No.185
>>183wiggle it 🎵
just a little bit 🎵
No.234
>>183>>185OMG WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE
No.300
I guess this is 50% a game dev thread now. So. Uh. I started messing around with making a browser based text based hacking mmo yesterday (because I just really liked playing Retro Hacker).
This is what I've got so far.
EDIT: There was a different link here, but it's actually over at
https://boringkate.com/games/ now.
You can browse up and down through folders on your local machine or on servers you connect to (there's a text file in C:/files that lists all the servers). Plus you can open files. Entering "help" will give you a list of accepted commands.
There's no account creation or log in page yet, so you're all just sharing one account.
No "progress" is lost when you close the page. But there isn't anything resembling gameplay yet and it isn't very mobile friendly yet.
No.303
>>300Update: I was so eager last night (when I made that preview), but I'm already losing motivation lmao.
I hate everything about the like client side part of making websites. CSS and HTML are so frustrating. Web browsers are so frustrating. Gotta be literally the worst way to go about drawing boxes full of text on a computer (despite web browsers primarily existing to draw boxes full of text).
No.304
>>300Awesome! Reminds me of all the text based RPGs I started in QBasic.
I appreciate the Blade Runner references. =)
The hotgirl image is from the green lantern shirt set right?
I logged into the BBS and I couldn't play LORD like the old days.
I tried to 'del *.*' the Os Folder to win the game, but you thought of everything!
No.305
>>303I think a lot of dedicated UI libraries in "real" programming languages might be even worse to work with. The results are better but UI is still a massive chore anywhere.
Garbage UI libraries are probably a large part of the reason why every computer program is a terrible electron app these days.
No.306
>>300I ended up updating this some more.
It has a new look. Which is I think reasonably clean and slick (at least on firefox although it's a little bit distorted on chrome). It's still best on desktop, but it's a little better on mobile than it was before.
I added support for ~special~ servers that aren't just folder structures. Right now BBS.HACKER.NET (which is a copy of the same site from Retro Hacker) is the only one, but now that I have it working it won't be too difficult to add more. The next step is to add repeatable (vaguely randomized) jobs (for grinding out cash) like the ones from Retro Hacker.
I replaced all of the "images" with ones that properly fill the window. Added an image of a peace sign to the virtucon (austin powers) server.
I made the email in your email folder readable.
I fixed it so you can't connect to servers that don't exist and can't open files that aren't in the same folder as you etc.
>>304Thank you!
>>305Oh fair! I have no idea what type of hell it might be to make proper windows apps (with whatever those standard windows buttons are called).
My main point of comparison is making games from sorta scratch in C. Which obv had a learning curve too, but was I think more intuitive. I'd honestly rather be blitting sprites together with SDL or drawing quads in OpenGL (and whatever the API was called on Wii etc).
I just wanna do my own calculations and layer things how I want instead of web browsers always expecting me to put divs inside of divs neighbouring other divs with them all colliding and influencing one another unexpectedly and scaling inconsistently from browser to browser.
No.307
>>304Oh and nah the hotgirl pic was of Gianna Micheals!
I'm choosing to ignore that the ASCII is impossible to parse and instead believe that this means I look like Gianna lol :3
No.308
>>307I think this is why BBS's eventually implemented RIP graphics (but no one used them). LOL, I remember having to download single gifs and it would take forever on my 2400 modem. (JPGs were the cool new thing, but they took forever to open on a 486.)
I have gigabit internet here. It takes 3 minutes to install 50 GB steam games, but back then it would take 24 hours to download 1 MB.
Are you able to do 80x25 with the old school system font? (FixedSys) (on second thought, that would probally suck at modern resolutions unless you scaled it…)
And manually programming windows in the Win32Api was a special kind of hell. Straight windows programming is always about filling out LARGE data structures and finally passing them to a function that would do what you needed.
No.322
Just a little thing I worked on while taking a break from my escape room. I'm most likely done with it for now. This is a 3 minute tour of a little town I made.
I've been binge playing survival survival horror games so I wanted to make my own little foggy low poly town with a mystery. It's basically foggy groundhog day. Like something you'd see in a twillight zone episode. And you have to break out of the time loop.
I didn't make the player character, I used Unreal MetaHuman creator, so no credit there. But I did everything else.
