Dark Impulses Discussion

[ValturNaa]

As for GameMaker, I used to use it back when it was GM6 and GM7. I have GMStudio, but not the full version anymore. Besides Alloy Tengu and Ion Aces, I did Rune Star http://bluecloak.net/ace/runestar.zip and some of an RPG engine: http://bluecloak.net/ace/TnD.zip I switched from GM to Flash because a year of working on Rune Star resulted in 600 or so views and lukewarm reception. I got more views from Puppy Love and Dildo, which was made in a weekend. And nowadays we've got that lovely "Windows protected you from this program" message. If you could assure me that you have a way around these problems, or that I would get paid anyways, I could be brought back to game maker, it's a lovely program, but right now, Flash is the best.

What we're working with is far from an "over the weekend" kind of game, no matter what kind of package we work with, and flash is simply not capable of handling what I want to do with it. It lacks the ability to work with modern graphics cards and drown your ram with video feed, producing lag in what appears on the surface to be a simple game but which is running code beneath it. BS had this problem in spades, and if you want an example of a pokemon game that does it, humbird0, who built the engine we are currently running on, finally stepped past flash's viable capacity in Pokemon Hentai. I won't say that flash is without its uses but there's a big difference between a point n click rape game and a game with both gameplay and porn. I can't tell you how many times I've played a flash game for five or ten minutes, hentai or otherwise, but there are very few that I would want to download and keep, and those are really based on the graphics because they're just interactive movies. More expansive games, on the other hand, do not come in flash.

That was not glossed over. To me, Racktoise and Tittiurtle suggests the worst type of parody. If I'm going to build a story in someone else's world, I want to see at least hints that the original content still exists. Sure I might *play* that type of parody, for a little while, but it won't prompt a download and I'm not interested in building it. If I'm going the route you suggest, I'm going all new content with my own monster class lists, my own theme, and my own world. I've actually been toying with ideas to carry the pokemon concept out of the pokemon world for quite some time now, and I have a few different ideas that might work, depending on the audience.When I say pokemon concept, I basically just mean a team battle game where you collect magical creatures.

And, I realize you're trying to be helpful by pointing out things we may not have considered, but I really don't think Flash is capable of handling any of the projects on this list. The only reason it was on Dapper's list of programs is because, if we had a flash coder, we might *barely* be able to make the current broken but nearly-functional engine work for us. Nothing will prompt me to voluntarily build a new engine in flash, I'm sorry. What we're really after is an engine capable of handling both 2d and 3d work, like unity, but gamemaker will do it for now. It even has an HTML5 exporter, though I don't yet have the package for it, so it *should* be able to create something to play in your browser.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

My point was that you can pour your heart into an elaborate game maker game and still get upstaged by something completely half-assed in Flash. Might be a little different now that Patreon's a thing, but even on LoK you can see the difference in participation between the Flash projects and NonFlash projects.

I don't know, the older I get, the more I'm interested in playing quick simple games rather than long engrossing games. Plus around here, people make the habit of coming up with huge ingenious concepts that they could never finish, and that's not the kind of project I would ever want to sign up for.

I think the Flash CS is a lot crankier than the SWF format. If you make yourself a blit engine or use the GPU functions you can get better performance out of it if that's the problem, like Blazing Void would probably crash the shit out of Flash if it weren't blit based. And there's something to be said for doing more content in sequels instead of one long game, although that limits you to more arcadey sorts of games. And back when I was using GM, people would give us shit about GM not having the speed or capacity or whatever to handle real games too, so if I'm compromising anyways, I'll do the compromise that gets more attention.

I have never understood why anyone gives a hoot about HTML5. It sounds like a worse version of Flash. And it's not compiled, so even a middleschooler can just copy it and hax it or rebrand it or whatever. But I haven't given it much attention since it was announced, it might have improved since then.

When Overmars was running Game Maker, there was some fledgling 3D support, did YYG not continue that?

