TF Flash Game the Second

[The_Nameless_One]

I feel your pain, and hope you will manage to get more done without letting Flash beat you into a bloody pulp in the next days.

I'm pretty sure most users here really appreciate your very cool work.

[Seadog Driftwood]

Originally Posted by The_Nameless_One

...without letting Flash beat you into a bloody pulp...

Or the other way around...

[transformative]

Originally Posted by Seadog Driftwood

Or the other way around...

heh?

nice work btw ;p

Edit: never mind I figured it out... >_<

[LostHopeOfDusk]

Is great to see you making transformation games again... how are you with Java?

Edit: May the cat one be naked or change clothes when you beat the game? Pretty please?

[monomonkey]

Originally Posted by LostHopeOfDusk

Is great to see you making transformation games again... how are you with Java?

Edit: May the cat one be naked or change clothes when you beat the game? Pretty please?

I am great with Java for simple applications like calculating the first 100,000 prime numbers, but when it comes to GUI-based Java, I am terrible.

I majored in it in college for a while but even with four straight courses on Java I never actually learned anything but the theory of coding. I promptly dropped it as my major.

As for a naked one, I've been trying to do it but I'm hindered by my lack of artistic ability. If I can do it for one, I'll do it for all of them, but it's difficult. My style of drawing is "Trial and Error" (hey, the same as my technique for solving Math problems!). I draw something zoomed in, look at it at regular size, and see if I like it. If I like it but I think I can do better, I make a new layer and try again and compare. So I end up with like 5 layers for each part and then narrow it down to which ones look best with the other parts.

In summary: I'll try, but this customization thing comes first. If there's another person out there who can do sprite editing, I'd love to have your help in that. Otherwise, I'll have to wing it and hope I get it right. Also, what did you have in mind for 'change clothes'? I worked on trying to do something like that too but it kinda falls into the same category as trying to do a clothesless version.

PS - I've decided to sneak in a new update to all of the stages too. It goes along with one of the edits I made when I was working on the Cat stage revision.

[mabmoro]

Are these available for download anywhere?

[monomonkey]

The ones I've actually done so far? Cat, Cow, Dog, and Bunny? They're scattered around posts in this thread.

Cat: http://www.process-productions.com/f...0&postcount=18
Dog: http://www.process-productions.com/f...1&postcount=21
Cow: http://www.process-productions.com/f...5&postcount=22
Bunny: http://www.process-productions.com/f...3&postcount=53

The update I'm working on will have all four of these games updated with the new customization and another new stage all in one file so it won't be so confusing trying to find all these things.

Edit: So I'm having trouble trying to figure out how to work with the Mouths. I still have it as one of the cards for most of the animations but I don't know what I should do with them. Should I put them on top of the custom mouths so as to show that it's permanently changed? I don't want to because it's a large part of her expression but I don't know what I can do about that, since the only other option I can see is to put the new ones on top, which makes it so you don't ever see the changed one.

Ideally I could have two sets of mouths that you can interchange once you get the card paired but I don't know how to do that effectively.

Edit 2: Or do I?

Edit 3: Ok I DID have a working plan on how to do this but I think it over-complicates things. I was going to have another set of four loaded files for each animal's expressions once their mouth changes but it's just annoying and not worth it. (Was trying to re-draw four sets of cat mouths but no matter what I did for that 'one tooth' style of mouths it made her look like a vampire and I wanted her to be cute not ugly so blargh. Also, her face is on a two-pixel symmetry, meaning everything in the middle of her face has to be two pixels wide (think trying to pick the middle of a row of 10 objects--you have to pick #5 and 6 together) and this has been giving me a lot of problems over the course of these edits for all of my games (can't do :3 face, can't do :< noses, most expressions look horribly wrong, etc. (man I love parentheses!)).)

