Aaaah, at last, I can tell you about this crazy project that's coming to fruition!
Negotiations had been going on for several months in the greatest secrecy. It's now a done deal, and it's not without a certain pride that I announce today the integration of my Superfluous character into the great Marvel superhero family!
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It is with great pride that I announce the release, today, of the first official port of Superfluous Returnz on console, and not the least: the Nintendo Switch!
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A whole host of changes as the year draws to a close: a revamped website, a new trailer, and above all, version 1.6.0 of the game. In addition to gamepad rumble, as well as a few optimizations and bug fixes, it brings an important change: the game's engine, Sosage moves from the GNU GPL license to the MIT license.
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Today sees the release of two new books: the game's artbook and the English translation of the comic book!
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This is the story of bug that makes you want to tear your hair out. The kind of bug where you end up thinking: “But that's not possible, the compiler is screwing up, no way it's something else!”
And a compiler bug is no small thing: in 12 years of C++ programming, I've found (and reported) just... one. And I can tell you that before reporting the bug to GCC, I tested/retested/checked in every possible way to make sure I wasn't going to look like an idiot.
Anyway. Here's the story.
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Well, just because the game's out doesn't mean I'm going to stop doing making-of! So here's a video that took me a while to make, but which I thought was important: it explains how I came up with the game's interface, with all the problems that had to be solved (making it pleasant, usable with a mouse, a touch screen, a joystick, etc.).
Enjoy and see you soon for new making-ofs :)
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I'm proud to announce that Superfluous Returnz is now available in Italian, under the name Superfluo Ritorns! As the game is set in a small French village, I think it's great that it's been translated into another European language, and I hope that players in Italy will appreciate the familiar atmosphere :)
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You can freely listen to the game's soundtrack on Peertube (and soon on YouTube, the upload is in progress but YouTube has certain limitations so it takes a while).
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The day after the release of the game, I was interviewed about it in Libre à vous!, the April show on the French radio Cause Commune.
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Not much more to say, the title speaks for itself! You can now buy the game on Steam or Itch.io (on Google Play, I'm still waiting for the app to be validated, so you'll have to wait a bit more).
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I finished the game yesterday afternoon when I integrated the very last sound effects. The conclusion of a 3 and a half year work is approaching!
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In the series of problems that I never imagined I would have to deal with when I started developing this video game, I present to you: the problem of transparent pixels in PNG.
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Having almost finished the game's graphics (apart from a few cinematics), I'm in the middle of recording the music. So I thought I'd show you one, like that, as a little extra teaser.
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If you read a tutorial on how to handle display with the SDL library, chances are it sums it up as a loop: perform the computations for the “logic” of the game (moving the characters, etc.), invoke the display functions, refresh the screen, then put the program to “sleep” for a while.
Except that this method is obsolete and we can do much better ... let's see that.
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A little feedback on a big blow that happened to me this morning ... and on how I ended up solving it. This is not a usual making-ofs article, but I think that this experience could be useful to others.
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So far, I've mostly made blog posts to explain the development of the game, but for once, this is just an announcement post: after months of work, I have finished the game's graphical basics! 🎉 🎉 🎉
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As you may or may not know, I'm French and I'm writing the story and dialogs of Superfluous Returnz in the French language. But fairly early in the development of the game, I thought it would be nice to be able to translate it, especially in English, just in order to broaden the potential audience.
So I'm going to talk to you about internationalization, or i18n for short. As the game does not have any recorded voices to date, it is mainly a question of translating the texts… and a few images.
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Superfluous Returnz is a 2D video game with a very classic “cartoon” style: if we put aside the descriptions of the levels and the sound part, the entire content to be loaded therefore consists of 2D images (the animations being simply successions of images).
In order to avoid excessively long loading times between levels and an overly large memory use on disk, choosing the right image format is therefore critical.
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I'm very proud to present the official trailer for Superfluous Returnz!
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A critical part of video game development that is rarely discussed in “classic” programming courses is the management of assets, i.e. game data (levels, images, sounds, etc.).
Alright, in general, we do know how to read files in C++, but here I want to talk about having an automated and cross-platform mechanism: you don't want the player to have to specify, at each launch, where the assets are ...
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Last time, I explained how to compile and distribute a game for Windows from Linux. This time, I'll do the same thing, but with MacOS as the target system, a procedure that is a little less well documented on the Internet.
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You probably won't be surprised if I tell you that I do development —and also perform all of my digital activities– on GNU/Linux. Of course, as many people use Microsoft Windows to play games, it is obvious that the game must also run on this platform.
As I'm not into the idea of approaching a Windows system without the
presence of an exorcist, I looked early into the possibility of
"cross-compiling" my game: producing a Windows-compatible executable
(the famous .exe) from a Linux environment.
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After a few technical articles, I wanted to do a making-of that's a bit more focused on the artistic aspect of the game. In addition, it will be an occasion to show you some images. Since most of the work I'm doing right now is on the graphics part of the game, this seems like a good time to do it.
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Last time, I discussed the whole technical aspect of “setting up” an Android environment to run our game: configuration, compilation, etc.
Now, we get to the heart of the matter: what does it change, on the code side, to port an SDL2 game on Android?
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Very early in the development of the game, I had the idea of porting it to Android: the game style (point and click) fits the platform, for example I really enjoyed playing Thimbleweed Park on tablet (and being able to play old LucasArts on your phone via ScummVM is a pleasure too).
This is one of the reasons that lead me to switch from SDL1 to SDL2 which, in addition to providing welcome hardware acceleration to display high resolution images and animations, offers Android support (and even provides quite a bit of tools to manage this platform, we'll come to that).
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A quick little article to let you know that Superfluous Returnz is now registered on Steam and Itch.io! It will be published on these two platforms on its release date, for the moment set for June 2022 (but it is possible that this date will evolve, in one direction or the other).
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For this new making-of, I'll start by reminding you (or teaching you, perhaps) several features of Superfluous Returnz:
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From the start of the game's development, it seemed obvious to me that it had to be cross-platform: it had to run at least on Gnunux (makes sense, this is the OS I use), on Windows (the most popular OS on desktop / laptop) and on Android (the most popular OS on tablets and phones). Derivatives like LineageOS are included in “Android”. Also, I wanted to make a web port to be able to play it directly in the browser.
I will now explain to you how I managed to create these different versions using the same code base as much as possible (apart from a few adaptations, I'll come back to this).
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This is what will undoubtedly be the last making-of of the year before the release of the playable demo of the Superfluous video game scheduled for the end of the year.
I already discussed, in order:
We will tackle the last big piece that is necessary for the game: writing and storing “levels” (which we should rather call “rooms” since the game is separated into different rooms connected by doors and corridors).
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After talking about graphics and programming, we are going to tackle a third facet which is: music!
Most of the musics that I'm composing for the game are ambient musics, they are relatively discreet and their goal is to provide a background sound that is neither boring nor annoying (since it loops), and that is not a distraction for the player either (the goal is to solve puzzles). Nevertheless, I still had fun composing big musical “themes”, especially specific themes for the characters. These themes will likely be used during cutscenes and transition sequences.
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Last time, I told you about the algorithmic aspect of travel: today explains how I handled the graphics part.
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For this first making-of, I will present you one of the first problems I had to deal with: displaying and moving a character in a scene.
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