Hey Guys, I've created a very rough demo of this game that I plan to have finished next month. It's a vertical space shooter that will put you in the mind of Space Invaders and Galaga, but you'll have bosses at the end of the stages and you'll be able to upgrade and add weapons. The options screen nor the upgrade store isn't on this demo, but you can upgrade your regular bullet 4 levels, upgrade the number of bullets, add side bullets and homing bullets /w level increase, buy different power shields, bombs, helper ships, and upgrade your speed of the ship. Each stage will have 4 waves of attacks, after each attack you scroll up to the next one until you get to the boss. All the enemies won't move Space Invaders style either, as you advance the enemies, depending on the planet will have their own movements. Some stages will have hidden powerup items that give you certain upgrades as well. In the first stage, there's a hidden item that gives you triple shot. It's a Windows build only right now, but i'll have a Mac and Linux version next month. Here are screenshots: http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/0.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/1.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/11.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/12.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/13.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/14.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/15.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/16.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/17.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/18.gif http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/shots/19.gif Here's the zip file: http://www.unitedmindsgames.com/revised_demo.zip It's over 13MB, which is sort of large for just the first stage, but I'll be doing some compression to get that size down. What do you think? Also, when posting your comments, Is it possible to also state what FPS you got for the story screen and stage, GFX card(if known), and processor and speed? That would be awesome if you could, I want to know if it's worth going back recode certain things as fixed or stick with floats. If the majority have modern computers, then I'll just stick with what I have. I have the FPS set to 60, so it shouldn't go any higher than that. Here are the controls: Move Left/Right Shoot Space Bar Pause P Exit Pause, then exit To go through dialog - Space Bar Whatever you say about this game will only help me. So, please be truthful in your comments. I can take anything as it's still in it's development stage. I'm actually recoding the timing loop so that the game won't be affected on slower computers. Thanks guys!!! --EDIT sorry about that. Meant to linkify these links. I keep forgetting that you have to manually do that. [Edited by - kaeumgprogrammer on June 25, 2006 10:26:19 PM]

Looks good :)

hmmm. your basic concept doesn't seem to be that different from mine (medevilenemy.f2o.org, products section)... Interesting to see how many of us come up with simmilar ideas. Anyway, looks good. What I dont understand is how it could possibly be 13MB for a full install. Mine is hardly a fraction of that and I have 6 levels finished so far (complete with my amazingly pathetic 6 script files per level not to mention the various textures and horrifically Low-poly OBJ models).

well med,

that's what I'm trying to figure out myself. I have like 60 different images right now, 10 sfx files, and 8 bgm files so far. I've tried compressing them, but I don't know what else I can do to keep that size down.

If you download it, you'll understand more of why there are so many pics. It has a menu, story screen, character select screen, and stage.

--edit
Hey med,

I just played your game and yet it is similar, it's a lot different as well. I mean for the first stage, the background alone was 12 smaller images. And in mine , there's vertical scrolling, a boss, dialog, and you'll be able to view the change in appearance in the upgrade. I guess that's why yours is smaller than mine. Do you have any suggestions?

[Edited by - kaeumgprogrammer on June 26, 2006 8:21:03 AM]

Quote:Original post by Simian Man
Very nice. I love the polished look your game has; it's very impressive.

There are a few things though. On this screenshot, "there" should be "their". A small thing, but it annoys people like me [smile].

Also at one point, I got a segfault. Using a debugger, it seems that a function in FMOD.dll was trying to access a NULL pointer. I'd double check that none of your sound/music pointers were played if they could be NULL

Again great job. It looked great and ran smoothly.

HAHA! Yeah, I noticed that and I've changed it now. I had meant to change it before I posted the demo, but I ended up forgetting.. Yeah, my wife was the FIRST one to say something! LOL. Thanks for your input on this, and I think i know which pointer to look at first.

What debugger do you use because I'm looking for a nice debugger as well instead of using MSVC's version.

1. The gameplay is a solid space invaders clone.
   
2. Maybe include more dynamism, such as waves moving in like in galaga, instead of just horizontal movement.
   
3. Maybe more variety in enemy shots (graphics and movement)?
   
4. Maybe more variety in enemy behavior (rather than simple size/speed/rate-of-fire changes) ?
   
5. I don't generally like non-manic shooters, but this one seems correct, in particular the movement of the player ship is well done.
   
6. The game crashed when I opened up the options.
   
7. The ESCAPE key is for quitting!!
   
8. Allow the use of the keyboard in the menus.
   
9. What is the difference between the two ships?
   
10. You might want to work your explosions a bit, they aren't "clean" yet (for instance, additive blending would be a great first step, as would be a bit more dynamism, like screen shaking, light beams beaming or particles and scrap bits flying).
    
