Banana Royale (Pac Man Battle Royale Redesign Contest)

[Le Chuck]

Le Chuck, where were you when we tried to get Candy Nightmare going?

WTF is candy nightmare?  I'm here now.  If you have a project I'm happy to help.  Send me a PM or just post it here as this thread is at least half my posts anyway lol. 

[Felsir]

Candy Nightmare is a project Sjaak started after I posted this:

The theme is halloween (my prototype C# project was named 'Candy Nightmare').
Replace the pacmen with human characters. Replace the pellets with candy (sugarcanes, chocolates) the powerpills are replaced by bigger candy (lollypops) .
Now here is the biggest change: when a player eats a powerpill they turn into a big monster (vampire, mummy, werewolf, frankenstein). So the large pacmen are actually unique monsters. The bumping and eating mechanism will still be in tact.

The ghosts are ghosts in the same graphic style as the rest of the game. I used the same maze layout but with graphics like a park or a graveyard (tried to get a style similar to ghouls'n ghosts).

Other notes I made was to have a character select screen, and instant join mini selection (much like in the game Rampage). The player can pick the monster they want to be (unless allready taken by another player). The characters would be linked to their monster (for example the female human will turn into a vampire, the blackhaired guy named Victor turns into frankenstein).

I did some tests for special effects, such as a comicbook lightning crash when a player eats a powerpill and an animation for the transition between human and monster while keeping control over the character as not to interrupt the gameplay.
Another thing I hoped to incorporate was configurable player (score) positions, as not everyone will have a 4 player cocktail table such as the origional. Ofcourse it has to act like a real arcade game ("insert coin to join in" and Cab friendly controls).

I have made more notes and did some experimental code but this is the basic outline.

We bounced some ideas around and shared some code.

Normal players don't have a glow (like in battle royale), but when a player turns and night falls, the other players carry a torch or lantern and they have a yellowish glow around them. The turned player has a redish glow(?)
------
I like the glow ideas for the lantern.  Glow for glow's sake for a turned player, dunno.  It depends.

Player characters


1. Victor - turns into Frankenstein
Concept: Victor wears a labcoat and geek glasses.
Transformation: When he eats the power candy, lightning strikes and he is turned in to his alter ego.
Backstory: Victor experiments with physics and biology. He hopes that by collecting the most candy he can earn his place. Or eliminate the competition...

2. Violet turns into Vampire
Concept: She wears a long red dress and has blonde hair. Her vampire self resembles Morticia Addams.
Transformation: When she eats the power candy, a cloud of bats fly from the spot revealing her vampire appearance.
Backstory: Violet once got lost on a school field trip to a cavern where she got bitten. As a revenge on her classmates who didn't go look for her she wants to prevent them from having candy. Either by collecting the candy first or other means.

3. Marty turns into Werewolf
Concept: Marty wears a school basketball shirt.
Transformation: a beam of moonlight hits Marty, starting his transformation.
Backstory: Marty could have been a popular guy at school; if he didn't have to hide himself from the moonlight so often. Why are parties always organised when it's also full moon? Marty hopes to collect the candy left in the park because he doesn't want to collect at the door so he won't be recognised.

4. Isis turns into Mummy
Concept: Isis has a white dress with blue details. She also has dark hair.
Transformation: When she eats a power candy, a sandstorm animation turns her into a mummy.
Backstory: Isis is a decendant from an ancient Egyptian pharao. To lift a curse in her family she is looking for an artefact presumed to be stored in the university-attic. She tries to blend in by going to college there. The pharao also had a huge craving for candy...

So after a couple of weeks we had little progress (mainly in the graphics department) and progress stalled. It's still an idea worth exploring I think.

[Le Chuck]

That's right up my alley. I'll start tackling the art. Since the jumbos are separate sprites it'll allow me to pack a lot more detail into the monsters as I can work on a 64x64 canvas.

Candies will be easy, monster morphs shouldn't be too bad either.

[Le Chuck]

Here's the first run at the main characters and ghosts, personally I think the clowns would work for this theme too, hell I might even make ghost clowns for uber terror. 

I think Victor is spot on, Lucian is hum drum boring but works, and both the girls are coming along nicely.  Thanks to CarmenMVS for some character pieces sampled here. 

[Felsir]

Great work Le Chuck! Now Sjaak for the support in code :-)

For the transitions, some effects could be programmatically- for example I had a bunch of bats swoop in on the location of Violet and a lightning bolt hit the spot of Victor. I do hope Sjaak is willing to restart the project!

