Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

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Gosma
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by Gosma »

Very well done game! Intro very cool! :geek:
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Thanks! Just a few more things to pull together for this one to be complete, which seems to always end up being the hard part for me :lol:
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uze6666
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by uze6666 »

D3thAdd3r wrote:Thanks! Just a few more things to pull together for this one to be complete, which seems to always end up being the hard part for me :lol:
It's already very good so I say finish the most important one (stun the other frog? ;) ) and release it!!! We need a new D3thAdd3r game! :P
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

I actually managed to create some new sprite frames that I am quite proud of. Now the animations are there for turning around to face the other side, stomping attack(he does a 4 frame spin mid air like yoshi in Super Mario World 2), and being dizzy, as well as blinking.
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I had flash space, but it got away from me when I started adding code. There are a lot of new features like menus to turn off music etc, and yes you can piss off your friend by entering a classic code...until he finds out he can too! Heh, that turned out pretty cool. I am very happy with the graphics in this game and I wont be cutting anything out there. I will employ some simple SD tactics to get me back in the bootloader. Long story told quickly, 2 kinds of jumping turns out awkward, full mario jumping is too easy and devolves the game into no skill, and while I'm reworking the state machine to support the additional states, I will make only 1 kind of jumping. Feels like the old jump except whenever you release the button you start falling. You can hold backwards on the jump to decrease your horizontal speed, but never manage to steer backwards since you can then easily "hover" in the kill zone to catch a fly. To reward long jumps and make the frogs frequently cross paths and encourage stomps, fly scoring is a chain for each one eaten in 1 jump. Scores per fly is now 2,4,8,etc each

I am thinking about doing a dual release on this as I have another game closer to done and this one is pretty close too. The other game is probably better but I am excited to finish something that isn't a puzzle game. I have more free time than I used to and I'm not a newbie programmer anymore, so my release plan is *SECRET GAME*+Frog Feast pretty soon, then my ultimate game Lolo(3rd from scratch version in progress,~150 levels,7 songs). I falsely believe there is always 1 perfect way for anything to be, then I harness that with procrastination and the ability to rapidly become more interested in new ideas, to ensure that any journey I ever manage to finish will be truly long, brutal, and therefore memorable :roll:
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uze6666
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by uze6666 »

Hey, those new sprites are very well done, congrats! And with all those features, it's going to be well worth the wait. :)
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Alright I have the gameplay just about dialed in and I figured I should release another build. I've tried a lot of things...lot of things...and none felt quit right, but what I have here now I am happy with. At first the control probably feels a little "squirrelly", but I think it works out for the best to created a faster paced game with more skill/competition because the jumps aren't such boring slow arcs. All of it also emphasizes attacking with a stomp too. Please let me know what you think especially if you have another person to play test with and see how the matches go. There are a couple bugs here and there but gameplay should all work. AI has been disabled because I have to teach it how to work with the new rules. The turning...I removed 1 of the frames and it looks less weird. Let me know what you guys think versus last version.

Hold B or UP to jump the direction you are facing. You will always start the jump with some momentum which you can increase by holding the directional pad in that direction or decrease by holding backwards. If you hold backwards long enough you can change directions in mid-air. When you let go of B or UP you start falling, so you can combine your control to create a wide array of arcs to catch flies, evade your opponent, or attack him.

Press Y or X or SL or SR to lick and catch flies

Press DOWN on the D-pad to perform a stomp. Timing is key to actually hitting your enemy. This is getting fine tuned so an opponent in the air is not immune to a stomp, and a frog is immune to a stomp that is only from a few pixels high(so no cheap quick stomps when you are right next to eachother)..still thinking on the balance for this. I have more than enough flash now just by eliminating the splash PCM :|
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paul
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by paul »

Really nice, Lee! The stomping works well. The only thing I'd request is a slightly larger radius on the lick (maybe I just need more practice).

Is this still going to be a tutorial game?
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

paul wrote:The only thing I'd request is a slightly larger radius on the lick
The jumping has been improved in the attached version and I think it feels a lot better, what do you think? It does take a little practice but the game itself is so simplistic I want to keep some element of skill for someone willing to master it. Then again the pick up and play factor might be more important in the end, I am unsure about this game. Did you try the konami code up,up,down,down,left,right,left,right,b,a at the title? You might like that one!
paul wrote:Is this still going to be a tutorial game?
I want this to be bigger but I'm out of flash space without: major surgery, title simplification, and conversion to SD screens+SD streamed music(unlimited songs easily then). It is feasible speed wise and perhaps a 64byte buffer, but I've only managed to do this with blocking functions as it is difficult to break up the SPI stuff into a state machine that just does a little bit each frame. If I can get the game showing the "unlimited music for free" concept I'll feel it as a good success, otherwise I have this lukewarm feeling about it that proves hard to fix until my motivation comes back. If the SD tricks do get implemented I would document the individual pieces of how to do the new techniques. If I go that route I think it ends up too complex for a good tutorial about the overall program.

New in this version you can double jump by pressing jump at the peak of a jump. You can also wall jump when against the wall pressing the opposite direction of the wall and jump simultaneously. The AI will even do it sometimes :geek:
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uze6666
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

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I'm tempted to say the game is already great as it is, all the music tricks you mention would serve better some other game like AlterEgo IHMO. I think it's ready to release...what do you think, we announce it?

I've found a bug when setting new record, seems "X" and "Z" chars are screwed up somehow in the selector. Gotta love the Konami code, but even with it, beating the AI is tough! Need more practice. :) Oh btw, was it me, but should the tongue be button "B" and jump "A"...for some reason I keep trying to use these buttons? :?
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

uze6666 wrote:I think it's ready to release...what do you think, we announce it?
I'm leaning that way so I don't have it in the back of my mind anymore. All the EEPROM stuff doesn't work right but that's all that needs fixing and it could be called done. I don't think we will have enough of Uzenet working by the time I want to release it so I am not considering that.
uze6666 wrote:should the tongue be button "B" and jump "A"...for some reason I keep trying to use these buttons?
Oh yeah I had meant to do that before too. The final version will be like that.

uze6666 wrote:beating the AI is tough! Need more practice.
Ok good that is very useful feedback! I was actually hesitant to call it done without better AI, but I have been played 10 times more of it than most anyone ever will. So I'm very relieved to hear that.

I'd like to make the AI slightly better because the weight values I used before(of course I didn't back them up) could achieve a score of 100 sometimes if the other player did nothing, had a lucky fly run, and there were favorable quantum wave function collapses happening on jupiter at the time. I am a big fan of weights based AI to achieve a human like output, so as long as your basic structure is good it's all in the fine tuning of values. It is super temperamental, nearly an art, tuning it, and I never stop "fixing" it when I know it's good. This happened in MegaBomber and good survivable bots turned suicidal, destroyed Columns(thought I could "optimize" an AI I couldn't even beat), and now here but maybe it's for the best then to leave it alone. I really don't want to implement multiple difficulty settings anyways, so screw it, AI is done!

Ok, more thought on this than I have done in a while. Everyone is saying it's done, so I will call it done, thanks for that. I will have to figure out why my EEPROM/high score stuff isn't working but that's it. What is the consensus on the tongue being longer, after a bit of practice? I don't know if there is much of a tutorial in this game that adds to what is already available on the wiki stuff. I probably should have started documenting from the get go if I was going to do that, but I didn't expect to actually make this game initially.
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