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Student Game Dev Part 18 - Layers and music

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Soan New Zealand194 Posts March 28 2014 01:01 GMT #1 + Show Spoiler [Previous parts] + Part One - It begins Part Two - Technical Foundation Part Three - Game Design Part Four - Input and Physics Part Five - More Physics Things Part Six - Even More Physics Part Seven - User Interface Part Eight - UI and the Editor Part Nine - Editor Progress Part Ten - Progress, and videos Part Eleven - Fixing the Physics Part Twelve - Unproductive Part Thirteen - Context menu + enemies Part Fourteen - Enemies and Problems Part Fifteen - Play testing Part Sixteen - Editor and Art Part Seventeen - Video! This Week Hello again TeamLiquid! Welcome back to my blog about the development of The Adventures of Sam the Pirate, the 2D platformer I'm creating as the final game project for my Bachelor of Software Engineering degree. Last week</a> I talked about getting moving platforms to work properly, and had a new video. This week I'll be talking about getting some parallax scrolling working, and talking a bit about music for the game. Background layers Got a base for background layers, behind the level, working this week. Should help to make levels a bit more visually interesting, I just need some actual art pieces to populate the backgrounds, instead of my terrible programmer art. These background objects can be a static image, or an animated sprite, completely stationary independently moving left or right. So for example there could be a layer consisting of distant clouds, a layer in front of that with some hills, and then another layer in front of that consisting of more closer clouds. The background items are positioned in an area the same size as the level, so at the moment they scroll past at the same speed as objects in the level. This means that anything which is meant to be in the distance and so scroll past slower, don't do that, so it's not correct parallax scrolling just yet. This would definitely throw off the illusion for anything meant to be in the distance, as they won't be moving at the same speed, but I'm not too sure I have time to try and fix this just yet. To fix it, and implement proper parallax scrolling, I need to make background layers scroll past at different speeds, rather than at the same speed. One method I've been thinking of, is to change the scale of the layer. At the moment, the scale is the same as the size of the level, so if the level is 10,000 x 2,000 pixels, the layer is the same. I could shrink that size for layers that are further away, and then scroll appropriately. Maybe I could achieve this effect by doing some hacky maths with the positions of objects and the camera position. Not really sure, but I'm leaving it as is for now, as I only have 7 weeks left so I'm moving on to other elements that still need implementing. Might have a little look at it today, and otherwise come back to it later if I have time. Music Had someone offer to create music and sound via the games Facebook page during the week as well, which is great! He's already created a couple of sample tracks, and you can listen to a potential theme for the ship/beach levels below: It definitely has the catchiness that I'm looking for in game music to have, so we'll have to see what else he comes up with. If you're interested, he has a website over at Eternal Vibration that you can check out. What's next? Next week I'll be adding water to the editor, and get it functioning in game, so that the player dies if they fall into it, as Sam is a terrible pirate who can't swim. I'll potentially be looking at adding coins, along with score tracking and display. Depending on how things go over the next few weeks, I'm thinking of putting a 10 level demo version up for download too. No promises on that though! Keep up to date! Be sure to follow me on Twitter, and like the Facebook page to stay up to date on future content and blog posts when they happen. If you have any questions don't hesitate to ask, either through Twitter or Facebook! You can also check out the blog, previous posts, screenshots and videos over at my site.

EatThePath United States3943 Posts March 28 2014 08:04 GMT #2 Are your backgrounds supposed to tessellate? Just have them scroll at a speed that scales with a "how far in the distance" parameter, which goes from 1 to infinity and just multiplies as 1/x. So the foreground has a parameter of 1 and something in the middle distance is 2 or 3 and something far away is 10, so it goes by at 1/10th the speed. I haven't read your other blogs but I'll check it out to see if I can give a more appropriate explanation based on your engine. That music is ballin.

Soan New Zealand194 Posts March 28 2014 23:13 GMT #3 I think I figured it out. I'm just using a scale between 0 and 1, and multiplying the cameras position (which changes which part of the level is being viewed, and causes the scrolling effect of the level), by that. So 0 is a static background, at a far distance, closing in to 1 being the level itself.

EatThePath United States3943 Posts March 29 2014 02:07 GMT #4 That makes sense. ^^

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