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Game Boy Dev Insight - Too Many Actors II
🕑 Added 2024-08-06 17:56:27 +0000 UTCAs a followup to my previous post regarding some of the limitations I encountered while developing my first game for the Game Boy, I wanted to breakdown what is for sure the most complicated scene in The Mayor of Sanctuary. Surprisingly, it is not the collectibles menu... it is actually the fire scene with all of the cats.
As you can see, this scene is insanely complicated when you see it in GB Studio. There are quite a lot of actors being used to make the scene feel more dynamic and also to increase the graphic detail, since I usually max that out in most scenes as well. And that sea of orange are all of the necessary triggers to make all of the cats talkable.
So why did I need to do it this way? The main reason is because of that actor limitation. As a reminder - the Game Boy can only show ten actors on screen at one time. If you take a look at the top of the house, I am already using actors to increase the amount of graphic detail in the scene. So I am already pushing the limits with actors. The square actor that appears at the right of the house is actually my cats. All of them.
The triggers are made as intelligent as can possibly be (with some of their own limitations) to determine where you are standing and which direction you are looking to predict which cat you intend to speak to. The trigger will move the cat actor to the appropriate place and know which cat in particular you are interacting with to show their distinct dialogue.
As an added complication, the slash animation and sound from your wand is something that needs to be intelligently controlled throughout the game. Which means the game also needs to predict if you intend to slash something or if you intend to interact with something (withholding the slash animation and sound). Needless to say, this is SUPER difficult to manage.
As you can see, a scene that is seemingly pretty straight forward can actually take an insane amount of work to make it feel that way. And there are little things like this all over the world of Sanctuary to create what is hopefully a seamless experience for the player. The goal as a game creator is to make an experience you can feel immersed in and get emotionally invested in. And any little stupid technical issue can break that experience and make you start thinking about the creator's incompetency rather than their creativity. As someone who considers themself both a technician AND an artist, I always hope to create an experience as close to flawless as possible. There were a few areas of the game where the technical limitations of both the Game Boy and GB Studio 2 made it nearly impossible to be perfect. But I often came up with creative ways to hide the limitations so you never saw them.
Can you guess which area of the game might actually be worse than this and gave me the most headaches during development and beta testing?
