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[v21]

Oh goodness! I seem to have been working on this forever. But here it is, naked and quivering before the world. Do your worst!

Anyway: Fight the ghosts of those that have come before by means of moving in two dimensions and firing missiles. The fiercer you fight, the harder it shall be for those that come after. How much of the past can you cope with at once before you are overwhelmed?

http://www.nottheinternet.com/hell

(You'll need the Unity web player to run it. It's a nice webplayer, and it installs cleanly and usually without even a browser restart. And there are tons of other games made in it worth playing. Yes, I know I could have done this in Flash, that's not the point. Play the damn game. Oh, and then criticise it for me here? Thank you, indie gaming community. You're the tops!)

EDIT: Updates update updates: now has a website, the database has been reset, the difficulty ramping was tweaked one way then the other, the weapons were (hopefully) balanced, the music has changed... etc etc.

[allen]

6 enemies was pretty impossible, because i picked up the stupid power-up that shoots vertically (which over-rode my previous power-up of shooting horizontal) on accident 

[v21]

Well, I'm not going to put in a "Are you sure? Y/N" dialog in. But I have made it so that the items take half a second to become active. Which means if you're barrelling towards a ship while firing, you shouldn't pick up the power-up before you've seen it. Having to carefully pick round dud power-ups when you've got a good one seems fair, though. There should be some risk...

I've also made the power-ups more useful, but increasing your maximum health to 200. This also has meant the colours have changed. The enemy ships go yellow, now. I am not sure what I think about this.

[EDIT: More changes! the pace of the game is now: slower. This should have the effect of making it take longer to die. Also, it scales back further when you continue. I am pondering doing something to make the power-ups more prevalent.]

[PsySal]

Oh goodness! I seem to have been working on this forever. But here it is, naked and quivering before the world. Do your worst!

I haven't played the game, but this is a fabulous attitude, hehehe... =)

[William Broom]

It's a really cool game! I got 10 enemies

But - I picked up a lot of powerups and... none of them seemed to do anything. The only one that had any effect was the horizontal shooting one, which I found to be extremely powerful, so I never picked up anything else for a long time.

[looseleaf]

So the guy I'm fighting is actually a recording - a recording of a fight against a recording of a fight, all the way back to the beginning of time?

So how come this guy keeps dodging my attacks? 

[v21]

Yet more pacing and balance changes! Also UI tweaking.

William Broom: The powerups also give you health, which is now indicated with a +10 underneath. I hope this clarifies things! I probably should have thought to add some visual indication of new added functionality. But this is what you guys, my willing guinea pigs are for, I guess.

I have gimped the sideways firer: it seemed too powerful. But the problem is, I gimped it by slowing down it's rate of fire. I guess I shall have to scrap the database, just for fairness sakes. And now every time you increase the number of enemies you're battling, you gain a random extra powerup, in order to spread the alt weapons around a bit more (and give you confidence to choose to revert to a boring weapon in exchange for a big pile of health). But: it might just be the way the afternoon is dragging on, a certain greyness in the light, but I'm worried the game kinda plateaus between 5 and 15 enemies. But I feel powerless to judge this on my own: what do you think?

I also took out the music, for now. I want to put Withered Hand's No Cigarettes and Harvey Danger's Little Round Mirrors on as the soundtrack, and maybe a third song I haven't thought of yet. But before I do, I will have to ask the people who made these songs about licensing them. For no money? We shall see how that goes goes. In any case, if you want the final experience, play these songs in the background:

http://songbytoad.com/2009/06/withered-hand-you-are-not-alone/
http://www.harveydanger.com/downloads/


Oh, and looseleaf: yes. All the way back to when I was beta testing and wiggled from side to side firing. From that small start... The guy keeps dodging your attacks because people are bastards. What was the name? Curse it just before you go to bed tonight. It'll make you feel better.

[SteGriff]

I got 17 of 'em

Pretty neat little game. Reminds me, in concept, of that game where you use other people's deaths to complete a platformer.

Also, of the AI mode in R-Type Final. I'm guessing it remembers not the exact pattern, but the general behaviour you applied to the battle? ie Aggressive/Defensive

[Eclipse]

i think Kenta Cho did a shump with this identical concept, still this one looks nice


edit: tried, it doesn't work, i can't see enemies at all, i destroyed the first then nothing more, restarted the game, same thing from the start... how is it supposed to work?

edit2: also the sound stopped to work, so i suppose it's a giant bug somewhere

edit3: finally something spawns but they just stand still... got like 20 ghosts then i went away bored, are those ships replicas of other people ones?

[v21]

Eclipse: Odd, I haven't seen that so far. And haven't seen it just checking it now. Sorry about that!

(updates) Oh, and odder even still.

The ones standing still can be players who spawned but didn't move at the start: but as far as I've seen there's only one or two of them in the database. Do they all spawn in the same place, with the same names? If so, then that's people making the game easy. If not: then that's code brokenness.

What OS are you using? What browser? What's your connection like? Does http://nottheinternet.com/hell/return_xml.php return 404 or does it forward you to a page of (most likely broken and in any case incomprehensible) XML? Do you get the "LOADING GHOSTS" message at all?

As for Kenta Cho: I like his work, but when I came up with the idea (in a particularly anaemic shower, as it happens) I vowed not to go hunting too hard to see if anyone else had come up with the same concept. Now it's done, it's safe to ask: Don't suppose you can remember the name? I am curious to play it.

SteGriff: Do you mean my game or R-Type Final? Mine just records the exact movements as a (as you can see above) huge XML file. And: thank you.

[Noyb]

The Kenta Cho one: http://www.indiegames.com/blog/2009/03/browser_game_pick_defeatme_ken.html

It's a similar concept. While in yours you fight the ghosts of others, the Kenta Cho one has you fight the ghosts of each of your past rounds.

Might be cool to up the player name length and have a meta-game about what ghost is the most effective at killing the player.

Pretty fun, although the difficulty curve is really shallow.

[allen]

Ya know, I had a weird feeling that I played a similar game like that but I wrote it off as Deja Vu.  But this is a more interesting game anyway.

Anyways, I didn't encounter the bugs Eclipse encountered just now. But I did have another one. For some reason the beginning ghost started off shooting up instead of at me, it was really weird. Then I refreshed and he would not move from the bottom of the screen. I loaded up Firefox (was using Chrome) and the problem did not occur. I'll try clearing my cache in Chrome and see if that fixes it. Have no clue if it will but it's worth a shot.

[Eclipse]

I'm using the latest version of Opera, just retried and the loading ghosts thing is showed but the ghosts stand still without shooting

[jimmykane]

It'd be useful if people could report the names of any "rogue" ships.
Hey v21, you should build 'mark this ship as busted' functionality into the game, and it could flag that one for removal. Then you can check for yourself if it's actually a bad ship or not.

Sad to see that my annoying-as-hell music was taken out. Good luck with licensing your new music!

[allen]

Have you tried reinstalling the Unity Web Player? Try all browsers and see if it's the problem.

anyways, I can't get past 6 ghosts because I always pick up a stupid vertical bullet power up which replaces the superior double-sided horizontal one.. Grrrrrr.