[Le Chuck]

Got the werewolf and frankenstein monster up.  Werewolf was a combo of a few others I've seen with a lot of work done to make him match Lucien.  I think he turned out okay.  Frank, well I spent entirely too much time on Frank today.  Frank was pretty much a scratch build.  The lightening is a separate layer so i can drop it off and he's got a faint elec blue glow also, I think he'll look awesome. 

I'm stuck on the mummy and vampire, I know how I want them to look but I know it will take me a day a piece to scratch build them.  I was hoping to find something I could piece out from but nothing really looks right and won't match the rest of the art that well.  If anybody wants to take a shot at them feel free.

I don't like the current ghosts so i'll get them switched out in the next revision.  Almost forget, I found a gypsy girl on RPG by Grandma (a great putter-outer of free art) that I thought was a better fit than the first Isis so I switched her out.  I like this one better, only minor tweaks were necessary. 

[Sjaak]

Great work Le Chuck! Now Sjaak for the support in code :-)

Working on the code for non rotating players, maze without color cycle and non colorized death sequence. I'm going to make this all optional, because i still want to support the 8 bit pacman look.

@Le Chuck: PLEASE put the clowns back in....

[Le Chuck]

@Le Chuck: PLEASE put the clowns back in....

Send in the clowns...
Updated the dead clowns to kinda float (we all float down here), made the fire in the death sequence die down at the end, minor tweaks - added some candy.  What are we looking for in candy? 

Do you need two frames on the clowns or three like the other characters are?  I can do either.

Hey, while we're piling junk on your plate how about being able to tile the background?  I can do some environments at 3/4 perspective like the players, to kinda gussy it up a bit.  I'd just need the level templates as .png or something to design around them.  Then the barriers could be transparent as I'd make them line up with the level background. 

I'm thinking:

Dungeon (of course)
Hedge Maze
Cave
Swamp
Laboratory

lots of different options there to give the game a much different feel.  Here's another one, how about some dynamic bonus items. 

Flower protects you from one impact with a clown
Amulet protects you from one impact with the Mummy, Isis cannot collect the amulet, so on and so forth for cross, silver bullet, and torch (franky hates fire).  Bonus items shown in corner of screen by score/name/what have you. 

Thoughts?

[Le Chuck]

I've been playing around with tiling, haven't done it before.  It's tedious but really fun oddly enough.  I don't have anything good to show yet but lets just say that if you're in the market for a dungeon very reminiscent of Link to the Past I can probably help you out lol. 

[Le Chuck]

Got the Vampiress 3/4 done.  Need to finish off her back side then I'll get started on the Mummy Queen.  I tried to make the vampiress have a likeness to Violet rather than just go on a total goth tangent.  The girl monsters are harder to get right. 

[Felsir]

Great stuff, Le Chuck!

[Le Chuck]

The Mummy queen turned out a lot less mummy and a lot more queen.  At this scale I just couldn't pull off a full body wrap and get the look I wanted.  I may go back and do the black gloves in wrap but that would take a few hours just for a small detail.  I have a bunch of little bugs done up that I'll have scurrying about her feet but this is a good start.  Still need to finish up the Vampiress backside but I haven't been motivated on that and wanted to get the Pharaohess done.   

Edit:  Didn't want to back to back post for no good reason, how are we handling the scared versions of Isis and the gang?  I don't know that we actually need scared versions, I think it might be overkill.  I'd like to see the set in action before going in for 48 more sprites. 

[Le Chuck]

Ugggh.  I kinda had to force this last set, not 100% happy with it but I think they're passable.  I'll want to see how jarring it is when the vampiress turns around, if its a huge visual switch I'll go back and rework them, if it's smooth enough I'll leave it as is. 

Anyway, I'm done for now.  Upon further guidance I'll add more sprites but this will get us rolling in the right direction I'm sure. 

[Sjaak]

Updated the software, sprites are a bit of a mess now. Clowns sort of work. Players kinda work.

download

Some sprites are missing: sprites for blinking big players, blinking small players, scared small players (in all 4 directions)

[Le Chuck]

Updated the software, sprites are a bit of a mess now. Clowns sort of work. Players kinda work.

download

Some sprites are missing: sprites for blinking big players, blinking small players, scared small players (in all 4 directions)

For the blink do you need each pose to have a blink frame - how are you handling that?  If so it's too easy for me to make blink frames for all of them and have it look fairly uniform.  Probably the easiest for me actually but I'll build to your needs.  Also, for now, can we just use the regular small players in place of the scared frames?  If so that's easy too, just need to know where I need to copy them too on the sheet. There won't be enough space on the current sheet for everything so I can either rearrange it in a way that makes sense to me or you do it how you program against it and I'll comply.  Either or. 

