Episode 2 Discussion Thread

[ztarwuff]

So, um, upon watching raocow's latest LP, I was wondering... is

Uncle Princess

going to be a thing?

[Rixithechao]

So, um, upon watching raocow's latest LP, I was wondering... is

Uncle Princess

going to be a thing?

Personally, that seems like a bit of a messy area we probably don't want to walk down. The term started as a joke based on equating the uncle character with Princess Peach due to her damsel in distress nature, so the character could be seen as inherently sexist or transphobic. Even beyond that, the character would have to be written perfectly so we'd avoid complaints of:

- Token minority
- Included for the sake of being political
- Included as a joke
- Stealing the spotlight from the other characters
- Not getting enough spotlight
- Their trans/nonbinary/crossdresser/damsel status isn't touched upon enough
- Their identity revolves too much around their trans/nonbinary/crossdresser/damsel status
- etc.

Like, don't get me wrong, I'm all for more diverse representation and I hope we get to the point where characters from across the gender and sexuality spectrum are included without anyone batting an eye. But if we end up going forward with the idea, it should be done right, and idk if we'd be able to pull it off, especially with the silly nature of the ASMT games and the relative maturity level of this community. I'm worried half of the community would spend a disproportionate amount of time on making sure the character is done well only to end up upsetting folks in the end anyway, half would either not care or complain, and a third half would just fill the Youtube comments and LP threads with super-edgy-offensive Tumblr jokes.

As it is I'm not sure what the status is as far as the game's story goes, as I understand it Darkychao was permabanned for making that 8chan board + other potential reasons I'm not aware of and I haven't seen or heard anything from Demolition since last year.
I'm a dumb, I forgot I've been seeing darkychao post around here lately. Still dunno where Demolition's been though. Disregard that, coulda sworn I've seen him around but he hasn't posted since February.

[ztarwuff]

So, um, upon watching raocow's latest LP, I was wondering... is

Uncle Princess

going to be a thing?

Personally, that seems like a bit of a messy area we probably don't want to walk down. The term started as a joke based on equating the uncle character with Princess Peach due to her damsel in distress nature, so the character could be seen as inherently sexist or transphobic. Even beyond that, the character would have to be written perfectly so we'd avoid complaints of:

- Token minority
- Included for the sake of being political
- Included as a joke
- Stealing the spotlight from the other characters
- Not getting enough spotlight
- Their trans/nonbinary/crossdresser/damsel status isn't touched upon enough
- Their identity revolves too much around their trans/nonbinary/crossdresser/damsel status
- etc.

Like, don't get me wrong, I'm all for more diverse representation and I hope we get to the point where characters from across the gender and sexuality spectrum are included without anyone batting an eye. But if we end up going forward with the idea, it should be done right, and idk if we'd be able to pull it off, especially with the silly nature of the ASMT games and the relative maturity level of this community. I'm worried half of the community would spend a disproportionate amount of time on making sure the character is done well only to end up upsetting folks in the end anyway, half would either not care or complain, and a third half would just fill the Youtube comments and LP threads with super-edgy-offensive Tumblr jokes.

As it is I'm not sure what the status is as far as the game's story goes, as I understand it Darkychao was permabanned for making that 8chan board + other potential reasons I'm not aware of and I haven't seen or heard anything from Demolition since last year.
I'm a dumb, I forgot I've been seeing darkychao post around here lately. Still dunno where Demolition's been though. Disregard that, coulda sworn I've seen him around but he hasn't posted since February.

i guess you're right, but my take on this was going to be

Basically Princess Peach with a moustache, whose primary feature is being kidnapped a lot.

[Learning-Timebuster]

Sorry to butt in on a thing that I've literally never had anything to do with but

I believe that Uncle Princess can be translated into a character tastefully if they were to be genderfluid. In practice, this would mean that they'd fluctuate between pronouns and presentation of self. Tricky, but with proper care I think it could be pulled off.

[SAJewers]

Just some things I was thinking of:

- Getting rid of lives altogether, making the 1ups useable for something else (maybe that raocoin store idea), and just having Demos.
- The Food/lives counter on the HUD counts the 1ups you've collected, and decrement on death.
- Removing the Leeks counter on the HUD and placing the demos counter there instead
- Having a raocoin counter on the HUD.

If we do go with the store idea that was thrown about eariler, how easy or hard would it be to have character resprites? For example, buying Pily, and being able to swap out Iris with Pily (and vice versa) within towns.

[docopoper]

Aww man. Those ideas sound awesome. I wish my life wasn't a constant stream of events right now!

Also is there a canonical dev kit I can download to make a level for this? I haven't been keeping up at all but I do have ideas for levels permitting I find the time and work up the willpower to learn Lua. From what little Lua I've done, I don't really like it, but if it's what this game is using and you're going to be proposing cool design choices like those I might have to get over my petty distaste for it.

