f13.net

It begins! Pardon my rambling! (http://networkofninja.com/devblog/)

Edit: Permalink - "Tiny Hells: Pixel Art" (http://networkofninja.com/devblog/?p=42)

You should outsource your pixel art to Korea.

Because Korea is so well-known for its pixel-art industry? Or because it's free?

Surely, it's one of the two.

you seem to have already mastered one good technique -- create an outline and repeat it with different shades for different items (the swords in the post).  Just keep that up and be crafty -- e.g. add pseudo-particle affects on the same model (a glowy) and vary the aura for an other unique item.    Keep at it :)

That's particularly easy in cases where it's not isometric, like the swords (even though they're largely :ye_gods:), but on isometric stuff it's not quite that easy.

What is actually wrong about the 'wrong' Save... table?

Look at the legs really closely. That's where it's easiest to see.

It becomes fairly obvious once you drop a box around it. While I'm in no position to possibly write a tutorial on pixel art (yet?), the problem with the degree is something you wouldn't notice until you dropped it in-game unless you've been doing pixel art long enough to see it. Until I made this (amateurish) mistake, I didn't notice such things. This resulted in doing a number of things over again from scratch, including the majority of the tiles.

(http://dl-client.getdropbox.com/u/39720/art/pixel/bed_tut.png)

I feel like the guy who couldn't see the sailboat in Mall Rats.

2 over. One up.

Good luck guys, looking forward to seeing what you come up with.

I've been among the few who have known about this title for a little while, and as time goes on, I grow more and more genuinely excited about it. I wasn't entirely sure what you guys would come up with. I knew you knew your shit when it comes to games, but I wasn't sure you'd be able to translate it to the Flash medium, or keep a project scale that was big enough to be awesome, but small enough to actually get done. As time goes on, it seems more and more likely that this will be one of the most bad ass games in 2009. Keep drawing pixels.

Fuck your RPG.  I tough you were making a TCG.


Still, congrats for living your dream.

What? What made you think that?

I won't find a direct quote cause your post count is too high but you usually agree that there's easy money to be done with a good online TCG.  I also tough you had a card game into the back of your head or your own plan to eventually do one.  Maybe I misinterpreted one of your old post.

I have like 5 card games in the back of my head and it's not necessarily easy money, but with MTGO being a fat mess there's obviously space in the marketplace.

Yeah, I've heard grumblings out of UO people for years about how much work goes into pixel art and how tough it is to find people who are good at it anymore. I think originally they just did everything in 3D and scanned it into sprites.

Grats on going for it. We'll try to refrain from any excessive "Critic becomes artist? Haha, kill!" impulses. Your sensibilites are much more similar to my own than it usually seems, so I'll be curious to see what you guys come up with.

I really don't care if my pixel "art" is insulted. It's a nightmare. That's all there is too it, and the sum total of me working seriously on pixel art goes back to me working on the game. I've tried it before, but I didn't have the time to invest back then. Now I do, and it's no easier. My only response would be "you do better." :awesome_for_real:

And yea, if I'd done it in 3D and used screenshots, it would've been dog easy and had no charm whatsoever. See: Diablo 2. When it came out, sure, great, now, lolol. Then look at Cave Story, fucking oozing timeless charm. Our game will probably not ooze charm, but it certainly can't get uglier :grin: Heh.

Could have been an old discussion between myself and schild about a card game that I designed on paper and am not really working on (see the thread where I'm "learning" C#), but I don't recall it being discussed publicly at the time.

We'd have more blog posts if development wasn't more important. Hoping to get something up by this weekend though.

Is it too personal to ask how you can afford to work on this game.  Is it full time development or you both kept a sideline?  You were broke a couple weeks ago, did you get an investor?

I've been running on fumes for a while now. Investor? Har, sadly no. But I can't say I'd want an investor on a flash game. I work on it full time because the economy is a big pile of shit. Sauced can answer for himself.

I could hook you up with a bag of funions.

Oh, I can answer for him. He's been basically working two full-time jobs since October, but only one of them pays. It's what I get for "encouraging" him.    :ye_gods: :uhrr: :drillf: (in that order)

Update!: When is a game a game? (http://networkofninja.com/devblog/?p=65)

No real information inside! Squee! Tighter than Fort Knox up in this mofo.

Edit: Also, a post (http://networkofninja.com/devblog/?p=77) that has nothing to do with our game in any way except for maybe that intangible "spirit" bit.

Any actual information... I demandz it!

Life begins at conception!

Also today I made friends with a real game musician so I can get him to score my game if I ever actually write it. :awesome_for_real:

Becoming a game is kind of like becoming a woman. It's not a game until it gets played.

Ha, you almost said "It's not a game until I can use the proceeds to buy pretty things."