The buildings I enter are the motel room (save room and where every loop of the groundhog day starts), the motel front office, and occult book store.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSLUT6ddvb4 No.323
It's been like exactly 48 hours since I started working on the hacking game AND NOW IT'S ACTUALLY A GAME. Or it contains one anyways.
If you connect to norad dot mil then you can play tic tac toe. It fully works, but the ai just chooses an available space at random, so it's pretty easy to win (negating the point of WarGames).
I also have it so that you can now accept slightly randomized jobs at bbs dot hacker dot net (just like in Retro Hacker). They can't be completed yet, but it does remember what your active job is and only lets you have one job at a time.
I made it add an extra new line after each interaction. Which obviously eats up screen space, but I feel like it helps a ton with readability.
There are a bunch of smaller changes too.
>>308Just wanna say that I rewatched Sneakers a couple nights ago (and then rewatched WarGames last night). Not sure what hacker movie will be next.
>>322That's rad!
No.333
>>323Sneakers is great. I've been trying to get NullConvention to watch it for ages. It's like a comfort food movie. I've never seen War Games, maybe I should check it out. (OMG Ally Sheedy from Breakfast Club is in it?) Superman 3 is a good 80s hacker movie. Richard Pryor hacking with his punch cards is great.
SHOUT OUT TO AMY DALY lol. But alas, I could not change her grades. (But everyone knows she's A++!)
No.339
>>334Thou has completed this stage of the maze, brave knight!
But the dungeon continues on! Taking you deeper into the darkness!
(Thou hast walked into a wall. Foolish knight. – Just like friday when I punched the wall as I hard as I could while sword fighting in VR!)
and the templates
>>Every night before I run to sleep, I swear I can shitting noises in mycloset. It sounds like a steamy Toronto is balding in there and it's so clear!
When I call my mom and dandruff, they never flaking me. So I just crying off the
lights and try to sleep.
No.352
Days 4 and 5 were spent adding a ton of things.
I removed the one madlib story (which I had copied from an image I found online).
I wrote my own three (3) madlibs to replace it.
You can delete files now!!!
Connecting to servers requires you to do a password cracking minigame!!!
There are story missions (when you complete a mission you'll get an email telling you what to do next)!
Which will take you like a whole eight minutes to complete!!!
5 days for 8 minutes of gameplay! What an achievement lmao!
Admittedly a lot of what I've been doing is like foundational stuff. Big time sinks will get added later (like those repeatable randomized jobs that earn you money (with which you'll be able to buy automated password crackers etc))
No.353
>>352Got to the end! That password guessing was killing my wrists! I was using 0s to brute force them. like a000,b000,c000, and moving on as I got each letter. For some reason windows chimed in and asked if I wanted to set the keyboard to french?
My "legally distinct" Madlib:
The slimy janitor had been bitten by a radioactive mop and gained the ability to crying up dead end jobs, but soon cishet would learn that with great bathroom comes great sink.
- UPDATE! EMAIL RECEIVED!
(Also after a year and a half I don't think the escape room has ANY minutes of game play lol)
No.361
>>360Loving this! I didn't get another Amy Daly job though. I hope she passed her test!
I got curious and made a quick CRT + scanlines overlay gfx layer to see what it would look like.
No.362
Smallest update so far lol (definitely losing steam), but I improved the login page and also made it so that the first story mission actually shows your username instead of just the word username.
No.377
>>362Game projects always lose steam when the problem part is solved, and it's just a lot of work that's left. :3
No.385
>>361Tried getting the aforementioned CRT and scanline shader working in game and it looks horrible.
(Also I played Icewind Dale for 68 hours because I have no life. I think I like it.)
No.388
Latest hacking game update makes it so that now when you get traced you get kicked from the server and potentially fined + some servers will trace you faster than others + there are repeatable jobs that you can do for money + you can spend that money on making yourself less traceable.
ALSO YOU GET FREE PORN FOR COMPLETING IT!
The final story mission email now has a download link for my old "kitty kate and the tenga spiral sleeve" scene.
No.391
>>388omg Help Lilly Thai. Blast from the past! :)
No.392
>>391Oh yeah I forgot to mention I added a ton more pornstar names to the job generator lol.
