Bad Management → Nice Progress

(This blog post was ported from an official Magical Mary community article on VK.)

💣The Destruction Platform

Roblox... Let's just say that making a game there is like building a house on a shaky foundation; You might not want to actually do it, as what if the shaking increases in intensity one day and makes your nice-looking house fall apart?

That may seem like a weird comparison, but it's actually a decent one. Roblox, being a live, online "game as a service"(?) platform, sometimes makes amendments and changes to their terms and rules that developers must follow, lest their experiences get taken down.

Recently, Roblox made a controversial and morally wrong decision, altering the terms to retroactively grant themselves almost every right (including sublicensing) to all UGC assets (including things developers uploaded). This violated the licenses of any users that imported models bought from Sketchfab's store, and left only one right to the uploader, "ownership", which ironically doesn't seem to determine who has usage rights, but rather who to blame for any violations involving the property.

That change was bad enough, but it looks like Roblox wanted to see how far they could go before users really became angry at them. On September 19th, they were planning to change developer policies to require prompting users to purchase any unowned clothing/accessories that they were wearing, stop players from equipping anything that's out of stock or unavailable, and, worst of all, disallow the use of any Roblox items!

✨The Legacy

Do you understand how bad that last point is? For years, Roblox has let developers use any of their many bundles (sets of character body parts), clothes, and gear (held items that do actions when the player clicks or taps), which made it easy for them to add gameplay to their experiences and decorate their world and characters. Now, however, they're taking those rights away from the developers!

Xane doesn't find the "classic Roblox aesthetic" too appealing, for two reasons:

1. Models like the ones used by gear look like something out of the mid-2000's, which is fitting, since Roblox was created in 2006! They're usually rather low-poly meshes with a low resolution texture wrapped around it, and don't represent the capabilities of Roblox's current engine (which can use PBR textures and up to 1024×1024 textures).
2. Though the classic R6 characters (which use six body parts) like the well-known “Noob” and the original LEGO^® brick aesthetic are part of Roblox's legacy and are charming in some ways, they tend to result in more basic, barren visuals.

👗(Don't) Be Yourself

Well, clearly that should mean that these changes wouldn't affect Xane, right? Well, unfortunately, they probably would. Roblox used pretty vague wording when describing the rule changes. The only place where they mention Roblox items is in the post's FAQ, which for some reason explains how to report experiences. (This is why users believe they will disallow using Roblox assets, in fact!)

If Roblox's assets might not be allowed in the future, or they're affected by the rest of the changes (including the annoying, shameless purchase prompt hounding), this could very well affect everything they've created, including their character bundles. If that's true, it could ruin any roleplaying game that includes a character editor, such as the one that's found in Royale High, a well-known experience.

In Royale High, your character can use any bundle, many of which you probably don't own… Uh-oh!

Just imagine you're playing Royale High on an account that doesn't own the “Boy” bundle, but you made an outfit that uses it. You enter Dress Up mode, check your list of outfits, then click the “wear” button on your alternative male character. Suddenly, a prompt appears somewhere, asking you to buy the bundle (even though it's free), just because you don't own it, and wouldn't use it on your regular Roblox avatar. Well, the rules still would require the developers to always show that prompt to get that stupid bundle!

🧍🏼‍♀️Execute: Plan B!

While other experiences have too many active players to limit what bundles and clothes that the player can choose from (as it would ruin countless saved outfits in some experiences), Project Magical Mary is still in its pre-alpha development phase, so spontaneous changes can be made without compromising players' saved content. Xane wasn't about to let Roblox inevitably sabotage his “house”, so he started doing something that he wouldn't have considered had Roblox not shot themselves in the foot (as they've done many times in recent years)…

He started making his own character “bundle”.

Yep, this is his first attempt at modeling a full R15 (15-part character model) bundle! This is based on Roblox's official “Girl” bundle, with the “Woman” bundle's torso size. Xane's custom character model has segmented arms and legs like Roblox's official offerings, but they have been specifically shaped so that their elbows and knees look smooth, no matter how much they bend.

Also, the hands and feet have been given specifically distinct shapes from Roblox's equivalents, with the former having all five fingers and the latter's thinner shape allowing it to represent bare feet, since Project Magical Mary's shoes will probably be extra models attached to your feet, similar to Royale High, but placing them on top of them instead of completely replacing your feet.

The Future of Project Magical Mary

So, how will this affect Project Magical Mary going forward? Well, while the player will still be allowed to join the experience using their current Roblox avatar, they won't be able to use any of their accessories, classic clothes, and bundles for custom outfits (which is different than Royale High). Players will also be unable to wear any Magical Mary-specific clothes, which would only fit the custom body part set.

To help any other developers work around these changes, should Roblox go through with them despite the heavy backlash in the announcement topic, Xane will release this character on the DevForums as both a native Roblox Studio model file (.rbxm) and the source .blend file so developers could tweak body parts as necessary to fit their experiences, and import the meshes themselves, for when the asset privacy system is expanded to support meshes too; If all meshes are made private by default (like audio is, as of this blog post's creation), Xane's character would be blocked from all experiences, which Xane could become unaware of, especially if something fatal such as his brain ceasing to function occurs.

For those needing a tl;dr for this whole post:

• Roblox is not a good place to develop games that you want to keep alive for years to come, mainly due to their out-of-the-blue, destructive rule changes.
• Roblox's most recent awful update tried to add new restrictions for the items that developers can use in their experiences, including Roblox's own assets (due to the post's ambiguous wording).
• Any experiences with character customization could be required to ask players to buy anything that they equip, if they don't own it.
• Project Magical Mary is going to use its own R15 character model, which will support its own clothing models. The potential rule changes will limit most customization to said model, however.
• Additionally, Xane will release this model on the DevForums in both native Studio (.rbxm) and Blender (.blend) formats, in case developers need to modify body part shapes or adapt to any “asset privacy” updates, which might make the original meshes private by default, messing up any experiences that made use of this model.

Magical Mary - A Necessary Redesign

 Well, well, well… It looks like I've neglected this blog for almost a year now! Sorry, everyone that is checking this, hoping for new posts, but I just haven't felt like writing any blog posts due to…laziness, I guess. That and my mind's recent obsession with creating its own itches constantly, and my throat's inevitable destruction.

