AMKitsune: @Radian: While those are also valuable things to understand and eventually master, if something as simple as line smoothness brings a sense of quality to an artists work, wouldn't that go towards building a sense of pride in their work that would consequentially give them more desire to keep drawing and get better with practice?

AMKitsune: @Kastor: A small handful of programs have 'brush smoothing' features that smooth out your pen/mouse movements, Paint tool SAI has special 'lineart' layers which let you draw lines then easily drag parts of them around as you see fit, there's a program called Lazy Nezumi which adds that brush smoothing feature to pretty much any program you want (I use it and it works really well), but the way most people seem to handle smooth curved lines is to have their fingers on ctrl+z (undo) and try drawing their line in a single, quick, fluid motion. If it isn't right, undo and try again and again until it's perfect. It's practically impossible to get a nice, smooth line when you draw it slowly on a computer (unless your working with a low resolution image). The mouse/pen cursor just wiggles around too much.

AMKitsune: I just had another blaringly simple idea while trying to create a custom level. Doors. Simple, openable and closable doors. Instead of having empty gaps in walls to signify a passage, why not have a special type of 'wall tile' that could effectively be toggled between impassable and passable upon interaction? If it had a specific texture, the player could tell that it's a door and whether it's open or closed. It would also allow the player to close a door shut behind them if they're being chased, blocking off the pursuing mobs (although this may require some quick finger work on the players part). Something else that could be done with them would be to have them emit a sound when activated. Another thing for the stealth player to consider perhaps? Finally, I'm not sure how you might go about implementing something like this, with the simplistic level creation system currently in place, but what about the idea of locked doors that require keys to open? If Keys were placable objects (like mobs and crates), you could place a locked door near the players spawn point and a key at one end of the level, effectively forcing them to traverse the level and then backtrack if they want to open the door.

AMKitsune: Ok, personal opinion here. While some people may find these various discord servers to be absolutely awful and others may quite like them, provided that you're old enough to peruse the various channels on these things, why not just check them out if you're genuinely curious? I myself don't really care for the sort of casual conversation that these servers facilitate (regardless of the topic), so it just isn't for me. I joined one, looked around for a bit and thought "No thanks" and left. Someone else on the other hand might want to stay. If you join one of these servers and think "Oh, this isn't too bad", good for you. If you think "Oh, yeah, I see what they meant now...", you can always just leave the server.

The point being, if you're on the fence about this whole discord thing, join one for a while to see what it's all about and make up your mind from there. The best opinion to trust on these things is usually your own informed one.

AMKitsune: Just got around to playing your latest version. Not much in the way of feedback regarding the newer feature, just UI and engine things mainly.

1. Character able to turn infinitely without their feet turning as well. Perhaps allow feet to stay in place until body rotation is 20 degrees away, then have feet follow (as through being kept within 20 degrees)
2. occasional crash on start screen. Seems to happen upon mouse click. (window not responding)
3. Information overload on title screen. If possible, consider relegating the various 'game settings' to a separate 'options' menu. As it is, you've got 26 clickable buttons on the main menu alone and 25 lines of accompanying text.
While how you may go about reorganising the menus would be entirely up to your own design choices, I'd offer that on the main menu itself, you could have a button for starting the game (walking offscreen seems a little 'hacky' for a main menu), the tutorial level button , a 'character select' button which would open a submenu allowing the player to choose from any of the built in characters or 'OC's from the modlist. An 'options' menu which could contain things like audio, graphical and gameplay settings. High scores could still be displayed on the main menu, but the button to clear them could be located in the 'options' menu.
4. escape/enter key to pause game and offer 'back to main menu' button for easy access to main menu. The only way I can find to do that currently is to press backspace a number of times until the player character dies.
5. Currently able to enter an 'OC' into the OC input textfield that doesn't exist, causing nothing to be loaded in. Assuming you stick with a text based OC selection method (which I suggest you don't if possible), you'll want to implement some sort of input validity test before the character is loaded.

Also, streaming the hosts screen as a requirement for multiplayer seems a bit odd. Wouldn't it be better (latency wise) to have the client computers render the scene using their local copies of the game but using the entity position (and rotation) data from the host computer?

AMKitsune: @AMKitsune: Edit: Well, that's how it goes over here. I don't know how the saying is used wherever you are though...

AMKitsune: @Pronin: Oh, no no no no. The full saying is "Jack of all trades, master of none" and Makkon is very much a master of his trade (from my perspective at least).

