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The Germinator v0-3

(http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/screenshot_25.png)

Gameplay

You are Norton, the Germinator.

You must stop the spread of viruses, trojans and worms within the PC you're installed on.

- Aim with the mouse.
- Shoot with Z,X or C to produce Red, Green or Blue bullets (which are strong against enemies of the same colour.)
- Red will also be powerful against Yellow and Magenta enemies.
- Green will also be powerful against Yellow and Cyan enemies.
- Blue will also be powerful against Cyan and Magenta enemies.
- You get 1000 for killing a virus with the correct colour, 250 without.
- You'll get a wave bonus of 2500 for a fully-killed wave.
- The flashing ellipses are enemy fire, and are indestructible.  Avoid them!
- [NEW!] There's now a nice crosshair.
- [NEW!] Right mouse button launches a smart bomb if you have one (best to save them for the worst bullet hell moments.)
- [NEW!] You'll get 500 for each consecutive hit with the correct colour (after the first hit).
- [NEW!] Collect powerups to help you on your way (2-Way, 3-Way, 1up, Shield, Smart Bomb.)

System Requirements:

- XP (SP2 or above)/ Vista
- A GPU capable of Shader Model 2.0, probably 64mb or above.
- 1Gb Ram (not tested)
- I'd hazard a guess at a 1.5Ghz Pentium4 CPU or above.

Here's the link:

The Germinator v0-3.rar (http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/The Germinator v0-3.rar)(12.7mb)

The Germinator v0-3 (patch).rar  (http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/The Germinator v0-3 (patch).rar)(Upgrade from v0-22 only - please extract files into their correct directories - 150Kb)

Here's a mirror: (thanks to Sar)

http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/The Germinator v0-3.rar (http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/The Germinator v0-3.rar)

You'll also need: Visual C++ Redistributable

Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=9B2DA534-3E03-4391-8A4D-074B9F2BC1BF&displaylang=en)(1.7mb).

Version History:

v0-1:

- First release.  Underwhelming!

v0-2: 

- Many small fixes, crosshair added. 
- Baddie speed adjusted. 
- Field of view adjusted.

v0-21:

- Tweened crosshair (smoother movement).

v0-22:

- Finally fixed that silly OpenGL bug - the yellow / black pixellated square is no more!

v0-3

- Everything's faster and more arcadey. ;D
- Powerups! (1up, 2-Way, 3-Way, Shield, Smart Bomb...)
- Correct Colour Combos.
- Many small glitches sorted.
- Enemies flash white if hit with the wrong colour.  They also take three hits instead of two.
- Enemy bullets are now flashing ellipses ala Space Harrier, they're semi-homing now, so no corner is safe!  There's loads more of them, and they fire in waves.
- Enemy waves are much improved, and they stick within the playfield.
- Collision improved slightly.
- Full text feedback about game, such as 'most recent powerup collected', 'wave bonus' etc...
- The bug that stopped you switching fire while holding the mouse button has been annihilated.
- The rounds are much shorted and sweeter.  There's no waiting for an imaginary boss now.

Nice concept. Looking forward to it ;D

Now you've got me thinking about Zarch. Must mean you're awesome!

 :o Ikaruga is hard enough with two colours, and you want us to use 6?? Oh well, shmup players are all masochists anyway, so go for it. I probably won't enjoy this much because I'm so bad at shmups, but I'll still be interested to see how the colour fusing mechanic will work.

Hmm I haven't tried ikuraga, but I think the system will be fairly simple in this.  We'll see...

I've just put up my first screenshot in the the top post, take a look!

Easy nominee for best-looking entry so far, methinks.  :)

Holy crap, looks really good indeed!

Yeah, I gotta agree, that looks fantastic :)

Thanks for the encouragement everyone! This is my first project created in Visual C++ / Ogre, so progress is slow-ish.  Actually it's my first fully-3D game.

I've got it so you can shoot the baddies now, and they generate nice 3D star particles.  Now it's time to add the colour mechanics.

I was thinking that either Green or Blue can kill Red, or Blue and Red can kill Green etc. But also you'll need to pull out Blue to kill yellow, Red to kill Cyan etc.  As for White, you'll have to wait for them to explode into smaller, Primary or Secondary coloured Baddies.

Baddies can fire, split or fuse.  You're best off shooting them before they fuse or split of course!  The idea for each wave is to kill all the baddies - but you might end up with more than you started if you don't hit 'em with the right colour.

I was hoping someone could point me in the direction of a nice cross-platform sound library that's not gonna get me in any license issues.  I'd like something ideally that will let me have access to playing sounds' pointers so I can do a sort of interactive music.  Anyone have any suggestions?

That sounds very confusing. Maybe you should make it so that right-colored bullets just do more damage (as opposed to the wrong ones not doing any damage at all or making them stronger or whatever).

