Reboot Comp Entry: Validius

[Steve Elliott]

I just received my XBox Controller clone (which is very comfy and at £18.99 good value).  Works very well with the game, I see your game is like Robotron with twin sticks for independant movement and firing directions.  The game plays well so looking forward to getting a high score or two.

[Xerra]

I just received my XBox Controller clone (which is very comfy and at £18.99 good value).  Works very well with the game, I see your game is like Robotron with twin sticks for independant movement and firing directions.  The game plays well so looking forward to getting a high score or two.

That's great to know it works on clone devices as well as the original ones. I'm almost embarrassed the game plays so much better when using a controller. I knew I had to start supporting them in games at some point, and this was the ideal game to do it on, but I'll be thinking a lot more on control systems and how mouse/keyboard and gamepad can all be used without compromising on game difficulty etc.

[Xerra]

Hi Xerra, we tried playing your game 2 different ways - just on the laptop and via a HDMI port to a big telly.

It 'seemeed' slower on the big telly - it could just be a Father Ted moment (sorry if that's lost on you)….

Had a further think on this and have now put in an fps counter in the top right corner. On my Mac it never goes below the 1500-ish mark but obviously delta-time is automatic in GMS2 so it's always going to play the same overall speed, it's just number-of-pixels that is going to make individual objects move at different speeds. See how that works for you.

As a consequence of this I did notice that I'd actually set up a PLAYER_MAX_SPEED macro and not used it correctly because it was set to 8 yet the player started off at 5. In the game the ">>" power up used to increment you by 0.5 each time you picked one up in the game but it always resets in the next stage. I'm thinking possibly I should have kept that active for the duration of a game and possibly the same with the shot damage and speed power ups. I might jig the game to do that after judging finishes because it's fairer on the player and the chances of being able to max out either setting is pretty low on early levels where the stage only has a few asteroids to deal with.

Anyway, at present I have modified the speed and also had to modify the player shots starting speed to compensate, otherwise they all stack up when you're moving in the same direction that you're firing. As a result this has made the game a bit easier which might be more forgiving for the keyboard/mouse players as well.

While I'm here I should possibly point out a few things that players might have not noticed thus far:

Powerups are:

Shot speed increase

Player speed increase

Score boost tokens (the dollar signs)

Shield (gives you 3 or 5 seconds)

Smart bomb which doesn't work the way you think. Each enemy and asteroids have a damage level. This bangs 5 points off each one. As most entities are less than that to start with, you'll find it does destroy most things. I was going to tinker more with this based on game level if I'd had a bit more time.


Limited time power ups - You can see a progress bar for their duration at the top of the screen:

2 directional shooting (compensating for whatever direction you fire in. Mainly because I could just half the angle by 180 :-) )

4 directional shooting (working the same way but on each 90' axis depending on your current rotation frame)

Super Damage - shots won't be destroyed after hitting anything so it does damage all the time it's impacting an entity and murders rocks big time. You can tell this is active as your shots go red.

I've been a bit tight on the time you have these power-ups as well but that makes it a bit more interesting trying to take advantage of them as much as possible while they are active.

There are 8 stages to the game and the level number determines which one you start on. The counting up will continue after stage 8 but the difficulty is capped there.

There are four different enemy types that can spawn and they are based on a timer which adjusts as the difficulty goes up. You can see the spawn areas of where an entity is going to appear by an exclamation mark appearing at the spawn point for a few seconds before it comes in. Green is a power up and red is an enemy.

Blobs are light grey balls and just appear and move at a random speed and just move towards the edge of the screen. They don't have any AI at all and are just an inconvenience. They don't shoot or change direction - so, cannon-fodder really.

Spikes are like balls but they will track on you if you get too close. They don't have any fire power, however, so you can outrun to a certain point and they will just carry on in their current direction until they leave the screen. Unless you get too close and they track on you again, of course.

