Poppytail Series

Been working on a clock feature for PT5's major chapters. There may not be any more PXT updates for a while because I want to get PT5 done and released before I start spending most of my (game-developing) time working on that.

Every chapter in-game lasts 24 hours. An in-game minute passes every fifth of a second, and therefore an hour passes every twelve seconds. This means a chapter lasts 288 seconds, or just under five minutes (4.8 minutes to be exact), to complete (assuming Jawlock, APPARITION, Nursina or whoever haven't killed you yet).

My main issue is the minutes section. Since Stencyl won't allow me to place a zero in front of a single-digit number, the clock may read something like "12:7pm" or "3:4am". I'm going to fix this, but I need to keep waiting to make sure the game switches scenes after reaching midnight a second time (as each chapter starts at midnight).

The concept of a clock is good.
Why is stencyl not allowing you to place a zero?

The concept of a clock is good.
Why is stencyl not allowing you to place a zero?

The "clock" is just written, showing the player the time, which will allow them to figure out how long they still need to progress.

It's a weird thing about number attributes. This can be fixed in the drawing event by checking whether the Minute attribute is lower than ten, and if so drawing a colon and a zero in front of a minute instead of just a colon e.g. "Hour & :0 & Minute & AM/PM".

Hour and Minute are my two number attributes for this, AM/PM is text.

Here are some images of Jawlock when he searches for you.

1) In Campbell's Office, looking at the player.
2) In the Main Hall, looking at the door to the North Room.
3) In the North Room, looking at the entrance to the Left Hall.
4) In Your Room.

After some Pixeltail work, I now have jumpscare animations for Poppytail and Easter Bunny (both are 20+ frames), Alex can now walk diagonally (after messing with a modified version of the 8 Way Movement behaviour), and I have now about twenty new sprites done (probably more).

I’m working on Poppytail 5 now, and I’ve nearly finished making the images for all of the empty rooms. With this and a lot more programming on the map, the process will of creating the main game’s chapters should be much easier and less time consuming. I hope to have (this may be a little unrealistic, but I’ll try) Chapter 1 finished by the end of the month.

When I say the process is sped up, that excludes the creation of 3D character models (which can sometimes take at least two hours, as basic and blocky as my models are). Since I have not heard from JackAttackGames about the process of the Shyyon and Vehicle Dummy models, Chapter 2 may take a while. As much as I like the idea of using 3D models to construct 2D images for a 2D game, it does take up a lot of time. Still, I don’t want to rush anything in case I end up with a bad and rushed-looking game (just take a look at some of my earliest images for the game back when Nursina was light green and Exister was entirely opaque).

Since I am on a holiday and there is no wi-fi here (I am using mobile data to post on these forums), I cannot make more 3D models on Autodesk Fusion 360 because the files are stored in the cloud. When I get home, I’ll try to get a few done if I have time (which may be unlikely).

In the meantime, thank you to those people who still read this thread!

Here is a devlog post I put on GameJolt. If you have a GJ account, please submit your response to the poll. The message from the post is below.

Hey everyone,

Poppytail 5 has taken multiple attempts to get… “acceptable”. If you look at the Stencyl forum thread you can see that some early images I had for this project weHey everyone,

Poppytail 5 has taken multiple attempts to get… “acceptable”. If you look at the Stencyl forum thread you can see that some early images I had for this project were of quite poor quality. Now I have figured out how to make everything I wanted to work properly.

The game is now working how I wanted it to, and most of my work on it has been building the map (since the mini map idea was scrapped), creating the images and the player’s ability to turn around. Pretty much I’m simulating a 3D environment in a first person perspective, while the game is technically in 2D.

Still finishing up Chapter 1’s code. My goal is to have a Flash version released on the Stencyl website and here on Game Jolt by the end of April. After that, it’s just adding more characters each chapter. I won’t release every chapter when it’s finished, but the occasional demo just to show that I’m making progress whenever I become quiet on Game Jolt.

Once again, if you want any news on how any game in the canon series is going, the link to the Stencyl forum thread (which I try to post to every few days) is below.

http://community.stencyl.com/index.php?topic=54694.0

Thank you all for sticking around,
Nickamon

P.S. The poll below is my question to you all of what you think I should do with my current projects. Please take the time to select one of the options.

Today is one year since I began working on the first Poppytail game (24/04/17)! Although I’m not counting this as a one year anniversary (which will be when the first game was released). On that date my goals is to have Pixeltail done.

Anyway, I have nearly finished (hopefully) Chapter 1 of Poppytail 5. I say this because I’ve still got to make a few animations and work on the AI for enemies (APPARITION is pretty much done, Jawlock is nearly finished, and I’ve made some good progress on Nursina and Exister). The map code is nearly done (because I still need to test it to see if it works), and because I have been making all this as a behaviour, that will save me a lot of time when making the remaining nine chapters

It’s good to see that I haven’t given up on the series after this amount of time (like the fate of the Elecreatures series, however it’s not entirely dead because of my plans for TPT Part 1). Hopefully I won’t abandon this game series for another year.

