Ah that's fine. This isn't the kind of game that warrants a test suite. I expect people to mess with the code and data, that's a big part of why it's open source.
Worst that could happen, someone cheats at a single player game? I guess the actual worst is if they manage to crash the engine, but maybe that turns into a bug report.
The Alpha quest line is sort of done. It may be revived/retold later, but it will be mostly replaced for 0.19.
The eggsac is fun. It might be too much detail for a small tile size though. Perhaps a similar design with fewer bulbous parts, and maybe a more irregular overall shape.
If I were creating the egg sac I would animate it a bit -- make it pulsate at least.
Our goal really isn't to implement everything (e.g. I'd never add a carrying capacity) but to make it a bit easier for people to want to add that. I want there to be some good customizability of the core action elements (e.g. attack, hit, crit, damage) at least, because those are going to be common for most games of the genre.
As far as just adding more stuff (powers, items) that's just editing data for the most part. I add more as I get inspiration.
Some of my thoughts on Flare's animations. I made most of them and I'm open to specific critiques. I'd like to work on new upscaled core art soon so this kind of feedback is valuable.
The animations are better than a ton of other indie games. I see lots of games like this that look great in stills but look awful when moving.
Some of the creatures have poor animations (e.g. the skeleton especially). Given infinite time I'd redo some.
I don't like the hunched over male pose. That's probably the oldest animation in the entirety of Flare. The female's stance is a bit better but is unnecessarily feminine (she stands and moves like a model, not like a warrior).
The attacks could all use some unrealistic momentum, if the game needs to go that direction (fast-paced gamey combat). The wind-up and swing should be all moved to the first half of the animation, and the second half should be follow-through and rest. I noticed this a lot in Diablo 3, and how much it added to a aggressive crunchy combat feel. This is harder to do with only 4 attack frames.
I don't do a great job of moving all the bones when animation. So a lot of the running feels more like sliding than actually a heavy stomp wearing full armor. I'd like to study the running animations in Dark Souls cause I think they nailed it.
Finally it's a question of how much detail is retained when rendering the heroes at ~60px tall. We don't expect these animations to e.g. work in 3D third person. They just need to look nice for the output sprites.
Some animations don't work (for heroes) at all with the current layer system. E.g. can't have a spinning attack because that required reordering layers per frame, instead of how it's currently done (by facing direction). Even the attack animations have to be crafted in a way so that they don't violate draw order. We could change this if and only if the actual requirement comes up (support per-frame layer orders).
What's lacking with the current animations? Just lame style? If so that's understandable. But the amount of work to re-render everything is probably too high a cost at this point.
We can't really add more frames of animation if that's what you're considering. All the permutations for 8 directions, several animations, and all the equipment means the game already takes a considerable amount of memory. If we roll out the "hdcore" version with no new frames the game will require 1GB of video memory which is steep for such a simple 2D game. (actually more than my dev machine has).
The engine and the game have different issues lists.
https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/issues
https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-game/issues
Report any bugs you don't already see, especially any that cause the game to crash.
Ah that's fine. This isn't the kind of game that warrants a test suite. I expect people to mess with the code and data, that's a big part of why it's open source.
Worst that could happen, someone cheats at a single player game? I guess the actual worst is if they manage to crash the engine, but maybe that turns into a bug report.
The Alpha quest line is sort of done. It may be revived/retold later, but it will be mostly replaced for 0.19.
Did you really get 2B XP?
Or were you doing some kind of modding of enemy XP? Or save file modding? Just curious.
We have more music given to Flare than we can put to use at the moment. And threads like that tend to appear on /r/gamedev weekly.
The eggsac is fun. It might be too much detail for a small tile size though. Perhaps a similar design with fewer bulbous parts, and maybe a more irregular overall shape.
If I were creating the egg sac I would animate it a bit -- make it pulsate at least.
We have begun some refactoring to allow modders to set the benefits for different attributes. See this recent change: https://github.com/clintbellanger/flare-engine/pull/675
Our goal really isn't to implement everything (e.g. I'd never add a carrying capacity) but to make it a bit easier for people to want to add that. I want there to be some good customizability of the core action elements (e.g. attack, hit, crit, damage) at least, because those are going to be common for most games of the genre.
As far as just adding more stuff (powers, items) that's just editing data for the most part. I add more as I get inspiration.
No, but thanks for asking. We're not close at this point. I'll post later when we are ready.
Some of my thoughts on Flare's animations. I made most of them and I'm open to specific critiques. I'd like to work on new upscaled core art soon so this kind of feedback is valuable.
The animations are better than a ton of other indie games. I see lots of games like this that look great in stills but look awful when moving.
Some of the creatures have poor animations (e.g. the skeleton especially). Given infinite time I'd redo some.
I don't like the hunched over male pose. That's probably the oldest animation in the entirety of Flare. The female's stance is a bit better but is unnecessarily feminine (she stands and moves like a model, not like a warrior).
The attacks could all use some unrealistic momentum, if the game needs to go that direction (fast-paced gamey combat). The wind-up and swing should be all moved to the first half of the animation, and the second half should be follow-through and rest. I noticed this a lot in Diablo 3, and how much it added to a aggressive crunchy combat feel. This is harder to do with only 4 attack frames.
I don't do a great job of moving all the bones when animation. So a lot of the running feels more like sliding than actually a heavy stomp wearing full armor. I'd like to study the running animations in Dark Souls cause I think they nailed it.
Finally it's a question of how much detail is retained when rendering the heroes at ~60px tall. We don't expect these animations to e.g. work in 3D third person. They just need to look nice for the output sprites.
Some animations don't work (for heroes) at all with the current layer system. E.g. can't have a spinning attack because that required reordering layers per frame, instead of how it's currently done (by facing direction). Even the attack animations have to be crafted in a way so that they don't violate draw order. We could change this if and only if the actual requirement comes up (support per-frame layer orders).
What's lacking with the current animations? Just lame style? If so that's understandable. But the amount of work to re-render everything is probably too high a cost at this point.
We can't really add more frames of animation if that's what you're considering. All the permutations for 8 directions, several animations, and all the equipment means the game already takes a considerable amount of memory. If we roll out the "hdcore" version with no new frames the game will require 1GB of video memory which is steep for such a simple 2D game. (actually more than my dev machine has).
tcauldillg: wut.
If this is satire it's over my head.
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