Thanks for the early feedback!

shirish: It's a browser-based game. Purely HTML5.

qubodup: Not clear whether the slow movement is unpleasant because it's an actual performance problem, or because the character moves at roughly 90 px per second. If it's an actual performance problem, there is A LOT of work that can be done in that area. And knowing the specifics of the machine/OS/browser used would be helpful in that case.

But if it's just because 90 px per second feels kind of slow ... yeah, it does. That's just part of all the game mechanics that I haven't touched yet (sadly).

Done! Added "HTML5" to the thread title. Sorry it seems that I'm intentionally vague. Truth is I don't have any plans for this project, so I can't tell you exactly what kind of game it will be. It might resemble something like Secret of Mana or Legend of Zelda... Or maybe Harvest Moon... Or... Who knows! :) Definitely no immediate plans to make it multiplayer, though that is easily at my disposal.

I will be working on a story, game mechanics, title, etc. during the remaining two weeks. But everything I have for this project is already on the table.

I hope that clears up at least a few things.

Cheers!

I see, thanks. That's normal. :P

Hi kintantee. Glad you asked! I have made some progress. Lots of details on my blog. The gist of progress since my original post:

• Added a simple NPC entity with a simple dialog for speaking.
• Added a simple collectible entity -- which is not yet collectible. That's my goal for tonight.
• New look for main player sprite.
• Player walks faster, and can run by holding Shift.
• Lots of under-the-hood changes to help with giving the game a nice polished look and feel.

There is still a very long way to go, but I'm sticking with it. Even working during my commute to/from work, and losing sleep because I work on it all night into the early morning hours. I will take next Monday off, I think, for a nice long weekend to solely progress on this project. :)

I have a basis for a story in place, I hope I can finish as much as I have planned, but it will be tight. I'm going to need more NPC sprites... I've contacted the author of the sprite I am currently using, and he has generously agreed to lend some of his free time to adjusting sprites if I can do a few rough frames for each one. I just want to keep consistency, because it's important.

That's really it for now! Again, you can follow my blog for a lot more details, as it's updated daily. You can also keep an eye on the snapshot, since it is also updated daily.

Oh right, before I forget! I also came up with a name: Neverwell Moor. I'll update the thread title and original post with that. :D

Hi all!

The past two days have been a tremendous effort to get this thing ready to go live in just over 10 days! Here's the progress since my last post:

• Coins are collectible.
• Quests are implemented.
• Added background music and sound effects.
• Added support for map animations.
• Minor changes to the island map.
• Added silver coins (worth 1/100 of a gold coin).
• Fixed rendering order; prioritize by Y-coordinate.
• Added a HUD which looks ... familiar.
• Chests are implemented. They don't contain items yet, but one contains a warp to ...
• Rachel's room. This is where Rachel's adventure will begin. It also looks ... very familiar. Hmm.
• Added some tools to aid in debugging.
• Did a LOT of tuning on the collision detection (again).
• Hours upon hours spent on internals again. (I hate being a perfectionist.) But at least the foundation is becoming very solid because of it!

The first 5 in the list are available in yesterday's snapshot. Today's snapshot will contain the rest of the changes in this list, and hopefully even more!

And before I forget, here's a screenshot of Rachel's Room. Normally I would not post screens, because It's easier (better) if you just visit the snapshot and start playing. But this is a special occasion, only because this map isn't in the snapshot at the moment.

Here's a video recording of how the game plays as of today: http://youtu.be/JagSFQOMyQc (Sorry for the poor quality. Youtube did that.) I also added it to the original post.

And here's a screenshot of what to expect from the video.

Awesome feedback! Thank you.

Which browser and operating system were you using? For reference, I'm developing on Chrome 22 (dev channel) and Mac OS X. I also briefly tested with Firefox 13.

I'll try to answer each of your points:

• For your first point, those are two separate issues. The skipping sounds a lot like the physics time stepping going crazy, probably because of a low framerate. I'll just have to do some tuning in that area so worst case there will be a lower framerate and the perceptual "time" will slow down (things will move slower instead of jumping to the location they should be). The animation speed has to do with (I think) the size of the map. A smaller map has less to draw == higher framerate, so animations run faster.
• I think rectangular collision boxes makes it feel more "old school". ;) But that's not really what I'm going for anyway. I will probably change Rachel and NPC collision shapes to circles, and the trees can be turned into octagons. But that means you'll have a lot more difficulty pushing NPCs around! hehehe
• The color is really odd; I hadn't noticed that in Chrome or Firefox at all. The tiles and background color use the same hex notation color: #156C99. But the background color is actually being rendered as #196B9D! This is a bug in the game engine. If I can't fix it, I'll go back to using the solid-color tiles. Nice catch!

