Hi all. Some of you may remember my shooter WIP a while back. I was going to revive it, but it is locked now as it has been a while. In case you haven't seen it, here is the link.
http://forum.thegamecreators.com/?m=forum_view&t=188488&b=41
So here is the one level demo of the game with no name! Perhaps someone might have a good idea of a name possibly?
I will be updating the game demo soon.
Controls are joystick based, and revert to the awsd keys if you do not have one, or, you can select keyboard controls on the menu, which allows arrow key movement and space for fire . Fire is button 3 on the joystick, or the r key on keyboard ( I think as I always have a pad connected!).
I have tried it on an android phone and it runs very nicely, just is a little difficult to keep up with using the virtual stick. I am afraid you will all have to make do with the windows version here though.
Since the demo I have added the following.
Powerups - Upgrades to the existing gun and a new type entirely. Also a powerup for increase in fire rate. I plan to add more gun types/powerups and an area bomb effect as an extra weapon.
Second End Boss - Still to be tweaked and finalized, but in and killable. I plan to have a different end boss for each level. Semi-obvious, but you may think from watching the vids that it will be the same boss over and over.
2nd and 3rd Level - Needs an end boss (level 3) and some basic enemies for both.
Improved menu options and graphics - Rather than a black screen we now have swirling stars (sort of
). Oh and a name! Although I noticed an old Amiga game with the same title, which was annoying. Nothing like mine though. Still, it's only a change of text at the moment, if I feel the need to change it.
Tweaked android control - The basic joystick setup on AppGameKit is not great for a fast paced shooter. On android it was a struggle to get past level 1 with a reasonable amount of lives. Although the game is still tough, I've managed to both shrink both the joystick size and increase the ease of finding it with your thumb. With the standard settings and images, simply shrinking the size of the joystick made it too fiddly to play.
Changed the resolution - Originally 640x320, I have shoveled it into 640x400 and added a console to hide the gap. I could have stretched the images but it probably would have looked a bit odd.
New sound effects - Nothing of note really, I only add it as a record of all the minor changes that go on with a project like this.
Added pause feature - Wow.. Wait, no it was harder than it sounds, really! Let me explain.. I added some code to check for the pause request, Play my new sound
, and go into a little loop where nothing is updated other than the screen refresh and a check for the request to restart. That worked fine, but the sprites still animated regardless, they just froze in place. So I put in a check to stop each sprite and then restart them again when you restart.
That worked ok until the end boss. For that I am using a timer based routine which the pause interfered with. If you paused the boss would freeze fine, but on restart he would jump to another part of his routine. So I then had to check the timer, and compare and adjust the boss timer according to how long the pause lasts. Now seems all is fine ( I hope
).
Wow, that took some updating. You may wonder why I put the pause story into the post. It is just to illustrate the odd problems you can get when you decide to add in a feature to an existing engine. Perhaps it should have been put in at the start, but I always leave tweaks like that till the nearer the end of a project.
All, in all a fair list of changes in just the last few weeks, so I am making progress at least!
Old but still relevant to the demo.
Added credits to menu but forgot the sound, will update it at some point soon (new videos include it). Sound is by Matt McFarlan as mentioned in the above thread.
I thought I would put all the videos so far in one place, so the games progression from it's early stages can be seen easily.
Edit - New Video of the game (29/04/2012).