If Unity would serve your purposes, what holds you back from using Unity I'm wondering? If you worked with AS3, JavaScript is almost identical, and that C# or whatever that everyone likes is not much different. I would imagine you could get a lot more community support for Unity too, since it is seen as more of a professional tool, while GM is seen more as hobbyist. And Unity has some amazingly well done tutorials. I have played with Unity a little, and it's interesting, but I have the same reservations about using something with less exposure than Flash. There was the WebPlayer, but that got killed, now there's WebGL or something, but that's supposedly a little glitchy and I'm a little nervous that it could just get killed too.

[ValturNaa]

What's holding me back from using unity is simple lack of familiarity with unity. Gamemaker is something I use much more and am more comfortable with. It's easier to get into and its results are pretty much the same on the 2d side. It just lacks the 3d capability. Yes, gamemaker does have rudimentary 3d support but we're talking double the coding complexity of 2d games for something akin to warcraft 3 level graphics. GMS's 2d capacities are still expanding, however. Spine support has been a recent innovation and I hear that the next update release they may be adding Spriter support as well.

I still like a long, engrossing, story-based game. I played your dildo game and that was fun but it was just ten minutes or so of poking around the maps figuring out what to click on. The other one was only interesting enough to unlock a couple of events and then I left. Not saying you're wrong in what you do but it just isn't my style. I liked the original Breeding Season's endless play, and mourned the fact that every build lost more animations to S-Purple's new character designs, but never seemed to get animations back. Of course, I also thought the official pokemon games were too simple. Black and White are the first ones starting to reach a point where I can see them as fun. If I hadn't been able to just blow through all the battles, I wouldn't have beaten the league in any of the earlier games.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Well, honestly, neither of the adventure games are really my kind of thing, they were just easy to make and porny. (I'm sad to hear that Knarf couldn't hold your attention, though, that was fun to make) The closest I've ever come to making an ideal game would probably be FireArm or Blazing Void. If I were going to point to someone else's Flash game that I would consider ideal, sheesh, lots to choose from.

Spoiler (click to show/hide):

Flight
Dino Run
Hex Empire
Snailiad
Idle Sword

Scrolling Shooters:
Frantic 3
Reactance 2
Traitor
Project Inthri 3

From a diplomatic view, I think you would most enjoy Snailiad and Traitor.

Thinking about, I guess none of those games are near perfect, but like, sitting in my basement are Grand Theft Auto, all the Disgaeas and Metal Gear Solid Collection, but I more often go back to my favorite Flash games than start up a more serious game.

That's a shame to hear YYG hasn't touched the 3D stuff in all this time I've been gone.

I gotcha feeling unfamiliar with Unity. That's part of why I'm sticking to Flash too. Since I can do pre-renders, there's not a whole lot that Unity can do that I can't sorta do in Flash. If you haven't really done a whole lot of poking around in Unity yet, I would just point out that Unity has an amazing built-in platformer physics engine, so if you wanted to make something like Corta's Splatformer in 3D, that's mostly already done for you.

[ValturNaa]

I've played games like firearm in the past. Not my particular niche but they're fun from time to time. My personal favorite genres are turn based strategy (both civ style empire building and battle specific strategy), rpgs, and tower defense games. Real-time strategy I would enjoy more if it was some cross between starcraft, where 20 minute matches are considered long, and online games like Evony where a single high level building might take two days to build. I like to take the time to think and plan, and not be constantly dashing off to maintain troop production queues. In terms of hentai and porn games, the only ones I avoid are the RoR type (because, hey, it's hentai...sex is the object of the game so it shouldn't just be the result of you losing) but my favorites so far are the lengthier games where you unlock scenes you can review later. Those kinds of games satisfy my itch both for satisfactory gameplay and suitable porn. I might enjoy RoR games more if it was more like sex-based combat and less you get fucked when you lose...I've often thought I should try to make a game where you fuck the foe to knock them out, but my skills at sprite building are minimal, at best. I mostly just do story and coding, and not a professional level at either (but probably a lot closer on the writing than the coding...my coding is still fairly primitive). Although thanks to the BS Revival project, I'm starting to revive my old art hobbies at scene design (I've ended up designing screens for that project) and have hope that eventually I can do decent human/oid figures again.

