Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Tal]

Hey all, Tal here. I just realized that while I've been around for a while asking for help, I never formally announced my game.

So. This is Meet Benny: Adventures in Finding Furniture!



It's a short (read: SHORT, about an hour) game where you play as depressed ghost Benny in the hopes of getting your stolen furniture back. Along the way, nothing will make sense. Ever.


This game is currently "done" in the sense that the plot and gameplay are complete, start-to-finish, and all the game-breaking bugs are patched. There are a few things that need to be fixed, though (such as speech bubbles, which cannot be coded the way I want them in WME script, apparently) and a few features I left by the wayside for time constraints (the game was built for a class that wrapped this weekend).

Anyway, I hope to have a finished, polished version available around January or February. Just thought I'd get it out there!

-Tal

[metamorphium]

Tal, what EXACTLY can't be coded in a way you want in WME?

[Tal]

Heh, the text balloons I was getting so frustrated over two or three months ago... I've racked my brain for every possible way I can think of to approach this, but it goes a little like this:

My talk function, as shown in the screenshot, has speech displayed over a tileable word balloon. The width of the bubble is fixed. The height of the bubble is (supposed to be) variable, depending on the amount of text present (so as to contain all the words). Unfortunately, what I can't seem to do is determine the height value of the invisible box containing the text at any given time. The width can be determined programatically with *variable*.SubtitlesWidth, but there's no SubtitlesHeight or anything like it. Without being able to determine the height of the subtitles, I can't get a guaranteed fit with my speech balloon every time... in the meantime, I've been basing it on an average number of characters per line, which is sometimes right, sometimes too much, and sometimes not enough.

^_^ I've spent something like 20 hours just trying to figure out a way around it. It's probably the last big problem in the game, other than something one of my testers caught yesterday, which is relatively simple to fix.

[metamorphium]

it works quite nicely in Ghost in the sheet (using the very same approach). I simply divide the ammount of letters and found a good approx. number to distinguish the height. It works ok even in 8 different langauge localizations. So to put it bluntly, your method is correct, you simply need to tweak it more. I'd take the most wide character (W) and fill the box with W's, then count the results.

[Tal]

Mmm, perhaps. My current version is based off the GITS code you posted some time back. I may try to do some more tweaking on that, or may go with another approach, I'm not sure. I was basically looking for a way to definitively get the size of that box, rather than approximate it, though. Thanks!

[Mnemonic]

The only way of measuring text height is using the static control in a window. Set the desired width, fill the text, call HeightToFit() method and read the resulting height.

[Mnemonic]

Cool artistic style, btw

[Tal]

Thanks! I had a lot of fun with the art... I wish I had more time to do character animations though. That's one thing I ended up lacking time to do properly beyond the basics.

The static control method sounds familiar- I think I tried it at one point, but I must not have gotten it to work. I'm gonna start looking at it again sometime in the next couple of weeks, I'll give that another go. Essentially, I'd need to be sending the string text of my actor.Talk function to the static control of a window, use HeightToFit, store the resulting height value of the static control in a variable then use that to define my balloon's height, yes? I think I can do that.

[Tal]

Oh.

Wow. THAT worked well.

Yeah, I dunno what the problem with my previous approaches to that method was, but that worked great! Only problem now is that the little pointy thing on the bottom of the bubble isn't staying attached to the bottom of the bubble (it's a static control), but that's partly because it's based off of the old math. Shouldn't be too hard to get it to stick to the bubble.

Thank you! You have no idea how much better getting that fixed makes me feel. ^_^

[Connway]

I gotta say, I'm really diggin' that art style. Can't wait for the release.

[Jyujinkai]

yea... i keep checking back as well.. it looks sweet

[Tal]

^_^ Thanks everyone. I'm taking the next couple of weeks to polish, though Christmas/New Years is probably going to delay that a bit... I go back to college on Jan. 12 though, and I'll be starting new projects by then so I hope to have it up sometime that week.

(And even after I release it, I'm totally open for feedback.  I'm totally open to changing just about anything to make the game better.)

[Catacomber]

I'm looking forward to this too. Some of my most favorite games have been in black and white.  :  )

[Tal]

Got the trail of the word balloon working right; Tomorrow I'll be doing quite a bit of work on this after I plow out my driveway. >_<

14 inches of snow here in the last two days.