Although it's been months since it was done, I have an announcement: Mary has a new, 3D design! Let's take a look at her third design iteration!

The Great Refactoring of 2021

How's Magical Mary going? Well, I think this picture says it all; There's not much anymore...

Oh, wow... I really suck at ensuring things are up to date, aren't I? I mean, just visit the official Magical Mary 1 YouTube channel and you'll see the severe lack of any update videos, which is mainly due to the higher standard of quality that is expected of YouTube videos compared to the quick, short, and easy videos uploaded to the Facebook and Instagram🆕 pages.

Still, despite the silence, there's still ongoing development and updates being made to the game! It just isn't the most exciting thing to show in pictures since it basically required all of the existing levels to be thrown out; Right now, there's only a very simple test level with ramps, raised blocks, and water. I can still talk about the cool recent updates in this blog post, so let's get to that right now!

The Fears of an Ambitious Indie Developer

Whoa, this blog hasn't been updated in months now! With that last blog post, you might've assumed I went insane due to fears of color association or something. Well, despite a certain infamous game's "gremlins" showing me how dumb this world can be with restrictions and morals (which kinda discourages me), I haven't disappeared...though I now have fears that if Magical Mary were to become popular, that people would scrutinize every line of my code and hate me for the slightest offense, though people should be more open to others in my opinion.

My recent (real) fears and frustrations with people aside, Magical Mary's development has definitely slowed down, and this blog post will explain my mind's ideas of plans that are way too massive to go through with...

Branching Out: the Growth in Tree Quality

Ah, trees... Believe it or not, they've been in Mary's Magical Adventure since its development began, in World of Kirbycraft v0.75! There's some cool things to talk about that I've been developing just within the last couple days, but first, let me tell you a story about the history of these leafy things...

(This post has an AI-generated voice reading video available. To hear it, play this video and read along!)

Out of Place Cutouts

In the beginning, trees were pretty basic. In fact, they were just like the trees in Doom, a game from over 20 years ago at this point! Just like in that game, they were paper-thin images that rotated to face you. The only thing that made these trees unique was the code ran upon each tree spawning, which gave it a random tree image. I would say these trees were fine, but really, there were two problems with them...

Ripped from Reality

World of Kirbycraft, even back in those days when the game looked pretty bad, still had some form of a cartoony "art style" in it. These trees completely contradicted that, looking like pictures of real trees cut out and glued to the ground, like the game's world is just something a kid and their parent threw together by cutting out pages of magazines... I don't believe I was going for that style, but looking back, it's like looking at early 3D games that intended to look realistic. They were fine then, but now look like a joke compared to unrealistic games.

No Originality

You may think I was just experimenting, seeing what worked and what didn't, but no. I started development of World of Kirbycraft while I was still making Doom II: The Monster Invasion's last iteration (which in my opinion was the worst).

When I needed things like objects and code, I'd grab it from that mod and slap it into World of Kirbycraft, and that's exactly what happened with the trees and grass.

While the "realistic" trees worked mostly fine in Doom II: The Monster Invasion, they completely clashed with World of Kirbycraft's style. Unfortunately, I didn't know any better until years later...

The Crappy Image Legacy

In World of Kirbycraft v1.4, Hell City was introduced. As it was a complete ripoff of Kirby Air Ride's City Trial map, one area was a forest with many trees. Predictably, those were the same exact trees used in every previous version. There's not much to say other than just how out of place they still look.

Just when World of Kirbycraft got renamed to Mary's Magical Adventure in v1.6, the trees were thankfully changed to use better images. Mind you, they still didn't completely fit, but were more cartoony. The best one was the one on the right in the screenshot above, which came from a Terry WAD. It was just too pretty of a tree sprite for me to let it get wasted in a stupid waste of time like that!

Despite getting these new, better images, unfortunately these trees were only used in two places:

• Hell City's island - In the park
• City Street Run - Around road corners

Apologies for the short section, but I really thought I did more with these better trees. However, neither version can beat what I've done to the trees lately!

The Perfect Trim

Am I...seeing things? Are these really 3D? Nature finally looks right!

When Mary's Magical Adventure's next version is released, oh, are people in for a massive tree upgrade! For once, trees actually feel like they belong in the game's world, with more 3D, detailed designs that are actually interactive! Let's show what makes these new trees really cool, one point at a time!

"3D Graphics!"

Only a video could do this justice, so...just watch this video of both new trees and admire how 3D and believable they are now. Don't question the weird music, I like messing with Guitar Hero songs' individual channels.

Yes, you're not seeing things. Mary's Magical Adventure's trees are made like more modern games now; The tree itself is a 3D (voxel) model and 2D leaf cluster sprites are placed on top of parts of it, giving it a 3D look voxels alone couldn't give. This is seemingly the same thing a lot of games do for trees, like Oblivion and Sims 3(?), bringing Mary's Magical Adventure into a more modern time, unlike...some things.

I said these are interactive above, and you might not expect all that you can do with these trees. For one, you can knock leaves off of the trees with nearly any attack. If you hit leaves with a hammer, they will scatter and float through the air, but hitting them with a fireball will catch them on fire, making the leaves turn brown, drop to the ground, then turn into flames. It looks good in motion and is satisfying to do. In the future, there will be more of a reason to randomly become a pyro.

Only you can prevent wildfires...if you can resist the urge!

If burning leaves isn't good enough, how about the whole tree? Yes, if you damage the tree itself enough, it'll lose all of its leaves at the same time then collapse. Burn it enough and instead, every single leaf will start burning, then the tree dramatically falls down. If either of these events happen, the tree stays gone, even if you leave the area.

Now, don't worry if you like trees; You don't have to destroy fictional vegetation, but if you want to force all leaves off of a tree without permanently destroying it, just hit it with a cold attack like an Ice Ball and it'll start shaking then jump as it loses all leaves. When this happens, the tree survives and will re-grow its leaves back when you move far enough away from it.

