Not-so-utilizable JsonUtility
Wherever We Go by Newsboys
I've adopted this song as Aubrey's theme on Zelda RPG. n.n
Hi all. Not a whole lot of interest to report outside my usual game dev, MU stuff (which I should rename to RP stuff come to think of it), and game reviews categories. Life shuffles along.
The ASCRS app has hit another stumbling block. I was using Unity's JsonUtility class to turn data into JSON strings and back to facilitate network communication. Turns out that it currently doesn't have the capability to handle certain data structures, like the Dictionary class which I use for a lot of things. -.-; The Unity folks say they're working on making that part of it, but in the meantime, it seems I have to create my own ToJson and FromJson methods for a lot of my data classes. This also involves making some utility functions to help with general serializing and deserializing of JSON. It actually took me a while to come up with a name for the class to hold those functions, since JsonUtility is taken. X) I settled for JsonSupport.
On the Zelda RPG, I got Tommy Twiggins (my roguish deku scrub char) peripherally involved in the plot by having him show up when a doomed warrior named Esava was teleported into the swamp. Esava had fought the heroes up on Snowhead Mountain and lost, then provided them with vital information about how to get home to Hyrule despite the fact that this activated a magic seal that would kill him. Mituni (crazy Gerudo pirate chef) teleported him to the swamp just before he died in the hopes the witches there would be able to help him (first time I've seen that she's displayed IC magic abilities, although she has often spoofed wild things happening for lulz). He was found by Risa (a socially-clumsy Gerudo based on a minor Breath of the Wild character of the same name) and dragged to Kotake's hut, with Tommy following along simply out of sensing opportunity from an unusual situation. Kotake brewed up a potion (using a twig snatched from Tommy's head as one of the ingredients) that brought Esava back to life, and after calming down from the shock of being brought back to the land of the living, Esava decided to go help out the heroes some more. BY FORTUNATE COINCIDENCE, he had previously established a rapport with a HUGE WYVERN that lived in the swamp, and said wyvern was able to fly up to Snowhead and bring everybody back. So now, according to Tommy, Esava owes Tommy a life-debt, and by extension everybody who got rescued also owes Tommy a life-debt. n.n
Gunman Clive HD Collection:
I got this by spending some points in my My Nintendo account. As typically happens when they outright give you a game just for points (as opposed to offering a discount), it's nothing spectacular, just a small game that wasn't wildly successful commercially. The HD Collection is Gunman Clive and Gunman Clive 2 as a package, presumably with better graphics...although it's hard to see how higher definition could improve it very much.
The first and most obvious thing to notice about Gunman Clive is the visual style. It's a 2D platformer implemented with 3D models, but those models are rendered as if drawn with simple pencil and paper. Certain objects are given a bit of washed-out hue to help distinguish them as enemies, hazards, etc., but it purposely looks like an old-west wanted poster. I can't say it's all that appealing unless you're a huge fan of such a style, although it's a clever way to cut art costs and have a good excuse for it. Of course, I don't know how much effort they had to put into achieving that style of rendering.
In gameplay terms, Gunman Clive is a love-letter to NES-era run-and-gun platformers. There is heavy influence of and reference to Mega Man, including appearing-and-disappearing block sections and traps that emit periodic lightning. There's also a nod to Contra with drops that change the way your gun works -- generally making it more powerful, but in some cases a little trickier to work with. Rather than lives, you have a life meter, and you can restart the current stage as many times as you need to without worrying about being sent all the way back to the beginning of the game.
The story is pretty basic and told silently. The game starts with a damsel in a music-hall dress, waving her arms and shouting for help as she's carried off in a speeding cart. Enter the hero, who follows after and guns down any desperadoes who stand in his way. His quest will take him through the old west town, the abandoned mine (with obligatory mine-cart roller coaster section), a forest settlement, a train ride (with engine that turns out to be a mecha enemy), and TO THE MOON! Yeah, very much not taking itself seriously.
The second game in the series is pretty similar, though it cranks up the difficulty a bit and dabbles in some alternative gameplay. There are a couple of sections that involve a Star Fox-esque moving-down-a-corridor view, and the platformer stages have a lot more special mechanics, like platforms that fall to pieces and bear you along with them and zones that change the direction of gravity.
Bottom line? If you really like old-school platformers made by indie studios with intentionally bizarre moments, this might be worth the small price tag for you. I can't call it a must-have in general, though.
