Stabyourself.net news archive

Gamescom (with an M) 2013

Thu, 16 May 2013 20:56:00 +0200

Last year, as some might have seen, we appeared at Gamescom with several of our games. It was an absolutely incredible experience (click here for a roundup post and pictures) and we hoped we’d get an encore at some point. Turns out we didn’t have to wait that long.

Now, what we did last year was awesome, but we thought we could perhaps try doing something radical. Think ninja skateboard robots voiced by Sean Connery fighting Mechagodzilla dancing to Thriller-radical. Except less lasers and chaos and destruction. And more computers.

Being part of the retro games exhibit, we of course need to stick to retro games or games that have graphics bad enough to deceive everyone. But apart from that, for now, there’s no leash. Of course there will be technical, financial and spatial limitations, but for now we have to let our minds roam thinking of the radicalest thing we could do. Like perhaps 8 player Mari0 played superwidescreen on a wall using 3 projectors.

This is where you come in, stranger. If you have some cool idea of what we could pull off that won’t get us arrested, send us an email, facebook or disqus comment, tweet, whatever you whippersnappers use these days. We’ll read every single one.

Mari0 SE (online mulitplayer) is on hiatus

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 22:52:30 +0200

We figured we might as well post about it. Mari0 SE, that is.

As you might know, it never had a release date (apart from extremely rough guesses which were completely useless), and for a very good reason: it’s a hobby. You pick your own hours and your own projects. Perhaps a bad excuse, but nobody wants to spend their free time working on something as if it’s a job, especially if they end up finding it tedious.

My point is that Mari0 SE is currently on hiatus. No, that doesn’t mean it will never be updated again. No, that doesn’t mean that online multiplayer isn’t coming out. It will come out and it will be released even before ~~Duke Nukem Forever~~ Half-Life 2: Episode 3. I explained why we can’t release it in its current state over here.

That does mean something else: More work on smaller experimental projects, bite sized games like Ortho Robot. Speaking of which, did you ever try it out? We always felt like it got less attention than it deserved and it’s arguably the most polished of our games. If you haven’t, perhaps give it a try.

I can’t imagine everyone will be happy with the news, but a game you forced yourself to make is guaranteed to be less fun than one you also had fun making. It’s a given. Don’t stab yourself over it.

Resizing the map and design questions

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 16:38:28 +0200

Adding new editor features always adds the challenge of making it easy to understand and access for the user. There has to be a good balance between number of clicks required, amount of information displayed and prioritization of features.

You may know the way map resizing is handled in Mari0 1.6, where there’s two arrows and an “apply” button.

This is terrible on so many levels and I still feel bad.

For Mari0: SE, which features vertical scrolling, I had to change the whole thing around anyway to allow changing of the height, so I went and made it not bad while I was at it.

It’s now accessed via a button at the old position and looks like this:

It shows a preview of what the map will look like after the resize and you can change the size of the map on the right as well as the left side. I might change the width/height display a little bit but I’m happy with the rest.

Exams are over, post progress!

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 20:48:00 +0100

Exams over and I have nothing to do for a week, so I would usually promise a lot of updates but that never goes well, but I’ll try anyway!

Here’s some notice system I quickly wrote for chat and other messages. In the gif I made it print a random message with a random color and a random duration.

Mari0 is 1 Year Old Today

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 23:59:38 +0100

Exactly 1 year ago (give or take a few hours), Mari0 has been released publicly for the first time - we almost completely forgot about it. Time really flies, doesn’t it?

There really isn’t much to say, so here’s some numbers: Mari0 so far clocked in 1,696,644 downloads (not counting third party websites), with Windows having 88.88%, OSX 6.09%, Linux 3.18% and source 1.85% of the downloads. It is played (details here) on average over 10 thousand times every single day.

That should be enough to satisfy your number hunger. We hope you’ve had fun playing and creating with Mari0 and will continue to in the future!

Community spotlight: Not Pacman ++

Sun, 10 Feb 2013 13:42:00 +0100

So you played Not Pacman and perhaps you thought “Hm, you know what this game needs? A level editor that allows massive levels, customizable everything and also sparkly powerup for pacman.”
Well, now there’s a mod for that.

