If you give it a whirl, make sure you leave me some feedback in my thread at iDG!
Besides the UB, I’m working on making a bigger armada of badguys to play with. Most importantly, I need enemies that can take a bunch of hits, and enemies that can shoot at the player. This will give me a better idea of what needs to be done to balance the weapons, as well as the general difficulty of the game. Right now it’s all fodder enemies that don’t shoot at you, and people are finding it to be a little too easy (understandably.)
I’ve got an enemy bullet and a few guns designed. Unexpectedly, the clip/reloading system of Arsenal is coming in handy here. Using reload times, I can just leave the enemy gun constantly firing and it will seem like it’s waiting between shots. Similarly, clip size can increase the size of the volley. So a clip size of 5 with a reload of 2.0 means it will fire 5 bullets in succession, wait 2 seconds, then fire again.
Another thing I will be experimenting with is adding obstacles to an enemy. This way, I can design say a mothership that has a weak point, and only hitting the weak point will cause it any damage. The obstacles will function as they do in the level, and not permit any bullets through. In addition, making them part of the Enemy faction will cause damage to the player instead of blocking him. (Ideally, they will do damage AND block him, but that will take some more work.)
The blade still sucks, I just wanted to stub something in. Also, not all of the guns level up yet. I added a few guns to the mix, but there are still many to go.
There isn’t a whole lot of thought behind the formations right now, again, I just wanted to stub something in for now.
Other than that, enjoy, and if you try it out, please give me feedback at this thread:
Today I finalized the powerup and weapon upgrade logic. Here’s how it works:
Whenever you kill something, they drop a little goodie that you can go pick up. Some enemies may drop several. Boss type monsters will drop tons. When you get close to one of these goodies, you will suck it in. Each one gives you an experience point that goes towards leveling up your guns. You have five guns: The Blaster, Spread Gun, Machine Gun, Laser, and a Blade. Each one has five levels of power. When you collect a goodie, the experience point goes toward your currently selected gun. Collect enough, and your gun will level up.
Right now, the upgrades look like this:
Blaster: Adds bullets per shot per level, and at max level gets a big rate of fire increase
Spread Gun: Adds bullets and angle of coverage per level. At max level, it will also fire behind you
Machine Gun: Adds rate of fire per level. At max level, bullets will slide along obstacles, or if I have the time to code it, they will bounce.
Laser: Rate of fire increase and slight coverage increase per level. Unsure of max level bonus at this time.
Blade: Blade size and power increase per level. At max level, the blade will fire a wave of energy.
In addition, each gun will have an Overload. You can use stored experience as ammunition to Overload your gun by right-clicking. This is a super powerful attack that should be used sparingly, as the experience drain could even level down your gun.
The Overloads as designed at the moment:
Blaster: Bullets can penetrate enemies, and detonate on impact, dealing splash damage
Spread Gun: 360 degree firing, extreme rate of fire increase
Machine Gun: Extreme rate of fire and coverage increases
Laser: The Armageddon Laser from Kill Dr. Cote makes a re-appearance
Blade: Damage is increased proportionately to experience for one shot of massive damage.
I may also increase the effects of weapon overload as you increase in level, if I have time to design the guns. Basically, in Arsenal, each level of gun is treated as a separate gun, so right now I have 30 guns planned, just for the player, 50 if I allow upgradeable overloads. Enemies will add to this further. Right now, I’ve got 9 out of 30. If time runs short I may nix unlockable weapons and pre-game weapon selection. I plan on working on this game after the contest so there will be time to put them in later.
Tomorrow I will work on enemy bullets, and I really really want to spend a little time to tie off what I have and release a playable build for people to try. We’ll see how it goes. No football tomorrow so I got nothing going on :)
After listening to the new tune as much as possible yesterday, I found a few things that needed to be changed, but they were very minor. Just a few notes moved around here and there, a few chords turned into either notes or arpeggios, and a few notes turned into chords, and now the song feels a lot tighter. I’m calling it done.
