Category: Technical

Posts of a more technical nature. Nuts and bolts detail.

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Tax Tag and Title

New Title Logo

After wasting about an hour trying to follow a Gimp tutorial to make a 3D text logo, I ended up using Gimp’s default  bevel logo creator.  The results are just as good as the 20 step tutorial I was using, and it was done in about 2 minutes.  I went ahead and made separate layers for each letter in the title.  I exported each layer as a separate PNG image, that way I can apply special effects with each individual letter.  I also kept each letter image at the full size of the title text.  It is a little wasteful, but eliminates the need to do calculations in the code to place each letter.  I just put each image at the location where the title needs to go, and it should look fine since everything but the letter is transparent.  Hopefully, this won’t have an impact on performance, and it’s just a title screen so high frame rate isn’t essential.

 

New Title Background

Used the image of one of my old computer boards, and shrunk it down to a 256×256 pixel square.  Then I used the Make Seamless filter in Gimp, which is found under the Map menu.  Then, I made the image grayscale and lighter by using the Colorize option and setting the saturation to zero.

  

 

The new graphics were then imported into the project.  I added a variable to track which letters should be displayed on the screen, and a constant to track the amount of frames between displaying letters.  Currently, the letters just pop-in, but I would like to add a zoom in or other method of displaying the letters later.  I added a variable to track the offset of the scrolling background image.  I simply created two loops to display the background image, setting it off vertically by the number of pixels in the offset, which makes it scroll.  Finally, I created a gradient that is filled with light green at the bottom, and gradually transitions to a transparent color.  I overlap this on top of the scrolling background image, to make it appear as if the background is fading away.  Well, it doesn’t appear that way to me because I know how it’s implemented, but I think it should appear as fading away to the untrained eye.

One problem now is that the title screen looks considerably different than the rest of the game.  The title screen has realistic images and rendered text, while the rest of the game looks like it could have been created in Microsoft Paint.  This is really apparent on the level select screen which still has the old title logo.  I may have to use Blender to render some of the components to make those look more realistic as well.

So until I create another update video, I won’t be able to show off the scrolling effects.   This picture will have to do for now.

The Game Biz

Began reading up on what needs to be done to publish the game, if I want to make money off of it.  One question I also have is if I need to create an LLC or other form of company to sell the game.  I read on one site that a company is not required until over $3,000 is made.  A company also helps protect the individual from being sued directly, if that unfortunately happens.  Taxes would also be paid through the company instead of my personal income, which may help in the long run if the company does not make much money.

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Level Up

Tile Editor Agony

Started using the Tiled tile editor to create levels for the game, because I thought that was the editor I used for Legend of Tux.  I created a simple sprite sheet which contained the tiles on one layer, and the batteries and LEDs on another layer.  I found that I was only able to export my maps in a very limited number of formats.  It’s sad that this tile editor can’t output a simple indexed array of tiles.  I’m really not in the mood to write a parser for any of these formats, so I went back to the Legend of Tux wiki and found that I actually used Mappy last time.  Therefore, I downloaded Mappy and recreated my levels with that tool.

 

Mappyland

Mappy will not load PNG spritesheets unless two DLLs are included, so I had to download those file separately from the Mappy website.  Apparently there is a now bug with the “export all layers” functionality, so each layer has to be exported individually or else you will get an array filled with zeros.  What a pain!  Unfortunately, they don’t provide a binary download for the previous Mappy versions, and it’s not on SourceForge so a previous version isn’t archived for download.  The author even says on the website that 1.4 is a beta, so why can’t the last stable release still be downloaded?

 

Make sure to set the color depth to 16-bit when creating the map, or else the sprite sheet will not load and Mappy will complain.  As shown in the sprite sheet above, batteries start at index 10, and LEDs start at index 20.  I can get the Elex value of the LED or battery by modding (%) by 10, which really isn’t scalable past 10, so this may need to be reworked later.  This sprite sheet is just used for creating the level arrays, so I was sloppy when placing the numbers.  In the actual game, the numbers are programmatically placed on the objects.