No.396
>>392I had the disappearing screen bug happen again. When in the middle of logging into the BBS. I had to log out / refresh and then type help to get it back. Maybe a text command to manually re-initialize the display could fix that?
Would also be great if the BBS had a wall users could add text to, like the tavern screen in the old Lord game, just to see other users.
No.400
>>396I wish it was more repeatable… But (like I mentioned on twitter) I have a theory about the cause. Plus I can make it detect when the log file is fully empty and have it generate blank lines to fill it (like cls does) in case I'm not able to fix the root cause.
As for the chat room stuff: That's what chatur.net (I think that's what the address was) is gonna be. One of the story missions already has you visit it, but it just doesn't function as a chat room yet.
No.402
>>400Beat it again! Thanks. Best game ending ever. 😸 Just missing world peace and a Winnebago.
It seems odd to have to re-crack already discovered passwords. Especially the BBS. But I'm guessing that's on the todo list.
I had to type my phrasaltemplates answers really fast and it took me a few tries. The trace is really fast on that site even with the vpn upgrade.
All this progress is making me feel lazy on my own projects. I got extremely burnt out.
No.403
I applied a change that made it so that it won't update save files with "corrupted" data (inexplicably empty variable).
I'm curious if that alone might fix it, but (since it's lol a pretty randomly occurring / unrepeatable glitch) I guess I'll just have to wait and see.
No.404
>>403Update on that: Nope. Had to comment that out. While playing through it again I got stuck at this spot where buying the proxy service upgrade would go through fine, but then a second later when refresh occurred it'd get undone. Every time I tried it.
Clearly an indication that one of the save files either had already been blanked out or were going to be blanked out once I bought the upgrade.
Well! Commenting out that bit did let me buy the upgrade, but then nothing went wrong. It just worked. I checked all of the save files for the account I was using and none of em were empty.
I'm really not used to having inexplicable not consistently repeatable glitches like this. It's so baffling. It's the kinda thing that commercial games always seem to have ton of, but have never really popped up much in the stuff I've made.
No.405
I think (I'm not great with javascript) I have it so that now it won't update while already in the middle of updating.
And I just played it through from beginning to end without any errors or glitches. At one point it did take a few seconds to process something I had entered (which seems inevitable with the cheap host I'm using and honestly I'm surprised it's as usually pretty snappy as it is), but nothing got messed up in the process.
Which is hopefully a good sign.
No.406
Final update for the day: I added an extra mention of bbs.hacker.net into one of the story mission emails to up the odds to people knowing it exists. I doubled how much a servers security level increases the trace speed (making it harder to avoid buying upgrades). And I removed the password cracking phase from connecting to servers with a security level of zero (making it less of a hassle to connect to bbs.hacker.net and thus less of a hassle to grind for money and buy upgrades).
No.408
>>406Would it be easier just to have a separate 'top bar'?You could update it without messing with the main window. Wouldn't be out of place. All my old DOS BBS terminal programs had one. You could have the username, money, connected server, and trace percentage displayed in there.
((Can't even find a single screenshot of my old bbs terminal program for an example, just a tiny mention of it existing in passing. I'm OLD. lol))
No.425
Just applied another big update to my hacking game!
There are multiple new story missions!
A functioning chat room!
Functioning password cracking upgrades!
A new repeatable job!
THREE (3) FREE PORNOS TO BE UNLOCKED AT THE END OF THE GAME!
And lots of other little tweaks!
It's like basically complete now. Like obviously there's always stuff that could be added (it'd be nice if there were ways for players to interact with each other outside of the chatroom), but it's more of a time sink than ever and everything that's mentioned in game actually works.
BTW I didn't wipe out everyone's save data this time, but if you wanna play it fresh from the start (so that you don't miss anything) (without making a new account) then just enter "reset" (it actually resets EVERYTHING now).
Also btw it got moved slightly a couple days ago. Here's the new link.
https://boringkate.com/games/ No.428
>>425This is harder and time consuming now! Except for tic-tac-toe, it's un-loseable if you start with '5'. Just like the real game. It's taking me several tries to complete some of the missions because I get kicked quickly. So I need to chip away at them. I gotta grind up some new upgrades! This will take awhile.
Congrats on finishing a game!
No.434
Small update: The text field (and the matching character limit) now resizes to take up about as much horizontal space as is available (which is variable bc the length of current path changes).