Went back and re-populated the first level with enemies. I learned the first time around that this game needs to approach enemies much much differently than other shooters, because of the dual-analog controls. What might be a challenging formation in Ikaruga or Gradius can be way too easily dispatched in my game, and a similar frequency of formations ends up being quite easy, almost leisurely. Also, I think I’m still stuck in the mindset of having enemies attack from the front. Having 360 degrees worth of attack angles versus 90 degrees worth of enemies will naturally feel easy. If this game is going to be fun and challenging, I need to make the enemies at least an even match for what the player is capable of doing. Now, I still want to start out attacking from the front and gradually extend into the full 360, but it looks like this will need to happen way sooner than halfway through the first level.
Also, the number and/or difficulty of enemies needs to be raised over other shooters. The other reason for this, besides the dual analog, is the weapons. Gradius is only challenging when your ship is bare of any powerups. And Ikaruga never gives you a different weapon at all. Since I want to have upgradeable weapons and keep the game challenging, the enemies also need to be beefed up. I want to play through a few shooters today and get a good idea of the frequency of spawns over time, as well as the relative toughness of enemies. Also, it would be a nice relaxing break. Working on many projects simultaneously (several as part of my full time job with Freeverse, plus this one) is starting to wear me down, and even though only 40 days remain in this contest, I could use a little R&R.
The original plan tonight was to add a few more enemy types and add them to the level, as well as add guns to enemies to allow enemy bullets. What actually did happen was I got inspired out of nowhere to write another song. And I’ve got it completely finished. This brings my music track count up to 2 and a half, which puts me past the amount of music I had for Kill Dr. Cote in 2004. (Woot!)
Given how long the first track took, I am STOKED beyond belief that this was a nice contained one-night effort. Basically, the track is a quick 40-second or so loop, and will be used for the second level. The tune is equal parts keyboard and Kaossilator, and it’s kind of catchy. For sounds, I found a very, very cool audio component for Garageband called Chip32 which gives me a real fine degree of control over the waveform, plus ADSR and some other things. For this tune I tried to emulate the NES sound by taking a square wave lead, plus a sine wave bass. Now, if I wanted to sound really genuine, I’d have a second square/pulse wave for accompaniment and straight up noise for percussion. But I cheated by using chords in the lead, and the percussion is handled by the Kaossilator.
The sequence I had in mind for this kind of tune was a level where you attack the vacuoles of Doomsday Odious. Vacuoles, as I understand them, are the digestive system of the amoeba. It’s basically one of many stomachs. In this level, you would be dodging digestive enzymes (in the form of acid dripping from the ceiling) as well as giant digestive pods that float around and soak up huge amounts of damage. Inside these pods would be half-digested spaceships being slowly broken down by digestive cells. When the pod is destroyed, everything in it explodes out (think asteroids times 10) and the cells then go after you.
So I will give this song the stress test tomorrow. 45 minute commute, each way, plus as much as possible during work, I’ll have this little 40-second bit on loop, to see what parts end up sticking out and bothering me. If it’s pretty good, I’ll just call it done, because I really need to get to work on levels.
Made quite a bit more progress today. I’m still ironing out bugs in my editor as I go, but now I have a level that’s (mostly) populated with enemies. I’ve got about a dozen enemy formations defined now, but while that sounds like a lot, the level still feels empty and it feels like there’s not enough variety. The enemies themselves aren’t too varied- there’s the cell enemy and the amoeba enemy but they’re both pretty much fodder. It will be a challenge to get the amount of enemies right.
I’m still not ready to post a build quite yet (sorry, I keep teasing, I don’t mean to!) but I’ve attached a shot of the level in action (click for big):
I’m really happy with how rapidly I can tweak and test this stuff. I can toggle in and out of edit mode with TAB, and I can skip to any part of the level, or rewind it and replay a certain part over and over again, tweaking each time with click and drag. Normally I hate making tools but I’m all giddy about how well this thing works. It’s still about as user friendly as covering yourself in honey and playing tackle football on a thousand anthills, but it gets the job done.
