AuthorTopic: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS (GAME IS RELEASED!)  (Read 15775 times)

Offline dkh

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Hey there!

Long time no see, Pixelation! I wanted to share my new project "The Art of Dying". It's made with a software called "Adventure Game Studio" that I've been using and abusing for non-adventure game for ten years now. This is a solo project, meaning I'm programming the entire thing, I'm drawing all the art and animation and design the game. The music in the video is used with permission and is by the amazing Tom Woxom - found on the equally wonderful freemusicarchive.org!

The way I want to present the game is with short video segments: each one focuses on one particular aspect of the game. This first installment talks about the most important game play mechanic in any platformer: movement! Please take a look:









In the video I demonstrate the way I implemented movement, acceleration/deceleration on different surfaces (solid and slippery), jumping, double-jumping and ducking.

Let me expand a little on two of the points made in the video:

- Featuring smooth movement (with acceleration and deceleration) as opposed to hard fixed-pixel movement is very important. The former gives a much more modern feel to your game, the latter is more precise and exact. I went for very subtle smooth movement and put a lot of effort into finding 'correct' values so that you would just barely notice that there is smooth movement in the game but still keep the controls as tight as possible.

- Jump systems are a second, fundamentally important aspect of platformers. There are several different styles that you can follow: There's the simple way. You hit the jump button and it results in the same exact jump every time no matter what. Then there's the Mario way: the jump starts when you push the jump button and gets an upward boost for a limited amount of time if you hold the jump button. That gives the gameplay much more complexity as you can now have jumps that players need to be careful not to overshoot (down-facing spikes over gaps anyone?) and you need to master the regulation of the jump. And then there's the double-jump system that I went for. It's like the first-mentioned primitive jumping system except that you can, well, double-jump. I went for this latter approach because it allows the player to regulate the jumps and makes the gameplay more complex and, at the same time, it looks really cool to double-jump all over the place. Don't ever underestimate how important it is for core gameplay mechanics to just be straight-up dumb fun (and complete unrealistic from a physics point of view)!

I will be releasing a second video very shortly from now which will focus on the various attacks in the game! Please let me know what you think of my project, the ideas I talked about in the video and in this post and ask any questions you might have!
« Last Edit: December 18, 2013, 11:21:36 pm by dkh »

Offline Corinthian Baby

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #1 on: October 25, 2013, 06:26:13 pm
1, that is a picture of a video. 2, I couldn't find the video on youtube. Can't really comment on the game without seeing it in action.

Offline dkh

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #2 on: October 25, 2013, 06:34:38 pm
Argh, I'm super sorry. It's fixed now. Looks like pixelation doesn't allow embedded youtube videos nor image links (the video thumbnail was supposed to be clickable and link to the video since direct embedding doesn't seem to work).

Offline Crow

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #3 on: October 26, 2013, 12:09:11 am
Edited your first post and embedded the video :)
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Offline Helm

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #4 on: October 26, 2013, 05:27:11 am
Hey, dkh! It's amazing to me that this runs in AGS. Pretty spectacular. And it's obvious from the go that you've thought about mechanics and such, looks responsive and tight. Good job! Are you using the arne 16 color palette for this? Looks like it a bit.

I think it's a beautiful project and I'm looking forward to watching more videos as you upload them. Feel free to keep this thread updated for us!

Offline dkh

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #5 on: October 26, 2013, 09:47:11 am
Helm, long time no see! I'm happy that you enjoy the project. It uses a version of Arne's 16 color palette indeed, good catch. When I make that first mock-up in Pro Motion, I generally start with Arne's palette - and then I just never see any reason to change anything about it :D

Offline surt

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #6 on: October 26, 2013, 11:21:37 am
Does AGS support tilemap rendering or is the level a single prerendered image?

Offline dkh

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #7 on: October 26, 2013, 11:28:17 am
surt: AGS supports rendering images to the screen, that's pretty much it, that's all you need! ;) You could just draw one large level background or - and this is what I am doing - write your own tilemap code to render a grid of little tiles! I went for tiles because a.) I love tiles, b.) they are more memory-efficient and c.) it allows me to have that build-in level editor in the game in which people can put together their own levels and challenges if they want to, and share them as well.

Offline Cyangmou

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #8 on: October 26, 2013, 12:38:18 pm
great stuff, I really enjoyed your vid. Please post more  :)

I think we all here talk in general too much about the arty side of pixel art and quite to less about game design which is also really important for game art assets.
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Offline dkh

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Re: The Art of Dying - Platformer made in AGS

Reply #9 on: October 26, 2013, 03:30:03 pm
Thanks Cyangmou! Here's the second video talking about how attacking works in the game:



Take a look and let me know what you think! It's getting a bit more interesting now! The next video will introduce the various enemies in the game!
« Last Edit: October 26, 2013, 04:21:54 pm by dkh »