Cool Guy Bob Threadlaw

Yo yo what up let's talk.

I've released the first demo of Cool Guy Bob Surlaw. It's a comedic RPG where you control the tone, featuring a great soundtrack by 8bit and Glock.

The game is still pretty early in development, but I wanted to release this demo anyway, in part to be eligible for the Heart of the OHR contest and in part to get a feel for what people think so far. Does Dr. Clownius work as a straight man to Bob's nonsense? Does Czarina's dialogue gimmick wear thin?

My immediate plan for the next demo release is to add more NPCs, since the town is pretty barren right now, and add more detail to the first dungeon. I'll be redrawing most of the cutscenes and the world map. I'd also like to add original sound effects, and give each hero new abilities to learn on level up. In the current demo, you're stuck with the skills you start with. I feel the boss in the demo is way too straightforward; do you think it's fine as it is, or should he have some sort of puzzle/gimmick?

Right before the boss fight begins, I'd wanted to have a slice of a sprite fly at the player and begin the fight once you collide, but I have never used slices before and I couldn't figure it out in the couple hours I had available to submit the game. I'm sure the explanation's simple, but my attention span's low right now as far as learning new scripting goes.

Any impressions or helpful feedback is welcome. I'd also like some pixel art advice on making the walls and edges in the mountain area look nicer.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

I'm sure James can help in the slice arena. He helped me with my bestiary pages (and the lack of them in AR-PUH-GUH! is due to there being a lot of pages to do, and no time/patience to do them).

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dOn'T MiNd mE! i'M jUsT CoNtAgIoUs!!!
Play Orbs CCG: http://orbsccg.com/r/4r6x

You can use loops and setting the sprite position, or just slice velocity. You could even brute force it by manually setting positions and using waits, but that would take forever. It's really easy if it's just going to go straight, gets a little more complicated if it has a more varied path.

So should something like this work?



Edit: Just tested this, it causes the slice to appear but not move.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

When you load a collection, you get a handle to the outermost container that holds the whole collection. it is set to fill the screen, so you can't move it directly.

Also note that "set slice velocity" starts a slice moving, but it will not stop, so "wait for slice" will not work as expected. I am guessing you might want "move slice by"

One method is to use a slice lookup code to get a handle to just the one slice that you want to move:



Also, if you just want a single sprite, you might not need a collection. You could do something like this:




Also, if "move slice by" doesn't float your boat, consider "move slice to".



This moves the slice to the middle of the screen in 36 ticks, regardless of where the slice started out.

Yep, loading the enemy sprite did exactly what I wanted it to do, thanks bro.

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

Yay! Glad to help :)

Looking back at the discussion from that time I changed that behaviour for exactly this reason (r4860) I see the suggestion that the root slice of a slice collection be shown so that it can be edited. It could even default to not filling. That sounds like an easy solution to me.

The reason I wanted the root of a slice collection to fill is because you might be loading it into some other comtainer. Mr. The Hamster's Math Class depends on that already.

If we make slice collections load as non-filling, it should be as an option to the load slice collection command, not as a new default

I know, I meant it could be the default for new slice collections.

IMO any issues with the appearance of the cliff boil down to art fundamentals rather than anything particularly pixel-arty. My assessment of it is that you could leave out the patterns entirely*, but you can't afford to leave out the volume and lighting.

Currently you have the top edge of the cliff undulating, which implies that the cliff has the typical 'unevenly varying columns' profile., but within the tiles, there is no difference in brightness between the more distant areas and closer areas, nor is there a difference in brightness between the right side and left side of the sub-columns within a tile.

Here's a really simple example edit ; vertical stripes are used to convey depth and angle to the light, and that's the only type of visual element used, except on the 'cliff bottom' tiles.


* which is not to say that better patterning wouldn't improve things. It would (image link), but the tiles as a whole still won't read without more basic things like light/value.

If you do patterning, then you will need to think about giving the rocks shapes in 3d (ie. lighting them individually), as well as applying the type of overall lighting variation seen in my 'striped' edit.

As a more general tiling tip, if you are not already using an image editor that can autocomplete tiles (like GrafX2 or ProMotion), give GrafX2 a go; the tile autocompletion applies your edits to one tile to every matching tile in the image, so it's very easy to see how well your tile works in all the different contexts it will be used in.

Hope that helped!

I think what the mountains really need is better border tiles. (or border tiles at all) your lack of corner pieces is the most noticeable flaw in my eyes.
So, give your pillar there some lines on the sides, and those corners some connecting lines.
I also think the shading is making it look worse. You should either try out Ion's shade technique or just stick with the darker of the 2 colors.

I think what the mountains really need is better border tiles. (or border tiles at all) your lack of corner pieces is the most noticeable flaw in my eyes.
So, give your pillar there some lines on the sides, and those corners some connecting lines. (0ion9's take on the pictures actually seems to give everything a border as a side effect of the process he used.)
I also think the shading is making it look worse. You should either try out Ion's shade technique or just stick with the darker of the 2 colors.

I'll definitely try something along the lines of that shading next time I get to work, thanks. I don't like how stripey it looks, but I don't really like how my current style looks either! I'm going to see if I can throw together some compromise between the two.

So that aside has anyone played the game yet?

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Super Walrus Land: Mouth Words Edition

To be clear, what I drew was just supposed to be an example of getting the basics right -- laying out some basic lighting that looks roughly right and reads as cliffs. It really wasn't intended to be a rendering, just a -basis for- a rendering.