I’m kind of surprised by just how little room you have to work with in shooters, as far as laying out the level goes. Because the scrolling goes so slow there really isn’t much to scroll past before your level ends. I guess I could always up the speed of the scrolling and scale the curve up by the same amount (however, this will screw up the positions of damn near everything) but still, in the end there’s not that much real world space between beginning and end, so you need to make sure the few obstacles you put in count. This may also be a blessing in disguise, since less obstacles means less assets, so we will see.
Playing around with level 1, I definitely want to make level 2 (the gooey interior of Doomsday Odious) a high speed level. As if you are now in an artery or something and you’re racing along with the bloodstream. Maybe I could even incorporate some of the obligatory doors-that-close-in-your-face. And unlike level 1, where a lot of action happens from left to right, level 2 will twist and turn in all directions, and possibly loop back over itself. Since you can shoot in any direction, I want to spawn enemies from any direction, and I intend to abuse that in level 2 :)
The big thing missing right now is enemy bullets. Nothing shoots at you yet. I will want turrets and gunships and tons of dudes all shooting at you. This may fill that void in difficulty that’s popping up at the moment. I don’t want a full-on bullet hell shooter, but the player sprite is small enough to warrant at least a little artful dodging. (The hitbox is actually quite a bit smaller than the robot’s body. Maybe 50% or so. A lot of shooters do this, so they can throw ten times as many bullets at you. See Ikaruga or Gradius V.) Once that’s in, the next step will be finalizing the upgrade system and incorporating it into the HUD. And then more and more content! Levels and guns and badguys!
Ugh, still slow going. I have the obstacles placed for level 1, but still lacking in the enemies department. I will probably just stick the formations I have in there now for the duration of the level as a first draft and start getting feedback.
On another note, I have an artist who is interested in jumping on board. Thomas K, who has done art for the Best Damn Podcast Ever and is also responsible for that sexy cartoon rendition of my face over there on the left, is willing to take a crack at some characters. I’m having him redraw the player sprite now, so I am excited to see how it goes.
Didn’t quite finish the level this weekend, doesn’t look likely that I’ll get it done before the end of the night either.
I’ve got the path for the level pretty much finalized. Thankfully, being able to use Illustrator makes tweaking and redrawing the curve simple and fast. Level 1 clocks in at almost exactly five minutes, split into three (fairly) equal parts: The victory flight, the rock zone, and the descent.
I’ve also got a fairly good set of obstacles defined, as you can see here. Click for big:
There’s the round asteroid shape you’ve seen before, as well as a diamond shape, a large horizontal wall with top and bottom ramps, a mountain shape (upper and lower) and a separate mountain cap shape. (Yes, there will be an homage in which you can fly through that for a bonus. I know my shooters!) Adding new shapes is a pretty quick process. However, there’s no rotation or flipping of shapes. So the mountains and ramps are two shapes, one for upper, one for lower. I can foresee definitely wanting to allow rotation/reflection in the future, the question is will I want it for this contest, or is that something I can put off for afterwards?
Also, the obstacle definitions themselves are not data driven. They really, really ought to be. I can see this library of obstacles becoming too unruly to have all of it in code. I also ran into some collision bugs with the irregular objects which took up a good deal of time. Basically, a bug that resulted in botched collision checks for points vs. polygons didn’t work, while circle vs. polygons worked fine, so Jones would slide off them ok but they couldn’t be clicked and dragged.
The actual placement of these objects into a coherent level will have to happen tomorrow. I’m pretty wiped out for the night.
So I finally finished up a major reworking of how formations are represented in game. Basically, in the beginning there were formations and there were enemies. Two totally separate entities. The edit mode maintained a list of formations, as did the enemy spawner. The spawner could create enemies from a formation and pass them along to the game. But after that, formations and enemies had no way of talking to each other. This blows for two reasons:
1) In edit mode, there was no way to change the visual representation of enemies, since they had already been passed along to the engine.
2) In game, it meant there was no way to tell whether all enemies in a formation had been destroyed. (This will yield sweet bonuses.)
