Swim [Build 004 - 17/12/12]

Swim

Click to play latest build

Work in Progress!

History
Development of Swim started way back early 2009, where I first intended it to be a small game to learn the basics of Stencyl before launching into my main idea at the time. As I worked on the artwork, I rapidly fell in love with the cute characters and idea behind the game, and Swim grew bigger in intent.

Soon after, I was lucky enough to be allowed in the Beta, and I began working on the game. Things were going swimmingly, however, Stencyl was young and many changes came with each update. One day, an update broke my game at a stage where I had hand made over 90 Snippets Behaviours. I attempted to start again, but life began to get busy and my motivation took a blow. Development stopped and I ashamedly left the community for some time.

Now I am pleased to announce Swim is back! Step by step, I will construct Builds of this game until all the game mechanics are ready to be put into a story where I hope you'll one day be able to play

Plot
You are a young Jellyfish out on a journey to save the ones you love. A storm has recently ravaged your town, which gave the perfect opportunity for a group of Mobster Lobsters to kidnap your family and every other Jelly in the village! You set out to find the fabled Great Pearls which are rumoured to contain the Power of the Sea, and save your family!

Build 001
Basic Player movement
Functional Camera
Basic Player attack
Some sound effects
A music tract
Destructable Actors

Development Notes 22/07/11
Due to the unique moving style, so far all Behaviours have been constructed by myself, and there are currently 12 working behind the scenes to result in what you see. I love Stencyl's design mode, and it's been drastically improved since the time I've been away, it's a joy to be back making games. These Behaviours are loosely based on my old ones, but now drastically improved and much more 'cleaner' than what the old ones were.

The camera works well, but I've had to approach this in a roundabout way due to this bug. Not a major drama, when there's a will there's a way to get around things. Also, the seaweed Actors will randomly generate one of three Animations when you start the game, which gives the Scene a bit of variability. This Behaviour can be found in StencylForge under 'Random Image'.

All music for this game has been composed by the mighty KungFuFurby. Amazing stuff!

Any and all feedback is welcome. Some things I'd like you to think about while trying Build 001 is the 'feel' of the character's movement, the camera's speed and the control scheme. I love nothing more than hearing any and all feedback! I hope you'll look forward to the next Build!

I love the look of the game, and I think the control scheme works well. The camera movement is nice, but the player movement feels too jerky to me. I'm thinking you did it that way intentionally, but I think it might benefit from a smoother movement. I look forward to seeing more!

Good to see you working on Swim again!

And, since I never welcomed you back, welcome back.

What a blast from the past! Sounds, looks, and feels great man. Of course, parts of it owing to the musical talents of KungFuFurby, and your cute, colorful style. :]

Nice to see this back, I'm sure it'll be fantastic.

Agreed, it's nice to see this start up again, it was one of the more popular titles of the Stencyl of yore. Good luck on developing it further.

~ Blob

Welcome back!

It's neat to see this being worked on after such a long time! FYI, if this doesn't turn out to be the best game ever made then everyone will definitely hate you forever!

Any plans for MindSnap some time in the eventual future?

Cool! Swim's back!

It seems to me like you can move faster if you change directions rapidly rather than try to go straight. Like if you press up then right 4 times, you'll get there faster than if you pressed just up 4 times. But maybe I'm just imagining it.

We're back! Yeah! ^_^ Other than what I obviously know from Flash not being exact about time, the game is back in action.

I've been well at work on the Mind Snap soundtrack (the soundtrack finally got put into a hiatus in March 2010 by me due to SuperJosh64 going missing, though right now I've got at least one brand new track in production). It's even larger than the Swim soundtrack, which is already quite large (I did these way back in the Java era, and Swim's soundtrack got completed just before New Year's Day 2010. We're talking 30-40 tracks here! Mind Snap's soundtrack is at least double that, and I'm two-thirds done.).

By the way, this game only made it to Build 7 in the original Java version before vanishing.

Both this game and Mind Snap are co-compositions between at the very least me and Josh (On Swim's side, two of them aren't even modified from their original form).

