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Thread: Pokémon Shadow Unbound (fan game)

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    Pokémon Shadow Unbound (fan game)

    So I had a nice post written up here . . . and then my computer froze for ten minutes, Chrome crashed on me and I lost it all.

    So for those of you who aren't away, not interested, not reading this thread or both, I'm working on a Pokémon fan game. Not a ROM hack, not one of those silly Pokémon RPG Maker . . . "things," this is an actual game with walking around and a first person camera and stuff.

    For things that were worked on up through May, maybe June, see here. For now I'm going to be making this own thread for this, since blogs haven't been fully implemented here yet.

    Basically:
    - Rewired the way all of the entities in the maps are linked together, so they hopefully fall apart less frequently and are easier to modify when I want to add stuff.
    - Walking around, gravity, mostly precise collision with objects, water you can swim in, etc.
    - NO GETTING STUCK IN WALL! (I think.)
    - Weather effects, a semi-realistic atmospheric haze when you go underwater, a decent amount of optimization (though, if you notice the frame rate here, I didn't really take the time to do that properly here).



    This isn't a map that I plan on actually using, this is just a map I threw together to try and show off as many working facets (and toilets) in the editor so far.

    All of the programs I used here were made by me, except for Game Maker itself, Windows, Python, and, uh, the Windows Command Line. Not sure if I'll ever put those up for download or not, things tended to go wrong when I did that in the past, we'll see.

    Also since a bunch of people who used to be involved in "Generation 7" a few years ago came back last night, it might be worth mentioning that I'm about 99% sure that nothing that was worked on in that group is still in use here :P

    Questions? Comments? Complaints? Flame wars? I'll deal with those later, I got to go to work in like twenty seconds D:




    Guess I might as well also store a little "downloads" section here. Pretty sure I enabled sharing on the Google Drive folders, if there's a problem let me know.

    Every folder should contain a Default, YYC and a gmz. For those of you not familiar with Game Maker, the Default uses the classic GM interpreter and should be more reliable although it shouldn't perform as well, the YYC version is compiled machine code and should be a bit faster although it may come with unexpected errors, and the gmz is the compressed source code/project files. (I don't actually know if the YYC version will run at all, since my computer actually has annoying graphics card issues and can't actually run it.)

    Version 7.0.2.17
    Version 7.0.2.16
    Last edited by Dragonite; 11-05-2016 at 01:25 AM.

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    Imma be honest. I was looking forward to seeing what you would do with a fan game ever since you said you were making one. I imagine the scripting is all very complicated, so on that note, you've done well with what you have. Looking forward to seeing it when it's finished. Imma play the hell out of it!

    This describes me so well it's saddening...


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    Lol, thanks :3 It's kind of funny, the farther this has gone the less the programming looks anything like a game. And then it's actually kind of funny when you step back and watch all of the nonsensical-looking snippets of code come together and form something that sort of resembles a game. It's been fun, but I'm not sure if telling people that will make them more interested in game design, or more afraid of it. ( @Kamex )

    Also amusingly enough, I've probably crossed the line where writing this from the ground up in C++ would probably be less arduous than writing it from the ground up in Game Maker, but since I've already generated so many facepalms with that I might as well keep going, right?

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    Doing Lots of Nothing

    I'm writing this at 2 AM local time, btw, so if you can't read this it's my problem, not yorus, but we'll pretend it isn't. Anyway, so far most of September has been a lovely marathon of 40 hour video game work weeks on top of a normal job and probably a few other irl things I forgot to do. The interesting bits:

    - Restarted making the game . . . again. Before you skewer me for being an incompetent programmer I didn't really restart, I just remade the engine so that the physics didn't suck, then remade the scripting stuff so scripting didn't suck, and . . yeah, and then copied and pasted and de-bad-ified a bunch of code I'd already written from the old one. Okay, now you can skewer me for being an incompetent programmer.

    -But yeah, there was that little program I was using to play with physics, and then decided that rebuilding everything on top of that would be less effort than un-breaking the other one. Worth noting that I've done in, uh, two weeks this time around what took about seven months last time. Which is actually kind of surprising when you consider I spent all of one day fixing a bug caused by me not scoping a variable properly.

