The demo returns...

posted in Stompy's Gamedev Journal

Published February 20, 2006

In case you missed it.

First off, Thanks to all who played the demo. I would like to address some of the feedback I recieved:

Prinz Eugn - The game doesn't work because it is missing MSVCR71.dll.

I've included that file along with the game, so I don't know what the problem is.

Scet - Bullets appear invisible on the grey background.

I'll make sure to change the bullet colors to something more noticeable. I'm still struggling with the color scheme, so I'm always looking to fix mistakes like this.

nilkn - The framerate is slow.

I usually set the framerate of the game according to "what works" on my computer. For this game, I tried to put more effort into this by testing it on a few other computers. It seemed to work fine on those too. As you said, this has always been a problem in my games, and one I'm still looking to fix.

mikedoty - I see you've been playing around with the enemy scripts[grin].

ApochPiQ - Battleship flies over while fighting the boss.

This was actually a problem that I knew would happen from the moment I added the Battleships. I couldn't think of a way to fix it, so I left it in there to see if anyone would mind. I think I should fix this problem, though.

Once again, thanks to all those who played the demo. And if you haven't, please give it a try.

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0 likes 13 comments

Comments

mikedoty

Hey Stompy, I made an editor for your game. It's a little rough around the edges, but it works great. Here's 2 places I uploaded it to (in case one doesn't work for ya):

http://rapidshare.de/files/13742676/StompyEditor.rar.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=AISG8SY8

There's a readme in the rar that explains how it works. I also made a new level for the city world (e.g. level 1), it's very evil and thus very cool. ;) Since I can't have 2 city.txt files, the level itself is city.txt, and its script file is myScript.txt, so just rename it city.txt in the scripts folder. It has more than 128 enemies, lol!

One note on the level, though, is that (you'll understand when you try it) I really wish you could go back to the left now. (This after saying I thought not being able to would work well; I'd better make up my mind. ;))

February 20, 2006 04:00 PM

Stompy9999

Very cool! Thank you! I'll make sure to upload this to my webspace, and put the link up tomorrow.

Just out of curiosity, what was it made with? If it's okay with you, could I see the source code?

Thanks again.

February 20, 2006 04:52 PM

mikedoty

It's just a DirectDraw fullscreen app, nothing too fancy. Let me spend a few minutes cleaning up the code a little and adding a couple of comments, and later this evening probably I'll zip up a second version, or tomorrow.

Edit - Alright, I've put a new version online.

http://rapidshare.de/files/13750460/StompyEditor.rar.html
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=HOWG8KI9

I added the ability to move the sniper bots in-editor by middle-click-dragging, and fixed up the level I made accordingly.

February 20, 2006 05:15 PM

Trapper Zoid

So I take it from your new forum avatar that your Wacom tablet has arrived? [wink]

February 20, 2006 05:42 PM

Stompy9999

Thanks mikedoty, I'll download it now.

And yes, the tablet arrived[smile]

February 20, 2006 06:34 PM

DecipherOne

That level 2 boss is insane, every time I'd go to jump over him he'd jump, although it did get a little predictable if I just waited for him to move before I did. Great work, keep it up, I really don't have that much time to play games these days, but this game is short and fun, which is exactly what I need.

February 20, 2006 07:49 PM

Stompy9999

Thanks for trying the demo! I'm glad you like it, and I'm glad people are enjoying the game. Gives me alot of motiviation to keep working.

February 20, 2006 07:55 PM

mikedoty

I just came up with a great enemy idea (just a basic enemy). It's a parachuting gunman; it parachutes from the top-right in a down-left direction somewhat slowly (but not at a crawl), and it has a gun it shoots at you on the way (diagonally, like a sniper). You'd have to make it so that it didn't start moving / descending (from its starting point high on the screen) until the player scrolled to that point of the level.

February 20, 2006 08:34 PM

Ravuya

You need a pause button. I paused it to get my email, but it turned out to have just quit the game [grin]

The framerate seems fine for me on my AMD64 3000+ though I wasted like half my healthbar trying to jump on top of the low buildings.

A "dash" button (i.e. double tapping one of the arrow keys to run for a short period of time without being able to fire) would kind of break up the pace of the game and make it more fun just to move around.

I love the gunship on Level 2; but it's hard to tell when the enemies are actually hurt (perhaps you could swap it out for a "damaged" sprite, but that's more work!).

Your sprite art is great; it reminds me of what I do for my first draft of programmer art. If it weren't for GIMP filters and gradients, my games would all look like this too. [grin] Not like they look all that much better with all that technology.

I did beat that red robot with only using two lives (one falling in a hole before I got to him, and one because I had a sliver of health when he rammed me as soon as I showed up). I dig it. Excellent work. I hope you are re-using code from various projects and trying to build a little bit of a library of code fragments.

February 20, 2006 09:29 PM

Stompy9999

Yep, a I definetly need to add a pause feature. Probably tomorrow I could do that.

I like the sprite art too, even if it is a bit cheap. It looks cartoony, which is exactly what I want. Now that I have a graphics tablet, I'm going to add more hand drawn graphics, but I hope I can still achieve a cartoony feel.

Alot of the code for this game can be easily reused for other projects. In fact, the level and player code are reused from Blocky Man and Bob. I wrote a basic C++ framework over SDL for this project, which I will also be reusing for future projects.

Thanks for trying out the demo.

February 20, 2006 09:58 PM

VisualLR

Man, that was great, I setup the rail gun and held down the space bar while jumping continuously to create sine waves of doom!

I really liked it, the only thing I felt it was missing (and maybe it's there and I just missed it) is the ability to fire diagonally and up, so that I could kill some of those robots up in the very high windows.

I also died twice while trying to kill the red robot with the cool jet pack.

Great work!

Oh, and if you want to up the difficulty level, make those robots up in the windows switch sides when you've run past them, I think that would be cool =)

February 20, 2006 11:38 PM

mikedoty

I found a minor crash bug of some sort.

http://img352.imageshack.us/my.php?image=glitch5il.jpg

I played through the 2 levels, and after beating the 2nd level's boss, it went back to the title screen. I can't remember if it crashed when I hit enter or right when it went back to the title screen. Just wanted to make sure ya knew about it before it became anything major. ;)

February 21, 2006 01:40 PM

Stompy9999

That's odd.

I can't seem to reproduce the bug here, so hopefully it isn't anything too serious. Thanks for letting me know.

February 21, 2006 05:22 PM

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Stompy9999

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