Flinthook:
I really wanted and expected to like this one more than I did. The mechanic for which the game is named is grappling with a hook on latch points scattered liberally about. When I actually tried it, though, it felt a bit disappointing. I think the main problem for me is that the hook yanks you straight toward the latch point and slings you a tiny bit beyond, whereas what I enjoy is more swinging ala Bionic Commando, the ninja rope of the Worms series, etc.
I'm getting ahead of things by talking about that specific mechanic, even though it's arguably the central one, so here's the overview. You're a space pirate who works solo raiding other space pirates' ships, grabbing what loot you can but primarily interested in ghost gems that will lead you to kidnapped ghost beings that have something to do with some important lighthouse. The story details are rather sparse, they make you collect pages of 'lore' from special rooms in order to glean info about what's going on. The pirate ships are randomly-generated collections of rooms full of spikes, razor traps, auto-cannons, and of course nasty pirates of every galactic species. You have to blast your way through three such ships in order to find enough ghost gems to locate the captain of a pirate fleet, then face that captain in a climactic boss battle. After succeeding in three such runs, you get to do a FULL run of all three in order followed by one more boss.
As with most Rogue-likes, you should expect to fail a lot until you learn the ropes of the game pretty well. Ironically, I find it's harder to do the last three-ships-and-a-boss run than the full run, because of the mechanic of perks. Perks are little modifiers that make it easier for you to accomplish your goals -- things like increased gold rewards, more health, better chance of critical hits, etc. You're allowed to equip a very limited amount of perks before beginning a run, and you can also find or purchase perks during a run that count only during that run. Thus, when you do a full run, you have more opportunity to build up perks before reaching the later bosses, and you need every advantage you can get. The third boss captain is a real pain, he does an attack that puts spiky obstructions on all the latch points and you have to shoot them off in midair in order to safely use them. =.=; I found increasing your shot range to be by far the most useful type of perk, by the way. The base range of you blasma pistol is pretty dismal, requiring you to get dangerously close to enemies.
Bottom line? It's a decent game, just not as fun as I'd hoped and a little unfair. Get it if you like procedurally-generated platformers.
Click to viewI've adopted this song as Aubrey's theme on Zelda RPG. n.n
Hi all. Not a whole lot of interest to report outside my usual game dev, MU stuff (which I should rename to RP stuff come to think of it), and game reviews categories. Life shuffles along.
The ASCRS app has hit another stumbling block. I was using Unity's JsonUtility class to turn data into JSON strings and back to facilitate network communication. Turns out that it currently doesn't have the capability to handle certain data structures, like the Dictionary class which I use for a lot of things. -.-; The Unity folks say they're working on making that part of it, but in the meantime, it seems I have to create my own ToJson and FromJson methods for a lot of my data classes. This also involves making some utility functions to help with general serializing and deserializing of JSON. It actually took me a while to come up with a name for the class to hold those functions, since JsonUtility is taken. X) I settled for JsonSupport.
On the Zelda RPG, I got Tommy Twiggins (my roguish deku scrub char) peripherally involved in the plot by having him show up when a doomed warrior named Esava was teleported into the swamp. Esava had fought the heroes up on Snowhead Mountain and lost, then provided them with vital information about how to get home to Hyrule despite the fact that this activated a magic seal that would kill him. Mituni (crazy Gerudo pirate chef) teleported him to the swamp just before he died in the hopes the witches there would be able to help him (first time I've seen that she's displayed IC magic abilities, although she has often spoofed wild things happening for lulz). He was found by Risa (a socially-clumsy Gerudo based on a minor Breath of the Wild character of the same name) and dragged to Kotake's hut, with Tommy following along simply out of sensing opportunity from an unusual situation. Kotake brewed up a potion (using a twig snatched from Tommy's head as one of the ingredients) that brought Esava back to life, and after calming down from the shock of being brought back to the land of the living, Esava decided to go help out the heroes some more. BY FORTUNATE COINCIDENCE, he had previously established a rapport with a HUGE WYVERN that lived in the swamp, and said wyvern was able to fly up to Snowhead and bring everybody back. So now, according to Tommy, Esava owes Tommy a life-debt, and by extension everybody who got rescued also owes Tommy a life-debt. n.n
Gunman Clive HD Collection:
I got this by spending some points in my My Nintendo account. As typically happens when they outright give you a game just for points (as opposed to offering a discount), it's nothing spectacular, just a small game that wasn't wildly successful commercially. The HD Collection is Gunman Clive and Gunman Clive 2 as a package, presumably with better graphics...although it's hard to see how higher definition could improve it very much.