    - Actually spent time and drew a bunch of arrows and illegible notes that probably described how stuff was supposed to work this time. So I guess now I'm at like Step #-25 on the road to making games, up from like Step #-26. End result is that most things can be changed by adding or removing one line of code (you don't even have to edit 60,000 different scripts to add 1 menu item!) which means you don't get as many crashes (the game just yells at you for doing something stupid and then pretends nothing happened in the first place) and it's not horrendously slow because most operations are O(constant) or O(small linear) instead of like O(n!!!!). The cutscene script stuff is semi-programming language-esque and not a bunch of statements that you throw at the wall. Probably would have known to do this like four years ago if I remembered to pay attention in any one of the many classes I took on this "computer" thing.

    - I just learned my shirt has been on inside-out for like, a long time. Uh.

    - Different languages. Of course I'm not actually going to translate anything but you can flip a switch and enjoy the five or six things I bothered to write in Dragon if you don't feel like doing more interesting things.

    - Game doesn't lag when you have lots of control input because, uh, ?????

    - Progress stuff: (i have no idea how version numbers are actually supposed to work)
    Spoiler!


    Actually started thinking about fully converting this to C++ some day. Not any day soon, mind you, but a lot of the annoying hacks I've had to come up with to get around Game Maker's limitations could be solved pretty quickly in C++/other languages.

    Spoiler!


    tl;dr I've been busy.

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    quick little update before I run off to real-life things today: I made a terrain editor! So I can rely less on those weird, blocky, awkward rectangular prisms for the ground that the player walks around on. Still got a bit of work to do when it comes to letting the player walk around on it, but progress!

    screenshot:



    the debug overlay on the top isn't really important if you're not working on the code.

    I guess since it's coming up on a year and I still don't have another real pokémon game demo, here's the executable(s) and the .gmz project file you can mess around with if you want (pretty straightforward, use the funciton keys and the mouse wheel to change settings): http://www.mediafire.com/download/41...rainEditor.zip

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    Right, so I probably owe this thread an update after like three months:

    The short version:

    I restarted everything, again. PUT THOSE PITCHFORKS DOWN.

    The long(er) version:

    Took a lot of notes on why my code was literally fighting with itself the first five times, so I know what I can copypaste over, what I should set on fire and forget about and what bits of advice I want to give myself and then adamantly ignore.

    The long version:

    1. No, I'm not dead (and neither is PSU).

    2. Finally did what I should have done in like 2013 and migrated to Game Maker: Studio. The (potential) benefits being:
    - Less ancient game making software, meaning it can do a lot more things than 8.1 could, meaning there are way fewer things I need to implement via ugly my-teacher-would-have-slapped-me hacks.
    - I MIGHT be able to port the game to not-Windows operating systems . . . IF I can convert all of the DLLs involved to Shared Objects without a visit to an asylum . . . IF GMS even decides to let me do that, which I have found no evidence that it actually does so far. (Maybe in GMS2, if it gets released within my lifetime.)(Also maybe an alien will visit my backyard tomorrow.)
    - YoYo Compiler is a thing, which basically means the whole thing can be compiled straight into C++ and should be many, many times faster than the games running on the ludicrously slow legacy GM interpreter. Rendering graphics might actually be the speed bottleneck instead of collision checking, like they are for . . . pretty much every other game in existence. 60fps MIGHT be a thing, but don't count on it. I'd try for 1920x1080 but my monitor isn't that big so testing something like that wouldn't work too well.
    - People can STOP BUGGING ME ABOUT UPGRADING MYSELF TO STUDIO, DEUS MEUS.
    - Has dedicated functionality for game HUD stuff, i. e. I can actually make HUD stuff without developing the urge to punch a hole through my monitor.
    - THEY FINALLY IMPLEMENTED ENUMS.
    - Shaders are now supported (and I probably won't bother to use them).

    3. Found a C++ compiler that actually works (lol Devkit Pro, Code::Blocks even has a better name than you do) and converted some of the more general math to C++ and made a DLL out of it. (Which may actually make the whole thing execute more slowly, since YYC compiles Game Maker to C++ anyway.) Anyway, that also makes it easier to reuse the code for other stuff later on, but whatever.

    4. Rethought the way game data interacts with other game data, abstracting it as much as possible. This is actually most of what I've been doing for the last three months. For you not-computer-scientists out there, "abstracting" basically means the only difference between a Pokémon and a Repel is whether it's grouped with other Pokémon or other Repels. Which has, on more than one occasion, led to interesting situations such as this:

    Spoiler!


    Also, since that includes most aspects of the game, not just obvious things like base stats, I don't have to hard-code a lot of things like move ranges, which are just as important but rarely get any attention.

