This is a diary I kept while making the game.
People often commented on this and the game itself. Click here to read the MR3 comments
Finished Music
15th Dec 2006I finished off the music today, after doing the update.
More Music
13th Dec 2006I continued adding the third way that music would be triggered in the game today. Actually, triggering the music itself was trivially easy but there were details around it, that needed a bit of trial and error to get right. I got there in the end.
Sorry for being so cryptic, but I want to keep some surprises!
Map Editor Docs Updated
12th Dec 2006After swapping a couple of emails with megaman4ever it became apparent that the time was right to explain better how to delete in the Map Editor. I have now added a new document to the TMB Open documentation which can downloaded from the downloads page or from here.
Yesterday on MR3 I made the music play in game by getting triggered by the map. I won't go into the details here, because I want to get on. Also, I have since done another test and the shockwave movie size is now coming out at around 4mb. I had to downsample one of the longer tunes even further to achieve this but I think it was worth it.
resampling the music
7th Dec 2006I added the music into the movie today and made (some of) it play. Once I had added all the tunes i wanted to use, I published a shockwave movie to test the size. It was 12mb!
MR3 is usually about 2mb, so that's quite a jump. I decided I had better try to make the size of the mp3s smaller. Fortunately, audacity was available today, so I downloaded that and made the tunes mono, and resampled them down to 16bit at 22050khz. If Michael and Noam and reading this I hope they're not flipping out!
Anyway, that reduced the size of the mp3s by a factor of about 8. So I was happily expecting the corresponding size of the shockwave movie to be around 4mb, which seems just about acceptable to me. However, when I did a test it came out as nearly 7mb!
However, I've just realised that I later worked out that I had forgotten to replace one of the original tunes with the lightweight version. So that would probably explain it. I'll do another test and post the results tomorrow.
Many of the pieces I was using weren't really finished, so I just clipped the extraneous bits off the end and faded it out. Not ideal, but one tune in particular - "the ultimate song thing v1" was just so perfect in the mood it set that it didn't seem to matter that it wasn't finished!
The credits screen in particular benefits hugely from the addition of music. "Final stand" fits perfectly there.
So far, these are the only two pieces of music that actually play. I have to do some new programming to get the other pieces to play. Some will be triggered by the map (entering a room) and some by another method, which you'll see later.
music
6th Dec 2006I was adding the music today. It looks as though playing it will be relatively straight forward as i am going to embed the music into the game. I am a bit concerned about how big the final movie will be but if it is too big, I will try reducing the sound quality.
There were a couple of tunes that I wanted to use bits of, rather than the whole mp3 as supplied, but I couldn't find an easy way to edit them. My favourite sound package audacity, wasn't available for windows today (the server was down) and the linux version wasn't compiled with mp3 support. (and I'm not getting into compiling my own.)
I'll probably have to adjust the soundMaster bit of the program. Since a tune will be played as a sound effect, I have a feeling that it could be interrupted if a lot of other sounds all try to play at once. I'll have to check that out.
Well, I'm just thinking out loud now. I'd probably do better to get on with it, rather than talking about it.
Loads of people wished me happy birthday - thank you!
end game script, copy protection
5th Dec 2006I finished the end game script today, and switched the copy protection back on. After giving it some thought, I did this because I would like the game to stay exclusive to my site for a few months after release.
I know that may sound a bit weird considering I've already released the source code, but that version doesn't have the finished data, so it isn't really the final version.
Anyway, I don't intend to keep it exculsive forever, just a few months, which should be long enough to make sure this site is seen as the 'main' site for MR3.
Day off
4th Dec 2006It was my birthday today, so I took the day off. Hope you don't mind!
Playtesting, bug fix, script
30th Nov 2006I finished playtesting the game today. It's pretty easy but I'd rather veer towards being too easy than too hard.
There was a bug where I had too many potions or levelled up too much to cast a blank army summon - it skipped straight to a warrior. So I fixed that.
I made a new script for when you rescue Berlin, next I need to do the game complete script.
A couple of people wrote in wondering what the final feature was - it's nothing huge and I could tell you I suppose, but I thought I'd try to keep a bit of mystery about the game so that it feels a bit more like a new game: even for the people who have been following the making of it for what feels like the last decade!
Added signs
29th Nov 2006I've been a bit ill today and yesterday but I was feeling well enough this afternoon to get back to MR3. I finished programming the last feature and got on with adding the signs to the map (the ones that tell you the name of the location you're at). The first location was called "Back Garden". After considering this for a short time I realised that it wasn't a particularly "Dragons and Wizards" sort of a name, so after some more careful thought I added another sign after it with "(of DEATH)" written on it. Much better.
With the signs done, I started playtesting it. Due to the programming changes I made previously, I had to start my game again. I've just played through the first few screens currently but I'll continue with that tomorrow. The map is smaller than the one in the current demo, so playtesting is not such an awe-inspiring pain in the rear now.
MR3 inching forward
27th Nov 2006I went with James to get some new hardware today, nothing fancy, just networking stuff. That took most of the day, so I only got about an hour done on MR3 before I left.
I set up a test map to test the new thing that I've been programming; it works, but it's not finished yet.
