Day 137 Finishing off Let's Get Fiscal

So what’s been going on. Well I have been making difficult decisions. Yesterday I woke up pretty early. 9.00 AM, and did some work on Rock Bottom. Then I watched a documentary about Pablo Escobar . It was pretty interesting.

Then I went to the gym. I hadn’t been to the gym for fifteen days. This is because of my horrible leg injury . So I started off doing some weights then I went to the dreaded elliptical machine. Actually it wasn’t very difficult, I ran for about twenty minutes and my leg was fine.

Then I chose an artist to draw the backgrounds for Rock Bottom. His name is Rafal and this is his gallery. In Rock Bottom you start off in prison, then end up on the streets, then you steal a job from someone using a cutting edge technique. Finally Adickle Face turns you into a fish. Then something surprising happens. Next it was time to do some finishing touches on Let's Get Fiscal. 

There are four things I must do before I can put Let's Get Fiscal into peer review.

1. Replace all sound effects that have copyright attached to them. I stole a bunch of sound effects from Streets of Rage 2 because it was damn easy. Luckily there are only five sound effects that need to replaced and Jonathan Tree was nice enough to agree to make replacements for me.

2. I need four more comic strips. These comic strips are played as cut scenes by Let's Get Fiscal. A cool guy called Rudy is making them for me. Unfortunately Rudy is massively busy. He has a full time job and has been making the comic strips for me after work. As a result it takes him on average one month to make one strip. So I am going to hire someone else to draw the remaining four comic strips. Which is completely fucked up, but I don't want to wait four months. Fuck.

Cutscene comic that plays before Stelven battles Fred.

3. Cut scene audio. Rudy is drawing the comics, and Josh Koen is composing the audio to go along with the cut scenes. He'll be done really soon and I can't wait because at the moment I have place holder audio and it fucking sucks. Combining the comic strips, professionally produced audio and my crumby comic viewing code all together makes for some awesome cut scenes.

4. I am waiting for eleven more animation frames for Fred's spritesheet from Clest Elnith.

Once all that arrives, I'll combine it all into the Visual Studio 2010 project. Play around with it to make sure it works and then enter peer review. That Daft Punk song Josh made is really excellent, I have been listening to it on repeat while writing this blog.

Day 135 Bikini Shopping

Damn I want an HP TouchPad. So I wandered over to eBay and searched up HP TouchPad, only to find a list of bullshit by assholes who are trying to trick people into buying HP TouchPad boxes, leather cases and other accessories that no one wants to buy. Fuck I hate eBay, it is so difficult to buy things on eBay. Those complacent bastards at eBay do no give a shit about their horrible user interface and product listings filled with shit. "Who cares man, we're still #1. Fuck the customers". Fuck you eBay, especially since your right.

In case you don't know, the HP TouchPad was released a few months ago. No one bought it. So HP decided to stop making it along with phones and laptops and desktop computers. Then a they decided to sell the remaining TouchPads for $100 instead of $500. Which resulted in a huge pile of humans purchasing the discontinued product.

Why do I want one? Do I want to be one of those jerks who walks around with google maps open trying to figure out where I am. Do I want to be some doofus who plays games on the train on the way to work? No. I want one because I want to port Let's Get Fiscal and Rock Bottom (when that is done) to it. Why? Because no one is developing for it anymore and an assload of people have recently bought them.

This plan may turn out to be complete failure. Whatever, onto bikinis.

Last night I stayed up really late working on Rock Bottom. I was just typing up notes and dialogue I scribbled all over various pieces of paper. I also did some small stuff. In actual fact I was watching various debates between the people behind Loose Change and 'debunkers'. Loose Change must make a lot of money and I have a feeling the creators don't really believe what they said in the film anymore. It seems like they are just defending it to sustain their cash cow. I stayed up to 5.00 AM.

Today I was woken up at 12.30 by Jacqui. She wanted to go to the beach. So I took a shower, and went to the beach. We sat around for about half an hour. It was a little bit cold. Then we ate lunch and went to look at bikinis. Which for me meant sitting around waiting. Wilson called me and we talked about his stock market stuff. Then Jacqui asked me to get her a different sized version of a bikini top she liked. GROAN. She gave me the bikini for reference and I began my journey searching through the woman's swimwear department for the sisters/brothers of the reference bikini I had in my hand.

Then Jacqui's phone rings, it was her friend. I like to pretend to be Jacqui when I answer her phone so I put on a very high pitched girly voice and answered. Then I realised how exceedingly gay I must have looked.

Fiscal Update

Hi there people who are reading this sentence. If you are not a person, and you are reading this sentence, then well done. I am surprised you have figured out how to read. Also I am confused as to why you would want to read this. Surely you'd have more important things to read. Unless you also have the power to read everything in the world in a very short period of time. In that case I understand.

I have made lots of changes to the last version of Let's Get Fiscal and you can download those changes here:
Download here

What is this guy so angry about?