Scouts are a bit more tricky. They lock onto you from a bit closer range than the spikes and will come after you a bit quicker. They're also armed and will fire every second or so.

Hunters are the nasty ones. They kind of look like a trivial-pursuit token holder and they have a much larger range to track and home in on you. They also fire a bit faster and move quicker. Avoid these or kill them from a distance, if possible.

Think that's pretty much it. A lot of this should hopefully be gradually learned from repeated play of the game to anyone who doesn't read this.

3DZ, if you give me your daughters name then I'll pop her name in the credits as one of the testers, if she'd like that. Sounds like she's played it more than the people I have listed already anyway. But I had to put the missus and my nephews name in somewhere

I'll have updated versions of the game uploaded onto Itch shortly. Please just use the 1.0 version for judging if you haven't downloaded it already, just so I don't break any rules with these tweaks.

[Steve Elliott]

That's great to know it works on clone devices as well as the original ones. I'm almost embarrassed the game plays so much better when using a controller. I knew I had to start supporting them in games at some point, and this was the ideal game to do it on, but I'll be thinking a lot more on control systems and how mouse/keyboard and gamepad can all be used without compromising on game difficulty etc.

Not much point producing an XBox Controller clone if they don't work lol, it's a good quality clone.  Yes if you're going to require a twin stick in your game you must use a proper game controller.  I didn't really bother trying to use keyboard and mouse in your game because I knew it would be a horrible experience - I just waited until my controller arrived.

This is also a dilemma for me regards my own game now.  I don't require twin sticks like yours because my ship shoots in the direction it's facing.  I guess I could switch from a purely digital keyboard/D-Pad input to analogue mouse rotation and fire on the mouse button - plus analogue stick/buttons on the controller.  But on a laptop maybe somebody is trying to use the trackpad, I can't see that being a particularly statisfactory way to control a game, so maybe keep pure keyboard support too.

[Xerra]

This is also a dilemma for me regards my own game now.  I don't require twin sticks like yours because my ship shoots in the direction it's facing.  I guess I could switch from a purely digital keyboard/D-Pad input to analogue mouse rotation and fire on the mouse button - plus analogue stick/buttons on the controller.  But on a laptop maybe somebody is trying to use the trackpad, I can't see that being a particularly statisfactory way to control a game, so maybe keep pure keyboard support too.

Personally, if it's controlled just like asteroids, where left/right turn the ship and you can thrust with forward, then I'd stick with just the keyboard. I'd have an option for having braking enabled on the title screen as well just so players could decide if they were able to use down to slow the ship down (for less skilled players) or they had to do the traditional spin the ship 180' and accelerate in the opposite direction. This was what I had originally planned to have in Validius until the game evolved into more of a Robotron/Infinity wars thing.

[Steve Elliott]

Personally, if it's controlled just like asteroids, where left/right turn the ship and you can thrust with forward, then I'd stick with just the keyboard. I'd have an option for having braking enabled on the title screen as well just so players could decide if they were able to use down to slow the ship down (for less skilled players) or they had to do the traditional spin the ship 180' and accelerate in the opposite direction. This was what I had originally planned to have in Validius until the game evolved into more of a Robotron/Infinity wars thing.

Yes keyboard works well, but of course you'd have more precision in rotation having a mouse/game controller option too.  Nah no brakes, that's what made Asteroids tricky - you could fly out of control if the trust was over-used lol.  Yes I plan on evolving my Vectors game too.  A shield has been added, you have a limited amount of power to activate a shield, when that is all used up you don't get a shield re-charge until the next level.  Also, after the entities break into the smallest pair on being shot instead of dividing into 2 again they excrete a deadly cell (which acts like a mine).  These 'mines' don't disappear until shot and destroyed, and even stay around from level to level so you better shoot them too or it's going to be hard to navigate.  I also want to add other game characters and powerups.

[Xerra]

How far off are you from completing your game now, Steve? I'm up for doing some testing for you. Erm, might be via Parallels of course :-)

Actually, you've got a Mac as well, don't you?

