Code a game competition - Jan 30th - Apr 10th 2018 - £500 worth of prizes \o/

[Qube]

Wasn't going to post anything but in the spirit of sharing, here's an early video of my dudes ( who have no animation yet ) walking around a section of the highly unfinished map. Still lots

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uE3-mqzoP6k

[Derron]

Looks nice. Avatars/Person-Pictures rendered on your own? Somehow I doubt that as the perspective of them is different. But if so: Poser, MakeHuman, ... ?


I think you will enjoy adding the "splattering blood" - as these top-down-shooter games always have it. And as therevills raised the bar for us pixel-gorehounds you will need to add a lot of ugly smelling innards :-)


Ah and do not forget: most of us are male, so use the top down view to give us nice details of "siggy".




bye
Ron

[Qube]

Looks nice. Avatars/Person-Pictures rendered on your own? Somehow I doubt that as the perspective of them is different. But if so: Poser, MakeHuman, ... ?

I didn't want them all at the same angle / pose because not everyone poses the same way. They were done in Daz3D.

I think you will enjoy adding the "splattering blood" - as these top-down-shooter games always have it.

Yup, lots of over the top explosions and death. But there is also puzzle elements, it's not just a shooter. You will have to split the team up and work alone for parts.

Ah and do not forget: most of us are male, so use the top down view to give us nice details of "siggy".

Lol, no - no sexualised imagery will be gracing my games

[Steve Elliott]

Great atmosphere, as per the film.  Good sound and it's shaping up very nicely.

How did you do the lighting, in a 2d game?

[Yue]

They're right, I'm not going to participate, I'll continue at my own pace, it's only been two months and I have 10 months left to play the game, at least something simple with what I have.  About the vehicle I'm thinking about taking it from the free NASA models. 

[Qube]

Good sound and it's shaping up very nicely.

Yup, I'm aiming to do more in the sound department with this game

How did you do the lighting, in a 2d game?

Not quite sure which part you are referring to but overall there is no lighting at all . To go through the generals :

1.. The wall shading is part of the map tiles on layer 3. A simple black image with alpha. The map has three layers. Layer 1 is the main map. Layer 2 is the floor ( plus all floor based action ) and Layer 3 is the collectables / shading / lighting and pickup items. The map is rendered layer 2 first, then layer 1 and layer 3 on top. Then layer 3 is parsed again above all other images for additional effects like the spinning hazard lights and static lights.

2.. The spinning and static lights are just simple alpha gradients in blend mode.

3.. The overall fade out of the map is a circle gradient from 100% opaque to solid black, double scaled and centred on the player(s).

This gives a good overall dark atmosphere to the game. It looks better than the YouTube video and I'm happy overall with how it looks.

Still heaps of work to do yet but I'm happy with the basic look of the game at this early stage. I did look into various shaders but in the end the good old fashioned methods worked better for the base effect I wanted. I did have the option of using shaders to cast shadows around objects on the floor but it didn't add anything for the extra work it would need to do the effect justice.

Tonnes of work to do yet but it's starting to take shape

[STEVIE G]

Good sound and it's shaping up very nicely.

Yup, I'm aiming to do more in the sound department with this game

How did you do the lighting, in a 2d game?

Not quite sure which part you are referring to but overall there is no lighting at all . To go through the generals :

1.. The wall shading is part of the map tiles on layer 3. A simple black image with alpha. The map has three layers. Layer 1 is the main map. Layer 2 is the floor ( plus all floor based action ) and Layer 3 is the collectables / shading / lighting and pickup items. The map is rendered layer 2 first, then layer 1 and layer 3 on top. Then layer 3 is parsed again above all other images for additional effects like the spinning hazard lights and static lights.

2.. The spinning and static lights are just simple alpha gradients in blend mode.

3.. The overall fade out of the map is a circle gradient from 100% opaque to solid black, double scaled and centred on the player(s).

This gives a good overall dark atmosphere to the game. It looks better than the YouTube video and I'm happy overall with how it looks.

Still heaps of work to do yet but I'm happy with the basic look of the game at this early stage. I did look into various shaders but in the end the good old fashioned methods worked better for the base effect I wanted. I did have the option of using shaders to cast shadows around objects on the floor but it didn't add anything for the extra work it would need to do the effect justice.

Tonnes of work to do yet but it's starting to take shape

Looks great.  You can't go wrong with a mix of Alien Breed and Cannon Fodder      Just make sure you can deploy the remote sentry units 

I'm still messing around with ideas but don't have anywhere near as much free time as I did over Xmas and NY.  Doing pixel art is much harder to get right so if I eventually nail down an idea it'll be in a minimalist style.   

[iWasAdam]

Got loading and saving of tiles sorted and I'm deep in mechanics now, getting it all flowing.
But good news is I can debug, reset, test, try out new things very quickly from the editor and catch what's not feeling right.
Basic dropping and tile movement all done as well.

First pic:

[RemiD]

@Qube>>nice.
I like the fake volumetric lighting using alpha.

I have worked so much on 3d games that i would use 3d textures flat meshes to create a similar 2d game (with flat meshes having a different zorder so that some are drawn one on top of the other)

But i am curious, are these textured flat meshes ?

[Steve Elliott]

How did you do the lighting, in a 2d game?

Not quite sure which part you are referring to but overall there is no lighting...

There is no spoon 

I was referring to how the darkness is lit up as players move forward.

3.. The overall fade out of the map is a circle gradient from 100% opaque to solid black, double scaled and centred on the player(s).

Neat idea.  And very effective.

[Derron]

When I did such a "light circle" I created only the circle with the fade out - so the texture/image was quadratic - then I rendered the "outside" via 4 rectangles/quads. Maybe it added some draw calls but used less vram. Else you would need a texture which is nearly 2 times appWidth and 2 times appHeight - as you need to be able to move the circle across the whole screen.
On a tile based game (only tiles are "lighted") you could of course keep it as "circle + fadeout + 2*tileWidth" - and then just skip rendering all the tiles further away from the light center than "0.5(circle + fadeOut) + tileWidth". Handling of light sources would be a bit more difficult then. So img+4*drawRect() seems the way to go - for me.

How did you tackle that? ... harr, time for a worklog to stay ontopic here.


bye
Ron

[iWasAdam]

OK, So I couldn't resist posting this one of the 'tower' (or 3 views of it)...


Complete with original angled structure plus 3 scenic lifts

[TomToad]

I now have level loading working, and ambulance control working.  Next I need to create building tiles, improve the road tiles, and set up some collision polygons on the sides of the roads for the ambulance to bump into.

Edit: Seems you cannot upload an animated gif as an attachment (at least, it doesn't animate) so I uploaded it to my site nd linked to it below.  Note that the jerkiness comes from the screen capture, the actual game runs smoothly.
Edit2:  can't seem to get the gif to work at all.  Well, here's a direct link to download
http://www.tomtoad.com/images/GIF.gif
Edit3: Seems to be a case issue.  One more try

Success!!

[Xerra]

Got loading and saving of tiles sorted and I'm deep in mechanics now, getting it all flowing.
But good news is I can debug, reset, test, try out new things very quickly from the editor and catch what's not feeling right.
Basic dropping and tile movement all done as well.

Seeing this the first thing that came to mind was Populous. We all remember that game, right? :-)

[RemiD]

@TomToad>>ready to remake GTA2 (it looks similar)