Features Added
- Made brawl and circle attack combo moves.
- Wrote AI for Nicole's leaping attack
- Wrote AI for Silvio's leaping kick.
- Treeboi and Kone run off the screen in the start of Act 1 and say "Let's get out of here!"
- Wrote AI for Coral's sliding attack.
- When Butabi gets up from the ground he starts to charge.
- After clearing Act three the score screen slides into view and cool sound plays.
- You do not receive damage when doing brawl and circle attacks now.
- When fighting an enemy with more HP than you. His excess HP will be represented by a blue bar.
- HUD font has been changed to QuartzMS. It still isn't very visible on my SDTV though.
- When a cut scene uses place holder, text will appear on screen informing players.

Bugs Fixed
- Reduced the camera's X limitation for the TBK office- Added in the Baller Industries Food Outlet backgrounds and foregrounds
- Cut up the audio for cut scene one. This means you can skip ahead and still hear the audio.
- You can now brawl Butabi when you grab him.
- Butabi can now be attacked while he is charging.

Todo List
- Trial should end mid way through cutscene 3
- Explain combo-moves before the game starts.
- Add continues when the player has lost all his lives.
- Give the player unlimited continues.
- Link the game all the way to Level 2 Act 1.
- Find out why Kiki sometimes stops whirling.
- Make Butabi charge away soon after he receives a hit.
- Before going to the menu play a four frame cut scene explaining Stelven's sordid past.
- Add a crazy item that makes all the bad guys slow down and creates a cool effect.
- Play cutscene 3 after Stage 1 Cleared.
- Guys being thrown should do damage to people they collide with.
- Code in the Treeboi and Kone boss fight. (Code it well).
- Press 'P' and everything freezes, ie Update() no longer fires. Press SPACE to make Update happen once. Use this to debug weird animation glitches and check that the sprite sheets are NICELY alligned.
- Write a procedure called ChangeLevel() to do something strange.
- Make a DemoOver state for jerks who do not purchase the game.
- Get someone to draw collisions.
- Stop Stelven from walking during a fade out.
- The music in ACT3 does not repeat.
- Add in HP up items.
- Make bad guys do less damage.

The Unbearable Life of a Computer Programmer

Hello there Baller Industries enthusiasts. So lately I have been working on a game I have not talked about EVER on this blog. Why haven't I talked about it? I don't know.

The game is about an accountant, who is sent to meet with one his clients. On his journey to their offices something surprising happens and he becomes a little bit crazy. Instead of doing his normal accounting stuff he decides to fight everyone in his client's offices. How awful! I am going to name it Let's Get Fiscal.

LGF is going to be a side scrolling fighting game. Which means it requires a lot more programming than Get Rich or Die Gaming or Virtual Kelvin. What a bummer. This increase in programming leads to an increase in unbearable moments of horror. Let me describe one to you.

Meet Benny, he's a bad guy who appears on the first level of the game. The Treeboi and Kone club level. Benny has two attacks, a karate chop attack and a throw.

If you get within a certain distance of Benny he will attack you with his Karate chop, a skill he no doubt learned in Karate class. If you try to grab Benny, by sneaking up behind him. He will instead throw you to the ground. Perhaps to your death. So how do you defeat Benny you might ask? I don't know, figure it out yourself you jerk. I'm trying to tell you about the difficulty I had when programming today.

So the Karate chop works out alright, it was the throw I was having trouble with. If you get too close to Benny he will grab you. Sounds simple. Well it is not.

First I need to define a grab point for both characters. For Benny I need to define the X and Y position of where he will grab onto the Accountant. For the Accountant I need to define the point where he will be grabbed by Benny or some other guy who is grabbing him. To do that I open the sprite sheet up in Flash, draw a little mark where I think a grab point should go, and write down it's X and Y coordinate and then place that into my data files. Those coordinates are for the sprite sheet.

When a grab happens, Benny needs to align his baseline (where his feet are) to the baseline of the accountant. He also needs to allign his grab point to the accountants grab point. So to do that I:

1. Convert the grab points to world co-ordinates.
2. Measure the horizontal distance between the world-coordinates. This will measure the horizontal distance between the two characters grab points.
3. Then I add the horizontal distance measured in Step 2 to Benny's X position.

What I wanted

Unfortunately it did not work. Benny and the accountant seemed to have switched places. So I got angry and cursed everything. Then I discovered it was because Benny's being grabbed frame was not aligned with the idle frame. This meant it appeared Benny was jumping forward when he was in the grab state. No good. So I fixed up the bounding box and hoped for the best.

The best did not arrive. Instead I was faced with a new problem. I couldn't figure it out. So I went through lots of code that I was sure was fine. Code to convert from sprite-sheet co-ordinates to game space co-ordinates. Then I realised, it was because I did not change the grab point after fixing the bounding box problem. I fixed the bounding box problem by shifting the sprite to the left. So the x co-ordinate of the grab point should have also been shifted to the left. But it was not. So I fixed that up and met great success.

However I have once again been faced with great unhappiness. When making the pictures for this blog post I saved the accountant sprite sheet in MSPaint. This caused me to lose the alpha layer and this was the result.

CURSE YOU MS PAINT!