It’s been a while, been busy working overtime, bought a new house, gotta fix it up and move in, figured I’d pop in here and see how the site is going, check out the new updates. Right off the bat, as expected, all my games are broken again, lol, oh well, no worries. Every update breaks all my games, which is why I gave up on fixing them until Flowlab is out of beta mode. A few examples are here:
Diamondsion Assault: http://www.flowlab.io/game/play/16618
Enemies no longer walk, music doesn’t play, the limit of blast energy broke, so I manually set it to infinite.
Vortex: http://www.flowlab.io/game/play/490587
Emitted objects off center again, all grid boxes play animation now, instead of only when you pass over them, boxes are not synced on right of screen.
Shifter V2: http://www.flowlab.io/game/play/488603
Rotating disc on menu is off center for some reason, and blue menu boxes occasionally get stuck zoomed in when not hovered over.
Just a few minor bugs I’d figure I’d point out while I’m here. I don’t plan on really working on anything until maybe after I’m moved into my new house and set up WI-FI. Might work on some tech, but won’t go all out, because eventually it will get broken again from an update, but I still like to test the limits of the program and create new ideas. It also helps if I ever find a coder that would like to port the game to PC or Nintendo Switch, but now that Steam Greenlight is gone, I need a fine polished bugfree game, so maybe I’ll do that over the next few years. Hard to believe I’ve been coming back here for 4 years now.
Keep on keeping on grazer. This site is what got me started in game dev. It’ll help many others get their first steps in as well.
I heard Nintendo has a lawsuit against them by a nobody company that sells smartphone joysticks. They may win some money but I doubt they will shutdown all use of the switch. Nintendo has far better lawyers.
Emit has always been a major problem since the beginning of flowlab. It just refuses to emit where you want it to, and emitted objects never work as good as the original copy of the object. It’s been a thorn for grazer for years. Attach is the same way. For some reason, emit and attach refuse to be centered on the object they came from, and pop off to the side for some reason, making dust particles and character clothes nearly impossible to work with.
I’ll be back to working on projects when I get a new laptop, my old one crashed. I have some ideas I want to work on, like slopes and running on water tiles. I got the ideas from playing Hydrocity in Sonic 3K. I was thinking of having blocks enable when player moves a certain speed or higher, and disable if you’re too slow, and you fall through underwater. However, enable/disable have given me a lot of problems as well, in the past, so I may possibly request a solid/clear state feature from grazer, so I can make things like water, and platforms that I can jump on from underneath, but land on, like Mario games.
Funny thing is, I can voice act Sonic, Shadow, Mario, Luigi, Wario, Waluigi, and tons of other characters from other games, or TV shows, so I tend to shout out stuff in a Sonic voice, when people are jogging and I’m driving.
It’s weird that new updates keep breaking games. Why does it even happen? It’s not like changing a single line of code could affect the whole project code.
The games break, because when you add new features, they may fight other code, causing new bugs, so when those bugs get fixed, the changed code causes other new bugs. It’s like how medicine fixes one problem, but can have over 20 side effects, and by taking medicine for those side effects, you have tons of new side effects. This is why games are so glitchy, like Bethesda games and Sonic 06. They just pick and choose what bugs are the easiest to fix or least game breaking, and leave them be. As long as flowlab has bug fixes, there will be new bugs, and because the code changes, old logic stops working, so I don’t bother making advanced games for that reason. Flowlab is great for testing ideas and education on code logic, but you couldn’t make Sonic Mania on it, or Metroid. Maybe Mega Man or Mario games are possible, but anything with advanced controls and massive levels, don’t try it until flowlab is finished. I’ve learned a lot over the years from flowlab, and realized how after starting over and over on games, that there are better and easier ways to do things I had previously struggled to do. My wires were a mess, so I couldn’t fix anything, in that tangled heap. Plus, if I accidentally clicked a wire, I’d never know which one got disconnected. From now on, I’ll only use messages, instead of wires. No wires = no mess, and I can organise much better in folders, and send messages to other folders. It’s great. Flowlab is coming along nicely.
Thank you, it’s good to see you’re all still here. I like seeing the new people we helped become the the new helpers. Makes it feel like a good community, when more and more people learn the program and help each other out.
Well the thing isn’t just that. See, I got a new house, but it’s not in livable condition. I’m gonna restore and remodel it. I won’t be able to move in for maybe a few months. The money I’ll be putting into the house will delay how soon I can get Wi-Fi and a new laptop. If I get a laptop first, I could at least use my phone as a temporary hotspot, but I probably won’t be working on anything major until November or December. Hopefully grazer will have some new mechanics in the game, for collision detection, so it’s easier for me to work on a Sonic style engine to figure out how it works.
[spoiler] I make mostly test games, because it would be a terrible idea to make a full game and mess it up, because the idea didn’t work, and I can’t undo it. Plus, practice makes it easier to redo. Expect me to work on water physics in two or three months. I’ll have everything from splashes, running on water, swimming, movement speed on land vs in water, and drowning in one demo. If I’m lucky, which is pretty unlikely, since animations don’t work off screen, I might have an idea for dynamic waves.
It goes like this. Top of the water blocks automatically drop half a block. This way, they’re lower than land. When a player collides with a water block, it emits two splashes, one left, and one right. These are invisible, but upon collision, they trigger the blocks they touch. Each triggered block bobs down, then up, then down, then back up, with an ease, all in order of the splash hitbox, causing ~~~~~~~~ waves from going up and down. As the player swims through the top of the water, it’s unaffected until they jump, because the collision is on the top. They also animate and play a splash. It my head, it looks and sounds good, but since I know flowlab, it will likely break offscreen causing chaos when you come back. Still worth testing. [/spoiler]