AMKitsune: @realbboy: I also encountered the 'start screen crash'. It happened on the 'random flurry of fireballs' screen and upon pressing "D", the window stopped responding. As a side note, when I restarted the game, I encountered the same 'screen' but promptly pressed "D" again and got straight through to the main menu. Perhaps it has something to do with the amount of time spent on the title screen?

AMKitsune: Well, it was right at the end of the stream and he'd pretty much been up all night at that point, so he may well have been a bit 'tired' at the time, but he seemed to have a little trouble grasping the use of things like the cloak, the fact that crates don't block line of sight and the fact that the levels repeat in a seemingly random order (I'm guessing he was assuming that they'd play in a linear fashion). The main things seemed to focus around controls and game to player information conveyance mostly.

Don't take my (probably inaccurate) word for it though, Send him a PM and ask him yourself!
http://www.prequeladventure.com/fanartbooru/user/Kazerad

AMKitsune: So far, has she canonically killed anything (besides the impmaster)? Another way of handling stealth attach bonuses could be to let the player 'knock out' mobs as opposed to dealing high damage. I don't know if there's currently a 'no damage done' score bonus for completing a level without hurting any mobs, but something like that could use used to quickly and non-lethally take out mobs (for maybe 20-30 seconds or so) to enable the player to freely move around without fear of the mob noticing and attacking. And for handling mobs of differing strengths, the knockout duration could be different for different mobs (a knockout attack could effect an imp for longer than a clannfear for example). I don't know, it's a thought.

Actually, that brings me on to something else (I fear I'm incapable of shutting up at this point XD).

While it may take away from the visual immersion of the game, while watching Kazerad try your game on his live stream last night (Yeah, that's a thing that happened), it occurred to me that having little indicators above mobs heads to indicate their current 'status' could be a good way of quickly and easily conveying their state to the player. For example, if a mob 'partially detects' the player and goes to investigate, that mob could display a tiny question mark over their head for the duration of their search. Likewise, an actively aggressive mob could display an exclamation mark. Linking this to the previous suggestion, a system like this could be used to display little sleep "zzz"' above a knocked out mob for the duration of the unconsciousness. the reason that I think these sorts of 'notifications' would be beneficial is because, while the mobs in your game have a number of different states that they could be in, the sound and graphics of the game don't really allow you to relay those states to the player particularly well. I dare say, but these little 'emotes' could even give the mobs an additional sense of intelligence and realism (A bit like how enemies in TES games say things like "Huh, what was that", and "Found you!").

AMKitsune: @bluedraggy: Those seemingly exposed legs and QW's expression certainly adds weight to the possibility.

AMKitsune: Something else that came to mind was the possible inclusion of short range melee attacks. If I understand correctly, in ASOTIL mode and when out of magicka, there's no way of attacking, right? Well, what if when the cursor is within a suitable range of the player character (about an ingame melee strikes worth of distance), left click could initiate a suitably ranged melee attack. No magicka requirement and it could be usable by ASOTIL as well. Now, for Katia, such an attack shouldn't be anywhere near as powerful as her primary fireball attack, but what about the possibility of having 'stealth attack multipliers'? Sneak up behind an enemy to within striking range and unleash an attack to do considerable damage. That would add an extra element to combat and would give players another reason to play stealthily. What do you think?

AMKitsune: @picartosux: Yeah, for the sake of conflict, I was going to suggest pretty much the same thing. Score two for this suggestion ^.

AMKitsune: @Kazerad: Gee wiz, I wish I could type while unconscious. I guess I'm just not experienced enough yet...

She also has teeth capable of reflecting light now. That's a nice thing to have.

AMKitsune: Damn, I started writing that before Bluedragon wrote their description.

AMKitsune: I can only imagine the premise for this was something along the lines of 'two lizards bet money on (presumably) nude, interracial game of twister'.

It's an imaginative premise at least, that much can't be denied.
The question is though, who won the bet?

AMKitsune: @realbboy: Ok, playing through version 1.1.0.0 (the most recent version available for download), I've noticed a few things.

Firstly, there's a 'level' that appears as a black screen with katia in the middle which has a number of black circles with red eyes floating around. After a while, I figured out that holding the mouse away from katia causes her to move and found that some of the 'entities' had names above them (I was there to!) so I presume that this is some sort of credits screen? If so, it's quite confusing, especially as it loads immediately after failing a level (sometimes) and uses a completely different control method to the the rest of the game. If this is how you want to go about handling credits (And I'll admit, it's a fun and imaginative way of doing so), I'd suggest letting the player use the standard wasd controls for movement, placing a floor texture below Katia that moves in the opposite direction she does (to give a visual indicator that she's moving across the floor) and masked in a circle around her (you probably don't want to much of the 'floor' revealed, so a small circular area around Katia would be enough to give the player that visual feedback whilst leaving the majority of the room in pitch blackness). Along these lines, the credits sequence could be ended by either touching one of these red eyed creatures of by pressing the escape key or something, which brings me on to my second point.