We'll see.

As it stands I have three shoot buttons.  I'm finding it quite intuitive to combine colours by pressing two at once.  Anyway, it's too early to say if it'll work until I have the baddie fusing / splitting mechanic in there.

When I've put it in there, I'll know if it's going to work.  If not I'm up for doing it the other way round, or a simpler way.

By the way, do you know of a decent sound-library Akhel?

Sorry, I don't know these complicated technological programming things of the future.

Mmmkay.  I've been having a think and I agree it's too confusing.  I'm down with the three coloured lasers, RG+B, but I think I need to simplify the baddies system.

I'm now imagining it like this:

Baddies begin as any colour from a single primary to white.  If it's white, you can hit 'em with any colour,  subtracting that colour from its RGB value.  Eg if you suck out the red, then green from a yellow baddie and you've killed it. If it's red, you only need to use red. 

I'll use a system whereby you must hit them with several shots in a row of the correct colour or they'll simply return to full 'health' for that particular colour.

They may also split randomly into their constituent colours, or just a copy of itself, and sometimes different coloured ones merge back together.  They fire their colour at you, but also sometimes at each other to replace colours (eg a yellow fires some green at a blue, making it cyan!)  This might leave them more vulnerable though.

So here's an example.

Red and green germs appear.   You shoot the red with red but it splits.  You kill one but the other has fired some red at green to make yellow.  You shoot the yellow with green but again it's too late- it's split into red and green, and so on.

I hope to try and control the splitting and merging so that it's a challenge to remove a wave from the screen, even if it starts out with simple parameters, such as two or three baddies.

Anyway, excuse my rambling - don't have any paper handy so I'm using this a source of notes!

Edit:

Rather than double-post, I'll just add this here...

Chutup and Akhel, you're absolutely right, and I'm glad I got your feedback.  I got my proposed system up and running and it was immediately confusing.  I've now limited to two fire buttons, green and red.  Green kills green, red, kills red.  But I've kept the concept in there by having yellow which can be killed by green or red, or quicker still by holding down green and red.  It's really fun and easy now, and I'm quite excited!  Thanks for your help.

Sexy cel-shaded blobs! Looking forward to the colour gameplay too.... maybe you could introduce more colours as the game progresses?

Been working hard for a few days on this. although it doesn't look much different there's a huge amount done under the hood.  I'm learning so much about C++ and Ogre on this project, and planning to use it as my demo for my game job-hunting.  I'm really enjoying it!

(http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/Germinator_2.png)

Shooting some green meanies - but your laser won't do much about those purple ones!

(http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/Germinator_3.png)

Which flavour of anti-virus are you gonna pull out here?

Status update:


I started by having the baddie as finite state machines which moved around according to sort of A-life cell-like simulation.  The problem was the game was unpredictable and difficult to keep under control as a designer (without a 'Back & White'-style schedule).

I then spent a couple of days writing a flexible shoot-em-up wave system.  When I finally got this working, so that waves could be defined with a single line of code, the game instantly felt tight for the first time. So I'm going along a (perhaps safer) more conventional shoot-'em-up route.  The graphics are still all procedurally generated though!

I'll perhaps end up incorporating the mutations.  Perhaps if a wave is wounded (one or more member is defeated) the remaining members will divide filling the space.  Also perhaps if two waves collide (eg red wave moving from left->right and yellow wave moving from right to left) then they fuse if feasible (ie red+green=yellow).

At the moment I have only red and green bullets (with yellow created by holding both laser buttons down).  But in the screenies above you can see I'm still toying with blue, cyan and magenta baddies.  It's really fun choosing the right colour for the wave when they're flying past you at speed. 

So I think I could go back closer to my original idea of having three lasers, R, G & B.

But to simplify it, I'd also cut the laser-combinations (eg yellow by holding green and red).  This way you'd be able to hit a yellow with green or red. but it would take twice as many hits (usually 2 instead of one).  Equally you could hit magenta with red or blue etc.  Then quick-fire colour recognition becomes one of the main skills needed, and a certain amount of instinct comes into it which seems to be quite fun and natural in tests.  I did want to avoid three buttons, but hell, SFII had six, and that's my favourite game!  Anyway it;s not so bad if you're using mouse control - you just rest three fingers on the keyboard as if you were using W, A and D in a FPS.

An extension of this idea would be:

You then have a 'duo-shot' bar which fills up with colour combos.  You can use up this bar to fire shots of two colours which merge in the air and become cyan, magenta or yellow.  This will destroy secondary colours in one shot, as well as either primary that makes up the duo-shot.

^^^ I'd love your thoughts on this!


