Finished game feedback
Woot! I got through 18 levels in clasic mode by random blasting... i guess speed beats strategy... =)
Very nice...
Very nice...
I have to agree with Madster on some of his ideas, naming (although I stil like my Pill Poppers), a mini double helix in some of the 'blobs' would be a good idea for making them a special form of unit as you asked qeustions on. Have them mutate (change color from time to time increasing the difficulty.
And some more ideas on different special blocks/blobs:
*Stealth virus - a nuetral color blob (say gray) that is an unknown strain (to the user only not the AI), that can only be destroyed by hitting it with the correct antivirus or those super pills. (Ex: player sees the boob as grey, when they hit it with a purple pill... nothing, a green pill... mothing, and finally a red pill... BLAMO! destroyed as the AI knew of it as a red virus but was rendered grey and unknown to the user - stealth.
*My prevoius suggestion on the biohazard blob that would infect all surronding blobs to match color, would essentially make less difficult.
*As this in in space - The black hole, this would resemble a blob, but after a certain delay would suck in all immediatly surronding blobs, pulling in new bolbs from outside the rendering area, one in each of the 8 directions. Would make harder in some cases, more difficult in others, but would add a twist. This would be a stationary piece such as the gravity fields, and would probally be alot more difficult to impliment given the way teh current engine work.
Or you can just have this as a tile that you can shoot blobs and/or pills into an POOF! they just disappear.
*Retrovirus - This may only work in the regular modes not the mission. A blob would infect one adjacent blob, changing its color, then the newly changed blob would in turn infect one random adjacent blob changing its color, but once the virus had moved to a new blob you can either have it remain a constant color or keep changing its color after a certain period of time. And finally what I was going to have this blob/virus originally do (retrovirus) is if the adjacent blob it were to infect is a pill that is on the board, it would change the pill to a blob of that color (you could then have it either stop its run as a retrovirus here as it has compleded in destroying an antivirus, or continue on its merry way spreading chaos.
Lasers - You have the horizontal and verticle lasers, what about diagnals? Also you could add auto fire lasers (horizontal only) that when placed would fire 1 line across only if there is a blob (or pill) (or when a bolb or pill is added in another column) on the same row as it.
Ex: (o=blob, p=pill, A=Auto laser, _ = just used to try and format it correctly)
oopoooo______________________oopoooo
poooooo______________________poooooo
A____________________________A____o_
(left)nothing would happen
(right)As soon as this o is placed the laser would fire
and A woud remain there desrtoying the newly placed o, laser could
disappear after one shot or have them have a few shots indicated by a small number in one of the corners. Again, probably not that easy to impliment, but just trying to give some ideas.
*Repulsion beam - this will lead into the area of another special weapon, in addition to the shooting (another bar with different rate of increase than weapon?) that would cause the board to retract one row.
*Homing AntiVirus - A new pill that would be able to permiate through all rows in a single column to seek out the first bolb of ists color and destroy it (and those chained to it of course), if no colol blobs in that column match it would be placed at the very top causing all those below it to drop down 1 space. You would also get to come up with more grafx and sound effects as the pill would permiate the membranes of the blobs it would need to travel through. You would also have to make this pill stand out from the normal color pills but still have the color the same, with a simple ensignia in it.
Ah hell, well I'm getting sleepy, medication kickin' in. Hope I gave you some more ideas. And again, great job Chronos, you got me looking into Lua (finally, I've been thinking of learning it and maybe now I'll finally get around to it.
Peace. Keep it up.
And some more ideas on different special blocks/blobs:
*Stealth virus - a nuetral color blob (say gray) that is an unknown strain (to the user only not the AI), that can only be destroyed by hitting it with the correct antivirus or those super pills. (Ex: player sees the boob as grey, when they hit it with a purple pill... nothing, a green pill... mothing, and finally a red pill... BLAMO! destroyed as the AI knew of it as a red virus but was rendered grey and unknown to the user - stealth.
*My prevoius suggestion on the biohazard blob that would infect all surronding blobs to match color, would essentially make less difficult.
*As this in in space - The black hole, this would resemble a blob, but after a certain delay would suck in all immediatly surronding blobs, pulling in new bolbs from outside the rendering area, one in each of the 8 directions. Would make harder in some cases, more difficult in others, but would add a twist. This would be a stationary piece such as the gravity fields, and would probally be alot more difficult to impliment given the way teh current engine work.
Or you can just have this as a tile that you can shoot blobs and/or pills into an POOF! they just disappear.
*Retrovirus - This may only work in the regular modes not the mission. A blob would infect one adjacent blob, changing its color, then the newly changed blob would in turn infect one random adjacent blob changing its color, but once the virus had moved to a new blob you can either have it remain a constant color or keep changing its color after a certain period of time. And finally what I was going to have this blob/virus originally do (retrovirus) is if the adjacent blob it were to infect is a pill that is on the board, it would change the pill to a blob of that color (you could then have it either stop its run as a retrovirus here as it has compleded in destroying an antivirus, or continue on its merry way spreading chaos.