Secondly, there doesn't appear to be any way to quickly return to the main menu besides dying or quitting and relaunching the entire game. The ability to pause the game (and possibly present a menu allowing the player to to things like return to the main menu and adjust various settings and such) would be a welcome inclusion.

Thirdly, besides the 'empty' level, I'm afraid that the ability to manually load the levels that you bundles with the game doesn't work for me. I select the level in the popped up file browser, it then returns me to the main menu, I walk offscreen and a code error message pops up.

___________________________________________
############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Alarm Event for alarm 0
for object textlevelgen_obj:

File is not opened for reading.
############################################################################################
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
called from - gml_Object_textlevelgen_obj_Alarm_0 (line 12)

Also, while the general file structure of user generated content may be clearer in the future, at the moment, it's a tad confusing in it's naming structure. With the way you say it's going to be structured, this may not be necessary, but have you considered changing the file extensions of your mob and level files? I know that mob files are currently restricted to single character long names and levels aren't but a file called MainRoom.level and P.enemy are much easier to identify at a glance than their .txt equivalents. The modlist.txt file also seems to be stored in my local\realbboy_infiltrate folder (while all the custom mob/level data is stored in that weird temp folder mentioned previously). Also, exiting out of the level select menu without actually picking a level causes the game to outright crash. You'll want to add in something to catch when the returned file is null (or whatever a cancelled file selection returns)

And finally, I love your title screen animation with the swirling fireballs and flying pineapples XD. It's not a dedicated graphic, but it's sure as hell making good use of existing ingame assets. There are however a few others that don't immediately stand out as being title screens (like the one where columns of fireballs fly in from the sides of the screen to eventually spell out the name of the game and a picture of Katia) While it's a cool tech demo of sorts, I initially dismissed it as pretty much just that. A tech demo that I assumed I wasn't meant to see and proceeded to click through it to the main menu. I'm not saying get rid of them, but I'd suggest somehow making them instantly recognisable as title screens.

One last thing actually, I also love the joke/tip button. There's some genuinely useful info in there!

AMKitsune: It's cool to finally see this here.
Thinking about the tagging situation, I don't know what the other mods would all think, but seeing as the thing that you're technically presenting here is the game itself (and this image is just to keep the booru happy), it makes sense (to me at least) that the tags should reflect the content of the game itself.

Also, while I believe that updating your game won't exactly pull the thumbnail for this page back to the front page of the booru, any comments left here will show up in the "Recent Interpretations" box, so if you leave a comment here whenever you update your game, that should bring it back into the forefront of peoples attention (for a little while at least).

Now, I'm not sure whether you got a chance to read my last suggestion before our disqus comments were 'pruned', but I had a suggestion for you regarding the custom enemies/maps system.

I noticed that you mention in your level editing tutorial that custom mobs (I'm just going to refer to non player characters as mobs from now on) have to be defined in the mad data by a single character which in turn needs to be the name of the respective mobs data file. I can see a setup like this potentially having conflict issues when different map makers use the same characters in their maps for different custom mobs. For example, imagine if "modder A" created their own map with a 'boss imp' mob denoted by the letter B and "modder B" created a different map with a 'badass clannfear' mob, also denoted by the letter B. Firstly, you can't have two files of the same type and name in the same folder. The operating system just won't allow it. Secondly, if only one of the custom mobs is chosen to be loaded into the folder, one of the custom maps will end up loading in a mob that the map maker never intended.

My suggested fix for this would be to allow mob files to have multi-character names that could better describe the actual mob defined within (Like "BadassClannfear.txt" for example). Not only would this greatly reduce the chances of a player encountering the issue of duplicate mob file names, but it would also make the files easier to identify at a glance. Now, I understand that you can't exactly have the map files use a long filename instead of single characters in the map layout, so my thinking is that within the map file itself, you could keep using single characters to denote instances of custom mobs, but below the map layout matrix, you could have a line (or multiple where needed) of text that essentially tells the level builder which external file to pull the custom mob data from. I'd say it would be like 'importing' the mob into the level data, but in reality, it would be more like taking the existing custom mob system, but instead of the level builder seeing the letter "K" in the matrix and thinking "Oh, I suppose I need to load in the mob from K.txt.", if would think "The letter K huh? Which file do I need to use for loading the letter K then?"

The structure for the 'import statement' of these mobs could be as simple as you wanted really, as long as it mentioned the character to replace and the file to pull data from.

