A lot of the time spent on this #GoblinGirlGame project has been figuring out what the equivalents of "coyote time" and "jump buffering" are for maze running and bump combat.
The sort of stuff Madeline Thorson
talks about in this old Celeste post
https://maddymakesgames.com/articles/celeste_and_forgiveness/index.html
Little update to last night's #GoblinGirlGame post. The new skidding animation means you can pump your speed stat up to absolutely ludicrous levels and still stay (almost) in control.
Should you do this? Probably not, but you can!
I've been working on enemy movement lately, so added some new features to my debug display system. Entities can now display their current state and movement targets.
Damage values are just for testing, normally when this specific enemy is idle it doesn't do damage.
A lot going on under the hood I want to talk about (much more than you'd think!) but today is Toronto Comic Arts Festival so will leave that for some other Saturday.
Today's #screenshotsaturday, a little chest spawning animation for the #goblingirlgame! Going to get secrets working to spawn these next week.
#ScreenshotSaturday
TREASURE PICKUPS!
Also got a Druaga style secrets system working to spawn these, but will hold off showing that till I have the level start and end screens in.
When you found nothin'
#screenshotsaturday #GoblinGirlGame #indiedev #monstergirl #pixelart #ドット絵
Bonus #screenshotsaturday
"When you found somethin'!"
For #screenshotsaturday, a hint/riddle screen that appears between dungeon floors. I showed a smaller slice of this screen awhile back, but now that it's in the game here's the full thing!
When you try to be a ~🎶sneaky goblin🎶~ and fail.
#GoblinGirlGame #screenshotsaturday
#indiedev #gamemaker #pixelart #ドット絵
#screenshotsaturday on a Sunday because I didn't have time yesterday.
Attacking these knights will knock their helmets off, blinding them and making them go berserk, attacking anything and everything, including other monsters!
New character reveal for #screenshotsaturday!
Goblin girl X elf girl, frenemies for life.
Bonus #screenshotsaturday, an animated gif of all the emotions I've drawn for the goblin girl portrait so far.
Game Dev Rule: Once you add a character portrait to your HUD, you are legally mandated to include Doom / Madou Monogatari style facial expressions to convey health status.
#screenshotsaturday #GoblinGirlGame #monstergirl #indiedev #gamemaker #pixelart #ドット絵
Finished the portrait damage feature last night for Screenshot Saturday, posted it and then immediately spotted a few things I wanted to tweak.
First improved the death skull bubble to be spookier and look nicer with the cream coloured portrait outline...
...Also added a fourth damage level so that she'll just have a couple cool scars when she's taken damage but isn't in any real danger yet. Saving the pristine face for when you have full health.
Don't have time to do the variations and implement it right now, but had a good idea for the "just picked up a treasure" portrait animation. So I quickly threw this animation together while the idea was fresh.
Improved last weekend's damage facial expressions, adding blinks, flinches and some tween animations.
Going to post some of the subtle art stuff I'm doing to convey both the mechanics and her character with these...
#screenshotsaturday #GoblinGirlGame #monstergirl #indiedev #gamemaker #pixelart #ドット絵
Because in bump combat you're simultaneously hitting the enemy and getting hit, I kept the attack mode flinch to just the eyes, keeping her mouth unchanged.
It's really important that players don't feel they're doing something wrong when they attack enemies even though it means taking damage.
If you aren't attacking the flinch is more expressive and involves the mouth. At first she takes her hits with a cheerful yelp, but eventually these get more pained looking.
She still reverts back to her smile no matter how beat up she gets though. She's small, but optimistic and scrappy!
I created blinks for every level of damage, for both the attack and defend modes. Hopefully that doesn't come back to bite me as I expand the portrait animations.
A subtle detail, but once she's really hurt, her left and right eye blinks are a little out of sync.
Promise something other than damage faces for next week's screenshot Saturday! I've been busy on the dialogue system, so maybe that!
