Scratch: Harvest Moon
So the point of this next Scratch assignment we had was to do a simple showing of the mechanics of the game (ie Mario hitting blocks), as well as a change of level. I asked the professor and he said going from inside to outside of a building would work fine, as well as working with the tools to show a couple of things the character can do. The target platform was a PlayStation1, however I could not find ANY sprites from the PS1 game, and the SNES ones are very two-dimensional, so in order to try to keep to the former art style, I was able to dig up some basic sprites from the Harvest Moon DS game. I have a very simple change from the inside of the main character’s home to the ‘backyard’ which is really just a small little thing. He doesn’t plant any seeds, but he picks up tools (yeah I know, not from the DS at all but I wanted a more classic HM experience!) , goes to the inventory screen, selects 3 out of the available 5 to perform actions with, and does them. He chops some logs, he fills up the water container from the pond, and he also smashes a couple of rocks with his hammer. He also can pick up the rocks and weeds as well to throw them.
Unlucky for me… I couldn’t find sprites for the throwing actions of the weeds or rocks, so I had to do those. I also hate to admit but I spent over half of my time with this assignment just organizing my sprites, because let me tell you, this script is HEAVILY costume dependent. If I had more time I probably would’ve liked to actually separated my main character into three sprites like I did previously with Ninja Senki, just because it got REALLY bad. I think the main character has 160 costumes. And the main reason I needed to separate it wasn’t so much the fact that it was hell to code between going back and forth to find Costume#s, but the movement. That’s right! I used the movement from my Ninja Senki game. What do you do when you don’t have time? Borrow your own code! Until you realize that it’s a LOT more buggy than you initially thought.
So if I said that I spent approximately half of my time just getting these sprites, then I spent at least 20-30 percent of my remainder just messing with the walking script. Still, STILL it doesn’t work. It gets SO buggy, and I’m PRETTY sure it has SOMETHING to do with the way the character responds between the arrows. Even though she might be going up, if you hit Right and don’t move for at least a second, she will continue to face the same direction Up, while moving right. Give it a second, and then she will face the correct direction again. I think it has something to do with the part of the script that tells the character, whenever a different button is hit, switch the costume to the new one. However, I think because it consistently checks to see if the character is moving in that direction to do the walk costume cycle, it bugs out between costumes left, right, up, and back. I cannot explain to you the frustration this walk cycle has given me. The best part? It’s not really a mechanic. It should be just basic rudimentary “yeah I know you know how to do a walk cycle show me something better” type stuff. But instead I have become so fixated on fixing this. My biggest problem is just the presentation itself. Everything else might work, but when you include a walk cycle that doesn’t work correctly, you become immediately detached from the personal experience and connection you get from the game. You get pulled away from it, and immediately realize problems that make the game a lot worse for such small reasons. I don’t know. I’m still upset about it. I resolved to trying to fix it if I had any time before it is due, but I don’t think I have the time. HOWEVER, at some point in the future I SHALL FIX IT! MARK MY WORDS!
