Okay, this whole thing is a lot less daunting now.
(Well, it was only really daunting because I never coded in C# before. I want to learn, but any time I think up a project to do in it, I figure I can do it just as well if not better in a language I know.)
I'm working on Quest 2, which is the most important Quest... And I decided to scrap the previous structure for the Dragons' AI code because I wanted to make it more robust (this process of scrapping it took like an hour of surgically removing code from all over the program, erg).
And now the code I'm doing for the Dragons' AI is going to be a lot better. I mean, I've just started reprogramming the Dragon AI, but already I can tell that this new structure I have in mind is going to be a lot easier for me to keep track of, and probably less likely to cause a bug.
Scrapping and rewriting the Dragon AI code for Quest 2 is going to make coding the dragons take longer, but the end result is going to be better.
It's a pretty horrible, tough, tough decision you have to make when programming some times. You have all this code already in place... and it does what it does, but you're not sure if it'll be sufficient for where you're going with the rest of the program... so the choice becomes, do you try to shoehorn that existing code into the rest of the program and try to hammer out kinks to make it work? Or do you scrap it and delete those pieces of code entirely and institute an entirely new algorithm, one that you think will probably work better overall in the long run? The former option will save time if it pans out, but you might get stuck with old code and a lot of bugs. The latter option takes a whole lot more time, but the end result is better.
I decided to go with the latter option and rewrite the Dragons' AI and priorities code.
I've continued on it since last night and it's already way, way more efficient and all around better and I've just started.
Honestly, this is such a big thing in terms of overall code quality. It's known as Fixing Broken Windows. If you have some bad code and you leave it around and you know about it, you're less hesitant about adding more bad code. If all you have is good code, you get VERY hesitant about adding code that you know is bad.
Also, as an update on this new Dragon code I've been doing:
Holy shit. This new algorithm/method I've implemented... holy shit. It works 10 times better, takes up less space, is easier to follow, is less prone to bugs, and took me about 1/10th the amount of time to implement for the Green Dragon.
If I implement the code the same way for the other two Dragons it shouldn't take long at all to get those guys working properly.
Then the real challenge begins (the bat of course).
Yeah, I'm not as hardcore about it as various Agilers are (plus they are a little to hippie/drink-the-koolaid for my tastes), but it only takes one case like you find yourself going through to realize that just because code is written and works, it doesn't need to stay like that forever. It can always work better.
Honestly, this is such a big thing in terms of overall code quality. It's known as Fixing Broken Windows. If you have some bad code and you leave it around and you know about it, you're less hesitant about adding more bad code. If all you have is good code, you get VERY hesitant about adding code that you know is bad.
Honestly, this is such a big thing in terms of overall code quality. It's known as Fixing Broken Windows. If you have some bad code and you leave it around and you know about it, you're less hesitant about adding more bad code. If all you have is good code, you get VERY hesitant about adding code that you know is bad.
Thanks for the advice on code, guys. I trashed all of my Dragon code and completely redid it with this new method. The result? The dragons act much much better. Much more consistently. And the code is far, far less susceptible to bugs; like respawning dragons. That is no longer an issue in this new scheme. Haven't had a dragon respawn at all so far since I implemented this brand new Dragon code. Also it took far less time and is more concise and easier to keep track of.
And on that note, I just finished redoing all of the dragons' code, including the red dragon, and now they're all put properly in place. As are the items..
So now it's officially time to start working on the Bat. This will be the last major hurdle in finishing the code for this project. Once I get the Bat done, the rest of the game's code will be easy stuff and mostly polishing. The rest of the time/effort I spend on code will be doing niceties like making U.I. look and work better/more clearly and stuff like that.
But be assured that this Bat is going to take a good amount of time for me to implement, so it's not like I'll be done coding this in another week. It's going to take a while. The bat's a pretty complex dude. He flies around and picks up and puts stuff down and steals stuff from the Hero. And he can be carried by the hero. All kinds of crap.
And so the bat is the last major hurdle and that's a nice thing to think about.
Wait, I though the Bat picked up the Hero, not the other way around.
The Hero can grab ahold of the bat. Which also means the Hero can hold the Bat who is in turn holding something else. So you can be walking around with a Bat holding a Sword, for example.
The Bat cannot pick up the Hero, he can only steal the hero's stuff. But the Bat can pick up Dragons and Dragon corpses.
So in the original game, if you were eaten by a Dragon, you could sit and wait for the Bat to come by (eventually) and pick up the Dragon Corpse with the Hero inside of it.
