Curious about how the program has been doing lately

Community Lounge
1

So, as you probably know, I like to pop in here every once in a while, and see how things are going.
I never really dedicate much time to a game, because a lot of changes happen to the game engine,
so my games end up becoming buggy, or entirely nonfunctional. It’s because I put so much work
into these projects, that I’m afraid to really dedicate a lot of time and effort into anything, because
I fear of losing all the work. Just read about a build error and a lot of bug fixes, so I was wondering
how the engine was doing in general.

I’ve been testing since the early beta, and have been a member
for 3 years, (time flies, doesn’t it?). I was curious about a few things:

*Stability of the program
(Previous updates used to speed up load times, cause off screen enemies to not function properly, when returning.)

*Whether there has been any work thought out about pixel based collision detection, rather than a sprite barrier
(So you can crouch, and dodge collisions with enemies or projectiles.)

*How many levels, and the size of the levels flowlab can successfully handle, without crashing
(Diamondsion Assault did, and didn’t load for almost a year. After a few decent size levels, the
initial loading times became unbearable, and the game produced heavy lag, when a lot of enemies
were on screen, or the level was very large.)

I still have interest in developing games on this site, but until:

*Building a Sonic engine is achievable, where you can run up hills
(even though I made many work around concepts, it’s not quite the same)

*If a boss goes off screen, they don’t get stuck, or have full health again

*Assurance that no progress will be lost, or corrupted

*A progress save feature is built
(I’ve made a few password concepts, to load levels, lives, health, and items, based on a number sequence,
64253672 = Level 6-4, 2 lives, 1/2 health, 3672 being a number based on the items held,
Lv 3 Sword, 6 Diamonds, 72 Coins)

I’d love to know what features you are planning to make, and if anyone has made any games that rival my own.
grazer, you should have my email, so if flowlab comes out of beta, be sure to let me know. I’d appreciate it.

2

Grazer added
-saving (YESSSS)
-bug fixes
-and I’m pretty sure newer games (one of mine is HUGE) can handle massive levels

I’m glad you are still checking in
I will do better

3

Anyway I’ve been working on some new concepts such as multidirectional shooters, FP horror, auto runners, and a few more things.

4

Hey Mhx,

Nice to hear from you :slight_smile:

Here’s a little backstory on what happened between the original and current versions of Flowlab. You probably know a lot of it already:

More than a year ago I combined the mobile and web browser versions into one app, since it was very difficult and time consuming for me to maintain and update multiple different versions for each platform. This change took a really long time, and in the process there were some updates that were not 100% backwards compatible. Most games were not actually affected, but yours, being some of the most complex and difficult for me to debug, were especially susceptible.

It really needed to be done, but it took a massive amount of time and effort to combine everything into a single engine. To make matters worse, this effort prevented me from adding new features during that time, and instead of fixing bugs only introduced new ones.

I can assure you that I do not intend do do that again, the version we have now is the one we’ll use moving forward, and I will only be making incremental changes.

Regarding performance, I made a conscious decision early on not to add limits to the size or number of objects in a level. There will probably always be a point at which the game can get too large, and start to load or perform poorly. My approach has been to let creators add whatever they want to a level, and when things start slowing down then try to find ways to optimize the loading or playback. This will probably always be an ongoing process.

As far as features go, I try not to make specific promises since priorities for different features are constantly changing and I’ll just disappoint people, but I did add a save & load feature at least :slight_smile:

I also plan at some point to add some more sophisticated physics shapes (e.g. angles for hills). Adding new shapes is actually pretty easy, it’s creating a simple workflow for dealing with them in the editor that’s more of a challenge.

Anyway, glad to hear you’re still interested, and I like the music you’ve been posting.

5

That’s good to hear. I’m glad you have still been working on this site over the years, even if it hasn’t been all of what you initially had hoped for. I’d love to use Flowlab to fully create a game one day, but not yet, not until the creased edges have been finely ironed out. My game ideas require a high demand, and so far, I don’t have nearly the sustainable amount of structure to run my game.

I’d like to hire coders to help me fine tune a game, and would make a kickstarter for it, but there’s no better feeling than making something yourself. Also, I’m glad you enjoyed the songs. I would like to actually put more time and effort into a soundtrack, but until I have that free time, I spend it drawing and animating.

Two things I’d like to see in Flowlab, are loading screens, and cutscene support. I had previously attempted to make a fullscreen object play a very long animation, and sync a voice audio file to it, but it didn’t really work out too well, because at that time, animations were bugging out, and corrupting. It’s definitely something I would like to put the effort in for, but currently, as I said, without hills, and being able to shrink your hitbox by crouching, I can’t really put any work in just yet.

I would also still love an 8 - 10 layer system, (a GUI, 2 front layers, a mid layer, a back layer, and 3 - 5 background parallax layers, like Sega Genesis had.)