Technical skills presentation notes

Over the whole semester for the technical skills, I've put all my focus into Stencyl. The first time I used Stencyl was last year during the second semester. At first I needed to get my head around but wasn't as brain imploding as Blender, which I now enjoy. The more time I spent on it, the more I enjoyed building a game from ground up. Not only did it get me to enjoy game development, but I started to appreciate coding.

In regards to technical skills, I didn't need to start from the beginning basics since I already got a grasp on navigating the programs interface. So I used the opportunity to work on the aspects of Stencyl I wasn't familiar with. These include Tileset creation, using collisions more effectively, creating custom event blocks, behaviors, attributes and giving more attention to the events editor.

I did run into issues regarding a Stencyl but I solved the problem and came out of it more wiser than before. For now on I will stick to blank games and start from scratch.

Another challenge I'll have is mathematics. This is a main skill needed in game development and has always been on of my weaknesses, but despite this I'm determined to stay devoted to game design.

Therefore I will keep on developing my Stencyl skills and move on to Stencyl 3 as this version has new features that I'm keen to try out. I aim to keep working on my skills while developing a game i can complete and publish on the app store.

Stencyl solution

Okay today I found a solution to getting the player character's HP to fall to 0 and die from enemy hits.

In the "Run and Jump" kits behaviour "Die in Pit", I added to actor collision event which allows the enemy to hit the player and decrease the health to 0. Next I set the players HP to 100 on the same behaviour in a separate event. The HP counter is a drawing event set in the scene 1 event editor and shows up on the screen.
Now the reason why the actor when die after the countdown expired is due to accidentally disabling the health management actor behaviour from the player. Also the countdown expiration event needs to be included in the Die in pit behavior to work like the death event. Without this behaviour, the custom event wouldn't work and trigger the behaviour. So now the actor is no longer immortal, but the one thing I still don't know is why this event had to be included in this behaviour. However right now I take this as a victory and good enough solution.

Stencyl issues.

Okay for a while now, the player character will not die from anything. This issue started to occur in a new scene I created using the run and jump kit. While this happened in scene 2, the opposite occurred in scene 1 which was the default scene in the template.
After creating behaviours and attributes to work around the problems, scene started getting the same problems as scene1.
Yesterday I got some help from our teacher Liam who found that applying the actor death even to an existing behaviour worked. Unfortunately when I made an actor behaviour focusing on actor death, the same issue occurred.
After some thinking, I came to the conclusion that maybe the template, run and jump kit itself was glitching especially when applying new behaviours. I could be wrong about it but my new solution is to start from scratch in a blank game. I've never had any problems with Milk Run, which I used the RPG town template kit for. The reason why is maybe the fact that the player actor wasn't made to die due to time restraints but I wouldn't mind testing this out to see if this template has the same issues.
Will update when problem is solved.

Stencyl event editor 3

While experimenting with Stencyl's event editor for the platformer template, I decided to create a monster who floats around and follows the player character. This worked out fine from looking back on a tutorial for creating a follow character behavior. I then set up an event for the enemy to kill player character upon collision. This works well in scene 1, which was included in the template. However for the scene 2 I added myself, the player won't die or if they do die, there's no reloading back to the start.
I honesty don't know whats causing this and knowing my luck it's something ridiculously simple. I've decided to leave this for now and focus on other events.
Currently I've started on creating an inventory system from a list and have a mechanic where  as the player takes damage, it will be displayed on a smiley face. The smiley has four emotions: Happy (yellow)-Displeased (green) -Sick (blue)-Dear death (red). This is the order of progression to represent how much health the player has remaining. I've added the smiley at the top of the screen below the counter or I could place it above the actors head. It's just a matter of working out how to set this up appropriately and I've been thinking that a custom event and trigger might be worth a try.

Update is so far this plan isn't working but I found a web page on creating a health system through the drawing events.

http://photongamedev.wordpress.com/stencyl-corner/quest-pals/quest-pals-tutorial-3-health-set-up-and-drawing/

I won't be using at present but it's still got some useful tips on other ways to go about it.
I also did some more searching and found a thread in the Stencyl forums:

 http://community.stencyl.com/index.php?topic=7429.0
This is about someone trying to solve the issues on communication between actors and the threads author is attempting to do something with making an actor represent health and have a animation change every time a player loses health. This is what I'm trying to do with the health smiley face actor. I'm gonna read this as a reference to point me in the right direction.

 Sunrisekingdom's event setup for a Mega man health bar.

My attempt at a actor health bar.