Here's my current problem. Let's say you do it the way I have it currently where the cat mouth is Mouth4. In the previous iteration of the game, her generic smile would be replaced with this cat smile whenever she smiled (after every pair once you were in the final mental state, for example) and that was fine. But I'm letting you choose, so I can't replace your choice, especially since the notepad file won't know in advance what mental state you're in and you might be trying to show annoyance or sadness with that specific situation. At the same time, you have no way of knowing in advance which order the cards will be picked, so you can't use Mouth4's cat mouth for any other situations except for when you pair the mouth itself.

I'm just about to say "screw it" and just have the mouth change ONCE (when you pair Mouth) and ignore your input for what the mouth should be just that one time, then hide it for good when you make another pair and her expression changes again. Though, there will be problems with this once again when I get to the cow stage and the other stage that I haven't divulged anything about since the mouths in those stages are so far removed from human mouths. I guess I could cheat and just say 'hey those mouths can't form expressions so you don't get anymore when you pair the mouth card so HAH!' as long as people are fine with my cop-out method of coding (which you should be since I'm doing this for free).

I know this is hard to understand if you're not in my head (and if you are in my head, GET OUT OF MY HEAD!) and I'm not even sure what it is I'm trying to say, so... hey!

Edit: Man these posts get sickeningly long as I edit them (POST MOAR).

For those wondering, I cannot include a section in the external text file that will let you change the introduction message (which is currently "What's with all those cards?"). The problem here is that Flash loads the text from the file too slowly and by the time it gets to the line in the code where it would look into the text file for the appropriate message, it will not have been loaded and thus loads nothing and proceeds to the next line of code. I can fix it with some brainstorming but I just don't care to =D

Edit # 600 billion: Finished the doggy stage. Cow and Bunny should take considerably less time since I am not adding anything new to them due to apathy. Cat and Dog took so long because I added new stuff and the new stuff broke the old stuff so I had to re-code the old stuff while fixing the new stuff and blargh. Then I have to do the super-secret stage (which I might just save for a future release or something I dunno. If you all are frothing at the mouth for this update then I'll leave it for later since it might take me a little while and I don't want you all to think I'm slacking off and never going to release this so whatever).

Edit # infinity: I don't want to post again even though people have posted after this post and this message will go unread >_>

ALMOST DONE. Ish. I just wanted to update to say I'm removing a lot of extraneous dialogue scenes in the various text files. For example, why did I have 12 different Spots dialogues in the Cow stage? What difference could you have established between them based on which spots were growing? Ugh. I don't think well this early in the morning.

The reason for this? I'm lazy, of course! The old code was like "_root.textbox = _root.spotsb3" or something (in layman's terms, the text box I use for all the dialogue and the name of the thingy in the text file I put along with the file). That was it. The new code splits up the line into five parts, taking the first character and finding out which Eye image to show, taking the second character and finding out with Eyebrow image to show, etc. I consolidated it as much as possible, but it's no longer a simple matter to do these variable dialogue sequences.

So, I removed all the "hands but no legs", "legs but no hands", "hands and legs", etc. things and just kept the important ones (wag with no tail and wag with tail for example).

Also, in the end, I've decided to have the new mouth show up once and then go away when you make the next pair. If someone can recommend something better once they see what I mean, I'll try fixing it.

Also also, these are likely to have lots of bugs since I'm not testing every case and scenario, so please report them =x

Edit # infinity/0: Cow stage done. Gave me a ton of grief. Hoping bunny has absolutely no changes necessary. Hoping.

[Syllis]

Hey, we're fine with anything you make. I believe I speak for everyone here when I say that we appreciate the time and effort you put in this. Those who don't should be happy that there is someone who wants to do all this for free for us. Thanks again monomonkey! Can't wait for the release!

[Hibiki]

Originally Posted by Syllis

Hey, we're fine with anything you make. I believe I speak for everyone here when I say that we appreciate the time and effort you put in this. Those who don't should be happy that there is someone who wants to do all this for free for us. Thanks again monomonkey! Can't wait for the release!

Ditto!

[monomonkey]

It's ready!