This video shows all three tree deaths:

Now, all of this interaction comes with a cost, and that's a sprite render time increase of 0.02 per tree rendered in "high quality", which is what was seen in the videos. To counter this potential beauty turning into a lag source, all trees are drawn as a single image at far distances, just like the older trees. This results in the game rendering a single image instead of many leaf clusters plus a 3D model, and this is what saves the 0.02 sprite render time mentioned above.

This is actually something games do, more common on games with a continuous open world like Oblivion. I came up with the idea to do this before watching that video, so I had no clue it handled things the same way as my game. Oh well, I guess I can say I did something like Bethesda now. Whether that's good or bad's up to you, because...oh no, does this mean now I'll leave many game-breaking bugs in the final release? I hope not!

Anyways, if you don't like the trees abruptly changing between images and 3D models, you can adjust the distance by changing the r_objdrawdistance CVAR, which is a multiplier that defaults at 1.0. Increasing this will change the distances at which many decorative objects switch to lower quality, though it changes everything, not just trees. If on a lower-end system, it's recommended to decrease this to 0.5 or similar, given you can tolerate more obvious object pop-in.

Anyways, that's the latest update! There's more changes, but the new trees deserved their own blog post.

Magical Mary History #2 - v0.75 Part 2 (Early Monsters and Unused Oddities)

World of Kirbycraft's original monster lineup. Some may look familiar from Mary's Magical Adventure...

Welcome back! Last time, we looked at the intended but very flawed gameplay that I thought was fine back when I developed this version, plus the "test levels" in the game. This time, we're going to look at list of monsters that are in this version. Yes, I said there were none in normal gameplay, but oh, there's a small list fully programmed into the game at this point in development.

The Bestiary

Though not a single monster appears in this version, there are some programmed in /Decorate/kmonsters.txt, Some are from the Kirby series for obvious reasons, but others aren't. Here's the full list, in order of when they appear in the text file, from top to bottom:

"Mouse!" Silence this noisy thing and it'll become worse...

Scarfy (KDog1/KDog2)

Just like in the Kirby games, this innocent creature happily shows its true "dog" form when you hit it once. The only way to avoid seeing the "dog" is by dealing a lot of damage at the same time. This isn't considered a monster to the game until it transforms, so if you can resist the urge to shut it up, you have one less to worry about.

Gordo

Another common Kirby enemy, a spikeball with eyes. If you get near it, it will start flashing. Touch it, and it will yell "Mouse!" at you and send you flying away! This enemy is indestructible, so your best bet is to avoid it.

Wheelie (KWheel)

A wheel with an eye at its center that somehow maintains orientation while it rolls around. Wheelie is a dangerous and unpredictable enemy, slowly moving until it gets into the perfect position to run over you! Its speed (and really bad weapons in this version) make it pretty dangerous, taking three hits from Arthas's hammer to make this wheel's rubber explode!

Cyclops Troll (Troll)

This big, blue cyclops may look intimidating, but he's only a threat up-close, conveniently the only distance your weapons work at! When approached, the troll raises his arms then slams the ground below him, which causes damage to everything in the area. Compared to his appearance in Mary's Magical Adventure, he isn't as powerful here, plus doesn't have random arm-brace colors.

Huge Troll (HugeTroll)

This larger, red-colored variant of the Troll may look like he should be able to hurt you from longer distances, but in reality, he's nearly the same as his normal-sized counterpart, only 3¼× bigger! Unless you cheat or team up with a friendly monster, you will be here all day with this big pain.

Tiger

This aggressive animal is more complex than any other enemy in this version. Once it sees you, it changes its behavior based on your distance. Get up close and it'll prefer to try pouncing on you, but run away and it'll really speed up to catch you! Your best bet fighting this beast is to stand near it, wait for it to pounce, then strike it while it's down!

(Interestingly if you look at its back foot, it looks like I erased some pixels of the sprite without noticing all this time... This is probably still in the latest version.)

For those that want to see fights against all of these enemies, here's a video I recorded.

Strange Unused Content

All right, time for the really technical things that literally can't be gotten to in-game. These are mainly just sounds, but these sounds alone give a big impression that I really didn't know what I wanted from World of Kirbycraft back then, as if the whole game didn't give that away with its generic grassland level...

Inside wok_x.pk3's sound folder, a bunch of unused voice samples and "music" can be found. In the voices/Monsters subdirectory, enemy and player sounds are stored, but take a look at that directory's contents. See those WOKGUY sounds? Those were intended for common enemies that didn't deserve custom sets of voice samples. The tiger uses the last set, but every sample above that isn't used!

• STOCKAHH - Interestingly, this is the stock scream heard in games like Twisted Metal 3 and 4! I'm not sure why it's here, as no enemy ever used it. The Wilhelm and Howie screams were used in Doom II: The Monster Invasion's second version for zombies to use at random, so perhaps a similar thing was planned for World of Kirbycraft...
• WOKGUY set 0 - I love reversing songs with lyrics because they usually break down into hilarious nonsense, such as the notable "Can't Help Mice!" and "No No Heat". However, in this case, I think I used my laptop's microphone to record something, possibly an iPod or something, playing a Red Hot Chili Peppers song, which I then spliced and reversed for these samples. Most of them suck, but I like sample #4, where he sounds like he's saying "Stop that...!", which is assigned as a pain sound.
• WOKGUY set 1 - For this set, I think I recorded myself talking, then reversed and slowed down the recording over an unknown song. Parts of this overall larger sound were used as the samples here. I think this set was meant for strong, mysterious enemies like flying enemies firing magic projectiles at the player. In the end, it was never used, though it fails to sound threatening with lines like "NOM NOOOOOM~!" and "Pandora... PANDORA...!" (Yes, I listened to Pandora, that's why that's randomly here.
• WOKGUY set 2 - This, like set 2, is just my voice reversed, but with no speed adjustment. In this set, it sounds like a man who thinks the player is a mouse (like the Kirby enemies) and even yells "A MOOOOUSE!" sometimes upon seeing you. This was briefly used for the Fighter enemies in Mary's Magical Adventure until I recorded their proper samples.