Thanks again! That was all very helpful.

About the color issue -- ugh! Pixie gave me a THIRD color as I was inspecting the screen. That pointed right at the real culprit: color profiles! DAMMIT GIMP! So I disabled color management in GIMP and removed the color profiles from all the images. Pixie shows everything is correct, now! Hooray!

Whew! Not a game engine bug after all.

Circle for Rachel, Poly for NPC. Got it! :D

I also noticed it was strange to talk to someone who wasn't even paying attention. ;) But it was 6am by the time I had AI working in a way I liked. "NPCs pay attention when talked to" is on my TODO list for sure.

Going back to my QA notes: "- Semi-frequent pauses due to JavaScript GC." The pausing comes from the JavaScript engine stopping everything to run garbage collection. And that means I'm "leaking" memory somewhere. Shame these kinds of problems are ridicoulsly difficult to debug in JavaScript. :\

Another thing I also noticed in Firefox (not apparent on Chrome) -- the animations run rather quickly for the first few seconds after loading a new map, then slows down to what I consider "normal" over time. Is that what you're talking about? It might be realted to the next thing...

Which is the game pauses when it loses focus -- at least, it tries to with varying degrees of success. There was a crazy bug in the game engine earlier where changing focus multiple times caused the game to speed up each time. This was related to the window.requestAnimationFrame() method, which is still experimental(!) I might disable it and see if it changes the weirdness in animation.

The music is from Nelson James Gatlin's LPC entry. The title of the track is "Bells (menu theme) #two": http://opengameart.org/lpc-art-entries (second one down) He has a lot of great music there.

Thanks again for your comments! They are super helpful.

Good, good. I did a bit of profiling on the memory leak, and it seems to be Chipmunk-js. I didn't get into it a great deal, though.

I agree with the colors on FF. I spent WAY too much time last night investigating that area, and I've determined that FF is just being incooperative, like it is applying color management to images regardless of configuration or ICC profile tags in the images themselves. Chrome and GIMP agree on the actual RGB values, so that's good enough for now. I can't spend a lot of time on it...

I'm not supporting non-free browsers (for obvious reasons) but it's good to know IE9 at least tries. I know one of the problems with IE8 offhand is my use of Array.prototype.forEach() just about everywhere -- I haven't used a compatibility method on the prototype, it's just expected to be there. The lack of sound is because I'm only using Ogg-Vorbis audio; again, it's a free software thing.

Awesome work on QA. And thanks for the offer to help with maps! the only real ideas I have left in mind are: a large outdoor area with a village (4~6 small houses), mountain, field, and forest. It is going to be a large island (surrounded by beach and water). The houses will have insides to find more items, talk to NPCs, etc. There will be a number of NPCs scattered around this large map; sadly they will have to share sprite images, because I do not have many available.

That's probably more than I can accomplish in the time remaining. But it's still not the complete vision! :\

Thank you again! You've been great already.

Hi verbalshadow. I don't have Rekonq, or any quick way to get it for testing. Are you able to find any error messages in the console? ... If it has a developer console? That will help debug the problem, I think.

Does the browser support Ogg-Vorbis format audio? Do any of the following links play in the browser for you?

http://parasyte.kodewerx.org/projects/lpcgame/resources/bgm/bells.ogg

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/49/Dance_Of_The_Sugar_Pl...

Cool! I don't have any set limits on tilesets. The ones I am already using are listed here: https://bitbucket.org/parasyte/lpcgame/src/ec5cf4e61923/resources/img (They may be renamed from original assets.)

And yes, the outside area is a single map. This is it: https://bitbucket.org/parasyte/lpcgame/src/ec5cf4e61923/resources/map/ea... If you can use Tiled 0.9 and its auomapping feature, that would be ideal. The earth.tmx map is already configured for it, and there are rule maps in the 'rules' subdirectory.

If you can't use any of those features, I can still import the map data from a TMX ... I think. Or I could always use an image layer, I guess. Will make it difficult to modify later, though.

