Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

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uze6666
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

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No progress at all. The 3D printing took all the free time and this game just doesn't motivates me enough to complete. :( All there is, is the graphics on this page.
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D3thAdd3r
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

I can understand those sentiments, having been there at least 50 times I wonder if anyone is interested enough in this game to make it a community effort or if it dies here? I like the way it looks but I could probably only contribute 25% of the total work before my interest rolled off. Never had a community gane done yet, but perhaps it is impractical?
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Harty123
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

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it's a pity ... :cry:
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uze6666
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

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Yeah I know... :( I should have followed my first rule of making a game...make one that you really like!
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Well I will confess that I ended up adopting it, but I'm glad I did because it has a lot of charm to me. It is pretty hard to get too excited about adding infinite features on this one, so it was perfect candidate for something I would actually finish! It is to a point where I am nearly going to call it done, though for sure I must make the game over sequence and the high score entry work first. After that I do intend to add a second song since I have around 4k left, but so far I am not finding anything that fits well.

There is the obvious idea to implement "mario jumping" where you can let go of the jump button in the middle and take a short jump, steer your jump, etc. Not sure I'm convinced it will actually make the gameplay better in this game but it's possible. Still needs a bit of polish before it's done, so might get mario jumping, and maybe slightly better AI. So here is a preview and the next version will be a finished product maybe in a month....along with hopefully another surprise 8-)
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uze6666
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by uze6666 »

Very, very well done, cool and original intro screen, music and FXs! :mrgreen:

My humble two cents to help wrap it up:
-I was wondering if my TV was freaking out because of the colors changing, but I guess it's a day light changing thing? Dunno if it's my monitor but a couple ones looks weird, like the purple sky. But the "full night"/blue one is very cool.
-Can't skip the high score screen it seems
-"Start" doesn't seem to work at main screen
-Would be nice to be able to continually move by holding left/right
-Use A to jump (And why not also UP, since I keep trying that for some reasons!) and B to "eat" for more "standard" controls
-I'd adjust the FIRST_RENDER_LINE a couple lines up since it truncates the bottom of the pic on my CRT monitor.
-Definitely voting for the mario jumps!!

Need to find someone to test the two player mode...
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

Thanks for the kind words Alec!

-I was trying to emulate the gradual day to night transition in F&F and Frog Bog. I ended up having to make up a bunch of custom binary masks to fade the video port because fixing one color always makes something else look weird so it's all a tedious compromise. Granted I haven't looked at this on a real tv yet, but out of the 12 fade steps, 4 of them probably are too dodgy.

-On the "GUI" screens I'll just make start and maybe also a&b buttons all work as well as skip-able high scores since that makes more sense.
-

-I have only played this game in Uzem with the default keyboard configuration so far, and for some reason hadn't put one thought into how awkward jumping with A was on a NES/SNES pad versus every other normal game(Angry Video Game Nerd went on a rant about exactly that I recall :lol:). I'll fix that. Hadn't thought about continual hopping either. As long as it's still easy to do exactly 1 hop when you want to, then it should be better.
-
-I moved 4 lines up, which is more centered in the emulator anyways.
-Ah... mario jumps :) Right now it's just a bunch of y offsets that make the "jump table" which would be very quick to add just a cutoff when you let go of the jump button. Now the steering aspect I do wonder about being too easy though, because it wouldn't be good if the High Score table was all scores of 255! I have some C code I translated from 6502 disassembly from marios jump mechanics somewhere..this will be tried after absolutely every last other detail is done so I can bale out and call it done if I can't get it right!
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

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Now the steering aspect I do wonder about being too easy though, because it wouldn't be good if the High Score table was all scores of 255!
After playing a bit more, a kind of agree with you! It forces you to better evaluate before jumping. Perhaps it could be a eater egg feature activated with a certain classic button code. ;)
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

Post by D3thAdd3r »

I was wrong again and I will release another unfinished build in the next couple days because I will need more feedback on gameplay. Alec I fixed all the issues you brought up and added a couple other features(intro,improved title,pause menu) and general polishing. I noticed the frog's eyes were getting very dry, so I added blinking, since it's a frog simulator...The Konami code is now there and works individually per player and can be turned on and off at the title screen by entering the code. I wont say what it does because that ruins the fun, but it will be obvious when you see it :)

All I have left is to finish eeprom high score sorting/storing and fine tune the jump controls, unless anyone else brings up gameplay ideas. All the extra code and improvements have left me with ~1.5k flash left so I am not going to add any more music; just features/variety. I didn't want to involve SD card in this game at all, but I could definitely get a couple kilobytes back by storing the screen maps on card like I'm doing in my other game if I find real need.

Mario jumping:
I have experimented with a couple different variations of mario jumps and each version is significantly easier(or at least a little faster since you don't have to travel accross the screen) to catch a fly. I do however intend to keep it as an integral gameplay element, and I have found making flies caught with a mario JUMP worth 1 point and those caught with the normal(un-steerable) LEAP worth 2 points actually works out for interesting tactical decisions based on the situation. You can pretty easily catch 2 flies by JUMPING straight up and moving left and right, but you can often catch 2 flies on a LEAP and it's twice as many points in not much extra time....so it's interesting but I definitely need to work on it to make it balanced. Basically I'm liking an exact copy of mario 3 jumps and then "nerf" them so they aren't so brutally effective. This also entails that the AI frog needs to be able to choose between jumping and leaping. I worked up a control scheme that feels pretty fluid on SNES pads and you can pretty quickly switch between jumping/leaping steering/hopping and licking.

SNES PAD CONTROLS
==========
D-LEFT/D-RIGHT = hop/steer
B or D-UP = JUMP(steerable, can abort by lifting button at any point for a short jump-I may FORCE a small amount of forward momentum at launch to make it harder?)
A or Ls/Rs = LEAP(goes further across screen with forward speed not possible by jump, floats around the top of the arc("killzone") longer, score is 2x)
Y = Lick to eat flies
Start = open pause menu, options for turning off music and/or sound effects, quit to title)

I'll have the new version when I can get jumping where I want, but I actually have started to think about other stuff like stomping. Similar to several mario games where you can push down at the peak of a jump to come quickly towards the ground and maybe stuns the other frog? Of course landing has a recovery time so the game doesn't simplify into a stomping match. Hmm yea that's all for now..
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uze6666
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Re: Tutorial - How to make Frogs and Flies!

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I'm eager to see the finished product!
Similar to several mario games where you can push down at the peak of a jump to come quickly towards the ground and maybe stuns the other frog?
Sounds like a really great gameplay element to me... :)
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