11. The timeless tradition is to have the points value "fly" out of the destroyed enemy.
    

Darklaga is a whopping 8Mb for 16 levels, including briefing screens, backgrounds, four soundtracks and all the sound effects. Mostly, we realized that most things did not need to be stored as full-screen-size images or full-length music, but rather be built out of smaller pieces or riffs.

Quote:

1. The gameplay is a solid space invaders clone.
   
2. Maybe include more dynamism, such as waves moving in like in galaga, instead of just horizontal movement.
   
3. Maybe more variety in enemy shots (graphics and movement)?
   
4. Maybe more variety in enemy behavior (rather than simple size/speed/rate-of-fire changes) ?
   

Oh yeah, that's what I meant to convey when I said there would be changes in the enemies. Yeah, the enemies movements and such (from Stage 3 on) will be more like galaga with more of a kick to it.

Quote:
I don't generally like non-manic shooters, but this one seems correct, in particular the movement of the player ship is well done.

Thanks!!

Quote:
The game crashed when I opened up the options.

Yeah, i thought I posted that the option screen wasn't in this yet, but I guess I could've just made sure that the game stayed when someone tried to click on it. I'll change that.

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The ESCAPE key is for quitting!!

Changed.

Quote:
Allow the use of the keyboard in the menus.

You know. I was thinking about that myself. I did a survey on indiegamers.com to see what the thought I should do, and lot of people suprisingly said mouse. So I went with that. But I like the idea of using the keyboard better in my opinion. So I'm going to redo that survey.

Quote:
What is the difference between the two ships?

Well, Kim's bullet's are different and will have different look than Adam's as they power up. Her shield's different as well. I was going to have her helper different, but the artist couldn't continue.

Quote:
You might want to work your explosions a bit, they aren't "clean" yet (for instance, additive blending would be a great first step, as would be a bit more dynamism, like screen shaking, light beams beaming or particles and scrap bits flying).

Thanks!!!! I had planned on including shaking in my explosions and COMPLETELY forgot about it! Thanks for reminding me! I can use alpha blending as well, but I don't want to use too much because I want people that have lower grade (4MB to 8MB) gfx cards to be able to play the game as well. I'll test it out to see how it works, though.

Quote:
The timeless tradition is to have the points value "fly" out of the destroyed enemy.

Oh, I getcha! I can do that no problem!! Do you think that "Upgrade!!" font's good enough?

Darklaga looks awesome!! I wish I had a Pocket PC! :)

I do have a question for you. Does your games also have bosses as well? See, some of my stages will using the same background pics as the first and some will be different altogether with smaller pics.

Did you code you nebulas or are those a drawn onto a pic and then rendered?

Quote:You know. I was thinking about that myself. I did a survey on indiegamers.com to see what the thought I should do, and lot of people suprisingly said mouse. So I went with that. But I like the idea of using the keyboard better in my opinion. So I'm going to redo that survey.

Why not both?

Quote:
Well, Kim's bullet's are different and will have different look than Adam's as they power up. Her shield's different as well. I was going to have her helper different, but the artist couldn't continue.

What I meant was: display on the ship selection screen the differences (might be as simple as showing the bullets and shields).

Quote:
Thanks!!!! I had planned on including shaking in my explosions and COMPLETELY forgot about it! Thanks for reminding me! I can use alpha blending as well, but I don't want to use too much because I want people that have lower grade (4MB to 8MB) gfx cards to be able to play the game as well. I'll test it out to see how it works, though.

Additive blending is extremely cheap (as cheap as drawing without the alpha channel, since you don't use the alpha channel). And it has nothing to do with the gfx card grade since it's one of the simplest things around. By the way, Darklaga explosions are additive-blended and PocketPCs don't even HAVE a graphics card.

On the other hand, 4MB or 8MB card will get a large performance hit if the textures used weigh more than 4MB (which, in your case, might happen easily) as they will be sent through AGP every so often.

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Oh, I getcha! I can do that no problem!! Do you think that "Upgrade!!" font's good enough?

Yep, looks cool.

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Darklaga looks awesome!! I wish I had a Pocket PC! :)

I do have a question for you. Does your games also have bosses as well? See, some of my stages will using the same background pics as the first and some will be different altogether with smaller pics.

Did you code you nebulas or are those a drawn onto a pic and then rendered?

Thanks. The game has 3 bosses (you can see all three of them on the preview video, only a 6 Mb download) most of which are snake-y, the third has a blending-based effect to make it look like its tail is in the shadows.

The nebula is a single 240x320 pic used in all levels with a background, with a different planet in the top left corner every time.