The other subdirectories are arguably stranger, so here's another list:

• weird - This is, contains, fittingly, the weirdest two samples in the game, which sound like very slowed-down beeps with their bass increased a lot. I think these were supposed to be used in scary areas to mess with the player's head, like those "beats" I can't think of the word for that make you get certain feelings.
• dynamic_music - Hey, all of the cool games do it, but it's a a shame ZDoom isn't capable of dynamic music, which picks different parts of a song based on in-game activity. It didn't stop me from trying using ACS in a test level that I haven't found in any version of World of Kirbycraft yet.
  
  This folder contains four WAV sounds that play different sections of a basic song, which would be chosen based on where the player was located in the test level. It would've been cool to keep this, but due to ACS being limited to the tic-rate of ZDoom, I could only use tempos that were synced up well enough with it, which would've limited how varied my music sounded.
• ambient - "Wait, the ambient sounds were planned from the very beginning, Xane?" Sorta. The sounds in this folder are weird ModPlug Tracker recordings that used a strange, "organ-like" instrument. The first three are the raw recordings while the latter three have a reverb effect on it.
  
  I think these sounds would've come from an organ in a castle level, but clearly that never came to be as the sounds were removed after this version, and my plans changed by the time Mary's Magical Adventure became the game's new name...

This video plays most of these unused sounds, minus the "weird" ones, since those are barely audible without editing. Since I forgot to include it in the first post, Mary's voice acting is included here as well, specifically the lines that never got used or were removed in later versions due to the removal of beams and cup-based weapons. Apologies for how long it took to finish this post, which was supposed to be done months ago!

Magical Mary History #1 - v0.75 Part 1 (A Terrible Start)

Yuck! What's this visual throwup? Magical Mary 1's past was a visual mess!

Magical Mary 1 has been in development for years, possibly dating back to 2010-2014, when it was just called "World of Kirbycraft", after the movie series I was making. As with any game, things weren't always as they are today, so it'll be fun to look back at each version and see how the game improved with time, and today we're starting with the earliest build I've found, one dating back to 2015, which was only seen in my third development video on YouTube! Let's dive into it, after the cut!

Intended Gameplay

Bad initial impressions

Since this is the start of a blog post series, let's establish the general layout. First, I'll talk about gameplay and the player's overall experience, then follow up with info about unused content and interesting miscellaneous stuff. As this is the first post, everything is new, so it'll be giant. Later versions will naturally have smaller posts written for them if they reuse things from a previous version.

With that said, let's start with the first thing the player sees upon starting the game, which at this point was just GZDoom with Freedoom as an IWAD, the title screen:

MY EYES! They're bleeding! This isn't Freedoom, game!

...wow. This title screen doesn't give the best initial impression, with a messy, incorrect-looking Freedoom title screen and an overall Doom-esque menu. That skull used for the selection cursor isn't helping, either! Anyways, on this menu, the iffy logo used for the World of Kirbycraft series is visible, so let's take a look at that...

You saw this coming, didn't you? This is so low-effort and...why did I distort the Kirby logo?

Yes, I bet you're face palming right now; The logo is just World of Warcraft's logo with Kirby's logo slapped over it. It gets worse the more you look at it, as a weird rectangle is around the Kirby logo, and even that fails to cover up the word. Back then, I used CoreFX rather than Adobe Photoshop, which didn't have a healing tool I could use to get rid of the text cleaner.

This very logo also appears in the movies, but only during its very brief, strange-looking intro. However, the logo is constantly changing position/size, so it's hard to get a close look at it. Anyways, let's select a difficulty and start the game.

How? This build doesn't even have a single enemy in it!

Like Doom, difficulty levels can display messages, usually used to warn the player about how unfair a difficulty is. Here, hard difficulty shows the message above. Insane difficulty says this:

This is the highest skill level. Not recommended unless you're experienced.

It doesn't matter what difficulty is chosen in this very early build, as there are no monsters in the one area you can visit, a place I've come to refer to as "Stupid Hills", a level I scrapped for being just...too boring!

"Early Installment Weirdness"

This is the whole playable area, shown on the automap and in-game!

In this version, it's very incomplete, with only the first area and cutoff paths off to the sides. The only thing here that makes this build interesting (and recognizable) is the random grey beam with animated pink light inside it, which is a Sonic Boom: Rise of Lyric reference. This was a character-specific gimmick, which only allowed Mary to stand on it. If Arthas would land on it, he'd get forcibly thrown to the side.

I voice acted unique lines that played any time Mary would land on the beam. Though some are just random noises, two include some of Mary's longest voice lines as of then. One of them mentions school, which hasn't appeared in the game at all! I'll include all samples of Mary talking in this version at the end of this post, but here's transcriptions of the more important lines:

• Oh...OH, I made it...and it's a beam! Let's balance! Weee~!
• Oh...oh...OH, I've been waiting for this day! In school, I went to gym class and...I practiced this. Now it's time to put that practice to the test! Yay!

There's one more thing that makes this build unique from later ones I publicly released: Mary uses restaurant cups as weapons! When Mary drinks the liquid from them, she temporarily powers up and performs attacks based on the color of the stripes on the straw. If the player uses the weapon enough, Mary will revert to holding the cup and will talk about losing her powers.

Now, this might sound cool and unique, but overall it wasn't that exciting to fight enemies like this. Mary had to stop and drink from the cup multiple times a minute, plus the attacks pretty much ironically only hurt yourself unless the projectiles don't touch the monsters directly! Here, look at this video and judge for yourself if combat looked fun in this very early build:

With how tedious the combat in that video was to record, I have to question how back in 2015 (or possibly earlier) I thought anyone would enjoy that combat. The attacks behaved uniquely, but sometimes it isn't best to reinvent the wheel; Projectiles exploding when hitting enemies is nothing special, but it is more of what the player expects than fireballs sticking to enemies, waiting until they hit the ground to bounce into the air...

Clunky Gameplay

This is common to all of the versions of Magical Mary 1 that have the "World of Kirbycraft" name, but I'll say right now that the gameplay doesn't feel as polished as it does now. Mary's Air Dash practically requires mashing the jump button, and it can arbitrarily not work in some situations. As for Arthas... His Kirby Puffs are also inconsistent but on top of that common problem also requires you to wait between jumps (a'la Kirby Air Ride) and doesn't give you any control once you're in the air. I fixed both of those when Xane replaced Arthas, but...just look at how iffy Arthas moves here:

Hiding the Secrets

Uther's Lab

Ah, this lil' building had much potential, but alas, it wasn't to be...

