Slick Forums

Figured it's about time to start a thread here

Theme: Magicka!
Entry: Enchanting Cadence
Tecnology: Slick applet + web services + facebook

I've been blogging progress at my site but I've just got the fundamental gameplay working, and now I'm seeing how much there is left to do



Basically Enchanting Cadence is a puzzle game about bouncing magical bolts around with mirrors and prisms through various elemental nodes to make magical items.
Here's a screenshot of where things are..



The applet is at http://www.enchantingcadence.com (you Will need a FB acct to see it)

I'm Not sure if it works on Macs... or how to get it working on em. any suggestions would be great in that regard.

If you manage to break it I'd love to know how (shouldn't be too hard)

Anyway Hopefully I'll have more updates soon.

Screenshots look amazing! Great job on the GUI! What graphics tool did you use?

Also my respect for coding a facebook app with Java and Slick. You might be forced by the forum community to write a little "how to"

And yes, you think you're mostly done with the game and then find out that all those tiny little details you moved to "later" sum up to the remaining 80%

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Right Angle Games | Marte Engine
Back to the past | Star Cleaner | SpiderTrap

tutorial could be a must

about game: works fine with windows 7 and java6 with firefox4, load fast, but menus response seeems to be a little bit slow.
About first level, my suggestion is to put a change direction on game table, so player can see what must be done

nice work, really good!

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

Thanks!

The graphics are all photoshop. Lots of layers, gradients, texture brushes.
I've tossed up the PSD file for the enchant button if anyone's interested
[url]cadence.swiftthought.com/dev/enchant_button.psd[/url]

Yeah I've been keeping notes and plan on adding a PHP -> JSON -> Jquery -> Slick applet and back again tutorial to the Wiki.... once I get this thing working properly

Yeah.. that little mountain of itty bitty 'must haves' just keeps getting bigger the more I think about it.. Time to make lists and cut things from v1

Thanks good to know it works on 7.
Yeah things are a bit sluggish.. maybe if I wind up with spare time I can shove things into some more snappy solutions

Tutorial is coming as soon as I finish working out the kinks.

Yeah the biggest gameplay issue is letting the player know what went wrong. I plan on 3 solutions/hints.
1. when you start the level (or press the (currently nonexistant) play button next to the formula) you hear a series of notes / sounds, each bolt type makes a different sound. and then when your solution is enchanting you get to hear what you did. that should help .
2. the formula track will have the divider lines turn green on success and red on errors.
3. the popup when you fail, will indicate more explicitly the problem.. ie. Missed a bolt.. got a bolt of the wrong type.. etc.

I suggest you use sound, but wisely: many users (at work for example) could simply have sounds off, so misunderstand everything

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Blog | Last game Gravity Duck tribute | In progress Gravity Duck tribute

End of the week update.
Probably only had 4 -5 hrs to do anything all week on account of sick kiddos.
Did manage to get the start of the level selection state in place, along with retooling the gameboard background image so the game maintains a sense of consistency.

is the new level selection screen.

is the newly retooled gameboard. The holes for the pegs in the gameboard area still bother me though.

Hopefully I can get the level selection wrapped up this weekend (barring the ajaxy parts since my development webserver cratered last week)

[/img]

Slow week..
Got the splitter put in place and some new launcher graphics so you can see how many bolts they're going to shoot out. Almost got the level selection gui bits wrapped up. A handful of bugs in all of em but for the most part functional.

I almost have the web based level editor finished. Just need to tweak some saving loading and fetching and sending stuff to the database and to the applet.

http://cadence.swiftthought.com/admin/editor.php it's not pretty but it does the trick.

Hopefully I can get some new stuff wrapped up for #ScreenshotSaturday

wow rough weekend.. not so much progress as I'd have liked.



Bunch more web backend crap is taking longer than I'd anticipated.. Too many things are interconnected making it hard to test individual bits which always makes progress feel incredibly slow. Yuck.

Hopefully I'll be able to test and save levels in the next couple days.

boring applet integration work progresses...
I've got the level groups call being made and caught by the applet and the level cards per group is being sent and caught as well now.

the whole thing is getting pretty messy since I had no idea how to do any of it when I started .. so everything is being done it's own way..
Down to just the last 2 applet -> javascript > applet calls left to write.. hopefully they're going to get easier..

However testing is slow as every time I change anything I've got to rebuild the jar since the game no longer functions as a standalone application
Also the browser.. has a tendency to lock up ~50% of the time on reload of the page... not sure what's causing it.. something isn't releasing the java plugin properly or something.. I've actually got an etire day/evening to work on it so I'm hoping to get the entire core working this by monday.

ugh. Soo much to do, soo few days left

Ok.. the list of version 1.2 (post contest) features is getting longer and longer

Working on quashing the bazilling bugs (which of course only work when tied to the applet and pulling stuff from the database so they take forever to debug... and ..oh yeah.. actually having levels might be nice too...

And just another screenshot.

Had a crazy thought that I wont have time to mess with.
but has anyone passed a binary blob from a database -> javascript -> applet which then saves it as the proper jpg file?
In theory i think it should work.. anyone tried something along those lines?

Well I'm out of time to work on this for now.

The one big thing I wanted to get in was mac support... except I'm completely stumped.

The java->javascript communications is broken in safari: giving you a fun error like so:


From what i gather is that it's preventing the filesystem's cached applet from talking to the web..

Now in Firefox / chrome .. the communications work fine! I can see it fetch and recieve the level manifests etc etc...

Except that the screen is blank. It shows the lwjgl loader fine.. but once in the main loop it's not rendering anything.

If anyone has any idea on how to fix that, i'd be more than happy to listen.
So the final files are uploaded and whatnot.
You can play it at http://www.enchantingcadence.com
You'll need a facebook account (all I do is store your fbId for use in tracking the stars earned)

I'll try and started on an applet tutorial update for the wiki during the next week.

This has been very educational and motivating and a lot of fun.

It looks great!!!
Very good work integrating to facebook, works perfectly for me on Chrome.