Either or, let me know if you do want some feedback when you've got something you're ready to show off.

[Xerra]

Updated version 1.01 for both OSX and Windows have been posted on Itch.IO

I have left a note there specifically saying to download V1.0 only for judging in the competition.

[Steve Elliott]

How far off are you from completing your game now, Steve? I'm up for doing some testing for you. Erm, might be via Parallels of course :-)

Actually, you've got a Mac as well, don't you?

Either or, let me know if you do want some feedback when you've got something you're ready to show off.

Well the basic game's up and running and the UI, some silly things to sort out (entities appearing too near you at start) that kinda thing.  It complicates things a bit with world and screen positions for the polygons to worry about, but I'm getting my head around it lol. The 'mines' have to be implemented properly and then other characters to consider - and maybe other control options.  So a little while, it depends how much tweaking I do.

Thanks for the offer of testing and feedback, I'll post a version here when I think it's ready.  Yes I have Windows, MacOS and Linux systems here, and the game runs identical on all.

[Xerra]

When my game still had a scrolling background I was playing around with a function that basically looked at where my player sprite currently was, the X & Y size, and then allowed 100 pixels or so added to whatever angle it was considering to plant the next spawning entity. If the random number generated fell within that criteria then it would just go back and generate another one so that you couldn't have an unfair loss of life by a bad guy spawing on you. It kind of mutated after that as I was working on a room size instead, rather than the camera location within the room size but it did work. If interested I'll see if I can post the script as it may be worth trying to convert what it does into AGK for your game.

I implemented the shield at the start of a new life as well but originally my plan was to be careful with the spawns in case i didn't want a shield later one.

[Steve Elliott]

When my game still had a scrolling background I was playing around with a function that basically looked at where my player sprite currently was, the X & Y size, and then allowed 100 pixels or so added to whatever angle it was considering to plant the next spawning entity.

What I'm doing is a bit different though so wouldn't apply.  As an example the space ship has a top mid point 0.0, -4.25, and the bottom mid point 0.0, 5.25 as if drawn on graph paper.  The models are then rotated, scaled, translated (into screen space) then drawn.  Screen positions don't come into it until they are transformed (and I'm doing this manually) so just drawing lines basically (plus adding a sprite for glow on each point of the model).  2.5D I guess lol.

[3DzForMe]

@Xerra, my daughter appreciates the effort involved in making games, and went as far as to say you must be Very good at coding (she's aware of the hours I've expended on my 'efforts' to date.) My daughters name is Eve, and she's blown away by your offer of being in the credits. As Brucey would've said 'good game, good game'. The different coloured exclamation marks (power ups / baddies) is a help.

[Steve Elliott]

@Xerra, my daughter appreciates the effort involved in making games, and went as far as to say you must be Very good at coding (she's aware of the hours I've expended on my 'efforts' to date.)

That's great to hear, I always hear of people her age wanting all games to be free, because it takes no effort.

[Xerra]

@Xerra, my daughter appreciates the effort involved in making games, and went as far as to say you must be Very good at coding (she's aware of the hours I've expended on my 'efforts' to date.) My daughters name is Eve, and she's blown away by your offer of being in the credits. As Brucey would've said 'good game, good game'. The different coloured exclamation marks (power ups / baddies) is a help.

I'm not that good, I only wish. I've got a friend who's taught me a lot over the last couple of years that's improved my games a fair bit. I had the worse discipline ever for someone who wanted to make games until recently. I counted once and found I had at least 20 that I'd abandoned at various stages of development. I still remember getting 95% of the way through writing an IOS game using Swift almost Four years ago then just realising it wasn't working and throwing in the towel. Should have known a long time before then.

Next revision I do I'll put a mention for Eve into Validius

[Steve Elliott]

I'm not that good, I only wish.

Don't be so modest, last time I looked you had completed more SB Competition entries than anybody.