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| There's that young male grackle from before. His darker feathers are coming out. |
I'm getting to the end of Chapter 18 content, which means just two more and I can finally move onto the final stage of development. That is making the game more presentable and fixing all the things that I know will bother people. The game won't be perfect, and I know bugs will slip through. I'll be doing my best to minimize that of course. There's going to be a point where I'll just have to say, "I'm done and I need to move on." I don't know what that point will be, but it'll happen.
Sound is the biggest thing missing from the game. A lot of sounds simply aren't there, or sounds aren't final. There's a video posted below that showcases sounds not being final. Jerry fires off the Shotgun Ice that uses the X-Buster sound as a placeholder. Little things like that.
There's a lot of little effects that still need to be put in. During DT1 development, I was afraid of using too many particles because I kept thinking they would lag the game, so effects that requires a lot of little particles didn't happen often. The thing is, those kinds of things did lag DT1 when I tried them. There were two reasons, my particle system was incredibly inefficient. I was using code that took more cpu time when there were far better options. The other reason is DT1 started on Game Maker 6.1, whose interpreter and sprite drawing functions weren't even close to how fast they are now. Game Maker has improved a ton since then. Frame rate was a thing in DT1 both because GM 6.1 wasn't very fast, and my coding practices were far worse than they are now.
I've been slowing adding in bits of sound and visual effects here and there, but I really haven't devoted that much time to them, because the rest of the game has just been more important. When all the game's content is set, I can then see exactly what I need in terms of sound and improved visuals.
Here's a video, the video info on youtube has more info.
8 comments:
I've been away from this blog for quite a while (e.g like 3 or 4 months, maybe 5)
and suddenly i got the idea: "Holy shyt, what if Zephyr is done with DT3 yet?" Then i checked here, and was disappointed.
I know coding takes time, making text, storyline, sounds, gameplay, bug fixes, more bug fixes, bugexterminating, graphics and all kinds of these shiz, but im saying this as an extremely whiny gamer, why does it take so LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONG? ;-;
Keep up the good job though.
Zephyr also has a day job (which I'm fairly certain involves grackle farming), which means DT3 is all done "off the clock".
This makes a huge difference.
I know of at least one fan game that's been going on for like 8 years with good progress.
I'm shooting for this holiday season. Not saying it's a definite thing because of the 'fixing all the shit' phase at the end, but I'll try.
I shared your game in a Minecraft Serva forum, cause i want people to know the goodiness that are your games!
Link:
http://www.randomcraft.nl/forum/m/11914430/viewthread/15090756-such-fun-much-game-wow/page/1/post/last
If ya want me to delete it, just say the word, dunno if there's some "no-URLs" rule in this blog. =P
Nah, there's no rules like that. There's very few things I'd delete/moderate.
This thought occurred to me while doing some cleaning around the house, and I wanted to ask. Remember the area in the first game where it had all those gimmicks involving the game window itself, how it would spin depending on Jerry's movement and slide across the desktop? Do you plan on doing anything similar in DT3?
I had been thinking of a game I had played before called "Irisu Syndrome" (Amazing game, if you haven't played it before, you should try it at least once.) Without giving too much away, there's a rather scary scene where somebody slowly sneaks up on a character from off-screen. It's particularly freaky because the game is played in a window, and the stalker appears from off-screen, not off-window, so the player doesn't notice them until they've been approaching for a long while, and it's all "Holy shit, how long have they been there!" as the character continues slowly coming closer and closer.
Anyways, it got me thinking how in-character for this game it would be to have a boss or something that escapes to the desktop mid-battle, and shoots at the game window. Of course, it's probably too late in development to add in something like that unless you already had a similar idea pre-planned.
But I'm rambling now, back to the original point. Do you plan on including any fourth-wall tricks like that in DT3? They were one of my favorite gimmicks in the first game, and I'd love to see them return for the final one.
(By the way, how come you can call that video a no-damage run? You took damage from falling in the lava, didn't you?)
There won't be anything quite like that level from DT1, there are other fourth wall breaking elements, but not where I mess with the game's screen mode or anything like that.
And what are you talking about, it's TOTALLY a no-damage run. :P
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