Brevity is the soul of wit. In essence, make anything the comes from your whelpling fingers be succinct, and that you don't overstay your welcome. Writing for too long can...
realbboy: This is the page I was told to make to host discussion of my fangame, realbboy: Infiltrate.
If you see anything wrong, like a bug, or have an idea for an improvement, please post it here. I would greatly appreciate any criticism or feedback you guys have to offer.
Here is a link to the Indie Database page, which has tutorials on modding and the downloads to all versions, past and present:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/realbboy-infiltrate
While it may not look like much from my horrible menu 'art', the fangame is a fully functional stealth/action game which depicts Katia's foray into the Kvatch Mage's Guild. You can be Stealthy by watching where you go and using the Cloak of Gray Tomorrow, or carefully take down all the daedra that stand in your way with copious amounts of fireballs.
realbboy: To BA: Sorry my non-low-res-sprite art is terrible, if I could draw I probably would have made fanart instead of a fangame. Please my judge my game instead of my art :p
To any mods: Should I tag this as this picture or what's in my game?
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?
realbboy: @AMKitsune: Alright, I had a larger reply but then I accidentally deleted it so here's a quick summary:
I saw your disqus comment, have already fixed the issue in a hacky manner which involved separating sets of levels into subfolder mods which are put in a load order file called 'modlist.txt'. They can only see characters in their corresponding custom folder. Don't forget that characters aren't restricted to just capital letters, you can use lower case and weird symbols too! Thanks for getting me to fix this before anyone made mods that could be disrupted.
I'll get to work with completing the tags now, but there will probably be a ton, which is why I refrained from using so many to start with.
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.
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############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Alarm Event for alarm 0
for object textlevelgen_obj:
File is not opened for reading.
############################################################################################
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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!
realbboy: @AMKitsune:
The fireballs, swirly stuff, and dark room are all fancy title screens/ idle start screens, with the intention of being unquie-ish if you die and rage.
The black one actually comes from someone challenging me to make a game on a fanfic, which I promptly created an decided it would go along fairly well as a loading screen:
http://disq.us/p/1jzrit9
They're not meant as much more than pretty stuff to look at/minigames, but I'll consider sprucing the darkness one up some more.
The crash you found was caused by some code that didn't update to the new level file folder format, so I fixed it for the next version. (I should also note that the tutorial overrides your choice if you haven't completed it on any version on your computer yet, not that that will likely be relevant.)
On filenames I'd prefer to keep the files as text files so that whenever anyone opens them, they will automatically use their text editors of choice, having ".file"'s by any other name is still mostly annoying. There is the matter of whether the mods should have a custom and levels subfolder or if they should go in the custom and levels subfolders as it is now. Either way will result in the same amount of folders, and differentiate the characters (which can be crates or any in-game object if you haven't realized yet, even hidden ones (try my name hint hint).
Having a misplaced modlist.txt file is concerning though, are you sure this is the case? On the other machine I tested on it seemed to work fine, but it may be different on different computers considering I generate it at runtime specifically to try to put it in the same folder as the options save.
Speaking of options, I will definitely need to add a suicide/return to menu button, but a pause menu will have to wait until I clean up the menu proper and make it more menu-able, if that makes any sense.
As for the credits, I mostly consider the dedicated line or two on the (probably outdated) help screen to be credits, but as is everything else, that is up to change.
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?
realbboy: @AMKitsune: ASOTIL's attacks (poorly animated punches) don't use magicka, so ASOTIL doesn't actually use magicka at all.
Unarmed attacks might be nice, but I'm not sure Katia could pull off a sneak attack kill, even with her claws. Thinking about it, has she ever used her claws at actually attack something over the course of the comic? In short, it sounds good mechanic wise but would be one of the more un-canon things. I might still add it because I really like the idea, but it would have to deal enough damage to kill at least scamp instantly or it's just not worth it, because the player would instantly die.
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!").
realbboy: @AMKitsune: I'll definitely have to add indicators, and the sleep thing will probably work out to, although I'm currently implementing other characters besides ASOTIL so that'll have to wait.
What did Kaz think about the game? What did he say? This is the first time that I've heard him directly acknowledge it, so I'm kinda really excited to hear how he think more work holds up.