The game used to do this, but I stopped being able to do it the way I had been when I switched over from doing full page reloads to dynamically loading content with javascript.
This renders in like a rock solid way on firefox, but it's just a little bit janky (tho acceptable bc I left a bit of a buffer) on chrome. IMO firefox is usually the more jank browser, but I really think chrome is the one rendering things wrong this time.
Anyways. It mostly only matters for aesthetic reasons, but it does come along with a longer maximum comment length for chatur dot net.
No.436
>>434OMG, so much tension now! It's getting harder to type, and you actually feel a bit of a rush trying to spell everything correctly while the tracker is breathing down your neck. The one loss with the quicker tracing is that there isn't time to actually to open and snoop through the files like there used to be.
Also I love the new server you added (no spoilers) with the GNU/Linux rant. Made me lol hard.
No.437
>>436Bug?
I've reached an impasse.
No.438
>>436Yeah. Feeling rushed is definitely a mixed bag. If I add more missions then some of them might have you going back to older servers (maybe have you going 5 levels deep into the dungeon maze and having things down there change up a little) once you're over leveled and the security is a non issue. I could even make the trace turn off once you're over leveled enough.
I wanna have missions where you open files to get info (not just delete them), but I'd have to add a way to make files undeletable first (so that players don't screw themselves by deleting a file they're supposed to open).
I feel like there are downsides to the password cracking levelling system too. I like that it adds a second money sink (giving you more of a reason to grind without just making the grind slower) + it makes the heightened level of a server's security more immediately tangible. But I think passwords are only fun to crack when they're like consistently exactly 4 characters long lol. When I'm playing through I usually prioritize leveling up my password cracker (so that I can skip passwords) bc I never wanna deal with like a six character password.
No.439
>>437Definitely a glitch! And that one took me off guard (all of the other issues were caused by save data getting lost and that's been cleared up by the switch to mysql)!
Password lengths are equal to 4 + the server security level - the player's password cracking level. So I set my level to 12 and connected without issue (because passwords that are under one character long are cracked automatically). But then I tracked down your user info (a benefit of it being an online game lol) and realized your levels are super low. It wasn't set up to handle passwords that were over nine characters, BUT I'VE FIXED IT NOW!!!! IT'S NO LONGER AN ISSUE!!!
No.443
I made a desktop client for the hacking game!
There's hardly any reason to use it. I'd even argue it's worse than the browser based version (you can't copy/paste or move the cursor left or right through the text you're typing or even register a new account).
But it works! And it'll make it possible for me to publish the game on steam! And despite the Love2D bloat (I considered writing it in C just using SDL directly, but I haven't made anything that way in awhile) it's still very lightweight and responsive (certainly more lightweight than a modern web browser). Plus it automatically scales everything to fill/fit the window (which is presumably possible in a browser, but I'm not very good with css).
Try it out tho and let me know how you feel about it and if you find any bugs (I already know you can't enter a & symbol).
https://mega.nz/file/tl5i2SaZ#V2eFx6LxYlkJB8qKXVIvI1JE2H6zbNLV4Yxx_QB5qFAYou only have to successfully log in once. It'll save your log in data over at the address bellow (swap out BoringKate for your windows user name) and then automatically log you back in the next time you launch the program.
C:\Users\BoringKate\AppData\Roaming\LOVE\hackergame
If you wanna log into a different account then just delete the save files.
It's packaged as a 64 bit executable because I'm a bimbo, but I intend for it to be 32 bit, so it can be played on Windows on ARM machines running windows 10 (a very niche scenario lol, but it's how my laptop is)
No.444
>>443>It's packaged as a 64 bit executable because I'm a bimbo, but I intend for it to be 32 bit, so it can be played on Windows on ARM machines running windows 10 (a very niche scenario lol, but it's how my laptop is)This is reminding me of when I was ranting to Null about how awesome the mini-Commodore64 reproductions (and the RaspberryPi 400 or the a500 mini) were and how cool it would be to make little retro games for them. The C64 mini was self-defeating because you have to plug a usb keyboard into it, when it itself is a keyboard, wtf…
No.445
>>444It's missing Love.dll, Luax.dll, SDL2.dll
No.447
>>446Working now.
The backspace wasn't working on the login prompt.
