Ocean's Heart

Started by Max, February 27, 2018, 01:59:34 AM

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Hello, thank you for fixing the bug. I have question about the game. How to go to kingsdown isle? the path to go there is blocked with rock statue. Because of this, I can't continue solving quest about finding a keyhole.

There is a quest elsewhere that will tell you where the keyhole is. If you've finished it, it will tell you where the keyhole is to make that statue go away. Message me for more details if you want.

I'm also only 90% sure the next area was even done last time I put any demo out, hahah.

Max, I just love your work. I am currently trying to make my own tileset for my own game. I have been drawing for a few weeks now for experimentation. I mostly look at similar assets from zelda a link to the past, pokemon fire red, minish cap, links awakening and your work for ideas. Here is a few i have drawn in paint.net. I dont really find any of them really use-able.



I am struggling coming out with my own unique charistics for my tilesets. How did you come out with your own art style?  :)

Thanks! You're off to a great start. I don't really know that I have my own style, I learned how to do pixel art by making small changes to art from Zelda games. For Ocean's Heart I wanted sort of a mix between Oracle of Seasons and Minish Cap because I think those games have good art that lends itself well to good world design, and just, that's what happened. I wanted to do a bold, cartoony style because I think it's easier to read than how a lot of modern games have outline-less pixel art with more abstract shapes.

So I guess basically, I decided what was most important for the game I'm making, then made art decisions to support that.


One tip for your art here, some of your midtones actually look brighter than the highlights, because they're more saturated. There's a word for this, I can't remember, value? Luminosity? Anyway, the bed for instance, the wrinkles are lighter in value, but less saturated, and it looks a bit odd.

Max, just of pure interest are you a fan of avatar the last airbender? :) I was trying to come up with a currency system for my project and I came up with an idea based on the the currency used in earth nation, which are round cobber, silver and gold coins with a square hole in the middle:



I came up with this:


Just noticed that you also use round coins, with a square hole in cobber, silver and gold types. ::) Good i also had a pearl currency concept i wanna try.

Thx for bed color advice. It looks less odd now.

Love that show dearly. Wasn't thinking of it when I was designing the coins specifically, I based it on that certain kind of Chinese currency, and also the ATLA team based the Earth Nation on China as well.

Good job with the hue shifting on the coins. Yellow generally shifts toward red rather than green as it gets darker, but yellow is probably the touchiest color to work with.

May 26, 2020, 09:18:41 AM #81 Last Edit: May 28, 2020, 07:48:31 AM by Dianthus
Max, sorry for writing again!!

Just of pure interest, why don't your game use a full screen ratio that uses all the screen in a 16:9 aspect ratio? At a resolution of 416/240 pixels you get black bars on each side because its not wide enough to take up the whole screen. 426 and 240 pixels should take up close to the whole screen that are of a 16:9 aspect ratio.

edit:
I have been trying that in my game, but i run into problems with dungeon design and separators switching between rooms on an area for each room that are 26,625 tiles wide. I cant place separators on 426 pixels and i cant place the tiles totally in the middle on the screen because the width of 426 brings the game out of a normal 16x16 grid. The only solution I have found for now, was having dungeon rooms on separate maps and then use teleports between them in doors, though that means i no longer have scrolling transitions in the direction of the room the hero moves to.

Seems like you're kind of answering your own question as to why I'm not using a 426px size. I rounded down to the closest multiple of 16 for things like that. So I can evenly fit 16x16 tiles into maps

I played through your game twice and thought that it would probably be worth making a few comments. I figured it was actually pretty good, usually I wouldn't be interested in playing a game twice in a row, never mind an unfinished game at that.

I did run in to a few issues though:
- You can break the The Hourglass Crew quest by using the key on the bear statue before learning about it. Ideally this would either be prevented or handled in the quest processing.
- You can get stuck in the path to the palace library if you go to it again afterwords. I didn't check if it saved your location in there, though. You also can't go down this path before learning about it, unlike using the bear statue lock.
- The exit to the apple cellar cave in Ivystump is broken, it puts you in the bush and you can't move.
- In Isle of Thorns/Lobb Trail, the arrow target to open the path to the Veilwood is not hittable.
- The Eastoak stone switches and Ancient Groves mini boss defeated triggers are broken by camera shake not working and faulting out.
- Bomb strength is not listed in the options menu with sword, armor, and arrow strength.
- You can freeze the game in the mana oak tunnels by using the Abyssal Flame. I entered from the Veilwood, used the Abyssal Flame to destroy all the corruption blocking the paths, and tried to exit to Oakheaven. I think the script for Hazel when entering from Oakhaven crashed.
- Blue flames don't hurt you, since it faults on start_hurt.
- The quest notes for the mana oaks doesn't list the locations after hearing about them. Kind of annoying if you weren't paying attention and have no idea where to find the third one later.