And what happens is the Bat continues flying, taking you on a tour of the Overworld from inside the Dragon's belly. At least, until the Bat drops the corpse in favor of picking up something else in its place.
Halkun, I had to make your Bat quite a bit larger. :P
that was the last of the placeholders. I made him waaay too small
Heheh, it's all good. I resized him then cleaned him up by hand, so that he's a proper size now.
Speaking of the Bat, I've been working on the bastard. He's a major headache as I expected, but I'm making progress. I'd say I'm about 30% done programming the Bat. It's taking a long time though, but I should be able to get it done.
I'll post a video in a few minutes once Youtube uploads.
I was rereading through this thread, and was reminded of the discussion you had over the dragons not fleeing from the sword. Difficulty levels were brought up, but last I heard you still hadn't figured it out.
The Atari 2600 had two difficulty switches, each with an "Expert" (A) and "Beginner" (B) setting.
I don't remember this 100%, but I want to say the left switch (player 1 switch for 2-player games) controlled whether the dragons were afraid of the sword. They ran away on Beginner and didn't on Expert.
The right switch controlled how long the dragons paused when the player ran into them. On Expert, they paused just long enough for the sound to play before eating the player (which was not very long at all.) on beginner they paused quite a bit longer.
Also, on the topic of the bat, I haven't seen you mention this behavior, so just in case I'll point out that I seem to recall after a random period of time carrying the bat, the bat will escape your grasp and fly away, along with whatever he's carrying.
Edit: Wikipedia informs me that I have the left and right difficulty switch functions reversed.
We did kind of touch on the subject of the sword/flee and difficulty issue, but I kind of forgot about it. Ironically, having the game on "Beginner," which makes the dragons afraid of the sword, actually makes the game harder than if they're not afraid of the sword :P. The reason being that if they are unafraid of the sword, and you're holding it, they'll fly right straight at you and you can kill them then and there. But if they're afraid of the sword, they'll flee offscreen from the thing, only to come back to haunt you again when you're not carrying the sword.. at which point you can't kill them, because you don't have the sword...
Anyway, that sort of thing is on the backburner, but I can already see how I would implement it if I decide to. Which means I'd have to take the 3 quests, and provide the player a Beginner and Expert option for each one. Wouldn't be too much trouble.... I don't think....
What's more interesting is the bit about the Dragon's pausing before they eat the player. I've noticed something similar. I haven't checked my switch settings on the real game, but whatever I have it set to, it seems that even in Quest 1 and Quest 2/3 they have different pauses. Like in Q1 they seem to pause for about 1 full second, but in Q2/3 they pause for about 0.5 seconds. So that was what I was going to go with. But I guess potentially if I implement Expert and Beginner for each Quest, I could set it up as 1 sec for easy, .5 sec for Expert.
As far as the bat, I think you're right, although I haven't confirmed it. I seem to remember too that the Bat will escape your grasp if you're holding it too long. I'll definitely have to time it in the original and implement that in this remake.
Anyway, I'll think over this stuff and make a decision on how to implement it. Thanks for the info
Another thing is that the two difficulty switches could be set indepdently, so you can have the dragons run from the sword while having a short pause, or the other way around, for a total of 12 different options with the three quests. You may need to introduce an Options screen.
I can confirm your experience that the dragons seem to react faster on Quest 2 than Quest 1. The delay seems to be 2 sec (easy) and 1 sec (hard) on quest 1, and 1 sec (easy) and 0.5 sec (hard) on Quest 2.
And I have to recant part of what I said earlier. It is indeed the Expert setting that causes the dragons to flee from the sword.
Another thing is that the two difficulty switches could be set indepdently, so you can have the dragons run from the sword while having a short pause, or the other way around, for a total of 12 different options with the three quests. You may need to introduce an Options screen.
Maybe I should set up a default difficulty, and then create a "Switch Settings" option within an option menu, and it would basically be reserved for fans of the original, who would go into that Options and adjust the switches to their liking. This might be the best avenue.
GOOD STUFF
Hardest part about game development is actually working
No kidding :P Making games is hard freakin' work, even for a relatively "simple" game like Adventure (which turned out much to my surprise to be amazingly deep/complex for an Atari 2600 game).
Slash, keep it up dude! Any chance I/we can help you test this bad boy?
Thanks I might have some people do a little bit of game-testing before I officially release this. But I won't ask for testing volunteers until I have "finished" everything, and move onto the polishing stage.
I can confirm your experience that the dragons seem to react faster on Quest 2 than Quest 1. The delay seems to be 2 sec (easy) and 1 sec (hard) on quest 1, and 1 sec (easy) and 0.5 sec (hard) on Quest 2.
