Forces Of Darkness (Halloween compo entry)

[BasicBoy]

Forces Of Darkness

Now with a full screen option!

A side-scroller/shoot-'em-up in which you must defeat waves of dark and terrifying forces. You must cast them back to hell with your high-energy plasma projectiles.

The bulk of the code was written from scratch in about a month, and the graphics, music, and gathering/processing of the sound effects took the best part of three weeks.

Download (v1.10) - Windows only (sorry!), and it won't work with Wine. See below for details of a possible future Linux, Mac OS-X, Android & Raspberry Pi port!

http://www.proggies.uk/progs/zip/fod.zip

The EXEs (launcher & main) are digitally signed and pre-scanned for malware, so download with confidence. You may still get a virus/malware warning until there have been enough downloads to establish its 'reputation' with the company that issues the code signing certificate.


Screenshots:






A possible port of FOD to Linux, Mac OS-X, Android & Raspberry Pi

To my amazement & pleasant surprise, work is underway that could lead to a crossplatform version of Forces Of Darkness. It's only at the stage of a demo so far, but the YouTube video linked-to below shows an early-stage FOD demo running on....     an ARM-based Raspberry Pi 3! 

A fair amount of optimisation will be necessary, but I think it's looking very promising so far.

My next game *will* be cross-platform, and will be frame rate independent (@ Steve Elliott  )


BasicBoy.
--
 

[Steve Elliott]

Great work 

[round157]

A possible port of FOD to Linux, Mac OS-X, Android & Raspberry Pi
--

Well done!   

Do you want to try to sell this nice game on these platforms in the future? Good decision.

Good luck!!!   

[BasicBoy]

Great work 

Thanks Steve, and thanks for voting for me. 


BasicBoy.
--

[BasicBoy]

A possible port of FOD to Linux, Mac OS-X, Android & Raspberry Pi
--

Do you want to try to sell this nice game on these platforms in the future? Good decision.

Probably not this one, no, but I think I might have a go at making a game that I could put on Google Play (not necessarily to sell though, unless it's really good). I think the standard will have to be very high indeed. There are so many polished, top-notch games out there.

I think my priority right now is to learn how to use Blender, having been inspired by Derron. 


BasicBoy.
--

[BasicBoy]

I didn't include a demo mode as standard with FOD because it's a bit buggy, but if you download this little data file (208 KB) and place it in Forces Of Darkness/FOD/Resources/Data then when you run the game (in full screen, otherwise it doesn't work properly!) you can press 'D' on the title page to launch into demo mode. It's actually me playing from beginning to end. 

http://www.proggies.uk/misc/demodata.dat


Requires FOD v1.10 in full screen mode, and the program should be run afresh before watching the demo (due to an elusive bug).


BasicBoy.
--
 

[round157]

A possible port of FOD to Linux, Mac OS-X, Android & Raspberry Pi
--

Do you want to try to sell this nice game on these platforms in the future? Good decision.

Probably not this one, no, but I think I might have a go at making a game that I could put on Google Play (not necessarily to sell though, unless it's really good). I think the standard will have to be very high indeed. There are so many polished, top-notch games out there.

I think my priority right now is to learn how to use Blender, having been inspired by Derron. 


BasicBoy.
--

oh. ok...I see. Anyway, good luck! I hope that your next game will be very successful in Google Play in the near future!
 
Actually, we are curious and have some questions in this following thread:
https://www.syntaxbomb.com/index.php/topic,3608.0.html

If you have time, please give some comments and review. Thanks. Thanks a lot!
 

[BasicBoy]

I hope SB members don't mind if I reflect for a moment on what I think I got wrong with 'Forces Of Darkness'? 

Mistakes (in no particular order of significance):

• Autofire should have been permanent and 'as standard'. I'm pretty sure that I developed some temporary but mild RSI (Repetitive Strain Injury) hammering away at the Ctrl key for hours on end. It actually affected/slowed some of the testing as I was nearing the deadline.
• Not being frame rate independent. A little more care from the beginning would've prevented this. I had assumed that most people who will play the game have 60Hz displays - not a great assumption to make in this day & age. As an inevitable result, the game runs too fast on screens with e.g. 75 Hz refresh rates.
• Not enough interesting weaponry/powerups rather than just those monotonous bluish-white 'plasma projectiles'.
• Not enough nasties! I had intended to include the following: black cats (well, it was Halloween after all); centipedes (essentially multiple, smaller versions of the snake), a big jumping spider with hairy legs, Evil Mummies, newts and frogs.  I think I was growing fatigued having already spent so many hours drawing graphics.
• Not producing anti-aliasing alpha masks for the sprites. This would not have taken much time, and would have improved the appearance of the plotted sprites. However, as I think I have said previously, with the sprites being software-rendered rather than GPU-accelerated, the alpha blending involved could have been an issue on slower machines.
• No music for the Title Page. I did actually start making a tune (with Renoise), but the atmosphere was wrong (more sombre than spooky!). So I excluded it. Also, it would have added another 3 MB to the already rather bloated download size.
• Background images didn't need to occupy so much RAM and disk space. One section of 'far background' looks pretty much the same as the next, so I could have generated maybe 4 or 5 screens' worth of imagery, and just repeated it after that. I don't think anyone would've noticed the repetition unless they were looking hard enough.
• The mid-distance background (the one with the sort of intestine-like imagery) is mostly empty, but occupies a lot RAM & disk space. It was meant to be populated with trees, walls, fences, Gothic/spooky castles, and so on. But time (and perhaps a touch of laziness?) was the enemy, as usual.
• It would have been nice to have, say, 4 short-ish levels rather than just one, long (10-minute) level with an endgame boss.

Anyway, onto the next project 



BasicBoy.
--









 

[Steve Elliott]

You forgot the most important.  That your game will run at the same speed on all systems and monitor refresh rates lol.   

[BasicBoy]

You forgot the most important.  That your game will run at the same speed on all systems and monitor refresh rates lol.   

Yes, very true - I'll include that one in the list

New project will use delta time for sure. No excuses this time.


BasicBoy.
--

[Steve Elliott]

I look forward to your next project 

[round157]

I hope SB members don't mind if I reflect for a moment on what I think I got wrong with 'Forces Of Darkness'? 


--

There will be other competitions in the future and your games will be more fantastic without these mistakes. Good luck!