Pokitto is on the way, what games should I make?

I am all for that one. If you need some help for the textures or any graphics I can always help.

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@drummyfish Amazed by what you do with this little thing!
RE: first person game engine, there are other ways you could go with first person games:

  1. Puzzle game
  2. Room escape - see above! Can the walls move to crush you for instance?
  3. Chase game - either being chased or chasing a mob for instance
  4. Maze game / Minotoaur type of thing.

Can the layouts be procedural? (apologies if I miss missed this if it is a thing posted above) to expand the scope of the play area?

It doesn’t have to be pew pew :+1::sunglasses:

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Double respect for what you’re doing with Pokitto right now :slight_smile:

Yes, unlike in Doom engine, the world can easily be manipulated in real time!

Which makes me wants you to really pursue your idea with demo 3.

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the three demos you have posted are all great, I like the sci fi one but that one with the black sky is really good looking, I eagerly await anything you make.

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Wizards firing spells at dragons with their hands. Problem solved.

Killing dragons and monsters as a wizard is typically classed as ‘cartoon violence’ so it’s still non-violent enough to be classed as ‘kid-friendly’.

The game that would eventually become Super 3D Noah’s Ark was originally conceived as a licensed game based on the movie Hellraiser

Well… that’s an unexpected twist. Biggest 180 in video game history?

(Disclaimer: do not look that film up unless you value your sanity and/or your lunch.)

This is sort of what I meant by:

Some problems are inherantly more interesting than others.
Many aspects of making a game are just a boring slog.
The fun part is almost always solving the difficult problems,
and once you’ve done that it starts to become more mundane and less interesting.

This is one of the reasons I stopped studying before I got a degree.

I have absolutely no doubt I could have gone on to get a degree, but I was having so much more fun studying material in my own time that everything we did in class seemed trivial and mundane by comparison.

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he’s a witch.

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Hmmm you’re definitely pretty close, it’s not ridiculous, but still casting spells with hands doesn’t have the right feel, and I suspect it’s because guns indicate the target very nicely by pointing at it, have recoil and very clear, sharp shooting sound. I think these are the reasons guns prevail so much in FPS games. An idea emerges of a “magic gun”, but that already seems forced again.

But maybe (cross)bows vs dragons and such? That’s doable I guess.

…worked for Heretic? :sparkles: :smile:

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Indeed, they kind of went for the “magic guns” and it seems to be working:

Not sure how kid friendly it is, but still better than guns I guess :smile: You guys have convinced me it can work to a good enough degree.

Hexen should probably be mentioned as well.

Indicate the target with a magic-symbol themed reticle.
It could be a rune, or perhaps a magic circle.

AlchemyCircleBlackCrop_1024x1024%402x

You can also use wands and staves instead of hands.

Magic tends to have a shooting sound as well,
just a different one to guns.
Just look at Skyrim, or the Harry Potter games.
(Especially the old GBA ones that didn’t have the sound quality for voice acting.)

You clearly haven’t been watching enough anime.
Magic guns firing blasts of energy are relatively common in anime and manga.

In fact, by searching ‘anime magic guns’, I found an image that precisely demonstrates both a magical gun and my magic circle reticle idea:

Sure, if you really want to go for something gun-like.

Bows with magic arrows are relatively common too.
Heck, ‘energy bow’ has its own TVTropes page (warning: TVTropes page, try not to get lost).

Quincy__Bleach_small_1259

The aiming cross isn’t a problem, what I meant is that with a gun you can see it physically aiming at the target and that for me makes it more satisfying somehow – maybe it’s the sense of control, can’t really tell exactly why, but with bare hands you have this feel that the spell can go in any direction. Imagine an FPS where you have the aiming cross but don’t see a weapon at all – that somehow feels less satisfying to shoot. But the crossbow solves it as it has a nice pointy arrow. Or a pointy staff or whatever.