The first and most obvious thing to notice about Gunman Clive is the visual style. It's a 2D platformer implemented with 3D models, but those models are rendered as if drawn with simple pencil and paper. Certain objects are given a bit of washed-out hue to help distinguish them as enemies, hazards, etc., but it purposely looks like an old-west wanted poster. I can't say it's all that appealing unless you're a huge fan of such a style, although it's a clever way to cut art costs and have a good excuse for it. Of course, I don't know how much effort they had to put into achieving that style of rendering.
In gameplay terms, Gunman Clive is a love-letter to NES-era run-and-gun platformers. There is heavy influence of and reference to Mega Man, including appearing-and-disappearing block sections and traps that emit periodic lightning. There's also a nod to Contra with drops that change the way your gun works -- generally making it more powerful, but in some cases a little trickier to work with. Rather than lives, you have a life meter, and you can restart the current stage as many times as you need to without worrying about being sent all the way back to the beginning of the game.
The story is pretty basic and told silently. The game starts with a damsel in a music-hall dress, waving her arms and shouting for help as she's carried off in a speeding cart. Enter the hero, who follows after and guns down any desperadoes who stand in his way. His quest will take him through the old west town, the abandoned mine (with obligatory mine-cart roller coaster section), a forest settlement, a train ride (with engine that turns out to be a mecha enemy), and TO THE MOON! Yeah, very much not taking itself seriously.
The second game in the series is pretty similar, though it cranks up the difficulty a bit and dabbles in some alternative gameplay. There are a couple of sections that involve a Star Fox-esque moving-down-a-corridor view, and the platformer stages have a lot more special mechanics, like platforms that fall to pieces and bear you along with them and zones that change the direction of gravity.
Bottom line? If you really like old-school platformers made by indie studios with intentionally bizarre moments, this might be worth the small price tag for you. I can't call it a must-have in general, though.
Flinthook:
I really wanted and expected to like this one more than I did. The mechanic for which the game is named is grappling with a hook on latch points scattered liberally about. When I actually tried it, though, it felt a bit disappointing. I think the main problem for me is that the hook yanks you straight toward the latch point and slings you a tiny bit beyond, whereas what I enjoy is more swinging ala Bionic Commando, the ninja rope of the Worms series, etc.
I'm getting ahead of things by talking about that specific mechanic, even though it's arguably the central one, so here's the overview. You're a space pirate who works solo raiding other space pirates' ships, grabbing what loot you can but primarily interested in ghost gems that will lead you to kidnapped ghost beings that have something to do with some important lighthouse. The story details are rather sparse, they make you collect pages of 'lore' from special rooms in order to glean info about what's going on. The pirate ships are randomly-generated collections of rooms full of spikes, razor traps, auto-cannons, and of course nasty pirates of every galactic species. You have to blast your way through three such ships in order to find enough ghost gems to locate the captain of a pirate fleet, then face that captain in a climactic boss battle. After succeeding in three such runs, you get to do a FULL run of all three in order followed by one more boss.
As with most Rogue-likes, you should expect to fail a lot until you learn the ropes of the game pretty well. Ironically, I find it's harder to do the last three-ships-and-a-boss run than the full run, because of the mechanic of perks. Perks are little modifiers that make it easier for you to accomplish your goals -- things like increased gold rewards, more health, better chance of critical hits, etc. You're allowed to equip a very limited amount of perks before beginning a run, and you can also find or purchase perks during a run that count only during that run. Thus, when you do a full run, you have more opportunity to build up perks before reaching the later bosses, and you need every advantage you can get. The third boss captain is a real pain, he does an attack that puts spiky obstructions on all the latch points and you have to shoot them off in midair in order to safely use them. =.=; I found increasing your shot range to be by far the most useful type of perk, by the way. The base range of you blasma pistol is pretty dismal, requiring you to get dangerously close to enemies.
Bottom line? It's a decent game, just not as fun as I'd hoped and a little unfair. Get it if you like procedurally-generated platformers.