Scripter Needed for Sidescroller

I'm looking to hire someone to help with some scripting. I have a specific type of game in mind, and it might be something somebody can knock out relatively easily. I don't want to divulge the plot of this project, as I'm still working on that. But I do have the gameplay pretty solid in my head. I realize that a lot of this game might sound like something there is a lot of, which hey, I understand.

I'm looking to make a sidescrolling game. There will be no enemies in this game. Throughout the course of this game you would get different moves to navigate the area, such ideas are like a double jump and a glide type move. It is more of an artistic styled game where the platforming is just a way to reach the next stage of the narrative. I will need the player to be able to interact with objects easily (NPC activation type stuff). Based on the level of ease, I would also be interested in possibly giving the player a laser gun to destroy obstacles.

I'm totally okay with anyone using a variation of an existing engine to help make this work. If anyone is interested, could you message me with a quote based on the details here and I can give more details if you need them?

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Is there a reason you want to use the OHRRPGCE for this? It's unsuited to platformers for a variety of reasons, not least of which is the poor framerate. It's very difficult to make a platformer that controls well at 15 FPS.

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Mega Tact v1.1
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I figured OHR would be easiest to do this in because so many others have made sidescrollers and my game won't have a ton of enemy AI or scripts to handle the AI basically. I figured it'd be as smooth as stuff like Timpoline, Tim-Tim and James' Floral game.

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Check out Red Triangle Games!

Yes, you could do that, but none of those games is especially smooth, and the problem is particularly noticeable when movement is fast. Go play Timpoline and Memento Mori at peak move speed, then give the 1985 Super Mario Bros. a try, sprinting through World 1-1. An OHR platformer is significantly choppier than its 30-year-old granddaddy.

Now, if your movement is fairly slow relative to the size of the protagonist (as in Vorpal Florist), then you can get away with it. But that's not really desirable in a combat-free game of exploration.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

You and I were making a game where the protagonist was a walkabout size and it was super smooth. I booted it up in the last few months and it's still a great tech demo. If you still had all of the code for that, would you be willing to tweak it for this? I mean... game was smooth and solid. The project just more or less fell apart.

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Check out Red Triangle Games!

I personally have a hard time noticing the low framerate in ohr games, but it has something to do with my eyes, and/or the fact that I am so used to it. To some other people it is way more noticeable.

But good news for sidescroller authors!

We are really close to being able to allow other frame rates for scripted games. CHanging framerate in a way that plays nice with built-in battle system and built-in NPC animation is pretty tricky, but for people who just want to script the whole game (like a sidescroller, or a racing game) the goal of faster frame rates is very much within reach.

Please bug both TMC and I about it continuously. I am talking to you here, Mogri :)

Well I for one will be bugging you about it. I'd love that in Gun Pigs! And it would be useful in many other things, especially if it's adjustable via coding function!

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Will this framerate increase, also increase the speed of the game. Or would including it in older games be a simple thing to do?

That is good news. The other feature that I'd want in a sidescroller is a screen resolution closer to the NES 256x240. It's not so much the shape of the screen as the vertical display area that hurts.

It's not the showstopper that framerate is, but it's definitely a nice-to-have. Am I wrong in remembering that someone mentioned custom resolutions at one point? It's another one of those features that would be very difficult to implement in a standard RPG (or, I imagine, in Android ports), but which would be very nice to have in heavily-scripted games. Custom pixel scaling would be nice, too, and much easier to support.

When you say "really close," how close do you mean?

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks

Giz has a couple "games" on slimesalad right now that use the new custom resolution OHR scripting.

You can adjust the frame rate while playing with ctrl +/-, which works, but is there any way to make the game make these changes with a script rather than having to do it manually every time you run the game? In theory you could just make a game and tell the players the optimum framerate for it.

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@Kyle: There is no way to do this with a script at the moment. It would be awesome though.

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Variable framerate was added a month ago, but shouldn't really be used for non-scripted games. Also if you ask for 60fps it might run at 59.5fps which will actually display at 30 or 45fps because gfx_directx defaults to vsync. I have to fix that. There's no script command to change the speed, but it seems like it would be useful, once frameskip is implemented.

Variable resolution was added two years ago, though it's much more incomplete: the option to change it is hidden in the SPAM secret menu, and heaps of stuff like built-in menus and backdrops remain at 320x200, and it doesn't work with gfx_directx (gfx_directx.dll is automatically excluded when distributing a game, but you'll have to remove the .dll when testing for yourself). However, it works just fine for scripted games.

Setting the default scale factor is something I've been meaning to add. It's definitely needed now.

Whoa, haha! This is already further along than I remembered.

I was somehow thinking that the setting for framerate was going in the spam menu along with variable resolution, and when I looked for it there and did not see it I thought, "Oh, I that hasn't been implemented yet" but no, as TMC says, it is already right there in "Edit General Game Data" in the latest nightly builds.

There are details about how the framerate setting works at the bottom of the F1 help screen for Edit General Game Data

Have I mentioned lately that TMC is awesome? TMC is awesome! :)

Mogri: Would you consider trying to modify Timpoline to run at a higher framerate? I think all you will have to do is change the one setting in the Edit General Game Menu, and adjust the movement speeds in your scripts accordingly. I am really curious about how it would affect gameplay.

Oh, right! The funny thing is that I already saw that setting, tweaked it for The Noodle Within (which basically changes nothing, since the game is all menus) and forgot that it existed.



Hmm, I'll have to see if I still have the game in editable form. It would require some heavy tweaking to ensure that the acceleration and max speed still feel OK, but it wouldn't be too hard.

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Mega Tact v1.1
Super Penguin Chef
Wizard Blocks