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DevLog Syntagmatoons

Pierrou

Well-known member
Joined
Jul 6, 2017
Messages
237
For a few... years (!) I've been working (on and off) on a game for French speaking speech therapists.
I'm still not done (many bugs left, some more game modes to add) but I'm beginning to think I'll be able to finish it some day.

It aims at helping the patient develop their sentence processing.

I'm using Mojo1 + IgnitionX (because I thought it would allow me to grasp multiple different scenes on the screen easily, which is quite the case but you have to understand Playniax's logic first to use it). I'm not always having fun coding this but in the end what I get on the screen is what I intend to get.

At the moment there are two main game modes.
The first one is some sort of "sandbox" mode. You can pick up words to make a sentence and then see what happens on the screen. Then you can modify the sentence and see what happens.
In the second mode you have to move the sentences on the right animations. The speech therapist can change many parameters, so that the computer automatically creates more or less complicated sentences to play with. Depending on the parameters, the sentences shown at once can look pretty much the same except for one word or one word's position, or be quite different so the patient must use more or less complex strategies to understand them.
options.png



The characters are randomly assembled, dressed and coloured from a bunch of images (limbs, clothes, faces....)
That's what those parts look like :
bustes.png


What I have to do is to clean everything up and fix the many bugs, add modes, add animations when you win, and send it to testers...
 
Characters can walk various animals... Last week I sent an early version to colleagues for them to test it with children. Still many bugs left but at the moment with most of the main routines working, coding it all is quite fun...
1570373246680.png
 
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Thanks Mike!

The game is slowly getting a little bit fun at last, and so is the coding. Most of all the items must relate to each other the right way so that the patient really has to understand the sentences and not just guess by reading a few words and watching the pictures.

Yes Mojo1 + IgnitionX. I began this project ages ago, I'm not even sure if there was a Mojo 2 at the time :)
On at least one other project I've been using Mojo2, which was totally fine too.

When I'm done with this one I guess I'll use Mojo2 and no framework for the next one.
 
There is nothing wrong with the combination you choose.
Of course not, except that IgnitionX is sometimes a bit obscure, I had to ask Tony a few times how to use some of the commands, I really couldn't figure out myself what he meant, even with the many docs and examples. On the other hand it is very powerful and overall a great tool and Tony's a wonderful coder and has always been very nice and efficient, but you should be struggling with how to fulfill your ideas and not how to use the tool. IgnitionX allowed me to do things I may not have done by myself but it sometimes sucked some of the fun out of coding.
 
I did a small GUI module (buttons, radio buttons, sliders) for one of my apps, I didn't share it because its use wasn't straightforward enough if you weren't me and I had no time to polish it (and there are so many of them out there) but it felt comfortable indeed and I will probably reuse it.
 
Wow that game looks great!

Did you use the framework mainly to make a flash-like animation possible?
 
Thanks for your kind words @RaspberryDJ !
I bought IgnitionX when it came out because it was supposed to make coding easier so that I could focus on creativity. That's not 100% how it went but that was the idea. One thing made easy by IgnitionX was the multi-playfield display. As you can see in the main game mode the screen is divided in 4 individual playfields each with its own rules and display. There are many useful classes like sprites, buttons and all. What I still don't like much about IgnitionX is that it's kind of an all or nothing thing : if you want to use those classes, you have to set up so-called "engines", "playfields", "layers" and so on. Pyro, meant for Mojo2, and also by Playniax, was more lightweight and more modular but I only used it once.
I can't see what you mean by flash-like animation?
 
Thanks for your kind words @RaspberryDJ !
I bought IgnitionX when it came out because it was supposed to make coding easier so that I could focus on creativity. That's not 100% how it went but that was the idea. One thing made easy by IgnitionX was the multi-playfield display. As you can see in the main game mode the screen is divided in 4 individual playfields each with its own rules and display. There are many useful classes like sprites, buttons and all. What I still don't like much about IgnitionX is that it's kind of an all or nothing thing : if you want to use those classes, you have to set up so-called "engines", "playfields", "layers" and so on. Pyro, meant for Mojo2, and also by Playniax, was more lightweight and more modular but I only used it once.

