Phoenotopia Remake - Blog Post 1

2024-08-30

Context

A while back, I worked on my (fan) re-make of the flash game Phoenotopia in Godot. Before reading further, I suggest you take a look at the original game on Newgrounds for some context, and the official remaster Phoenotopia Awakening.

I started the project in October of 2023, and worked on it slowly through to January of 2024. By that point, I had a working level import system thanks to the YATI Tiled Importer, an oddly-made, but somehow functioning ladder system, and boxes that could be pushed around.

Coming back to the project yesterday, I was unsure of what feature to work on next. I launched the flash game in ruffle, and started a new save to compare to my re-make. I realised what stood out to me the most was the lack of cutscenes. While I don’t think I’ll have NPC sprites for a while, it felt nice to work on cutscene dialogue as a starting point after having left the project for a year. This also un-intentionally helped me implement part of the story progression.

Finding a cutscene

To work on cutscenes, I obviously needed a cutscene which I could refer to. I chose the starting cutscene with Kiter, which shows as soon as you climb up the stairs.

I looked at the level in Tiled, and added the scene type as a trigger within my code. As any rectangles are imported by YATI as solid walls, I need a few tweaks to add a new trigger type. I first tell YATI that any object with the type scene should be imported as an Area2D - used as trigger zones in Godot. I then add the scene type to a list of trigger types, which I use when importing the level to attach logic to them.

Dialogue

I couldn’t find the “Gale! Over here!” phrase in any of the levels, instead the text for all the cutscenes was placed into a common AllScenes.as file. As Quells said in his blog post on Tumblr, the text was spread out all over the game. I kept this in mind as I was writing the re-make, and moved as much of the dialogue as I could out from the levels themselves, keeping them in the common translation file:

"CLEM_03_8","Clem Alex said he saw a shooting star crash into the nearby woods. _He rounded up all the kids and they left in a hurry. #Clem He's always rallying the kids and stirring up trouble.",
"CLEM_03_8_2","Clem You're looking for Alex and the kids? _They're playing in the woods right now. #Clem To reach the woods, exit the village and head East.",
"BERTIE_03_17","Bertie You need to leave town on an errand? #Bertie Sure. _Give the switch above a mighty thwack with any old stick you find and the gate will open.",
"BERTIE_03_17_2","Bertie You can't find a stick for the gate? #Bertie Try checking the warehouse on the East side of town. #Bertie There's always plenty of junk in there.",

I added the two lines KITER says in the cutscene to the translations file, and placed the theatrical logic into the global Cutscener script, replacing the previously lengthy lines with KITER_CUTSCENE1_1 and KITER_CUTSCENE1_2.

A few problems got in the way of seeing the cutscene, such as Gail being on the wrong layer, or the cutscene trigger being activated by the level itself, but these were quite easily fixed.

Cutscene commands

The cutscene commands were quite easy to make, splitting the string by spaces to separate the verb from the rest of the string: TALK KITTER_CUTSCENE1_1 -> TALK, KITTER_CUTSCENE1_1. Linking this to my dialogue system was quite straightforward, though I did need to wait for the phrases to finish before moving to the next part of the cutscene.

Phantom trigger

Funnily enough, the cutscene activated as soon as I went through the door, and did not wait until I climbed the ladder. The trigger was there, but it was for some other cutscene, and I couldn’t find it in the level editor.

Turns out, there was actually a trigger in the level, in the same spot where I was finding it in-game. A peculiar thing about Phoenotopia’s level layout, is that there are different layers of objects for different levels of story progress:

• GT 27 - just after prince saving
• GT 17_22
• Lisa Alex talk - find Thomas GT 15_16
• village post abduction GT 8
• Abduction - big meeting GT 7

The trigger I was looking for was located on the just after prince saving layer. In the original game, it obviously did not show this early in the game. If I wanted story progression and cutscenes, I needed to find how this was done.

Story progression filtering

As I looked at objects in the level, I saw many of them had game_start, game_end, and game_time properties. The game’s story progression is stored in the game_time variable as a number. I’ve called it story_progression in my code. It starts off at 0, and as you complete quests, or cutscenes, this number slowly increases. To show the game at different points in time, each object specifies the minimum and maximum story progression number.

The phantom trigger that kept showing up for example, had game_time set to 24, meaning that it will only show when the story progress is exactly on 24. No more, no less.

On the same layer, Alex has a game_start value of 25, and game_end value of 27, meaning he will be visible in that location during a story progress of 25, 26, and 27.

Writing these checks in my level loading script, I was able to hide a lot of objects that were not meant to be visible during the start of the game.

Interestingly, these checks are also applied to music and background elements, meaning I finally have the sunny background outside Panselo instead of the night sky which I had earlier.

First cutscene

With the phantom trigger taken care of, the first cutscene is now less or more functioning. Out of all the cutscene instructions, the only ones that I have written are the TALK and GAMETIME. TALK can show dialogue, and GAMETIME can update the story progression number. There are many more instructions that could be ported like the FILM, WAIT, MOVE, and PLAYANIM commands, but I’m happy with the progress I’ve made so far.

Here is a short recording of the current game.

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