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

Started by Qube, January 30, 2018, 00:10:55

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Qube

QuoteAnd in my eyes forward and north are the same thing.
Lol, really?. OK, face South, now walk forward. Which direction are you traveling in? :P - Also, when playing something like Doom, W moves you forward in the direction you're facing and not north.

QuoteI figured it out! They all stop moving as soon as one has reached the crosshairs. That's why things get pretty complicated once your squad "opens" - as long as they all stick together, it's almost easy ;D but if one once get's stuck, it's almost impossible to bring them back close together unless you control them individually. Not a great pleasure when facing a dozen of huggers :'(
<----- holy crap balls, proper constructive criticism :P ;D
Huh, good point. It would of made more sense to have the others keep moving until they too reach the cross hairs.

QuoteMaybe Qube cheated a bit on path/wayfinding. Locate your units on a side of the wall - the mobs will try to attack you from the other side of the wall instead of moving around the wall (little cheat hint: you can shoot them from this position ;-)).
Not on level 2 you can't ( thicker walls ). I have seen you can wiggle a little into the slim walls sometimes and then be able to shoot through. Silly bug that I thought I'd fix ages ago.

No pathfinding at all. I did try A* path finding but it was too slow to do in real time when you have 20+ EBE's after you at once. Downside of AGK being interpreted. I did attempt to split the path finding over vsyncs which would of worked but as time was critical I had to abandon that idea and base it on distance / angle.

Quotelmao crazy logic.  But I guess I've learnt something - that some people aren't always logical.
Everyone else is a bloody idiot :P

QuoteAs said I think "my" problem with it was the mouse movement + team movement coordination.
If you play for a while it becomes second nature. I think learning to play a game is a lost art these days and things are expected to be dumbed down. 90%+ of the old classic games that people coo over are so hard that they just wouldn't be tolerated these days. For example Manic Miner. A classic, yet show it to someone who's never played it and they quit within a couple of minutes as it's too hard for them.

Believe it or not I mentioned to Steve a while ago about the controls being a little different. I also had planned on 3 methods of controls via an options screen but there's only so much you can do in 10 weeks.

QuoteThink it is time for Qube to setup the "vote thread"
That's done.

QuoteThanks Qube, downloaded.  Will play tomorrow.

As far as I'm concerned it was submitted before deadline so in terms of voting it's a valid entry whether you want it to be or not.   :D
Rebels, the lot of you :P

As been requested by a few people I'll revive my entry. Without going into personal detail it's really not been a great few days in Qube land and the criticism of the game just put the icing on the crap fest cake. My apologies for the outburst, it was not warranted and unfair.
Mac Studio M1 Max ( 10 core CPU - 24 core GPU ), 32GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD,
Beelink SER7 Mini Gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core 16-Thread 5.1GHz Processor, 32G DDR5 RAM 1T PCIe 4.0 SSD
MSI MEG 342C 34" QD-OLED Monitor

Until the next time.

Qube

It lives :P - Feel free to critique all you want :)

ExBiEn

OK people, listen up... Take your elite squad of mercenaries and save the space station from destruction of an unknown EBE threat. You will have to work together and alone in this top down shooter in order to complete your mission.



Downloads
Windows
Mac

Controls :

Key W to move towards the cross hairs
Key S to move away from the cross hairs
Keys A / D to strafe left and right around the cross hairs

Keys 1, 2, 3, 4 to select individual players
Key 5 to select all players

Key G to select grenades
Key B to select bullets

Key M] to turn motion tracker on / off

Media info :

Graphics, coding and music done by me. The Alien and Face Hugger models are fan created but animated by me. The characters are Daz3D models. Sound effects are a mixture of modified / unmodified AGK sound library sounds and modified fan made Aliens sound effects found on YouTube.

Intro Video :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azMLUJa7mV4

General Notes :

If you're wondering...

Level 1 = Face Huggers
Level 2 = Aliens
Level 3 = Face Hugger, Aliens and Sentry guns
Mac Studio M1 Max ( 10 core CPU - 24 core GPU ), 32GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD,
Beelink SER7 Mini Gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core 16-Thread 5.1GHz Processor, 32G DDR5 RAM 1T PCIe 4.0 SSD
MSI MEG 342C 34" QD-OLED Monitor

Until the next time.

iWasAdam

@qube. There was no offence meant when I said "I didn't like the music."
Q. How should I say that I didn't like something?