And I have to recant part of what I said earlier. It is indeed the Expert setting that causes the dragons to flee from the sword.
Ah! OK cool, now it makes more sense. I haven't had a chance to test it myself (I should go do that now), but I'm glad you were able to make these confirmations.
I already have the Quest 1 dragons reacting in 1 second, so I'll cut that time in half for Quest 2 and 3.
Then once I'm totally done with Quests 2 and 3, I'll implement some Options to set the Difficulty.
Also I'm glad that Expert makes the Dragons flee the Sword because that's more intuitive, as they're harder to kill when fleeing from the sword, rather than letting you have an easy stab
Nice. I look forward to playing this when released.
You're lucky to have something like Game Maker. When you're on your own, the polishing stage takes AGES because you have to make every menu, every setting reader, every config option from scratch.
This is still going strong? Awesome, looking forward to it.
Yes, I'm nearly done with the most important, largest, most time consuming and difficult aspect of it, which is having created and completed Quest 2, which is the bulk of the game. I just finished the last major gameplay-related piece, which is the Bat. So now what I'm doing is I'm polishing code and tweaking little quirks and making sure certain things are in order. I still have a few other small things to do; like put the "darkness" in the forest/dungeon, and have the Sword-carried-by-bat-carried-by-Hero kill the dragons like it does in the original. But besides those things and general polishing, Quest 2 is essentially done. However, polishing the code could take some significant amount of time if I run into some unexpected issue or glitch, but overall I don't expect it to take much longer to polish.
Aside from that, I still will be needing to input Khavall's music, and the sound effects that Delphinus is putting together. Hopefully Khavall is finding some time to get some music done.
Quest 3 will be easy to do.
The next hurdle that will take some time is setting up the Difficulty settings. I hadn't realized, when I started this, that the Switches on the Atari system alter the behavior of the Dragons. Now knowing this, I have to go in and input different settings for the Dragon AI to account for this, as well as set up some Options so the Player can adjust his difficulty.
Hopefully setting up Difficulties won't take too long.
edit: as a side note, I haven't actually been slowing down my rate of work on this thing; it may seem like it's taken me forever since I first started working on the bat to get to this point, but that's because the bat is the most sophisticated aspect of this game. The bat is like an object, but it's also like a dragon, but it's also like another player. I have to be able to treat it like all of these things at once, and so maneuvering the code so that the bat is like an item when carry it doesn't interfere with the bat's behavior when you're not carrying it (as an example). But I finally worked out all the major kinks, now I'm just fixing the minor issues. But overall the bat does what it's supposed to.
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Okay, this whole thing is a lot less daunting now.
(Well, it was only really daunting because I never coded in C# before. I want to learn, but any time I think up a project to do in it, I figure I can do it just as well if not better in a language I know.)
I'm working on Quest 2, which is the most important Quest... And I decided to scrap the previous structure for the Dragons' AI code because I wanted to make it more robust (this process of scrapping it took like an hour of surgically removing code from all over the program, erg).
And now the code I'm doing for the Dragons' AI is going to be a lot better. I mean, I've just started reprogramming the Dragon AI, but already I can tell that this new structure I have in mind is going to be a lot easier for me to keep track of, and probably less likely to cause a bug.
Scrapping and rewriting the Dragon AI code for Quest 2 is going to make coding the dragons take longer, but the end result is going to be better.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
It's a pretty horrible, tough, tough decision you have to make when programming some times. You have all this code already in place... and it does what it does, but you're not sure if it'll be sufficient for where you're going with the rest of the program... so the choice becomes, do you try to shoehorn that existing code into the rest of the program and try to hammer out kinks to make it work? Or do you scrap it and delete those pieces of code entirely and institute an entirely new algorithm, one that you think will probably work better overall in the long run? The former option will save time if it pans out, but you might get stuck with old code and a lot of bugs. The latter option takes a whole lot more time, but the end result is better.
I decided to go with the latter option and rewrite the Dragons' AI and priorities code.
I've continued on it since last night and it's already way, way more efficient and all around better and I've just started.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Honestly, this is such a big thing in terms of overall code quality. It's known as Fixing Broken Windows. If you have some bad code and you leave it around and you know about it, you're less hesitant about adding more bad code. If all you have is good code, you get VERY hesitant about adding code that you know is bad.
Also, as an update on this new Dragon code I've been doing:
Holy shit. This new algorithm/method I've implemented... holy shit. It works 10 times better, takes up less space, is easier to follow, is less prone to bugs, and took me about 1/10th the amount of time to implement for the Green Dragon.