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
realbboy: @OhHiThere: It's an .exe file, which means you can just double click it to run it. Sounds like you're having trouble finding where you downloaded it to, though. Depending on your browser, you might be able to find it by clicking on some sort of download queue and clicking 'open file location'. Alternatively, you can poke around your /C: drive or search for 'downloads' in your entire computer'
realbboy: X-Post of my disqus 1.2.0.0 update:
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Ever wanted to see what happen if Quill-Weave or Aggy decided to loot the Kvatch Mage's Guild instead of Katia?
With my fan-update to my fan-game, you can!
For those of you who haven't heard of it, my fangame is my fanart of the update, except I can't draw, so I made a fangame of it instead! It's gotten fairly large since I first started around over a month ago (or maybe a few weeks, I'm not good with time)
You can find it here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/realbboy-infiltrate/downloads/realbboy-infiltrate-1-2-0-0
I strongly encourage any criticism or complaints, although I have to ask that, if possible you leave them on the fanart page, found here: http://www.prequeladventure.com/fanartbooru/post/view/4308 so as to not spam this disqus page and annoy the mods.
I hope you have fun playing my fangame!
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Also note that I didn't mention the added 'Your Weird OC' feature that is both untested an undocumented.
- On the loading screen, when you make a highscore (on that game that you need to run from the black things) too big and you die, the game crash.
- When you click the option "Select your Weird OC", and press Cancel, it crashes the game too. (It just need to be reviewed his code, probably there is an error of coding in the button :D)
- When you cancel the selection of a level, without choosing the level, game crashes too.
- When you ran around a wall with a Zombie Clannfear following you, they sometimes stop in the wall and get stuck in there, spinning in the same place like crazy.
- On my PC, when is on that start screen, sometimes when i click on the screen, it freeze the whole game. And crash.
Also, can you make Asotil punch have more range? Like, 0,5 more? Because sometimes i have problems to punch the Clannfears... (Or it is just me?)
Beside all of that, the game looks pretty cool! All those additions that were supposed to take weeks to add, but they were so quickly to came out, i don't know how did you do that!
All characters, abilities, special powers and stuff looks SOOOOO PERFECT!!!!!!
realbboy: @Robbyn:
1. How high was the highscore? I guess it might be possible to go over the integer limit and it would crash, but that would probably take hours of not dying. I can't think of anything else that could cause a similar problem off the top off my head, but I'll look into it.
2 + 3 : argh, I though I specifically fixed those bugs, I'll have to look into that as well.
4 : I'm pretty sure that's a bug specific to clannfear that just never comes up because there usually aren't corners everywhere, and I'll probably get around to replacing the clannfear zombies with regular zombies before I manage to fix that bug.
5. I'm not sure what causes this bug, I looked into it before but it stopped showing up, thanks for reporting it, I guess I'm going bug-hunting now.
As for the Asotil suggestion, I haven't actually tried Asotil mode that much, probably for that reason, I'll make sure to buff the punch for the next reason.
Thanks for the testing, the game will be much better for it.
realbboy: @realbboy: Ok, so I just spent some time bughunting and I wasn't able to reproduce the 'cancel' crash or the start screen crash. I do remember seeing both of them in this version and the last when I was testing my development builds, but I thought both were fixed. I looked at the code and 'cancel' crash is pretty much explicitly protected against. The start screen crash is more random and weird, so I'm going to need more details if I want to hunt it down. Is it after a specific start screen? Is it only when you load the game for the first time? Is it only with a specific character or option setting?
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?
realbboy: Ok, so I think these crashes are compiler specific, ie my debug compiler doesn't trigger them but the one I use for the exports does have them. I think this may be because the functions with cancel were intended for debug, so I'll try to rewrite them in the 10x more unwieldy asynchronous dialog events.
realbboy: @AMKitsune: When testing, I encountered it immediately on the pineapple swirl screen, so I don't think it's that. I put a message about it in the disqus update, but I think this is gonna be an issue that goes unsolved until I accidentally fix it or do something that breaks it more and makes it obvious.
