Girly game (more about ramps?)

So I've got yet another detour in my hobby coding.  While my son and I were working on Robo-Ninja, my daughter kept asking if she could help me design a game.  She had drawn some rough pictures and had some ideas about what it could be like, but we hadn't really done anything with it.

She asked again recently, so I thought it was time to humor her. She decided it would be a cute little game where she could walk around a neighborhood (in a 2-d side scroller, despite me trying to convince her that it should be a top-down game) to visit friends, and collect items.  Eventually we settled on the idea that she's trying to make a leaf collection for school, so she has to collect leaves.

Well, being a 2-d side scroller, and wanting to see if I can churn this out pretty quickly, I decided to reuse a bunch of the codebase from Robo-Ninja.

So with a few hours work, I was able to pull in a bunch of the main classes from Robo-Ninja, clean up a good bit of stuff, and have something working for her.  The biggest difference is that you can actually control the main character of this game, so I had to re-work the main character a good bit. Which also gave me a chance to redo a bunch of the code that had turned to spaghetti in Robo-Ninja.

Using the knowledge of the mistakes I made from Robo-Ninja, and some tips from that page I referred to in my last post, getting the collisions and movement, particularly on ramps, was quite a bit cleaner. It makes me pretty embarrassed to compare with my Robo-Ninja ramp code, really.

Anyway, the game currently lets you run and jump around. Time to add a little bit of fluff (items, characters to talk to), and it will be half done already. (yeah right, these things always take WAY longer than I'd ever estimate!)

Stanguna is still in my brain, even though I haven't done much with it lately. Someday soon, hopefully....

Collectibles

Well, turns out that was pretty easy. The new build with collectibles is now in the play store. With a new achievement if you collect all 16 of them.

(which means I had to play through the game yet again to test it. I'm getting pretty good at this silly game by now)

Collectibles in Beginner Mode

Well, it's time to open back up the IDE.

My friend Geoff brought something to my attention, which he's completely right about: In beginner mode, there's a bunch of dead-end passageways, with a yellow dot on the map implying there's something there. But there's nothing there.

Beginner mode, being a bit of an afterthought, doesn't have any of the slow-mo or checkpoint items. There's nothing to replace them, they're just gone. Which is weird and confusing.

I decided that an easy answer is to make them into simple collectible items. You find them, it says something like "you found collectible #3 of 16!"  And maybe have an achievement if you collect them all.  This makes the weird passageways make more sense, and adds a simple extra goal for beginner mode.

It should be pretty straightforward to add, we'll see how it goes.

Ramps

Well, the release of Robo-Ninja went well. People are playing (and hopefully enjoying) it, so I'm happy as a clam!

I'm spending a little time now in my "free time" focusing on some outside consulting work, but hopefully I'll be back in gear to work hard on Anguna Atari soon!

Until then, I was recently thinking about how I ended up handling slopes/ramps in Robo-Ninja, and how my code ended up getting really messy after a few iterations. I decided (now that I'm finished) to do some research about how other people have implemented them, and ended up finding this awesome article that talks about the standard methods for handling the mechanics of platform games.

It's pretty awesome.

Release!!!! (And beginner mode)

And....Robo-Ninja is released!  It's up on the Play Store (although might take a few hours to appear for everyone).   Thanks for your help, everyone who tested, contributed graphics, ideas, etc.

 

Or, if you want to donate $1.00 and get to play the "harder" mode, use this one:

 

And for all you of you that found the game too difficult, you can thank my friend Bryan who finally convinced me to add an easier "beginner mode."  If you start in beginner mode, the game is 10% slower, and, more importantly, you have unlimited uses of the slowmo and checkpoint items. Being able to set a checkpoint after each set of obstacles makes the game a lot more playable if you aren't into crazy frustrating challenges.

You still have to pick one mode or the other at the start, and if you pick beginner mode, you don't get any achievements or get to post to the leaderboards (big whoop, eh?).

Good enough? Beta Test time

Ok, I think I found a cheesy solution to the problem (which involves looping the laser sound continuously the entire time you're playing, but mostly at zero volume), although I still see an occasional stutter right as you start a map.

I don't think I'm going to let that hold me up though.

If anyone wants to take a stab at it, I've got a build up on Google's Play's beta test system that I'm thinking of pushing to release, that you can try out: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/net.tolberts.android.roboninja.android

Just follow that link, and give it a whirl. Feel free to email me any bugs, or leave comments here.

If nothing drastic appears, I'll probably release it in the next couple days!

So close...but so laggy

I'm so almost done. Most of the bugs are gone.

Except there's one thing that I just can't seem to resolve. There's some weird gotcha in libgdx's audio engine (on Android) where there will be a brief pause, or drop in framerate, whenever a sound effect stops playing. During most of the game, there's very few sounds, so it's not a huge issue, but the lasers that the blue guards shoot (and that Robo-Ninja shoots) are causing problems.

I've tried all sorts of things, but I just can't seem to work around it.

I've got a couple more things to try, and if those don't work, then I'm giving up and removing the laser sounds. Ugh.