Website updates

If you haven’t noticed, I’ve started updating the website for the open release of World 2, which is this Thursday. I’m trying to set this site up as much like a real site as possible, so there’s the sections to the right right, right there, and, ah, fun, some ads.

So, what do you guys want to see? Some questions you want answered in a faqs would be nice, general, or for a specific game. Anything you want to see in the ‘about me’ in particular?

Anything else I should add to the site?

Comments Website updates

The colors!

Okay, so a few things had to be left out of the initial release of World 2, but there is one feature that made it in that I thought you guys especially would enjoy.

On every level, there is a snail, and somewhere else on that level is a golfball hole. Sink the shell, your pants turn the same color as the flag at the hole. Surprise surprise, the hole in level 3 is based on the little challenge that this site created while playing the beta!

Post screens of Fancy Pants Man sporting different shades of fancy! How many can you earn? Who can get all 6 first?

On a sidenote, the Fancy Golfball challenge was created in direct respose to anyone who said that World 1 was too easy 😛

And guys, please, no spamming up this thread like the others…

Comments The colors!

Merry Christmas!

As much as I would have liked to have World 2 out already, being able to work less and actually enjoy the Christmas holiday has been quite nice. I’ve also been working on a few small things in the game that I wouldn’t have been able to do if I didn’t have the extra development time, if that’s any consolation.

Either way, Merry Christmas!

world-2-christmas.png

Comments Merry Christmas!

Some real news

Alright, guys. I’m gonna do the classic good news / bad news deal.

Good news is I actually have a release date for World 2.

Bad news is, it’s not before Christmas.

I’ve been working like mad lately, with World 2 and Christmas stuff, I’ve almost burnt myself out. So I’m going to release on January 8th, there’s not all that much left to do, but I don’t want to be cutting corners or sleeping even less than I do now. Plus, you know, I wouldn’t mind enjoying the holidays with my family a bit, heh.

And in an attempt to get ya’ll to hate me less, a shot of what’s probably my favorite background in the game. It’s actually from the second level that was in the demo.

picture-1.jpg

But, this will be the final delay, as long as nothing goes terribly wrong, which it shouldn’t…

Comments Some real news

Beta .1, have at it.

Approximately 3 gajillion fixes in this one, so attack it and make sure I didn’t break anything else.

Off the top of my head:
– improved landing smoke and new cannon smoke animation (by James Kholamian)
– fixed that pause when you land while running
– fixed baddies rotating when coming into screen
– should have fixed baddies just floating in the air
– fixed where the stupid shell would skip forward while rolling off of something (you don’t know how much that bugged me…)
– tightened up normal wall jump
– that stupid teleporting thing should be FINALLY fixed
– LOTS more stuff

Beta .1

Comments Beta .1, have at it.

Beta .09, final (*crosses fingers*)

Alright, this should be the final beta. If something’s not fixed in here, chances are I either wanted it like that, or it would be too much trouble to fix. That doesn’t mean you guys can’t pillage through this version and make sure everything’s fixed, but unless it’s a major issue, I doubt I’m going to take the time to fix it.

My girlfriend’s been helping me on a wrap up page for the Beta, with all the bugs that were found, suggestions given, and what has been changed. Pretty much just a summary of everything that’s been accomplished during the Beta period. Huge thanks to her for all her help.

I’m trying to post this quickly, and I still need to paste all the new code from the working build over to the Beta build, so I’ll make a more official ‘yayz teh Beta is finished!’ when I make that wrapup page.

New features in this build:
– New spider animation, yes the old one looked pretty bad
– Slippery walls… Something I’ve been meaning to program for awhile now so I through some in there. Remember the ‘icy’ floor as someone put it? Well I finally remembered to color the ink over that, and now there’s ‘inky walls.’ This level doesn’t really take advantage of that feature too much, but you can still try it out. Jump at the walls with some upward momentum, no the real laws of gravity have no real effect here! It’s nice for going higher up the walls, or down quickly, as they’re slippery. You can press the direction away from the wall to get off of them quickly, making the section that I added them too able to be ran through even quicker now.

***To those new to the Beta, this is only a single level used for finding bugs in the code, though there’s a few new features to be found if you’re interested. There’s no goal to get the shell to, yet, but a few of the Beta testers have gotten the shell to the top of the level just for fun.***

Beta .09

Also, keep an eye on JayIsGames.com, they should be running a preview sometime monday, they even have some info that you guys don’t know about yet.

