Code a game competition Nov-Jan 2018 - Minimum £500 prize fund

[Steve Elliott]

Not yet mate.  Polymaniacs, I really need to get back to that game.  And I suggest others pick up a copy.  It's great fun and total chaos!

[STEVIE G]

Not yet mate.  Polymaniacs, I really need to get back to that game.  And I suggest others pick up a copy.  It's great fun and total chaos!

I played it again last week and got hooked going through all the challenges - some are pretty tough.  I love the chasing and avoiding games - must make a more focused game out of those elements some day.

[Derron]

Palette is still something to work on (somehow I sometimes get 18 instead of 16 colors...investigation ongoing ;-).





Still plenty of stuff missing (ladders/climbers, presents, enemys, shadows for units, animations...). But hey, rotation of the evil magma dwarves-tower is already working (no real 3D - of course).


bye
Ron

[Qube]

Looks good, Ron - Is this like a Nebulus type game?

[Derron]

Yepp, Toppler/Nebulus-like (which I actually never played - only had access to an KC85 in my youth and after GDR and BRD formed nowerdays Germany again I got access to fathers first (80)286 right in the same year. Means, no C64, no amiga, no amstrad,...).

Just think people here would like a more arcadey-approach (kick/shoot/... magma dwarves from the platforms...). Still fiddling to bring all together in an "OOP" way (units need to know about tiles, tiles need to know about units, all need to know about the tower and the screen2tower-coordinate calculation, tower needs to know about tiles ...).

Will have to create some proper "base classes" to keep it tidy. Source code will be promoted when it is worth to get read :-). So for now game will be FOSS as much as possible (so music is still on my TODO).

BTW interesting side fact: If you are member of the "GEMA" (company in Germany "representing" many musicians) you can no longer "public domain/cc0ing" your music without hassle. Everything is then "protected" by the GEMA. So pay attention if you hire a GEMA-listed artist for music when you want to FOSS everything of your project. Some require you to be member of the GEMA - so things aren't that easy.

bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

Todays update relates to gameplay and sound.
OK, so the sound and tracker routines are now being incorporated and so far so good.
What is nice is having the chipsynth open, tweaking a sound, saving and being able to test play it immediately with the synth still open.

Lives have now been added:


so if you hit anything nasty - you loose a life, but you also get pushed back hopefully saving you from certain death again.
Lots of little animations being added here with angel wings and other stuff to make it 'great fun' to get hurt


Gameplay itself still not quite worked out. but something along the lines of:
"kill the monsters, finish the level... Next !"

Now where did I leave that bomb?

[Derron]

"kill the monsters, finish the level... Next !"

That sucks, I planned to do something similar. Seems gamplay is back on the table for reconsideration then. Thanks, many thanks for copying my idea!

@ wings
animated wings? You know, we want sugar on all these nifty little decorating game elements.

bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

Static wings... NOOOOOO, everything is fully animated!

For todays pic it's 3 sprites:

top 2 are part of an animation cycle
bottom one is a 2x1 sprite, but I'm not saying where this is going to go... Yet!

Been adding timing stuff to the tracker so it can report back and also interrogate it. This way I can just set everything up with the tracker and music and it will all be perfectly timed.
One thought here, is to possibly add a new track to the tracker at some stage which could act as a trigger track. How you use it would of course be up to the end user...

[Derron]

Ohhh acid cave rain !!

Hope that umbrella also allows "slow falling" to avoid penalty when falling 2-3 floors more ;-)

@ tracker adjustments
If you want you could try to adjust game music to the pace of the game. So when time is running out, music plays faster and faster, if you come across a dangerous zone you can react to that too - etc.


bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

yep. tracker is fully programmable while playing

[iWasAdam]

So for todays update:

It's the first look at an enemy. In this case one that is timed with the tracker to fire fireballs at you...

This is the dev level so its kinda busy. but you can see the bubbles being spawned plus some very nasty steam - DONT walk into it!!!

So how is it done and what is the logic?
- Using the tracker I interrogate the current playhead (which goes from 0 to 31).
- when the playhead is > 26 change the master type to the one that waits and flashes
- when the playhead is 0, fire a fireball and change the monster type to one that is moving

[Derron]

Isn't this similar to add a "event" to certain tracker numbers - and then emit the event when the tracker number is played?
You even could do this with normal "time based"-timers but you of course loose ability in dynamic music then (eg. the music lets the enemy fire multiple shots in a row)
"tack tack tack tack..."


@ steam
Similar to the bubbles I would suggest a slight slowdown... it just looks a bit too fast (animation wise) _imho_


@ steam 2
You might consider that a "arrow down" turns the wheel to stop the steam (dunno if that was useful in the game then).

Hope you have a nice "ouch I burned my feet" animation when hitting the steam :-)


@ ladder
the latter hides the pipe - doesn't it?


Hope it compiles for linux/windows this time.


bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

windows no problem. all files are completely synchronised.

I've installed ubuntu (linux), but haven't yet had time to get monkey2 working on it...

[therevills]

Tanks are in!

[iWasAdam]

oooh purdy color skys...