X-post from disqus
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The last version was bugger than expected, and was silently patched (not that you guys noticed the worst bug- the crash that prevents Quill-Weave from getting arrows) those bugfixes, as well as additional content and features, can be found here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/realbboy-infiltrate/downloads/realbboy-infiltrate-1-2-1-6
As usual, the discussion/bug report page can be found here: http://www.prequeladventure.com/fanartbooru/post/view/4308
There are three primary new features to this version are YWOC, books, and arrows sticking in things.
YWOC is the ability to add your weird oc to the game as a playable character. You can find the guide for that here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/realbboy-infiltrate/tutorials/creating-your-weird-oc-in-realbboy-infiltrate If you want, you can even give Katia a beard! (I was going to make a skyrim joke, but now I can't find any mention of how much Bethesda pushed their beards anywhere)
The second new feature, books, adds two types of books to the game, attack skill books and special skill books. Attack skill books increase your damage, and special skill books improve your special skill. ASOTIL doesn't have a special skill, but he did have the balance patch of better hit detection, so go punch away for justice!
The final feature, arrows sticking into things, is pretty small, but I think it looks cool. True to TES, you can pick up arrows that hit walls solid walls but not arrows that hit soft, yielding flesh.
KNOWN ISSUE: The game sometimes, crashes after the start screen. It usually doesn't, and I haven't seen any pattern to it yet. You can just restart the game and you lose no progress, so it's not that big of an issue, but I would appreciate any evidence you guys have to offer.
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realbboy: The next update will likely be delayed a day or two while I try to figure out multiplayer stuff, which is like three different things I don't have any practice suing rolled into one. Luckily there are plenty of tutorials and examples to pull from, so it shouldn't take to long.
If anyone's interesting in how I'm going to go about doing it, I plan to basically livestream the host's screen to the clients, who will only return input data. This means that one person will have to have a good computer and internet connection, while the others will likely only have to have a bad computer and an ok connection.
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?
realbboy: @AMKitsune:
1. I'm definitely going to have to do that at some point, but I'll also have to account for players moving and running backwards, and strike a balance between making noise and not making noise when they rotate, since realistically that would involve them moving their feet.
2. I still have no idea what causes this, thankfully it isn't mid-game. I'll work on it, but I don't think I will be able to fix it until another change either fixes outright or reveals it's true nature.
3 + 4: I"ll put these together, and add a pause menu with options.
On the streaming, I was poking around in the manual and noticed that the application surface (essentially the end result of all the graphical stuff, which is then displayed on the screen) apparently is saved to a buffer every step. The network functions can only send over buffers. This seemed ten million times easier than sending over all the data dictating everything's blending, movement, states, and a bunch of other stuff that I use the draw things. The problem is that I can't find where this buffer is, and the function to straight up convert it to a buffer is very laggy. I managed to scale down the surface for sending, which takes care of the lag, but a bug is causing the client connection to crash which is why it isn't out already.
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.
realbboy: Disqus X-Post:
EDIT: I have uploaded an update (1.2.4.4) that has fixed the startup screen crash, expanded the highscore output, introduced some neat quality of life features, and added an "Easy Mode" that will help you learn the game.
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Easy mode has the indicator stuff, if I do a sound pass, the indicators will be in that as well. The startup screen crash was caused by an infinite do loop even though I specially made in with a break out when it runs out of things to look through, but despite my best efforts it decided to endlessly look through a <?> path, which I was not able to directly fix, so I instead implemented a 20 loop limit when looking for modded room categories.
Describe This Image As Dramatically As Possible
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If you see anything wrong, like a bug, or have an idea for an improvement, please post it here. I would greatly appreciate any criticism or feedback you guys have to offer.
Here is a link to the Indie Database page, which has tutorials on modding and the downloads to all versions, past and present:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/realbboy-infiltrate
While it may not look like much from my horrible menu 'art', the fangame is a fully functional stealth/action game which depicts Katia's foray into the Kvatch Mage's Guild. You can be Stealthy by watching where you go and using the Cloak of Gray Tomorrow, or carefully take down all the daedra that stand in your way with copious amounts of fireballs.
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To any mods: Should I tag this as this picture or what's in my game?
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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?
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I saw your disqus comment, have already fixed the issue in a hacky manner which involved separating sets of levels into subfolder mods which are put in a load order file called 'modlist.txt'. They can only see characters in their corresponding custom folder. Don't forget that characters aren't restricted to just capital letters, you can use lower case and weird symbols too! Thanks for getting me to fix this before anyone made mods that could be disrupted.