Comments Beta .09, final (*crosses fingers*)

Beta .08

Been out of town with my family for Thanksgiving, so I can’t say I spent a huge amount of time on this update, but there’s a few issues I want to make sure I just fixed that have been popping up recently.

Fixes:

– Spiders should behave while off screen now. This issue was especially apparent while kicking spiders off screen to the right into the small platforms by the cannon…

– Falling through slanted platforms while low jumping / kicking.

– Added some speed to the landing, that should stop the landing from the kick from feeling sluggish.

– little stupid platform tweaks like always…

– Juggle the snailshell in the air without it landing or hitting anything 😀

– Finally remembered to add the caching progress bar in there, not a big deal, but I think it’s neat

Beta .08

Comments Beta .08

Beta .07

I’m going to give you guys a bit of debugging power with this one. Try and get those spiders to stop responding or floating or whatever, if they do, click on them and post what words pop up in the top right of the screen, what they spider should be doing, and if you can, what you did to make him like that.

Fixed:
– Spider crawling on your body and getting knocked out, completely fixed, definitely. Should fix other things with the spiders too.
– Snailshell going through you, being knocked away even when behind you
– I think some other stuff but I don’t remember…

Features:
– Play around with kicking the shell and knocked out spiders, did something new there 😉 Tell me if you like it.

Shell should be tweaked a lot to deal with the added feature.

Beta .07c

[edit again: slide into the shell (the letting go of the arrows slide) to ‘dribble’ it on the ground, tell me if that helps with the ‘can’t hit it lightly’ problem]

Comments Beta .07

Screenshot

So here’s a new post for ya’ll to spam!

I kid, I kid, just thought I’d share a screen of the level I’ve been working on.

Yeah yeah, I still can’t draw, but I think this is looking pretty swell.

flash-playerscreensnapz002.jpg

So what do you guys think about the look? The dark browns are quite a bit different from anything from World 1, but there’s actually a reason you’re in a cave, falling… The levels in this game aren’t just a series of squiggly levels, they’re a series of, uh, squiggly levels, only now you’re traveling across them, with a destination! and a purpose! Woo! Something just happened, and now you’re falling into a cave… omigosh itsaplot!

Comments Screenshot

Registration

Sorry about the forced registration… There’s been a huge influx of spam lately, I’m seeing if this will help that any. So please, register (with the name I know you by would help), and keep up the commenting!

Just to clarify… I’m not accusing anyone of spamming the comments, I kept getting automated comments from stupid websites, and turning on registration seems to have stopped the bots.

Comments Registration

Beta .06

I really hope you guys aren’t thinking, oh no! another beta! Seriously though, this is helping me out way much. A huge thanks to everyone participating!

So, what should be fixed (aka go test this stuff out, and see if I accidently fixed any of the old bugs):

– Defeating on a spider by jumping at him from below a platform
– Spider freaking out while crawling on your dead body (wow that sounds morbid…).
– Lots of little weird things that you guys probably didn’t even know where broken

– This miiight fix the deal with jumping on a spider right when he wakes up. Educk, check ‘er out.

Also, I let the first door stay visible so you can go back into it to reset all the baddies. Thought that would be easier than hitting refresh once they’re all dead.

Tell me what’s still bugging out, I’m hoping that the changes I made actually fixes bugs that I weren’t targeting specifically…

Beta .06

Comments Beta .06

Beta .03

– Cleaned up the baddie interacting with character code a lot, tell me what’s still messing up with the bad guys. Spiders won’t bring you back to life anymore, and they shouldn’t be able to hurt you if you’re hanging. Jumping on them feels a bit better to me, but I might be imagining things.

– Rope bug should be fixed, tell me if it doesn’t something else wacky now instead.

– Rolling into baddies should have you ramping off of them now.

Not too much progress, but lets see how many of the spider bugs are still in there, especially how they can float / stay squashed / etc.

Again, thanks to all who are participating in this beta. Unless you’re just being completely obnoxious and haven’t contributed a single thing, you’re going to get your name in the credits, so no more ‘AM I GETTING MAH NAME IN TEH GAMEZ?!,’ k? 😛

And oh, right… the new beta build… Beta 03

Comments Beta .03

Bugs!