    5. The database/map editing stuff has been grafted onto the actual game stuff, and the way the two interact is . . . decently . . . not, uh, abhorrent. Which probably sounds a like a lot more effort than it's worth, until you remembered that my last attempt had about ten different programs for editing different things like moves and Pokémon, none of them worked the same way and trying to figure out which one was breaking the game on a daily basis was not my all-time favorite thing to be doing. Also, imma be honest, the first 3D map editor I made kind of got the job done but using it was about as fun as teaching preschoolers calculus.

    6. Consequently, I don't actually know if the terrain editor in the last post is actually going to see much use. Oops?

    7. Took the opportunity to change the 3D collision DLL I was using. P3DC was nice, but this unnamed thing has better structure and is (supposedly) a lot faster.

    8. Wrote out regex that should match (most) swear words without flagging false positives like Cof*grigus. Probably not actually going to use it, though, because people like @X!! will probably shoot cannonballs through it before I even finish writing this post which makes that easily the biggest waste of a day I have had since forever.

    9. A couple miscellaneous, largely unimportant systems like day/night and achievements. The latter took all of about twenty minutes to set up. It's amazing how overcomplicated I decided to make it the first time. Actually, that describes . . . pretty much everything.

    10. Temporary checks to make sure I'm not duplicating code, spaghettifying code, using twice as many words as I need to for splitting strings (yes, that actually happened), etc. Already solved an unbelievable number of problems before they actually had the opportunity to become problems. Related, the another nice thing about YYC is that it forces you to declare your variables before using them (though it doesn't seem to care if you actually do that in the right place or not . . .), meaning I'll actually know if I misspell the word "inventroy" or something. Usually.

    11. Probably going to burn the old cutscene scripting thing I had and replace it with an actual object-oriented, more flexible, less headache-y system. On paper that made scripting cutscenes look more like programming computers and less like herding cats, will talk more about that after spending more time with it. That's probably what the majority of the next three months will be spent on.

    12. Wrote a story that I actually don't hate (on like the fiftieth attempt). It turns out that removing the "save the world" bit instantly makes everything much less lame. Still using N and Cynthia, though, because I can.

    13. Remembering to use //comments now, so when I decide to waste three days playing clicker games I can remember what I was doing when I get back. I wish I could tell you I made that up.

    14. Which Pokémon conventions get preserved and which Pokémon conventions get chucked is up for discussion. So far I'm probably going to keep the traditional 8 Gym format, but HMs are almost certainly going to be abolished, though Surf and Fly are going to be re-purposed so they actually do what it sounds like they do.

    15. This is what the actual game part of the game currently looks like:

    Spoiler!


    Actually plan on keeping it looking like that until most of the underlying systems are working. Which is the technical way of saying it'll probably be a while before I have more stuff that people will actually be interested in. My minimum goal is going to be the better-looking parts of the screenshots I had a while ago, but that's probably a while off.

    An interesting fact: The date created timestamp on the project file is November 14, 2015, so I've been working on this for a little less than two months and it's about as functional, easier to work with, prettier and (so far) harder to break than the 2D version I originally posted about back in 2013, which was the culmination of nearly two years of work. Really hope that pace keeps up, I might actually finish before landing in a nursing home.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Grandma View Post
    Remembering to use //comments now, so when I decide to waste three days playing clicker games I can remember what I was doing when I get back.
    I never bother using comments on my stuff. I'm too lazy to type more stuff and I also feel like my codes should be ORGANIZED and I wouldn't know where to put the comments without them looking messy or out of my view.

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    Okay, more or less scrapping the terrain editor I posted about earlier, I'm just going to leave this here right now. Hopefully I'll finally be able to write more about this soon-ish (and I know I've been saying that for about three years now) :P

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    So I wanted to have this done like two weeks ago, I guess you can blame Reddit for the fact of that not happening or something. Anyway, here's a video of NPCs and stuff:



    No sound, except for the message tone that totally wasn't recorded straight off a HeartGold game.

    There's also a download link in the description over there, if you want to mess around with it yourself. I recommend reading the file that says "important things" on it.

    If not, basically, NPCs are now a thing. Again.

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    Another small-ish update. Download in video description.

    Did a few more things with the menus, and also added (a) door that can open and close properly. And a moon, that looks acceptable now but runs in pseudo-real-time so it may or may not break into pieces a couple phases from now.

    Right click/hit B/whatever the equivalent on other controllers is to throw a ball around to test how it collides with things.


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