I actually finished! Fortunately the bunny stage only required a little bit of layer shuffling and code-swapping, so I ended up saving the easiest for last.

A few things.

1) I did not test extensively. If you see a problem with the game, please post it here. With one billion combinations possible (seriously! 10^12 combinations!), I can't test them all. Also, the game will run differently for every computer out there, so bugs for me might not happen for you and vice-versa. One bug I can't fix is when you pair too quickly. Sometimes it will increase the pair count by 2 and it can end the game prematurely. Try not to make another pair during an animation.

2) You will notice that I added something other than a spiral for the mind cards. I felt like the spiral was a cheap cop-out and instead gave her the item that was on the card. However, I could not think of a reasonable way to do this for the bunny stage. I'd either need to change the icons or think way outside the box, because there's no obvious way to me to implement those two other than to put a carrot in one hand and an egg in the other, which is boring and does not make for an explanation as to why her mental state has changed.

3) Along with the bug testing is the quality check. Are the images OK? Are the animations good? Can I improve on them in some way? Please tell me. I'm not an artist and don't really have an artistic eye, especially when I stay up later than I should to finish up a drawing.

4) Please continue to suggest stages, and don't be afraid to think outside the box. I have several suggestions currently: frog, donkey, clothing. I do plan on doing them (eventually...) but would love more suggestions! I'll even do a new sprite if you've got one!

Now to take a well-deserved break... until the first bug report post that is.

Edit: And there it is. If you want to see me go insane, read my next post! As for the game, it has moved four posts down (see the insane post for details).

[Seadog Driftwood]

Well, first odd issue: In the last two stages of the Dog one, Osaka turns partially invisible: only her ears, hands, eyes, mouth, paws, the ball and the leash are visible...

Second, hilarious issue: In the Cow one, when the fur is selected (possibly only if it's the first change?), it covers her eyes, nose and mouth. In subsequence changes, the eyes reappear, but they vanish during animation of the changes.

Third, odd issue: In the Cat one, a number always appears before the text associated with a change.

Fourth odd issue: Again in the Cat one, when the spirals are matched, the text response is "undefined" - but I remember in the previous version there as a text response programmed!
Similarly, when the last match is made, the response is "fined". Wha?

And as for the other stages: clothing sure sounds interesting, but what about my suggestion of a squirrel?

[monomonkey]

Oh right that one yeah that one too ok.

As for all the issues:

I know what I did wrong on the Dog stage and that's going to require a lot of work. Damn.

The Cow stage: I put the face on top of everything on accident. Shouldn't take long to fix. -- edit: No, it's another "I made changes to the SWF and didn't check them before packaging it" error. I really need to pay more attention.

Cat: I'm a huge idiot on this one. I put the wrong SWF in there. Sheesh. It's undefined and fined because it's trying to find a text line that isn't there because I renamed some of the text entries (and it's trying to crop the first four characters which are supposed to be numbers in the instance of 'fined'). That's what I get for doing a mass-rename right before packaging it all.

Sigh. Ok, give me about fifteen minutes. I'm going to delete the zip in the previous post when I make all the changes.

Status:

Cow fixed.
Cat fixed.
Working on doggy.
Doggy problem 1 fixed (the one I found). Problem 2 requires doing a quick re-animation. 5 minutes. 10 max.

Or not. Yeah, remember that stacking problem? You do if you've read my rants in this thread. Turns out I completely ignored the problem in the Dog stage. So, that's what happened. Thanks Flash for this completely arbitrary rule!

Will be another 5 minutes. Thought I just had to re-do some animations as the popping out problem was happening with image swaps earlier, but I only swapped one image for this one and I had already cleaned it up.

Done! Packaging and uploading.

Or not. I tested Cow before I packaged it and it was still broken. Think I got the error. Testing again...

Wow all this time I forgot to add Tail to the size-up animation. Added. I think I'm ready.

Nope -.-

OK! One last thing. Cow works. Wanted to make a quick change to the other 3 (the eye up/down was staying on through to the Win/Lose screen).