I suggest using fewer straight lines in the map wherever possible. Like, here's a zoomed out view of the "earth.tmx" map. Notice my path is angled in kind of a random fashion:

Here's an updated screenshot of that same map, now with a dense forest. Also note the extensive use of pattern breaking. (This was created with the Tiled Automapping feature. It's very difficult to get right with complex positions, and the Automapping really makes this happen like magic.)

Thanks for the heads up! There are no collision shapes on the big outside map. So you will walk through everything. It's just unfinished. :|

D'OH! I just now noticed that I completely forgot to commit the baddies AI source. :( I blame literal lack of sleep... That explains the error in the snapshot. It's in the repo now, so if you can run the game from source, you can test your maps on it now.

I just finished the weapons integration (Rachel can defend herself! Hooray!) so I'm pretty much ready to do some more mapping, myself. I'll pick up your maps and try to integrate. Don't worry too much about learning to write rules for automapping; it's a pain to get right with complex patterns. But you can use the rules I already have setup! Just open the "earth.tmx" map (you should clone the git repo, so the directory structure is the same. That will solve your problem with Tiled directory handling) and press the "A" key to run automapping. You'll see some of the grass tiles and sand tiles randomly change to verify it's working. Just look at the two layers called "set" and "set_trees"; those layers define how the automapping will generate the other layers.

The tiles on the two set layers are VERY important: For grass, you must use the flat green tile in the "grass" tileset. For sand, it's the sand tile in the same position, but on the "sand" tileset. Ditto for the dirt. The "dirt2" tileset is NOT used yet. For trees, use the first trunk tile in the "trunk" tileset on the set_trees layer. And there are some spacing rules to get trees to work properly: There must be at least two horizonal spaces between each tree, and at least one vertical space. For anything that is not one of these supported tiles, use any tile EXCEPT the "no tile" (eg. don't use the eraser!) I used the blank water tile in the the "watergrass" tileset.

You can imagine why it's so difficult to write the rules... So many limitations.

Anyway, THANKS for your help on the map! Where do you think the roads will lead? :)

Ok, I just posted today's snapshot! Though I started on something else already (the story screens) they can wait, because I'm tired of Gimp for now. So I'm going to start going through your map files and begin poking them into earth.tmx. It will be some much-needed love for the area. The shed is pretty cool! I will put the Mighty Mallet there. :D

This little house can't be Rachel's ... she has a very small two-story house! hehe...

Also I wasn't able to find "misc.png" anywhere, so I don't know how to credit it to the author. You mentioned Matthew Nash in your previous post, is that it?

(I had a full response written, but hit CMD+R by accident instead of CMD+T. So I lost all of that time. grrrr)

Yes! The attributions information would be super-super handy!

• Sorry about that. I forgot to update the chest contents on the island when I added the description field for the dialog. It's fixed in the repo.
• The snakes are ridiculously difficult. They were supposed to be a pushover mob, too! I'll decrease their speed and vision range for sure, but I want another semi-powerful mob to keep the balance. The only idea I have at this point is the bat from the base assets. Mainly because it will be really quick.
• I haven't seen the snakes move slower when Rachel gets out of sight. But I like that idea as well. I can very easily add two speeds to angry NPCs; a normal roaming speed, and a faster hunting speed. When they lose sight, they'll revert to the slower roaming speed for the remaining leg to their destination, which is the last position they saw their target. That should be about the same effect.
• I ssooooo wanted to add this! I was worried the friendly NPCs would go out looking for trouble, though... They'll attack snakes even if the snakes don't see the NPC. And if I give snakes a smaller window of vision, it will really look like the NPCs are more aggressive than the snakes. :P When an NPC becomes angry, it simply turns into an enemy. So the snakes become friendly to an angry NPC. It's silly, but fun!
• Saving state between map changes is something that has been on my TODO list for a long time. It's just going to be difficult to implement properly. And I don't have time for that. I will just have to fake it. :\ It needs to be done.
• There are a lot of little sound effects added recently! Almost all of them were generated by cfxr. I've had really poor luck when it comes to finding decent sound effects. I spent two days looking for an award jingle for when when Rachel collects and item. The one I have if thebest I could find, and I don't think it fits well. :( That's why I turned to auto generated sounds.
• SFX for NPCs taking damage has been done very recenlty. I think RIGHT after last night's blog update. They all "squeek" when attacked and dying. It's not perfect, but it is kind of cute.
• Also something I noticed and did not like, myself. Preventing any action during a transition was a workaround for interrupting the transition and causing it to look ugly.
• Nice! I'll have to do that... I should also remove the front door on the inside, to match what I did with rachels_house.tmx

And yeah, I emailed Radomir a week ago to ask if he could help me with some sprites. He actually created two more that I'm now using! George and Betty (renamed Jessica for the story). He also has a "character creation kit" (a fantastic idea!) for download on his site, but it won't work because the dimensions don't match.

