Hey there. First of all, if you're new to what's happened concerning this game, you can catch up here:
viewtopic.php?f=64&t=7159&start=20 at the bottom.

So Donkey Kong is being refitted into it's own game, and today I fired up the PS2 to take a look at my previous work.

First, I had to decide on a new section. See, in the game you can pick up extra items and then redeem them for tokens, which in Arcadia Mania you bought new items with. But since Arcadia Mania is not a part of the game anymore, I had to think up a new idea for these collectable items. And that's where I stumbled on a new idea, one that would add a little extra meat to the game.

You still get tokens by trading the collectable items, but you use the tokens to play an 'item-grabber game'. Then you play a game of skill and can collect figurines and plush dolls and other interesting items. There will be a new trophy room where those items go so you can view them.

And that's my new idea. So far I've designed the trophy room, and not much else. What I'd like to do is make custom sprites for the prizes, so that way you get more of an eye-appealing item. This does, however, mean more work, but hopefully it's something I can get done. It will be my first project using custom sprites, so it's also a testing ground, if you know what I mean.


I playtested the game just a little bit, and am glad to say I throughly tested this one out before I stopped working on it. Everything is working exactly as it should, so as long as I don't mess with the old code too much, I should have no problems. I plan on going over the entire game with a fine-tune comb to make sure I catch any bugs before release.

And I also deleted all the old Arcadia Mania stuff left over and cut certain dialog boxes down, to keep things consisent.

It all depends how quickly I catch on to the custom sprite making, but with any luck I'll have this game churned out soon.

A couple things have changed.

First off, I'm cutting the idea for custom sprites (as least for the prizes). It would likely take too long to figure out and would slow down the development of the title. I may look into going back to this idea, but it depends.

Second, the item grabber is going to be a lottery machine, much like what you'd find in Super Smash Bros Melee. There will be two machines that have 5 figurines each. Having two helps me program it, and I can let the player know when he's got all the items from that particular machine.

So, here's what I'd like to do before the game is complete:

Make custom sprite for Jumpman
Complete coding for capsule system
Reminder: give player tokens for beating game
Consider making a title screen
Debug entire game (last)

There, let's see how well I can do completing all these objectives within a short time.

Oh, and one more thing I decided to add today. A save system. That way you don't need to play everything in one sitting.

So, more progress has been made.

6/10 capsules have been finalized. The theme I decided to go with was homage to games I've made, much like how Smash Bros does. However, I haven't made enough games to fill the remaining 4, so we'll see what goes in those spaces later.

And I was in for a surprise when I found someone's already made a rpgmaker sprite for Mario. What a shock! I found it at the pavilion. It might be a little too small and old-school to use, but I'll decide on that later.

And I haven't decided on a title screen or not....8 blocks is quite a bit. Since my game uses 6 blocks and there's 15 total....that means I'd only have 1 block to finish things up with. Still need to consider that.

Anyway, that's just what's been going on. I'll report more progress later.

Right now I'm in the process of playing other people's games (first Fufu, and now Karr's Crystal Shores demo), so development is at a standstill. Don't worry, this is only very temporary. I'm still chugging along, and Find the Needle in the Haystack was released today, two days ahead of schedule. How's that for dedication?

In the meantime, I'd like to give a shout out that I'm looking for playtesters. If you have a dexdrive and rpgm1, I'd appreciate the help. You'll be given proper credit of course, and it might be a good experience to learn from, since there's a bit more code to this than a normal project, and the game is not password locked. I'm hoping to get some people to help playtest this to sort out any bugs I may have missed, or to give their opinions before the final project is released.

I would ideally like this to be finished within two and a half weeks, so I think a fair release date would be May 22nd. I'll try and wrap everything up by that date, and depending how quickly I can get a posse of playtesters, I may even be done sooner, such as the case was with FtNitH.

Rally men! Let's fight the good fight! Recruit today!