The game is almost complete.

That said, it has a name, blog post incoming.

It lives! (http://networkofninja.com/devblog/?p=96)

Strange.

(http://forums.f13.net/index.php?action=dlattach;attach=4299;type=avatar)

 :nda:  :why_so_serious:

Hey! You in the front! Pipe down!

Please do not violate the NDA.

 :drill:

So we can almost play the game? Almost?

 :grin:

what did you do to your website, looks to me like all of the text got set to background color (or more accurately the background color got set to the foreground color)

What?

Yeah on my IE the background and post text are both gray.

I don't know why this is happening.

Need web designer :awesome_for_real:

I have an ie.css, it's not changing any colors, just fucking with the formatting a bit. Also, I can't find anything referencing ie.css. I have no clue why this is happening and I don't like it.

Margalis to the rescue!

In style.css:

FONT-SIZE: 12px; BACKGROUND: url(images/bg.jpg) #333333 repeat-x center top; MARGIN: 0px; COLOR: #333333; FONT-FAMILY: 'Verdana','Verdana','Geneva',sans-serif

"color: #333333 "

Is the problem, that's the same color as the background. I would guess that down below you have colors being applied to post body text but IE isn't picking up the other style and thus is using the #333333. I spent a couple of seconds poking around in the CSS file and it wasn't clear to me where a different color was even supposed to be applied.

That won't really help. Look at it in firefox. The background isn't showing up in IE. If it was just a font, I'd have fixed it. Basically, IE is being a motherfucker.

When I downloaded the web page using IE I didn't even get the images folder.

Instead of:

BACKGROUND: url(images/bg.jpg) #333333 repeat-x center top;

I woudl try:

background-image: url(images/bg.jpg')

This might be good place to look at syntax:

http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/colors.html

It seems that IE isn't picking up the plain old BACKGROUND syntax at all

Well, first, that's for the background behind the content and it works fine. Further down in the CSS you'll see the .content and .sidebar background stuff. The correction you put forth "background-image:" only managed to fubar it for both firefox and IE.

I would suggest doing it differently altogether. Make a background that spans across both columns (i.e. that includes the white area) and then just repeat-y and no custom alignment. The whole deal with background alignment is sorta irregular and I wouldn't rely on it to work consistently across browsers.

I wasn't relying on anything across all browsers, that's site has been up since January and this is the first time anyone has said anything (which says a lot about IE and gamers).

Ask for help but maintain the snarky attitude, that's classy.  :uhrr:

Nor was I going for classy!

Also, comeon now, that's not even the tiniest bit snarky for me, you know that. And don't tell me browser compatibility doesn't drive you batty.  :tantrum:

Letting Dreamweaver go through and close tags actually results in more issues. This is just unreal.

Fun fact! IE6, 7, and 8 don't even work with any wordpress themes straight outta the box.

YAY!

Finally found a decent looking theme that works in IE! Now to futz around with it. When I break it, I'll let you know! haha.

just run it through an html/css compliance test and manually fix the tags, if you are leaving tags open your site deserves to look retarded.

It wasn't me, it was the base skin, either way, it should all work now since I basically started from scratch.

Late and unwelcome advice:
Validate the CSS (http://jigsaw.w3.org/css-validator/)
Validate the XHTML (http://validator.w3.org/)

Also IE8 is balls.  Moreso than I expected.

Re-did the "save" bed again. Awesome.

>_<

Worst.  Update.  Ever.

qft. also, why is like 90 % of my abilities still broken? maybe u should hire some people who know what their ding or something im trying to be reasonble and all but u wont listen to teh players

really love the game but srsly u are being lazy

edit rofl @ yegolevs picc! see that devs its funny you should have mor funny thing in the game

We accidentally released it. (http://www.networkofninja.com/devblog/?p=123)

I'm confused.  Trying it right now.

edith : Holy shit, pretty neat for a flash game  :drill:

Good job guys.  Love the Diablo-style loot. ;D

Thanks! Glad you guys like it :awesome_for_real:

 :drill:

I'm still doofing around in training, but so far it's pretty good. I found a hat, some shoes, and a gun that has an AOE effect. I throw it on when stuff is bunched together. I dig the fact that my cyborg appears to use five and a quarter inch floppy disks.

Didn't get to play much before the baby needed attention, but I like what I see so far. 

Congrats on launching!

Save/load is very nice to have. 

I deleted my guy on level 3 of the virtual thingy when everything started kicking his ass. I think I did my stats wrong. I hope it's not one of those "There's 5 stats but 3 are just there to trick you into wasting points" things. Gonna make another guy.

Stats don't make much of a difference by that early on. I mean, sure, a minor difference, but really, things get harder after level 2. That's mostly what you ran into. What class were you?

