Looks good! Also, some engines tend to use space as jump by default and people don't think to change them because it's been the thing for like... Ever. But I agree with you, it's terrible. I'm not sure what the best keyboard scheme is because I typically avoid games without controller support but if it looks too good to pass up, I'll use my steam controller.
I didn't do space for jump on the psychopomp, though.
Are you just wanting to render it in a standard hd resolution or redo everything in hd? You can do the former pretty easily via view in room = 640x380 port on screen = 1920x1080 and make sure interpolation is off. Also, if you just leave the port on screen the same, it'll match device screen pretty accurately in fullscreen.
@withthelove Hey, thanks! I hope it pans out! I've spent more time on getting gamemaker to handle stuff than I have actually making this game, so I've had to go back and rewrite stuff over and over and even remove things entirely T.T My work-flow has been anything but a straight line this past week.
I think after this jam, I'm going to try and remake it in unreal. Taking advantage of 3d space, streaming volumes, camera effects, mature particles and lighting might really make things pop and less of a nightmare. For example: I've spent a lot of time on parallax code in each scene/room with gamemaker and it's still glitchy, I'm disappointed with it, but it'll have to do. After testing on unreal, I just drop a layer in, scoot it back a little in z-space and it's done and perfect. I feel like choosing gamemaker was a mistake on my end but at least I'm learning from this!
Eh, I see similarities in the two, mainly in the ears, but I don't think it's a "rip-off". They have two completely different body builds, colors and personalities. Ori is more sleek and graceful and looks more like a majestic monkey with legs akin to a goat while Stitch is pudgy and clumbsy and looks more like a demented koala bear. I'm speaking from a place where I love them both <3
Sorry about your game :X at least try take a break for a few days.
Oooh, yeah, I forgot about metal slug. That is a grand example.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that but uh.. I'm very impressed with Ori. That team managed to do a lot of things with that game that has never been done before, which is a pretty big accomplishment these days. I've played it several times and I've never found a glitch or a bug. Everything you see was made specifically for that spot and you will find it nowhere else. Like, if you see a mushroom next to Ori, that is the only place you will ever see that mushroom in the entire game world. A lot of the individual items also have a physics based animation that's even reactive to you walking by it. The entire gameworld is loaded in after one load time, so each individual scene is seamlessly streamed into the next without any indication. The way the collision works with the various art elements is also unlike anything I've ever seen. It's a metroidvania, which there are plenty of, but they've done things that no metroidvania ever has and really raised the bar in that genre and they've raised the bar in just about every genre when it comes to how artwork is deployed.
But yeah, I wouldn't stress texture page management with pixel games and pc. Toasters should be able to run them, even if they're big games. It's just been the bulk of my workflow with my project @.@
I disagree with you there. Most of my favorite games are pixel games. Granted, there are games that really hit you with the "wow" factor that pixel games rarely accomplish(eg ori), but there are really beautiful pixel games too. My favorite game, visually, is megaman 8.
But yes, if you can keep an entire game in one texture page, do that. If it gets bigger than a texture page, you can always scale it up to a certain point, depending on the target platform. Pixel games usually require little to no management. Good practice with tpage management would be to keep all of your specific level graphics (eg the frozen stage's tileset and enemies that only appear there) in their own tpage. Then have all the graphics repeated throughout the game in its own tpage (player sprites, pickups, switches, sprite-based fonts, in-game hud etc). You just have to play around with it and check performance to see where it needs or could use performance. If your target is always PC, you can just ignore all of the above entirely and you'll be fine with pixel games.
Some platform examples
Android and iphone are targeted at 1024x1024
Newer iphones and most contemporary android phones cap at 2048x2048
Windows phones max at 512x512 (though you can do some tricks to use 1024x1024 pages)
laptops with graphics chips built-in to the cpu (eg amd a8, intel family mobile), it's going to have a hard time with 4096x4096, especially when swapping happens.
My workaround is not really good at all, honestly. It would have taken way to long to do it the "right way" and I already had the setback of tediously re-exporting everything from a 2004 software at the start of the race lol So, I did what I could with minimal effort.
Vector can be heavier than raster in someways. For eample, if you have a sprite that's 64x64 px, it would be more efficient to keep it rastered because that's hardly a noticeable workload for the gpu or ram. But if you were using 2000x2000 px image, not only is that not a power of 2 image (does not utilize texture page space efficiently), it could easily spill over into the area where you're using texture page swapping. When that happens, you are working your gpu and ram much harder, and if you exceed the hardware limits, it will create spikes in cpu loads aswell. Even today's high-end gpu's struggle with 8 simultaneous texture page swapping(depending on size), which delta time won't even help much with the frame rate.
