Comic Genesis Forums

Ghastly wrote:Would a female version of the game be called "Clam-jammer Lammy"?

It would if I wasn't afraid of lawyers.

Actually I was thinking the game should support multiple characters.

this game absolutley must be made.

and on another note, this is actually not my 2nd post, damn keenspace deleted my accound because of inactivity.

Just make sure you put healthy disclaimers in your game, like a splash screen or something. Satire as far as I know is still legal in this country.

It is, and if the artwork is original it's probably safe... I don't know.

OK, so here's what I've done so far...

• Loader
• Title screen
  • Gravity logic
• Credits
  • Logic for chaining movie clips together in an infinite vertical scroller
• Some music

Next: Character select screen. I'll see if I can post a preview URL later.

What do you need?

I don't know Flash... But I can suply artwork or any kind of graphic...

What exactly is needed?

Well as you know other OOL's then you souldn't find Actionscript too taxing, but you can ask me if you get stuck.

I'm making a pre-alpha available. It's about 380K. There is no gameplay yet - I wanted to do some other stuff first so I could get up to speed on ActionScript. The server only has a 13K/sec link to the Net so it'll probably take a minute to load.

http://kadath.org/ProjX.php

ThaPig: Thanks for the offer! Idunno yet, I'm still thinking about how I want to do the various stages.

Al: Thanks! It was a little wierd at first, but Flash 6 MX is so great that working with ActionScript is total cake. I might ask you for some help though.

I know Ghastly said he might be able to help out with music. I'm pretty good at electronic type stuff but for the action stages I'm thinking porno music would be great. The pre-release versions will have aggresively downsampled music (32kbps) for file size considerations, but for the final version I hope to aim for 96kbps quality or thereabouts.

I'd also like to insert contributed drawings (fanservice, tentacle love, or whatever) at random places in the credits scroller. They can be up to 300 pixels wide (narrower = better) and should occupy 30K or less (hint: cell shading is very space-efficient, blurring isn't). I can take PNGs, GIFs, JPEGs, or vector format (Illustrator, Freehand, PostScript, etc). Naturally, full credit will be given. Post here or draw something on Cave Deli's oekaki and make a note that it's for Project X.

I finished the wireframes for the character select, options, and first stage scenes. Right now I am working on an algorithm to simulate fapping. <:) I am periodically updating the in-progress preview at http://kadath.org/ProjX.php .

Very cool start man. 8)

As for suggestions:

Credit scroll speed should be doubled

Bouncy title screen would be more interesting if done in combination w/ load screen.

Music in mono would halve its bitrate. Unless you're using mono allready.

Map out what sounds/music/SFX you're going to put in there. This is a very music-oriented mini-game so it should be an area of focus.

Map out what the character animations should be. Stroke Left, Right, Blinking, Fap, etc.

Work out the beat patterns for the songs, get them to synchronize with the music.

Is there a tool to find signal levels from a song to trigger various animations?


Anyways I'm just spitting out ideas here. Ounces of planning saves pounds of work. Next priority it would seem to me, would be to work out the user interface module, make it so it can compare the scrolling commands with keypresses.

I just finished the first draft of the fapping algorithm!

I sat down and figured out that fapping has five primary variables: Strokes coefficient, Interest, Effectiveness, Stamina, and Power Level.

Strokes coefficient: Calculated by dividing the number of strokes/sec by the target strokes/sec (which is determined by Power Level, below). If strokes/sec = target strokes/sec, the system should remain stable. The coefficient drops if there aren't enough and rises if there are more than enough.

Effectiveness: The coefficient causes slow rises or drops in Effectiveness. Effectiveness measures how you are doing in the short term.

Interest: Interest measures how you are doing over a longer time span than Effectiveness, and is affected by that and other variables. The Effectiveness causes slow rises or drops in Interest. Interest is also affected by Stamina - for example, if you're hungry or tired, your stamina is lower, and Interest will be harder to keep up. Random events can also effect Interest - the phone rings (decrease), you see a scene you really like on the TV (increase), etc.

Power Level: This is how close you are to completion. Think of it as the strength of that tingly feeling you get. When Interest is less than 40%, power level drops. When Interest is more than 60%, power level increases. The 40-60% range is where Power Level remains stable.

Now, as you probably know from experience, any kind of fuckaroundery (alone or with others) requires an increase in speed as the power level increases. This is what controls the Target Speed.

If the actual speed is less than Target, it will cause Effectiveness to drop, which will drag down Interest. When Interest goes below 40%, Power Level starts to drop. Power Level affects Target, so Target drops as well.