Stencyl event editor 2

Okay in regards to coding in stencyl with the event editor, my main challenge is building more advanced events. I have followed a tutorial last year on building the basic set up for a turn-based battle system. This was reasonably long and was successful, but what I need to attempt is building a more advanced event without the assistance of resources.
From what I've noticed with Stencyl is it does require some mathematics skills. Okay in my case this throws a challenge at my face because Maths is one of my weaknesses. I do know somethings like how to use the greater than or less than block. I'm hoping this won't be much of an issue as I discover different event block combinations.
So far I'm starting small and building events, attributes and behaviors I've done before from tutorials either from last year or this year. I've set up health points for the player actor, countdown timer for the top of the screen and to even have the health points number on the screen. At the moment it's just a matter of getting these number elements to show up on the screen and even follow the actor as they progress through the level.
I'll do a small tutorial this week to include in the post but right now I just want to apply these skills I've gained without any help from tutorials.
On the bright side I can navigate well enough in Stencyl so it's now a matter of developing my coding skills with the events editor.

Stencyl custom events

Today I focused on creating custom events. These events are for creating a set of instructions that will be set off by a trigger that the developer can specify. The tutorial I used is from the Stencyl textbook on page 126 to 127. For this exercise I made a custom event called Relocate actor and this will be started by event called Restartlevel (Caps and no spaces is important to remember).
It is very vital make sure the event name is typed exactly the same as it in the custom event. If this isn't done, then the trigger won't happen.
Technically in the custom block it states "When RestartLevel happens" two blocks with the contents "set x or y to the coordinates in the scene for self". So in other words it's another method to make an actor restart from the level start after death.
Before this I had to make a behavior called health which the event "RestartLevel" must trigger in for the actor.
For this activity I used the stencyl platformer template, which I've been using for experimenting with different behaviors, events and attributes.

Therefore, I gained a new understanding of custom events, which I never tried last year. For now on, I'll be using custom events in developing games.

Stencyl coding with event editor.

Okay last week I went ahead and watched  a three part video tutorial on coding in stencyl.

Part1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5SUIfXrRP8
Part2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHU7kfo2Ey4
Part3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rbao383WrUM

I could have found a tutorial from the text book, but I remember this tutorial from last year and figured it would be a good plan to actually learn from it properly. Anyway instead of following this tutorial step by step, I'm going to apply what I gained from it in one of the text books game files.
While in the process of working through this, I discovered some other tutorials for Stencyl here:
 http://www.kongregate.com/games/abigayl/stencyl-tutorial-first-game
This is part of a series of interactive tutorials made be abigayl for stencyl. I watched through the first couple of tutorials and gained some skills from it. I even picked up on making custom event blocks in the event editor. I believe this will allow for more flexibility in building events especially ones for specific controls or for controlling when actor animations will occur. I plan to keep working this technical skill for a bit longer as coding event blocks is a big part of building a game in Stencyl, which is used for many aspects like controls, attributes, behaviors and animations.
If I don't keep building up on my skills for this then it will make building games in Stencyl very difficult and limited.
Anyway one of the things I did in regards to applying this in a test, was setting up controls for the player character's speed in right and left directions. For example by pressing shift in the right direction, the player actor will speed up and can even do longer jumps from this.

Stencyl Attributes

Okay for this tutorial, I started with consulting the Stencyl textbook, which has a decent introduction  on page 50. I have worked with attributes last year where I followed a tutorial on building a turn based battle system. I actually want to find another tutorial to further expand on my skills as there's a lot involved with attributes.
Anyway attributes are the configuration information that is supplied to a behavior. Attributes can be almost any type of data like number, text, actor type or a list of items.
For the game I worked on last year; "Milk Run", I used the dialogue behavior from the RPG town template found in Stencyl. This had a list attribute that allowed you to add in the dialogue for each block of text. This did lead to some issues where you had to assign this to each character and remove the list completely and start a new one. If you didn't do this and just add on text to the list without removing the whole thing first, it will affect the other actors dialogue behaviour. I didn't know why it did this silly thing but I was very happy to find a way to work around it.
Reading about attributes in the stencyl textbook did help a bit in understanding the overall purpose of an attribute, but I want to work on another tutorial this week. Sunrisekingdom on YouTube makes a lot of tuts on Stencyl especially on attributes, so I'll check out if there's any ones I haven't seen yet.

