graphics

Interior Decorating

mstop_4 Feast for the Senses , , 0 Comment

I made quite a few changes this week:

Lighting

I’m not as gung-ho about hiding stuff in total darkness anymore, so I made some changes to the player’s light to make things easier to see:

  • Larger light radius – so you can detect enemies sooner and have more time to whip out your gun.
  • Small amount of ambient lighting – it makes the edges of the light circle a bit nicer.
  • Tracers are now lit through the darkness – so you can see if your magic missiles successfully attacked the darkness or not.

boomThis is my Boomstick

New marble and glass tileset

For a large part of the development of this game, I’ve been using the Grass Maze tileset to playtest my game:

While I have made improvements to it over time, I still got tired of looking at it and decided that the game needed a makeover. Below are some screenshots of the different features of this tileset:

Diamond tiles

Roll out the red carpet

Sunken carpet


Sunken waterway

Miscellaneous additions

I added a bunch of new sound effects and fixed a bug in the countdown timer. If there is anything else I added this week that I forgot to mention, it will be in this video:

Eaten by Some Linux Redux

mstop_4 Feast for the Senses, GameMaker: Studio , , , , , 0 Comment

One day as I was switching between build targets in GameMaker: Studio, I noticed that an entry labeled “Ubuntu (Linux) (YYC)” was on the list of targets. I have exported previous projects to Ubuntu before (e.g. Gonna Catcha) and have been building Feast for the Senses with the Yoyo Compiler whenever I go out to show the game and playtest it with other people. But doing both at the same time? Do I dare to cross these categories? The answer was “yes”.

Come to think of it, I don’t even know when this option (and the “Mac OS X (YYC)” target) was released. I must have missed the memo.

Anyway, I was eager to try it out, since I do want to eventually distribute Feast for the Senses on multiple plaforms and tests have shown that it does benefit from being built with the YYC (e.g. it gets a higher max framerate, so less chance of slowdown or needing cap the framerate at 30 on lower-spec machines). First, I tried to build and run it on my Linux Mint virtual machine, but the compile would failed every time. I eventually learned that the YYC wasn’t supported on Mint and that I should be using plain old Ubuntu.

After creating an Ubuntu VM and much “sudo apt-get”ing, I finally got it to work:

Full-sized screenshot:

The game seems to run fine, though sometimes it can’t maintain 60fps, but that just might be the fact that it’s running on a low-spec VM.

I also got a bricked SteamOS VM out of the experience, but that’s another story. And by another story, I mean:

Next on the agenda, I’m working on a new tileset, because the grass maze tileset is starting to wear out its welcome. This one uses various layered tiles…

…and animated tiles.

It’s still a work in progress, as the tileset has many clashing elements to its design. (Note to self: get new interior decorator.)

Lastly, I’ve implemented areal dialog triggers. This enables Réiltín to comment on areas she enters: