EmperorIng360's Forum Posts

  • Most independent devs have no money.

    Thus, the cheapest way to make graphics at little time and effort spent is pixel-graphics. Especially when MS Paint is free.

    There, that's the reason.

    Does most of it suck? Yes.

    To see good pixel art, look at some arcade games from the 80s and 90s - Like Irem's X-Multiply, or Capcom's Strider Hiryu. Or the obvious poster-child of sprite games, Metal Slug (also check out In the Hunt! Another beautiful- scratch that, ASTOUNDINGLY beautiful sprite game).

    I for one like 2D art better than 3D models, because as mentioned, it's a lot easier to see and enjoy stylistic 2D art than it is to be fully immersed in a 3D world.

    There are exceptions, but aesthetic style is important. It's a lot easier to be drawn in to Jet Grind Radio's colorful cartoony world than something like Black Ops, because it's too easy to notice when things are just uncanny.

  • I suppose i would have a Variable like "Alignment" with 1 being Up/down, and 2 being Left/Right. Cars with Value=1 could only move on the grid up and down, and =2 would only be left-right. You could probably use offset or checking nearest grid area as far as placement goes.

    There are tutorials for grid movement floating around the forums, which would be a good place to go for actual grid movement.

    As for collisions, I would try to have some sort of event set up that checks

    A) the alignment of your car

    B) whether or not there is a car immediately a square above or ahead of you

    and if the condition is true, disable the car from moving in that direction.

    Or alternatively, you can have the car be able to move IF and ONLY IF there is not car on the grid square directly in front of it.

    This might over-complicate things in terms of numbers, but you can even have each grid-square be its own sprite, and have a switch 1, or 0. If a car overlaps said grid, then you can have it so that cars cannot go onto any grid square that has been switched on (that is, it has another car on that spot).

    Just some thoughts.

  • These are pretty sweet. I especially like O'Skool!

    Good job, Tulamide!

  • dl.dropbox.com/u/29072735/labgame.cap

    The game is coming along fairly nicely - the next major thing will be to work on score and difficulty increases, which are definitely big tasks!

    THE PROBLEM:

    My event sheet 'Robot' is set up thus:

    When a player activates the 'Pod' the Robots will turn to animation "Angry" and have their timer set to random(4). The timer will count down every 500 milliseconds and at 0, the Robot fires a bullet.

    The bullet's speed is set to private('Speed').

    If the bullet's x is less than player.x, its angle is set to 0.

    If greater, then 180.

    In the cap itself, when the "Angry" animation is trigger, most of the robots fire bullets that stay in place and do not move. I am not sure what is causing this bug, though I suspect it might something to do with the timer -I didn't use clamp for the timer, because every fiddling around resulted in a massive unbroken stream of bullets that looked cool but had no place in the game : p

    It might be some form of syntax error, as well. Any advice would be appreciated!

    ---

    On a not-so minor note, I have consulted Ashley's method for keeping the same aspect ratio for full-screen games, and it doesn't seem to work for games without any scrolling.

    In the event sheet "Fullscreen" event 2 is where things seem to be mucking up.

    I set the resolution to the DisplayWidth x DisplayHeight, and set a global variable "czoom" to DisplayHeight, and then set System Zoom to "czoom * 100"

    In game, however, it shows the correct resolution, but only a small fraction of the playing-field - the same size as the original window size, 320x240. This is obviously frustrating because I can't quite figure out where I went wrong.

    Fullscreen at this point is not a major issue, because i would like to get the game working before cosmetics come in, but it would be nice to know where I went wrong!

    Thanks in advance,

    Emperor Ing

  • Real programming? REAL programming?! <img src="smileys/smiley16.gif" border="0" align="middle">

    It's funny you say that because I'm testing the waters of the great fearsome assembly ocean at this moment in time.

  • Ha ha ha, the "discount" was roughly over a year ago when it was still about $40 for a personal license.

    I told myself at the time I should probably get one, but I never did. ;.;

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  • Also, even though they are old files, check out deadeye's Platform School, since it deals directly with your issue. I haven't checked the update made by someone else, but I bet you they did as well.

  • imo, some of the best shooters were made in the 1990s. Mainly by Taito and Irem!

    2000s, the best around are in my opinion:

    Mars Matrix (Takumi)

    Giga Wing 2 (Takumi)

    Psyvariar (Success)

    Border Down (G.REV)

    Under Defeat (G.REV)

    Gradius V (Treasure, G.REV)

    Mushihimesama [Futari 1.5 Black Label] (CAVE)

    It's really the age of the bullet hell. When I think about developing and designing a shooter (and I often do - it's just getting an array to work that eludes me! I need to do more tutorials) it's not that I necessarily play these games looking for bullet patterns etc. But rather I look at how they are designed and how their levels work, how their weapons work, and how tight they are overall. E.G. Mars Matrix is a very tightly-designed, fun game.

    Even if you make a shooter based off of a more simple template like the (rightly-praised) Twin Cobra, you just have to make sure it plays tight - that often means things like no inertia for your player character (inertia is the worst thing you can have in a shooter), or enemies that can point-blank fire at you (easy to prevent with Construct's evaluate by distance actions), and so on.