Not Pacman ++

A Not Pacman mod by Felix Dumenil adds that and much more. If you’d like to give it a try, see the forum thread for download and run instructions as well as the full changelog.

Automated Portals

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 08:12:00 +0100

Someone on the forums recently suggested a gamemode where the portals are made for you. Well since SE has portal placing entities and region triggers, you can already do this.

I wrote a quick overview of links so you can roughly see how it’s made up:

Another silly gif

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 20:38:00 +0100

Mari0 SE doesn't have a release date, and here is why

Thu, 31 Jan 2013 23:42:11 +0100

Mari0 SE, the upcoming update that adds online play to the game, does not have a release date, and that’s simply because it isn’t done.

To be more precise, the online mode is proving to be tougher than expected and we can’t tell when it’s going to be done. Since this is the most anticipated feature, I do not wish to release the game without it. If something like the overworked Portal campaign wouldn’t be done yet, I could release the game without and then update again when that is done, but it’s simply not an option for me with online play.

I hope you understand and thank you for your patience! It’s your constant positive feedback that keeps us going.

And You Thought Yesterday's Gif Was Confusing

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:08:00 +0100

I did what I was threatening to do yesterday and added a second world on the “right” side of the cubes. The player collides with both worlds now.

Because it’s really confusing, I added a little 2D map showing the combination of the two worlds. It makes it a little more obvious what is going on.

Some 3D-2D Hybrid Platformer

Sun, 20 Jan 2013 14:24:00 +0100

Ever since I updated the Ortho Robot engine to support textured cubes, I always had this idea of playing a 2D platformer on the sides of the cubes where you can move the cubes around. Well last night I decided to make a prototype like that and you can see the results below!

I’m thinking of creating a second 2D world on the right side of the cubes so that changing the cubes will affect both worlds. Not sure what will become of this or if I even want to punish myself by making actual levels for that.

Rolling Around at the Speed of Fast

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 18:52:00 +0100

Before Not Pacman’s release, our best time was just above 40 seconds and the best time at Gamescom was 39.4, but RabidJellyfish has put that all to shame with his impressive time of 30.9 seconds.

Are you a bad enough dude to roll even faster? Tell us your best time!

Not Pacman Released!

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 23:47:00 +0100

Finally! After over 2 years of sitting around on our hard drive, Not Pacman is ready to be played.

The main problem with the game were lack of a working control scheme, which we managed to solve with the standard controls where the player moves his mouse left and right to rotate the field.

Find the game over here and a video of the game below.

Not Pacman later today

Fri, 11 Jan 2013 15:42:22 +0100

After a lot of work, we’ll finally be releasing Not Pacman later today. You know, that game that has been in the sidebar for one and a half years? Yeah.

That’s pretty much all I have to say. So, prepare to Not play Pacman later.

Levelscreen backgrounds

Tue, 01 Jan 2013 01:04:30 +0100

You know these boring black screens before each level which tell you how many lives you have left?
Well mappacks can customize these on a map basis now. There was a thread on the forums suggesting that and it sounded like a good idea. Also some forum members (hans1998 and idiot9.0) made a few nice mockups of levelscreens which you can find here:

Oh and, happy new year everyone!

An update!

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 19:54:01 +0100

Bad news first: There aren’t any bad news. We never have bad news. Remember when we had bad news? You don’t.
Good news: Thanks to winter holidays, we’ll have a lot of time and will be able to work on Mari0 SE and updates to this blog!

We’re planning to have Not Pacman, that game that’s been on the list on the left for forever, ready for release in the next few days, so that’s something to look forward to.

Besides that, there will be a drastically increased amount of posts on this blog! Hooray!

Making of an Enemy

Tue, 27 Nov 2012 15:30:52 +0100

When I released Mari0, a lot of people have suggested adding enemies from SMB2J (the japanese sequel to SMB) or SMB3. And for that reason I’m trying to add enough enemy behavior components to allow at least most of them to be recreated easily with the enemy customization.

So let’s go and add fireball spitting Piranha plants to our mappack.

