I literally have no idea. The random function is seeded exactly like it is supposed to but still no fish.
i ran out of time to find out what was wrong.
Oddly, you can upload new versions even after the deadline has passed ??!?!?
But what happens now on hardware is the question. Anyways, what a great trip this jam entry has been. This community is really working towards the same goal! I have never seen or witnessed something like this before where people are contributing to the same project remotely, but with such co-productive manner that even real teams in one room do not always accomplish!
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Hey all! If you get a chance tell your friends about this CGAJam entry you’ve been working on and ask them to give their rating and comments.
Creating itch.io account takes no time, and then everyone who wants can leave their rating and comments. Maybe @jonne could add one more field to More Information tab (rating with stars / comments) where the overall rating can be viewed at the project page.
I have been reading this post from the beginning, and i can only say : Wow…
Great work!
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Played this Column&Coffin
Awesome game!!
Waiting to play the same on actual device
Thanks Community for great game !!!
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I have started working on the design doc for the game. Let me know what you think of the ideas in it so far.(it’s mostly about the setting right now)
If you want to edit it, let me know, and I will add your email with editing privileges.
Now, let’s talk about color!
@jonne - how big a palette can we have for the game in the hi-res mode for:
- Each sprite being 1bit of any color from the palette
- Sprites being 2bit (4 colors including black)
I would personally love 64+ colors. But I can make something good with something like 32… maybe even 16.
@adekto/@jonne - how much of an issue would it be to have 2bit (4 color) sprites if we consider that every sprite would use black and up to 3 different colors (as we would need to assign colors 1-3 for each sprite to a different color from palette, 0 always stays as 0)? Would it be time consuming to program or memory intensive to run when we have a screen filled with sprites?
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My improvements would be to animate the movement with at least with the mirror image when moving from left to right. This would add more “realism”. This same simple animation should be applied also to the enemies. For fights some simple movement of the sword / weapons would make it feel more like a duel, at least when fighting an opponent facing horizontally. For vertical movement the characters could be left without additional animation.
These are very simple additions, but would in my mind make a nice improvement.
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Yeah, we are planning on mirroring the sprites (hopefully this can be done in code), and possibly adding a small “hop” or some other one frame animation for movement.
And yes, I want to add something for the combat animation. I am not sure if the system allows us to move a tile by less than a tile (because moving it 2-4px for few frames towards what you attack would be awesome!) That would be for the attacker. For the attacked character probably something similar to what Dungeons of Dex does: if hit, sprite changes to a “hit” icon for few frames, or if dodged, it changes to a “dodge” icon. You can see it below in action:
This would mean, we would take control away from the player for however long it takes to play through all the animations ( it wouldn’t be too long as maximum of 4 monsters will be able to attack the player at once, because we will stick to 4 direction movement), but that doesn’t seem to be too hard to program or too annoying to play with.
I will do some more research on how roguelikes deal with that, see if there is a better solution.
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Your questions about how many colors & other things require a bit of thinking and I will get back to you on it.
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Just a short thought I wanted to share with you all.
Columns and Coffins is placed at the first entries shown at startpage of the CGAJam. Could we have asked for better visibility in terms of placement? If this was due to our last minute upload, then let’s enjoy the time well spent on the last minute tweaks! 
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Didn’t help my issue 
was your code somewhere to test?
Hate to bust your bubble but I’m pretty sure they’re diplayed randomly.
I have updated the design doc, we now have a core gameplay loop explained and most categories blocked in.
Outside of my previous question about color, I have another one:
Would it be helpful to make a spreadsheet that will include all sprites with their name/ID and attributes that will be used in game?
It shouldn’t take me more than few hours, and could save us a lot of headaches in the future when we add new sprites.
Would something be more useful than a spreadsheet?
Ok, so the basic calculation goes like this:
Tiles is 16 wide, 12 high.
Means
- 192 bytes in 256 colors (1 byte per pixel)
- 48 bytes in 4 color mode
- 24 bytes in 2 color mode (basically 1 color + black)
For 256 tiles
49152 bytes in 256 color mode
12288 bytes for 4 color mode
6144 bytes for 2 color mode
In my experience, all Pokitto programs have been < 100 kB so far. So you can easily use at least 64 kB for tilesets.
So its kind of your call. If you think multicolored sprites are more interesting, and especially if you can keep it to 4 freely selectable colors per sprite, we have space for several full tilesets in the
game
Edit: and, if you want, you can have 256 different colored 2 color sprites, with 1 selectable bg color and 1 fg color per tile.
Edit2: and this is important (@adekto, @trelemar, @wuuff) if we do this (example 256 different monochromatic tiles) the display system has to be a custom tile mode. The normal hi-res mode (220x176 @ 4 colors) can not be used. This means also the UI has to be either made with tiles, or by using the DirectPixel and DirectBitmap methods that draw directly on the LCD without using the screenbuffer. There is no screenbuffer in a tiled mode.
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I’m not sure if we need that much color among all the sprites. We can get a consistent retro aesthetic that still looks great with a lot less complexity if we use less colors. Plus, if we have to put everything as a tile, I assume that means issues with attack animations by sliding a tile, as suggested here:
That is not really efficient to do with tiles, right? Just some thoughts on that.
Also, @VonBednar , the design document seems to be coming along well. I was thinking about the premise. Some roguelikes seem to have an actual ending, even if it is quite difficult to reach. What if we had it so that the final objective is to serve Lord Mort with a court summons for tax evasion, but he’s deep at the bottom of his dungeons, on the 100th floor? Maybe in this world, court summons must be given in person, so he’s hiding in his fortress hoping no tax collector is strong enough to reach him. Every year, his monsters remodel his dungeon, which is why it changes every year. If we want themed dungeons, he could just have different phases where his tastes change (“this year, goblins are in”). I feel like this fits the comedy style we’re going for as well.
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I also think we need undead vixens. Otherwise its a no-go. A dungeon with only dudes sounds a very sad dungeon indeed.
Edit: on a more serious note: the current graphics look really nice on the pokitto screen, because they are so tiny and crisp. If we go all “technicolor dreamcoat” with rainbow colors, it does not necessarily improve the aesthetic of the game. I would even go as far to say that I would keep the number of colors very limited but perhaps play with shades of same colors to make the gfx even better
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A question on derect mode and 16x12
Soo we are only using 12x12 and i know bit wise theres no other way but
We can use the last nibles of every even byte to store color info of the 1 color sprites
Actually gives us 6 bytes for potential colour info
Its a wierd compressed format but might be usefull sine you can have a 2 color sprites with full rgb
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Wait. Are we talking about 16 tiles wide on tiles high? Because the sprites themselves are 14x14 px which gives us 15x12 tiles (resolution of 210x168). Am I missing something?
Sorry my mistake, you are right
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