If I implement the code the same way for the other two Dragons it shouldn't take long at all to get those guys working properly.
Then the real challenge begins (the bat of course).
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Remember, the bat can pick up a dragon and give whoever is in his belly a tour of the word
I know. I'm unsure how I'm going to implement that. I may have to do it in a special way, considering the way I have a "continue" screen right now...
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Second this. Never be afraid to throw away code.
Third'd.
And on that note, I just finished redoing all of the dragons' code, including the red dragon, and now they're all put properly in place. As are the items..
So now it's officially time to start working on the Bat. This will be the last major hurdle in finishing the code for this project. Once I get the Bat done, the rest of the game's code will be easy stuff and mostly polishing. The rest of the time/effort I spend on code will be doing niceties like making U.I. look and work better/more clearly and stuff like that.
But be assured that this Bat is going to take a good amount of time for me to implement, so it's not like I'll be done coding this in another week. It's going to take a while. The bat's a pretty complex dude. He flies around and picks up and puts stuff down and steals stuff from the Hero. And he can be carried by the hero. All kinds of crap.
And so the bat is the last major hurdle and that's a nice thing to think about.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
The Hero can grab ahold of the bat. Which also means the Hero can hold the Bat who is in turn holding something else. So you can be walking around with a Bat holding a Sword, for example.
The Bat cannot pick up the Hero, he can only steal the hero's stuff. But the Bat can pick up Dragons and Dragon corpses.
So in the original game, if you were eaten by a Dragon, you could sit and wait for the Bat to come by (eventually) and pick up the Dragon Corpse with the Hero inside of it.
And what happens is the Bat continues flying, taking you on a tour of the Overworld from inside the Dragon's belly. At least, until the Bat drops the corpse in favor of picking up something else in its place.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
that was the last of the placeholders. I made him waaay too small
Heheh, it's all good. I resized him then cleaned him up by hand, so that he's a proper size now.
Speaking of the Bat, I've been working on the bastard. He's a major headache as I expected, but I'm making progress. I'd say I'm about 30% done programming the Bat. It's taking a long time though, but I should be able to get it done.
I'll post a video in a few minutes once Youtube uploads.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzhmipL3gwY
There's no sound. For some really strange/odd reason. Oh well!
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
The Atari 2600 had two difficulty switches, each with an "Expert" (A) and "Beginner" (B) setting.
I don't remember this 100%, but I want to say the left switch (player 1 switch for 2-player games) controlled whether the dragons were afraid of the sword. They ran away on Beginner and didn't on Expert.
The right switch controlled how long the dragons paused when the player ran into them. On Expert, they paused just long enough for the sound to play before eating the player (which was not very long at all.) on beginner they paused quite a bit longer.
Also, on the topic of the bat, I haven't seen you mention this behavior, so just in case I'll point out that I seem to recall after a random period of time carrying the bat, the bat will escape your grasp and fly away, along with whatever he's carrying.
Edit: Wikipedia informs me that I have the left and right difficulty switch functions reversed.
We did kind of touch on the subject of the sword/flee and difficulty issue, but I kind of forgot about it. Ironically, having the game on "Beginner," which makes the dragons afraid of the sword, actually makes the game harder than if they're not afraid of the sword :P. The reason being that if they are unafraid of the sword, and you're holding it, they'll fly right straight at you and you can kill them then and there. But if they're afraid of the sword, they'll flee offscreen from the thing, only to come back to haunt you again when you're not carrying the sword.. at which point you can't kill them, because you don't have the sword...
Anyway, that sort of thing is on the backburner, but I can already see how I would implement it if I decide to. Which means I'd have to take the 3 quests, and provide the player a Beginner and Expert option for each one. Wouldn't be too much trouble.... I don't think....
What's more interesting is the bit about the Dragon's pausing before they eat the player. I've noticed something similar. I haven't checked my switch settings on the real game, but whatever I have it set to, it seems that even in Quest 1 and Quest 2/3 they have different pauses. Like in Q1 they seem to pause for about 1 full second, but in Q2/3 they pause for about 0.5 seconds. So that was what I was going to go with. But I guess potentially if I implement Expert and Beginner for each Quest, I could set it up as 1 sec for easy, .5 sec for Expert.
As far as the bat, I think you're right, although I haven't confirmed it. I seem to remember too that the Bat will escape your grasp if you're holding it too long. I'll definitely have to time it in the original and implement that in this remake.
