Project of the Month: June 2010The Midnaphone
Forum Topic |
Site PageDeveloper:
Goodnight
Language: Game Maker 7.0 pro
First Posted: June 2nd, 2010
Last Update: June 16th, 2010Interview:1. What made you start this project?
Just being me, I guess. The Midnaphone is a combination of lots of things I enjoy. Silly game-toys, sound production, making little apps with no real purpose other than a programming exercise to impress people with... that's about all it is. I think the idea came to me when I was recording Midna's voices for my .wav collection and wondering what people might use them for.
2. Who do you see using this program and how?
Honestly I don't expect it to be very popular. Even if I had made it 3 years earlier when Twilight Princess was still fairly new, it's kind of a useless application. I posted it on a forum dedicated to all things Midna and everyone seemed to love it, but still, there weren't many responses and people mostly used it as an annoyance tool, or just because it "sounds cute".
The Midnaphone could easily be converted into an engine that others could use in their own fan-games, just for the speech aspect. I might even be able to support custom sounds. If there's enough interest in that idea then I'd gladly make it happen.
3. How long did the project take for you, with the graphics, sounds and coding?
It's hard to say exactly, because there were things going on in my life that caused some major delays in the project. I can tell you the coding took the least time, probably only a couple days to learn the basics of the .wav format and get my loops working to read/write files, then a few more days to program the interface. That's right, the interface took longer than the file-creation code. There was a long break in between writing those two portions but I'm guessing it would have taken about 10 casual days from start to finish.
The sounds don't really count toward the total time because I already had all of them before starting, and the graphics were developed hand-in-hand with the interface. Paint a little, code a little, it's tireless fun.
4. The visuals look stunning. How did you decide on those and did it require you any special skills to create them?
The idea was to have a small, simple application, so I knew I wanted Midna somewhere on there as well as some menu buttons. Replicating the Wii-Remote HUD from Twilight Princess came to mind very early on, and then I figured, why not make it into a little scene straight from the game? Nearly all of the graphics were ripped from one place or another so I can't take much credit for them, besides making the necessary edits. In the end I think I may have gone a bit overboard in recreating that T.P. look for such a simple little project. In any case, it took me a while to decide whether to redraw the HUD from scratch or try to "rip" the graphics, and I tried a bit of each before coming to the conclusion that my graphical skills weren't quite good enough.
Those graphics came from playing T.P. on an emulator set to dump textures, so they were easy to grab. The problem was, all of the pieces were in different sizes. Even the transparency masks were sized differently than their corresponding buttons. I had to carefully resize and re-align everything, sometimes zooming in and touching them up by the pixel.
The game's font was dumped to 4 nice image sheets that just needed to be cut up, but I also had to measure the width of each character (and how much space should follow before the next character) and feed all those numbers into the text engine. Originally I planned to use two fonts, but doing just one took more than enough time.
I wanted a nice, foresty, bloom-lit scene for the background. That was also in mind from early on - just an idea that never got replaced with anything better. Taking screenshots from Twilight Princess was proving difficult, so I remembered the Hyrule Field overlook from the official Twilight Princess website. Just used a Flash decompiler, realigned and cropped it a bit, and voilà .
Midna's animations also came from that Flash site. Unfortunately she was a motion-JPEG that dumped as individual frames, so I ended up with a very compressed look with none of the actual filesize reduction. Just for her floating, I used a only a third of her original animation (a portion that looped as perfectly as possible - you can still see a slight jump in her hair and hands at one point) and then thinned out the number of frames to another third. Then a bit of smoothing and dithering to help clear up the compression artifacts, topped off with some moving/stretching/vanishing effects done in realtime by Game Maker. So she's only got a ninth of her original animation and it still looks pretty good. That's the kind of size/quality trade-off I think you need to experiment with as an amateur developer.
5. Was it a lot of work to collect all the needed sound effects?
Yes and no. The recording was easy because I connected my Wii's audio cables right into my PC, so it was quick and nearly perfect-sounding. And I found a couple places in Twilight Princess where Midna speaks without any music or background noise, so I just talked to her over and over, recording everything. Cutting and splicing sounds, I'm experienced with. The difficult part was having to make LOTS of recordings to make sure I got every voice sample, especially since the text-box sound effects overlapped with some of the voices.
5. If people like the sounds and wish to use them themselves, where could they find them?
You know the answer to this. I know you know it. So thanks for the cheap plug! My alter ago HelpTheWretched has a collection at
http://noproblo.dayjo.org/ZeldaSounds/ with over 4,500 sounds and growing. Go nuts with 'em.
6. Seeing as how you are one of few creators to finish a project completely, is there any advise you can give people just starting?
One thing I can never stress enough: be realistic about your own abilities. If you've got an itch to start a game project, do you really know how to do the things you want to do? If not, do you at least have knowledge of your design tools to be able to figure it out? I don't mean that to be discouraging, but the history of aborted Legend of Zelda projects speaks for its self.
If you're a relative beginner at programming, I think you'll be much more likely to complete something - and improve your skills in the process - by thinking up a simpler mini-game or spin-off project. It may not be grandiose in the end but I think that if you have a solid idea that seems fun and feasible, you'll even get more people interested and appreciating what you're doing.
7. Are there any new projects you are working on currently?
Nope, only old projects that I'm not working on. But knowing me, the next thing I design will probably be something like a pinball layout, or an AMV, or a board game. Who knows? Not I.
Anyone who's been around ZFGC a long time knows I've dropped a lot of examples and engines on the old forums, but I haven't been very involved since the latest move and haven't re-submitted them to the new database. Some of them have become really popular, like the Link Movement script - It's embedded in so many game engines that it wouldn't be fair to redesign it now - and a bunch of the others barely got used by anyone. Maybe I should get my stuff together and repackage those things, what do you think?
I also had a Zelda fan-game demo that I released about 4 years ago and haven't work on ever since. Go to
http://noproblo.dayjo.org/ZTS/ if you want to give it a try. I don't feel bad about "giving up" on that project because what's there is a fully-playable game (minus some of the levels and characters I had planned), and also something out of the ordinary and pretty fun to play with a friend. To be honest that's more than most demos ever accomplish, so I was content to put it away until there was a push of interest to get me working on it again, but that never really happened. Even though the response was great, I guess there wasn't much "market" for a 2-player-only game. But if people still try it out and enjoy it for what it is, I'll be happy with that!
- still not finished though)
