actually happening here, and why does it only happen 50% of the time?

The short answer to what's happening is that Young is colliding with the gates in front of the boss room and they push Young out of their hitbox.

But this is supposed to be where the player gets teleported to, so how is that in any way colliding with the gates?

The answer lies in exactly how collision gets calculated in Anodyne's engine, Flixel.

All entities not only keep their position, but also their last position. This allows for Flixel to do collision resolution on fast-moving objects, with their effective hitbox being the whole rectangle spanning both positions. The last position gets set to the current position at the start of each entity's update call, and movement is done at the end of that. In-between, entities set their velocity and other physics variables, and that way every frame, the last and current position are correct.

When the player gets warped across the map, however, a few things happen:

Entities on the current screen get unloaded

Player position(but not last position) get set to the warp point

Entities on the new screen get loaded

Game update stops without running an update call on all entities

An interesting thing happens when you warp from floor 3 to floor 1: the apparent hitbox of the player gets incredibly large, and, more importantly, intersects with the gates on the new screen:

The very next frame, if the gates' updates run first(before the player's update, which would correct this hitbox by setting the last position), they check collision with the player and this absolute unit of a hitbox is what they see. This then triggers the glitch.

Note the "if the gates' updates run first", because that shouldn't happen according to the explanation thus far. In step 3 above, the gates get added to the list of entities, which at that point only has the player in it. That means they go after the player in the update order.

Fortunately(for us, not the game), there is another part of the game that messes with the order of entities: the draw function. When a draw call happens, the entities get sorted by their "lower y" position(ie: the position at the bottom of their hitbox), top to bottom, to get the layering right when entities visually overlap. For some more reasons, this value doesn't get updated for the player until its update runs.

As the player's y bottom value is still that of before the warp, they are way below the gates, so they get put after the gates in the draw(and update) order.

Then the next update call happens, the gates update first, and see the enormous hitbox, etc etc.

So if it's this simple to trigger, why is it so inconsistent?

That's because while Flash can only draw at 30 frames per second, Anodyne's updates try to run at 60. So for every draw call, there is about 2 update calls(there is some random jitter bc of performance varying across frames, sometimes there's 3 update calls).

This makes it essentially random whether there will be a draw call in-between the update call that performs the warp and the next. With no way to make sure the update and draw calls line up perfectly at that moment, it's going to stay about a 50/50 shot at landing the glitch. Luckily it's only a few seconds to retry, with a large amount of time skipped not doing the rest of the dungeon.