Author: Brad

You probably know me for my Flash game series, The Fancy Pants Adventure.

Beta .03

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– Cleaned up the baddie interacting with character code a lot, tell me what’s still messing up with the bad guys. Spiders won’t bring you back to life anymore, and they shouldn’t be able to hurt you if you’re hanging. Jumping on them feels a bit better to me, but I might be imagining things.

– Rope bug should be fixed, tell me if it doesn’t something else wacky now instead.

– Rolling into baddies should have you ramping off of them now.

Not too much progress, but lets see how many of the spider bugs are still in there, especially how they can float / stay squashed / etc.

Again, thanks to all who are participating in this beta. Unless you’re just being completely obnoxious and haven’t contributed a single thing, you’re going to get your name in the credits, so no more ‘AM I GETTING MAH NAME IN TEH GAMEZ?!,’ k? 😛

And oh, right… the new beta build… Beta 03

Comments Beta .03

Bugs!

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If you’re just getting to the site, the link to the beta is in the next post. Please only post on umknown bugs Of course, anything that’s opinion is still open for discussion. And go ahead and now comment on this post instead of the old one for bug reports And as I said before, I should have a new build up sometime this weekend.

Wow, the response to the beta has been pretty awesome so far. There’s reaaly quite a few bugs still in there that I already knew about, lets get those out of the way first:

-Dying and getting hit again: lots if smaller bugs seem to have come from this, but basically I’m going to vastly tighten up how check for baddies is done, and this will be fixed.
– There is a small mound of ground that is spawned when you die. This made it look like spiders would crawl over you once you died, but it doesn’t look like anyone noticed that in the first game, heh. This will be fixed when the baddie interaction us fixed.
– Grabbing a rope and continuing downward: found this awhile ago but thought it was isolated, I’ll have to go through the rope code again, honestly it’s still pretty rough.
– Spiders becoming unresponsive (staying squashed, floating): this one appeared when I changed the baddie jump code (holding jump whil hitting on them bounces differently than if you don’t hold jump while landing on one). I have a feeling that I’m going to end up putting in lots of protection code to stop that from being a problem.
– Snailshell physics: they’re deliberately unreastic, and overly react to your character. I’m not going for realism here, so it’s not a bug. You can still comment your opinion on how it feels, though.
– Landing while holding down: deliberate, think of it as the megaman slide, only with that momentum actually coming from somewhere.
– Shell collecting squiggles: deliberate, just underused in this one level.
– Hitting head and flying downward: been there forever, you’d think I would have fixed that by now…
– Hair disapearing: omgwtfbbqssbbrawl!!!!!eleven you know how many times that’s been commented on in the demo? And I know that there’s NEW animations that don’t have hair, but that means I haven’t drawn it yet, as I have to animate unique hair for most of the animations. Sorry if I sound mad,but I still get those comments, even though I warn of horrible acts of temporary baldness in the comments there, and the post here… *sigh*

Comments Bugs!

Beta!

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Alright guys, there’s not all that much new in this build, to be honest. I just want to stress test the code, and I’m anticipating a lot going wrong, this engine is more complex than the demo, and far more complex than World 1. I’ll try to keep this build updated as I update the engine.

To report bugs, I’ve set up an email address, or you can go ahead and leave comments on this post.

Click the link below to launch the game. And apologies for the barren page, I know pretty much nothing about HTML…

picture-1.jpg

Look out for bugs, of course, but tell me what you think about killing spiders, the look of the level, the new animations, stuff like that.

Oh, I made jumping on baddies while holding jump versus letting go of jump before you hit them feel much different from the other than before.

And YES, I know his hair disappears sometimes, it’s because I haven’t animated it yet in those areas.

Comments Beta!

Speed

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Very few people have played The Fancy Pants Adventures at full speed. No, really. It doesn’t matter how fast your computer is, or what operating system you run, I set FPA to 30 frames a second, and if you’re playing the game in a browser window, it will run at an unsteady 20 – 25 FPS. The only way to get World 1 to run at a solid 30 frames like God intended was to run the swf file in the Flash Standalone Player, offline.

There’s some good news for World 2, however, as long as my plan ends up working correctly (and I’ll definitely be testing that during the beta). See, some time over the summer, Adobe multithreaded Flash so that it could play HD video, yeah, big freaking deal, like we need yet another streaming video player on the Internet, right? Well, it looks like that allowed Flash to run full tilt, even on single core computers… under certain conditions. Yeah, I basically have to time every frame manually because Flash is overfilled with suck because it will never be optimized for anything better than obnoxious web advertisements.

Anyways, all this means is that there will be more than just a few people who play FPA like it’s meant to be played, despite Adobe not having the slightest idea what the hell they want to do with Flash *shakes fist*

Comments Speed

Beta

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Alright guys, I’m not going to release a new demo with more levels or anything, but I do need a way to stress test the code before letting the game out into the wild.

So I’m planning on putting a beta up on the site, don’t get too excited, it’ll just be the first level of the demo, updated, of course, with all the new code and physics.

You guys will be in charge attempting to break the engine, and leave comments on what you did, how you did it, and screen shots if you can manage them. And if you report anything that I don’t know about that I end up fixing, your name will end up in the credits of the final game.

Of course, feel free to comment on the new animations, physics, all that stuff, what’s better, what’s worse, all that non technical stuff…

I need to finish updating that level before I can upload the new build, but check back soon!

Comments Beta

super quick progress report

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Re-animated the ‘going in a door’ sprite, I figure if I’m going to make you guys look at it over and over it might as well look nice. I’ve also been drawing the infamous Level 5 (my favorite level in the game). I’ve been trying to shove little goofy things into all the levels, even more so than I did in the first World. There were a lot of little things that I threw in there as a nod to the old platformers (and some people actually called me out on some of those tribute bits as evidence that the game was a direct rip of old Sonic and Mario, like those two games play anything alike, right?).

