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The Evolution of Stonerid

Stonerid Enitvare

When we started to develop Stonerid in Autumn 2011, we were quite unexperienced in game development. That’s probably why we chose platformer as our first game. Many people who start their adventure with game dev, often choose platformers, maybe just because it’s one of the easiest game genre to do. In this post I would like to show you how Stonerid evolved during the development process.

Recently, when I was looking for the first level in Stonerid, that we’ve ever created, I found something what you can see below.

Stonerid - first level ever

It looks quite different than levels in current version of the game, because it was only test level. Anyway, most of the key mechanisms worked correctly, so I started to design a few normal levels.

Stonerid - level

Stonerid - level

Stonerid - level

As you can see, they look rather good (however still significantly worse than the newest levels), much better than the previous one. We also add parallax background, which offered 3 independent layers to use. These levels were created at the beginning of 2012, a lot of time before the official release in december 2013. To design these levels I used a very cool editor, written by our programmer (my elder brother). By pressing one key I could switch to the level and immediately test it. It really speeded up the whole process. Take a look at the first version of our level editor.

Stonerid - first editor

This editor was constantly improved. It became a very powerfull tool, with a huge number of useful features. Below a screenshot from the current version.

Stonerid - editor

One of the first screen, which you can see after you run Stonerid, is a game menu, located in fiery cave. This one below, from the first version of Stoneird, doesn’t look so bad, but in final version we significantly improved it.

Stonerid - old menu

Stonerid - new menu

As you can see we also changed a main character’s design, for both forms. Now they are also much better animated.

Stonerid - main character

Atronast Mountain – main places in the game, also significantly changed. We completely rebuilded it and added more details. The Great Tree is now much greater and it’s covered with toxic substances.

Stonerid - old atronast mountain

Stonerid - new atronast mountain

Stonerid - old atronast mountain

Stonerid - new atronast mountain

During the development process we many times redesigned other important screens, like „options”, „loading” or „level summary” screen. It’s quite difficult to create something that looks good on the first attempt, that’s why we created so many versions.

Stonerid - old options screen

Stonerid - old options screen

Stonerid - new options screen

Stonerid - old summary

Stonerid - old summary

Stonerid - new summary

At the beginning „loading” screen was a just black with a small centered caption „Loading”. I know this screen is not important for most of the players, especially that loading times in Stonerid are relatively short. However, in my opinion that simple thing improves a little the game’s mood.

Stonerid - loading

We’ve worked on Stonerid for about 2 years, it’s quite long period of time. Why it took so much time? One of the reason are parallel worlds. The first version was a just simple platformer without that feature. But after half year of development we decided, that it’s not enough if we want to get players attention. That’s why we implemented parallel worlds. Because of that, all levels required much more time to create and were more difficult to design.

When I look at these screenshots today I wonder how come we made Stonerid. We didn’t make any „normal” game before, and so many obstacles appeared on our way. Main goal was to get on Steam and we also did it. I know that Stonerid was for almost 7 months on Greenlight, it’s quite long, but who cares about it now.

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How to use a gamepad other than Xbox 360 controller?

Stonerid controller

In default XNA Game Studio technology supports only X360 controller. It’s definitely a great gamepad, but what if somebody doesn’t have it and a game (e.g. Stonerid) doesn’t support other gamepads?
Normally I prefer keyboard than gamepad, but many people like to use them in platform games. In this short tutorial I will show you how to use other controllers (I used Logitech RumblePad 2) in Stonerid.

1. First visit this link: this link and download “x360ce vibmod 3.1.4.1.zip” file.

2. Unzip downloaded file.

3. Open “Device Manager” in your Windows. How to get into Windows device manager? – Visit this tutorial.

4. Make sure that your gamepad is connected to a PC. Find it on the list and open its properties.

Gamepad properties

5. Go to “Details” tab and select “Hardware Ids”.

6. Find your Vid and Pid numbers. My Vid: 046d, Pid: c218.

Gamepad properties

7. Edit “x360ce.ini” file, which you downloaded earlier and type there your Vid and Pid.

vid_pid

8. Run “XInputTest.exe” to see if every button works correctly. If you are not happy with default settings you can edit “x360ce.ini” to make some updates.

9. Go to the folder where you installed Steam. Then go to steamapps -> common -> Stonerid and paste there “xinput1_3.dll” and “x360ce.ini” files.

10. Your gamepad is ready to use, run the game.

I tested it on Win XP and Win 7,and I didn’t encounter any problems. And one more thing, don’t unplug the controller during the game because it can completely freeze it. If you have any questions regarding this post, don’t hesitate to contact us, I’ll try to help.

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