Qube

Quote from: iWasAdam on April 12, 2018, 06:56:09
@qube. There was no offence meant when I said "I didn't like the music."
Q. How should I say that I didn't like something?
I know :) - Just say it unfiltered. Yesterday was just the final of a really bad time for me and I took it out on the forum to which I apologise. Luckily all is sorted now ( no need for a long story )

If you like, dislike, loathe or hate something then please fire away unfiltered. If you think my music sounds like a 1980's Casio keyboard played upside down then say it. Honestly, it's all good ;D
Mac Studio M1 Max ( 10 core CPU - 24 core GPU ), 32GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD,
Beelink SER7 Mini Gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core 16-Thread 5.1GHz Processor, 32G DDR5 RAM 1T PCIe 4.0 SSD
MSI MEG 342C 34" QD-OLED Monitor

Until the next time.

Derron

@ IWasAdam
Say "The music was not my kind, too many harps playing a heavy metal track just does not fit - imho". Think "hating" is a strong word for some of us. I did not feel offended as I thought it was some kind of "exaggeration" but as written words do not express your face expression/mimic things can get interpreted a bit more harsh than meant.


@ path finding
Why not cheating there:
- every 500ms (plus bit individual randomness to avoid doing it all on the same time) you do a path finding to avoid "running against walls for too long"
- everytime the "current grid cell" changes you do a path finding
- everytime collision-layer changes, do path finding (this is still a "'TODO:" comment in my code ;-)) 
- if the level is big: only do path finding if grid-distance to player is smaller than "1.5 * Max(onScreenGridCols, onScreenGridRows)" (depends on how you spawn mobs)

I write this here as I am not sure if my approach would work - I just came up with that idea.



@ Music
I think it had this "80s music" style with that overly used synthesizer sounds, I liked that. TVTower needs some 80s music too ... so come up with some music for my FOSS game and I will happily add it - if it fits ;-)


bye
Ron

Qube

Path finding - I tried to add it in recursively per frame to not have an impact on frame rate but it just wasn't working for some silly reason. As time was critical I had to abandon the idea and go for a quicker alternate solution.

Music - yeah, it was meant to sound like a cheesy 80's tv theme ( the title music ). Again, time plays a big part in how long you can spend on such things.
Mac Studio M1 Max ( 10 core CPU - 24 core GPU ), 32GB LPDDR5, 512GB SSD,
Beelink SER7 Mini Gaming PC, Ryzen 7 7840HS 8-Core 16-Thread 5.1GHz Processor, 32G DDR5 RAM 1T PCIe 4.0 SSD
MSI MEG 342C 34" QD-OLED Monitor

Until the next time.

Derron

@ envahi
As there is no custom thread for it:

I played it a short while.
Music track in main menu and ingame is nice and pulsating. Think it fits into the early 90s era of action games. Good find.
The sound effects got pretty fast into the box labeled "annoying". Maybe make them a bit less loud than the music. And add some variations, so it does not sound the same over and over.

I then killed all the incoming ufos (without trouble in the time I tried it for now). After some minutes I tried what happens if I move into this "catcher" thing. It catched my helicopter and moved it out of the screen ("towards top"). Then for 3-4 seconds nothing happened - then all units vanished (think "life lost" or so). And then nothing... I pressed fire, nothing, pressed cursor keys... nothing. Pressed "Q" and got a "Game Over" screen.
What to do once you loose a life?

What could get improved: some more animations / variations of the invaders (the rotating balls rotate too "stuttering")
What could get improved2: sound effects
What could get improved: gameplay alterations. Else it will become repetitive pretty fast
What I did not like: the building backgrounds - they do not fit to the other parts of the game (maybe trace them in your painting program and do some "pixel art" out of it)
What I like: the water-container gfx - make the rest of the game in the same quality and it looks consistent and nice
What I like2: as said the music was cool

May I ask why the exe is 79MB - uncompressed audio?

bye
Ron

Xerra

Quote from: Derron on April 12, 2018, 11:50:44
@ envahi
As there is no custom thread for it:

I played it a short while.
Music track in main menu and ingame is nice and pulsating. Think it fits into the early 90s era of action games. Good find.
The sound effects got pretty fast into the box labeled "annoying". Maybe make them a bit less loud than the music. And add some variations, so it does not sound the same over and over.