That mallet sound effect is great! I had to break it into two pieces to get it sync'd with the animation, but it fits really well. Weapons support multiple sound effects (chosen randomly at play-time) so if you can come up with one (or two!) more, I would really be into that!

Here's some story details, and background info on Rachel:

Rachel is 15 years old. She grew up hearing stories of a strange island called "Neverwell", told by her grandfather ("Poppa" to Rachel). Rachel was 5 at the time, and the stories were always something adventurous and entertaining. Poppa would tell her about the inhabitants of the island, and how they could perform magic. He would fight monsters while hunting for treasures buried in deep caves. There were so many details in his stories that he had to set some of his adventures on smaller islands around Neverwell.

Poppa died shortly after, and it's been 10 years, so she doesn't remember all of the stories he told. But she remembers important details like the eponymous moor, which was a very dangerous place, but that it held some kind of secret... Perhaps the secret to the inhabitants magic? But that was a long time ago, and they were just stories. Everyone knows there is only one island, and they call it "Earth."

So Rachel sets off on a day like any other, but, feeling a little adventurous, she decides to help a friend. That kind gesture leads to a series of quests which eventually lands Rachel on Neverwell; a place that isn't supposed to exist...

That's it! A little something for your appetite. That's just about as much as I can get done within the remaining time, so ... yeah.

And a piece of trivia: the character Rachel is actually based on a real life friend of mine.

I was planning to put the Whitey character in the large manor. I don't have an inside map for it, so I just placed her spawn position right outside the door. ;)

I'm not too worried about the Z-order problems at the moment. There are a lot of them, especially after adding the mallet. Just run up and down the stairs in Rachel's house a few times. :x! I do have proper Z-ordering working for sprites against sprites, but not for sprites against background layers. That would be a REAL challenge to solve. Fixing the Z-order on the mallet is even more difficult that all of that combined. I'd have to break it into two separate images and handle them interdependently. The sprite composition code does some of this work, already, but not enough...

As for the fenced in guy, that was a bit of a gag. ;) I didn't want him running away on me as I tested things. The area is really only for decoration.

Amazing, I never would have spotted that missing collision shape on the bridge! That was an utter mistake. The whole north/north-west side of Earth was intentially left incomplete, including collision shapes. :P

I noted the same coin-pushing bug in the commit log. Sadly, I think it's a bug in Chipmunk-js. It appears that any shapes that are created touching another shape will not trigger the collision handler between those shapes. There's another bug that may be related, where the arbiters passed to the collision handler are given in a random order if the collision types are listed from highest-to-lowest. Strange stuff!

And yeah, I have everything needed for dialog. I don't know how likely it is I'll add a whole lot of dialog or quests, but it is sorely lacking!

I am actually adding all kinds of major features before submission! Lots done so far, I've been at it non-stop for about 28 hours. I have about 9 and half hours to go. Then I can sleep. My next goal is implementing notifications (like tutorial info bubbles) because it's really important for presentation.

Thanks again for all your help, it's been great.

I did fix the dialogue bit, thanks. No time for anything else, I'm afraid. I really appreciate all the help you've been able to provide so far! I'm now submitting my entery...

Thanks! The "dynamic" feeling is one of the things I was going for. I did not want it to feel realistic, but have a more fast-action pace. One of the features that I missed implementing was a simple targeting system, where Rachel would jump long distances to target nearby enemies... Allowing for combos and such. Maybe an upgraded mallet later in the game? ;) That definitely would have added to the pace, and show off more of what I was trying to acheive.

Has anyone found the hidden credits? The NPCs will provide hints if you help them out. I actually completed it in about 5 minutes after one death. Saving the number of coins makes it a bit too easy...

It's in a very silly spot. You were close. :P

Anyway, I posted my postmorten to my blog today: http://blog.kodewerx.org/?post=29

FYI, the git repo has moved since the coding competition ended. The new location is: https://bitbucket.org/parasyte/neverwell-moor/ I've also updated the original post with the new link.