Time for the obligatory fourth wall breaking dialogue test!
#GoblinGirlGame #pixelart #ドット絵 #indiedev
#gamemaker #scribble #chatterbox
I haven't implemented choices yet but plan to do that in the future, which will really unlock the power of yarn/Chatterbox.
Having access to a rich narrative design tool like this has already sparked some great ideas for future features in this game.
For #screenshotsaturday this week, I have a mockup of a campsite area. If you discovered enough secrets on the floors before, you'll be able to bank your new items and use the camp as a shortcut/save spot. If not you can still continue on to later floors.
A thing I want to try to preserve from Druaga, or to use a more modern example, the chains of secrets in Spelunky, is the idea of an exploratory run. A session where the goal might not be to make permanent progress or win, but to poke at secrets you haven't solved yet and add to your knowledge.
Cozy little goblin camp. I wonder what's for dinner?
🐛🍳👩🍳
Didn't quite get this out in time for Screenshot Saturday, but still surprised that I managed to fully implement my mockup from last week in so little time!
Including a bunch of stuff I'd put in my "polish this later" list, which I promptly ignored and implemented.
Experimenting with using my script expression tags to give character mouth flap animations while dialogue is drawing.
Going to automate and improve this later by hooking directly into Scribble's typist object, so the mouth will also automatically close during delays mid dialogue.
Bluesky has started an important ship building project.
https://bsky.app/profile/spookysquid.bsky.social/post/3lxsmistgq22f
Really happy with these little action emote pop ups for examining and talking.
Is she REALLY that forgetful?
Going to dive a bit into the code for this one 🧵
I mentioned awhile back that I'd come up with an idea for a way to automate dialogue animation with basically no extra work. The above is the result!
My original plan was to just have a static open and closed version of each facial expression depending on who was talking.
Here's what the script for the new conversation looks like. A mix of native Chatterbox/Yarn and Scribble markup plus some of my own custom stuff. Details in alt text.
The real driver of all the portrait stuff is the markup:
[character_name,expression]
Which runs this GameMaker GML function.
Breaking that function down. It's designed for both flexibility and laziness.
First look for stage direction keywords. Right now that's just "exit" which lets me force a portrait to exit the screen before the conversation ends. I plan to add more.
if the typist isn't typing text this frame, it sets the mouth to the closed frame and pauses the animation, but lets the bob tween complete.
This means that the mouth flaps match up with the text typing and the result looks pretty close to hand keyed animated mouth flap without all the effort.
Obviously in a world in infinite art resources, fully animating these with proper phoneme shapes would look even better.
But realistically that's completely out of scope for a one artist game. I think this strikes a nice balance between that and just doing simple static images!
Bonus #screenshotsaturday!
After you talk to the elf you'll get this extra bit of text when examining the stone egg again.
Chatterbox makes it very easy to add little hidden bits of dialogue like this. Great library!
#goblingirlgame #gamemaker
Talkin' about something tasty!
#screenshotsaturday #monstergirl #GoblinGirlGame #pixelart #ドット絵
BUMP COMBAT!
#goblingirlgame #indiedev #gamemaker #pixelart #ドット絵 #bumpcombat
Have enough game now in #goblingirlgame that I made a little demo with a tutorial so I can throw it in front of friends.
I do a regular library work session with
@matthammill once a week, and we've been referring to this state as our respective projects being "game shaped now"
@heroicthehobbyist Glad you find it interesting! Always feel a bit self indulgent sharing my code since my background is on the art side.
I'm actually just on the generic mastodon.social 😅
@ThePrimo It's an unannounced/unnamed game project I'm working on. A Tower of Druaga-like starring a terrible goblin girl.
Still early on getting various systems up and running. There's a ton more dev posts in this thread if you scroll up through it!
Miguel 🦑 Sternberg
Farbs
Ratsnake Games 🔞
Heroic 
MVU
J M Berntson
ThePrimo 