So now enemies and formations are tied much more closely. The enemies now keep track of which formation they are in, so when the parameters of that formation change (because you’re whipping it around in edit mode) they will also change accordingly. Also, there is now a list of active formations, which keep track of the number of enemies in it. When an enemy is killed by gunfire, it decrements that number by one. When it reaches zero, sweet bonuses can be spawned. Right now, that sweet bonus is a printf(). If an enemy makes it off screen and times out normally, the number is not decremented, and the bonus cannot be earned.
So why do I feel so good about this? Just a bug fix, no? Maybe so, but it marks the point where I now have a fully functional editor. I remember saying this damn thing was done a long time ago, but at the time it was buggy and not user friendly, especially when it came to formations. I feel I can actually use this thing to make some levels now. It is also code that has been strung along for a long time. It was slow going the past two weeks, both with the return to full time work, a little bit of burnout, and just being emotionally drained from family withdrawal. This crap got put off and put off, mostly by music, and failing that, Fallout 3. I’m so glad it’s done.
Most importantly, this marks the point where I will now begin making levels. It’s been wicked boring engine crap for too long. Hell, not even engine. I’ve been making a damn tool. So now I can begin the creative part, which will very much break up the monotony and get a fire back under my ass. We’re talking guns, enemies, levels, obstacles, formations, particle systems, level scripting, this is where the game will really come together. So THAT’S why I’m so excited.
I’m set to record a podcast sometime tomorrow, so that will suck up a few hours, but aside from that, the order of the day will be to whip up a very quick draft of level 1. I’ve got the path already drawn out in Illustrator. Next step is making and placing some obstacles, populating it with enemies, and give it a few test runs. This will allow me to see if there are still any holes that need to be filled in edit mode. Once I have a proof of concept for level 1 going, I will post a build for feedback. This will hopefully occur tomorrow or Sunday.
I am now official! Got the entry fee all paid up, the game info filled out, and I am now showing up on the uDevGames front page! Woot! Now I’m forced to go the distance, which is a very good thing. While yes, I’ve been adding game credits to my name through my full time job, Laserface Jones is my first truly original game since Arachnoid: Predator of Worlds in 2005. That’s way, way too long ago. That’s why this has me so excited.
As far as big-picture progress, it’s been very good since contest start. I personally started about 2 weeks late, mostly due to waffling a lot over which game concept to attempt, but even between that and having to work after hours, I’ve made good steady progress. At a month and a half, I’m a little behind where I wanted to be, but I feel the actual content of the game will occur very quickly, due to the edit mode of the game. Definitely far enough along to decide to make the jump and enter!
You can check out my entry page for Laserface Jones here:
You will notice there’s been a slight title change. Instead of Laserface Jones vs The Doomsday Amoeba, the game will be called Laserface Jones vs Doomsday Odious. The more I sounded it out, amoeba was a bit weak to be in the title. Plus, it seems there will be another game using the word Amoeba in the title, so I will also want to distinguish this title from that one. Doomsday Odious just sounds more badass, while still having a bit of cheesy sci-fi b-movie ring to it.
The game entity Doomsday Odious has gone under a bit of change, too. Instead of a formless amoeba shape, Odious is now shelled. There are types of amoeba that form a hard “test” around them for protection, and can extend tendril-like pseudopods through the many holes in the test. Odious will now be modeled after that. Odious is protected with a thick shell of calcium carbonate, and uses tendrils to pull entire planets out of orbit and into a giant hole in the shell that functions as a maw. Jones will have to navigate through one of the tendril holes and destroy a pseudopod to get into the creature. The shell interior will function as a rocky zone for level 1.
On the code front, I made a few improvements to the editor today. Most notable, formations in edit mode now have a visual representation. The enemies are drawn in their starting places, and any enemy can be clicked and dragged to move its entire formation. This change makes the edit mode both capable and effective at making the levels I will need.