           
Stuff update:

*** DONE ***

- General improvement of my framework.
- Scrolling terrain.
- Mouse / keyboard controlled player.
- Player bullets + collision
- Baddie animations (vertex morph and node).
- Baddied can be killed.
- Baddie particles (they explode into 2D and 3D particles!)
- Baddie division, fusion.
- Baddie waves - they now move in groups along nice spline curves with variable start positions and individual offsets (in space and time).  Also keeps track of defeated waves (unused at the moment).

*** TO-DO (in no order) ***

- Actually put the score in there (it's just done in photoshop at the moment I'm afraid!)
- Enemy bullets.
- Player health + lives.
- Get FMOD installed and put in music!
- Maybe look at making the music interactive?
- Improve explosions.
- Tag up combos.
- Re-instate mutations for wounded waves
- Make more baddies
- Boss (of course!)
- Start and end of level
- Title screen
- Type out waves or better still generate an algorithm in the spirit of the compo (maybe even that adapts to the player's skill)
- Hmm I'm liking the above idea ^ -  should be pretty easy with the framework I've built!

[edit:]

Just realised I remember Zarch as Lander on the Acorn Archimedes.  Now that's old school.  Wicked game!

For anyone that's interested I've gone back to the RGB system.  There are no combo lasers.  Now it's simply a case of either hitting them with their correct colour (hit red with red) to kill them in one shot, or any other colour to kill them in two.  This means you can ignore colour matching if you like, but it definitely helps in getting a high score!

This works really well, so now I want to make an automatic 'wave' generator. Anyway, any feedback would be much appreciated!

Will put up a video at the end of the day, just working on getting Fmod in there for sound.

Ok latest update!

I've got a video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soZ06p5i_Z0 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=soZ06p5i_Z0)

As you can see, things now in:

- Got FMOD up and running.
- Wrote this piece of music entitled 'Fire' (you'll hear the full thing when the game's done).
- Made game sounds out of the track elements so the audio is a coherent whole.
- Ironed out many bugs.
- Improved the wave system. Still buggy though.
- Improved exposions.
- Got text working and did fonts and overlay with score.

I've already done more since the video, like baddie bullets, and I'm working out the shield system now.  I want to put powerups in next, then make the wave auto-generator.

That looks fantastic!

Perhaps you should improve the aiming by creating a 3D aiming reticle. You know, a series of reticles going from your ship in different depths. Or a line. Or something.

@Pip

Thanks, I'm quite pleased with it, considering it's my first full C++/3D effort  It looks better in HD of course.

@ Melly

A nice crosshair which appears if the enemy is in sight would be good definitely.  I think so anyway.  The again, aiming is lenient, so it's not that hard anyway.  I've deliberately kept the player's movement very 8-bit and digital, with collision pretty loose (I wanted to capture that manic 80's Space Harrier feel - and that didn't need a crosshair).

@ Other People

I'm thinking about powerups at the moment.  Almost definitely want a super-weapon by pressing R+G+B when your super-bar is full.  Big fat laser would be nice.  Some kind of lock-on death laser. 

Regular powerups?  Smart bombs could definitely be good.  Three way?  Homing?  Gravity gun (sucks em' in for easy shootage)?

Any ideas anyone?

I'm not sure if what I'm about to suggest is included in that (sorry if it is), but maybe you should add some "inertia" to the ship's movement. Right now it seems it just stops abruptly when you let go of the movement keys; I guess it would feel better, smoother, if it actually decelerated to a halt, even if very quickly.

That is a very good feel to go for.

Just through I'd update you with some pics... Doesn't look much different I know, but there's loads more going on!

Baddies' bullets are white at the moment.  I'm still working on how I'm going to differentiate them from the player's bullets - I think a different shape would be preferable to this though, as white 'upsets' the colour scheme.

Thoughts, anyone?

(http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/Germinator_4.png)

(http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/Germinator_5.png)

(http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/Germinator_6.png)

You could make the bullets with something like the shape of a pulsing spinning star with the same color of its origin by a lighter shade. Not sure how well it'd work.

Sneak preview of the boss arena:

www.spacerecordings.co.uk/screenshot_3.png (http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/screenshot_3.png)

1920x1200 so it's linked.  Wait till you see the boss, though, he's not in this shot. Iif all goes to plan, it should be a nice retro experience.  :)

Haven't had any time to work on it due to house and job-hunting.  :(  Hopefully I will have more time to get it in on the deadline.  I don't want to rush it though, because I like the way it's playing.  It's kind of addictive and simple.

What I still need to do:

- Finish boss stage.
- Add high score.
- Scale wave difficulty to level number in PG wave generator.
- Perhaps use an initial random seed of zero, then base the random seed on the high score (so you repeat the level until you beat it) or last score (where it's basically totally random?)