As for playability or whatever you feel like calling it, the only problem I had story-wise was finding out how to get to the pirates at Ballast Harbor. When I finally noticed it, after looking around the town several times, I knew what it was right away.
I ended up cheating and using the quest editor to figure out a few things though.
- I missed the book in the phantom squid house in Oakhaven and couldn't figure it out. Also, it's kind of weird that there are two haunted houses in Oakheaven.
- I didn't actually find the path to unlocking the Abyssal Flame without searching for it in the editor.
- I couldn't figure out what to do with the crow feather, which I didn't even find the first time through. In hindsight, Crowfort should have been a give away though.

I ended up with 18 hearts and only the dandelion charm, so I'm not sure if I got everything that's available or if I missed stuff. The first time through I missed quite a few things. It was actually kind of disorienting on the first play through, with the names of a lot of places not being displayed on entry or listed on the map.

Hopefully this helps out and I didn't mess up anything too badly. I enjoyed playing it and hope you can get it finished and polished up yet.

June 02, 2020, 07:18:25 PM #84 Last Edit: June 02, 2020, 08:02:20 PM by Dianthus
Quote from: Max on May 26, 2020, 02:41:04 PM
Seems like you're kind of answering your own question as to why I'm not using a 426px size. I rounded down to the closest multiple of 16 for things like that. So I can evenly fit 16x16 tiles into maps

Dammit, i really need to find a solution for that. The fact that my game has black bars when i run it in full screen, is really irritating my Asperger's :P ;D

256 x 144 ratio?
Or 384 x 216 (fits 8x8 but not 16x16)
Or 512 x 288

If you maintain a player character of the same size, these game sizes will change how the game feels a lot. More claustrophobic and less room to fight enemies and see them coming, or else zoomed out more so you would need to move faster probably. But I don't think it'd be a craaazy drastic change. You could also, instead of black bars, probably do something where the game is 416x240, but there's a menu in the sol.main context that's outside the game, and takes up that space.


@scruffy, thanks for the feedback! I'll go through it and fix any bugs.

The fact you can use the key on the secret place if you know where it is, is intentional. I thought it'd be fun to put in a massive skip, and designed so the items of the dungeon you skip aren't mandatory. I don't think bomb damage ever changes, so it didn't make sense to list it like a stat. The rest sound like bugs though!

You can actually get the bomb maker to upgrade your bomb strength. I tested it and it does work, but it's not like I ever used bombs as a weapon normally.

Oh yeaaaaaah, I forgot lol
It's a good point. I'll think about adding it, I needed some way to sink extra coral ore after miscalculating how much there was

August 07, 2020, 08:35:23 AM #88 Last Edit: August 09, 2020, 11:05:30 PM by diegopau
Hi!, hope you don't mind I bring back the topic of resolutions for a moment. I just read through this and I smiled when I realized I went through exactly the same doubts when choosing what resolution would be best and at the end I choose exactly the same as Max for my own project: 416*240. In my case the main reason was that anything that else that would be a good fit in terms of being a multiple of 16 would be too zoomed out for what I wanted... but there are actually other resolutions that could get a bit closer to perfect 16:9 ratio, I share my notes here:

16/9 = 1.7777777
416/240 = 1.7333333 (multiple of 16, same height and most of 16-bit games, 4K screens will not show glitches in the height because 2160/9=240), significant borders at the sides.
432/248 = 1.7419 (multiple of 8 ) DISCARDED no special advantages.
448/256 = 1.75 (multiple of 16 ) (borders at the sides)
480x270 = 1.7777777 perfect 16:9. Not multiple of 8, however is the perfect one to have a pixel perfect presentation in the typical 1920x1080 screen or 4K screen. So it will not glitch with shaders at all (explained below).
480/272 = 1.7647058.. (multiple of 16 )
512/288 = This is perfect 16:9 (and multiple of 16). However 1920x1080 is 3.75 times this, so it is not really helping with that other concern.
456/256 = 178125 (multiple of 8 ) (tiny borders at the top)
456/264 = 1.727272 (multiple of 8 ) (tiny borders at the sides)

When I talk about "glitching" I mean that the most common resolutions nowadays, at least in desktop and laptops (for mobile is a different story) are 1080p and 4K and if 1080 or 2160 can be divided by your chosen resolution you will get a pixel perfect experience which is good especially if you use shaders. Shaders can shot artifacts and glitches when not being pixel perfect. An example is attached.

So I think this is a balance between how much you are ok with zooming out your game's view (when too zoomed out the immersion can be lost), if you want it to be a multiple of 16 so you can easily edit your maps (I think multiple of 8 would be good enough as long as you have some 8 by 8 tiles), if you want it to fit perfectly in a 16:9 screen, if you want it to give a pixel perfect experience in 1080p or 4K!

So anyways, I think the choice for Ocean's Heart is good!, the borders are not that big! Thank you for reading.


Another thing to consider, none of the maps on the game like, touch the edges of the game area, then going 480x270 is probably ideal. I believe this is what hyper light drifter does, they're 16x16 tiles (I believe), but just every map is large and the playable area doesn't go to the edge, so you don't have to worry about tiles lining up at the edge.