I like the energy crossbow very much. You could even make it just stun the victim instead of killing it, or it could “evaporate” the enemy, which is not as bad as letting them die from shots I guess. Depends how far you’d like to go with the kid friendliness. It also reminded me of the lightning gun from Quake, but that one works a little different.

EDIT:

These TV tropes look like movie design patterns.

The spell would go where the palm is aiming, like it does in Skyrim.

That’s what monsters do in Minish Cap - they vanish in a puff of smoke.

And the same in Wind Waker.
In fact as far as I remember the monsters just vanish in pretty much all Zelda Games.

You haven’t encountered TVTropes before?
Then your life has not been truly ruined yet.

It’s essentially a collection of all the tropes that appear in any kind of story-based media:
games, anime, western animation and to a lesser extent live-action TV.

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Yeah, Skyrim’s exactly what came to my mind and I was like “man, that never felt right” :smiley: Or at least very different from precise shooting. May be just me though.

I have, but only briefly, will have to take a closer look.

It’s always felt fine to me.
You know it’s going to go towards the centre of the screen because that’s where the projectile goes in pretty much every game.
It’s a darn sight easier to contend with than games where the projectiles arc.

If you only took a brief look then you weren’t doing it right. :P
TVTropes is widely reputed to be one of the biggest black holes of the internet.
The joke is that once you go onto it you keep clicking links and reading articles until suddenly it’s dark out and you realise you’ve spent all day reading tropes.

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It used to be called “WWILF’ing” about twenty years ago, which stood for
What Was I Looking For? -> that feeling of going on the net / web / whatever, spending ages looking at web pages and realizing you’ve lost time and can’t remember what it was you originally went on for…:sunglasses::+1:
It’s happened so many times over the years :joy::scream:

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I’m trying to play around with porting this puzzle collection.

It’s designed with porting in mind (it’s been ported to many platforms, including JS, you can play the puzzle in the browser by clicking them, there is also a porting guide). So it would be enough to rewrite just the frontend, and we’d get some 40 (?) puzzle games on Pokitto. Not promising to finish, just testing the waters :smiley:

So far what should look like this:

looks like this:

image

EDIT:

Looking a bit better now, and also getting playable.

image

The framework even handles the animation and everything:

out

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I think I need an advice – I need to implement a clipping function. It should behave like this:

If clip(rect) is called, a clipping rectangle is established. All drawing calls will then only affect the pixels inside this rectangle. Then, when unclip() is called, the rectangle is destroyed and drawing affects everything again. (I am working with persistent display, the drawing API counts on it.)

How should I do this without having to reimplement all the drawing functions that Pokitto library offers?

Maybe I should draw into a separate off-screen buffer of the clipping rectangle size and then blit in on the screen? Can Pokitto lib draw into specified buffer, or only to the screen?

Going to sleep, will be back tomorrow :sleeping:


EDIT:

Having some palette issues, but it’s looking much better now:

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Some issues worth mentioning:

  • Controls: some games are best played with, or even require, some advanced controls, like numerical keys or mouse. How to address this? Have a little on screen keyboard and a toggleable cursor mode?
  • Filled polygons: how to draw filled non-convex polygons without much hassle? At the moment I use an approximate method – I compute the polygon center, then draw a triangle fan from it to all the boundary points. This can fail of course, but may turn out to be good enough.
  • Clipping: mentioned above, ATM solved by clipping at the primitive level (not pixel accurate). E.g. you can easily clip a rectangle against the clipping rectangle by just adjusting its position and dimensions. But e.g. text you can only clip in a limited way like this (drop characters, skip drawing altogether, …). Again, may be a good enough solution.
  • Saving: the framework supports saving/loading, but I don’t know if it’s really needed. I may leave it out. actually not, I’ve misunderstood some function names
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There is really huge number of puzzles in the collection!

Yes! And there is also an interface to easily add new ones.

EDIT:

Oooh this one looks nice:

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Let’s see what the others look like.

Well, more or less glitchy still:

EDIT:

I love porting now, you get nice results for low effort:

out

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