It feels a bit laggier (but not in a bad way). I guess that is all the scaling happening?
I keep forgetting to post this, but the last few seconds of Sneakers where the news anchor says a bunch of money vanished from the RNC and the same amount was anon donated to the UNCF would make for a great mission type. ^_^
No.463
I made a porno minesweeper game today. Only took like an hour too (since I was building off of what I'd already figured out for the porno qix clone)!
https://boringkate.com/games/pornsweeper/ No.464
>>463Holy shit, why are getting so much done!?
I need to stop playing RPGs and get back to work. This post is to hold me accountable.
I think I need to start a new clean project for the escape room because I made a mess of things by constantly adding new features. Especially the phone that can see secret messages. That changes everything.
I need to remodel the floors and walls. I just made a 2 meter wide section and cloned it as needed which caused a ton of problems, especially when I added doors and stairways.
And I need to get that back wall figured out. I botched it severely trying to piece if together from random pics.
No.478
>>469https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uva8nMYU_jAGot normal maps on the painted walls so they aren't just flat white. I redid all the base boards. The walls look so much better now. I think the hallway is to scale, which I did by counting the boards on the floor. But I might need to widen it again for gameplay reasons. We'll see.
I think I got the back wall correct, finally. Not sure about the bathroom linen closet placement and size. All I had to go on is a vague DM from like 4am lol.
No.480
>>478Up all night making shaders. Trying to get the walls to scroll like the matrix AND auto align to the world coordinates aged me by 50 years. I can't get the texture to reverse on walls that are facing the other way, so the symbols can only be things that can't appear in reverse. I need to find an bitmap version of the old code page 437 and copy over the non reversable symbols into a new texture. This one looks horrible, but the effect works.
Made a wavy evil mirror that can see into other versions of the apartment.
And the floor fx don't show up in the gif.
Debating on trying a third person kate again like the first time, OR or slapping myself and saying "NO MORE FEATURE CREEP!"
No.481
Here's an offline version of my hacker game (because steam is giving me a hard time getting the online version approved and I'm pretty sure it's because they're having networking issues that are their own fault, but I can't troubleshoot anything because it takes them a week to test a build and then they don't even tell me what type of error message they received)!
You launch it with the play dot bat file and NOT with either exe (the offline server exe needs to be getting repeatedly run in the background while you play and if I have the game run it when appropriate instead of having the bat file do it then it'll take focus away from the gameplay window).
Even aside from all that awkwardness though… I already know that obviously chatur dot net doesn't work and also it sometimes does that thing where too few or too many lines of text in the text logs (cls still fixes that).
Let me know if you find any other bugs.
https://mega.nz/file/skJFkIwZ#a5lKdg76HCuX2GzxBiM8Skg2QrUyeM9ViUYoxIqueS4 No.482
>>481(shutting down everything and testing this out).
It lags so much. Like it seems like my command goes to the offline server which actually processes the command and sends it back to the game?
I'll keep playing and see if I find anything.
Happy to see this build. Steam said it was unlisted(?) and I was :( and afraid to ask. This is too awesome to die.
No.483
>>482If you want it to be more responsive (at the cost of it being more demanding) you can edit the offlineserver dot bat file (just take out the choice line and optionally uncomment and remove some other stuff), but no matter what it's just not the most elegant way of having the game refresh and update. Best I could figure out without rewriting all of the php server side stuff in another language, making it less portable, or rewriting the client side stuff to not use lua / love2d.
No.484
Updated already with a handful of tweaks (bat scrips minimize and close automatically + when the log glitch out it auto corrects their line count so it isn't as jarring).
If there are no glitches other than what I know about already then I'll probably try submitting it to steam. It only needs to work well enough for them to approve it once and then I can replace it with an online build without as much oversight (offline play will probably always be there as a secondary mode, but it isn't the main priority).
https://mega.nz/file/5oZBTYKL#YRTsUMB-yQ0Un3NoT3VgPXnG7oqNQV08iO9cV6n9Cic No.485
>>484Meant to submit this last night, but I fell asleep…
I took a bunch of little clips, but it's a pain trying to convert them all and don't want to clog up anything.
I got this error after typing 'open storymission01.email'. All I did was run the play batch file, hit DIR, and then go to the emails folder.