This is where the vector comes in handy. It's heavier on cpu workloads, yes, but any remotely new cpu will have multiple cores (each with hyperthreading), and if it somehow hits its limit (which I've yet to see in gamemaker) it will store excess into ram, which may cause lag, but it can be saved (made unnoticed) with delta. All of this is pretty universal with the engines I use and know pretty well (unreal, unity(which can vectorize rasters natively), and game maker).
The only area where gamemaker (1.4, I haven't been able to get a working swf in gm2 at all) struggles with vector is when there's elements outside the stage, handling embedded ActionScript, tweening and apparently timelines(though their documentation claims it can do timelines). The last graphic intensive project I had that used vector ran very smooth (and I had multiple images over 8000x8000 px in a single room!) on both my PC and phone, though I also used tricks involving surfaces to store static images
, so it went well. There's no way I would have had time to do all of this from scratch, but it's exactly what I'll be doing post jam (probably reusing scripts from the older vector project)
Oh, yeah. It's kind of barren, honestly. Just about everyone with a progress report has more going on than I do! I was able to slam out WAAAAY more content and features in last year's oga jam in a shorter amount of time. Using these graphics is cumbersome and it's really all I have to carry me, which I pretty much anticipated, just not to this extent @.@ I was really banking on the fact that I would be using the graphics in their original vector format. For example, every room/scene had originally 9 layers and after changing them to png, I was mostly limited to 4. Either way, I'm happy (content?) with my progress!
@spring Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. I've been getting up two hours early most days to add code but I'm also running out of steam. I'm very impressed with the amount of content you've managed to pull off and the amount of features you've packed into it. My game is pretty simple by comparison.
I've spent most of my time on the project's foundation, making it as simple as I can to expand on later, if I decide to. So, between that and the optimization bandaids I've implemented to handle pretty large raw graphics, I'm not going to be able to use half of the enemies I've animated. I've also shaved off 6 areas/scenes/rooms and I'm probably not going to have the boss finished in time.
I'll be spending the next few days tying up loose ends on what I do have and removing what's implemented but incomplete for the sake of intuitive playability and submitting something that represents more of a draft of how I envisioned my project.
This all sounds sorta depressing, maybe, but that means I can start remaking what I do already have way better without a time limit!
Looks good! Also, some engines tend to use space as jump by default and people don't think to change them because it's been the thing for like... Ever. But I agree with you, it's terrible. I'm not sure what the best keyboard scheme is because I typically avoid games without controller support but if it looks too good to pass up, I'll use my steam controller.
I didn't do space for jump on the psychopomp, though.
Are you just wanting to render it in a standard hd resolution or redo everything in hd? You can do the former pretty easily via view in room = 640x380 port on screen = 1920x1080 and make sure interpolation is off. Also, if you just leave the port on screen the same, it'll match device screen pretty accurately in fullscreen.
@withthelove Hey, thanks! I hope it pans out! I've spent more time on getting gamemaker to handle stuff than I have actually making this game, so I've had to go back and rewrite stuff over and over and even remove things entirely T.T My work-flow has been anything but a straight line this past week.
I think after this jam, I'm going to try and remake it in unreal. Taking advantage of 3d space, streaming volumes, camera effects, mature particles and lighting might really make things pop and less of a nightmare. For example: I've spent a lot of time on parallax code in each scene/room with gamemaker and it's still glitchy, I'm disappointed with it, but it'll have to do. After testing on unreal, I just drop a layer in, scoot it back a little in z-space and it's done and perfect. I feel like choosing gamemaker was a mistake on my end but at least I'm learning from this!
Eh, I see similarities in the two, mainly in the ears, but I don't think it's a "rip-off". They have two completely different body builds, colors and personalities. Ori is more sleek and graceful and looks more like a majestic monkey with legs akin to a goat while Stitch is pudgy and clumbsy and looks more like a demented koala bear. I'm speaking from a place where I love them both <3
Sorry about your game :X at least try take a break for a few days.
Oooh, yeah, I forgot about metal slug. That is a grand example.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and all that but uh.. I'm very impressed with Ori. That team managed to do a lot of things with that game that has never been done before, which is a pretty big accomplishment these days. I've played it several times and I've never found a glitch or a bug. Everything you see was made specifically for that spot and you will find it nowhere else. Like, if you see a mushroom next to Ori, that is the only place you will ever see that mushroom in the entire game world. A lot of the individual items also have a physics based animation that's even reactive to you walking by it. The entire gameworld is loaded in after one load time, so each individual scene is seamlessly streamed into the next without any indication. The way the collision works with the various art elements is also unlike anything I've ever seen. It's a metroidvania, which there are plenty of, but they've done things that no metroidvania ever has and really raised the bar in that genre and they've raised the bar in just about every genre when it comes to how artwork is deployed.