Well, now it's time to go beyond what I intended the player to experience in this version. No, I didn't look over anything above or I would've written about it. If you followed the water down either generic corridor, you'd be greeted with a wall in your face. With any in-development level I make, this is a common sight, but usually levels I make don't cut off less than a minute after they load!

This is what you get if you think running into a cave will save you from the ugly graphics, a dirt wall!

Despite this level's stupidly small size, there is an area out of bounds meant only for Arthas's intro cutscene, Uther's Lab. If you turn around when starting the level, you'll see the lab in the distance in a field, but trying to fly out there will kill you! To make matters worse, that building out there is just a really flat imposter, not the real interior.

To go inside the lab, bring down your console using ~ (tilde) and type noclip2. Fly up a bit so you don't touch the insta-kill ground, then move towards the fake building. As you enter the open field, turn right and go through the glitchy black wall. Welcome to Uther's Lab.

Yes, this is the really basic room where the first part of Arthas's intro would take place. Though it looks grey and empty here, it became more detailed with blue lighting in later versions...though still wasn't ever used! In fact, it's normally worse than this, because the Arthas and Uther cutscene objects aren't normally here. (They only move around and talk, so I can't recreate the cutscene, or I probably would.) I'll explain Arthas' intro here, since it was never made:

Arthas and Uther are in Uther's Lab, standing around. Uther recommends Arthas goes out the back door (left side in screenshot above). Arthas initially refuses, but Uther forces him out. Arthas trains outside (which is just a glorified tutorial), then walks back in to check on Uther, not approving of the tutorial he had to go through. Uther sees an odd blip on the radar, pointing straight ahead. Arthas, knowing what he has to do, starts running out the front door. He runs down the path then jumps down to the starting point. No, I don't remember what enemy Arthas was off to fight, but I know it wasn't the Origin Master. I don't know how far I went with it, but Xane might've been planned to help Arthas, though over time, only Uther was heard talking to Arthas during gameplay.

Unused Levels

Now, Uther's Lab was within the level, but there are two levels the player never visits within MAPS.wad, named TEST and SND_TEST.

This is a foreshadowing of my obsession with cups expanding in later versions...

At first glance, TEST is just strange. The initial area is a narrow corridor with grass textures on the walls that has no gravity. Going through the wall to the left, you will end up in an area with a giant fruit punch "juice box" from Sims 3 Seasons. This area also contains character-specific areas and a broken end-of-level area that takes you to the normal level, since this area was used to test those mechanics before later making their ACS scripts global.

The more interesting part is on the other side. It's a big, open grassy area with paths and houses. It's better than the normal level in this build! What's going on? Well, this area was made to be used as the background of a Touhou-esque shooter section. Yes, I'm not joking, this was to be used as the background behind a boss battle where you'd fight Reimu, but due to technical problems (and now obvious legal issues that would arise), the whole idea was scrapped.

Y'know the weird first room the player starts in? Well, bring down the console and type in puke 102 to enable "Touhou mode", as the script calls it. When in this mode, you teleport to that room, and get locked into an area visible on the left side of the screen. The controls are the same as normal, except for your "run" button, which instead puts you in focus mode and reveals your hitbox, just as it would in the Touhou series.

SND_TEST is a more logical level...or rather, would be if any of its music played! I assume this map was created before the three soundtracks that are already present in v.0.75. Well, this gives a good idea of the random songs World of Kirbycraft would've used in my original vision, minus Famous by Puddle of Mudd, which would've played during the final boss, and probably would still be, if the legal system was wiped from existence...

It seems I originally intended for the game to use music from various sources, mostly Mega Man games. Here's the song list in the sound test, each linked to YouTube so they can actually be heard, unlike in the game proper:

1. Rockman & Forte - Museum
2. Rockman & Forte - Tengu Man
3. Rockman & Forte - Pirate Man
4. Rockman & Forte - Cold Man
5. Rockman & Forte - Ground Man
6. Rockman & Forte - King Castle
7. Mega Man 7 - Slash Man
8. Mega Man 7 - Spring Man
9. Mega Man 7 - Freeze Man
10. Mega Man 7 - Dr. Wily Castle 1
11. Mega Man 7 - Dr. Wily Castle 3
12. Mega Man 8 - Tengu Man (PlayStation)
13. Mega Man 8 - Tengu Man (Saturn)
14. Super Mario RPG - Going Shopping in Ripple Town
15. The Flintstones - Unused 2
16. Earthbound - The Metropolis of Fourside
17. Lucky Star - Lucky Star Mush ~DustFunk Lozik~
18. Fandango - Autos, Moda, Y Rock and Roll
19. Sixpence None the Richer - Breathe Your Name

Based on that list, I can only guess I threw in every song I liked at the time, like the overused "Lucky Star Mush" song that I played in the background of some of my older YouTube videos. The SNES songs had static in place of their cymbals, which rarely made any of the songs sound better. This can be heard in one of my development videos, where I make fun of the noises.

Well, this is giant as-is, so I'm going to split this post in two. Hopefully later versions I look at don't have so much stuff to talk about!

The History of Mobile Mary's Magical Adventure

Has it really been months since my last blog post? Apologies, but I suppose I haven't felt like writing out detailed posts about things like my game, though two posts are planned for the future, once I get the item to show.

Anyways, if you've been reading this blog's previous posts about Mary's Magical Adventure, you've only been hearing about the main version of the game for computers running operating systems like Windows. However, in the past, I had plans to bring Mary's Magical Adventure to Android. It just sounds great on paper, to be able to take the game on the go and play the very same game you could play on your computer, or to even play with or against computer players using your mobile device!

In this blog post, I'll look back at the times I attempted to bring my game to mobile devices, and what I learned that I may put to use in the future...

World of Kirbycraft (D-Touch)

Yep, time to return back to those crappy old versions where I had no idea
where I was going with the game again...
(picture from World of Kirbycraft Development #3)

Back in 2015, I found out that Beloko Games ported Doom to Android. This was done before, but what made Beloko's port different was that it included GZDoom, the very same version of Doom's engine I used for my in-development game, World of Kirbycraft. Due to how awesome this was, I bought D-Touch and, with a bit of tweaking, managed to get my Doom mods running on my old tablet.

