[Update: FINISHED]

Update: FINISHED

Download (20 KB)

I'd like to think this game really immerses the player in a Lovecraftian nightmare of horror from whence there is no escape.  It's truly horrible.  I mean really, it's just bad.  omg it's so bad.  please don't play it.  don't play it.  play it

Wow the visuals are incredible! I tend to agree with the general assessment of the sounds although they are sufficent,. (if you ever want sounds for another project I would be glad to contribute waves or procedural synth )
The game play is good,. it is almost ambiant,. and re-active to the player,. i.e. if you don't try real hard time just runs out and the game ends,. and if you do well the game goes on and gets progressivly more difficult/hectic.  One thing that I did not like was the spores escaping through the walls, while I keep hitting them.  I did think that the gamespace could have larger as the forward movement looks so good with the particle 'soup'.  Great effort for sure!

Question about how it was made,. did you use your Gaia system and Chaos Core Engine? 

Thanks, glad you liked it.

Fundamentally, parts of my engine are still partially based on the tech that I wrote in school (the "Chaos Core" engine).  After I graduated, I made a big long list of all the roadblocks that made developing apps in my engine difficult, then I pretty much rewrote the whole thing from scratch, taking these aspects into consideration.  It's way better than it was before, but I'm still not entirely happy with it, so I'll probably do another engine pass before I start working on any new game projects.  Gotta love those infinite-time tasks.   

I submitted Arc Aether Anomalies.  I'm keeping my fingers crossed for the Excellence in Visual Art category since Arc is a glorified graphics demo >_<

Definitely looks like there's a lot of quality stuff this year.  Can't wait to see how it goes.

374!

My only complaint is that I had trouble distinguishing my guy and the crosshair from the baddies once the screen got cluttered.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the cool effect is... radial blur with red channel shifting away from the center, and film grain. Right?

Yep, more or less.  There's also some bloom, which I'm multiplying with a vignette filter to keep the corners of the scene a little darker.  The "radial blur" is my attempt at simulating chromatic aberration, the separation of light as it passes through a lens.  I'm doing this by sampling multiple points outward from the center of the screen and weighting the components of each sample so that red gets shifted the most, green a little less, and blue the least, with some amount of blending throughout so that it's not just three distinct red, green, and blue samples.

Wow, this game's beautiful! You should really upload a gameplay vid for poor suckers like me who have computers unable to run this game at more than 3 fps 

Oh, thanks for the reminder, I meant to link this in the original post:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rGqRsiRME4A

I love the physics on the debris, especially using the grenade launcher on the stacks of boxes in the weapons training.  Got a little bit of slowdown there, but otherwise, it was totally smooth.  Controls are intuitive and movement feels pretty good.  Good variety of weapons.  Only problem I had was trying to jump while walking down a slope, since you become airborne as opposed to sticking to the slope.

[Download (8.02 MB):]

Download (8.02 MB):
http://www.j-kyle.com/arc/Anomalies_Install_2008-10-31.exe

Features:

• Shoot things and blow them up!!
• Grab pickups and get a huge score multiplier!!
• 3 whole D's of graphics and gameplay!!
• Online leaderboards what are online!!
• Xbox 360 gamepad support!!
• An unsolicited overabundance of exclamation marks!!

Screenies:












For the curious, my high score is currently 18,552,310.  Game on, gentlemen!

Bumping this thread one last time to say, "Stick a fork in me; I'm done!"

Arc Aether Anomalies is complete.  The final build is available here:
http://www.j-kyle.com/arc/Anomalies_Install_2008-10-25.exe

• Added "sticky" aim assist (optional, enabled by default)
• Added non-linear scaling for Xbox 360 analog stick axes
• Increased the gravity on pickup cells so they are much easier to collect
• Bug fixes to leaderboard system
• Various other tweaks and fixes what I've forgotten

As I mentioned previously, I'm interested in developing a longer, slower-paced exploration/discovery game with this visual style at some point, but that will be a separate game.  My goal with this one was to aim for something relatively small-scale that I knew I would be able to finish in a reasonable length of time (about nine months, as it turns out).  It's brought to light some interesting revelations about my engine, and I'm looking forward to taking some time now to do another engine pass and then start working on the tech for something larger-scale.

Guess I'll mosey on over to them Announcements forums now....

Thanks Kyle

Do you have a link to that game? I would like to play it!

http://www.j-kyle.com/knights_info.html

It's pretty prototype-ish.  It was a student project with a strict three month timeline, so I has to cut some features like AI for single player (it's hotseat multi only).  Also I blatantly stole the exploding livestock and holy hand grenade from Worms 2.    But I guess they stole it from Monty Python, so it's cool.

Also apparently some of the screenshots got borked when I moved my website content to a new server and I didn't even notice it until now.  Whoops!

It's like that episode of Futurama where they got a box containing the universe.  And then Fry sat on it.  It's like that.  Except more horrible.

Through the magic science of recursion!

[- 169 What hatches from primordial egg. -]

- 169 What hatches from primordial egg. -

- a computer Game by the gentleman Jonathan Kyle Pittman -
- based upon that most commonplace of Books by Howard Philips Lovecraft -
- being a grim and cautionary Tale of Madness and the Macabre -

This is an olde timey text adventure in which you find yourself burdened with the care of the primordial egg what birthed your own universe.  But when the egg begins to hatch, who can say what horrors it might bestow on your fragile human mind?

Update: FINISHED

Download (20 KB)

I'd like to think this game really immerses the player in a Lovecraftian nightmare of horror from whence there is no escape.  It's truly horrible.  I mean really, it's just bad.  omg it's so bad.  please don't play it.  don't play it.  play it

Great tutorial.  I had to solve a lot of these same problems a few years back when I was working on a Worms-like game.  I used a different method for generating the terrain, though.  I created a 2D Perlin Noise image and used a threshold value to set which pixels were solid and non-solid.  It gave me some pretty interesting organic shapes, although in retrospect, I probably should have done a second pass to clean up rough edges and small holes/islands.

New build is available here: http://www.j-kyle.com/arc/Anomalies_Install_2008-10-14.exe.  I've updated the first post with this info as well.

The biggest change here is the addition of online leaderboards, which I felt was essential for a score-based game like this.  Beyond that, there are a number of general performance improvements, slightly more responsive controls, and a functional Controls menu with settings for mouse speed, look invert, and a handful of other options.