Okay now on page 159 of the Stencyl text book is a tutorial on creating a game attribute to count lives. I've worked through this short tutorial which demonstrated how to count the lives of an actor. This will display text showing the number of lives which will decrease each time the player dies.
All you need to do is create a game attribute called Lives, then put it under the scoring category, name it as Lives, which will be a number type and set the initial value to 3 and click okay.
Next I went onto the next part where you you go into the manage player collisions actor behaviour and go into the collides with enemies event. Then go into the game attributes category button and find the purple set lives to 0 block which can found under number setters subcategory. You then need to drag this block into the orange when event and must be above the red block.
Next click on the drop down arrow of the set lives  and choose the 0-0 in the maths section. Now in this left side of this block, click on the drop down and find lives in game attributes and in the right side type in 1.
Now find the print anything block in the flow flow section  of the palette which is under the debug menu. and drag it just below the set lives block.
For the print block, click o the drop down arrow and find text & text in text and basics. Now I could not find this block in the standard Stencyl but it could in the 3x version which this text book is for. i Decided to pick text + text instead.
In the print block first empty space, type in Lives remaining: and the last one find anything as text under the basics menu.
In the as text block, go to the drop down arrow and select lives in game attributes under the number option. Finally test the game to see if it works.

Okay this didn't really work for me as I couldn't find the lives countdown text but this could be due to using text + text instead of text & text. This couldn't be helped due to that block not being in this version of Stencyl I'm currently using but it probably would have worked for Stencyl 3x.

Scene behaviors

Okay after some researching into scene behaviors, I realized I've already got a good understanding of this. Technically I already know how to do certain scene behaviors, which include scene change and preventing an actor from going out of bounds.
These behaviors are set up like actor behaviors but must be attached to an actual scene instead of an actor.  Scene change is very easy to do and to start setting it up is by putting in a region box in your desired point like for example a door. This method is for moving an actor to a place like a door with s region box on it, which will transition to the next scene if the actor touches it.
Next go into the scene's events editor, add a new event which is in actors-enters or leave region-actor or type. After this go to the event block to choose the actor, if it will enter or exit scene and the region which must be placed in the scene prior to this. You can then choose to add a transition that can be found in the event palette menu under the scene and game flow options. Any transition will work for example try a fade out  for 0.5 secs, then choose what scene it will go to and a fade in for the same time. This is a very important step in setting up which scene you change to.
I believe this is a good example of a scene behavior and how I came across this method is from this tutorial:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aGjYpFOIxO8

This was a quick tutorial I discovered last and felt like refreshing my knowledge of it. I haven't found actual tutorial for it in the Stencyl text book but I believe adding a level timer for a scene could count as a scene behavior as with a scene scroll which will move along with the actor. This will be in later tutorials I'll be working on. As for this method of scene transition,  I plan to use for any game I make in the future.

Stencyl actor behaviour tutorials.

Actor behaviors requires building a custom behavior like following actor and applying it's own events. These behaviors can then be applied to the actor, who will act on those behaviors and can be applied to more than one actor. This will require a couple of tutorials which the first one is:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vslD_SxxvXM

The next tutorial will be from the "Learning Stencyl 3.X Game Development" textbook. This book has activities to work through and one is behaviors.
Okay I worked through the first two parts of chapter 4 which is about creating behaviors. First thing was to create a custom behavior called collide with collectibles. This enabled the actor to make a collectible fruit disappear when collided with. You have to create the actor behavior, go into the event option which is also the behavior editor.
Next add an event which is the one under the collisions, in any actor collides with and find member of group. Also change the name to collides with collectibles.
A block will appear called when actor hits a...You have to find in the center panel, the actor group selector which you choose an actor group from the list. In this case is the collectibles.
Next you go to the actor button in the instruction block palette at the top of the right-hand panel. Click on the properties panel and go down to kill self block in the Alive/Dead subcategory.You then drag this block to the space in the orange center panel. Locate the blue of group at the top-right of the orange self hits block and drag it into the word self in the blue kill self block.
Finally click on the green attach to actor type button at the top-right of the block palette and pick the monkey in the choose actor type dialogue box. Now test the game to see if it's working.
This demonstrates how to start a custom character behavior and add events in the behavior editor. I actually went a little further in the tutorial and added an event where the actor will die if colliding with an enemy which works similar to colliding with collectibles.

Update and next technical skill development.

Okay collisions in Stencyl wasn't a difficult skill to development. Collisions are used in tilesets and actor creation. The collisions appear as shapes that need to be adjusted via points around the object. Actors are slightly different than tilesest where the collisions are shapes like circles but aren't solid. This is because the actor has to be in the center of the collision and can be a number of shapes like a pentagon or square. These collisions prevent any object or actor from going through the other actor. However if making a ghost character, then excluding collisions is a good option as ghosts are usually perceived as transparent.  
Next skill to develop is actor behavior which is a bit more technical.

Stencyl Collisions skill development.

Next technical skill to develop is collisions. I had problems with this last year and found my character sprites would glitch when colliding with each other.