But either way, I thought this was neat:

picture-6.jpg

Okay, okay, I admit it. That little bit of level plays out exactly like a cross between Mario and Sonic.

In the very least, the art is much better than in World 1…

Comments super quick progress report

Snailshell

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Phew! Finally got that stupid snailshell to quit acting up. Yeah, it worked fine in the demo, but I completely recoded it, a few times…

It’s got a far larger part in World 2 than in the demo, so I had to completely change the physics to some custom code, instead of sharing code with Fancy Pants Man, like the baddies do.

SO… what’s up with the snailshell in World 2? Well, there’s an entire minigame within World 2 that revolves around the snailshell. I’m sure that makes World 2 the first Flash game to not only not be a minigame, but also contain an entire minigame that could probably stand on its own on the internet.

Kinda crazy, eh?

Comments Snailshell

‘Menu’

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Here’s another quick progress report. I’m currently working on the ‘menu’ system for the game, which, once again, is just a series of rooms, no pointing and clicking in my game thank you very much.

So this time around, I have about twice as many main levels. Not only that, but the cameo levels are turning out so awesome (and some of them rather large) that I want them all selectable from the Level Select room. So World 2 will have a system of doors for a menu that isn’t as simple as the one screen rooms from World 1.

Setting up all the doors that will be unlockable made me worry about something, though. With the game being so much longer than the last one (though I’m sure you can still run straight through fairly quickly if you skip the bonus rooms…), will that be a problem for people who play the game on public computers that can’t save their progress? I’m making sure that the game will be fun even if you only drop in for a few minutes into a clean game with nothing unlocked, but I still want to have enough there that players want to spend more time with the game will have a sense of progression, completion, and even be rewarded for exploration. This is pretty much a problem inherent with Flash games, and probably part of the reason that they’re usually quick fix games.

I’d like to imagine that World 2 is accessible enough to give a player a quick gaming fix, yet has enough substance to reward any time investment (not saying it’s anywhere near as long as a commercial game, though)…

Any thoughts?

Comments ‘Menu’

Story

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Yep, that’s right. World 2 will actually have some sort of story. Don’t worry, nothing too long, not much dialogue, I promise!

So that’s the mayor.  And he’s giving you some ice cream as a present. Yes, I based the entire plot of World 2 on the mayor of Squiggleville giving you some ice cream.

You’ll have to play the game to see why he gives you the ice cream and what happens once you take it from him, but I think it’s an awesome plot.  Sure beats saving a princess, no?

Comments Story

Platforms

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So here’s a quick bit of update, I want to start making quick progress update posts on here, since I wont be burying older, more important posts like on Newgrounds. So, last night I was finally able to get the new platform code working, so now the platforms (any ground that can be jumped through and landed on), can be curved surfaces too now. really doesn’t sound like much, I know, but its one of those features that should have been in the game all along, but sounded like far more trouble than it’s worth. Really, though, any feature is only as good as the levels that use it, so I guess we’ll see.

Next mini-update should be more interesting than this one, promise.Who else thinks that Fancy Pants Man needs to be in Smash Bros. Brawl? Someone email Nintendo for me.

Comments Platforms

Cameo Levels

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In World 1, I included trophies as collectibles throughout the game. If you're actually reading this, then you probably know more about the game than you should, and have all the trophies in World 1 (or not).
Trophies were my way of giving a nod to a few Flash artists whose work I really enjoyed, though I filled most of those spaces with characters related to projects I was working on or had worked on. This time around, there's going to be about twice as many levels as before, so that means a lot more trophies that I have to find.
The good news is, people actually know of The Fancy Pants Adventures this time around, so it's a lot easier to ask artists whose work I dig to let me use their property as collectibles in World 2. That means the trophies will hopefully be more recognizable in World 2.
Of course, tons of big levels and trophies means tons of tiny bonus levels for me to plan and draw out. My solution? the next logical step from cameo trophies, and the revealing part of this post: cameo bonus levels. Still working out the details with some artists, but they're definitely guys you'll know. Step into a different style level, grab a trophy from that artist... should be pretty fun.
Feel free to recommend artists who you'd like to see cameoed in World 2. And if you think you deserve a level and trophy in World 2 yourself, show me how awesome you are, we'll talk...


  


 


 Gorgeous, isn't it? 

			Comments Cameo Levels

Frames

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For World 1, I was proud that when Fancy Pants Man just stood there, he swayed back and forth, 72 frames of continuous, 30 frames every second (when the game is running full speed, it animates faster than Who Framed Roger Rabbit?) animation. Mario had 1 frame of idle animation, Sonic had something like 5. Donkey Kong Country doesn’t count, it was computer animated.

For World 2, not only does Fancy Pants Man continuously animate, even when not moving, he’ll go through a few different idle animations while he’s getting bored. In the demo, he just fell asleep, but in the full game, he’ll do a few, more interesting things. Currently, FPM has 514 frames of idle animation, which I’m quite sure is some sort of record.

Here’s a shot of the latest idle animation that I was working on:


Think that’s crazy? You should see the other timelines!

So why does this actually matter? Who actually watches FPM while he’s just sitting there? Really, I want to give the little guy much more personality this time around, and I think this is a fun way to do that.

 

Comments Frames

Hair 2.0

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For your enjoyment, a picture of Fancy Pants Man's hair blowing in the wind as he rides on a moving platform. Yes, his hair reacts to motion in game now even if he's not running, and yes, I am really that insane.


 


 

			Comments Hair 2.0