Lasers - You have the horizontal and verticle lasers, what about diagnals? Also you could add auto fire lasers (horizontal only) that when placed would fire 1 line across only if there is a blob (or pill) (or when a bolb or pill is added in another column) on the same row as it.
Ex: (o=blob, p=pill, A=Auto laser, _ = just used to try and format it correctly)
oopoooo______________________oopoooo
poooooo______________________poooooo
A____________________________A____o_
(left)nothing would happen
(right)As soon as this o is placed the laser would fire
and A woud remain there desrtoying the newly placed o, laser could
disappear after one shot or have them have a few shots indicated by a small number in one of the corners. Again, probably not that easy to impliment, but just trying to give some ideas.
*Repulsion beam - this will lead into the area of another special weapon, in addition to the shooting (another bar with different rate of increase than weapon?) that would cause the board to retract one row.
*Homing AntiVirus - A new pill that would be able to permiate through all rows in a single column to seek out the first bolb of ists color and destroy it (and those chained to it of course), if no colol blobs in that column match it would be placed at the very top causing all those below it to drop down 1 space. You would also get to come up with more grafx and sound effects as the pill would permiate the membranes of the blobs it would need to travel through. You would also have to make this pill stand out from the normal color pills but still have the color the same, with a simple ensignia in it.
Ah hell, well I'm getting sleepy, medication kickin' in. Hope I gave you some more ideas. And again, great job Chronos, you got me looking into Lua (finally, I've been thinking of learning it and maybe now I'll finally get around to it.
Peace. Keep it up.
Just to say I loved it too.
Simple, playable, addictive, polished. All good qualities. Shows you don't have to make Doom4 to impress people, and should help encourage newbs like me who haven't written their first game yet.
Nice GUI as well.
Worked fine on my machine, although it should - P4 2.8 with 9800 Pro and 512 RAM.
Simple, playable, addictive, polished. All good qualities. Shows you don't have to make Doom4 to impress people, and should help encourage newbs like me who haven't written their first game yet.
Nice GUI as well.
Worked fine on my machine, although it should - P4 2.8 with 9800 Pro and 512 RAM.
Quote:Original post by Seriema How do you feel this has been better than using C++ for setting all those stuff?
The flexibility of LUA's tables combined without having to recompile everytime you make a change has made the development process go much much faster. Since LUA is a scripting language you can do some other cool things like print out code and then execute it immediately afterwards. It also lets the game be editable without providing all of the code. Because you can control from C++ which functions LUA can and can't use, you basically also have an easy way to restrict the scripting code to only be able to modify files in the game directory.
-Amitt
your game is great. The multiple combo effect feels so great!
Congratulations, It's obvious you know what you're doing here. Keep it up!
Congratulations, It's obvious you know what you're doing here. Keep it up!
Looks fantastic! I really appreciate the polished GUI and solid game mechanics...its clear you spent some time getting the subtle things right that makes a game fun!
I'm developing an engine with a very similar approach...native code for graphics/sound/engine functionality, but Lua scripting to drive logic. It's still early, but one of the potential problems I foresee is difficulty in debugging Lua code in-game. You can't "step through" Lua code, but I know you can make the interpreter fail (somewhat) gracefully when there's an error. How tough have you found it to have so much of the game's functionality in Lua? When something isn't quite working right, what do you do? Litter the script with print statements? What do you edit it with? (Just a curiosity ;)
I'm developing an engine with a very similar approach...native code for graphics/sound/engine functionality, but Lua scripting to drive logic. It's still early, but one of the potential problems I foresee is difficulty in debugging Lua code in-game. You can't "step through" Lua code, but I know you can make the interpreter fail (somewhat) gracefully when there's an error. How tough have you found it to have so much of the game's functionality in Lua? When something isn't quite working right, what do you do? Litter the script with print statements? What do you edit it with? (Just a curiosity ;)
Chronos, thanx for your answers. That cleared up some things for me. I'd give you another rating++ if I could ;)
Quote:Original post by snowblind329
How tough have you found it to have so much of the game's functionality in Lua? When something isn't quite working right, what do you do? Litter the script with print statements? What do you edit it with? (Just a curiosity ;)
Well its true that its very hard to debug LUA script but the nice thing is that LUA provides all sorts of error handling functions that let you figure out where a problem is occuring.
Everytime there is a script error, I issue a fatal engine error(meaning I just shut everything down), then I use built in LUA functions to print out a call stack including line numbers and relevant pieces of info (like function names, file names, and the exact error that occured).
Obviously, the usefulness of print debugging is not to be underestimated. That has saved me hours of time before and is not a bad way to debug a script language.
I personally use Textpad with a LUA language highlighting plugin to edit script files. It has served me pretty well and I'm just used to it now. You can also edit LUA files in MSVC.net with a plugin or two. I can't give any specifics about that though. I like using a different program for engine code and game code, lets me switch back and forth and not get confused as to what exactly I'm editing.
-Amitt
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