Hahaha the insanity! Someone with 0 posts on the forum, meaning they created the account for this only, just sent me this in a PM:

Would something like this do the trick ?



Sorry for quality, pixel art on phone is not easy :D

And indeed, it would do the trick. I'll redraw it myself though. Thank you so much, stranger :D

btw this pink color looks a lot like white. and... it's pink!
is this color option more or less set in stone? how about some other choice in it's place, like gray?

The pink was a temporary thing, but then it kind of stuck. But you're right, I might need to think twice about it. Gray is no good though, as the backgrounds are grey.

I do! Xbox 360 controller thing. send it over!

Yes sir!

If you need any extra help, I've got 4 wired controllers and people to play it with.

Maybe... I'm always hesistant to sending the game to people I don't know, but your offer seems very tempting... However, James needs to check two things first: That it recieves Joystick input at all, and that it's possible to move the character with a joystick.

Have you thought about adding bigger mountains? Would be really badass to have a 7-tile monster sitting in the middle of the map, begging to be climbed 

Maybe you could have a crosshair in the shape of a cone in front of the player, that gets narrower over about 1-2 seconds as you keep aiming? So that if you do the snap-shoot you'll end up hitting the ceiling or the floor most of the time -

EDIT: Or one thing that might be interesting to try:
If you chrouch, the aim starts at 45 degrees upwards and over the time of 2 seconds becomes parallell with the ground. If you aim, it's the same but with the starting angle being 45 degrees downwards. That way you'd have a system where in the majority of the cases (the other player on the same level as you) the you'd have to aim for a little while before shooting, and in some cases you'd be able to pull of totally awesome angled shots at a jumping opponent if you got your timing right.

No idea what I am looking at, but I love this. With much love.

Me too. This rocks.


I've been living for a while in Accra, Ghana. People here are generally religious (which I am not) and today I was preached to extra much. When riding a taxi along the beach (the taxi driver had a bible the size of a shoe box in the car) I became interested in the relationship between this environment and the beliefs of the people living in it.

[Update 145]

Sorry, no. Not unless the game reaches a level of success where someone else re-codes the whole thing for xbox or something 

Update 145
We now have a fully functional, and not too ugly-looking, options menu. You can set advanced graphics on and off, you can set the music and sound volume, you can change the screen resolution, and you can change the input for all four players. The icons for the buttons are not done, they should look like something sensible and not right pointing arrows. Speaking of which, can someone come up with a good symbol for "Define keys/joystick buttons"?



Except from defining keys you can also define the joystick input, which has its own screen which was a horror to create:



Here you can not only define the buttons, but also test them, so as to not have to start a game everytime you try to find out which is button 14.

In theory we have a working 4-player game with customizable joystick support. In practise I have no idea what we have, as I'm far away from home and don't have a joystick or three friends to try it.

James, do you have a gamepad?

PLAYER 1
WASD, E, and Space

PLAYER 2
IJKL, U, and Right Shift

Dude, what do your hands even look like? Did you have octopi stitched on there? And... do you expect that one of the players will be left-handed and the other a rightie, or why do you flip the directions/buttons from one player to another? Did you select buttons in order to play each character with one hand!? 

Any sensible human being want to control the directions with their right hand, and have their left hand press two buttons that are next to each other. I propose to you the following control scheme:

Player 1: WASD - TAB - Q
Player 2: Arrows - N - M

Or if you can't do arrows: IJKL - T - Y

Other than that:

"I LIKE IT A LOT ITS AWESOME THE WAY THE DUDES DIE IS BAD ASS"

True, the animation is cool! Also like that it's a shooter where the shooting is more sparse, you don't just spam with bullets.

When I enter the *aiming* mode I want to be able to walk, slowly, as in one of your old gifs if I remember correctly. I also want the player to preserve his direction, so that if I started aiming when facing right, and press left while keeping up pressed, he walks backwards.

I like that the ammo is sparse, but maybe you could get at least two or three rounds per packet?

Looking forward to seeing what the environments will look like.