  • The guy gets points from me by saying we should play Taito and IREM games.

    The two made some of the greatest games of all time. What are you people waiting for?

  • dl.dropbox.com/u/29072735/forcedscrollplat_test.cap

    Here is an example of auto-scrolling. It's horizontal, but here's what you do.

    Look in the Event Sheet "Camera", and see how the auto-scroll is set up.

    Basically, you have a private variable "ScrollSpeed", and have the System scroll to Y + global(ScrollSpeed)*timedelta.

    So basically switch where it says from ScrollX to ScrollY and it should work.

  • I'm sorry; I was going off of my knowledge in Construct Classic, which has that action.

    Looking through my C2r92, it doesn't have an action "Exit Application"

    Because, now that I think of it, a Construct 2 game is not an application - it's a browser-based type of thing.

    So I don't quite know how you could 'exit' a browser-based game.

    You could have an event that takes your game back to the main menu or title screen layout, though, with the system action "Go to Layout."

    So I'm sorry for that.

  • For quitting:

    On AnyKey pressed:

    System: Exit Application

    That's the basic gist of it.

    Making a working pause button is trickier because you have to set up a time scale, and have your events correspond with said time scale, to pause it. I would recommend reading up a lot on the delta-time stuff to get a better grasp of what you want to do.

    Because to pause a game, you need to set the time-scale of the game to 0 (time-scale at runtime is at 1.0). You just need to make sure that the rest of the game's objects and events are running on that time-scale, which is a process I am not 100% sure how to accomplish.

    Of course, I might be speaking of outdated knowledge since I haven't picked up the latest version of C2 for a few months. I don't think any magical pause plugin has been created, though.

  • Reminds me a lot of Sega's "Typing of the Dead"

    <img src="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m61ky17wqt1rodbx4o2_1280.jpg" border="0" />

    But hey, a good idea is a good idea regardless!

    Note:

    There is no indicator of how to get back to the main menu when you go to the "How to Play" section. I had to refresh the page to play the game. Might be something to think of fixing or at least add a text prompt "Press X to get back to menu" or something of the sort.

  • Looks like you just did, ha ha.

  • The best thing, I think, would be to play a whole lot of arcade or arcade-style games, and see how they work, see what makes them fun (or not), and go from there. With MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator), the possibilities are endless, and an entire generation of gaming can rest in your laptop with no real effort.

    Remember that the thing with shooters is that the longest shooters out there are from this generation and previous, and even then they are only forty minutes to an hour long. The more refined your game is (see CAVE's latest arcade ports, such as the now very-cheap Shin Akai Katana and their upcoming DoDonPachi SaiDaiOuJou on the 360) the shorter it will be - anywhere between 20 and 30 minutes.

    Psikyo's Dragon Blaze is only 15 minutes long, but hot damn is it some of the most glorious fifteen minutes of gaming out there!

    When you are making an arcade style game, it needs to have the right type of pace. Notice in all the examples you've listed, things are always clipping along nicely. There are quiet moments here and there to catch your breath, but there's no "filler" or if there is it lasts at best 2-3 seconds and that's once a level. Modern game design seems to dictate that you need lots of hours of content in a single play to have a meaningful game (and often this content is boring padding), but the old shooters are about short play times, with lots of replay value - competing for score is addicting.

    Split games are a mixed bag. In a shooter sense, the NES game Guardian Legend is a pretty cool hybrid of zelda-adventure and shmup. You have Wonder Boy III on the arcades and Genesis that is a cute, fun platformer with annoying and frustrating levels. If you're going to do a hybrid, make sure they both work damn well, and that they compliment one another.

    As for weapons, in an arcade-style game, the player-character is everything. The entire game must be designed around how the player-character moves, reacts, and fights. So the player and weapons need to be designed first, often. An overabundance of weapons can complicate things really fast. Originally the developers of R-Type were going to have your Force Pod attach to the top and bottom of your ship as well, but that made things far too difficult. A well-crafted simple system is better than a mediocre system bustling with features.

    As for level length, my thoughts about game length in general should apply. Basically, you don't want to bore the player with long stretches of un-fun or un-challenging segments. A minute shooting asteroids slowly drifting towards is a sure-fire way to lose the interest of a player.

    Again, this is where playing some of the classics and making some observations is handy. In the Taito masterpiece RayForce (Arcade, Saturn, PS2 in Taito Legends 2) each level lasts about four to five minutes, but a lot is going on, and the later levels are longer and more challenging. In a game like Strikers 1945 by Psikyo, a level can just be a few waves of enemies before a boss encounter. Don't feel too tied down by level lengths - a good game that takes 10 minutes to beat is worth a whole lot more than a boring, meandering 10 hour game.

    Some recommendations:

    • Anything mentioned in the above post
    • Darius Gaiden (TAITO)
    • Twin Cobra (TOAPLAN)
    • Batsugun (TOAPLAN)
    • Radiant Silvergun (Treasure)
    • Salamander/Life Force (Konami)