If the actual speed is more than Target, it will cause Effectiveness to rise, which will cause Interest to rise. When Interest goes above 60%, Power Level starts to rise again. Power Level affects Target, so Target rises as well.

If you watch the current version of the movie, you can see this system in action: The user's speed is fixed at 4 (out of 5), and the system oscillates up and down continuously because 4 is enough to make it rise but not enough to maintain Power Level at 100 indefinitely. If it was 5, Power Level would climb to 100 and stay there; and if it was 1, Power Level would drop to zero.

I haven't quite got the stimulus algorithm perfect yet, but at least it's doing something interesting. So I'm leaving it alone for a while to work on the music synchronization.

I am using Buzz for all the music and some sound effects. Since Buzz's sequencer is based on beats per minute (BPM) and ticks per beat(TPB), it is possible to calculate which notes fall on which ticks.

Off to read up on music synchronization...

OK... I have the music synchronization figured out. Unfortunately, one of the limitations of Flash is that you are constrained to doing stuff once per frame. There is a kind of half-assed way to call a function every X milliseconds, but according to the docs it isn't actually accurate, so I decided to just put up with doing things once per frame. It's a bummer because unless I choose an exact TPM (ticks per minute) for the music, the ticks won't line up with the frames.

However, the algorithm I devised knows how many ticks happen per frame and it's smart enough to know whether a tick happened between the last frame and the current one. It can be instructed to fire off an event once every X ticks. It won't be exact if the TPM (ticks per minute) doesn't line up with the FPM (frames per minute), but at 25 or 30 frames per second the error margin is too small to be really noticeable.

The other end of music timing is that loops have to be of a certain length or there'll be a pause between the end of the sound and when it's replayed, and of course the sound events will get out of sync by however long the gap is. Flash does have a sound editor but it's too elementary to really do that, so I have to get a real sound editor.

In the mean time I'm going to plan out the stages and figure out what kind of animations I want to do.

UPDATE: Turns out I don't have to buy a sound editor after all. Linux is just the BEST THING EVER. To trim a .wav to an exact number of samples (say 117,600), this is ALL I have to do:

sox Drums.wav Drums2.wav trim 0s 117600s

That's, like, faster than doing it with a mouse! I'm so happy I don't have to piss away $50 buying a sound editor. <:)

Wow your actually going through with this and making the game. I am also learning flash and other programing languages. You have my support, hell i maybe a n00b on the forums but still have many resources. Need anysoftware or help with programing

Thanks Bob!

The biggest setback I've encountered is that Flash DOES NOT SKIP FRAMES. If it takes Flash longer than one frame to do something, does it just skip the next? Nope. So you might think it's running at 25FPS but it's actually running at 20FPS one second, 23 the next, 12 the one after that, 16 the one after that, etc.

On top of that, the Flash debugger (used for previewing the app before publishing it) and the Flash plugin DO NOT RUN AT THE SAME SPEED. The plugin is WAY SLOWER! Code and graphics that run perfectly in the debugger run like SHIT in the plugin. So guess what happens?

The synchronization routines fire perfectly in the debugger. Then I tell it to export the .swf, and I bring it up in the browser. And do the sync routines still fire properly? NO. They can't even stay in sync for two seconds before sloooowing dooooown.

Now, it may just be that I have a screwy version of the plugin, or it just needs to be installed, or whatever. But, if I can't figure out a way to rectify that, I'm afraid the music will be purely in the background, and there will be no synchronization. So the gameplay would have to be different.

Yeah I found that to be a problem when I did the "Capital H" flash animation when I was trying to syncronize mouth movements to words. Sometimes you'd play it back and it would be in sync, sometimes you'd play it back and it wouldn't.

If you are having FPS problems, perhaps you can make it a stand-alone executable, that may help.

Zypper wrote:If you are having FPS problems, perhaps you can make it a stand-alone executable, that may help.

Fucking amazing! <:D

The exported .exe runs at the same speed as the debugger!

>.< Every time I read FPS all my brain can say is "Faps per second?"

Take Care
DFG

P.S. Yes I know it means Frames per second.

Thanks, now I'll always remember FPS as "Faps Per Second", and I have my major IT exam coming up!

Yay! My first post! Go me! <hides from flames>

I've updated the preview. The filesize is larger this time and there are more GFX in place. You can play with (hehehehehe) the stimulus algorithm on the game screen with the arrow keys. There are a couple bugs, such as the arrows not disappearing if you go back to the title screen. (They destroy themselves automatically after they leave the screen anyway.)

The executable version runs much faster than the plugin version, and can be run FULL-SCREEN, so I've put a link on the preview page to download it. Be sure to virus scan EVERY program you download, including stuff I compile!