I used Dragon Bones to convert my Cat Cafe animations into a PNG with XML data. Interesting…
Now I need to figure out how to use this in Starling. Hopefully it won’t be too complicated.
This stuff is kind of cool because I’m learning the “proper” way of making game assets. 😛
EBF4 has fallen in the Greenlight rankings a bit. It’s down to number 48, from 41. Which means a bunch of other games are overtaking it. If Steam keeps approving big batches, then that’s not really going to be a problem, but it does slow things down a bit.
So go vote, blah blah blah, etc.
The number of votes between games is pretty small now.
3,000 more votes will get me into the top 20, and just 1,000 will probably get me into the top 30, meaning I’d have a pretty good chance at getting into the next batch, if they do 25 again. I’ve currently got 14,460 votes, but pretty much everyone who cares has already voted… so things are gonna take some more time.
Meanwhile, I’m playing around with Dragon Bones, and hardware-accelerated skeleton motion-tweening!
That means that I’ll be able to do complex character animations with much better performance.
So if I ever make another game with as much animations as EBF4, it’ll run a lot better on crappy computers, and could even be playable on mobile devices!
So that could open up some new possibilities. Maybe EBF5 could be a mobile game. Maybe not. I’ll worry about that later.
Before my trip to London, I was taking a lot of time off work, and just sitting around playing video games. So here’s my thoughts on some of the games I played recently.
Amazing, just like every other Kirby game I’ve played so far. A lot of people told me that it was too easy or childish, but that’s exactly why I played it; so that I could enjoy the unique art style and relax a bit. And the art and animation really is amazing.
But it turns out that getting 100% completion was still reasonably challenging. Even though you can’t die, the scoring system means that you can’t take very many hits, if you want to earn all of the medals.
I’d also like to point out that this game does Wii controls right. It only using them in a few areas, and they’re fun in all of them. I don’t have a single bad thing to say about this game. 😀
It’s so pretty! The Wii’s graphical limitations aren’t noticeable at all.
This could have been a really fun platformer, but the way the Wiimote controls were implemented is just really stupid. Why do I have to shake the Wiimote when pressing a button would have been so much easier and more intuitive? Ugh. I should have gotten the 3DS version.
Besides that, the game’s great. The most notable thing is the amount of detailed background animations; Tidal waves, pirate ships, big enemies etc. They usually don’t effect the gameplay much, but they make the game way more exciting, and show that a lot of work went into the graphics.
You’re really only dodging those moles, but having a train loop around you makes things way more exciting!
Got this for cheap and wasn’t expecting much. It’s a very simple game, but it’s still really really really fun, and I had a great time with it. Strangely enough, the Wii controls didn’t bother me, like they usually do. I hated trying to play Mario Kart with the Wiimote, but here they seemed to work okay.
Anyway: Rocket powered trucks + Heavy metal + High speed and huge jumps = Awesome fun. 😀
You probably spend more time in the air than on the ground!
I always wondered why people enjoyed realistic racing games. I picked this up just to see if I could possibly enjoy the genre. Using the “easy mode” controls, the game was incredibly boring. It was just like playing Mario Kart, but on very boring stages and with no items.
But then I changed the controls to “realistic”, and it became a totally different game. On my first attempt at realistic controls, I damaged my engine by not using the clutch, lost control of my car on the first turn, barrel rolled a few times, and then couldn’t start my car again, because it was wrecked. Simply controlling your car becomes the biggest part of the challenge, which contrasts quite heavily with less realistic racing games. A bit frustrating at first, but I found it surprisingly fun!
I’m sure that people who are seriously into cars and motorsports would enjoy the game a lot more than me though. There’s a lot of customization you can do on your car that just doesn’t make sense to me. I don’t know about tire pressure, suspension, gearing, and all that. 😛
I also wanted to play this for the shiny graphics.
Here’s another Shoot em up! The controls are a bit strange in this one, but to me, that’s what makes it stand out from others. Your helicopter turns sideways when you move, unless you’re shooting. And the whole game is tilted forward a bit to give it depth, and isn’t completely flat like most shmups. So that takes some getting used to.
I love shmups, and this was no exception. It had massive bosses, lots of explosions and a somewhat interesting power up system. It’s also nice to see a vertical shmup that fully supports widescreen. Most of them usually only use a 3rd of the screen. I’m also glad that the Deluxe version comes with a soundtrack CD, because the soundtrack is amazing!
A few major complaints though: Enemy shots look very similar to yours, so it’s easy to not see them if they’re overlapping. Ugh! Smoke often covers enemies, so you think you’re safe and then some shots fly out from a smoke cloud. Urgh! The game also looks quite cheaply made, overall. Just a little.
Did I mention the bosses were massive?
When I was in London, a bunch of people recommended that I check out the Starling framework for making Flash games for mobile platforms. I was already slowly looking into it, but after hearing about the massive advantages and relative ease of implementation, I jumped right into it.
Basically, Starling let’s you use Flash’s Stage3D API and hardware acceleration without having to do any low-level programming.
With hardware acceleration, you get much better performance, which is very important for mobiles.
The limitation is that Flash’s traditional motion-tweened animations don’t really port well; it’s better to use sprite-sheet style animation.
That’s fine for Cat Cafe though, because the animations are very simple, and I can port the tweening required quite easily.
Anyway, here’s some of the tests I did:
Test 1: Stars
Test 2: Cats
Test 3: Tweens
The first test is just a bunch of glowy and transparent objects bouncing around, much like they would in Bullet Heaven.
The second test has a lot more particles and no transparency, which speeds things up a bit.
The final test is just to see what Starling’s built in tweening engine can do. It’s pretty easy to code objects flying around, stretching, rotating and fading. But it would be pretty hard to animate a character with multiple moving parts this way.
All of these tests should run at 60fps on a decent machine. They’re pretty extreme though, and no games that I have planned will need this many objects, not even a potential Bullet Heaven 2. For now I’m just going to use Starling to get Cat Cafe working at 60fps on crappy phones.
After collecting a bunch of awesome business cards in London, I decided it’s time to make my own. Here’s a few designs I came up with. I think I’ll probably go with the first one.
What do you guys think? Which one is your favorite?