This is another tutorial made by the same one who did the tile sets:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkywrBBDPn8

Technically you use your tile sets and adjust the collision lines around the edge of for example a barrel. The points you move around is similar to masking with the pen tool in After Effects which has moveable points around. It's also like the Pen tool in Photoshop and even Illustrator has this feature too.
The actor or player character will then collide with the scene object, but they can move through them if it's a non collision tile. Putting these objects on another layer and moving it above the existing layer allows the character to move behind the object. This can be very useful for having a hidden path or treasure behind an object, then allow the player to get behind it too without collisions.
I will be using this skill for my own games, as it's good for level design and gives the players more incentive to look in every possible places for hidden goodies.

Stencyl tileset tutorials

Last week I got a grasp of building my own tile sets in Stencyl. The method I used was to paint them first in Photoshop then import them in Stencyl. An easier method would be to simply create the tiles in Pencly but the plug-in had some issues. It does work on my laptop but once brought back into Stencyl, the options window wouldn't close meaning they didn't export properly.
For more paint options, I'll be sticking to making the tiles in Photoshop which actually made some already:

The tutorial I used for making tile sets is here on YouTube:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGOPh-Ko6mU
This tutorial had it's funny moments, but he was very informative and easy to understand.
This guy also has a has a collision tutorial so I'll be watching that for my next technical skill development.

I will be applying this skill for my own Stencyl games. The reason is for convenience and saves time which I learned last year the hard way. I created all my environments in Pencyl and exported them in as flat background images. This meant no collisions from environment elements like trees and houses, which is very bad for level design.

Technical skills brainstorm

For the rest of this term, I'll be focusing on building up my technical skills in Stencyl. Currently I'm working on tilesets but there is also a few more aspects I need to work on:

*Tilesets
 *Collisions
*Actor behavior
*Scene behavior
*Attributes
*Logic
*Building scenes like for scrolling levels, including parallax
*Controls with character actions and interactivity
*Building an inventory system

There are a few other different things like sounds, loading screen but these are straight forward to set up in Stencyl, so I'm better off using my time wisely for the skills that need the most time and effort.

Next term I ca go a step further and go onwards to Unity, which I've picked up the basics for last year.
I only know how to build a scene and have a first person controller running around a really basic scene. I really want to go into the coding side to it, which gets a lot more technical than Stencyl.
Blender also has an inbuilt game engine so I could even check that out too.

Stencyl testing

Okay currently I'm furthering my skills with Stencyl. This has been an interesting experience with tilesets that have some issues occurring in the editor. I'm hoping it's just my computer having a minor issue which restarting it might fix. I really need to get a grasp on using tilesets in Stencyl for easier level building. I can get around this problem by creating the tilesets in another program like photoshop then importing them to Stencyl. Honesty this will be a better option as Pencyl is very limited compared to photoshop in designing graphics. For my game in another subject, I'll do this method for better quality. I'll also continue reading the Stencyl text book to further my knowledge and skills especially with behaviors.

Stencyl tutorials.

I checked out some tutorials on Youtube for Stencyl at last weeks workshop session. I mainly looked out into coding and tile sets. I have no ida why I didn't use tile sets for Milk Run last year, it would have made things quicker and more efficient. So for now on I'll be using this instead of making my own environments in Pencyl, which is probably better used as an alternative for making spites instead of Photoshop. I've also got my Stencyl textbook for more extensive information and activities to help in Mastering Stencyl.

Dream Job

My "dream job" has changed gradually over the years. At first I was focused on animation mainly 2D and possibly 3D. To increase my chances of getting into the industry, I completed the Bachelor of Arts Animation and Visual Effects degree at CSU. In regards animation skills, I might do some tutorials on Blender and can animate characters a step further in Stencyl.
Following this is Digital Media which I'm currently studying and my goal did change from this. At first I came here wanting more skills in Web Development, which I didn't enjoy but this changed when I actually focused on the coding side to it. I have been building a website portfolio where I had a struggle on the design elements yet enjoyed building the CSS and HTML codes.
Game design is also one of Digital Media's subjects and my goal began to shift in this direction. Playing games is one of my hobbies and I find it even more fun to actually make my own games. If I was to go in this direction, I would lean more in the direction of coding games instead of the design elements but I can do both.
I won't do a copy paste with this on the conceptual blog, but will find inspirational images instead.

Software I'll focus on will include:

Stencyl
Unity
Dreamweaver

Intro

This blog is connected to the conceptual blog, so there will be similar subject matter between both. The subject matter is in regards to what my future goal will be and the skills required. This will consist of tutorials and resource material required to improve skills focused me chosen career which I will go into more detail about next post.