Planning, then testing.

Followed by more planning, and retesting.

I've played enough indie games by developers who decided to just sort of throw things together, and it's not fun in the least. Bloated levels, levels with nonsensical progression, levels that are obviously debug test-room levels, etc. etc. They're all sh*t.

Start making the best, hardest stage you can think of, and start building levels around that.

Level design without the "design" is just pointless.

Since Kickstarter has grown like a bubble, it's natural that many of its projects are liable to burst.

In my experience it's always best to go in with a contract. Saying what the work is, what the agreed rate is (don't be afraid of selling yourself too highly), and that both sides agree to own up. If any complications occur, what part of the contract is still binding, etc.

Sign it, scan it, send it over, get a double-signed copy. Boom, you have a working contract.

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. ;.;

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?