First person Educational Multiplayer Hidden object Light game about Porn with Fractal art and a Funk soundtrack

That's a really complicated way of saying "let's play Find the Sausage!"

Vertical scrolling Hidden object game about Zombies and Business with Cubist art and a Eclectic soundtrack

Zombies & Co.

Text based Relaxing Board game about Super Heroes with a Reggae soundtrack

City of Stoners (a la City of Heroes)

Horizontal scrolling Arcade JRPG game about Cowboys with Shitty Flat-shaded art and a Rock soundtrack

What if Squaresoft made Sunset Riders?

Text based Visual Novel game about Doctors and Porn with a Pop soundtrack

I swear, someone must have made this already.

First person Platformer Goal-less game about Dinosaurs and Cowboys with Glowing Programmer art and a Bluegrass soundtrack

This actually might be marketable, in the vein of Velociraptor Safari.

Text based Stealth Beat 'em up game about Sex and Girls with a Pop soundtrack

(Violent) Rape simulator!

Audio only Stealth Strategy Perspective game about Bears with a Hiphop soundtrack

This might actually be kinda fun.

FMV Action game about Vikings, Love and Money with Retro Ascii art and a Metal soundtrack

Also sounds like someone's made it already...

I think you underestimate the vast emptiness of space. For a good real-world example, look at probe missions through the asteroid belt. It's very unlikely you'd hit anything unless you are trying to very precisely jump within a few kilometers of a location where there might be stuff in the way, like a very busy space station, or the low orbit of a future Earth which is surrounded by a cloud of space junk. Of course, if you were wanting to come very close to a planet (remember, Earth's diameter is about 12,600km, so in space terms I mean REALLY close), you'd just need to make sure you didn't overshoot and go /through/ the planet.

I'm beginning to go outside my knowledge here, but I'm betting that the ecliptic planes of other solar systems are never going to be very closely lined up to ours, meaning you wouldn't even have to worry too much about a planet you want to jump to being behind a star (and thus would result in your death) from your current vantage point. It's technically possible you could hit something in the Oort cloud (or similar cloud surrounding other systems) or any other random thing in between you and your target, but it would probably be very very extremely unlikely.

Now, it's very true that if you calculate just a millionth of a minute of a degree off, you wind up millions of kilometers (if not more) from your destination. If you have a limited number of jumps / fuel supply and might not be able to jump again after you make the jump, then it means you could maroon yourself unless you were spot-on with the trajectory.

Of course, none of this should have bearing in a game about hyperspace, as fun trumps reality (particularly in space games), unless you think "if you aren't very accurate, you overshoot by a longshot and you're screwed" would be a good game rule.

I made some terrain I kinda like:


Shot at 2009-04-18

Unfortunately, it's not procedurally generated. I still need to make the sea be a proper sea (flat) and make the terrain collidable, as well as add the ability to place structures on the ground. Then, after implementing some very dumb AI for flak turrets, I could make the game "playable" insofar as air strikes are concerned.

Very, very cool game, I love the concept. I was frustrated at first because there are no instructions

First of all, thanks a ton! I'm amazed people have had so much fun with it.

Second of all, the instructions are in a file called "sbc-409a_manual", but it seems to be missing from the latest build. I blame the fact that I made the build at work so I probably just overlooked that. There are very simple ways to automatically include those files as part of the build process, and after all these mishaps I'm actually going to go ahead and add the necessary commands to the build script.

You can get the manual here:

You can switch modes with the middle mouse button. The fact that there are three active buttons on the mouse is because I sort of wanted the game to be mouse-only, but I kept the WASD controls because piloting with the mouse is currently a hassle, even more than manual rotation is.

Still, that real challenge underneath the frustration made me come back and read through the thread and keep trying. Once you know how to play, it's an awesome juggling act of keeping track of target distances, which targets you've fired on yet, and switching between offense and defense. If it weren't for the game-end bugs I'd be playing this non-stop. Unfortunately as of the latest (1.2), it still crashes after trying to start a second game from the main menu. There's also a minor bug where pressing escape at the game over screen closes the program; I assume this is because the key press gets repeated at the main menu if I don't tap the key too slowly. Not that I can start a new game anyway, but if you fix the one it would be nice to fix the other.  Hand Thumbs Up Left

I didn't know anyone would actually like the juggling act it turned out to be! It ends up being sort of pointless to turn, I think in a future version I'll try to put in code that will force you to point at the target to achieve a missile lock.

The bug has to do with the engine not being able to properly clean up after itself when ending the game scene. I thought my "engine improvements" would solve this, because in my other game using the same engine it seems to work pretty well, but there's something else afoot, and it will be hard to figure out because I just get a crash and no error message.

Although I don't know if left handed people actually use their left (rather than their right) hand for the mouse?

A friend of mine keeps the mouse on the left side of the keyboard, but apparently keeps the standard mouse button configuration, so LMB is actually "RMB" in terms of it being the "secondary" mouse button.

I figure he doesn't mess with the button orientation because it would then be really hard to use anyone else's computer without going in and messing with the configuration. It's pretty easy to scoot the keyboard over to the right a little and put the mouse on the left side, though.

The ship shudders as an explosion flashes outside the window.

HAN: Here's where the fun begins!

BEN: How long before you can make the jump to light speed?

HAN: It'll take a few moments to get the coordinates from the
navi-computer.