Speaking of which... it's time for a more proper release of those original two tracks (and the third track which you only just began to hear). The track that you hear in-game is "Happy Traveling! ^_^" (with smiley) (Yes, I came up with tracknames for my own tracks). The two tracks that were originally released were called "Shopping For Adventure" and... "How many stings does it take to defeat a boss? The world may never know... unless you try." (a boss theme), or just simply "How Many Stings" if you want a more abbreviated form. I did these MP3s SNESMusic.org-style: opening + two loops + fade out.
Shopping for Adventure
Happy Traveling! ^_^
How many stings does it take to defeat a boss? The world may never know... unless you try.
I'll also be releasing the original .ogg files as we progress right on through via my works list. ^_^

By the way, I've also got a track that was originally released on the Stencyl forums by SuperJosh64 himself that goes by the name of "Valor in the Spineless Jelly". I intentionally left it unmodified (There's another track by NobodyX in there. Yup, I remember quite well. ^_^), though I did utilize the notation at least once.
Valor in the Spineless Jelly by SuperJosh64

Here's where the notation is utilized. It's a file selection tune (or you could consider it more of a save/load tune at the moment, as currently I don't think anyone's managed to get more than one save file up and running. I don't even know where to find the save files on the computer.)
Memories of the Jelly

There are two tracks from Mind Snap in two different versions also by SuperJosh64, and those two were what I'd like to call... "Schism Tracker-ized" by me (both of my versions aren't present yet... though in time you'll eventually hear them.). That was on request.

Thanks for your kind words everyone, and your warm welcomes! It's exciting to be back

To address some of your comments and questions:

I love the look of the game, and I think the control scheme works well. The camera movement is nice, but the player movement feels too jerky to me. I'm thinking you did it that way intentionally, but I think it might benefit from a smoother movement. I look forward to seeing more!

Thank you! I know what you mean by the jerky player movement, and it's true that I've done this intentionally... I failed to explain that the gameplay actually revolves around this 'hopping' movement. I like to think of it as a throwback to some classic retro games such as Frogger and Snake where movement was achieved by 'jumping' x amount of space. Hopefully things will look a little better once the scene is filled with a few more things.

Any plans for MindSnap some time in the eventual future?

MindSnap will eventuate some time, it simply has to! I think I'll need a few people to help me out if I ever want it to be as big as I've planned it. First I plan to get quite far into Swim before moving back to MindSnap.

It seems to me like you can move faster if you change directions rapidly rather than try to go straight. Like if you press up then right 4 times, you'll get there faster than if you pressed just up 4 times. But maybe I'm just imagining it.

Hmmmm, I'm not sure if I see what you see. I've totally redone the movement Behaviour since the early Beta. The game uses the 'time' blocks before it allows you to move again. Maybe this has something to do with flash being odd about time as Furby has mentioned. I'll look into it!

Shopping for Adventure
Happy Traveling! ^_^
How many stings does it take to defeat a boss? The world may never know... unless you try.
Valor in the Spineless Jelly
Memories of the Jelly

Thanks for showing these off Furbs - those are a few of the amazing tracks that will feature in Swim! You can look forward to the piece NobodyX composed when you finish the game

Well, I'm back to Uni tomorrow so progress will slow down a little. However I plan to allow one hour a night to work on Swim, and I hope to have Build 002 out by the end of the week! Until then feel free to fire any questions my way if you're curious

Swim being completed? That will truly be an amazing day. Welcome back, Josh!

It seems to me like you can move faster if you change directions rapidly rather than try to go straight. Like if you press up then right 4 times, you'll get there faster than if you pressed just up 4 times. But maybe I'm just imagining it.

Hmmmm, I'm not sure if I see what you see. I've totally redone the movement Behaviour since the early Beta. The game uses the 'time' blocks before it allows you to move again. Maybe this has something to do with flash being odd about time as Furby has mentioned. I'll look into it!

I don't think it was intended, but I do see what Duckaiser means. Pressing a key and then pressing another always moves the jellyfish in that direction, as if each one were deactivated individually rather than all four at once. You only deactivate one key at a time for each movement, rather than all four.

I like it seems similar to starfy to me. Hope you get out a new build soon and love the music by kungfufurby

This is really cool! The wall collision noise and tile based movement reminds me of pokemon.

Hey all! Just a quick shout out updating you on the world of Swim. I haven't been too active in the forums lately since Uni has been keeping me pretty busy - but with study comes procrastination, and I'm happy to say Swim's progress has been going quite well

On average I've put in at least 1 hour a day amongst my studies (thankfully it's mostly revision at the moment). I was hoping to have Build 002 out last week, however I under estimated how long it would take to reach the goals set. None the less, I'm very pleased to say the game is looking and feeling quite nice!

I'm close to reaching my goals for the build and plan to release the next demo come the release of StencylWorks 1.1.0. The reason being I want to make sure no unexpected bugs pop up come the upgrade and change any behaviours where required. The main feature of the build will be the use of Power Ups, but you'll find a few other new things too

I'm currently at 59 Actors and 30 different Behaviours. I've also generated a whole lot of sound effects that I'm also importing into the game - it's all shaping to be quite a colourful experience!