Speaking of which, back on the design front, I’ve scripted out the sequence of events for the first level. It will go something like this:
- Initial “victory flight.” You can move and shoot freely without threat for a few seconds, followed by a few introductory enemy spawns.
- Earth forces are deployed. I can use moving obstacles to have a ship that spawns from left to right towards the enemy. If the code is simple enough, I can use Arsenal to give it a few guns, set it to the player faction, and it can fly through with guns blazing to help out Jones.
- Shortly after a few ships make passes over the screen, EXPLOSIONS from stage right, followed by more moving obstacles: debris from the newly deployed ally ships! Fire and smoke particles trail off the debris (I know you can’t have fire in space, sue me) and some pieces are covered with digestive ectoplasm that attacks the player.
- Spawns grow in strength as asteroid like objects begin to appear: pieces of the shell. You soon enter the shell, which will resemble the quintessential rock zone from every space shooter ever.
- The rock zone takes a quite literal twist when the level path turns 90 degrees straight down, then begins to wave and weave through the shell wall. While before, enemy spawns start off in front of the player, now they will have extended to 360 degrees around the player. Welcome to the game, baby!
- Towards the end of the bottom of the twisting tunnel, ectoplasm will become much more common, and Jones will begin fighting off pseudopods.
- Soon Jones encounters the Outer Membrane. The membrane slides around Jones and closes behind him, sealing him in, in tried and true amoeba hunting fashion. The boss fight has begun! Pseudopods begin to assault Jones from all angles, and Jones will have to both fight them off while keeping an eye on the Weak Spot that is sliding around the outer edges of the screen. When the weak spot is destroyed, a hole is blown through the Outer Membrane, and Jones can proceed inside Doomsday Odious and begin Level 2.
Another light work night, spent it on music and design.
So the main level theme is now very very nearly finished. I added a cool bridge between the verses, and rekajiggered a few drum hits, and added some fills. It sounds pretty good now. I want to give it one more layer of polish, but it’s at the point now where I could say it was done if I wanted/needed to move on.
Also, I’ve redesigned how upgrades are going to work. Instead of a power bar that slowly fills up a la Gradius, the pickups you get will act as experience in leveling up your weapon. Weapons that are similar will be clumped together, with the stronger version being an upgrade of the weaker one. At the start, you will have level one in all weapons. I am torn at the moment on whether you have ALL weapons and can switch at any time, or whether pickups will change your current weapon (like in Kill Dr. Cote.) At the moment I like the idea of having all weapons available at start. It adds more of a strategic decision on which weapons to level up, instead of hoping you luck out and get a weapon drop like in KDC.
As for what those weapons are, I will offer a similar selection in function to the guns in Kill Dr. Cote. You will have a straight shot blaster, a spread gun, a rapid-fire weapon, a focused power weapon, and a devastating short range weapon. An idea I really like is the ability to customize your armaments prior to game start. So say among focused power weapons, there would be a railgun, a charge beam, and a penetrating laser. Short range weapons could include a flamethrower and a blade. Rapid fire: A machinegun, or an arcing electricity gun. You could pick which weapon you want for each type, but you can only have one of each. Plus, more weapons could be made available as unlockables or achievements. Arsenal makes guns very easy, so that won’t be a limiting factor at all. A subway-commute-brainstorming session or two should give me all the guns I need :)
Finally, I am now mirroring all dev blog entries on my website:
Did some work on the music today, and got quite a bit done. I’ve got my new instruments (The DS-10 and Kaossilator) all incorporated into my setup here. The Kaossilator especially is a lot of fun to jam on, and will likely replace the iDrum app for percussion & beats, and it has some wicked cool synth sounds to boot.
I’ve got a main level theme nearly finished, as well as a theme I want to use for an intro/title. The process started going a lot faster once I broke away from just writing in minor scale. The tone of the game especially is much more upbeat than Kill Dr. Cote was, so I wanted the music to reflect that. I really like how it came out. The next step is to put it on the iPod and listen to it ad nauseam and pick the hell out of it. This will let me write up a hit list, address it, then give the tune a layer of polish then call it a day.
