Weekly progress post #52: Ground pound Tags: Games, ESA 2, Regular updates, Streaming Weekly progress post #51: Minigames Tags: Games, ESA 2, Regular updates, Streaming, Small games Adventure cards! Weekly progress post #50: Well, this is a bit unfortunate Tags: Games, ESA 2, Regular updates, Streaming So yeah Tags: Other Weekly progress post #49: I keep forgetting to disable the welcome message Tags: Games, ESA 2, Streaming, Regular updates Image Generation Algorithm Tags: Other, Procedural generation, Small games Procedural generation is dear to me. Tags: Other, Procedural generation More image generation, yay Tags: Games, Other, Plans, Procedural generation Weekly progress post #48: Tutorial Tags: Games, ESA 2, Other, Regular updates, Small games, Streaming Pages
Posted on 2017-02-18 02:20
Today’s stream was pretty productive, yay! I added a new enemy, two new rooms (both are WIP, though), a story-related system, some minigame stuff and a new functionality to a powerup. That last one turned out to be especially neat; the powerup in question had felt somewhat limited before. All in all I feel that ESA 2 will have a much better powerup lineup than ESA 1. :)
There’ll be an extra stream tomorrow, so I think I’ll get a screenshot saturday gif from there!!!
Posted on 2017-02-08 01:11
Today I started work on redoing a thing that I’ve been very unhappy about in ESA 2 for a longer time; there’s a sort of a minigame related to the teleport system that I implemented really clunkily back when I initially started working on the game, to the point where I kind of dreaded working with it later on (especially since I’ve forgotten how it works, exactly). The new implementation is way better and I’m surprisingly close to the stage where I stopped working on the system previously! This implementation will also support other minigame-type things better, although I wont talk more about those now because I kinda want to keep them under the wraps. A new room was also finished, along with some work on that fantasy RPG battle cinematics thing seen above. All in all, a very fun stream! :)
Posted on 2017-02-02 01:48
A friend requested me to draw some cards for their tabletop game, and here we are. It was a lot of fun to make these, especially since I wanted to try to make those “proper” border patterns etc. Also got to extensively try out these new inks my girlfriend bought me (thanks <3)!! The result is very homemade-looking but I'm very happy with these in any case. The font used is Avara.
Deviantart link to the cards
Posted on 2017-02-01 23:23
Hahah, I didn’t realize that the 50th progress post would be now! Oh well. Today’s stream was shorter than usual due to other things, but I feel that I managed to work on ESA 2 fairly nicely – A new enemy and a new room were added! I wasn’t intending to add a gif this week, but I guess I ought to celebrate this milestone somehow so there we go. I’ll try to have an extra stream later this week.
Posted on 2017-01-29 15:37
Lots of awful things going on right now in the world; kinda afraid but maybe writing a couple things matters, if only on a personal “here’s how I feel” way. A lot of these ideas originate from my girlfriend, who’s a very very smart and insightful person.
– Nazism and fascism are really terrible & inhumane worldviews and shouldn’t be supported; instead there ought to be active work to really drive home why they’re awful ideologies. Some people will probably never learn, but a majority showing that they don’t want said ideologies to their lives is the most important thing for ensuring that things can get better.
– People should be treated as equal, no matter what their ethnicity, religion etc. is. All consciousnesses are important and should be allowed to lead meaningful lives with as little suffering as possible. Ensuring this for as many as possible is the end goal of all legislation. “For the greater good” isn’t a good argument nearly 100% of the time because being able to argue for it would require complete factual knowledge of the situation and how the different outcomes would increase/decrease suffering (which almost never happens).
– A mindset that aims to increase the happiness of a group of people via making others suffer is wrong. Increasing the suffering of a consciousness is disproportionally worse than increasing the happiness/pleasure of another. We cannot estimate if one person’s suffering is equal (or of equal “worth”, although saying it like that sounds wrong) to another’s and thus we cannot argue for actions that are based on the assumption that they are equal.
– Increasing a person’s understanding of the world is the best way to ensure that they can make meaningful choices in their life which do good things that lessen suffering in the world. A worldview that isn’t based on factual knowledge, and especially one that actively opposes factual knowledge, will lead into choices that hurt others but also the person making said choices, even if they initially do not feel that way.
