Baies pas mûres

 

Eh si, il me reste encore des gribouilles du 1er Janvier 2022 à poster ... dont cette idée d'un berry-bat pas encore mûr qui essaie de se s'attaquer à Bilou mais qui reste attaché à sa branche ... qui a bien fait rire les gens qui l'ont vu, d'ailleurs.

Mais pourquoi, me direz-vous peut-être ? Eh bien outre son rôle de bow-wow rigolo, ces baies encore vertes sont plus dures et pourraient donc rester à trainer sur le sol une fois assommées par un saut. Quelque-chose qui pourrait se révéler utile dans les montagnes, par exemple, où les Applemen ne poussent pas...

There are sketches in a notepad, which were drawn on new year's day two years ago and that haven't been blogged yet. This is one of them. J.L.N and I were revisiting the green zone baddies and came up with a variant of the berrybat that isn't ready to leave the vines. 

It would play a bit like a bow-wow, it would be green, to show it isn't matured, and it will likely be a challenge to animate, especially if I want the vines to be a bit flexible (at least, flexible enough to justify they cannot suport Bilou's weight). But they would be harder than their matured, flying counterpart, meaning that they would stay around once stunned, could be picked up and thrown on things to stun them.

Il était aussi question de s'en servir pour faire enfler certains piafs et s'en servir comme plate-forme.

map.poke

I will try to get energy again for DS development. Not that I have dropped any Bilou-related activity, but I would like it to lead to code, and not just sketches. One of the last notes I wrote were about live-patching the map from scripts. That was before going on short vacation and no, I did not have my source code along this times (kids have grown up ;)

I know I've been tempted to dismiss it as "not so important", "low priority", but then I realised: if I want to start working on new controllers like "hanging" or "between", I will likely need special tiles to use them. And if I have to go for a full power- NDS- wifi stick- NUC- emulator cycle every time I need a new tile somewhere, I'll never be done. (proof: it's been two month and I haven't done that a single time).

I already have methods in the FlatWorld class that could take care of updating graphics and physics layers as needed. The thing that has been holding me back so far is the fact that this class isn't reachable from ScriptParser.

But well, things aren't as bad as I thought: GameScript keeps a physWorld reference to the objetct that has the desired interface. We're just one getWorld() call away from being able to implement map patching...

Once I'll have the a tile flagged as "hang here", I'll give a try to a new Hanging state ... Even without fancy swinging animation, it should already take us much closer to the gameplay I want for "dreamland"...

edit: just as I was checking the state of my working folders, I found the old maps I had considered merging into the current demo. So I went on and coded a 'secret exit' special block that could send us to one such old map ... And haven't tried it yet because I of course don't have any block of that type on my map ^^"

SMBW: comme dans le jeu du blob

J'ai bien souri quand j'ai vu la gelée quelque part dans les mines fongiques de Super Mario Wonder: un clin d'oeil bien vu à une mécanique jusque là unique d'un niveau de Super Mario Land 2.	J'ai souri encore quand Mario s'est vu changé en blob à son tour, collant aux plafonds (comme avec le très réussi power-up foreuse) et suivant le parcours sur les murs ...

Vous pensez bien que quand J.L.N est arrivé là-dedans, il est parti dans un "wouahh. C'est génial! On peut aller Partout!", parce que évidemment, la mécanique est entièrement neuve dans la série Mario. Enfin, il y avait quand-même un peu de ça avec la super-étoile dans Yoshi's Island et il a joué à des niveaux de Rayman où on court sur les murs, mais dans les deux cas, si on s'arrête, on tombe, alors qu'ici on a tout le loisir d'explorer le niveau pendant qu'on colle au mur...

My son was all hype when he discovered that Mario could turn into a blob and slide on walls. Something unprecendented in the Mario series (well, the super-star of Yoshi's Island works a bit like that but hasn't played them), and unlike the run-on-walls in Rayman Origins/Legends, he can stay on wall/ceiling even if he stops moving to avoid obstacles.

Personnally, I discovered it with a déjà-vu smile. There was an Amiga game featuring a blob sliding on walls as main character. I had seen that in a magazine, but I couldn't recall its name to check. I called tweeters for help, and eventually stumbled upon a XXth-century-like website hosting the list of all the 90s video games featuring a blob.