Hope everyone enjoys the newly themed avvy I've made. I figure it will help get the game more attenion, and a new sig is on the way as well.

But about the game...I have been planning this title for a good while, and have recently read a lot of articles about information about game making and planning, as well as advertising. One note sticks out in my mind, and has led me to a revelation of sorts. The line said,

"Make the game the way you want to."

It's really simple advice, but it speaks volumes about how we're supposed to approach game making.

I wanted to make Donkey Kong something that stuck to it's roots, and keep it a simple conversion of a game I loved and work it into rpgmaker. The capsule system is too far removed from this, and parralells the original plan I had for it. Was the capsule system ever in the original Donkey Kong? No. Why is it in there? To try and give the game some replayability. That'd be fine, but this is about DONKEY KONG, not some figurines. You shouldn't be playing the game just because you can try the chance game again.

So, with that, I'm cutting out the capsule system entirely. This will make some more work on my part, but in keeping focus with what goals I've set out for this game, it's suitable.

I'll have to cut out the trophy room and other areas. I'll also have to find a new way to impliment the items you can collect. I'm happy with this decision though, and I hope you will be too.

This cut may or may not push the game's release date up. I still have work to do and haven't done it yet, so time will tell. I'll continue to post information as it appears.

Here's some Donkey Kong media for you to chew on.

Now I know what it's like to lose information in RPGMaker.

Haha, don't worry, it's nothing big. I lost power to the house for a split second, and I just happened to be finishing up Donkey Kong. So I really only lost about 10 minutes of work, but it's still a little annoying. No data was corrupted though, so I fired it up again and continued progress. I'll have to check the computer to make sure nothing's wrong with my personal archive.

So what did I do today? I first uploaded, compressed, and coded in the title screen. It turns off with a switch so you'll only see it once. Then I deleted the trophy room and that stupid capsule system. I then worked on the last thing that's been bugging me since I made this game seperate; making the pauline itms worth something. I've decided to go with a point system, where you collect points for grabbing items and finishing the game. The points don't unlock anything; they're just there to collect, like getting highscores. I could actually expand this idea to have a highscore table on this forum, but I'd have to take precautions like setting a password and requiring people to screenshot their scores. And it may be null and void since the password feature can be bypassed. It's something I'll think about.

And I'm otherwise 100% finished with the title. Now that everything is complete, I'm ready to start handing the game out for playtesting. I know there are a few people out there who love a bug free game, so I want to go over it throughly again. But if Usuru taught me anything, it's that having more people onboard to help is invaluable, since many people can spot bugs you would have otherwise missed. So I plan on sending out a few PMs and see if I can get anybody to help me out, and I'm also going to grab my friends to help too.

I know now, without a shadow of a doubt, that I'll be able to hit the May 22nd release date. But should I move it forward? What do you think?

If you'd like, I can Test-Play it. I can even put it into a special little "Let's Test-Play" video, so you can see the glitches I find. Easier than trying to go by written descriptions.

Sounds like a great idea. I've sent you the file.

I would help playtest it, but I only can play RPGM1 games that are in PS3 format. This sounds very interesting and I look forward to testing it out someday once it's converted. Congrats on having things nearly completed.

Indeed, although converting the game isn't something I can do, since I don't own a PS3. But here's the game file anyway, playtesters....Maybe one of you kind chaps could convert it for me?

Note: If you plan to playtest the game, there's a guy in a tux that meows. He'll give you an item that allows you to access the Hard mode right off the bat. This guy won't be in the final build.

I like what you've done with your project. You even have a cover (which uses the boxcover materials I made )!

Good stuff.

Thanks Ix. I want lots of people to play this game, and I figure the best way to do that is to promote it. It also gave me a good chance to mess with some graphical stuff.

Draygone recently sent me his test-play video of Donkey Kong (which is a private video until it's released, but I may change my mind). He picked out a good number of things I forgot to add to the game, and had some good suggestions I decided to add. Some enemies didn't take lives when touched, or some were broken in they didn't turn off a switch.