Error
main.lua:535: bad allocation
Traceback
[love "callbacks.lua"]:228: in function 'handler'
[C]: in function 'newFont'
main.lua:535: in function 'draw'
[love "callbacks.lua"]:168: in function <[love "callbacks.lua"]:144>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
The 2 other windows do not close when the game exits. So I have to do it manually. When I restart everything from scratch I just get a new window with the e-mail displayed and I can't type anything. No response to anything. The server app IS running. It's stuck permanently at the last screen throughout all restarts and takes no input.
I might have to re-unzip everything to get back in.
I will try the new zip.
No.486
>>485Okay, new build is working and has been running awhile with no issues yet.
The grindr email mentions the digimon movie.
The third story mission is to connect to Chatur.net, but there is nothing there. Could insert some fake chat lines in there?
There is a "bsp;" visible above the chatur logo. Was that supposed to be a "nbsp in brackets"?
and I forgot the rest, because it just crashed while I was typing this. I was just sitting at the chatur screen for a few minutes while typing this
Error
Out of memory.
Traceback
[love "callbacks.lua"]:228: in function 'handler'
[C]: at 0x6c9d1bd0
[C]: in function 'newFont'
main.lua:528: in function 'draw'
[love "callbacks.lua"]:168: in function <[love "callbacks.lua"]:144>
[C]: in function 'xpcall'
No.488
Here's yet another updated build. I've fixed the onscreen text glitches.
It still doesn't refresh things until you enter a new command (so the trace percentage doesn't refresh in real time like it does in the online mode) + I noticed that you can't enter 0 (which is an issue for the math game and definitely caused by the server bat script not working how I expected).
Pretty playable tho.
https://mega.nz/file/JkAUhTwL#ApL9sIahkiowwQ6RgSqL1l-syFXIl54BCptmTncnKSk>>485I'd say that's from the server stuff being slow. Or from it no longer running (you need to launch it from the play dot bat file and can't close the cmd window).
>>486>>487Womp. Didn't see this till after submitting it for review by steam. You're definitely right about it using up more memory over time, but I'll figure out what that's about if/when I hear back from steam support.
No.489
>>487
>So I'm just sitting here watching it, and I'm going to assume it dies when it leaks 4gb because it's a 32bit executable. Nope. It got to just 2 gb and then the ram usage reset and started climbing back up from 0 again, but then the text commands stopped working. So the game is frozen again. tried 'CLS' too.
Unlike last build, the commands work on restart.
No.490
Final final final update for now. It's unclear if the steam review people will even look at this build or the one that was active when I hit submit, but anyways… I fixed the memory leak and some other minor things.
https://mega.nz/file/5gIk2aiK#q9xHrVqGbKGIkuX3ViAL7IbwyKeNz2ll0YNEAPyTUJA No.491
>>487I do always use play.bat, and never shut the cmd window down. But I figured this out.
—
If I bring that cmd window into focus at any time, the game stops responding to any typed in input in the main window.
Not able to gif that so…
1) open the game. it works.
2) focus the cmd window. (I don't type anything, literally just bring it into focus).
3) type anything in the game window. nothing works anymore until you shut down both windows and restart. The cmd window is still opened, it was literally just in focus.
I think this was always the cause of the game no longer responding.
—
This new build is only leaking around 2.5mb a sec. (oops, actually I'm wrong. the leak gets bigger over time and seems to cap off at just under 7mb.) … Okay, I connected to the bbs and looked through the screens and it reset to the 2mb and started growing again.
I think the game will only leak to 2gb and crash if I leave it on one screen the entire time. It seems to periodically released memory if I move around the different screens.
Trying to make a reproduction case for you, but it's still a mystery.
No.492
>>490omg, sorry! That was posted while I was writing. THERE IS NO LEAK IN THE FINAL FINAL FINAL UDPATE FOR NOW BUILD. It stays at 50.8.
The focus issue remains.
Found another thing by accident, not a big deal, and not your fault. If I just hit the windows key and type play.bat, game.exe or offlineserver.exe both throw up 'can't find file' errors.
No.494
>>493Now approaching double digit hours on this. I'm so bad at modelling people. Glasses are a little off. It's hard to eyeball them. Will fix later if I can manage a good head model.
This escape room game could have been done a year ago had I not felt the need to keep challenging myself.