I really like your sound design! The bot doesn't seem to be the most clever though 

Pretty fly for two hours! I like the colors. Had some trouble understanding the controls, as the craft is only two pixels (of which one is outside the screen if you're stuck in the spawning corner) I didn't really understand that it was rotating. Then the AI wooped me. How does the AI work?

Still, at this point it's too shallow to be interesting for any amount of time - which is to be expected after two hours of development. Give it a few hours more!

Looks cool! The action looks like a lot of fun, I especially like the tower boss. Just a thought on the art: it appears to me as slightly strange that it's set in a happy mario-like world, and everyone has this grim expression on their faces. Maybe you could make the environments more gritty, if that's the style you're going for, or drop the frowns and give the characters more blank expressions?

This makes a lot of sense actually, it's like how an experience curve works in RPGs.

I guess it's a little bit like approaching the speed of light; put in a certain amount of energy, and you get to 50%. Put in as much energy again, and you get to 75%. Put in as much energy again, and you get to 87,5%. And give it as much again, you get to 93,75%. To actually get there, it takes an infinite effort

It's as if after so long of looking at something you begin staring at this huge grey wall.
And you can't see the flaws, and so you spend so much time just looking for what you should even be working on.

I've run into this problem as well. Luckily, there's a very simple solution for it - make a to-do list.

As you encounter things that are not finished, put them on the list. Small and big, my list has things like "move the button ten pixels to the right" next to "rewrite the collision engine". When you don't know what to do, go to the list and pick something you feel like doing.

Hehe well the tattoo stays where you put it, so I guess you're the commitment kind of guy.

When it comes to the way you live your life, this is obviously not at all my thing to get involved in as a random guy on the internet, but have you thought about changing your approach? Instead of living chaotically and on the verge of starvation, you could perhaps pick up a job. Granted, it will rob you of 8 productive hours every day. But a job provides you with two things, structure and food - and in the end it might be that getting up in the morning and not starving increases your productivity so much that your monthly output is greater compared to your current life style. Just give it a thought.

I feel the game has to be what I feel it needs to be, any less and I would feel like I let you all down.

Well, you probably know about the Allegory of the Cave - the perfect form of your game only exists in your head, and what you can create will always just be a shadow on the Cave wall. No matter how good you make it, you can only approximate the ideal. It might take twice as long to reach 99.5% of perfection than it takes to reach 98%, and you'll never reach 100% - ask Tarn Adams. So you might as well relax and not think about this too much.

I don't know about GM, but if you're just updating to a new version of the same software, maybe some code can be moved over straight? Also, it will of course be much quicker to write everything the second time. Just be sure to not get stuck in an infinite rewrite loop:

It's a difficult problem. I guess it comes down to what kind of person you are - if you are A: the type who likes a proper marriage to a project and can work on it for ever, or if you B: have new ideas all the time and the difficulty is finishing anything.

If you're an A, it might be worth it, because you want to create one game, and make it perfect, and you know that you are commited enough to continue. I've no idea what it looks like in an A's head, but I can imagine that they would be dissapointed to release something flawed, making it worth it to work even longer in order to get it right.

If you're a B, like me, it's under no circumstances worth it to restart! B comes up with four new ideas every day, it's finishing them that's difficult. So to the B ideas are not a valuable resource, but work is. Which makes it a bad bargain to trade away many hours of work in order to save an idea.

As I totally dig the style of your game, I'd prefer that you'd just wrap it up and finish already! 

- JLJac: Your not going to be able place things in the world. An idea in the game is that you have no physical presence in the world, that's a reason why you view the world in silhouette.

Didn't mean "you" the player, but "you" the developer. What I'm fishing for is whether you're going to make an engine which supports different machine parts that can be built into bigger machines, or if you're going to code every puzzle from scratch.

I actually think this looks a lot better in the blown up version, it looks more organic. What size are you planning to display it?

Also it looks to me like it's a slight top down perspective rather than a straight front view, is that correct?

This looks cool! Will you create machines that have certain interactions, and can be placed on a grid in some kind of level editor to create bigger machines, or will you script every bigger machine as a separate scenario?