Topics

31

Ask a Question / New Game +, Is there a better way?

« on: April 20, 2017, 04:31:17 pm »

Hi all, I am working on a story-heavy game at the moment, and I want to include a newgame + mode. I did it by using a plugin for multiple saves, and having the game make a special secret save when the game starts, then saving variables that will carry over as scene attributes, loading the secret save, then changing those variables that carry over to match the scene attributes.

However, I have been getting a lot of confusing bug reports from doing this that do not show up when loading saves with the same plugin normally. Variables seem to go crazy once a new game plus has begun, causing all sorts of strange things to happen such as lines getting jumbled, some variables seeming to have two values at once, and so on. So, I am wondering, is there a better way to get all the variables to go to their default values? Doing it by hand is pretty much out of the question, as there are hundreds of variables in the game with many more still yet to come which would mean having to manually add to the list every time a new variable is added to the game.

32

Ask a Question / Persistent RPG dungeon fog of war

« on: January 05, 2017, 08:01:51 pm »

Hello, everyone. I've been working on an RPG for a while and I would like to improve the dungeon in it. At present, it's kind of just a maze that you walk around in, with key items invisible until you step on them. But that's not really very good, and requires the player to remember everywhere they have explored, or else systematically touch every tile in the dungeon.

I am wondering if there is any way to get stencyl to effectively handle a fog of war for numerous dungeon levels, so that the dungeon map would fill in as you explore a floor of the dungeon, and then if you return to that floor the dungeon would still have the explored areas filled in so you would know where you have or have not yet gone.

I've been trying to think of ways to make it work, but so far, every way I can come up with has required the creation of hundreds of variables and I kind of don't want to do that. xD

33

Ask a Question / Assigning a value to an actor?

« on: October 03, 2016, 05:37:00 pm »

I am working on a puzzle mechanic which involves switching different actors to different "channels", or essentially wavelengths that determine what they interact with. For instance, a boosting tile on channel 3 would increase the potency of any tile that has an affect that is also connected to channel 3. Part of the puzzle would involve changing the channel different tiles are on, so they are affected by different sets of values.

For the sake of working as a puzzle, however, I would need these actors to start on specific channels. Since there could be duplicates of each actor, I'd have to use actor attributes for it, rather than game attributes.

There are two messy ways to do this that I know of; making a different version of every actor to match every possible starting value, but that would get very bloated very quickly. The other way would be to have an "assign channel" global attribute, and have the scene spawn each actor and then the actor change it's channel to match the assign one. But that has the problem that I would need to space them out at least .1 seconds apart to make sure every actor gets the right value, which could make the set-up of puzzles with a lot of actors take a perceivable amount of time to assemble which might annoy players.

Is there any way to have the game create an actor, and then more directly assign a specific value to one of it's actor attributes?

34

Ask a Question / Making an actor that acts like a keyboard key (Simulate key doesn't work?)

« on: September 21, 2016, 08:18:36 am »

Hi everyone. I had been working on a largely story based game for a while. For now I've been doing dialogue choices with the keyboard, but want to start allowing the player to use the mouse too. I figured I could make some buttons to correspond with each option, since I could make the dialogue window that is in every scene spawn them, but the way I had programmed it, I was using "when key is pressed" commands for how the scenes handle dialogue choices. There are more than a hundred scenes in the game, most of which having multiple choices by now though so it would be the most tedious thing in the world to read through them all and change the code for every dialogue choice.

So, I was wondering if there is any way to make an actor act like a soft keyboard button; where clicking on it causes the game to treat it like a keyboard press. That would probably be the most efficient way to make this change.

Edit: I found a "simulate key press" block... but it does not seem to do anything when I click on the actor it is attached to.

35

Ask a Question / Actors won't collide

« on: December 30, 2015, 02:22:01 am »

I am having issues getting a fairly normal collision to work. I'm not entirely sure if this one is a bug or if I am somehow missing something.

I am trying to build a menu for a combat screen, so I made some actors that would act as buttons, assigned to a new collision group called "Menu Button" and another actor that moves over the different buttons, and switches animation from a collision-less animation to an animation with a small collision box in the middle of it. Both the actor, and collision box are set to a collision group called "Selector" which collides with menu button.

In theory, when the button detects the collision with the selector, it should run it's code. But it does not, nor does it print to the debug screen when I applied a print command to the code. I put a print command in the code for the selector actor and it does change animation properly. I changed the collisions on each actor to no longer be sensors to see what would happen, and they do not even push each-other away like two colliding actors normally would.

Is there something about the way I'm going about this that's causing a problem? And if so, is there a way to work around it?

36

Ask a Question / Best way to make multiple saves in an RPG

« on: September 30, 2015, 05:40:24 pm »

So, I've been working on an RPG style of game, which has multiple branching stories depending on choices you make during the game. Some people who have played the demo version have said though that they would like to have multiple save files so that they could try different paths without losing progress on the path they are going down.

Problem is; from what I've looked up, the only way I can find for making multiple save files involves making copies of all of the global attributes in a list. Since this is an RPG though, there are numerous attributes that I am using to keep track of plot flags, character stats for all the playable characters, and items collected. So, I have well over a hundred global attributes already that would need to be saved, and many more that would need to be added to the list the further along I get in development.

So, I can easily see myself forgetting a few attributes here and there and screwing everything up. So, I was wondering, is there any way to automate the list generation, or is doing it all by hand the only way?

37

Resolved Questions / File size on images inflated - Solved

« on: August 21, 2015, 02:33:52 pm »

I'm not sure if this is something that can be controlled for or not; but I am noticing that when I add an image to Stencyl, it has a much larger impact on file size than the original image is. For instance,  I had a set of 4 .PNG images, each having a filesize of about 110 KBs. I imported them into the game, and found that the file size of the game goes up by an entire 10 MBs.  They were larger than intended anyway, so I shrunk them down and got their filesize down to about 70 KBs each, and yet the new versions still added about 7-8 MBs to the original filesize.

Is there any way to get around this problem?

38

Ask a Question / Stopping click conflict on overlapping actors

« on: August 07, 2015, 07:48:36 am »

So, I have a turn based game I'm working on, and when one of the player's characters' turns comes up, a menu pops up with spell icons to select. The player clicks on an icon, and it sets a variable to make the menu disappear, then I have the behavior for the monsters being clicked on that they don't check for if they were clicked on UNLESS that variable is at the value that makes the menu disappear.

Yet, when I click on the icon for a spell that overlaps a monster, almost a quarter of the time, it instantly casts the spell on that monster. So, I wrote a bit more code. I made it so the monster first checks for the variable that makes the menu disappear, then if it is set to the right value, a tenth of a second later it sets a second variable to a value that allows it to run the check for if it is clicked on. 

But it continued to instantly cast the spell on the overlapping monster. So, I changed the variable to make it wait a full second; and still, it keeps casting the spell instantly on the overlapping monster. I am out of ideas. It's almost like the when self is clicked on check just flat out ignores all the if statements it's embedded in for some reason. Is there any way to get this to stop happening?

39

Bug Archives / Scene became null instead of being removed.

« on: May 31, 2015, 07:18:36 am »

I am using Stencyl 3.2 currently. The problem I encountered is that I went to make a new folder for scenes, and accidentally clicked on new scene instead. When I clicked to remove the new scene however, I got this error message:

Unexpected problem on thread AWT-EventQueue-0: null
java.lang.NullPointerException
   at stencyl.sw.editors.game.atlas.AtlasSceneManager.initSceneModel(AtlasSceneManager.java:504)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.game.atlas.AtlasSceneManager.initAtlasSceneMapping(AtlasSceneManager.java:490)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.game.atlas.AtlasSceneManager.<init>(AtlasSceneManager.java:94)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.game.atlas.AtlasPage.createScenesPage(AtlasPage.java:276)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.game.atlas.AtlasPage.<init>(AtlasPage.java:96)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.game.GameSettingsDialog.load(GameSettingsDialog.java:169)
   at stencyl.sw.app.tasks.OpenGameTask$3.run(OpenGameTask.java:314)
   at java.awt.event.InvocationEvent.dispatch(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEventImpl(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventQueue.access$000(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventQueue$1.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventQueue$1.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
   at java.security.AccessControlContext$1.doIntersectionPrivilege(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventQueue.dispatchEvent(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpOneEventForFilters(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForFilter(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEventsForHierarchy(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.pumpEvents(Unknown Source)
   at java.awt.EventDispatchThread.run(Unknown Source)

And now it gives this error when I attempt to either open or remove the scene, and my game no longer compiles.


Edit: I found a solution; going into the scenes folder and copying the scene files from another scene, then renaming those files to one number higher than the current highest scene numbers, then pasting it back into the scenes folder causes the scene to go from null to a duplicate of the scene copied, which can then be removed.

Edit 2: Now in the same game, I got another null error during compiling,  but it does not cause the compiling to fail. Not sure if it is related, but given it's the same day as the first random null error, it seems likely.

Level:     ERROR
When:      2015-05-31 19:02:13
From:      root

Unexpected problem on thread pool-7-thread-3: null

Throwable: java.lang.NullPointerException
   at stencyl.sw.editors.snippet.designer.Definition.parseForHaxe(Definition.java:1131)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.snippet.designer.Definition.parseCode(Definition.java:986)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.snippet.designer.Block.toCode(Block.java:2126)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.snippet.designer.Group.toJava(Group.java:245)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.snippet.designer.EditArea.toCode(EditArea.java:654)
   at stencyl.sw.editors.snippet.designer.EditArea.XMLToCode(EditArea.java:712)
   at stencyl.sw.io.write.resource.SnippetsWriter.convert(SnippetsWriter.java:840)
   at stencyl.sw.io.write.resource.HXWriter.compileBehavior(HXWriter.java:2001)
   at stencyl.sw.io.write.resource.HXWriter.access$000(HXWriter.java:75)
   at stencyl.sw.io.write.resource.HXWriter$1.run(HXWriter.java:996)
   at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.runTask(Unknown Source)
   at java.util.concurrent.ThreadPoolExecutor$Worker.run(Unknown Source)
   at java.lang.Thread.run(Unknown Source)

40

Ask a Question / Text is cropped at random

« on: September 25, 2014, 09:07:28 am »

So, on a game I am working on, I have at the end of the round a bar that slides down to display the results. Unfortunately, the text on that bar seems to crop completely at random. Even within the same play session, sometimes it will display correctly, while other times the numbers have parts of the cut out.

I am using the [display text[text & text]] block, with the name of the stat on the left, and the variable connecting to it on the right. The actor that creates the text is spawned on the middle layer when it is created, and is moved down by 2 pixels every frame until it reaches it's final position.

Is there any way to correct this?

41

Chit-Chat / Which ad service do you guys recommend?

« on: August 06, 2014, 03:08:58 pm »

Mochi being assassinated by it's parent company earlier this year screwed me over pretty badly. Afterwards, I switched to Newgrounds' ad service, but after giving it half a year, it's CPM is pretty low, and its analytics are practically non existant. One of my games spread off the site a few months ago, and it doesn't have any analytics to tell me where it went. I am assuming it is some chinese site due to the low CPM, but whereas Mochi would give an average of 8-12 cents per thousand views to China, Newgrounds offers an average of 0-1 cents. That game now has 900,000 views, with me sitting at 12 bucks for it, when Mochi would have given me somewhere between 70-100 dollars for the same thing.

Between all of my games since the beginning of the year, I am only at 22 dollars total, with all of it being held hostage until I somehow reach 100 dollars which does not appear to be very likely at the current pitiful CPM. (I am starting to suspect it's less to do with China, and more to do with Newgrounds just giving negligible CPM for views that aren't on their own site)

So, I want to try seeing if there is a better ad service available out there, but I don't want to go into it blindly and end up with another several months profits being blockaded. Which ad services do you guys recommend using? The only other one natively available on stencyl appears to be CPMStar, but I'd heard it has much stricter quality requirements and I don't know if my games are high enough quality to be accepted there yet.

42

Windows / Mac / Flash / HTML5 / Bob the Archaeologist 2

« on: May 23, 2014, 07:05:27 pm »

Finished a new game, a sequel to one of my early games. You play as Bob, an intern archaeologist with more than a few delusions of grandeur as he explores a cave system hoping to make groundbreaking discoveries on his own.  I went with a comedic tone, or at least, I hope it comes across as comedic.

The style uses stick art like the original game, though I added a paper background in hopes that would add to the effect. I also changed the journal to be separate from  the game play and added a skip-able death narrator to add some in-game humor. Again, humor being subjective, I am mostly just hoping it is seen as humorous.

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/639762

Feedback would be appreciated.

43

Ludum Dare 29 / Burn a Moleman

« on: April 28, 2014, 10:24:13 pm »

So, I found out about the Ludum Dare Saturday night, and made a mad rush to finish it on time. Hope it isn't a problem that I am posting the thread today rather than Sunday. I did finish the game on time though for the Ludum Dare.  (My entree on the site is here for confirmation: http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-29/?action=preview&uid=37029 )



Here is the game on Stencyl Arcade: http://www.stencyl.com/game/play/26118

44

Stencyl Jam 14 / Ultra Mega Shooter Dude

« on: March 24, 2014, 01:10:56 pm »

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/636269



I tried to go for a bit of an over the top tone for this game. Originally, I was going to have several levels, different cities and more robots... but then my wrist started getting pretty sore from all the drawing and with only a few more days til the deadline I didn't think I could draw much more and still meet the deadline. So, I decided to make it a fairly short game to avoid being overly repetitive given the low variety of enemies.

Feedback would definitely be appreciated. Still working on getting better at this.

45

Windows / Mac / Flash / HTML5 / Confectionery Guardian Epic

« on: January 29, 2014, 01:14:43 pm »

I decided to enter the Candy Jam, and spent the last week or so building this new game. In it, you control a bipedal, upgradeable robot, and defend innocent candy stands from being destroyed by waves of Candy King's army.



http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/632928

First game I've made in this genre, so feedback would probably be pretty helpful.