[ztarwuff]

One thing I have noticed with the devkit I'm using is that when I require players to access certain warps using a number of leeks (e.g. 5 leeks to enter a warp), the game keeps saying you need X stars.

[Hoeloe]

If we do go with the store idea that was thrown about eariler, how easy or hard would it be to have character resprites? For example, buying Pily, and being able to swap out Iris with Pily (and vice versa) within towns.

Pretty difficult as far as I know. With current technology I don't think there's a way to re-route character sprites, so I don't think you can change what characters look like on the fly. However, functionality to do that may be possible to add.

Also talking about the shop idea, I should probably finish up v2 of the library for it...

[Kevsoft]

Also talking about the shop idea, I should probably finish up v2 of the library for it...

I might be able to remove the 100 coins limit, if there is any use for it.

[Hoeloe]

Also talking about the shop idea, I should probably finish up v2 of the library for it...

I might be able to remove the 100 coins limit, if there is any use for it.

The idea was to use raocoins, since they have otherwise no purpose and are already regulated in levels, so there's some semblance of balance there.

[SAJewers]

If we do go with the store idea that was thrown about eariler, how easy or hard would it be to have character resprites? For example, buying Pily, and being able to swap out Iris with Pily (and vice versa) within towns.

Pretty difficult as far as I know. With current technology I don't think there's a way to re-route character sprites, so I don't think you can change what characters look like on the fly. However, functionality to do that may be possible to add.

Also talking about the shop idea, I should probably finish up v2 of the library for it...

What about doing it using file operations? (ie. Selecting Pily as a character has the game copy her sprite files over Iris's)

[Hoeloe]

What about doing it using file operations? (ie. Selecting Pily as a character has the game copy her sprite files over Iris's)

That a way of doing it certainly. I don't know if LunaLua provides access to the file system in that way, though, and if it does, whether SMBX would reload the file reliably.

[Rednaxela]

If we do go with the store idea that was thrown about eariler, how easy or hard would it be to have character resprites? For example, buying Pily, and being able to swap out Iris with Pily (and vice versa) within towns.

Pretty difficult as far as I know. With current technology I don't think there's a way to re-route character sprites, so I don't think you can change what characters look like on the fly. However, functionality to do that may be possible to add.

Pretty easy actually I'd say, if I get a chance to do a little extra poking around.

The hooks that I've implemented for the OpenGL renderer pretty easily allow overriding what sprites get rendered (even when not actually using OpenGL). The question is, how to detect when a particular draw operation is a character sprite one and for which character sprite. This is something that I could figure out easily enough.

Fun fact: SMBX's loading of level-specific character sprites leaks GDI resources, eventually causing the game to crash after you load a level with customers character sprites too many times. (I found out because this has occasionally caused a crash when testing the MaGLX2 relay level for me)
Its on my radar to fix that, and I know that in the process I'd definitely learn the missing pieces of what's required to override character sprites.

Last week I got a little bit of a start on that.

[Hoeloe]

If we do go with the store idea that was thrown about eariler, how easy or hard would it be to have character resprites? For example, buying Pily, and being able to swap out Iris with Pily (and vice versa) within towns.

Pretty difficult as far as I know. With current technology I don't think there's a way to re-route character sprites, so I don't think you can change what characters look like on the fly. However, functionality to do that may be possible to add.

Pretty easy actually I'd say, if I get a chance to do a little extra poking around.

The hooks that I've implemented for the OpenGL renderer pretty easily allow overriding what sprites get rendered (even when not actually using OpenGL). The question is, how to detect when a particular draw operation is a character sprite one and for which character sprite. This is something that I could figure out easily enough.

Fun fact: SMBX's loading of level-specific character sprites leaks GDI resources, eventually causing the game to crash after you load a level with customers character sprites too many times. (I found out because this has occasionally caused a crash when testing the MaGLX2 relay level for me)
Its on my radar to fix that, and I know that in the process I'd definitely learn the missing pieces of what's required to override character sprites.

Last week I got a little bit of a start on that.

Oh sure, I figured this was the case - I was just talking about using the current version of LunaLua. Would be really neat to be able to hot-swap sprites, and not just for the player. Hot-swapping NPCs could allow NPC behaviours to be reused with different graphics, which would be really neat.

[Kevsoft]

Now that I successfully removed the HUD of the Overworld, I wanted to ask if there are any plans to make custom stuff for the overworld or if you guys are using the overworld at all for Episode 2?