For example, you could go for a format like;

"import K Super_Badass_Clannfear_Boss.txt"

Something like this would make finding and parsing these lines of text pretty easy when needed. All you'd need is to search your your level data file for "import [letterX]" (with or without the square brackets, that would be up to you) whenever the map matrix calls for letterX. If the program finds a match for "import [letterX]", it's then a simple case of using a regular expression to find the proceeding file name and load the mob data from there.

I get that at this early stage, this kind of expandability isn't too important for the 'user content' side of your development, but with enough uptake, file naming conflicts and maps loading the wrong mobs could be a legitimate issue. Plus, the current system limits the number of simultaneously installable mob files to the number of keyboard characters not being used by the vanilla game. As you add in more and more placeable elements into the game, that number will just decrease.

Sorry this wasn't the usual "gameplay suggestion" kind of feedback that you're usually after, but the boring file management stuff is just as important, right?

AMKitsune: @Bluedragon: Well, you know, booru content guidelines still stand, but provided that you're not linking to anything outright pornographic, I fail to see how linking to something that sounds like it would be classed as 'questionable' would be an issue. Then again, I'm not speaking for Kaz here, just as someone who likes seeing what people are coming up with and wouldn't mind seeing more. If you don't think your alternate versions are really suitable to be linked here, don't feel that you should just because I suggested it.

AMKitsune: @madmanransom: Whatever the bardic equivalent of a witch-hunter is, this guy clearly thinks like one.

AMKitsune: @Bluedragon: I'm not entirely sure what it is, but there's something about the way you clean up, colour and shade these pictures that just works so well for Kazerad's style. It also gives these images a uniquely recognisable style of their own.

Would you perhaps be willing to link the other versions in the source? I'm sure people would love to see them as well.

AMKitsune: My headcanon for this: It's little Katia's birthday and her parents had begged the lord of the castle to give them one of his finer, imported fish from the kitchen (in exchange for an unreasonable amount of unpaid overtime in their regular duties).

Expecting nothing but a regular paupers dinner, with a small song and well-wishings, Katia's eye's lit up in shock and awe as she was instead presented with a whole, freshly grilled fish.

As the plate was placed before her, excitement bubbled up within, as her tail rapidly swished from side to side, betraying her feelings to everyone nearby.

"Is... Is this, for me?" She asked her parents, trying her best to remain humble and non-expectant.
Sitting at the other side of the table, each with their plates of hardening bread and bowls half filed with cabbage soup, they replied with big smiles, "Of course. This is a very special occasion. It's not every day a little girl turns [whatever age you think works best], is it?"

With an open jawed smile nearly as big as the fish itself, Katia burst into thanks and hurriedly started slicing up her dinner. After the fist couple of delicious mouthfuls, she noticed that her parents were just soaking up their soup and weren't having anything nearly as nice as she was. Feeling a little disheartened by this, she took her fork and split the remaining fish into thirds, two of which she took in hand, leant over the table and placed on her parents bread plates.

"You'll have some too, right?" she asked.

They both looked at each-other for a second, before her mother turned back to Katia and asked, "Don't you want the whole thing sweetie? We probably won't have another like it for quite a while."

"Oh, yeah, I do... But then you wouldn't get one for a really long time, right? I'd rather we all got to share it anyway, if that's ok..."

Hearing this, her parents both got up, stepped around the table and leant in to give Katia a big hug.

"Of course it is dear." her father replied, welling up from his daughter's selfless gesture.

"It's your special day after all."

AMKitsune: And this is why we don't eat grasses and leaves when we're hungry.

AMKitsune: @Lykozze: Like the oblivion character class portraits, but better.

AMKitsune: HNNNNGGG... This guy never fails to impress! If I'm honest though, I think I'm more smitten with the texturing and overall line style than anything else. It's so rough yet purposeful. Beautiful!

AMKitsune: "Two years?" thinks Kazerad.
"I could probably come up with something in that time."

Also, AMK's medical standards for the win. If their heart's still beating, they're fine XD. Studied under the esteemed Dr. Zoidberg didn't you know?

AMKitsune: @Paulverizer: It looks like someone added in a duplicate 'meme' tag (which was subsequently removed) and 'smells_like_burned_ork-meat' and 'totally_not_arson' only seemed to be used on this one image (if there were any others, there aren't now). Sometimes, 'single use' tags like this end up being removed. If I had to guess, I'd imagine that's why your tags were changed.