Mais moi, ça m'a surtout rappelé une vignette dans un vieux magazine de l'époque Amiga. Sauf que pas moyen de me rappeler son nom pour vérifier. j'y avais repensé au moment ou "the blob" est sorti, quoi qu'en réalité le gameplay serait plutôt à rapprocher de Super Morph auquel je n'ai pas joué non plus (mais j'aurais bien voulu).

Ce n'était pas non plus Super Putty, toujours dans la catégorie "plate-forme avec un blob bleu", mais bien Globdule, un jeu de Psygnosys (!) tout en rampes et en arrondis avec un blob bleu qui est mauve, apparemment... tout en glissades et en adresse.

Et si j'ai finalement remis le doigt dessus, c'est parce qu'un internaute maîtrisant le japonais a un jour décidé de faire un recensement de tous les jeux 8-bit et 16-bit où on contrôle un blob. Eh oui. C'est ça aussi Internet...

So I could finally identify Globdule by Psygnosis as the game I had in mind

RTTI vs getSubClass()

I was doing OS development when I started learning C++, and then I went on with DS development. In both case, the amount of memory you're willing to devote to the code of your program is limited. I remember I heard of -fno-rtti on the osdev wiki and thought "well, yeah, that makes sense". I'd rather not have something I know almost nothing about making key decisions on my objects when I have an instance of SomethingGeneric and want to turn it into SomethingMoreSpecific to use its advanced API for any purpose.

Here and now, I had something where I'd be in a similar situation, but there's actually just one way it could be more specific. I had added SomethingGeneric::isSpecific() virtual function and used it to see whether I should reinterpret_cast<SomethingMoreSpecific&>(myGeneric) here and there. Then the colleague who reviewed suggested it might better be a dynamic_cast<SomethingMoreSpecific&> instead ... or we could have SomethingGeneric::getSpecific() instead. and, well, yeah. I like that.

That wouldn't work with SomethingImplementedWithOpenGL vs. SomethingImplementedWithDirect3D vs. SomethingImplementedWithBlitterAndCopper, but for this use case, it's just fine. I don't have more weight on the virtual table ... I don't depend on unknown run-time ... I don't need to add exceptions catching in case of std::bad_cast ... So long, dynamic_cast: I won't need you, after all.

Les cages

Délivrer des animaux dans des cages, c'est tout à fait dans les attributions d'un héro tout rond tel que Bilou ... Le fait de les délivrer, ça justifie qu'ils soient disposés à aider Bilou malgré la difficulté apparente, et ça donne des combinaisons clé/serrures pour le level design. 

Mais une question restait sans réponse: "qui les a mis en cage" ? Et qu'est-ce qui a pu motiver ça. C'est pas comme si on avait un Bowser dans l'univers du jeu ... J'ai posé la question à J.L.N en fin de promenade, et il m'a proposé une cage-à-pattes qui court derrière les oiseaux pour les enfermer. Sympathique assurément, mais d'un point de vue game design, ça pose plus de question que ça n'en résout ... mais ça m'a inspiré une variante des berry-bats qu'on pourrait baptiser cage-berries, une sorte de plante pirhana qui ont la dent longue.

So, there shall be mountain peaks and gaps in-between. There shall be ropes that Bilou can hang to. That last part has became almost a mandatory part of platforming since Rayman Origins (or even New Super Mario Bros ? ). So at some point, I figured out that I could replace the need for "wide floating things" by "ropes carried by two round-shaped birds".

That sounds like a nice gameplay idea, so I wanted to extended with key-and-locks mechanics with caged birds. And unfortunately that got me trapped into a design pitfall: how did they got trapped into cages ?

I know, the question is fairly irrelevant in terms of gameplay: when you knock a question block in Mario, you don't worry about who has been placing coins in there and why. But it turns out I do when it's my own world. And since I've long decided that there is no global invasion army in Bilou's Adventure, I don't have any off-the-shelf baddies that could have captured all the helpful birds.

Hopefully, when I asked J.L.N about it, he suggested some legged-cage that would have caught them on its own. Something reminiscent of legged-chests in recent platformers, I guess. That might have worked, but that triggers other game design questions like "how fast should it run away", "can it leap over small gaps", which I'd rather not address because all I truly need is a cage to lock the bird in it.

His suggestion did inspire me sort of giant berries with fangs that locks the bird in. It's not moving much as the berry is still on its vine, but it could move enough to make animation interesting. It integrates quite well with the return-of-the-berrybats already envisioned for Peaks Zone. I could give it a frog-tongue to catch back birds if we stay too close ... and above all that, J.L.N likes it ;)