...let's drop that, because I was trying to be uptight to represent the rest of the world in a half-sarcastic fashion, and as I started to qualify my reasoning it got a little out of hand.

Acceptable use of the term is based not on whether you have privileges but whether it has a legitimate reason to be there. Personally I don't find STEVE URKEL SAID NIGGA LOL IM HILARIOUS at all amusing because the entire punchline seems to be that Steve Urkel said nigga. I like my humor to be clever. Honestly, if you're not good at humor, don't try to write it; no jokes are a LOT better than bad jokes. I know I'm not good at writing humor, so I don't set out to write things that are hilarious.

Dude, it was one line. And you don't even know the context of it. Steve Urkel is a black guy, Steve Urkel said "nigga", legitimacy confirmed. Black people use the word among themselves, and part of writing a believable black character is use of that word.

It has nothing to do with racism or whatever, he didn't use the word in his game to be hurtful, he used it to make the character believable and for comedy. Whether you think it's funny or not is not the point because you are not the standard of what's funny and what isn't. Others may think it's funny.

Don't forget humor is based on opinion. You might laugh about stuff I think is stupid and vica versa. Sure there are bad jokes in general, but this is not one of them.

Been awhile since I posted some screenies! Ain't too far in development, but I decided to post a photo anyhow.




Here's a li'l snapshot of the Golmar Mines, past and present. Prepare your lanterns and explosives-- this dungeon is full of spiderwebs, falling platforms, minecart tracks, and lots and lots of rocks.

(Feedback on the lighting? )

I'm a big fan of custom lighting in Maker games. I've come pretty close to accomplishing good lighting using pictures, but the pictures would always shift slightly whenever the character moved on screen. Did you manage to get around this problem? It looks great!

There is a long, long way to go, however:



That's an Android emulator.

Things to do: fix borders, spacing, etc; remove URL bar (if possible), and then tweak the actual game.

You can try out an unofficial beta of this app by changing your user agent to iphone and going to www.afar.ws.

Nice, that's Aptana Titanium Studio, right? I also just started working on a (more classical) app with that software. But Aptana works with javascript libraries, right? So, is it easy to use php within Aptana? Are you planning on releasing it as an app or are you just testing how you're website looks like on mobile devices? I'm also dreaming on creating an appgame with aptana.

It's actually Eclipse's android emulator, I'm coding this myself this time instead of relying on another software like I was originally going to. To be honest I am cheating: all this is is an app, made in Java, which creates a web browser view, (but have managed to take away the menu bar and everything now including the url bar) - the actual contents of the app is a website which looks different when using the right user agent. So, the game is the same game as what you can play at www.afar.ws, but viewed with a user agent which makes it change resolution to fit an android device. It does mean once the app is in the app store I don't need to take it down to edit it and so on, which is great.

Is it using more or less resources when you do it that way? Resource use is extremely important on mobile devices~

What I did was simply create a gradient circle that fades into darkness, then show it as a picture centered over the player's screen coordinates. You'll need a Parallel Process Common Event to continually check if the player has then moved, and move the picture accordingly.

It works great, especially because I'm using pixelmovement (though I'm sure it would work with tiles as well). The only problem is if the player walks too close to the edge of the screen, you can see the edge of the picture, so for that I need to enlarge it.

Some maps I've been working on.

Bedroom


Cosplay Party (Before Infestation)

That's pretty great. i'm searching for ways to turn mobile websites into apps too. Could you maybe tell a bit more on how you get this to work? Maybe PM would be handier for this. Thanks ;)

@Obsorber: pretty good, but i'm not a big fan of the way how you make doors to you sidewalls. Also, I'm not sure ot the rtp and custom tiles blend together perfectly but it's better then another generic indoor map i guess.

The difficult part (well, time consuming at least) is formatting the website correctly.

Once I know the app works perfectly I might make a tutorial.

The website has to be made in PHP (javascript might work instead, I dunno). You just have to force the app to send a custom user agent, and then test for user agent in the PHP script; you then show a different page (or different stylesheet, different bits, etc, as necessary) depending on what user agent comes through. This way you can have the same website look different for PC, android, iphone browsers, but more importantly you can have it display differently specifically and only for your app. (But note anyone can change their user agents with a user agent hacker).

My code is probably awful but basically look up:

- webview
- android, changing user agents
- PHP, testing for user agents

Keep note that:

1. Javascript acts differently on different platforms
2. Bandwidth and disk space are limited

Looking forward to a guide, would be awesome! However, I'm pretty experienced in making mobile versions of websites, but I don't know how I can turn such a mobile website to an app. And it looks like you are achieving that?

Working on making completely custom graphics.
Started out like this:


Now going with this:


I'm trying to go with a Earthbound/Mother-inspired artstyle simply because I'm not very good at this and it looks easier to do.

It looks alright so far. But please get rid of that horrid gradient on the roof.

Hmm, do these look any better?


or even:


So much of the coloring in the mapping is just fills, so it hard to know what gets detail and what doesn't :/

It's hard to get a good feel on any of those examples because the JPEG artifacts are obscuring pixel-level detail.

a few changes suggested over at rmn~

I literally see no change in those pictures whatsoever...

get your RPG-Making goggles on then :O

You've gotta make unobvious triangle shapes with your trees! Just ask Tindy~

Jason, its a shade change

The second is a tiny bit more white

It actually isn't haha, that's probably just the fog having moved. There are more trees and a clearer "path". :P

More trees and a clearer path?

... I've got them open in two tabs, and keep flicking back and forth, and it looks like the exact same picture with absolutely zero differences...

Like, literally... NO DIFFERENCES, it's the EXACT SAME map... NOTHING is positioned differently...

Is this not what you're seeing? :X

that's weird. O_o