As shown in the screenshot above, it was successful; For the first time, I could see attacks from another player's perspective, and experience deathmatch in my game! The tablet's battery was running low at the time, so this experience was quickly cut short, but everything seemed fine, the usual flaws of touch screen controls aside.

After that video, I started adding CVARs (console variables, or settings) to the game that would, I believe, tweak how running works (xane_dtouch_controls) and reduce effects (xane_dtouch_lag). Even back then, I knew Android could not handle much before it started dropping frames like crazy. After this, however, I don't remember bothering too much to get the game running on mobile, as ensuring it ran and looked good on Windows took priority.

First Real Steps

A couple years passed, and by then, D-Touch's version of GZDoom was way too behind the official engine build used on computers, so there was literally no point to bother making my game compatible with D-Touch. However, in 2018, Beloko Games released a closed beta of Delta Touch, the successor to D-Touch, which came with an up-to-date build of GZDoom! When I saw this, I signed up for the beta, and Beloko Games gave me Delta Touch for free due to my previous purchase of D-Touch on Amazon.

After everything was set up, I ran Mary's Magical Adventure on Android for the first time, and seeing my newly-renamed game running on my phone gave me the inspiration to start bothering with mobile optimization again. Yes, just seeing what I recorded in this video made me excited for a mobile version of MMA:

Mobile Performance Troubles

Yes, it might not look like much, but that was the island Hell City level running on Android, which was "amazing" at the time. Though it looks really close to its computer counterpart, something might bother you, and that's the inconsistent framerate that is first encountered when Mary enters the "park" area with the big fountain. Of course, no one should be surprised that lag is there, given this is Android running essentially a PC game, but...well, would you be surprised if I told you it could've been worse than what that video contained?

Faux-Draw Distance

Basically, look at the beginning of the video and you'll probably see that things in the distance seemingly don't exist until Mary gets near them, like early 3D games did. I implemented this for similar reasons to what those games would've done, for better performance. If I disabled that, the game would try to render nearly the whole map, and the framerate would plummet to sub-one frame per second.

This is how that level appears with "render culling on (top) and off (bottom).

So, how did I pull off this weird effect, since I doubt any other GZDoom mod is going to (ab)use it? Well, basically GZDoom supports polyobjects, or moving walls that go from floor to ceiling. These are meant to be used for swinging doors or objects that can "crush" the player, but I discovered that the game doesn't render anything beyond these when I didn't put a texture on one of them.

Now, I couldn't draw a single diamond-shaped polyobject around the player, as that would create a solid object around the player, trapping them. However, by using two chevron-shaped polyobjects, I could place the player between them, then make them follow the player around the map. Back then, polyobjects were always solid, so a single solid object or enemy would stop them permanently until I removed the object, but later on, I modified GZDoom's source code to make "hurt on touch" polyobjects ignore collisions, creating the desired effect.

If you've ever looked out of bounds and wondered about the weird blue
squares with white diamonds inside, now you know what they are.

Why does this work? Well, you see, Doom's renderer was clearly optimized for the corridor-based, mostly-indoor levels in Doom, which had a lot of walls that went from floor to ceiling. When the renderer encounters a wall like this, everything behind it is not rendered. Polyobjects are also this type of wall, so they stop rendering, which is convenient for my game, which has wide open areas that Doom was never meant to render. Yes, if you stand behind a building on that island level, the game's still rendering everything behind it you can't see because unlike the Source Engine, Doom treats all sector heights equally, so if you can see through even the tiniest gap, the game will happily render everything.

Yes, all of that was just for one optimization; There are more of them, but they seem to be more effective on computers. However, there are other things that will cause Android to slow to a crawl than just rendering a open area without hackish invisible things blocking the renderer's view...

What Makes This Renderer Tick...in a Bad Way?

This is basically not an issue for computers and their high-quality NVidia GPUs and Intel(R) CPUs, but on Android's little ARM processors, the smallest things can cause frame drops. One of these things is slopes. Take a look at this video and notice how the framerate drops every time Mary looks to the left. Why is it dropping? Notice the island and volcano in the background? Yeah, the game's rendering all of those slopes and is lagging as a result.

That may seem understandable, but I've also seen that Android can't handle additive-rendered mid-textures, such as the fake lighting effects seen in City Street Run in the HCPD HQ's bathroom or the windows in Xane Corp.'s light testing room. If the game ever renders a single one of those, the framerate is basically guaranteed to be cut in half.

Overall, pretty much the only levels that work well in Delta Touch on even the high-end Google Pixel 2 are indoor corridor levels that don't use additive-rendered textures and don't have too many slopes. Man, that sounds boring. That sounds like...the original Doom, which Mary's Magical Adventure aims to be nothing like... What to do?

MMA: A New Hope

Well, an idea came to mind yesterday while I was sitting in bed, about to go use the bathroom. What if the mobile version was its own standalone game, separate from the computer game, with its own short storyline and simplified gameplay? Hear me out, this sounds like the best way this could be handled.

Think about it; If I used Mary's Magical Adventure's levels in the mobile version, they would be too open and would probably use too many of the lag-inducing things I mentioned above. This would require me to butcher the levels, adding render-blocking sectors and turning the levels way more linear. That would work better for mobile, but at the same time would probably feel like a bad imitation of a good game instead of an official mobile port.

Therefore, making mobile its own game would allow me to start fresh, with new, more linear levels and simplified gameplay. It would still feel like the computer game, but would be (nearly) made from the ground up to work better on mobile without compromising and possibly ruining anything from the computer version.

The story of the game would take place during Mary's Magical Adventure's two stories, beginning at the end of Xane's story. You would play as Princess Peppermint, the dark-skinned princess of Cumulus Peaks, who is tasked with killing the remaining monsters from the first invasion. However, as she finishes "cleaning up", the Origin Master accidentally releases more monsters, some of which land right near where Peppermint is. One of these monsters catches her off-guard, knocking her off the clouds down to whatever's below at that point in time. Now, Princess Peppermint needs to make it back to Cumulus Peaks to get rid of the new wave of monsters and save the place she rules over!