Made a cyborg. Gonna do the same thing, only ignore all the stats besides "HIT STUFF" and "MORE HEALTH" and see how that goes.  :grin:

Loot makes the biggest difference.

Hmmm - stopped responding on me while I was trying to recycle loot.  Can access the help menu, but nothing else responds.  And of course I did not save :/




edit.  I like it so far - extremely addicting. 

Been putting my points into the ability that helps you find better loot.  Mistake?

Anyone else finding the text really hard to read? Thin white on crossed green isn't the easiest...  Need to be able to make it full screen.

Some people do, some people don't. Hold down left alt and use your mouse wheel, you can make the whole page bigger, including the flash app.


I can't say I'd recommend that early on.

Played up to level 6ish, character was about level 6 too.

Vagrant, 24P, 42I, 10L, 27E, 32AGI, 28Ddef, 0Mvmnt, 90HP, 49% to hit, 3-8 damage, 8% crit, 23%mitigation, 8%dodge.

Was saving talents for level 8, but it seems that when you close and reload the ones you had saved disappear?

At this point the levels have all been the same for the first 6 though, so I'm going to give it a rest.

That's because there's no reason to save points.

Eh?

View range can be a bit tricky when you have big blast range weapons. Have to hit something that is sometimes nearly off screen unless you want to kill yourself also. (Blast range 4 weapons can make things pretty easy)

Also I found a typo! In the cascade manufacturing journal thingo the last line says "many of the weapons in this simulator are base on their designs."

Gratz on the release of your game, boys! I'm so proud of you both. I retweeted Sauced's Twitter update, then some weirdo "RIPJacko" RT'd mine. You guys are huge in Estonia!

(http://blog.wineenthusiast.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/champagne_toast.jpg)

Don't forget Germany.

Interweb translations are the best.

I like it.  Bookmarked as a time waster @ work.

Good job guys. Dig the music.

schild liked my reaction so much he put it on the page!

Not bad at all.

I made it to level eight and the repetitiveness is starting to take a toll on me. But the atmosphere is rather great and adding new kinds of mobs - or should I play on to encounter some? - etc shouldn't be too laborious should you develop the game further.

You'd be surprised.   :ye_gods:

Well yeah, I'm sure you're right.

But you've got a great base - both the feel and also code-wise, I assume - to build on if you ever feel like doing so.

Can you make the music available as a soundtrack?

Very addicting, i still can't tell the difference in those save tables.

Hmm?

I think he means the final product Save table/bed/cot from "one pixel is off, stupid isometrics" table from the earlier version.

Edited because of improper comma placement due to terrible typing.

Oh rite. Well, I'm glad he can't! Or something!

guys this is impressive.  Well done. 

Damn fine game gentlemen!

Had to turn the music off for a bit to catch some of the other cool sounds - love the "door unlock" sound.

And for some reason a "Rusty Oswald" just sounds dirty...

Turning music off cleared almost all my bugs.  Ya know, fyi.

Is this the place to nitpick about things you probably already know about?
Moving from A to B, where # is a wall, takes 3 AP when it should only cost 2 (unless you split it into two moves). It's also difficult/impossible to target ground behind spider nests. A "move only" modifier key would be nice.

Having fun so far with my all-luck vagrant. Shooting 5 times in a turn is pretty great.

Yeah, the performance tweaks I made to get the fairly standard pathing algorithm to run fast enough for me left a few flaky bits like that in there.

And the nests are, indeed, a bit too big for the "spec" of mob sizes our engine likes handling.  It's annoying if you run into it early, when the hit % really needs that extra square or two.

Both issues were declared regression risks and left in as sad reminders of my imperfection.

Here I thought I was being perceptive, and I never even noticed that range affects hit %. :oh_i_see: Guess I'll keep my other nitpicks to myself! Not like they stop me from playing the game anyway.

Really reminds me of Fallout,nice work. Will spread the word. INT Affect Attribute bonus per level <---One thing I obsess so much but never put points to confirm it.

Hit level 4. Grenade made a big difference at the spider levels. I just kept aoeing them and with berserk I could throw twice a round. Perfect for those generators!  :grin: Fun game. You took good mix of concepts.

Please don't!  I like talking about it, and learning from it.  I'm still planning on doing patches til we get sick of it, so I can still fix plenty.

On Kong:
http://www.kongregate.com/games/NetworkOfNinja/cyber-recession-warrior-edgar

oops!

Goddamn this is hard to put down. It has occurred to me that my love of procedural content may be bordering upon unhealthy (based on some of my post history, you may have already come to this conclusion).
Oh, well okay then! Well the combat movement talent effectively doubles your movement speed, but only if you split up your move into two-tile chunks. I'm guessing this is not the intended behavior, but I am abusing the hell out of it anyway. Who needs Shifty?

