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In Anodyne, you explore and fight your way through nature, urban and abstract themed areas in the human Young's subconscious, evoked by a 16-bit-era visual style and a moody, dream-like soundtrack. The player moves between rooms 160x160 pixels in size, an intended constraint that we used to create the monster-filled dungeons you will navigate and the set of nature-based (and sometimes stranger) places you will explore. Anodyne is on Steam Greenlight, please vote for it.

Report RSS Anodyne News, 9-10-12

In this week's updates of Anodyne, a 2D Zelda-like, in preparation for the near demo release, we implemented dialogue, added some new art/music/sfx, did some polishing and finished a million other little things.

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Hmm, what to talk about today.

Scripting! Dialogue! Story!

Jon sent me the dialogue for NPCs for the demo a few days ago. So, I got right to thinking of a semi-smart way to put the dialogue into the game, and speed up the workflow when he tweaks the dialogue. I spent a bit writing a dirty Python script, which will take an easy-to-read format where Jon types the dialogue, and then translate it into AS3 Object notation. The great thing about this, is that I can add any needed metadata AS3 representation, without having Jon having to deal with it - metadata such as, whether a certain set of dialogue has finished playing, whether any of it has played, and so forth.

Then, I programmed the dialogue events. I have a few nice abstractions that I made after coding a few events - one that fires up the dialogue box, one for requesting some dialogue and then playing it, one to making an NPC walk towards you and then talk to you, one to make two entities face eachother and play animations - little things like that, to make programming these dialogue events easier. I'm getting better at doing it, after ironing out initial bugs. I'm assuming there's some better way to use an actual scripting language to do all that but...this seems to be working, and there's not too many complex scripted events. So I think I'll be fine.

Watch out!

Also, Jon's been polishing up a few tilesets and finishing up graphics and working on dialogue, to make the demo very pretty. Everything looks nice, and I've been adding small things in too that will be nice touches (animations for certain items, more menu infrastructure).

Some dungeon #1 visual rehauling...

We're close to a demo release, and a giant to-do list we created a few days ago only has a few items left! I'm pretty excited to see how people react to a polished demo. In preparation, I also redid the official Anodyne website to have an organization of information that wasn't just a mish-mash (like it was before). Check it out!

Other than that, there are countless other various things we've finished - new sound effects, some added songs, save file fixes, oh and checkpoints! Yes, there are checkpoints. They work...nicely, I think. Autosave is on by default - though you can turn it off - , so the game saves your progress through dungeons if you get close. If you step on a checkpoint, then if you die, you will respawn there. This is to hopefully mitigate needless backtracking if you die at a boss or something.

That's all for now. Excited! Back to trying to justify my existence and fill an ever-deepening hole.

-Sean

Follow me (sean) on twitter, Jon on twitter, or even the sentient Anodyne game on twitter. And vote for us on Greenlight!

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Vaalknut
Vaalknut

Binding of Isaac clone?

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Fib
Fib

People have been making zelda-like games long before Binding of Isaac existed. Binding of Isaac itself is a zelda-like.

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Fib
Fib

The game looks really great. I'm up for trying any zelda-like game I can get my hands on. I can't wait to play the demo.

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seagaia Author
seagaia

Thanks! Demo soon...I hope! What's actually left is polishing a few sprites and finishing a tileset, and then on my part, adding one or two little text events and changing up a song a bit.

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LaughingLeader
LaughingLeader

Hey seagaia! Just wanted to say that the game is looking great so far. Keep up the good work!

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seagaia Author
seagaia

Appreciate it!

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doppl3r
doppl3r

This looks really fun. It makes me want to make a game like this. What made you choose Flixel over any other 2D based engine?

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seagaia Author
seagaia

Hey, thanks! Yeah the game's pretty fun to make (most of the time...), although at some points I feel like throwing myself out of my basement level window. Haven't done so yet, though!

I chose Flixel mainly out of familiarity and comfort, it's what I started with (around August 2011), and I started this project in March 2012 by myself, so it's kind of just stuck. It works quite well, I must say, and I haven't had any large issues with it so far. I'm pretty sure there are loads of technical limitations I don't know of (besides natively running in Flash Player) due to my inexperience. Part of the limitations are definitely not being "close to the metal". Garbage collection is kind of annoying, I'd rather be dealing with most of the memory management myself - the way things are allocated/cleaned up in my code is kind of stupid (e.g., I don't use pooling), but it works well enough, plus with the cushiness of modern system architectures, I can get away with it :P - one of the things helping is we use scaled bitmaps so the memory usage isn't terrible.

But in the future I think for my experience and more flexibility I'd like to move to a C++-based engine. I'm already relatively comfortable with C, so I don't think it should be that big of a jump. Flixel has definitely helped learn a few useful abstractions used in games, etc - for the future, I think it's handy to have in the toolbox as a prototyping platform.

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