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[2k3] [DEMO] Sore Losers: Riot Grrrl

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First of all:Great Game! I enjoyed all that I got to play. (Explained below) When Breaking down doors or looking for junk I felt that it never was too fast,so I was able to beat it,and not slow so its boring. Now onto the next thing...

Second:After I left (A Dog is harder than two thugs?! Damn steroids!) the game,I soon tryed to run it when a error came up,saying: DirectDraw Error
                                                                   (DDERR_UNSUPPORTED)

Has anyone else had this problem,and has anyone solved it?

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I've never heard of that problem before. It certainly doesn't happen when I exit and re-enter the game on my own computer. Is it only happening at a specific save-point?

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I just wanted to say that this game isn't dead, even if it has been years since I posted here. Development is still progressing after a couple of RL-imposed hiatuses, and a lot has happened since I last posted in this topic. You can read more about my progress here, and I've also updated the original post to include a screenshot gallery so that you can see some of the progress I've been making (especially in the aesthetics department); some of the better screenshots are included as thumbnails!

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Good luck with your game.
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This is still awesome, please keep going.
you awoke in a burning paperhouse
from the infinite fields of dreamless sleep

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Good luck with your game.

Thanks :) I'm pretty confident I'll finish, it's just a case of "when" I'll finish >_<

This is still awesome, please keep going.

It's very unlikely I'll give up on this; I'm just working a lot slower than I anticipated due to RL stuff :)

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You know, I think its all gonna be okay.
For going the distance for a balanced breakfast.Project of the Month winner for June 2009For being a noted contributor to the RMRK Wiki2013 Best WriterSilver Writing ReviewerSecret Santa 2013 Participant
I dig it, man. My main project is still on the back burner for now.

But anyway, this look pretty good. I'm not really hip on 2k, but I'm definitely going to give this a try.
:tinysmile:

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So I'm finally working on this game again. Unfortunately, the way that I see it, there is a lot to do to get the levels that have already been made up to scratch. On one hand, this is very frustrating since it means that I'm not really working on "new" stuff. But on the other hand, it's also satisfying in that I can visibly see things that I'd already deemed "complete" becoming a lot better than they were.

The Item System and "Key Items"

One of the first things on my target list was the item system. Previously, Cheska could only carry six items and two weapons at once, and this included key items/weapons that are near-constantly required such as the Screwdriver (in relation to the "hotwire" minigame) and the Sledgehammer (in relation to the "smashing" minigame). Over the course of the game, there are four such items/weapons that can be collected and this essentially meant that four out of the eight slots available (50%!) were being taken up by items that you had little choice but to keep with you. This was obviously not good design as it would only serve to frustrate players and limit their options.

To fix this, I've introduced the concept of "key items" to the game. Items such as the Screwdriver no longer take up item slots, can no longer be dropped and appear separate from "normal items" in the item system. In line with this, "key item" elements relating to weapons such as the Sledgehammer have been moved onto newly created items instead. In the case of the Sledgehammer, the item that has replaced it is the Battering Ram, which you can see in the screenshot below:


It took me longer than I would've liked to work these changes into the system since a large chunk of the item system eventing needed to be redone in order to accommodate, not to mention the fact that new item system overlays needed to be drawn up! By far the most tedious part was going through every single item drop in the game to make sure that they weren't dropping additional key items, since that would pretty badly break the system! However, I do think this was something worth doing (as boring as it was) and I'm glad that I was able to get it working. The game is much better off for it!

Cutscenes... Again!

Another thing I've been working on is updating the look of the cutscenes, which is something that I've mentioned working on before. I've updated several of the cutscene images on this gamepage to reflect the work that's being done and I personally think things are looking a lot better now. I won't link all of them here since you can find them under the "images" tab, but here is a taster:


I said this previously, but the best part about working on these is that I've been able to draw up a set of templates that allow me to streamline how I work on producing cutscenes, so doing this will help me to be much more consistent going forward.

Consistency

Speaking of consistency, I've noticed a lot of inconsistency with how I've gone about some things in the game, most likely related to how many large breaks I've taken in development. A very basic example is the way that option dialogues look. Sometimes, option dialogues will look like this and pressing escape whilst in them won't do a thing:

Quote
What do you want to do?
>Do the first thing!
>Do the second thing!
>Don't do either thing.