I'll get to work with completing the tags now, but there will probably be a ton, which is why I refrained from using so many to start with.
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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.
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############################################################################################
ERROR in
action number 1
of Alarm Event for alarm 0
for object textlevelgen_obj:
File is not opened for reading.
############################################################################################
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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!
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The fireballs, swirly stuff, and dark room are all fancy title screens/ idle start screens, with the intention of being unquie-ish if you die and rage.
The black one actually comes from someone challenging me to make a game on a fanfic, which I promptly created an decided it would go along fairly well as a loading screen:
http://disq.us/p/1jzrit9
They're not meant as much more than pretty stuff to look at/minigames, but I'll consider sprucing the darkness one up some more.
The crash you found was caused by some code that didn't update to the new level file folder format, so I fixed it for the next version. (I should also note that the tutorial overrides your choice if you haven't completed it on any version on your computer yet, not that that will likely be relevant.)
On filenames I'd prefer to keep the files as text files so that whenever anyone opens them, they will automatically use their text editors of choice, having ".file"'s by any other name is still mostly annoying. There is the matter of whether the mods should have a custom and levels subfolder or if they should go in the custom and levels subfolders as it is now. Either way will result in the same amount of folders, and differentiate the characters (which can be crates or any in-game object if you haven't realized yet, even hidden ones (try my name hint hint).
Having a misplaced modlist.txt file is concerning though, are you sure this is the case? On the other machine I tested on it seemed to work fine, but it may be different on different computers considering I generate it at runtime specifically to try to put it in the same folder as the options save.
Speaking of options, I will definitely need to add a suicide/return to menu button, but a pause menu will have to wait until I clean up the menu proper and make it more menu-able, if that makes any sense.
As for the credits, I mostly consider the dedicated line or two on the (probably outdated) help screen to be credits, but as is everything else, that is up to change.
As always, thanks for the input.
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Unarmed attacks might be nice, but I'm not sure Katia could pull off a sneak attack kill, even with her claws. Thinking about it, has she ever used her claws at actually attack something over the course of the comic? In short, it sounds good mechanic wise but would be one of the more un-canon things. I might still add it because I really like the idea, but it would have to deal enough damage to kill at least scamp instantly or it's just not worth it, because the player would instantly die.
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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!").
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What did Kaz think about the game? What did he say? This is the first time that I've heard him directly acknowledge it, so I'm kinda really excited to hear how he think more work holds up.
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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
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Ever wanted to see what happen if Quill-Weave or Aggy decided to loot the Kvatch Mage's Guild instead of Katia?
With my fan-update to my fan-game, you can!
For those of you who haven't heard of it, my fangame is my fanart of the update, except I can't draw, so I made a fangame of it instead! It's gotten fairly large since I first started around over a month ago (or maybe a few weeks, I'm not good with time)
You can find it here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/realbboy-infiltrate/downloads/realbboy-infiltrate-1-2-0-0
I strongly encourage any criticism or complaints, although I have to ask that, if possible you leave them on the fanart page, found here: http://www.prequeladventure.com/fanartbooru/post/view/4308 so as to not spam this disqus page and annoy the mods.
I hope you have fun playing my fangame!
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Also note that I didn't mention the added 'Your Weird OC' feature that is both untested an undocumented.
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- On the loading screen, when you make a highscore (on that game that you need to run from the black things) too big and you die, the game crash.
- When you click the option "Select your Weird OC", and press Cancel, it crashes the game too. (It just need to be reviewed his code, probably there is an error of coding in the button :D)
- When you cancel the selection of a level, without choosing the level, game crashes too.
- When you ran around a wall with a Zombie Clannfear following you, they sometimes stop in the wall and get stuck in there, spinning in the same place like crazy.
- On my PC, when is on that start screen, sometimes when i click on the screen, it freeze the whole game. And crash.
Also, can you make Asotil punch have more range? Like, 0,5 more? Because sometimes i have problems to punch the Clannfears... (Or it is just me?)
Beside all of that, the game looks pretty cool! All those additions that were supposed to take weeks to add, but they were so quickly to came out, i don't know how did you do that!