Excellent news: Poppytail 5 is literally making my heart race every time I test it. So, it’s working. It’s even worse than PT4, and that combined with the randomised mechanics and repetitive music made me jump all the time during its creation. Everyone but APPARITION worked the way I wanted them to (however this was a matter of moving an if statement from a Created to an Updating event). I still need to program the tunnel system, however.

It’s working, however everyone is faster than I am, and then they kill me. I just need to keep tweaking my behaviour attributes to slow down everyone’s reaction times and speed.

It’s going well. Hopefully I can have a playable demo finished tomorrow. Oh well, we’ll see

Mostly just audio editing that needs doing. Nearly done Chapter 1. That'll get done tomorrow. Today I just had to get rid of some duplicate animations, free up some storage in Stencyl, create the tunnel system, and then debug it. Some more debugging is necessary but I'll also do that tomorrow.

Also I 3D modelled the tunnels, and then another enemy (although that one won't be seen in-game until the tenth and final chapter). An image of the model is included (and yes, it is a walking birthday cake, which is fitting since tomorrow is the birthday of Pirate, my dog who was the inspiration for the character Poppytail's design).

I made progress

Something else might be coming...





Okay, the last image is sort of irrelevant. I just like Italian Baguettes

Edit: I was talking about Poppytail 4: Special Edition.

Making a Flash version of PT4, then I'll do the Special Edition. There will be a few things removed because Flash can't use shaders or close the game, plus the game is no longer in full screen. I'm still testing and fixing PT4, so hopefully that won't take too long.

CHANGES:
-Graphics lower quality to save storage
-Shaders no longer appear in minigames accessed during Custom Chapter mode or Minigames Mode.
-Error Ending no longer closes game, instead transitions to menu.
-Bug where Hybrid Chicken cannot jump in Build-a-Monster minigame fixed
-Bug where Red Guy does not appear in Build-a-Monster minigame fixed
-Game cannot be reset
-Bug where the camera does not follow Towelwich in Bath Time minigame fixed

Attempting to upload to Stencyl Arcade... Success!

Click here to play Poppytail 4.

Made these same changes to Poppytail 4: Special Edition.

Attempting to upload to Stencyl Arcade... Game too large.

Unused files cleaned up. Re-attempting Stencyl Arcade upload... Failure again.

Trying again... Failed again. Oh well, it doesn't matter that much if I already have the normal version up and running.

Poppytail 5 Chapter 1's nearly done. There has been some procrastination as I have been tired some days but now I've been bogged down with other work, but this won't stop me from continuing to make this.

Audio editing's done, and I hope that in the next few days I'll have something to show!

One thing that's been bothering me is a bug where Jawlock, Nursina or Exister (although for some reason this does not happen so much with Exister and not at all with APPARITION) try to kill you, the kill noise plays and the screen shakes (as normal), but the animation loops.

I used to be able to make this happen at will by entering the tunnel system during a jumpscare animation, since the way I've programmed it expects me to not be able to move (as during these animations it is impossible to turn around or go through a door), and that certain jumpscare animations will only occur in the rooms they're supposed to. Since it's playing an animation for a jumpscare that's meant to happen in one room while the player's location is the tunnel system, the game doesn't know what to do except loop the animation and wait until the 24 hours for the chapter are over. I've made it impossible to enter the tunnel system during these animations now, but this still happens sometimes. I have a theory as to why this is happening, but it's getting late and I want to go to sleep.

Thank you to anyone still reading this!

I've fixed an issue I was having when implementing a sound effect.

Plus I have implemented some shortcuts for player convenience:

Left Arrow- Turn 90 degrees to the left.
Right Arrow- Turn 90 degrees to the right.
Down Arrow- Enter the tunnel system.
W Key- Go through the door directly in front of you.
A Key- Go through a door on the left of your screen.
D Key- Go through a door on the right of the screen.

The A and D keys are only really needed for entering the Main Hall for the Left and Right Halls, but I think the rest will be easier than using a touchpad to play the game (like I have been this whole time).

I think I only need to fix some animations that loop when they're not supposed to, program some sort of winning screen, add a sound effect for going through doors and crawling through tunnels, and then some more for ambience I guess. Maybe I should add subtitles for the audio recordings and enemy voice lines?

Since I've modelled the Chapter 1 enemies and JackAttackGames is nearly done with Chapter 2's enemies, I've started learning some more Autodesk Fusion 360 to create Chapter 3's models (Dingo Cool, Bad Bunny and Cinder). Here is what I have so far (note: I still have some work to do, and the metallic texture is Fusion 360's default texture).

I've changed the colour themes for some of the game pages to match their logos using Game Jolt's new option to change pages' colour themes.

Bad news.

Autodesk Fusion 360 generates an error whenever I try to open it, the file for Poppytail 5 on Stencyl is corrupted and Stencyl only makes a .zip with two blank text files when I try to generate logs.

I have a recent back-up, luckily, but this may slow down my progress.