To be entirely honest, I'm not that familiar with the inner workings of flash. I do know an .swf file is extremely compact and supposed to be fast, but I also know that humbird's engine is very .swf dependent and still extremely laggy. I'm not sure if this is because of flash or because he left a data leak, as the problem gets worse as you continue to play the game or use the editor. But I do know that his program has always been extremely slow on the web player, while the direct app has been more responsive up to his last update. I'm sure someone who is very skilled with flash can do a lot of things but I don't really want to be that person. I'd much rather gain the skill in something else like gamemaker or unity.

But I will ask the programmer if he is willing to consider working in unity instead of gamemaker. I can't imagine that unity's map creation support is as good as gamemaker but if we can make it work, we'll have a good basis for going 3d with the sequels.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Oh, actually I love turn-based strategy games, but to program the AI for a good one seems beyond me. I particularly liked Final Fantasy Tactics, and I was always curious about the idea of doing that kind of game with a hexagon grid. In the interest of getting things done quickly, I figured you could save some sprite making by arranging your hexagons thusly, and doing the characters only in side-view:

hexample2016.png (18.46 KiB) Viewed 1954 times

I figure such a system could be used for either a grandiose sort of tactical battle, like FFTactics, or as an improved sort of Final Fantasy or Pokemon random encounter battle.

You ever played Space Empires? I have been crazy addicted to Space Empires IV later.

As for laggy Flash, there is an entire art form to writing code so that Flash performs faster. A lot of this revolves around not triggering the garbage collector during action moments. Increased lag over time sounds like something is not getting garbage collected at all. You would need someone more specialized than I to really diagnose it. I'm not sure if humbird uses blitting, but I know this is part of why a blit engine saves you a big headache. With vectors, you need to create an object to be the visualization and delete it when you're done with it, whereas with blit, you can just have one big main loop that says "draw this thing at this this time".

Regarding Unity, actually, I wouldn't say that Unity itself has a fantastic map creation support, but you can easily model something up in Blender, import it to Unity and have a character running and jumping on it in a couple of clicks. It's more the versatility of Unity's character collider and physics engine that make this work.

[ValturNaa]

I like the layout of this grid. I also love hex grids and have been sad to find minimal help online in learning how to code them. Apparently they're considerably more complex, mathematically speaking, than square grids. But I would still love to create such a game. I'm attaching a very simple vector image of a game concept I came up with a while ago...a card driven TBS battle game. I sketched the background with isometric mostly because it was easier than drawing a hex grid, but accomplished the same thing letting sprites be side only. And yes, I do realize the graphics are very simple. This is from a few years ago and it was done quickly to capture the image of a dream I had. I have not put anything more into it since then. With a real artist, this could become a fun, cartoony animated gui for a somewhat casual strategy game.

Yeah, I don't know. But, I talked to the programmer who agreed to help out, and he feels that we might be best off going with a Java IDE he knows of, which can support both 2d and 3d work and should handle everything we want with acceptable speed. As it is his go-to language, I'm inclined to go with it, and maybe I can learn enough from him to continue developing in that environment.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Well there's this site: http://www.redblobgames.com/grids/hexagons/

[ValturNaa]

Thanks. Checking it out.

[Dapper Gent]

I...have no words to express how I feel right now after reading all of that. My head hurts. It's like I was reading blueprints for a rocket.

Anywho, still recruiting. In need of artists, specifically for scene art. PM me for details.

[AcetheSuperVillain]

Actually I've been thinking about parody stuff, a lot of it is that I resent Nintendo. To me, Nintendo is like the peanut butter and jelly of video games, a simple little thing for kids or people who are new to video games. But so many people are like "wow, nintendo's the best!" Ugh, no way. There are way more interesting games out there, and absolutely much more interesting characters to work with for making parodies.