[SAJewers]

We are using a hybrid overworld (just like Episode 1). As for custom stuff, not that I can think of, unless you want to attempt to recreate SMW's map viewing thingy (where you can press select and pan around the map)

[docopoper]

Tracking when the player picks up a super leek to determine when they have beaten the world would be nice so that we don't have to trap the player on the world anymore. However that's something that could be done with level scripting. I imagine there are a lot of cool special effects that could be done though if someone made a way to instantly change large amounts of tiles into other tiles without affecting the camera.

[ztarwuff]

Tracking when the player picks up a super leek to determine when they have beaten the world would be nice so that we don't have to trap the player on the world anymore. However that's something that could be done with level scripting. I imagine there are a lot of cool special effects that could be done though if someone made a way to instantly change large amounts of tiles into other tiles without affecting the camera.

Alternatively, do we want to trap the player on a world? The only reason I can see is because of plot, but surely we can use script to prevent those from happening before certain events occur?

[docopoper]

I don't really like how it worked in Episode 1. While it did feel more immersive to be trapped on the world and was cool in concept, it lead to very frustrating experiences when you got stuck on a level. In the same way the life system in Episode 1 didn't work that well, it added a small amount of tension when you were doing decently but was just plain punishing when you were doing badly (which is also the worst time to be punishing). If I remember correctly, Episode 2 will have infinite lives, which is great. But maybe we could come up with some kind of compromise that makes the player feel trapped on the world. It needs to not be punitive since then we are again punishing the player for doing badly.

I propose that it is revealed that in order to power the emergency teleporter Yoshis must be incinerated. There can be a small cutscene of a Charlie throwing a Yoshi into a furnace every time the player returns early and there can be a visual indication of the number of Yoshis burned in the hub. This way players can take pride in having made it through the game without burning any Yoshis or can make it into a joke and burn Yoshis just for the sake of it. Players who are good enough will be given an extra challenge and players who aren't will get a gag to mess with. Not killing Yoshis shouldn't be presented as the right path in any way by the game otherwise players will feel like they aren't getting the "good ending", however there could certainly be a gag involving it at the end. We could even use it to characterise some other members of the party by having different members taking stances on the killing of Yoshis. Kood would presumably be against it and raocow for it.

[ano0maly]

Would it be possible to allow you to quit a world before you beat it, but doing so would re-lock levels for that world and reset your progress?

[Willhart]

Would it be possible to allow you to quit a world before you beat it, but doing so would re-lock levels for that world and reset your progress?

Only problem with that was the way the hub was set up. Once the player returned from the overworld to the hub, a leek appeared at the exit location for a short time. Those leeks were used to open the way to the next area.

Since they could be only collected when exiting the OW, exiting the OW before completing it in some way was not allowed. By using some other way of remembering the progress of completed levels, it should be fairly easy to just have a warp leading back to hub.

There was also a thing on the Maglx2 hub that allowed moving from episode and level to another. I wonder if it could be used somehow for re-watching the cutscenes for example. It could be interesting to have multiple .wld files too or something, but I'm not sure how that would work. It could allow us to use more graphics on the overworlds.

[SAJewers]

Would it be possible to allow you to quit a world before you beat it, but doing so would re-lock levels for that world and reset your progress?

Only problem with that was the way the hub was set up. Once the player returned from the overworld to the hub, a leek appeared at the exit location for a short time. Those leeks were used to open the way to the next area.

Since they could be only collected when exiting the OW, exiting the OW before completing it in some way was not allowed. By using some other way of remembering the progress of completed levels, it should be fairly easy to just have a warp leading back to hub.

There was also a thing on the Maglx2 hub that allowed moving from episode and level to another. I wonder if it could be used somehow for re-watching the cutscenes for example. It could be interesting to have multiple .wld files too or something, but I'm not sure how that would work. It could allow us to use more graphics on the overworlds.

That shouldn't be necessary with Lua Variables.

It was done the way it was in Episode 1 because it was the best way to have worlds unlock. Episode 2 shouldn't need those extra leeks, since we can just use Lua Variables to determine if a Super Leek was collected or not.

Since we won't need that restriction in Episode 2, I suspect we'll allow players to return to the HUB at any point, and maybe allow the cutscenes to be skipped.

EDIT: If I do an update to Episode 1, I'm considering backporting some of this into Episode 1. The question is if I really want to.

[Mikkofier]

How's Episode 2 coming along?

[WestonSmith]

How's Episode 2 coming along?

Summary:
-Dr. Shemp hoopla means the project is stalled until new music can be chosen/created for the editor
-A bunch of levels are in progress, submissions have not opened up yet
-No real planning has begun on the game's structure of features
-AKA: This hasn't actually started yet

At least, to the best of my knowledge the above is true. Feel free to correct me.

[SAJewers]

All I'm waiting on is for a Super Leek Jingle, which is apparently coming.

Then I need the will update all the music codes in Episode 1, then maybe backport some of the features possibles with Lua I'm thinking of (mainly Start+select level exit)