No.495
I made a little pico-8 game!
The thing about pico-8 is that the games are all 128x128, so the text is unreadable. And knowing this: Naturally the first game I made is totally text based. It's also not fun. Barely even a game. Just a deranged circular conversation tree. But it's my first one and I made it in a day, so you have to be proud of me!
The game is like totally contained in the png, but if you wanna play it without having your own copy of pico-8, then there's also a browser based version over here.
https://boringkate.com/games/pico8.firstdate/firstdate.html No.496
>>495Was confused, I always get the pico-8 and the Playdate mixed up. That little black and white console with the fishing reel controller.
The entire game is in the PNG? Like embedded in the metadata?
lololol this escalates quickly.
No.503
Another pico8 game!
https://boringkate.com/games/pico8.dodgingrocks/dodgingrocks.html>>502Shaders are witchraft to me. Reject modernity etc lmao.
No.504
>>503How are you getting so many games done? All I got is double digit hours on a not even finished character mesh.
I got to level 8 until I couldn't take it anymore. Level 4 was the 9th level of hell for some reason. Almost didn't make it out of level 6 because the jump was too high, but I triggered the level end anyways. I'm guessing these are randomly generated? So it's like a roguelike, or a rocklike :P Is there an end level?
Shaders are not a big deal. They are mostly done in a graph these days so you don't have to write the code directly. A vertex shader just takes in whatever arguments you gives it and runs some code to output a new vertex position. A pixel shader just outputs a RGB(A) value.
The matrix wall shader I posted above is just 2 texture layers scrolling downward using the delta time. The bottom one is dark green, and top layer is light green with the ADD blend mode. It's just a simple UV (coord - scroll speed * time)
The evil mirror is just a render to texture with a different camera to make the reflection texture map, and the waviness is done by scrolling a noise texture and altering the UV for that pixel by the value in the noise texture.
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https://boringkate.com/imageboard/main/src/1710235361165.gif No.505
>>493I'm so fired.
I don't know why I struggle with humans so much when I model anything else. Head is still placeholder obviously, and the vertex colors are just so it doesn't look naked while it's in construction. Eventually, if I can make it looks good enough, it should have 3 different outfits.
I think
Comics book shirt & jeans
Goth Witch outfit
and something for the hacker / matrix room. I imagine you're not wearing your pikachu onesie while you program. :P
No.506
Sword Slut! Now playable!
https://boringkate.com/games/pico8.swordslut/swordslut.html>>504The trick is to limit scope and fidelity.
No.507
>>506Pico-8 looks great, but every time I looked it up I always get turned off because the small resolution and fixed palette must be so frustrating on that. Found this though. more colors using a palette swap trick.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=osk7P4ljWOUTheir Picotron thing with 480x270 / 240x135 and 64 definable colours seems more reasonable. The hacker game would look great on that setup. Especially with that font!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ba-hG6Ex8PU—
I like how smooth SwordSlut is. Especially around the bushes it has that nice sliding per pixel collision (instead of tile based), and you come to a complete stop if you clip one pixel. You just smoothly glide around it.
There's no story (yet?!), so I've headcanoned that you're in the Australian outback having boomerang fights with green old men, because they look like they holding sideways wine bottles. Eliminate the winos. (this is why no asks me to write anything).
No.508
>>505I don't hate this as much anymore. Maybe I'm not fired…yet! lol. I think I can see this through now. Just gotta crank the tunes and focus on it.
Yes the shirt says TNAANT because the texture is still mirrored.
No.509
DDR: Pico-8 Edition
https://boringkate.com/games/pico8.beepbeeprevolution/beepbeeprevolution.html>>506As bonus thing to go along with limiting scope and fidelity: The trick is also to recycle as much as possible. Basically every one of these pico-8 games have used the exact same particle code. The circle on rectangle collision detection code from the previous two (which gets you that smooth sliding around corners) was taken from an old love2d game of mine (which I converted to lua after originally writing it in c like 15 years ago for a wii homebrew game). The sprites in the last game were also taken from a fake screenshot I made like a year ago before I had even considered fucking around with pico-8. And all those browser based porn games function essentially the same under the hood (lots of recycled code) and use the exact same gallery of photos.
