I agree. The bubble sounds much better. Maybe the text could scroll across the bubble, even.

And regarding choices, let's have different kinds of bubbles. Any bubble that's outlined in blue (or whatever we make it) can be continued to further choices/dialogue if you press a key next to it. Or something.

Yeah. That sounds like a good way for people to talk. And soon, we can even begin working on a test level!
Progress!

I have a test map set up. It's been included in every build so far for the "Fox" engine.

When I make the next release, it'll have a physical representation.

As for physics, would you guys want to have multiple-vertices geometry? Or should it just be rectangles and circles? (like WoG)

I think that primitives such as rectangles are circles are enough. Maybe triangles too, if possible, but I don't think we need anything too complicated.

Sorry if I didn't read, but I think it's a good idea if(you don't have to) you can chat with your bubble, play with it and feed it gooballs

Gooey, you have to understand what this is. This is not related to World Of Goo, this is a totally unrelated game that we are working on together. If you want to join in you can say so, but you have to understand the situation. Please read the first page of this thread to get it.

I do thunk we should have some REALLY obscure developers easter eggs, like if you run into a tree, it says "I am sorry, Chris Houlihan is not here right now."
I don't even think you guys know what that one means XD
But anyways, I feel like we should have one small wog easter egg, like a triangle of goo trophy randomly in some level, we are goofans .

I was reacting to thenoobtester's remark. My lols are actually worth something you know. Regardless, I think after the NPC is done talking, the player should choose a bubble out pf three at the bottom.

thenoobtester wrote:

I do thunk we should have some REALLY obscure developers easter eggs, like if you run into a tree, it says "I am sorry, Chris Houlihan is not here right now."
I don't even think you guys know what that one means XD
But anyways, I feel like we should have one small wog easter egg, like a triangle of goo trophy randomly in some level, we are goofans .

Easter eggs would be cool, once the game is almost done (or at least steadily being developed) we can add a few here and there. However I'm not sure if we'd be allowed to include any goo-ish easter eggs, at least if it uses actual WoG sprites.

Nah, if it's small enough, low resolution enough, etc. it'd fall under fair use. But anyway, easter eggs should probably be saved for last. We want to know what the game's actually ABOUT first.

About triangle geometry, that's why I was asking. There's no "triangle" shape, but I can set shape using vertices. Three vertices would create a triangular object. If I spent a bit more time, I could refine this to many-cornered shapes.

Then again, it's basically the same thing as just having a bunch of boxes and circles.

Let me know if you think triangles should be included. They can, but it's almost the same thing.

Or just stick three rectangles together to make a triangle.

Exactly. There's almost no difference. It would just be more complex than it should be.

Like this:

_______________
|Bla bla bla?.........>O
|..........................|.-\-
|_______________|../\
................................................................________
_______________ . _______________ . _______________ ........_ |........| _
|Answer 1.............|...|Answer 2.............|...|Answer 3.............|......|................|
|..........................|.|..........................|.|..........................|....|....This is you.....|
|_______________>.|_______________>.|_______________>...|......................|

And select with the mouse which answer you want. (doesn't look how I thought it would, but I think you get it)

I'm not exactly getting what you're trying to show, but I've got an idea: we can make choices appear in a bubble above the player's head. The player doesn't have to talk, but the choices can just appear there.

We can leave triangles out, if we need them (which I don't even think will be likely) we can stick rectangles together.

This is what hes talking about. After the NPC asks a question, you get 3 choices to answer, like say... this

1. Eat the cookie
2. Pay 10 AC for the cookie
3. Run away

That looks like something in my asd account, do you think I should use it?

@thenoobtester: Yeah, but I thought he might be trying to illustrate it.

Gooey, please only post useful contributive posts. This is a serious thread with a serious discussion. Any further posts that don't aren't helpful will be deleted.

Alright, anyways, lets discuss about the first tutorial level, because that's probably what we should start out with. How do you think we should design the tutorial level, that kind of stuff.

Let's do a basic cutscene, illustrating the background for the world we're in. We'll begin with some basic gameplay, letting the player walk through a few areas to get comfortable with the play style, making sure to include a little bit of combat. Then we should have the main plot begin to appear, making some disastrous change to what was. The player would then want to course the main game in order to help bring things back to the way they were. (catastrophic -> peaceful) We should also make sure to include some of our best music (not the best, we'll save that for the ending) in order to keep the player interested in the story and game.

@Red & thenoobtester: Righto, I'll try to get myself to write a background story for the tutorial level.

Alright, that's awesome. Red, when do you expect the next release to be. And also, one question, why is the file called "Fox"?

Oh god...56 new posts...

So we are definitely doing text, not voiceovers? Then the bubbles are good.

