After 3 months of doing nothing, I finally decided to dig an old project out of the grave and update it... so I did last week. It's called Extreme Guerrillas. Goto my website here to check it out. I'd appreciate feedback. Alex Edited by - Bigshot on 6/17/00 7:13:09 PM

Because he has the coconut monkey in it, PC Gamer''s mascot.

That''s pretty cool. Say are you using Direct3D or DirectDraw? I guess probably Direct3D cause you got that nice fade from menu screen to screen. Good work. You must have started your game proggramming experience much better than any other newbies I''ve seen, with an artist you could make some really cool things with that technology! Very neat in deed. Say do have any plans for a future game or are you going to improve this one more?
See ya,
Ben

The game is actually all DirectDraw. Doing fade-ins is a little bit more difficult than fade-outs, but I accomplished it by saving the palette from the next screen, then slowly increased all the color registers until they matched the new palette. I''m not sure how the pros do it, but that''s the way I figured it out. I could try making the game in Direct3D, but I don''t think 3D would save the bad graphics.

I don''t have any plans for future games at the moment. I''d like to learn 3D soon though. Until then I''ll probably try to optimize Guerrillas, get rid of a few bugs in it, and maybe add new features. I''m going to try to add TCP/IP support so you can play over the net or LAN, but it might not be done for a while cuz I need to learn Winsock and I''ll have to redesign parts of the game. But that will probably be the next major release. There''s a semi-major bug in this release I need to fix as well. If you make Coconut Monkey fight against Godzilla, sometimes Coconut Monkey will fall through the floor or the hits won''t register correctly. I''ll try to fix that soon. This is actually one of my first real games (besides BASIC games I did over 5 years ago). I started it last December, but it was in DOS back then. Then I bought Andre LaMothe''s Tricks book, learned some DirectX, and started to convert the game to Windows. It''s funny, the DOS version had more features than the DirectX version for a while. It had a parallax scrolling skyline (which I don''t have now) and the players taunted eachother (which I didn''t have until this release). One of the earlier DirectX versions had a really wide playing field and used mouse scrolling (like in Worms), but it made the game too hard, so I got rid of it. Other DirectX games I''ve worked on are Extreme Firemen (which is on my website). I made that in about 1 weekend- it''s pretty simple. My first DirectX game was Pong, which I did in 1 night by reverse engineering the source code to a Breakout game. And I was lead programmer on a Command & Conquer clone once, but the designers and artists were too flaky so I dropped it. All I had done was the tile engine and a minimap anyways. Doing pathfinding was a headache, and I never actually figured it out. Maybe I''ll pick up that project again by myself someday.

Alex

I just wanted to say I released a new version tonight, which should fix the Coconut Monkey bug, but who knows, it''s really late, it might just all be in my head. The new version also has a new feature (try playing Mr. T against Godzilla to find out). Please give me more feedback and look out for bugs!

Thanks,
Alex