I then killed all the incoming ufos (without trouble in the time I tried it for now). After some minutes I tried what happens if I move into this "catcher" thing. It catched my helicopter and moved it out of the screen ("towards top"). Then for 3-4 seconds nothing happened - then all units vanished (think "life lost" or so). And then nothing... I pressed fire, nothing, pressed cursor keys... nothing. Pressed "Q" and got a "Game Over" screen.
What to do once you loose a life?

What could get improved: some more animations / variations of the invaders (the rotating balls rotate too "stuttering")
What could get improved2: sound effects
What could get improved: gameplay alterations. Else it will become repetitive pretty fast
What I did not like: the building backgrounds - they do not fit to the other parts of the game (maybe trace them in your painting program and do some "pixel art" out of it)
What I like: the water-container gfx - make the rest of the game in the same quality and it looks consistent and nice
What I like2: as said the music was cool

May I ask why the exe is 79MB - uncompressed audio?

bye
Ron

Ok, from the top.

I worked on the sound over an evening trying to make sure I didn't overuse it and it was too noisy. I think maybe the UFO sound was a little excessive as it's going back and forth all the time, pretty much. If it's any consolation one of my testers was made to play the original game for a while to get an idea of what my remake was all about. He claims to this day that his ears are still bleeding :-)

The background music in the game was a set of 9 (as I recall) retro loops of music that were each 8 seconds in duration. I put in a random system to give the background a constantly changing beat and left it running a while to make sure it didn't appear to get annoying. Sounds like that part worked out ok.

Not sure what happened to you when the grabber took you off screen as I've not seen any other reports of a problem. The idea of the grabber is that if it catches you then you get taken off screen and you can no longer participate in defending the city and you have to watch as it gets either invaded, destroyed or flooded. Due to the random nature of the enemies I put in a warp mode to increase the speed of all the action so you didn't get bored waiting for something to happen. This has a side-effect of making the enemies look like they're on red-bull so one of them must have triggered one of the events and maybe you didn't see it?

When a dropper hits the city, or the zoomer reaches it, then the city is invaded and the game says so while waiting for you to press the fire button (shift). If the acid rain from clouds destroys the shield of the city completely then that will explode but you would have noticed this, I assure you. Otherwise, if you somehow don't have that happen then the Nibblers are going to eat through that Dam. I'll leave it to your imagination to guess what happens then. I hope you have an umbrella.

Pressing Q does quit the game, hence why you saw that message and went back to the title screen. On loss of life you just press fire to go to the next life. Perhaps give it another go?

Point taken on the sprite animations. I didn't ask for many frames as I was doing a remake and wanted a resemblance to the original game. I was a bit pushed for time as well as I had to cancel the work for the first artist I picked as she just couldn't come through. It's the first time I ever hired someone to do art for anything I've written so I could have been easily pleased.

As for the 79mb executable, I can't really answer. I did strip out a lot of stuff I didn't use before building the final version on Mac and then moving the project files to the laptop to build for Windows. I'm tied to what Gamemaker adds to the project although it was compiled in YYC mode, rather than with the interpreted language that you would normally build with, so wouldn't have had excessive amounts of debugging stuff in it.

I could probably do the entire game in BlitzNG now and make it a lot smaller but it would also take a lot more time. Gamemaker is the perfect dev system for developing games to a short deadline.

Thanks a lot for your feedback. I was getting worried that not many people were even looking at my game for a while.
M2 Pro Mac mini - 16GB 512 SSD
ACER Nitro 5 15.6" Gaming Laptop - Intel® Core™ i7, RTX 3050, 1 TB SSD
Vic 20 - 3.5k 1mhz 6502

Latest game - https://xerra.itch.io/Gridrunner
Blog: http://xerra.co.uk
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