Yep, no Mary or Xane, just Princess Peppermint. I believe the inventory system would be simplified and any items Peppermint would walk over would be auto-activated, closer to Doom. Also, no upgrades or Jane's Hut, as Peppermint doesn't have the item to warp there. Now, if you've read the previous post, you might be wondering about her magical instrument. Yes, that will be one of her weapons, where pushing buttons would cause her to play different notes from her melodica, which would hurt enemies.

I wanted to add this to the computer version of the game as a mini-story, but with how big and overly-ambitious as my game's become, I think using this story for its own smaller game would work well for mobile! It would be smaller with less content, so perhaps it'd have a chance to actually get finished!

Anyways, with that said, that's the current plans for the mobile version of Mary's Magical Adventure. What do you think? Let me know in the comments below!

Introducing the Princess from the Clouds!

On this blog, I've only talked about Hell City, as that's the only location that's actually in the game, unless you count the Fourth Dimension, better known as the Special Stages. However, I still have plans in my head about other parts of the game, the most recent ideas being for the levels that take place in the clouds. Yeah, the clouds, y'know, that place that I composed a song for a long time ago but still haven't gotten around to adding to the game proper?

Anyways, getting to the point, I didn't have ideas for the sky levels, just planning to make them open areas where you have to do precise platforming, jumping from cloud to cloud. Not even the boss was planned out, just the music that would play in these levels, Atmospheric Glide (formerly "The Skies"). However, recently, an idea started coming to mind, the urge to create a new third little girl who'd be found in these levels, with her being a part of the overall story with her own unique things about her. Everyone, meet Peppermint!

Yes, I know, she has that skin tone...

This is Princess Peppermint, the first dark-skinned character I've created! In my game's universe, the darker-skinned humans originate in the sky, where their skin tone makes it naturally easier to see them on top of white clouds. Lighter skin tones originate down on the ground, respectively. Unlike American TV shows that just shoehorn in dark skin tones to indicate their racial diversity, Peppermint was created just due to my personal want to design a girl with this skin tone.

She has strange green hair with curly bangs and two oversized peppermint circles attached to it with two long bangs going down the sides of her face. This, along with her skin tone, was done to make her look foreign compared to Mary and Jane, coming from a different part of the world than them. Her normal outfit is a light-yellow dress with red stripes that go down the front then spread out similar to the lines on a peppermint.

Her dress is different than Mary and Jane's outfits, as it has short sleeves! These and the dress itself end in soft, cotton-like white stuff, which makes the dress more comfy. Her shoes don't have as much detail, but they are the same light-yellow color, with green gems on top of each, which match her hair color.

Princess Peppermint lives in Cumulus Peaks, located in the clouds. She is the current princess there, though during the story she isn't found at the big place the royal people would be found at, but rather guarding a path that leads to there. She doesn't have weapons in the traditional sense, unlike Mary or Xane, but she has another way to protect herself...

Peppermint has a magical melodica, given to her as part of being the princess, handed to her on the day she was declared one. With it, she can play small "melodies" that cast spells on her target, whether that is an object or another person. Though these spells are nothing major compared to the Origin Master's powers, things such as stunning her enemies and forcing them to move in a certain direction are possible thanks to her instrument.

At the moment, the melodica is basically the real Yamaha Pianica P-32D/E, a light-blue rectangular instrument with 32 piano keys on its front side and a black handle on its backside. A small mouthpiece is attached to the left side, which Peppermint uses for more reliable airflow when playing melodies. To the left of the keyboard Cumulus Peaks's insignia, a light blue circle with a round, yellow sun placed near its center. A long, white cloud overlaps the sun, placed at an angle, hanging off the edges of the overall insignia.

As stated before, this is based on Yamaha's 32-key Pianicas, melodicas that use piano keys rather than small buttons. I was inspired to bring this melodica into my game when I saw an anime girl named Kaori playing it in Your Lie in April. I didn't watch it, but seeing that odd but neat instrument gave me the urge to replace the magical recorder that was planned for Princess Peppermint to use previously. That will still appear in the game on display in one of the buildings in Cumulus Peaks, but it won't be used by her.

After I made this 3D model, I got a light blue Yamaha Pianica P-32E myself! Why would I be after this harmonica-piano hybrid? Well, four reasons:

• It's a neat instrument I haven't heard of much. Sure, I saw it in WarioWare DIY, where it looked like a light-blue Pianica (and sounded like a harmonica), but I didn't see it in high-quality until Your Lie in April included it.
• It looks kinda cute, like a little light-blue piano with a mouthpiece on the side. It's probably the "toy-like" color that gives the Pianica its cuteness, but unlike others, I like its color, even if a pink one would've fit Kaori's pink dress a bit better.
• Just like how I like owning the weapons magical girls like the cute Pretty Cures use, I wanted to own "Kaori's melodica" myself. (Unfortunately, since I got the P-32E, the back of my Pianica doesn't match Kaori's melodica. That melodica has two markings on the back near the mouthpiece, which are positioned exactly the same on the P-32D. I guess I didn't think those indented parts would be moved in the latest P-32-series melodica...)
• Of course, the biggest reason for getting this melodica is because I plan to have Princess Peppermint's instrument-playing to be recordings of me playing the real instrument. As they are only short series of notes, I won't have to play much. With the way Kaori, Peppermint, and I hold the melodica, you can't see the piano keys, so I won't know what keys I'm pressing!

Yes, I know how to play the piano, so that knowledge can transfer to the melodica, but I have no clue how Kaori seemingly knows exactly what she wants to press with her limited vision...unless it's because she's an anime girl that doesn't exist.

...I bet I just made someone start crying about her, so I'll end this blog post here!

Development Worries and Updates

This post is pretty negative compared to my usual post, so read only if you wish to see the bad side of game development.

Whoa, how long has it been? Sorry, but sometimes, I forget to update this blog. I believe I'm becoming too lazy to even write a blog post lately, even though that's easier than other work I haven't been doing, working on Mary's Magical Adventure. Anyways, let's get to the updates about the game! It's been a long enough wait for this!

Indie Game Troubles

Work, Work, Work...