The ship begins to rock violently as lasers hit it.

LUKE: Are you kidding? At the rate they're gaining...

HAN: Traveling through hyperspace isn't like dusting crops, boy!
Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or
bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick,
wouldn't it?

My kneejerk reaction is "get rid of levels", I think they really ruin MMOs or any form of multiplayer RPG.

Mikademus' idea of making high and low level players be in a symbotic relationship sounds pretty decent, but you'd also need to make all-low-level or all-high-level groups viable. Mentoring systems, according to some friends that play City of Heroes, seem to work out pretty well. Basically, a higher-level player can temporarily raise a lower-level player's level and/or abilities so long as they are grouping together (or maybe just while in a dungeon, I dunno exactly). You could try tweaking this system until it works out as intended.

2. Sound design was a big boring slog. And still I'm not happy with a lot of the sounds. Semi-realism kind of sucks that way. Next game I won't do something that can't use sfxr for all sound.

I agree that the sound effects were actually pretty fitting. The ridiculousness of the game is well complemented by the ridiculous sound effects.

5. Minimal Tigs updates. Some more sharing, and thus feedback might have saved me one or two mid-project existential crises.

I think a lot of people had those "existential crises". I know I'm not really happy with my game because of its core gamplay, as I mention in my post-mortem, but I feel a little better when I realize it was successful as an experiment. It's good to get feedback to alleviate your concerns, and in reality, what you have been debugging for hours is probably a lot more fun for a newcomer than you'd think.

I think the posting frequency really depends on your personality, I've noticed several projects that showed up out of nowhere, or started a thread but didn't make another post until the game was finished. You might notice I'm the sort of person that likes to release often, not just because of technical issues, to get feedback and such.

Will, you've usually gotten it to run, so now I'm particularly concerned.

I will try to make a build on my work machine (WinXP) today during lunch and publish a new build. I might have the time to merge a few engine improvements in as well.

edit: Posted. Please try it out!

There's always the Lostgarden art packs, but they are sort of restrained in terms of their domain.

Interesting idea, and very promising results. I would have never thought of bump-mapping a sprite, it's a cool idea and I'm sure in action it looks awesome.

You have a very industrious attitude and I notice you learned pyglet in a short amount of time. I'm sure anything you make is going to turn out great.

Working title.



Aircraft are good to go thanks to my cockpit compo engine (sans AI and flight model!), just need to put together terrain for a fun minimal release.

You can just use 7zip, actually. It might even have a package that requires zero install.

Anyways, what precisely do you mean by "full tests"? Unit tests, or just booting up the code and running through the game/app/whatever?

A bit off-topic, but it's interesting to see someone make a game in D. I checked it out several years ago but didn't get very far struggling with getting SDL to work with it. How did it treat you in comparison to C++ or Java?

Panda3D does something similar to this, but it's more intended as a sequential/parallel sequence of scenegraph actions, rather than more generic Model ones.

This, along with the Observer model (i.e. frequent use of game events to get many unrelated components to do something at the same time) and a few other things are really the cornerstone of flexible game engine code. It's sad to see there is no engine or library about that addresses merely these concerns and lets you plug it into whatever other code you want to use it with.

Hmm...

Honestly, Super Joe is a lot like a more edgy Pencerkoff. That, and he's vehemently anti-commie, as opposed to being vehemently pro-commie.

Wow, thanks for all the detail! It's cool to see a play-by-play of all the visual effects used. I might go back and add some details like that if I feel any of it is interesting.

I don't mean to degrade any of your accomplishments, but I had to agree it felt like a really well-polished game where the gameplay was overlooked.

I hate to make a comment that sort of invites "RTFM!", but I'm wondering if anyone's had better experiences getting a central repository to work with SFTP and/or HTTP. I remember trying out hg awhile ago, wanting to use it in the same way as I do bzr, and there was a hangup about this.

I'll take another look, but I think it can do SFTP but not HTTP. This means that I can host my own internal repos fine, but it is not possible to host them publicly without extra shenanigans / a daemon / something like that. With bzr, you can post your repo to some of your webspace and voila, you now have a copy of your repo that the public can readily copy and which you can pretty easily commit to, all without the need for a shell account, daemons, or anything like that.

Hmm... it's probably the 64-bit thing... Can you try removing the msvc dlls i have included, since you have the runtime dist installed probably?

I will try this out when I get home. It works fine here at work, perhaps because I'm running on 32 bit.

I'm going to try out the same strategy for the people still having issues with my own game, so if it all works out, I owe you some thanks.

update: tried to simply remove all of the msvc* DLLs, but it didn't help :/

I hate to refer to famous quotes, because it's trendy and superficial, but:

I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
    Mark Twain

pretty much says everything.

Did some minor adjustments, I will post a new build as soon as it finishes uploading. I have replaced the missile tracking algorithm with a much stupider one (go straight towards the target, do not attempt an intercept path) and it seems to actually work better in tests where I let the enemies gain some speed while I flanked them (moving at heading 90 while they were at about 180).

In the targetting screen, BEARING is your bearing towards the target, HEADING is the actual heading that target is taking. This adjustment made me realize that the "steering" (if you look in the source you know I'm not actually steering) mechanism the ships and missiles share cause them to spin. I've replaced it with an alternative, and missiles have since been flying straight and true at all times.