Anyway, I'll think over this stuff and make a decision on how to implement it. Thanks for the info
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Hardest part about game development is actually working
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And I have to recant part of what I said earlier. It is indeed the Expert setting that causes the dragons to flee from the sword.
Maybe I should set up a default difficulty, and then create a "Switch Settings" option within an option menu, and it would basically be reserved for fans of the original, who would go into that Options and adjust the switches to their liking. This might be the best avenue.
No kidding :P Making games is hard freakin' work, even for a relatively "simple" game like Adventure (which turned out much to my surprise to be amazingly deep/complex for an Atari 2600 game).
Thanks
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Thanks! I hope to be done soon-ish (which might mean another month or something :P)
Ah! OK cool, now it makes more sense. I haven't had a chance to test it myself (I should go do that now), but I'm glad you were able to make these confirmations.
I already have the Quest 1 dragons reacting in 1 second, so I'll cut that time in half for Quest 2 and 3.
Then once I'm totally done with Quests 2 and 3, I'll implement some Options to set the Difficulty.
Also I'm glad that Expert makes the Dragons flee the Sword because that's more intuitive, as they're harder to kill when fleeing from the sword, rather than letting you have an easy stab
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
The Bat's behavior and Priority List are both now done.
Now I need to tweak the Bat in a few aspects and clean some aspects of the Bat up, and I should be done with the Bat.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Easiest difficulty is BB, hardest is AA.
And in between, I think BA is harder than AB.
How I go about implementing that will be interesting...
Maybe for each Quest I can let the Player choose Difficulty or something. Let me think....
Maybe I can provide an Options setting for Difficulties:
Easy (BB), Normal (AB), Hard (BA), Expert (AA).
How does that sound?
Or should I just set a Default difficulty then let players mess with the Switches themselves in an Options menu?
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
That means that (aside from some polishing) Quest 2 is done!
After I polish some programming and tweaking some stuff, I'll be totally done with Quest 2, which leaves me with Quest 3.
And Quest 3 is a simple matter of taking Quest 2 and randomizing Item locations. Which I could probably do in a day.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
You're lucky to have something like Game Maker. When you're on your own, the polishing stage takes AGES because you have to make every menu, every setting reader, every config option from scratch.
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Yes, I'm nearly done with the most important, largest, most time consuming and difficult aspect of it, which is having created and completed Quest 2, which is the bulk of the game. I just finished the last major gameplay-related piece, which is the Bat. So now what I'm doing is I'm polishing code and tweaking little quirks and making sure certain things are in order. I still have a few other small things to do; like put the "darkness" in the forest/dungeon, and have the Sword-carried-by-bat-carried-by-Hero kill the dragons like it does in the original. But besides those things and general polishing, Quest 2 is essentially done. However, polishing the code could take some significant amount of time if I run into some unexpected issue or glitch, but overall I don't expect it to take much longer to polish.
Aside from that, I still will be needing to input Khavall's music, and the sound effects that Delphinus is putting together. Hopefully Khavall is finding some time to get some music done.
Quest 3 will be easy to do.
The next hurdle that will take some time is setting up the Difficulty settings. I hadn't realized, when I started this, that the Switches on the Atari system alter the behavior of the Dragons. Now knowing this, I have to go in and input different settings for the Dragon AI to account for this, as well as set up some Options so the Player can adjust his difficulty.
Hopefully setting up Difficulties won't take too long.
edit: as a side note, I haven't actually been slowing down my rate of work on this thing; it may seem like it's taken me forever since I first started working on the bat to get to this point, but that's because the bat is the most sophisticated aspect of this game. The bat is like an object, but it's also like a dragon, but it's also like another player. I have to be able to treat it like all of these things at once, and so maneuvering the code so that the bat is like an item when carry it doesn't interfere with the bat's behavior when you're not carrying it (as an example). But I finally worked out all the major kinks, now I'm just fixing the minor issues. But overall the bat does what it's supposed to.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
I've fixed most of the bugs, so it plays pretty well.
Also, I've implemented the feature that you can lock the castles back up with the keys (if you choose to do so), like in the original game.
Next up I'm going to have to figure out a good way to do Difficulties.
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games
Also, I will translate this game to my mother tongue so hard, I hope the game uses .txt files for the text
I've got 2 out of the 4 difficulty settings completed.
And the majority of the bugs in the game that I had found are now fixed.
Implementing the other 2 difficulties will take a little longer but shouldn't be too bad.
I'm going to need the Music and Sound Effects pretty soon-ish....
Steam ID: slashx000______Twitter: @bill_at_zeboyd______ Facebook: Zeboyd Games