Xane's newest blog, which replaces the old Typepad blog. Though not well-updated, this blog contains info about updates to Magical Mary 1 and sometimes Xane's personal complaints. Please respect his opinions.
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...
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!
Do you sometimes question why every song in Mary's Magical Adventure has a normal and 8-bit version? If so, that will require another trip to the past, as while the chiptune music wasn't in earlier "World of Kirbycraft" versions, there were multiple soundtracks to choose from, using basically the same ACS code as Mary's Magical Adventure v1.95! Come with me to the past to see where it all began! It'll be a long post, but it'll be fun...
The World of Iffy Music
In the beginning, there was no menu, and Xane declared it was bad.
Back in the first downloadable version of World of Kirbycraft (click here to view alpha v1.0's release info in a new window), believe it or not, the soundtrack system was already implemented! It wasn't obvious because no music played by default and there were no menu options to change the soundtrack yet, but there were two commands you could type in the console to listen to the three strange soundtracks:
puke 254 # - This runs script #254, which sets the "requested song" variable for the current player to the number specified at the end. Here are the songs in v1.0:
1 - Ocean Base Zone Act 1 (Sonic Advance 3) 2 - Miscellaneous #1 (World of Kirbycraft animated series) 3 - Miscellaneous #2 (World of Kirbycraft animated series) 4 - Miscellaneous #3 (World of Kirbycraft animated series) 5 - Uther's Lab (World of Kirbycraft animated series) 6 - Mysterious (World of Kirbycraft animated series) 7 - Special Stage Completed (World of Kirbycraft/Mary's Magical Adventure) 8 - We Can Do Anything (Ojamajo Doremi, sang by Onpu) 9 - Otomehakyunitomarenai (Ojamajo Doremi, sang by Doremi) 10 - Dokidoki no Maho (Ojamajo Doremi) 11 - Half Point (Ojamajo Doremi, sang by Onpu) 12 - Arigato (Ojamajo Doremi, sang by Momoko) 13 - Tempest Valley Zone (SRB2 Mystic Realm) 14 - Aerial Garden Zone (SRB2 Mystic Realm) 15 - Special Stage (Sonic Robo Blast 2 v2.0) 16 - Jingle: Fight (Tomodachi Collection)
xane_soundtrack # - This chooses which soundtrack is used during the game. Changes to this apply after closing the console. Here are the three soundtracks:
Normal (0) - This is the standard soundtrack, how the game was meant to be heard. The other soundtracks were added for anyone recording videos for YouTube and other websites picky about copyright. (Famous by Puddle of Mudd was going to play during the final boss battle, similar to the movies that preceded this game's creation, after all!)
MIDI (1) - This soundtrack is, as its name suggests, comprised of MIDI versions of the songs. Video game music used VGMusic MIDIs while the Doremi songs used the MIDIs that were used in SRB2 Demo 4. The neat thing about this soundtrack is if a keyboard is connected to your computer, it can play the MIDIs while your computer handles the sound effects. Xane did this with his Yamaha PSR-E413 once and it was a neat experience. If a song was "copyrighted" in the normal soundtrack, like Famous, it would instead play a similarly-awesome song from a video game.
Weird (2) - Who even knows why this soundtrack was added to the game! This soundtrack uses MIDIs that were forced to use a Pokémon RSE soundfont that mainly contained drum samples. While some songs were neat to hear, most sounded like someone loudly hitting a drum near your ear endlessly! Just...listen to this weirdness; The folder this soundtrack's contained in may be named "3_INTERES", or "interesting", but this soundtrack is mostly called "weird" for good reason!
Later Versions
It's supposed to say "Standard; May cause strikes on YouTube!".
Anyways, now that that's out of the way, now you know about the first three soundtracks that were added to the game. In later versions, an iffy-looking option was added to the options menu, but no new songs were added beyond those sixteen.
Starting with v1.6, after the game was renamed to Mary's Magical Adventure, the two soundtracks you may be familiar with are the only ones in the game, the weird one removed from the game. At this point, the MIDI soundtrack was still in the game, but only had iffy recreations of songs like "The Nightlife" and "Jingle: Fight", the latter being notable because the MIDI version of it inspired the chiptune version, which in turn inspired the normal soundtack version to be replaced, essentially kicking out a copyrighted video game song. Nowadays, this jingle is named "Burned Bridge".
After this version or a later one, the MIDI soundtrack was removed; If an easy way to make MIDIs from modules ever exists then Xane will try using it. Don't mention OpenMPT's MIDI exporter as it isn't that good, especially with long waits which throw the whole MIDI out of sync. (Hopefully I'm not confusing that with XM2SMPS, a Sonic custom music converter...)
Odd Drums
One thing that may seem weird in the chiptune soundtrack are the drums, so I'll talk about them. You see, the chiptune soundtrack isn't pre-rendered or faked in any way; The file the game loads this music from is an NSF file named CHIPTUNE.nsf (NESMUSIC.nsf in older versions). This is a file made using 0CC-FamiTracker, which makes Famicom music.
One limitation of NES/Famicom music (other than the oddly-specific channel sounds/behaviors) is how the samples are compressed. The NES/Famicom plays really-compressed DPCM samples, which only store the difference between each chunk of each sample. For whatever reason, it can only store if the waveform goes up or down one on each frame, so things like drums become very hard to make out and voices...those developers shouldn't have tried putting voices where they don't belong, in DPCM; As I said in the fourth World of Kirbycraft movie, "You can't understand this. DPCM sucks!".
This is what causes the drums to have their odd sound in the chiptune music in Mary's Magical Adventure, though what makes them really bass-heavy (easily heard with good speakers like ones found in vehicles) is unknown to me. How different are the drums when heard by themselves, you may wonder; Well, here's a comparison using a drum loop from a new song, starting with the chiptune soundtrack:
You could probably tell that was a bunch of Roland Sound Canvas samples and a really noisy sound three times. I'm sort of a hypocrite, not liking Sound Canvas' cheap-sounding samples, but I still use those samples in 8-bit music because they are so clear despite the compression! Anyways, here's the samples I used, though in their original, uncompressed forms:
Notice how the Sound Canvas samples stay pretty much the same but the other drum sounds way different. I'm not absolutely sure about that drum sample's source, but I got it from Fight Trap, another one of my songs which I assume it comes from.
Anyways, thanks for reading this very long post; Hopefully this makes up for the recent absence of blog posts!
