Manna by Marshal Brain

This post contains nothing about porn at all.  It's simply a post I found that was so interesting, I felt the need to link it.  As an apology, here are two porn blogs you may not know: 
hnyarly.blogspot.com is by another amateur coder like myself, and he even posts here occasionally. 
theknightshinesbright.blogspot.com is 3D picture/movie related, but I really dig his art style.


Today I read a series of posts simply named "Manna".  It's near future science fiction, which I usually dislike.  Or to be more precise, the writer usually fails to get past my bullshit filter.  They will make some 'funny' assumptions in order to get their alternate future world in motion, and my mind immediately rejects everything from that point forward.  Manna's assumptions are so simple though that I really can't contradict them:

1. Corporations are greedy.
2. A computer program with some wireless headsets is a cheaper way to manage minimum wage employees.

From there it snowballs in the usual SF manner, and gets pretty damn bleak.  He 'saves' it with a utopia around the 5th post, but he's got too many assumptions in his dream world for me to accept it.  If you have similar feelings, you may want to stop around the 4th page or so. 

This really got me thinking.  In a world where we no longer have minimum wage jobs, and only a sliver of middle class jobs, what is one supposed to do to earn a living?  I don't have an answer of course, but my mind is still spinning, and probably will be all night.

I actually took a course on Science Fiction once.  One of the points I remember is that Science Fiction isn't really about spaceships or aliens, but rather it's about getting us to think about how our present actions could affect the future.  Marshal Brain totally nailed that today.

DirtyC101

Humans!

Hm... okay, maybe not quite as exciting as bunnies. heh.  Here's the human 'monsters' I expect to use in Act 2.  Like before, these drawings aren't finalized yet, so if you have some feedback now would be the time.  I plan to go back & touch them up in a few weeks, once I've got all the opponents drawn.

Look at the waist level for the two characters.  The dude is several inches taller, but his hips are lower.  Unlike the bunnies, this time around I think I made the girl's thigh & calf too long, rather than making the dude's torso too long (although there's some of that too).  I also find it interesting that I naturally put some sheen on the girl's skin, but didn't think twice about it on the guy. 

Not really happy with the girl's breasts either.  They're smaller than the hero's, but something about them looks either too large or out of place.  Again, could be the torso being too short, I'll play with that & find out. 

I will not speak about the guy's hand, other than that took almost as much time as the rest of him combined.  Wouldn't be so bad if I felt like I was either making progress or learning something, but at the moment it's pretty much delete & start over, repeat until I get something passable.  Don't be shocked if he ends up with mitten hands in the next release.  ;P

On the up side, I feel like I really nailed both faces.  The dude has a fantastic blank stare that really says 'Duuuuu', and the girl's hair came out pretty damn well (personal opinion).  Despite the complaints above, I'm really pretty happy with how both of these turned out.  Here's hoping that trend continues.

Oh, & before I forget again, Thank you's to Mr. Jester for the link to posemaniacs.  Used it quite a bit when drawing the dude, and will almost certainly hit it again in the future.

DirtyC101

Bunnies!

This week I've been working on the Act 2 monsters.  I decided to start with the residents of HoppyKin Village.  I think the girl turned out pretty well, although I may tweak her hip/waist ratio a little.  Girl's seriously got too much junk in the trunk.

The dude however was a bit more of an experiment for me.  I wanted to try & make a tall, thin character.  In some spots I think I did well, but the relative sizes of each body part are off.  Like I think the calfs are too short, while the torso is too long, and the thighs came out really really thin.  His hands are also too small, but if I enlarge them, the back hand goes from 'off'' to 'WTF'. 

So, more work to do here, but honestly pretty happy with them so far.  I'll come back & touch them up in a few weeks, once the rest of the badguys are drawn.  If y'all have been just dying to give me some artist feedback, now's your chance. 

DirtyC101

MoreWithTheBugHunting

(Another long-ish post about code.  FYI).


In the beta, there's a bug where if you die & restart while being double teamed, both monsters will become invisible.  I believe I have that fixed.  I thought I was pretty clever & used the state variable (in my case, _root.held) to track how you die as well.  That variable used to only tell if you were held or not, but it has since grown to pretty much capture any state - moving, attacking, grappled, etc.  So having it also track death & death type wasn't really a stretch.  So now when you hit continue, the game knows if there were any grapplers & what to do with them.  But this change brought along new 'interesting' bug.  Being killed by a grapple caused the 'game over' screen to play twice. 

Now, this is not a game breaking bug, so I put it on the back burner as a 'huh, wierd' issue to be resolved later.  I was the mood to do some puzzle solving last weekend, so I picked this one up as a challenge. 