Gooey Goo, I think you just failed the Turing test.

If you haven't added sound yet, I have some cool code I'm working on for that. It just requires some sort of LoadFile(filename) and PlayFile(filename) functions.

I like multi-vertex geometry, but we should definitely have circles/ellipses/conics? as well. Rolling wheels or the like would be hard to simulate without WAY too many vertices.

I'll get to work on effects and such, it'll be easier now that finals are done.

What render modes can we use? It would be nice to be able to set each image to either add (glows)/subtract (fx)/multiply (color)/refract (if possible?) on top of the others, or just behave normally.

This is looking awesome! Keep up the good work Red!

@thenoobtester: I'm steadily getting it done. You'll see a post when there's an update.

I called it Fox just cuz.

@AP: I was going to use SDL_mixer for sound, but if your code has volume, panning, pausing (and continuing later) then we could probably use that instead.

Whoa. Baby steps. My main priority is getting basic physics done. In other words, circles and rectangles. The main reason I'm holding off multi-vertex/complex geometry, other than wanting to release it, is complexity. The way I have it now is simple and easy to understand. If I did any more, the XML element would look fat.

Sweet. I'm really lacking any good visuals. Sure, we have plenty of concept art, but we don't have anything usable in the test builds. I guess I can find a Mario sprite sheet somewhere or something.

That kind of effect might be doable, but probably with a masking, slightly opaque image. I don't know anything I could do with SDL that would do that sort of thing.

Just because I can, I'd like to recommend The Spriters Resource for any sprite sheets you might want to use. Massive range there, you could even use Braid sprites if you wanted to see how that type of art would look in-game (since that's the style we're going for).

Red:

Sorry, my post was a bit unclear there - my code is quite different from SDL_mixer, it's more like how the level designer would specify how SDL_mixer would play it.

Couldn't you do something like 2D Boy used to, with

<polygon>
<vertex x="0" y="0">
etc...
</polygon>

and have the last vertex connect to the first? That would specify an arbitrary polygon. I understand it would be (very) hard to code, but the XML wouldn't be the main problem.

I've found a lib for additive blending, like we planned to use for light. I'll see if I can find ones for the other modes as well.
EDIT: What about SDL_SetTextureBlendMode()? It looks like it can do addition and multiplication.
EDIT2: Maybe not. But what about the SDL_gfx library? I'll look into that one.
EDIT3: We will definitely want SDL_gfx, if only because its blit function includes scaling.

Puggsoy: I like that site, but it doesn't seem legal.

Only problem with SDL_gfx is it's slow, since all processing is done in software. It's perfectly fine for now, but your max framerate will be around 20-30 fps, which isn't terribly great, just because of all the processing. I personally am currently using HGE for my projects, as it can get 60-100 fps on very low end machines. It also has additive/subtractive/multiplicative blending and such, so you can have shiny stuff, dynamic colorizing of images, etc. It's fairly simple and straightforward, and thanks to Ryan Gordon's recent HGE-Unix port, cross-platform.

I will say this, though: For the time being, I'd stick with SDL if I were you. We can worry about special effects and stuff like that later. The important thing is to get the engine off the ground, and if you design it correctly, it should take very little time to port to a different graphics platform. I think you were originally saying something about SDL+OpenGL, which is ideal (HGE uses something similar to this). Basically, keep working on physics. We can worry about this sort of thing later.

The other question is how much stuff we really need. Do we want it to look insanely professional and have a ton of really awesome special effects, like Aquaria or World of Goo style, or keep it simple, like Mario or Terraria? Do we want a tile-based platformer with slopes and stuff (Yoshi's Island comes to mind), or rotated rectangles and such so we can have arbitrary geometry (World of Goo or Braid)? Or polygonal geometry, just to be epic? Keep in mind that the older versions of World of Goo had polygons, but they took them out to keep everything simple.

Just a few things to think about.

<polygon>
<vertex x="0" y="0">
etc...
</polygon>

So do we want polygonal geometry? It's almost the same thing, but it's a bit harder to make levels with. I'm thinking about keeping it simple more than anything.

I agree with MOM. We ought to think about visual effects later. Yes, I hope to incorporate OpenGL eventually. If I ever feel we should, a port to something like HGE shouldn't be too hard. It might take a little time, as I have scattered SDL code all over the place, but not to the point at which there's more than 150 lines of pure SDL. The rest is done in functions, so those functions could be called over and over, and the SDL code won't grow.

>mfw I realize I'm rambling about my code structure

Definitely not tile-based. That was never the plan. We want a physical game, not a Mario clone. I want very much for most levels to be full of swinging obstacles, falling rocks, etc. Each of these objects would be physical, which is why Box2D is being used.