AMKitsune: @MetalC0Mmander: Alas, I don't think the site was built with comment editing in mind. A shame really, as such a feature would require a significant overhaul of how the site deals with and stores comments to make such a feature possible (in a secure and manageable way). In absence of that though, you've always got 'slowly re-reading the comment before you post it'. That tends to work quite well XD.

And yeah, could someone please give this cat a sandwich or something? I think she somehow glitched her bodyweight slider into the negative.

AMKitsune: @Furrymoan: Levitation is just jumping with the addition of an arcane "fuck you gravity" at the end.

AMKitsune: @Lykozze: If two months ago you could only draw stick figures, then you've been improving a great deal in a very short time. Hat's off to ya.

As far as drawing hands goes, you've always got a couple of references stuck to the ends of your arms in case you need a bit of guidance.

AMKitsune: Seeing as the level names in Bubsy are pretty much all cat puns, a lot. A lot could go wrong.

AMKitsune: Wow. just, holy shit wow. Even if we did host video's here, that would have been way over the file size limit XD. I can see why this episode took as long as it did. That must have taken ages to model, animate and render.

The important question though, are animation extravaganzas like this going to become the norm for the series, or occasional delights like the prequel flash's (in comparison to the quantity of regular pages)?

AMKitsune: @Furrymoan: A tumblr thing from a while ago where Kaz said he'd reblog any picture with both princess Celestia and Vivec in it.

AMKitsune: "Broom broom, I'm a god!"

AMKitsune: When I woke up this morning and checked the booru on my tablet, I saw the thumbnail for this and genuinely thought "Oh wow, Furrymoan must have had a go at 3D rendering one of Makkon's pictures."
But nope. It's just Makkon being unbelievably amazing.

AMKitsune: A quick 'Katia-ification' of a prototype logo proposition for Pepsikat(Pepsidude) that I mocked up a while ago.

Now it's Katia holding a board with something on it. What could it say? Whatever your imagination (and sense of moral decency) permits!
(I'm not going to actually put peoples text here. Feel free to edit it yourself for your own purposes.)

AMKitsune:
I only had a few colours in my pencil case.

AMKitsune: @picartosux: Don't be silly. This is clearly Rajirra with a haircut.

AMKitsune: @Furrymoan: Quite mad, but do continue.
I've got blender installed and now begins the process of learning the basics. Wish me luck, I'm going to need it XD.

AMKitsune: @Furrymoan: How did you make that 3d model? It's simple, yeah, but I've been wanting to get into 3d modelling for a while now and have never really given it a good enough go. If I could make something like this, it'd be a good start.

AMKitsune: "Do you expect me to talk?"
"No Ms Managan... I expect you to meow."

AMKitsune: Stop being 'you' and be the pillar instead.

AMKitsune: While it's not a perfect replica, you can steal her look by giving yourself the in-game items "Green Robe" (player.additem 0007101B 1) and "Tan robe hood" (player.additem 0007101A 1). It's not as good as this mod looks, but it's not too shabby for using vanilla game assets.

AMKitsune: @Furomone: I don't mind in the slightest. It was admittedly a bit of a surprise, but not an unpleasant one by any means XD.

I'd all but forgotten about the dissolve blend mode. I couldn't see much use for such a 'binary' blending mode under normal circumstances, but it's evidently perfect for pixel art of this nature.

AMKitsune: @Furrymoan: Don't... you... DARE call your Kazerad: Adventure series 'shitty'! It started out good and has only gotten better and better with each passing update (and as of episode 5, yes, my opinion is very much biased XD). I'm really looking forward to seeing where this story goes.

Also, if it's Grape's ship and Katia's the captain, what position does Grape serve on board? And I'm a medic now? If that's not an incentive for the other crew members to stay healthy, I don't know what is XD.

I also have to ask, do you rotate (or otherwise transform) the images with 'fuzzy' aliased edges using nearest neighbour interpolation to distort the edges, or do you make it look that way manually?

AMKitsune: Ok, I have to ask. How did you do this? I'm guessing that you probably didn't place each Katia down by hand.

Also, is this meant to be a portal into the mind of a prequel fan? If so, looks pretty accurate to me XD.

AMKitsune:

AMKitsune: @Banana60229: Much like mr.2tails, I also mistook the thumbnail. I thought the lid of the container was a shield XD.

Looks like Katia's found employment as a waitress. Let's just hope she earns enough to be able to afford some of that delectable food for herself.

AMKitsune: @Rick2tails: That's a little ageist, isn't it?

AMKitsune: @The_guardsmen: I think Toryu-Mau was suggesting that Katia looks like she's ready to kick some serious ass and leave her victims significantly more flexible and less reliant on breathing than before... if you get my meaning.