But yeah, I wouldn't stress texture page management with pixel games and pc. Toasters should be able to run them, even if they're big games. It's just been the bulk of my workflow with my project @.@
None of this is indisputable fact, it's just what I've observed over the last few years.
I disagree with you there. Most of my favorite games are pixel games. Granted, there are games that really hit you with the "wow" factor that pixel games rarely accomplish(eg ori), but there are really beautiful pixel games too. My favorite game, visually, is megaman 8.
But yes, if you can keep an entire game in one texture page, do that. If it gets bigger than a texture page, you can always scale it up to a certain point, depending on the target platform. Pixel games usually require little to no management. Good practice with tpage management would be to keep all of your specific level graphics (eg the frozen stage's tileset and enemies that only appear there) in their own tpage. Then have all the graphics repeated throughout the game in its own tpage (player sprites, pickups, switches, sprite-based fonts, in-game hud etc). You just have to play around with it and check performance to see where it needs or could use performance. If your target is always PC, you can just ignore all of the above entirely and you'll be fine with pixel games.
Some platform examples
Android and iphone are targeted at 1024x1024
Newer iphones and most contemporary android phones cap at 2048x2048
Windows phones max at 512x512 (though you can do some tricks to use 1024x1024 pages)
laptops with graphics chips built-in to the cpu (eg amd a8, intel family mobile), it's going to have a hard time with 4096x4096, especially when swapping happens.
Uhhhg, I guess you're right. Carry on, then!
My workaround is not really good at all, honestly. It would have taken way to long to do it the "right way" and I already had the setback of tediously re-exporting everything from a 2004 software at the start of the race lol So, I did what I could with minimal effort.
Vector can be heavier than raster in someways. For eample, if you have a sprite that's 64x64 px, it would be more efficient to keep it rastered because that's hardly a noticeable workload for the gpu or ram. But if you were using 2000x2000 px image, not only is that not a power of 2 image (does not utilize texture page space efficiently), it could easily spill over into the area where you're using texture page swapping. When that happens, you are working your gpu and ram much harder, and if you exceed the hardware limits, it will create spikes in cpu loads aswell. Even today's high-end gpu's struggle with 8 simultaneous texture page swapping(depending on size), which delta time won't even help much with the frame rate.
This is where the vector comes in handy. It's heavier on cpu workloads, yes, but any remotely new cpu will have multiple cores (each with hyperthreading), and if it somehow hits its limit (which I've yet to see in gamemaker) it will store excess into ram, which may cause lag, but it can be saved (made unnoticed) with delta. All of this is pretty universal with the engines I use and know pretty well (unreal, unity(which can vectorize rasters natively), and game maker).
The only area where gamemaker (1.4, I haven't been able to get a working swf in gm2 at all) struggles with vector is when there's elements outside the stage, handling embedded ActionScript, tweening and apparently timelines(though their documentation claims it can do timelines). The last graphic intensive project I had that used vector ran very smooth (and I had multiple images over 8000x8000 px in a single room!) on both my PC and phone, though I also used tricks involving surfaces to store static images
, so it went well. There's no way I would have had time to do all of this from scratch, but it's exactly what I'll be doing post jam (probably reusing scripts from the older vector project)
Oh, yeah. It's kind of barren, honestly. Just about everyone with a progress report has more going on than I do! I was able to slam out WAAAAY more content and features in last year's oga jam in a shorter amount of time. Using these graphics is cumbersome and it's really all I have to carry me, which I pretty much anticipated, just not to this extent @.@ I was really banking on the fact that I would be using the graphics in their original vector format. For example, every room/scene had originally 9 layers and after changing them to png, I was mostly limited to 4. Either way, I'm happy (content?) with my progress!
Also, stop! You said you were done!
@spring Yeah, I'm kind of in the same boat. I've been getting up two hours early most days to add code but I'm also running out of steam. I'm very impressed with the amount of content you've managed to pull off and the amount of features you've packed into it. My game is pretty simple by comparison.
I've spent most of my time on the project's foundation, making it as simple as I can to expand on later, if I decide to. So, between that and the optimization bandaids I've implemented to handle pretty large raw graphics, I'm not going to be able to use half of the enemies I've animated. I've also shaved off 6 areas/scenes/rooms and I'm probably not going to have the boss finished in time.
I'll be spending the next few days tying up loose ends on what I do have and removing what's implemented but incomplete for the sake of intuitive playability and submitting something that represents more of a draft of how I envisioned my project.
This all sounds sorta depressing, maybe, but that means I can start remaking what I do already have way better without a time limit!
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