And it's not you guys specifically, this whole website is the Legend of Krystal forum, when a Legend of Carmelita Fox or Sally Acorn or Minerva Mink would have been better suited to porn making.

[ValturNaa]

LOL ... actually the LoK games are one of the few porn games I can still play multiple times. Especially furry fury. I love equipping the medkit or the slave collar and fucking everything into submission. For me, the heavy lines and over-exaggerated features of most cartoon artists just doesn't cut it. The early BS work was like that...I could get hard to it but not get off to it most of the time. I was very excited to see S-Purple's enhanced bodies but very sad to *not* see animations to go with it. Although to me they could have just raised the quality of existing bodies and I'd have loved that even more.

As far as the nintendo hate...I really don't have an opinion on it. I played nintendo very few times as a kid and have not owned any of their consoles in my life. I do have emulators for nintendo ds and the gameboy but I got those mainly to do research for pokemon pink. Same reason I finally watched the pokemon anime. Because if I'm going to be heavily invested in building a pokemon game (unlike pokemon hentai where I just colored a few battle arts) I want to know what it is I'm parodying. I think nintendo has fallen prey to a lack of imagination, if anything, but I think the same thing about most game developers whose work I see. Whereas the games I plan out are more likely to fall under the "enormous and impossible" category. But they're definitely imaginative, and if they don't satisfy the need for breaking new ground, I put more into them until they do.

[Dapper Gent]

Updated information on the main page.

Mainly added in the need for animators. Familiar with SFM? Want to help us make a pokemorph hentai series? Send me a PM!

[Dapper Gent]

Updated some of the info on the main page.

Mainly added in the link to our patreon page and touched up the Webmaster listing.

[Paw]

I know you are not looking for writers at this time, but I have made several rpgs that were 8 or more hours in length for my brother and his friends before. I think I could help in making side stories, and side quests for future games if you still need the help later on, I am no professional though. I am glad this game isn't dead, and am looking forward to it's completion, and the other projects.

[Dapper Gent]

Although we don't need a writer you're more than welcomed to join up now as we may be able to utilize you.

Shoot me a pm when you can (after 10 posts). The quickest way to get them would be to post more in the general and discussions forum. You can also give feedback for Pink in our game thread which will actually help us as well.

Feel free to write a short story that would take place in Poke Pink as a sample. It can be anything from a trainer finding his fresh morph to a researcher studying the virus to a new hire at the day care center or anything else that cold tale place.

[Avian07]

Seems like you need help here buddy. Anything I can do?

[ValturNaa]

Do you have any talents other than the sketching and hand-drawn animations you did with mew? And, if that is your specialty, do you draw those frame-by-frame or are you at all familiar with more computer-oriented forms of animation, such as bone based or mesh animation?

[Avian07]

Do you have any talents other than the sketching and hand-drawn animations you did with mew? And, if that is your specialty, do you draw those frame-by-frame or are you at all familiar with more computer-oriented forms of animation, such as bone based or mesh animation?

Im more familiar with frame by frame. Ive made gif animations before. I know of mesh animation and ive been dying to learn it but i never seem to have the time or the software to indulge myself in. I want to get my hands on Spine or the similar sorts someday and let loose. Oh thats gonna be a wondrous day.

I never did get to finish this but this the most ambitious animation ive done. Im no pro so go easy on me.

Elesis Signature.gif (114.84 KiB) Viewed 1787 times

[Dapper Gent]

It's not bad. Where it stands, that's more or less what we're looking for as far as 2D animations go. However, we're quite a ways away from using animations like that, which I'm anticipating implementing in our third installment of Pink.

If art is your forte, can you duplicate my art style? We'really a bit peculiar in how we are handling the artwork. Our main drive is consistency, making sure the artwork changes very little.