Topic, Game "Moonlights"

  Do you plan to make one able to set the shape that the nodes start off in?

  Jp, do you think you could tell me what day this will be done.

  wow, that makes me want to be an admin even more

  only people who are on the admin list can play this game untill it's published, then other people can play it

  Neat feature, jp! My only qualm is that when you speed up the speed up the background particles it makes me feel a little queasy.

There was one level it was pretty bad on, I don't remember which though...

Perhaps you could slow it down some to be easier on the eyes?

EDIT: actually, looking at it again, it's not so bad. Maybe it's just that I'm a little tired...

  I've added a "show me" button on the engine.
When you click on this button you play the achievment of the best player of the level.
Of course this will not be activated on all levels, only on a list of key levels.
Exple on the first level Little Tower (Moonlights)

{edit] it seems the replay is glitchy on this level Crawler (Moonlights), i need to work more on it.

{edit 2] It should be corrected now. Luckily, the problem was on the replay side (not record side).

  You can't, because it is not yet published

  How to play the game?

  Acttually i'm not sure I will release the game very soon.
There are several reasons, but the main one is that I've just bought a MacBook to make a try on iPhone games. So I will spend a few days to learn iphone deve and see if I can come with something. If the answer is yes, I would like to release both iphone and flash version at the same time.

I think developping an iphone game for the first time will take 4/6 weeks.

Actually I'm not sure I will enter the 4K contest anymore.

The other reason is that with "Captain Dan" being released soon, maybe it's better not to release 2 games at the same time to balance the load on the servers.

  Wow, great background! I can't wait for the game to become public!

  @ murtaza, he said that before, middle end march

  When do you plan to release this game?

  i like it how it is

  Ah Ok sorry I get it now. It's because of the black background but I'm not sure to keep it this dark.

  If you get a better score, your new score comes in top of the screen right?
Well, you can close that by pressing 'close' in the top right, but because it's written in black you can't see it because the background is also black

  Shiro, sorry I don't get it, which 'close' button ?

  When you get a better score you can't see the 'close' button, mabey make that white?

  Yes, but I don't think a dark background goes well with the rest of the site... It makes all the white areas look out out of place, and causes the page to look very unprofessional.

  wow jp i love the background awsome

  I encountered the glitch where you are unable to add new nodes.
just after playing the lvl 1, I started the lvl 2 manually and it happened.

But the glitch disappeared after I move the mouse out of the window and get it back to the game. If the glitch happen again to you can you test this (move the mouse away, and back) ?

  Might work gecko.

I think I'm going to contact the guys who made Aether and see if they could give us a tip (I post on one of the forum that they also post on)

EDIT: he expands a bit on his methodology in this thread.

  I've got an idea about how we could fix this, but it might be hard to get the fade-in effect we want...

We could have track one:
Moonlights1 playing on its own.

Track two:
Moonlights1 and Moonlights2 playing together.

Track three:
Moonlights one, two and three playing together.

And so on...

If you could get them to switch between each other to the beat, then you might not need a fade-in...

  @captain, here is the result of the engine I made with your 4 sounds (click on the buttons to change the ambiance value):

MixSoundsTest.swf

It's nice overall but there are synchronization problems.

The 4 loops don't loop perfectly (a small glitch at the time going back to position 0).
The main loop size is 1/3 of the other sounds. As it's the leading sound, I repeat 3 times, and then I reset the all loops. But the synchronization is lost after the first repeat. It might be due to the same problem. That means all the loops are a little bit longer than they should for a perfect loop/repeat process.

I have the same problem when I generate loops with Fruity Loop studio. I solve this by cutting the sample with a wav editor like Audacity but it's really anoying work.

  Can you turn down the volume a bit, I find it loud enough that my volume setiings must be near 0. That's multiple sliders. It's much louder than the other ones.

  How about a 'main' track that lasts for twice (or four times) as long as the other tracks, and plays more of a tune than the others?

I re-exported my tracks to .wav files, because they are more accurate than .mp3 files (in which the time is altered very slightly when they are exported).
moonlights5.wav
moonlights6.wav

And here is a composition of all the tracks mixed together:
moonlights composition.mp3

If you decide to include my tracks (which you certainly do not have to), you might want to get rid of track five if you don't think it fits.

  jp, I used garage band for the mac. And jp, if there's something you don't like about it, or don't think fits, or if you don't want to use it at all, be sure to tell me as I won't be offended.

gecko, The tracks could be longer, these are just short rough drafts to get an idea for what direction we want to head with it. Rather than invest a long time in a huge track that's hard to edit and change, I made a smaller, more flexible one.

  Well, reading further back a bit, JP says:
"when the sound on the leading track reaches the end, all track/sounds are restarted from the beginning."
So we don't need to worry too much about going out of sync.

I also think that while you are not playing a level (in the level menu etc.), you should pick a bunch of random tracks to play at the same time, so as to keep the music slightly different each time.

I kind of wish some of the tracks could be longer...

  OK these are interesting tracks. I will experiment them as soon as possible.
@captain, what software did you use ?
@gecko, your tracks are Ok, but the sampels as not as depp as the piano samples used in captain's tracks. I think it's very difficult to work 2 on a small music :)

  I've experimented with the tracks in Flash a bit, and it does seem very hard to get the volume balance and timing just right. I'll upload what it should sound like (at least with only my parts) in a bit.

EDIT: http://ian.janasnyder.com/moonlights%202.aif

  Ok, I've made two tracks, which should be enough.
I think the music by Reasoner is more suited for this game, but we'll see which JP likes more. I'm also very worried about playing all the tracks at the same time, because even though they are carefully made to loop at exactly the same time, they will eventually start to drift out of sync, as Flash is not made for handling music with such precise accuracy (unless AS3 has some advanced music features).

So, here they are anyway:
moonlights5.mp3
moonlights6.mp3

Tell me what you think about them.