As for the intro, I have a theme, but it needs a second half. I may sit on it until I have a fully working title sequence, so I can put the music to the action on screen.
Been slow going the past week. I’ve since returned to NYC from Vegas, and gotten back into the swing of work and all that jazz. That and I just needed a break to enjoy my last few days in Vegas and to at least kick back a bit in NYC.
My goal this weekend is to wrap up that vertical slice I talked about last week, and get something to start showing around. I can use the editor I have to whip up a rudimentary level, and from there it becomes a matter of creating content. Guns, enemies, formations, all the stuff I’ve been building a foundation for in this first month. I also want to wrap up the musical theme that’s been sitting unfinished, and add that to the level as well.
As far as progress, I’ve got the pickups working. Basically, destroyed enemies will spew these out, and there’s tons to collect. And instead of a given powerup requiring an investment of 1-6 pickups, it will take 10-100. Additionally, pickups will double as ammo for a secondary fire mode, which will be much more powerful than the normal fire mode.
Between being sick and the New Year, it’s been slow going, but it’s done. I can now pan back and forth along my level’s curve, add obstacles and formations, and save them to a map file. I can then load it back and play it. I can even switch back and forth in-game, allowing for a rapid testing/tweaking cycle. Switching between the two happens with a keystroke.
Saving/loading is done in a binary format, and Game Objects now have Read() and Write() functions for serializing themselves to disk. A nice side effect of this is that it’s not that far fetched to extend it now to the classes in the Game Object hierarchy, netting me an easy way to save and load game states. I don’t think I will explore it yet, as time is limited, features will creep, and I can’t see it adding all that much to the game, but it’s something I’d like to add in the future.
The weak link right now is the fact that formations have no in-game representation. They’re invisible objects that spawn at a certain point, and while they contain a list of enemy specifications, the formations themselves have no physical representation in the engine. Meaning, when I add them to the level, I see nothing. I can’t click and drag them the way I can click and drag obstacles because there’s nothing to click and drag. So at some point I will have to add a separate list of objects that simply represent the formations, and only draw those in Edit Mode. Shouldn’t be too bad, maybe a day or so of extra work. While I’m there, I can also foresee the need for a representation of the visible screen. That is, in Edit Mode, I can slide the camera back and forth along the level curve, but I can also pan it off of the curve to add offscreen elements. All moving enemies must be added from offscreen, or else they “pop” into the gameworld. I have a control for re-centering the camera to the level curve to get an idea of the offset, but I will also want to draw a box around the area that would be visible at that point, so I have a nice hard line to gauge the adding of offscreen stuff.
From there, I have the powerup mechanic to finalize, and then it just becomes a matter of adding content. I am planning on taking the rest of my vacation finishing up the formations in edit mode, adding the powerup mechanic, and at least stubbing in a title screen. With 4 days left, and plus with still being a little sick, I think I can pull that off.
Day 3 of being sick. Got a bit done yesterday, but between being sick and the Patriots not making the playoffs despite an 11-5 record, it was not a good day to focus.
Still, got edit mode stubbed in with some basic functionality. Controlled with the keyboard, Q and E pan back and forth along the curve. WASD moves the camera off the curve for easier placement of edge objects, and also formations (which will almost always appear from offscreen.) X recenters the camera on the curve. You can switch between obstacle mode and formation mode with O and P, select an object with 0-9 keys, and + and – keys switch to different groups of ten. Clicking in the screen places an object. There’s also a delete mode by hitting backspace but it doesn’t do anything yet.
To do: – Click and drag to move a placed object – Click on an object in delete mode to remove it – Save/load a level to/from disk. I could probably just embed obstacles and formations in the svg file itself. It’s basically XML, so that’s no problem.
Finally, in the time where I was too groggy to code, I started storyboarding some ideas for an intro sequence. If in the event I burn out, I want to be able to switch gears into an intro/title sequence and get that all looking sweet. No complicated math, just UI elements sliding around, so it should be a good reprieve.