That's one thing I don't like about some frameworks, you can't have a few trees without the whole forrest. If you do a framework "monolithically" it really needs to do EVERYTHING and be BEST at *everything*. Few things are.

And not a lot of frameworks works together with other frameworks, libraries or basic commands.

I can't see what you mean by flash-like animation?

Maybe I misunderstood the graphics, I think I saw an animation before at some point and it looked like it was done using skeleton animation (vector animation), which Adobe Flash used (now Animate). I was thinking that you loaded models from some 3d or vector fileformat and then did skeleton animation using the framework?

It would be awesome to try to do that kind of animation using only things like tweening and the main graphic instructions of Cereberus-X.
 
I think there is used to be something like what you describe for MonkeyX/CerberusX

but here I'm using my own code. I have a class called "Puppet" which contains sprites for arms, legs, head, body and links them using HandleX/HandleY. Just like the rest I wouldn't share it in its current form but it's working anyway.
 
Unfortunately my usual publisher (https://www.orthoedition.com/) refused to publish the game because their current IT guy doesn't want to deal with other people's code anymore. I have always been able to fix problems by myself without having to ask anyone except you guys until now but that's their new policy...
I guess I have to go the indie route now but really don't feel like it... Raising funds for advertising, hiring someone to do some professional-looking packaging or even a website. No time and no money to spend on that for now...
 
I am sorry to hear that. Sometimes you wonder what others base they decisions on.
 
That's sad to hear. How has it been before and how many customers do you have?
It might be usefull to have a simple website for your customers to stay in touch with you. Once being perceived as vanished it could be hard to come back to live. The name of your product seems pretty unique, this should definitely help finding you with google there.
 
Thanks!
I contacted the publisher 10 years ago when I made my first reading game written in Blitzmax (just over a few weeks). They didn't sell too many applications at the time but were interested in mine and it sold a few thousand copies (knowing that there are approx 20000 speech therapists in France, so not too bad for such a niche market). My second game didn't sell much but since production cost was nearly 0€ it was OK. The nice guy who ran the company at the time retired a few years ago so some rules changed at the time. I was happy to work with that publisher since they were the oldest and biggest publisher in our field, people tend to trust them, and the people I dealt with were nice, but there are probably other ways to sell the game.

I'm not sure my first game is famous enough to build on its reputation alone, but it sure can help. I will contact a few other publishers next week (they usually sell books and board games but have people running their websites and might be interested in publishing apps anyway). If I don't get any satisfying answer I'll try to set up a website. My other stuff is now free so I might attract a few colleagues that way...

The colleagues who tried the game with their patients like it so far and it's something that didn't really exist before so it might interest people, I'd love to reach them.

I have no time to set up a website from scratch playing with html, css and so on these days, maybe there is a way to make something nice using Wordpress or something like that, what do you think?
 
I have no time to set up a website from scratch playing with html, css and so on these days, maybe there is a way to make something nice using Wordpress or something like that, what do you think?
Having a responsive website in mind, I would go with wordpress. I used it for my own websites and some friends of mine.
But be aware, that you can spend a lot of time trying to find a decent Theme and a Themebuilder. Especially, if you go the "no premium/paid tools" route. I did spend some time on the research, so maybe you can skip parts of it using my current "all free" combination:
- OceanWP - Theme for the underlying setup of your Website layout(They also have a usable Child-Theme to download)
- Elementor - Plugin Builder for creating the pages.
- Premium Addons for Elementor - Plugin with useful Widgets for Elementor Builder (They are only called "premium", but they are free)
- Contact Form 7 - Plugin for emails from within the website (If you want this kind of communikation)
-Honeypot for Contact Form 7 - Plugin for basic spam protection with Contact Form 7
- GDPR Cookie Compliance - for cookie notice
 
Still working on my game which is almost feature complete now.

Today with some help from Mike I added a gallery where the user [user profiles can be loaded and saved] can walk by the screengrabs he or she did while playing. More to come (being able to read the sentences while watching the pictures for example)

The good thing is that Mike came with a new LoadBMP function (so did I and I'm glad to get it working at last, but his code looks better of course)
 
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