All characters, abilities, special powers and stuff looks SOOOOO PERFECT!!!!!!
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1. How high was the highscore? I guess it might be possible to go over the integer limit and it would crash, but that would probably take hours of not dying. I can't think of anything else that could cause a similar problem off the top off my head, but I'll look into it.
2 + 3 : argh, I though I specifically fixed those bugs, I'll have to look into that as well.
4 : I'm pretty sure that's a bug specific to clannfear that just never comes up because there usually aren't corners everywhere, and I'll probably get around to replacing the clannfear zombies with regular zombies before I manage to fix that bug.
5. I'm not sure what causes this bug, I looked into it before but it stopped showing up, thanks for reporting it, I guess I'm going bug-hunting now.
As for the Asotil suggestion, I haven't actually tried Asotil mode that much, probably for that reason, I'll make sure to buff the punch for the next reason.
Thanks for the testing, the game will be much better for it.
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X-post from disqus
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The last version was bugger than expected, and was silently patched (not that you guys noticed the worst bug- the crash that prevents Quill-Weave from getting arrows) those bugfixes, as well as additional content and features, can be found here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/realbboy-infiltrate/downloads/realbboy-infiltrate-1-2-1-6
As usual, the discussion/bug report page can be found here: http://www.prequeladventure.com/fanartbooru/post/view/4308
There are three primary new features to this version are YWOC, books, and arrows sticking in things.
YWOC is the ability to add your weird oc to the game as a playable character. You can find the guide for that here: http://www.indiedb.com/games/realbboy-infiltrate/tutorials/creating-your-weird-oc-in-realbboy-infiltrate If you want, you can even give Katia a beard! (I was going to make a skyrim joke, but now I can't find any mention of how much Bethesda pushed their beards anywhere)
The second new feature, books, adds two types of books to the game, attack skill books and special skill books. Attack skill books increase your damage, and special skill books improve your special skill. ASOTIL doesn't have a special skill, but he did have the balance patch of better hit detection, so go punch away for justice!
The final feature, arrows sticking into things, is pretty small, but I think it looks cool. True to TES, you can pick up arrows that hit walls solid walls but not arrows that hit soft, yielding flesh.
KNOWN ISSUE: The game sometimes, crashes after the start screen. It usually doesn't, and I haven't seen any pattern to it yet. You can just restart the game and you lose no progress, so it's not that big of an issue, but I would appreciate any evidence you guys have to offer.
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If anyone's interesting in how I'm going to go about doing it, I plan to basically livestream the host's screen to the clients, who will only return input data. This means that one person will have to have a good computer and internet connection, while the others will likely only have to have a bad computer and an ok connection.
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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?
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1. I'm definitely going to have to do that at some point, but I'll also have to account for players moving and running backwards, and strike a balance between making noise and not making noise when they rotate, since realistically that would involve them moving their feet.
2. I still have no idea what causes this, thankfully it isn't mid-game. I'll work on it, but I don't think I will be able to fix it until another change either fixes outright or reveals it's true nature.
3 + 4: I"ll put these together, and add a pause menu with options.
On the streaming, I was poking around in the manual and noticed that the application surface (essentially the end result of all the graphical stuff, which is then displayed on the screen) apparently is saved to a buffer every step. The network functions can only send over buffers. This seemed ten million times easier than sending over all the data dictating everything's blending, movement, states, and a bunch of other stuff that I use the draw things. The problem is that I can't find where this buffer is, and the function to straight up convert it to a buffer is very laggy. I managed to scale down the surface for sending, which takes care of the lag, but a bug is causing the client connection to crash which is why it isn't out already.
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EDIT: I have uploaded an update (1.2.4.4) that has fixed the startup screen crash, expanded the highscore output, introduced some neat quality of life features, and added an "Easy Mode" that will help you learn the game.
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Easy mode has the indicator stuff, if I do a sound pass, the indicators will be in that as well. The startup screen crash was caused by an infinite do loop even though I specially made in with a break out when it runs out of things to look through, but despite my best efforts it decided to endlessly look through a <?> path, which I was not able to directly fix, so I instead implemented a 20 loop limit when looking for modded room categories.