Hempuli's blog

Well, that sure took a long time! I’ve promised to release a tutorial of how my map generation works multiple times over the years; for various reasons I haven’t managed to fulfill that promise until now. But better late than never, eh?? EH???

I kinda want to add a tutorial for generating towns as well, plus adding names for the different biomes. On top of that, road generation & area-of-influence generation are the two big things missing; the former is basically just A* so it’s not super interesting, but the latter might be a cool thing to add as well. We’ll see! No promises.

GET THE GENERATOR HERE!

The generator is fully MMF2-made, but should run on Clickteam Fusion 2.5, assuming that you have the plugins required. There’s a nice little executable included, so not owning MMF2/CF2.5 doesn’t prevent you from toying around with the generator!

The plugins required are:
– ‘Surface’ by Looki: https://lukasmeller.com/mmf/extensions/beta/Surface1.5.zip
– ‘MT Random object’ by Chris Branch: https://www.clickteam.com/webftp/files/mmf2/Exts/MMF2ExtPack1.exe

I’m not sure how the MMF2 Extension Packs work these days since the program itself has been discontinued; if you can’t install it, tell me and I’ll try to resolve the issue (or contact Clickteam).

Yay! Spent today’s stream working on a new boss for ESA 2! The bosses in this game are much much larger than most of the ones in ESA 1, and working on them (and especially the graphical assets) takes a lot more time; luckily though I got a pretty nice ‘feel’ for this boss so it shouldn’t take too much tweaking to get it to work nicely.

At the beginning of the stream I also fixed some bugs in the map generator. That one is also coming along sweetly right now! :)

Today’s stream was very productive! 3 new enemies were added (although two were variations of the same enemy), a new room was implemented and a new trap was introduced to the game. The chat was also fairly active, which is always neat. The swamp area I’m working on right now is a very enjoyable biome; making it will probably be a joy(??)

I also worked on the map generator a bit at the end of the stream! Neat to get something done on that as well for a change.

Today’s stream was spent on an entirely new area in ESA 2! I added 3 new rooms, 2 new enemies and a new environmental hazard. The new area feels somewhat static right now but hopefully some animated machinery and such can alleviate that. Moving platforms are proving to be problematic once again, and a feature related to them I was planning for today didn’t make it. I’ll have to look at that later.

No work done on Map Generator or Snake Game, although I’ve worked a lot on the former during the past week.

Today I made the basics of a new tileset to the game; my intention was to get to work on a new area today but alas, things took a bit longer than I thought they would and I didn’t really feel too motivated to actually work on that. I added a new enemy type, shown above, along with random floating debris that can be seen while floating in space. I’ll have to draw quite a few variations of that, though.

I also worked some on the map generator, mostly fixing bugs. I feel simultaneously excited & intimidated by the things I’m working on right now in that project.

There they are! I added 3 new enemies to ESA 2 today along with tiny tweaks. Making them took more time than I estimated, but it was fun and I finally got around to implementing a ricocheting effect for enemies with shells.

Snake game got also some early work on the player losing while inside their plane. Making a nice-looking effect for that will be really time-consuming, I’m afraid! Also fixed various smaller bugs here and there.
No map generator work tonight.

Today’s ESA 2 progress was way slower than I’d have hoped, mainly due to a huge amount of tiny annoying glitches related to the new feature I’ve been working on. I tinkered with those and added some new content but ultimately gave up on trying to get everything working and instead decided to look at the glitches outside of the stream.

Snake game saw a return since I had figured out a way to fix a really horrible crashng bug in it! I spent most of the stream implementing features of the Snake Game engine in lua, but progress was fairly good and the attempted lua fix seems to do what it’s meant to, namely increase the FPS (although I had MMF’s debugger open while testing for a long time and interpreted the related slowdown as indicative of additional needed optimization). There were a couple weird and potentially annoying glitches left in the game after the conversion was done, but hopefully those can be ironed out.

Map generator saw the addition of lighthouses! That is all.

In today’s stream I ended up having to give up my original plans due to a particularly nasty design issue. I might have an idea of how to fix it thanks to Mokesmoe suggesting neat solutions, but I’ll have to implement that still and it probably wont be nice! I ended up working more on little details and adding a bunch of powerups along with polishing certain bits that needed it. In the end progress was pretty nice overall. I also implemented a bit of stuff for the world generator, but again public opinion made me turn back to ESA 2 after a while.

Today’s stream was spent on a new boss in ESA 2! This one is possibly somewhat “nostalgic” for players of ESA and will also hold some (hopefully) neat plot importance. I got the basic structure of the fight working fairly quickly, but the arena and everything related to the encounter is really bare-bones and in need of heavy polish.

I started the stream with the map generator but quickly changed to ESA 2 due to people mentioning wanting to see it being worked on, haha. Apparently the stream was also picked as a “community pick”, meaning that it was showing as the “main” stream of the #gamedev tag. Cool??

…Well, almost. I’ve felt that ESA 2 has been progressing fairly slowly, but when I checked last week, a surprisingly large amount of the map was done! There’s tons of work ahead for sure, though.

Tonight I added 3 new rooms, although 2 of them ended up being really rough drafts just to get to the next boss, on which I also worked a little bit. This boss is one I’ve been looking forward to, because it marks a rather important plot point and I have a fairly cool idea for how the boss might work. We’ll see!

I intended to work more on other projects, too, but ended up only concentrating on ESA 2. Oh well!