Mudtato
Significant Progress!
The story was a huge obstacle for me. I struggled to settle on something I liked, which made it hard to develop the player character(s), mechanics, enemies and their behaviours, levels and so on.
Well, I’ve got my story figured out, I’ve got my main characters figured out and it’s finally all coming together!
As I’ve mentioned before, DKC2 is a big inspiration for this game. I’d almost given up on having two playable characters with distinct advantages, like Diddy and Dixie, but just the other day I had a flash of inspiration! I’ve now got two very different main characters that will be great fun to design levels for and play with.
One of them is offense focused, and the other defence. This will make more sense as I show more of the game’s progress.
However, coming up with this stuff on paper is easy. Actually making it work in the game is another story. Well, I managed to implement it over an hour or so tonight, with the player now being able to pick up the equivalent of a DK barrel to enable you to switch forms (with their own animations and abilities), switching forms when hit, losing additional forms when dying and so on.
I’m amazed and excited with how quickly it’s coming together.
My next task will be to do some simple keyframe animations for the two characters, so I can start to build out the look and feel of the game. With the final art being claymation/stop motion, the rough drawn animations can double as storyboards/concepts which will greatly speed up the process later.
I love look of the game that these guys are creating, and I’ve seen how they utilised placeholder animations in their devlog videos and I think it helps a lot. (example)
Can’t wait.
Latest News
Another several months have gone by…
This isn’t shaping up to be an “Arid” game now, so I’m changing the name of the blog from aridgame.com to mudzoo.com. Mudzoo seems like a fun word. Could be mud zoo, or just a made up word mudzoo. I can also use it as the name of the associated studio/company.
Mud is a reference to clay, which is the visual style/medium that the game(s) are created in, and zoo because it sounds good and offers plenty of ideas for branding.
As far as game development goes, what a journey… A large amount of work has gone into getting the collision detection just right for a platformer. It’s such a critical part, and I don’t feel bad about working on it, testing it and tweaking it for so long.
Basic bounding box collision was a good starting point, but really limited.
I scrapped rectangular bounding boxes and went for bounding shapes defined by points. A flat platform may be two points, i.e. a flat or sloped line, or several points to define shapes or curves.
For animated assets, like the player, the points are set for each animation frame, meaning that the bounding shape can correspond accurately to the sprite.
A good example for how effective this is can be seen when standing at the edge of a platform. Usually you’d check the bottom corners or mid point of the players bounding rectangle to see if it’s off the edge. With the points I know exactly where the feet are, and the player can visually and literally walk right up to the edge without falling off.
Collision between the player and enemies will also be sprite-accurate, so there’ll be no surprises.
The player sprite is from Skullmonkeys, one of the inspirations for the game. (It’s hard to get a nice looking gif at a manageable file size)
There are a couple of draw order issues in the gif above, which I spent some time last night implementing a solution for. It’s a tricky one, as each platform has a background and foreground component, with the assets on the platform needing to be drawn between the background and foreground.
I also went with data driven design for defining the various assets in the game. All the different enemies, platforms etc are defined in JSON, making it easy to tweak their parameters and build development tools. I had a bit of a hybrid approach before, but it wasn’t going to scale well.
Still so much to do, but I’m excited about where it’s at. Can’t wait to get my hands on the clay!
(Also, I think the story’s changed yet again from what it was back in July :)
More Progress
So I’ve got saving and loading the game done, level backgrounds/foregrounds and parallax, camera movement and zoom in the editor, a swatch menu in the editor as well as several other improvements and additions. It’s really coming along!
I’ve also invested in more claymation supplies and tools, and will begin creating assets to get an MVP first level done asap!
The story, setting(s) and main character are also finally worked out and should be fun and different, yet still fit the platformer aesthetics established by the classics.
Loving this project!
Lives, cameras and more…
The player now starts with three lives, which are depleted when falling out of bounds or hitting an enemy/hazard. As I’ve mentioned before, I like classic platformers and want to stick with most of the mechanics they used, like lives. I see what they were going for in the latest Crash game, but I still prefer to play it in classic mode.
I’ve also spent a lot of time on the camera. Like jumping, getting the camera right in a platformer is one of the most critical components.
I still need to work on easing a bit, but it feels good so far. The player is kept at about 1/3 in from the side of the screen, with it switching sides depending on which direction they’re facing. The camera will also remain stationary on the Y axis until the player enters into certain upper or lower bounds, where it will re-center on the player.
I’ve also started on a level editor, and have just implemented a title screen and pause menu.
As for the setting/story… I think I’ve changed my mind again. Fortunately I can continue to build the game without having that figured out.
The clay arrived! It seems like quality stuff (Jovi Plastilina), and I can’t wait to get started with it!
Moving & Jumping
I’ve got the basics of moving and jumping done and it feels really nice. I’ve gone with a grounded feeling as opposed to the sliding around that happens in Mario, which I can’t stand. There’s also a nice bit of time after leaving a platform where jumping is still possible, and jumping and releasing the movement direction still keeps you moving slightly in the direction you were moving. All in all it just feels right. However, it will be tweaked significantly as levels are designed.
Clay is on the way! That’s right, clay. As ambitious as going with claymation is, I think it’s such a fun and interesting style.
I’ve also got a basic storyline, theme, settings etc all worked out, but I’m still refining it.
Fun times 
but is it… fun?
So in the previous posts I mentioned that most classic platformers are kind of nonsense, and that I wanted to go in a more logical direction. Well I think I’ve had a change of heart.
I want to make a fun game. I first played Donkey Kong, Mario, Skullmonkeys, Yoshi etc when I was a kid, and I remember them for their fun characters and environments. With wanting to go down a claymation route this would also suit a more fantastic setting.
It’d also be nice if I can share it with my young kids :)
I think there’s still definitely a place (and need) for a more realistic platformer, but this one doesn’t need to be.