 Let's just start this blog post with the negative, as I have to get it off my chest. If you want to develop your own indie game, take it from me: It's way harder than photography and, "music theory" aside, even harder than playing music on an instrument you aren't familiar with! You'll start off with many ideas, things you can't wait to put into the game. Sure, at first it's easy because there's barely anything in your game to keep track of, plus it's easier to take it easy at that point.

However, as you start really developing things, you start raising your standards, like improving the game's textures, lighting, and overall look. Problem is, doing this only increases the amount of work you have to do from then on to put something in the game, as placeholder art and basic shapes would look very out-of-place beside finished assets. This is one thing that affects me, as I've done just that over the years, adding and improving textures, even redesigning Mary. This isn't even mentioning the music, which initially improved with song after song, beginning with The Nightlife for Rooftop to Rooftop. However, since the music is so high-quality, like the textures, this presents me with a bit of work that I have to look forward to doing, which I rarely do.

All of this has made me too lazy to add much before hitting the invisible walls that an artist hits when in an "artist block". As a result, not much new is here for those who have been checking the Xane's Development group on Facebook or kept up to date with the Facebook and Google+ pages. For readers of this blog, it will seem like I've done more than I've really done, due to these blocks and laziness. Hopefully this can be bypassed and work can resume going full speed, but with how I'm a single developer with no team members, this will be way slower to finish, and will probably take a big chunk of my life to finish, to earn barely any money to make up for it.

Legal Potential

No, don't worry, no companies were dumb and threw a cease & desist letter at my face, thankfully, but, you see, I read /r/gamedev on Reddit and people on there mention that any indie game developer should get two things before releasing their game, an accountant and a lawyer (and said lawyers sometimes make posts there). The first, I assume, is just to make sure your money is all in order. However, the second one made me really start thinking: I have no lawyer. This would be a big problem, should Mary's Magical Adventure get released then have legal trouble for whatever reason. Additionally, lawyers can handle getting trademarks registered, so things like "Mary's Magical Adventure®" can be used, like Intel®'s legal symbol obsession! There's a third thing lawyers can help me with, and with how lazy I've become, I'll probably need it...

Work-for-Hire Contracts

Yes, they can write legal contracts in that confusing Legalese English variant that somehow is more legally-binding than actually-understandable English! Since I barely seem to feel like doing work lately, I'd like to pay others to make things like character art, animated parts of cutscenes, and even music for me. It sounds straightforward, but trust me, reading that subreddit reminded me that even if the commissioned person gave me their finished work, they still own the legal rights to it, so they could backstab me after the game is released and cause a lot of trouble and wasted effort from me. With a contract, this is eliminated, as their legal rights are forcibly transferred to me, so I can use them in my game with no problems, the way it should be by default (but isn't, unfortunately)!

Anyways, hopefully you understand the problems in my head now, knowing I have a lot of work ahead of me if I want this game to be released but I don't feel like working enough anymore... How about we move on to updates?

The Many Minor Updates

Compare Rooftop to Rooftop (1-2) and City Street Run (1-3) in both of these videos. The top one is the first video on the newly-created Mary's Magical Adventure YouTube channel while the bottom is the last gameplay video on my personal channel. You may notice most of it is the same, but there are some small differences...

There's really too much changed to be explained in a blog post, but I'll show comparisons of a couple things here, anyways. It's up to you to find the other differences between the videos.

v1.95 - Did someone paint the ceiling black? Nice try, whoever owns this place.

v2.0 - Now this looks more believable! Want to follow the coin arrow up there?

One subtle difference between v1.95 and the upcoming first demo is this secret room found in Rooftop to Rooftop, hidden in the room down the hallway with the three trolls. In the older version, the holes in the ceiling where panels are missing were just pure black ceiling parts, raised slightly above the panels that didn't go missing. Nowadays with how much more detail I put into levels, this seemed too simple, so I converted the ceiling into 3D floors then added an extra "floor" above, hiding a Powerup Coin and upgrade!

You can get up there with Mary's upgraded Air Dash, Xane's multiple jumps, and Mary's Hammer Jump upgrade, the latter used in the newer video. In case the player couldn't see this obvious secret, an arrow of coins was also added below the "ceiling" to encourage players to try going up there. Yes, in a way, this is now a secret within a secret.

v1.95 - A Gex tile texture was used for many floors in the third level.

v2.0 - Not only is this more legally-safe, but it's high-res and has nice reflections!

The second change to point out is...well, new textures. You see, like the legal stuff mentioned at the beginning of this blog post, using assets from other games could cause problems for Mary's Magical Adventure, so I've replaced some textures since the old video. For example, the checkerboard tiles seen around City Street Run, most obvious in HCPD HQ. Notice how nice and shiny that floor is! If you play MMA and want reflections like those, get the Materials Mod, which adds realistic PBR reflections to some surfaces around the levels.

v1.95 - Most textures here come from SRB2. Also, note the background.

v2.0 - This dimension is more realistic now! Goodbye, trippy rock sky!

This particular change goes even further than just replacing level textures; All Special Stage textures were also replaced, just in case Sonic Robo Blast 2's developers could legally do a thing when their game's not an official Sonic game.

v1.95 - Who cares about soap? We've got a meeting, guys!

v2.0 - Soap's on the table, in Mary's inventory, and more! Don't underestimate soap!

Returning to the video, there's another obvious difference that can be seen when Mary goes to the HCPD HQ: When she visits the meeting room, there isn't a Soap Box on the table! Out in the hallway around each corner? Same thing, no soap in sight! Soap Boxes were a recent addition, added to represent my fear of soap. In Mary's Magical Adventure, soap is harmless unless there's enough of it, in which case it becomes deadly! Soap Boxes are this game's equivalent of explosive barrels, but you can push these boxes around before hitting them.

You can also purchase soap boxes to carry around. This can be seen in the new version's inventory, which shows the Soap Box as the first item. Additionally, magic was added as both a form of ammo and a timer for Mary/Xane's transformation. Collect at least 25 magic and you can transform, but you will lose the magic gradually over time.

Well, there's more to talk about, but due to that intro section, this is already pretty long, so more development-related stuff will be included in a second blog post. See you then!