TIGSource Forums

Disclaimer: This is my first videogame since high school (8 years), so be gentle.

I don't really have a title yet... for now I am calling the game 'The Last Colonists', but that sounds way too serious.

It is a shmup/music game.  I wanted to make a game where the user had direct control over the music, rather than the 'enhanced audience member' role that the player usually gets in music games (GH, AudioSurf, Rock Band .. etc).  I am kind of achieving that with this game, but the music is only just started.  There will be much more of it in the final version.

The generative elements are the expected ones.  The size of the stages and the enemies that come at you are PG.  Of course, the gameplay is synced with the music, so the music is also PG, but it's also user-controlled ... that's the kind of unique thing here.

Also, I know next to nothing about graphics programming, so please forgive the line graphics.

Oh, and it's a java browser game (OH NOES!! RUN FOR THE HILLS!!!!)

http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/lastcolonists/ (http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/lastcolonists/)

I'd love to get some feedback, but I'm not sure how much more I can do before the deadline.  I may add one more tangential feature, like scoreboards or co-op multiplayer ... or maybe a cell phone version (j2me ftw), but I am not sure that I will have time.

EDIT:
There are only 3 stages.  It can be beaten in about 10 minutes.

EDIT:
Screenshots
(http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/images/lc01.jpg)
(http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/images/lc02.jpg)

Interesting, although it's more a prototype at the moment.
I would have liked to have more musical input than just the tempo beat. Maybe more weapons and/or protective elements that would have alternate sounds.
I haven't played all the latest music based games or shmups, so I don't know if it's really new but I like this concept.

I played the demo for a few minutes. I haven't played too many music-based games either, but I really like how each enemy adds its own part to the music.

I feel like the ship should have some inertia, but that may be from playing Asteroids too much. :)

Alas, you used that f*cking WASD... (http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=1698.msg40329#msg40329)

(didn't pay attention the first time because I didn't move. BTW moving doesn't seem to be very useful in that game anyway)

Fun! I felt kinda bad killing the enemies since they made the soundscape more interesting. I agree that new music for each level would justify the sudden decrease in musical complexity at the start of each stage. Maybe you could increase the firing speed/tempo at the least.

Right, I'm going to try and increase the tempo.  One problem with that is that I can only use tempos that divide evenly to an integer number of milliseconds per quarter beat.  This is due to the fact that most timing classes use milliseconds as their base.  Obviously, there are workarounds, but I don't really have time to implement them.

And good idea about having each of the pickups start different sounds.  I think that I meant to do that originally, but just forgot.


Wow.  I didn't realize that people used non-qwerty keyboards that often.  I will put in numpad and arrow-key controls.

Moving basically isn't useful until the colonists die, at which point you can still play on to the end, you just get a different ending.

People who live in non-English-speaking countries use non-querty keyboards all the time. I remember French people complaining about shooters because their 'Z' key isn't in the bottom-left like ours is.

This game is rather cool. Everything is nice synched and the minimalistic effects are fitting.

But I hope you will polish the music matching a little more. If the bass suddenly stops, it is kinda awkward. Maybe add a little release (or reverb) or something. Would be awesome :)

JUST ADDED:
-arrow key controls
-inertia on the fighter
-a few more enemies
-colonists now follow you around the screen

ADDED:
-new music on each stage
-loading screen for each stage
-fixed up the graphics a bit

Could someone give me some feedback on the difficulty level?  I want to make sure that everyone reaches stage 2, but it's still pretty tough to get through stage 3.  Since that's all generated by equations, I'm having a hard time figuring out if it's too hard or too easy.

Also, the game freezes up for a second occasionally, and I can't figure out why.  No exceptions are being thrown, there is no bug, and there is no loading at the time. Anyone know a good way to profile an applet?

http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/games/ (http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/games/)

I found the difficulty to be pretty OK. After a couple of abortive tries getting used to the game I got to about waypoint 2 on stage 3 before losing the colony ship, although after that I managed to survive 'til most of the way to waypoint 5 before dying. Annoyingly when I did die it was 'cause the game froze up for a short period and I was dead when it came back. :/

Thanks Sar.

Yeah, I've got something odd in there that I need to fix.  I think it's something in my draw routines, but it blows my mind that it's not throwing an exception but still pausing for that long ... unbelievable.

Awsome game, but I'm not digging the whole protect the collosnists thing. I preferd it when you just fly around shooting shit.

Also sucks with a laptop trackapd :P

As it goes, I kind of like it. I don't think I'd want to play too many games with the same thing, but it's nice to mix the formula up a bit sometimes.

It'd be supremely annoying if there were bad guys shooting at us instead of just ramming us, since it's plausible enough to dodge stuff in the little ship but probably not the huge hulking colony shop, but as it stands...

This is really fun.  Strong, simple concept, and very original too, as space shooters go.

And I like the music.   :)

Found the difficulty all right, I managed to get to stage 3, what I did find annoying is that the powerups last too little time.

The game did not freeze for me.

That is one thing, actually - are the powerups all on the same timer?

I wouldn't say that they necessarily last too little time - a couple of times I had a combination of big and bouncy and backwards (some 'b' thing you have going on there? ;-)) and nothing could get on the screen 'til they expired... but I did notice that they all seemed to disappear at the same time, no matter how recently I'd picked the last one up. So I guess if I'd picked up backwards and had it for 90% of the allowed time then picked up something really useful like bouncy, and then bouncy ran out in 10% of the time it would normally, that could be quite frustrating...