The basic behavior of the fire Piranha is the same as the normal Piranha, so we can just use its base and then change some of the attributes:

base=plant
{

}

This basically creates a 1:1 copy of the existing plant enemy.
You can find the attributes of the plant enemy over here. Notice how it says ‘“quadcount”: 2’, which tells the game that the included graphic is composed of 2 different sprites, an open- and a closed mouth one for the Piranha. Each enemy can have one png image with the same name as the json settings file which is used for all the graphics.

We could override the graphic of our plant with a fancier looking SMB3-alike one, but I’m lazy so let’s just keep the graphic the same by not supplying a “fireplant.png”. Instead, let’s see what we do have to change.

{
	"pistonextendtime": 4,

	"spawnsenemy": "fireplantfire",
	"spawnenemydelays": [2, 1],
	"spawnenemytowardsplayer": true,
	"spawnenemyspeed": 5,
	"spawnonlyonextended": true
}

First, we make the plant stay outside the pipe a little longer so it can fire off a few shots before disappearing again. Then, we set up the “spawnsenemy” parameter with another enemy we’re going to make shortly. The delay is a table of values from which a random one is picked for each shot, something I’ve discovered is the easiest to modify.

For the initial speed of the spawned enemy, we have the option of a set or random value for both X and Y, or make it fire towards the player with a preset speed, something we use here. Also we have an option to make piston-based enemies only spawn enemies while extended, something I totally didn’t add only for this blogpost.

So if we run that, we see that everything runs fine! Just kidding, it crashes because it tries to create an enemy that doesn’t exist. So let’s add that fireplantfire enemy.

The above graphic is the four frames used for Mario’s fireball, and we’re just going to use that for the Piranha fire because I’m lazy. You can find the whole fireplantfire.json here, but this is the important stuff:

{
	"quadcount": 4,
	
	"animationtype": "frames",
	"animationspeed": 0.1,
	"animationstart": 1,
	"animationframes": 4,

	"movement": "none",
	"kills": true,
	
	"width": 0.5,
	"height": 0.5,
	
	"gravity": 0,
}

We’re telling the game that this enemy’s graphic (fireplantfire.png) has 4 frames and that they should be cycled through with 0.1 seconds for each frame. The fireball itself has no movement pattern so it will just keep moving where it was sent to. It kills on contact (there’s also separate attributes for “killsonsides”, “killsontop” and “killsonbottom”) and it’s half a block (8 pixels) big. Lastly, it has no gravity so it doesn’t fall down.

So now that we have everything that we need, let’s try it out!

Everything’s working as expected. To make the Piranha plant face Mario in case we had replaced its graphic, we’d have to set “facesplayer” to true.

I hope this gives some insight into the enemy creation for mappack authors and will be enough to satisfy all the creative minds out there.

Putting stuff into coinblocks

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 14:05:00 +0100

Why not? So now you can put any enemy in a coinblock to have it appear as soon as Mario hits it. Yes, hammers are enemies. Mushrooms and co will probably use the same enemy customization so I guess they’re enemies too?

Give Me Your Screenspace

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 15:14:59 +0100

Ever since Mari0 was released, people have been requesting the ability to run the game in fullscreen mode. I’ve always been against this since Mari0 uses a 400x224 base resolution which can’t be easily scaled for any resolution.

The solution is either: Change the base resolution by showing more/less blocks on the screen at the same time, something I can’t do because it would change gameplay, or scale the game with unrounded factors, but I really don’t like scaled pixel art.

I caved in though and added both letterbox and streched fullscreen to SE. You can chose any scaling factor that fits on your screen and going any further will make it go fullscreen. I put up a quick comparison between letterbox, which preserves the aspect ratio, and stretch, which fills up the whole screen, below.

The problem with: Customizability

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 10:42:00 +0100

I was writing a blogpost about how customizability is always a problem because of the format that I let users specify attributes in (loading lua is too dangerous because people like to download these mods, and text parsers are annoying to write), but then I thought “Why don’t I just use JSON?” and then I just used JSON and it works perfectly. Or I’ll use sandboxing lua.

Have a silly gif!