[Sjaak]

For the blink do you need each pose to have a blink frame - how are you handling that?  If so it's too easy for me to make blink frames for all of them and have it look fairly uniform.  Probably the easiest for me actually but I'll build to your needs.  Also, for now, can we just use the regular small players in place of the scared frames?  If so that's easy too, just need to know where I need to copy them too on the sheet. There won't be enough space on the current sheet for everything so I can either rearrange it in a way that makes sense to me or you do it how you program against it and I'll comply.  Either or.

I'm going to work on a different way to handle the sprites. Probably reorganize the spritesheet, because now the game won't work anymore with simpler pacman-ish graphics.

[Le Chuck]

Just ran it, I'll lose the lightening and the glow on Frank.  Right now the small character movements looks good, the monster movements look odd.  I can either add more frames of animation for them or is it possible to have the frames sampled twice to slow down their animation a bit, that could help too. 

I can tween the image between each state *I think* effectively adding two extra frames of animation for each direction which could smooth transitions out a lot.  Thoughts?

[Le Chuck]

Added some flashies but based on guidance from Sjaak will modify to fit needs.  Also included the psd I'm working from - most characters are saved in sep files so this is a lot of collapsed layers that are easier to work with a move things about on if it makes it easier for Sjaak to do a rearrange as necessary. 

[Generic Eric]

The only real flaw in the game is if you play alone. The game throws in a CPU player that is very, very easy to beat. But luckily, people would always be playing this game, so you may not need to worry!

Sjaak, does your Banana Royale suffer from this critique?

[Sjaak]

The only real flaw in the game is if you play alone. The game throws in a CPU player that is very, very easy to beat. But luckily, people would always be playing this game, so you may not need to worry!

Sjaak, does your Banana Royale suffer from this critique?

Nope, it throws in 3 cpu players instead of one and they are pretty hard to beat. Try it for yourself, there is a download link a couple of posts up.

[Le Chuck]

The only real flaw in the game is if you play alone. The game throws in a CPU player that is very, very easy to beat. But luckily, people would always be playing this game, so you may not need to worry!

Sjaak, does your Banana Royale suffer from this critique?

Nope, it throws in 3 cpu players instead of one and they are pretty hard to beat. Try it for yourself, there is a download link a couple of posts up.

Yeah, one of them is a little bastard.  Two of them aren't so bad but that one is a damn menance

[Le Chuck]

Sjaak, any progress?  What's the word? 

[Sjaak]

Sjaak, any progress?  What's the word? 

Reworking the whole sprite thing. I'm going to split up all the images and use TexturePacker to construct the spritesheet, which will map the sprite names to coordinates.

This will not change a lot for people designing sprites, but it will make adding more sprites and supporting different spritesheets a lot easier (for me).

[Felsir]

Sjaak, since you're already familiar with Nuclex: it has a texture packing algorithm in there as well, could save you a few bucks on the Texturepacker.
http://nuclexframework.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=Rectangle%20Packing
I made a class that packs the sprites and puts the resulting rectangles into a hashtable with the filename as key. One could put the filenames into an enum and enum.parse the filenames- so you can use the enum in the rest of your code.

[Le Chuck]

Cool, just wanted to check in - look forward to updates 

[Sjaak]

Big update: All player and enemy sprites are now configurable (for all 4 colors/4 directions/different states/etc.). Sprites are stored in a separate folder, there are 476 sprites in total. check "list of sprites.xml" for names and locations.

Download here

Here's a picture of all the sprites that are in the 8 bit pac man battle royale...

[Le Chuck]

Looks like I've got some serious rearranging to do!

[Sjaak]

http://imagesplitter.net/

Just split the spritesheet into separate sprites here, no need to use a spritesheet anymore

[Le Chuck]

http://imagesplitter.net/

Just split the spritesheet into separate sprites here, no need to use a spritesheet anymore

Looks like I've got some serious renaming to do 

Thanks for this, I'll get it tried out 

[Sjaak]

Update:

New version supports more than one level and also supports Tiled for building levels. Download here

[pbj]

Could you explain what exactly we have to do to get a playable game out of your download?

I've downloaded your out.jpg file you posted, converted and renamed it to spritesheet_pacman.png, and stuck it in the root director with the program and get absolutely nothing.  Doing the same with other work posted here yields the same result.

No errors, no game screen, no anything.


I've tried this on three different machines.  Nothing.

[Le Chuck]

The game no longer uses a sprite sheet, all gabillion of those sprites need to be split up into individual files, appropriately named, and placed in the correct sprite folder structure.  It's all in the readme. I'm working on the candy nightmare set (slowly as I'm busy with other things this week) once I get it I'll post it up and that can be used with sjaak's game structure.  If you want pac-man you'll have to build it yourself. 

Sjaak - really looking forward to getting into that tile editor.  Thanks!  It'll be a bit before I get to it but this looks very promising. 