So yeah, I feel that things in the world have mostly progressed positively towards a world where more people out of the Earth’s total population can lead meaningful lifes, and really hope that people who short-sightedly seek the advantage of their small in-group at the expense of others don’t manage to undermine this progress, be it Trump, neo-nazis, populists or anyone else.
Posted on 2017-01-26 02:02
In today’s stream I added a new room and a new enemy while tweaking a couple existing levels, fixing some bugs and in general making the new area feel like its own thing. Surprisingly the moving platform bug I started the stream with ended up being fairly trivial to fix! More lurk ahead, though…
Posted on 2017-01-22 18:07
Well then!!
I decided to release the image generation algorithm I’ve been working on. I feel that I went kinda overboard with the legal license stuff but it seems that those are the norm, so hopefully everything is okay there. Please tell me if not! The zip contains an executable, the source file, lua files for the algorithm and a variant with wrapping enabled as well as a readme file.
Again, this algorithm is heavily based on the WaveFunctionCollapse algorithm by mxgmn.
To open the source file, you’ll need two MMF2 extensions:
– Surface by Looki
– Xlua by Justin Aquadro
GET THE ALGORITHM HERE
Posted on 2017-01-20 23:54
After that previous post I decided to finally add a ‘Procedural generation’ tag for my blog, and went through all the posts to tag them if applicable (with games like Excavatorrr I mostly tagged posts with pics!)
It made me very happy to realize that my blog has essentially begun with a procgen project (Excavatorrr) and continued to feature said thing frequently through the years. If I look at the stuff I’ve made, a nice amount of my games incorporate procedural generation in some form (Masjin, CWOUN, Excavatorrr, Paradise Fort, World Generator off the top of my head), and this recent interest in things like the WFC algorithm and Markov chains provide evidence that my interest in procgen hasn’t really waned. Quite the opposite, I guess!
So yeah. Thanks, procedural generation. U the best.
[Addendum from 2024: in hindsight it feels really bizarre why I chose to make procedural generation a 'thing' or a part of my identity in this way; I even updated my Twitter profile to say 'also lots of procedural generation' around this time, I think! I do like procgen a lot and have used it in a lot of projects, but in some way it just feels odd that I needed to make this kind of a statement at this time. Hmm.]
Posted on 2017-01-20 23:28
So! I spent some more time working on my image generator algorithm based on/inspired by the Wave Function Collapse algorithm.
Here’s what I ended up with the last version of my first generator:
At that point it was really really slow even with very small input pics (you’ll notice that the output image is smaller to help; the gifs don’t represent the actual generation speeds!)
I decided to re-do the whole thing, this time trying to implement as much as possible in lua. In the end I got it working much, much faster:
I implemented some more things after taking that gif, but sadly didn’t make any new compilation gifs. I think this next one is done with a later version (tried to make an input that’d generate roguelike-like areas). Fairly sure I kept improving the algorithm after that, too!
Finally, I made some simple roguelike-like map generation using the final iteration of the algorithm! First with a more basic “tunnels, walls (and water for some reason)” pattern:
…And then with a more complicated pattern:
All in all I’m really happy with how this thing turned out, even though it’s not really a match for the WFC algorithm. I think this could be useful when generating levels, although I think it’d have to be comboed with multiple input images to really work. Maybe first an input image that defines various ‘areas’, then separate inputs for all those area types? I’d like to release the source of this but I think I’ll have to ask ExUtumno who made the WFC algorithm first, since my algorithm is very heavily inspired by it.
Posted on 2017-01-20 01:03
Today’s stream was fairly low; a new enemy was added as well as a new room (although said room contains some special features!) I spent a bunch of time on a tutorial for dynamic tiling I had promised previously; at first I intended to make a video tutorial but that didn’t turn out so great so I went with a more basic tutorial instead. The file is for Multimedia Fusion 2, but should work in Clickteam Fusion 2.5 as well.
GET THE TUTORIAL HERE!
I’m pretty happy with the fact that I’m currently working on the penultimate ‘normal’ area of ESA 2; after this and the next one, things are either optional, smaller parts of existing areas or otherwise nonstandard. Gives me hope that this one’ll be actually finished eventually!!!
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