To be honest, though, the thing that annoyed me most about the powerups was that I nearly always ended up with them right at the edge of the screen, 'cause that's where I'd shot the enemy that dropped it, meaning that half the time when I went to pick it up I got rammed by something that jumped onto the screen and right into me before I could react. But I just put that down to a risk/reward decision I had to make...

You're right about the powerups at the edges, half the time I didn't pick them up trying not to risk the colonists.

But I have not problem with them operating on the same timer, I mean that takes away situations like the one you described, where you have several powerups and are unstoppable. But when you have a single one it dies out too fast (IMO, not applicable for everyone).


Haha, possibly, the last one you didn't mention is bulletproof. All powerups start with b

Each of the powerups lasts for 500km, but each one extends any previous powerups.  So yeah, they all expire at once, but the idea is that you let them sit onscreen until there's at least 2 to pick up, then each one will last for a longer time.

All start with B.  I'm not sure why.

Thanks for playing, everyone.  I think that I'm only going to change a few more things before completing it.

TO DO:
-refine the music a bit
-make the transitions smoother (stage changes and death/completion)
-figure out that occasional freezing problem

You definitely have something very nice going on there with the music, but, as Noyb said, it feels bad to kill the enemies since they're the ones making it interesting.

Also, it keeps playing even after I close the game's tab in Fx. ???

Fixed.

Sorry, I hadn't tested it in a tab!

4.8k's from the final checkpoint in stage three.

I'm pretty sure I'm hooked dude.

heh.

The only problem is that the number of checkpoints in each stage varies every time you play it.

I've only gotten to the end with the colonists like twice.

In my humble opinion, PaulMorel, i like the game exactly as it is: simple, geometrical, Asteroidish, musicful - which is definitely the best part of this whole thing. Nice idea of making overlays sounds.

Maybe, maybe (now i got this thought) you could make another special tang for moving / standby mode with the ship. You know, some weak droning-buzzing sound. Just a thought.

I get a strange broken applet thing when I view your page which is really too bad as I would love to play this and use java to write my games as well!

Thank you 13_11.  I don't think I have time to do anything else, so it will probably just stay as it is ... but we will see


Update java here: http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp (http://www.java.com/en/download/manual.jsp)

You may also need to update your browser, if you are using an ancient one.

That page is the reason why I chose to use java for this game.  I love all platforms.

*cue troll mentioning some esoteric platform that has no JVM*

hm... well I'm on osx and I write quite a bit of java so I was pretty sure I had the newest java installed already.  Even so I reinstalled java 6 (that's the newest right they didn't sneak one past me?  Anyway I'm using firefox version 2.0.0.4 I so the browser is pretty new as well.  Still when I load the page at the bottom it says...

Applet ProceduralShooter notloaded

and there's just an x where it should be

There's 2.0.0.14 or something now.

Dustin, all I can really tell you is that the problem is probably on your end.  I'm using no external libraries, or optional java libraries, or any such nonsense.  It's all core java classes.

Here's the mac page for updating java.  It should have the info you need:
http://developer.apple.com/java/ (http://developer.apple.com/java/)

Of course, the other possibility is that you are getting a cached version of the applet that was bad (although I don't recall uploading one, and I have the meta set to no-cache).  If you haven't closed all instances of your browser in a long time, you may want to do that.

I just wanted to mark my game as FINISHED, since I will be out of town this weekend.

It isn't perfect, and it certainly doesn't use all of the ideas that I wanted to get in there, but for my first game in 8 years, I think I did OK.

It's a java browser game, and it can be played here:
http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/lastcolonists/ (http://www.thisisnotalabel.com/lastcolonists/)

Forgive the slight load time on the first level.

Certainly interesting. The game starts lagging when I get the bouncy powerup and there are tons of bullets on screen, and when I got that one and the backwards powerup together the lag was so much that when they ended the game sped up to catch up and my colonists were hit in a split second with no chance of me defending them.

I really like the procedural music based on the enemies popping up, very Rez-like.

Overall interesting effort, fun for a while.

Wow this is really great congratulation man, this is very nice to play.
Gameplay is very good, although I didn't understand the purpose of the colonist ship, it should be integrated in the gameplay, even in easy mode.
I think maybe the playing area could be a little bigger (to make the game more relaxed than it is now), also this could be a very good "relaxing" game if oonly you could make the levels last longer, maybe even include an option with infinite play (morphing songs maybe?) and less difficulty, some people like this kind of games for mental massage.
Once again I don't know how new the concept is (my historical game knowledge stops with the 16 bit consoles) but I think you could flesh out the game, polish it, put it on  a nice page and try to gather ad revenue from it before someone steals the idea.
 :-* :-* :-*

Thanks for the nice comments moi.

All of your suggestions are right on.  I would like to do more with the idea, but I would need to enlist a graphics programmer.

Would any graphics programmer/artist out there be interested in making a full version of this game?  I would gladly do it in any cross-platform language/environment; I only chose java because it is easy to work in for a 1-man team.

I am a highly motivated musician/programmer, and I think that I could do a full version of this game, with different styles of music on different planets, and a basic mission structure, in less than 2 months, if I could find a decent graphics programmer/artist.

I very much enjoyed this game and think that you are very close to having something brilliant here. Hope you can get it going into a full project; I think you should!

Cool!  I like the music and the general style of the game.  I did have the whole thing kind of freeze up for a few seconds when the music re-started, which caused me to fail to move or shoot and thereby get squished by 'roids (Asteroids, not the other kind), but in general I liked it.
Cheers!
--Zack