Whilst others will look like this, with cancellation being achieved by pressing escape:

Quote
What do you want to do?
>Do the first thing!
>Do the second thing!

It's a minor thing, but now that I've noticed it I'm going to try and fix it.

Another thing that I need to fix in relation to this kind of thing is my massive overuse of ellipses (...) in the text, something that I personally dislike people doing in RM* games and something that I hadn't even realised I'd been doing to such a massive extent.

Finally, I've also been rooting out the use of \| (which pauses text) in message boxes and replacing it with \! (which waits until the player presses something), again because the use of the former it is something that I personally dislike and something that I hadn't realised I'd been doing.

Again, these are all minor things, but they're things that should be consistent so that the game plays more smoothly than it does at the moment.

Conclusions?

It's good to be working on the game again. It's good to be making obvious improvements. It's good that I haven't forgotten so much about how the game works that I'm unable to mess with/fix/improve key eventing-based systems that the game 100% relies on being perfect. But there is a lot of work to do to get this game finished to the standard I want and that fact doesn't escape me. I've said before that, "I constantly worry that people are going to be incredibly underwhelmed when they realise this isn't all that different from most RPG games" and that hasn't changed. Hopefully I can prove myself wrong.

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Sometimes* I like to give my skills punny names:



Skills that inflict a status effect (in this case Blind) always have the same animation after them as a visual indicator, so that's what the darkness thing is.

*Read: At every possible opportunity.

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I finished re-doing all the animations for Sore Losers: Riot Grrrl... but in the process I worked out that some of the skills could be coded a lot more realiably, so I'm going to work on doing that next.

I'm so far down the development hell rabbit hole that I'm going to find that development hell rabbit and choke the bitch out.

EDIT:

Here are the Chainsaw and Taser animation sequences*. Both have a skill that needs "charging up" before it can be used:

Spoiler for:
Spoiler for:
*I should point out that I'm rebalancing enemy/skill stats and haven't gotten around to the enemy side yet; that's why enemies appear to do no damage and die so quickly. That won't happen normally!

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(Still) looking cool. B)
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Thanks!



I've been doing some bug-testing and I forgot how much I liked some of the areas in the second level of Sore Losers: Riot Grrrl.
« Last Edit: August 09, 2015, 07:33:02 PM by Sated »

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So the current demo has 666 downloads, which I think is pretty neat. It wasn't a landmark that I was looking out for, I just happened to load the page and there it was, but dumb luck is sometimes pretty cool.

This is also a heads up that I will be taking down the current demo in the near future. The current demo no longer reflects the current state of this project, what with all its graphical placeholders and all the recent gameplay updates I've been making, so it won't be around much longer. I'd estimate that it will be gone sometime over the weekend, so grab it while you can because there's no telling when (or even if) an updated demo will appear!

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Lockpicking

It wouldn't be a Sore Losers game without a lockpicking minigame... right? Well here it is, and I'm sure people who played the original Sore Losers will recognise most of the graphical assets used.


I originally only made the control overlay at the bottom, but it thought it looked kinda silly since it covered up parts of the puzzle being attempted. That's when I decided that intentionally cutting off a significant portion of the puzzle would probably look more aesthetically pleasing, whilst also making the minigame more difficult without me really having to change anything!

The chipset needs updating to fit the Riot Grrrl style a little more (it's still the same as it was in Sore Losers so it does need a change) and I'll probably do that next. Then I'll need to apply the changes to all the other lockpicking puzzles in the game, as well as adding more of them since the game definitely doesn't have enough of them.

... workworkwork.

Hotwiring

Some people said they didn't like the hotwiring minigame from the Sore Losers: Riot Grrrl demo so I decided to modify it. I didn't want to take a completely different direction with the minigame because I still wanted to keep the key element (picking "wires" from one side and matching them to another side) and so I went with something that should be a familiar concept to people:


I think it speaks for itself. The game lets you pick a tile from the left and then lets you try to match it with one on the right. The tiles on each side are completely randomised each time you attempt (or re-attempt!) the minigame in a given area, and the process repeats until you've either matched all the tiles or you've ran out of attempts (attempts only deplete if you give a wrong answer!). The game will give you 12 attempts initially, but this will be reduced as the game goes on. It's basically a memory test, I guess :)

*You have no idea how many lines of eventing it takes to randomise the bloody tiles. Holy fuck. I'm glad it's completely copy-pastable now it works else I might've had to shoot myself.