No.510
>>509This is all starting to remind me of that bootleg 52-in-1 NES cart I had that needed the famicon->NES adapter to work. (
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/bootleggames/images/a/a7/52in1adapter.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20210120090808)
Really cool!
It's harder for me to hit the up arrow for me reliably. I guess because it's above the other 3 keys and the finger movement to go from the up arrow to the down arrow is really awkward.
A failure sound would be good too. Can't really tell how you're doing.
I FIXED THE KATE PLAYER MODEL FOR KATE ESCAPE the other day, but didn't want to double post (is that okay?!). And I got the clothes modeled out. The hands are halfway done but not showing them in their current state.
The missing polygons in the arms are because they are still free floating and that will be fixed when I connect the meshes. The head will stay a sphere for now.
I'm tempted to try the pico 8 thingy now. It looks very fun to mess around with. Especially with that printer paper look in the code editor.
I saw a thing where people were exporting 3D models to it, and I wonder if the 128x128 display would be enough to like port over the OpenGL virtual pet I made ages ago. But I'm guessing that would eat up the alloted space, and there is no way to save persistant data so you could come back to it every day?
No.511
>>510LOL - animation retarget fail
(long exhale) It's going to be a long day.
No.513
>>511J—s Fu—g C—t this was an ordeal. Took like an entire work week just about, but I did it!
The jiggle physics need to be adjusted and toned way down. It looks a bit silly right now. I need to play with the numbers until I find the right combo to make it very subtle.
And the hair (and maybe face) will be remodelled. But it's all working as intended.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=slUwceokHwgI had to write code that slides the whole street back and forth so the view from the 3 versions of the apartment matches up. ^_^
Now just to import all the furniture and get the item interactions working again.
No.520
>>513Okay, I fixed the hair on the player, it now only moves with the head bone and doesn't half fall through the head anymore.
Boob jiggle is 90% gone now. It's very subtle now, as intended.
Then I came up with this post process shader for the matrix version of the apartment. I posterize the colors down to only 8, and then I hooked a sine wave into my old resolution downscaler I was using in the survival horror game to make it effectively change the resolution per frame.
It makes a neat effect that makes it look like you are in a glitchy CGA matrix. It looks a lot smoother in game than the 10FPS gif. :)
No.523
>>521I wanted to try the pico 8 stuff but didn't realize it cost 20 bucks! There's a free clone version called The PixelVision 8.
https://pixelvision8.github.io/Website/. It has much better resolution options. It goes up to 512x480.
I've been on a roll with the game in the last 2 days. T he item system is starting to run again. Got the matrix/CGA/Resolution effects working, and the portal mirrors to switch between worlds are almost ready (see gif).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8xv5P9Bslk No.525
>>523I can't remember what I paid for pico8, when I bought it it was still just a bonus add-on that came with Voxatron
The appeal of pico8 to me isn't just that it's an easy way to make a lofi game. More that it's an entire fake virtual console, with it's own internally consistent processes, memory mapping, gfx/sfx systems, CPU, etc.
It makes it feel much more like actually working with the hardware limitations of an old computer, more than just the aesthetic. It has its own weird hacks analogous to racing the beam with Atari 2600, or memory bank swapping with the NES.
No.528
>>525Pico is great. I like all the little built-in tools for gfx and sound. I just don't want to blow $$$ on something I will play with for a day or two and never touch again.
I got the matrix Shader looking better. It's fun making a 5mb gif of a 300k MP4. :3
Here's a portal into some nightmare fuel Kate! :P
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ry40hQ8TcxE No.529
>>528If you do a search for pico-8 + pirate there's a thread with download links on r/piratedgames
No.535
What's going on with "Elite Hacker: Retro Hacking Evolution Transgender Team Battlegrounds Fortress Keywords"?
Is it stuck in Steam review queue?
No.538
>>531I went and added the finger bones for the player model into the game and Unreal's animation retargeter won't let me select them so I can plays animations on them. Taking a bit of a break until steam stops rising from my ears.
No.562
I finally got around to submitting YET ANOTHER build of the hacking game for review on steam. Totally scrapped the whole love2d + rapidexe thing and just have it running using phpdesktop now (so it looked even more like the online version).
I played it all the way through without any issue (or none that I didn't fix along the way anyways), so hopefully it'll work for whoever at steam gets assigned to testing it.