[Sjaak]

Could you explain what exactly we have to do to get a playable game out of your download?

I've downloaded your out.jpg file you posted, converted and renamed it to spritesheet_pacman.png, and stuck it in the root director with the program and get absolutely nothing.  Doing the same with other work posted here yields the same result.

No errors, no game screen, no anything.


I've tried this on three different machines.  Nothing.

out.png doesn't do anything, you have to fill the sprite folder with the sprites you design yourself. A list of all the sprites is in the .xml file.

For example: in the folder sprites/ghosts/pink/left/ you have to create 2 (32px by 32px) sprites for the pink ghost moving left (normal0.png & normal1.png)

This update is just for the guys working on the candy nightmare project, it's not playable.

Also: Did you install all the prerequisites?

[pbj]

Okay, looks like XNA was the problem there.  So I've got a game that boots up with old school looking walls and dots, but no character sprites.  Progress.

How do we implement the additional levels?  I have actually slightly figured out that Tiled software.

 

[Sjaak]

Okay, looks like XNA was the problem there.  So I've got a game that boots up with old school looking walls and dots, but no character sprites.  Progress.

How do we implement the additional levels?  I have actually slightly figured out that Tiled software.

 

I'll post some instructions tomorrow, but you can open level1.tmx with tiled to get an idea. To create a new level, just make a copy of level1 and go from there.

[pbj]

Yes, I've figured that out.  How do we get the game to cycle through levels?  Say I design an additional 5 levels, how do I ensue the game plays through them properly?

[Sjaak]

Yes, I've figured that out.  How do we get the game to cycle through levels?  Say I design an additional 5 levels, how do I ensue the game plays through them properly?

Name the files level1.tmx to level7.tmx, update game.ini (Rounds=7).

To build new levels start with this template. Don't delete anything from the template. The "ghost box" has to stay in this place as well as the starting positions for the 4 players. Also don't modify the first 7 sprites.

• Layer1: this is the graphical representation of the maze. This layer has no effect on the path that players and ghosts can follow.
• route: This layer describes the maze, put a small dot on every possible player location. Make sure every dot is reachable!
• start: These describe the position of the dots when the game starts. No powerpills here.
• variation1 through variation9: This describes the various dot/powerpill layouts when all the pills ara eaten. Make sure there are exactly 4 powerpills in each variation.
• portals: This layer describes the playfield "portals". Don't try anything funny here, make sure that all the portals connect!

If the level doesn't work, you probably did something wrong. There are no errors or warning messages.

[nevinskima]

Thanks so much for developing this man.  I'm having a blast playing it.  I've got my sprites created (8-bit classic Pac-Man), and I'm just having a blast.

Can't wait until you enable us to add our own sound files.

When I play the version 4 of the game, there are counters on the bottom of the screen (fps, something, and a countdown timer).  Is there any way to remove these numbers from the screen?  I didn't see anything in the Game.ini to disable them.  Is there any way to increase the timer?  I copied level 1 and 2 to make levels 3-7, and when I try to play 8 rounds, when the timer reaches 0, the game just exits.  Should that be a count down timer for each round to decide if there is a draw rather than a total game limit timer?

Also, when playing 1 player verses 3 CPUs, the red player doesn't show stats.

I've just downloaded Tiled, and I'm looking forward to creating my own mazes.  This is so much fun!  Thanks for all the time you've spent on this and for sharing it!

[Sjaak]

Thanks so much for developing this man.  I'm having a blast playing it.  I've got my sprites created (8-bit classic Pac-Man), and I'm just having a blast.

Can't wait until you enable us to add our own sound files.

When I play the version 4 of the game, there are counters on the bottom of the screen (fps, something, and a countdown timer).  Is there any way to remove these numbers from the screen?  I didn't see anything in the Game.ini to disable them.  Is there any way to increase the timer?  I copied level 1 and 2 to make levels 3-7, and when I try to play 8 rounds, when the timer reaches 0, the game just exits.  Should that be a count down timer for each round to decide if there is a draw rather than a total game limit timer?

Also, when playing 1 player verses 3 CPUs, the red player doesn't show stats.

I've just downloaded Tiled, and I'm looking forward to creating my own mazes.  This is so much fun!  Thanks for all the time you've spent on this and for sharing it!

The countdown timer is in the game, because it's a beta. There's still lots of bugs and missing features. Sound support will come in the future.

Thanks for the compliments. I hope you will share some of your level designs (and sound designs???).

I've created a more complex level, you can download here

[nevinskima]

Excellent.  I'll be working on a few maps today with some variations.  I'll shoot you a message later on where you can download them, and you can choose to include or ignore them with a future release.