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I haven't really done any work on this game since Fallout 4 came out back in November. Fallout 4 took up most of my free-time throughout November and December, with the rest being taken up by all the shopping and parties and dinners and general-get-togethers that Christmas brings with it. It's been a fun couple of months (some random bouts of nausea aside, but I'm taking medication for that now!) but it's really time that I start working on this project again. Not that I don't find working on this game fun, it's just that I've really saddled myself with a lot of tedious tasks to do. In any case, I really want to get this project finished by the end of this year. It's been going on for far too long now, it's actually kinda ridiculous!

Crawling Through Vents

I was working on the vent-crawling minigame back at the start of November. These sections are handled in a style similar to the dungeons in the first Phantasy Star game, in that you're shown a first-person view of what's immediately in front of you and then get to choose which direction you want to travel in. It's really easy to get lost in these areas, so it's really up to the player to keep careful track of where they're going so that they don't end up going in circles, and that's where the challenge in these sections comes from. Hopefully people aren't too put-off by what is a fairly old-school approach to labyrinthine puzzle design, but I've always liked dungeons that are set up in this kind of manner.

What I've basically done is update the graphics for the vent-crawling minigame so that it has an overlay like all the other minigames do. This means that I don't need a message-box based tutorial, since those are kinda boring and also feel pretty damn cheap. I also needed to tweak how the images were displayed because the wait-time between them was far too long, and I've also updated how the vents look since they were pretty ugly previously. It was never going to be something that would take a long time but I'm happy that it's done. Here's are some images that I hope is self-explanatory, with the second image showing an example of a new sewer-tunnel minigame that works in exactly the same manner:


Fighting With Words

Another thing that I've been doing is bringing the "convobattles" (which are basically rock-paper-scissors in how they work) in line with the aesthetic applied to all the other minigames. This actually entailed a lot of work, more than I was originally expecting when I set out to make these improvements. When the "convobattles" were first implemented, only dialogue from the opponent that continued the "convobattle" was shown as an image. All other text was shown using a normal message box, including all instances of Cheska's speech during these "convobattles". This meant that each "convobattle" only needed 3-5 images producing. When I started updating the graphics, I quickly decided that all the dialogue should be shown in speech bubbles so that the same aesthetic was maintained throughout the course of the whole "convobattle", which meant that loads of new images needed to be created. It ended up being pretty tedious work, but I'm happy with the results!


I'm also happy to say that all the "convobattles" in the game have now been updated, which was something I only just finished doing on New Year's Day. The ability to avoid combat by getting these minigames right is going to play a big role in how different players end up experiencing this game, because many battles can be avoided if you get the associated "convobattle" right. I'm not currently planning to have your success rate in "convobattles" have an affect on the ending, but it's something that has come to mind in the past. Definitely something for me to think about as I come to implement the closing scenes of the game!

Taking Stock

All the blog posts I've made since starting to work on development of this game again have been about updating things that were already implemented. Whether that meant replacing minigames with whole new minigames, updating graphics or simply adding more instances of under-utilised minigames, I've essentially done a lot of work without getting any closer to finishing this game. But that's okay! Why? Because this game is a hell of a lot better now than it was when I came back to developing it!

I'm pretty happy with where the project stands at the moment, but my next target is probably my most important since my next target is the battle-system. Frankly, the "interaction" system I've implemented needs to work a hell of a lot smoother and I'm sure that it can. It seems a long time ago that I was updating all the battle-animations, but I'm pretty damn happy with them and there's definitely nothing wrong with how the battle-system works from a traditional RPG stand-point. It's just that the "interaction" mechanic is the one mechanic that's meant to differentiate Sore Losers: Riot Grrrl from other RPGs with turn-based battle-systems. It's supposed to reward you for being inquisitive a lot more than it currently does. The mechanic is severely under-utilised and, if I'm being perfectly honest, it's implemented in a very cheap manner. Simply put...

MUST. DO. BETTER.
« Last Edit: January 03, 2016, 03:16:13 PM by Sated »