Those of you who are thinking that having one variable track so much is a mistake are on the right track.  Turns out that late in the 'death' code this variable was getting reset as part of a pose change, which was causing the whole thing to reload.  So I reckon the lesson here is watch what your variables are doing.  I'da never found it if I hadn't been tracking the held variable & just watched the hero get killed over & over.  Which made for an interesting night BTW.  ;P

The other bug I found this week was even more subtle, but it's been in the game for a while & man has it irked me.  If you managed to completely shift the grapple in your favor, the whole bar is supposed to shift to your color & the arrow game is supposed to end.  However, half the time the arrow game would continue after the bar changed color.  Now, this was a frustrating bug to track, because honestly I don't peg the grapple meter all that often.  So I'd see the bug, look for it for a few minutes, get distracted, and then not notice it again for a week.

The problem all stems from how I named these variables.  In this case I was looking for a variable called grapplebararrowcheck, which gets set to false if the the bar gets maxed.  The problem ended up being I mistyped the variable in some places as grapplebarrowcheck.  See the difference?  Yeah, I didn't either.  What if I type it as GrappleBarArrowCheck and GrappleBArrowCheck?  More obvious now? 

Up til now I had been purposely using all lowercase letters in my variable names, to avoid any problems with case.  Now that I've made this mistake though, I think I'm going to move to capitalizing the first letter in each word.  Flash already does something very similar with it's commands - it capitalizes every word past the first.  I'm told this is known as camel case.  Yet another smart idea I wish I'da picked up on sooner.  Ah well, now I'm all learned & ready for the next bug.

And believe me, there's going to be more bugs in the next release.  So far I'm only talking about the ones I've actually fixed.  There's a bizarre one at the moment where trying to save the bunnygirl will occasionally spit everyone out into the engine room & lock the game.  I still haven't puzzled out exactly what triggers it, so I'll have 'fun' hunting that one.  Maybe I'll draw some more first.  hahaha

DirtyC101

Getting crowded in here

As y'all know, I really can't draw.  With enough time, I can make something that is 'good enough' by simply redrawing it over & over, but nothing I do stands up to someone who's had some actual training  (and they probably knock it out in a fraction of the time too). 

So now I'm coming to the finishing touches for act 1, which is really just fleshing out the backgrounds.  There's a lot of empty rooms which aren't supposed to be empty, and I'm going through & fixing that.  The nice thing about this is that it's 'just' backgrounds.  So rather than my usual hundred passes to get something good enough, I'm going through & only redrawing each NPC a couple of times.  Basically whatever I can stand in a single sitting.  And y'know what?  It's really fun.  I had forgotten how much I enjoy drawing.  The additional time to make it good (if you call my art good) is such a joykill that I found myself really dreading going through & adding in these guys.  Now I'm playing with poses I would have never even attempted before.  Does it look good?  Not so much.  Hell, some of the perspectives & angles are downright wrong.  But it looks better than the empty room, and I think it really helps set the mood a bit.  For example, here's a before/after full view of the Rec Area:

So yeah, I'm all tickled with myself right now for having the drawing ability of a middle schooler.  What can I say, it's good to be the creator.  ;P  Anyway, I'm enjoying myself & making progress, which is two wins in my book.  Plus this practice will almost certainly help me later when it comes time to draw the next round of monsters.

DirtyC101

September Update

R said... How many acts are there gonna be? And are you going to release any more betas or wait till its finished completely?

This blog is popular enough folks are building accounts just to post?  And one letter names are still available?  Lols all around.  ;P

The game will have 3 acts.  The first act ya already know from the beta, it just needs the final boss & some misc background stuff (which is what I've been working on).  The second act is slightly smaller in length, just because there's less running around/puzzles.  You'll visit Hoppykin Village mainly to gear up, and once cleared you'll probably be bouncing back there occasionally for repairs & upgrades.  (Did I really call it that?  I need a better name.  Sadly 'Shire' is already taken.)  Then the 3rd act is the real meat of the game, and SHOULD be about the size of the other two acts combined.  It may shrink depending on my motivation, but the goal at the moment is a moderately sized area.

My goal is to have the game done before 2012.  I promise I'll post something playable by then.  Whether it's merely another beta or a full game will depend on how much spare time I have (I could really use some more 3 day weekends).

And to wrap this post up, here's the ending screen from Act 1.  This is how you unlock the cheat codes, so thought I'd show ya your goals.  This is an early screenshot from back when it was full of bugs, and I thought it was neat because I managed to get zero's on everything (which is impossible, as you have to defeat the slimeboss to make it appear). 
DirtyC101