new user with questions

[Kathleen]

Hi Sieg,

Yes, that's a great treble clef. I'll try the eraser thing on it and I think it will be a big improvement.

I'll send the game to you by email. Here is my initial idea for the different levels, in case that makes a difference. I'm open to suggestions:

1. The lines and spaces are identified by their letter names to make it easy. The notes G-F (GV 35 and GV 0-6) drift slowly over the staff and the player just has to line the shooter up and blast with the right letter showing. When each note has been correctly blasted three times, the screen changes to one where the lines and spaces are not identified by their letter names. Now the player has to ID the lines and spaces by memory. When all have have ID's correctly 3 times, jump to a screen with another seven notes on it, lines and spaces lettered to make it easy. This goes on until all five octaves have been covered and all 35 notes have been ID'd correctly three times. Jump to level 2.

2. Same thing, without the lines and spaces being lettered. I may want to have it jump to the next level after only two correct hits per note.

3. Faster notes, possibly jump to next level after one correct hit per note

4. Faster still

5. Maximum speed with occasional bombs coming across the staff (I know how to do this)

6. Fighter is horizontal across the bottom of the screen instead of on the side (I can do this too)

After the first level, or maybe even in the first level, there will be health bars or points, and possibly penalties for missing the notes or letting them get past the shooter. I'm not sure about any of that yet, but I know how to do it.

[Random]

Yes, that's a great treble clef. I'll try the eraser thing on it and I think it will be a big improvement.

Wah! Stop!

If you use his', you can just use the fill tool and fill the white space with the transparent color. That's two clicks instead of 3.4 hours of eraser weilding.

EDIT: Note that when you import it, MMF will think the black part is meant to be transparent. So.. make sure to fill the black part with some color/black before you fill the white part with transparent (transparent is the checker stuff under the color palette).

EDIT2: You would use the eraser on pictures that have anti aliasing (aka blurry edges ) or are scanned in (LOTS of blurry edges). This isn't the case with Sieg's.

[Kathleen]

Thanks, Random! Yes, I quickly discovered how impossible it was to erase around that kind of image. What I ended up doing was finding a matching bass and treble clef image that I liked that were just simply the clefs in black against a white background. No staff lines or anything, just the symbols. There were a lot of those available. Then, since I have it on the game against a black starry background, I made them negative images in my photo editor so I had white clefs against a black background. Then I just erased a little bit around them in MMF2 and put them on the staves in the game. So a little bit of the lines (which are gray) look like they are erased around the clefs, and it actually looks great and even adds to the 3D look I've got going on with scrolling. Thanks again! I learned a lot.

[Kathleen]

Thanks for working on the game, Sieg. I'm hoping to get to it tonight or at least by this weekend. Someone has volunteered to make me 35 wav files for each of the notes so when they explode they will sing. He's going to send me one note file so I can test it out before doing all of them.

[Kathleen]

Yo Sieg,

I've put in the things you said to do, and as far as I know that level is working fine. I had a problem trying to break it down to a level where just seven notes were in play. Can you check your email and see what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks!

Kathleen

[Kathleen]

Thanks, Sieg! I think I've sent you the right file this time. It is still not working for me.

Kathleen

[Sieg]

Just as I thought! You made a simple mistake.

Random(7) picks a number between 0 and 6 inclusive (0,1,2,3,4,5 or 6).
So the numbers 14 through 20 never get picked.

All you need to do is change those 7 conditions:

Global Value A = 14
Global Value A = 15
Global Value A = 16
Global Value A = 17
Global Value A = 18
Global Value A = 19
Global Value A = 20

to:

Global Value A = 0
Global Value A = 1
Global Value A = 2
Global Value A = 3
Global Value A = 4
Global Value A = 5
Global Value A = 6

Just change the numbers and it will work fine.

Also I advise you to really try and understand WHY it didn't work, and why this is the solution. Don't blindly do as I say ok? You need to understand what you are doing

[Random]

You could also write Random(7) + 14

[Kathleen]

Thanks,Random!

Kathleen

[Kathleen]

Thanks, Sieg! It is true that I don't really get what global or alterable values are except in the most general way. It seems like I've seen some books on game design mentioned on this site, and I'm going to read some of them to see if I can really figure this out.

I'll change those values and break the game down into levels, also line up the notes more exactly. It might take me a couple of days to do that.

Kathleen