Some problems were easy to fix, like adding a script to take a life away. Others took more time, like changing the sound effects to many different events. And one particular new addition took quite a bit of work. In the playtest version I have it set so you get the same responses from Pauline and DK ever time, but with some work every difficulty level will provide you with some new text. This was a huge pain for 100m, since there's a lot of takeovers and switches to worry about. Something really weird happened when I got into the code for changing the text; apparently I had planned to have the text different already when you beat it on a different setting. But it was coded incorrectly, so it never got used. So I rearranged the pages, so it should work now.

I haven't playtested any of my changes, but will do so later today.

Ok, so I playtested my newly altered code; it was a mixed bag.

The added text for the ending of 100m didn't work at all. I was confused for a while, because according to the switch board everything was in place. But I learned a new rule with rpgmaker; if you meet the requirements for more than one page condition, it chooses the one with the most conditions. So while I had hard text at switch 1, for example, and noemal text at 2-8, even though page condition switch 1 was ahead of the normal, it still went to normal. This required me to refit the locks with new code and many more switches to make it work. I had to increase my maximum switch usage from 16 to 28. Wasn't great, but hey, I made it all come together.

Other issues weren't as bad. I skipped over making new text for 75m, so that was fixed. There was a tiny bug in 50m concerning walking through a certain tile, and an idea to make Pauline walk towards DK worked so well in 25m that it's extended to all levels now.

One of the few areas I haven't touched upon is the credits room, which I'm not looking forward to. It'll be a little bit of a pain to code, and since my list of contributors isn't finished, that means I can't quite finish it either.

Oh, and I almost forgot. Dray made a mention to center the title screen, and I thought it was a great suggestion. Problem is, my execution couldn't have been sloppier. I changed it on paint, uploaded to GME and then....the file would freeze when I loaded it. Great. The problem was I had two indentical title screens that were the exact same, and I couldn't tell the difference between the newly altered one and the old one. So I deleted one and....it was the unchanged title screen. Drat. So I tried loading up rpgmmaker's own anime maker to fix the problem, and more headaches ensued. Finally I got the damn thing to work right, but it was such a hassle. Hopefully someone out there will appreciate the centered title screen.

And, I'm done working on the game for the night. More work will likely continue tomorrow.

Actually what happens is that RPGM starts at the last page, and works its way to the front until it reaches the first page that meets all conditions. The very front page acts as a last resort if none of the other pages meet conditions.

If I had known that, I'd have saved myself a good bit of time.

Oh hell, the new system I have works just fine. No use changing what isn't broken. And it's not like I'm in desperate need of memory either.

I've added a sprite and saved all my progress up till now to the computer, saved as Version 4. For those not in the know, V2 was the last save that had the capsule system and V3 was the playtest version.

All I need to do is playtest it some more, and it should be good to go anytime soon.

Haha.

This particular game has been through a lot. Getting made, being split into it's own game, adding and removing many aspects. It's seen numerous revisions and many bug fixes. The game was started and finished in December, and was split last month. I would estimate this title has seen about 2 months of solid progress and 25 hours have been pumped into it.

Don't let that scare you off though, because Donkey Kong is a fun, polished effort that is worthy of your time. The 4th game made by Quixotic Productions (and the 2nd non-garbage game), is simple fun and rated E for Everyone.

Newest Release Date: May 13th. Check your calendars.

Thought I'd change the topic name to make more people aware of the game, and I've also decided to release the game at both the Mag and Pavilion at the same time. I'm sharing the love

Glad I decided to playtest the almost-final build before finishing up production, because I found a good number of small bugs that would've slipped by otherwise.

And I'm glad to report that Donkey Kong is now 100% finished! It'll be available in 3 days for everyone to play! YES!

And I'm also glad that I went over the final build again to clean up some minor stuff. Heck, if it wasn't for this release date, I'd just keep slighty modifing this game forever. I might actually try doing that up till it's release.