Also, the balance doesn't feel tuned quite right. In the high-single digits my vagrant was just barely edging by, at times entering a level only to kill a few spiders and then run out before getting overwhelmed. Admittedly, part of my problem may have been putting every point into agility, but now at level 21, on game level 20, I'm pretty much tearing through everything with nigh-impunity. Spiders get shot down as quickly as they are created; drones give me a little trouble if there are two generators or I get bad attack/disable device rolls, but nothing I can't run away from if necessary. I have 88% hit chance without really trying (no hit talents) and 44% dodge (my goal is to see if the engine will let me hit 100% dodge and be invincible; don't spoil it for me!). The spiders I'm handily dispatching now are actually worth more experience proportional to my level than the ones I was struggling with ten levels ago, which doesn't seem right.

I'm curious though, how do you even go about trying to balance a project like this? Do you have certain builds in mind when you make the skills and item tables, or just throw in a bunch of cool stuff, see what naturally emerges, and tune everything until it works? Do you have arcane formulae that let you balance (say) the dodge contribution from agi with the loot contribution from luck? How many talent/stat/item combos do you have to test before you feel confident that you're not missing the one SUPER AWESOME character build that trivializes the game?

And in case you're wondering, I'm the vagrant on top of the hardcore leaderboards.  :grin:

I like it.

I found out that if I have a stack of ANTI-VIRUS FLOPPY in my locker and doubleclick another stack in, it adds to the first stack and then makes a second stack.  I had one in the locker and two in my pack, after sending my pack floppies to the locker I had one stack of three and one stack of two.  I took the stack of three into my pack and put it back, so now I have a stack of three and a stack of five in my locker.

Edit for maths.

Hardcore mode seems less hardcore when you can just run out of a level, heal, and then run into a new randomly generated one whenever you meet trouble. I don't think I've died with any of my characters yet.

Also, if you're a Kong member, feel free to rate the game.

Balancing was a fairly difficult process, and in the end there are still a lot of holes.

I fixed that dupe bug on Kong.

And yes, please hit us up with a rating on Kong if you like it.  We were swarmed with haters last night.

Until you run out of money.

Too bad someone reported that dupe bug. :awesome_for_real:

Edgar has some potential lot of things to like about it, music grabs me from the off really dig it.

This thread really inspired me thanks, I spent a bit of time doing pixel art so I know how painstaking it can be here's an example of my work (yes also a shameless plug). May aswell throw it out there, I was trying to do a remake of the C64 game Ghettoblaster/Streetbeat in Flash. I eventually decided against isometric because of the amount of work involved in creating the framework on my own. Then ditched the project but could pick it up again sometime in the future.

(http://i225.photobucket.com/albums/dd50/jam3ie/beatnik.gif)

The bitch about that fella was his legs, took a while to get them right.

always does. I think I did the walk cycle animation about 4 times. at least.

It was enough to guarantee we never do isometric again. At least not in a way that would require humanoid bodies.

You have the same dude in your avatar as Soln, don't you.

"I AM NOT A NUMBER! I AM A FREE MAN!"

I *think* I can see the rails from here.

But isometric is so cool :grin:

I'm not fully sure but I'm guessing isometric and flash aren't exactly a match made in heaven?


Yes same guy it seems, I like this sig though so don't wanna change it.

Update the Edgar page on the Network of Ninja site.

Kudos on the game guys!  The music is fantastic and I'm really enjoying it.   Also, glad to see you on Kong.

I would love to see "end turn" as spacebar, but that's just personal preference.

Planning to do that this weekend.

Isometric is a pain in the ass to draw correctly in and of itself.

There's a level cap.

You bastards.

I hear they're gonna fix it in the expansion, at the same time they add the high-end raid content.

Me, I'm waiting for the crafting system and player driven economy.

I'm not seeing it on Kongregate.

http://www.kongregate.com/games/NetworkOfNinja/cyber-recession-warrior-edgar

Weirdly enough I found this through a completely separate link.

's pretty nice but I'd like to see some kind of visual indicator (maybe a stripe in the lower right) about whether something's rusty or tuned. That almost means more than rarity.

This is fun!

You should post this to the PC Gaming forum, this area is a bit obscure.

Btw, what's the revenue model for a game like this? (Maybe I missed it in this thread?)

Kinda reviving a dead thread but I just found out about this and gotta say good work on it.

Yeah I never saw this, I even use the front page instead of going through the forums.  I went straight to hardcore and got a scientist at L5, almost died to clone bots once and had to run away.  I really need a 8 max damage weapon but so far none are dropping for me.  Hella late grats on making this.