If you’re just getting to the site, the link to the beta is in the next post. Please only post on umknown bugs Of course, anything that’s opinion is still open for discussion. And go ahead and now comment on this post instead of the old one for bug reports And as I said before, I should have a new build up sometime this weekend.

Wow, the response to the beta has been pretty awesome so far. There’s reaaly quite a few bugs still in there that I already knew about, lets get those out of the way first:

-Dying and getting hit again: lots if smaller bugs seem to have come from this, but basically I’m going to vastly tighten up how check for baddies is done, and this will be fixed.
– There is a small mound of ground that is spawned when you die. This made it look like spiders would crawl over you once you died, but it doesn’t look like anyone noticed that in the first game, heh. This will be fixed when the baddie interaction us fixed.
– Grabbing a rope and continuing downward: found this awhile ago but thought it was isolated, I’ll have to go through the rope code again, honestly it’s still pretty rough.
– Spiders becoming unresponsive (staying squashed, floating): this one appeared when I changed the baddie jump code (holding jump whil hitting on them bounces differently than if you don’t hold jump while landing on one). I have a feeling that I’m going to end up putting in lots of protection code to stop that from being a problem.
– Snailshell physics: they’re deliberately unreastic, and overly react to your character. I’m not going for realism here, so it’s not a bug. You can still comment your opinion on how it feels, though.
– Landing while holding down: deliberate, think of it as the megaman slide, only with that momentum actually coming from somewhere.
– Shell collecting squiggles: deliberate, just underused in this one level.
– Hitting head and flying downward: been there forever, you’d think I would have fixed that by now…
– Hair disapearing: omgwtfbbqssbbrawl!!!!!eleven you know how many times that’s been commented on in the demo? And I know that there’s NEW animations that don’t have hair, but that means I haven’t drawn it yet, as I have to animate unique hair for most of the animations. Sorry if I sound mad,but I still get those comments, even though I warn of horrible acts of temporary baldness in the comments there, and the post here… *sigh*

Comments Bugs!

Beta!

Alright guys, there’s not all that much new in this build, to be honest. I just want to stress test the code, and I’m anticipating a lot going wrong, this engine is more complex than the demo, and far more complex than World 1. I’ll try to keep this build updated as I update the engine.

To report bugs, I’ve set up an email address, or you can go ahead and leave comments on this post.

Click the link below to launch the game. And apologies for the barren page, I know pretty much nothing about HTML…

picture-1.jpg

Look out for bugs, of course, but tell me what you think about killing spiders, the look of the level, the new animations, stuff like that.

Oh, I made jumping on baddies while holding jump versus letting go of jump before you hit them feel much different from the other than before.

And YES, I know his hair disappears sometimes, it’s because I haven’t animated it yet in those areas.

Comments Beta!

Speed

Very few people have played The Fancy Pants Adventures at full speed. No, really. It doesn’t matter how fast your computer is, or what operating system you run, I set FPA to 30 frames a second, and if you’re playing the game in a browser window, it will run at an unsteady 20 – 25 FPS. The only way to get World 1 to run at a solid 30 frames like God intended was to run the swf file in the Flash Standalone Player, offline.

There’s some good news for World 2, however, as long as my plan ends up working correctly (and I’ll definitely be testing that during the beta). See, some time over the summer, Adobe multithreaded Flash so that it could play HD video, yeah, big freaking deal, like we need yet another streaming video player on the Internet, right? Well, it looks like that allowed Flash to run full tilt, even on single core computers… under certain conditions. Yeah, I basically have to time every frame manually because Flash is overfilled with suck because it will never be optimized for anything better than obnoxious web advertisements.

Anyways, all this means is that there will be more than just a few people who play FPA like it’s meant to be played, despite Adobe not having the slightest idea what the hell they want to do with Flash *shakes fist*

Comments Speed

Beta

Alright guys, I’m not going to release a new demo with more levels or anything, but I do need a way to stress test the code before letting the game out into the wild.

So I’m planning on putting a beta up on the site, don’t get too excited, it’ll just be the first level of the demo, updated, of course, with all the new code and physics.

You guys will be in charge attempting to break the engine, and leave comments on what you did, how you did it, and screen shots if you can manage them. And if you report anything that I don’t know about that I end up fixing, your name will end up in the credits of the final game.

Of course, feel free to comment on the new animations, physics, all that stuff, what’s better, what’s worse, all that non technical stuff…

I need to finish updating that level before I can upload the new build, but check back soon!

Comments Beta