I created getter methods in the LevelDefinition class to return the background tile array and object array.  Then I have a method in the GameLevel class which converts the integer arrays to actual objects (GamePieceBattery, GamePieceLight, etc).  Using the Mappy exporter, I was able to acquire the static array data definitions, which I pasted into my LevelDefinition class.  Wrote simple if/else statements to return the correct array for the level, but this could be changed to a switch/case statement (if C Sharp has those… I don’t know, and I didn’t feel like looking it up, since if/else does the job).

Next Level

Added instance variable to the main ResistorGame class to track the current level.  I’ve been trying to keep instance variables out of this class except for the media files.  When the GAMEWIN state is enabled, the current level instance variable is incremented.  If the current level variable is greater than the maximum number of levels (currently hardcoded to 5), then it gets set back to zero.  For the  LevelSelectScreen, the class could return a level index, and the ResistorGame class can use that value to set the current level instance variable.

One problem I’ve noticed is that the cursor defaults to cell 0,0 at the start of each level, which may be off the actual game board, now that the shape of the levels are custom defined.  I may need to add an additional object to the level definition which is the starting position of the cursor.  Additionally, all levels are using the same value thresholds for the ranks, which will need to be fixed later.  The S rank for luminosity should be easy to calculate (the sum of the bust values of all the LEDs).  As for the time and pieces used rank, I’ll probably just play through the levels a few times, and use my best scores for S rank, then use some sort of bell curve function to determine the thresholds for the A, B, and C ranks.

 

Loose Ends (Fix later)

Here’s just a few additional things that need to be fixed.

Currently, there is a display issue if the wires connect to the resistor from the sides.   The wires need to be removed from the resistor sprites, then just simply display a standard wire which will make the proper connections, then display the resistor core on top of it.

I haven’t decided if I should let the player move the cursor off the board cells, and just prevent the user from placing a piece on a non-board space… or should the player only be allowed to move the cursor on game board spaces.  If the player is allowed to move the cursor off of game board spaces,  then the player shouldn’t be allowed to lay pieces on those empty spaces.

I may allow the player to continually lay wires as long as the confirm button is held down, because currently the player has to keep alternating between pressing the direction and the confirm button to lay continuous pieces, which feels jerky.

The LED values can still fall below zero if enough resistors are used.  Need to set the bottom limit to zero for these.

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It’s Time for a Change

Bust Condition Handled

Added code to detect if an LED has busted, which makes the game transition to the GAMEOVER state.  Added a GameOverScreen class to handle the display of the game over state.  Need to determine if I should give a warning to the player if the wire connected to the light is higher than its bust value, and allow the player to put a resistor there before the light has filled to avoid losing the stage.  Currently, once the light starts filling it is locked to that value, which doesn’t give the player a chance to fix their mistake.

Will add a meter to the lower right corner to display the Elex flow value of the currently selected cell.

Time Variables Added

I was able to get the current game time using the TotalGameTime.TotalMilliseconds property of the GameTime object that is passed to the update method.  However, I had to update all the update methods of all classes that extend Screen to accept GameTime as a parameter.  Created three new instance variables to the GameLevel class for holding the level start time, the current time, and the end time.  The end time is now displayed on the game win screen.

Level Definition

Created LevelDefinition class to hold the definition of the layout of each level along with the requirements for each piece/time/luminosity rank.  Created arrays of size 3 for holding each grade threshold.  Index 0 is for the S rank, index 1 is for A rank, 2 is for B rank, and all greater values are assigned C rank.

Fixed the getPieceCount method that returns the Pieces Used end level statistic to not count the LED and battery pieces, but only wires and resistors.

Added methods to the LevelDefinition class to take a piece count, luminosity value, or time and it will return the grade rank for each of those values.  The grade ranks are now displayed on the game win screen.  Using yellow for S, blue for A, green for B, and red for C.

Just thought I would reiterate the fact that I’m trying to make a fun game that is as scientifically accurate as possible, instead of trying to make a scientific simulation as fun as possible.