To do the following I want to introduce Cel-Shaded 3D text (so it looks like the score currently  -ie white with black outlines.)  I need to fire up 3DS Max and make a series of meshes for the font I'm using.

Once I've done that I will add a 'string'->'series of 3d objects' kind of function and hopefully I'll be able to finish it up with:

- Hiscore screen.
- Title screen.
- Game over screen.

I'd like to add if possible:

- Powerups.
- Barrel rolls.
- Turrets.

@ Melly, I like your idea about the stars.  I think if they were like spiked balls, that would help differentiate from the player's wobbly ellipses.  About a lighter shade, I'm not so sure because I want to keep the number of colours to a minimum (actually basically the ZX Spectrum colours with a slightly more pastel tint!)

@ Kao, this is the subject of much debate, but friends who've played it seem to prefer the movement glitchy and precise.  I've decided to keep it like this.  It also kind of fits the theme of being inside a digital machine.

Looks very good.  I am very jealous of your graphics skillz.

Oh boy oh boy I've been working hard. With a bad back that's killing me, but I have to deliver!

I've got this done:

- Made the control a little bit more analogue, it's mouse only now, and I love it.  Thanks Kao.
- Spiky ball bullets.  Look much better.  Thanks Melly.
- Really cool death.
- Lives (displayed on screen).
- Intro.
- Got a GUI in there but not done much with it yet.
- Game Over screen.
- A whole new WaveManager class to handle PG waves.  They work now. [AT LAST!!!!]
- Better sound effects.
- Level difficulty scaling.
- Each level is set to the music, and had three stages, Interface, Bus, and Virus / Worm encounter. Done transitions and world geometry for them.

I hope to do tomorrow:

- Tally each 3D mesh type to a path type, so you learn to predict their paths from their looks.
- Encounters are not right yet.  I hope to have them in!
- I doubt I'll get powerups in.  It's fun anyway.
- Hope to put some more wave patterns in there, but it's tedious work.
- Hiscore screen with name entry.

Version 0-1 FINISHED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is without doubt the hardest I've ever worked in my life.  So much so that I was in hospital this morning.  But I did it!

See first post.  :)

Edit:

These are things I know need improving:

- I'm still not sure the mouse speed / craft acceleration is the same on every screen resolution and framerate.  This has been a major problem, and I don't know if I've solved it yet.  For now I've set it very sensitive.  Please let me know how it plays and I'll fix it if need be.
- The waves need tweaking still.
- The boss didn't make the cut (might be in a day or two.)
- I think the camera field-of-view needs looking at, because it looks as if the enemies approach too slowly, and they seem too fast when near the camera.



Please leave me your comments and suggestions, and I'll bugfix over the next couple of days.

I'd also love to hear your hiscores!

Thanks.

If you've got it up and running could you also leave a comment and let me know?  I don't have anywhere else to test it!  ;D

I was looking forward to playing it, but I can't get it to run. Using both the link and the executable in the bin directory, I receive this default error message (localized in Dutch in my case):

(http:///www.useless.be/!/error.png)

It basically says: "The application cannot be run because it has not been configured correctly. Reinstalling this application may solve the issue."

I'm using Windows XP SP2 - default things installed such as XNA 2.0 (probably not needed), DirectX 9.0, using a decent graphics card and plenty of RAM/CPU etc.

Hmm, it shouldn't require XNA.  It would need the latest directx though.

Could anyone else who has this problem PM me the contents of the file ogre.log (in the bin/release directory?)  I should be able to figure out the problem.

Did it get as far as the Ogre Display Preferences?

I didn't and there no new entries in the log file except for the ones included by default/your original release. Using DirectX 9.0c. You'll probably need to see if other people encounter this as well, but usually I never have technical difficulties. I have run Ogre games before.

Different system, now Vista: same error. I do get the notice here that the error may be recorded in the event logbook, but when I enable the service Microsoft declares my pre-installed OEM version illegal and refuses to start the service. Sigh...

Hi Sciere, I'm researching this problem... Seems quite obscure and I haven't come across a solution yet.  I hope I do.  Then I can sleep.  :o

Edit:  looking outside the Ogre forums, it seems as though it's a problem specific to Visual C.

I believe you need the 'Visual C Redistirbutable' - I'm gonna put a link to it in the first post.

Awesome game! I really like the music, and how the killing of germs influences it. Easy controls. Took me awhile to figure out the stars were enemy fire and I should not try and kill them but avoid them, but all in all, very fun stuff. :)

Oh joy... it works!  Did you already have the Visual C stuff?

Let me know your hiscore mate...

That solved it, thanks!

Great, now I can check out all these other exciting games I've not even had time to look at yet!

Tomorrow I'll have a go at setting a high score.  You can print screen with '0' by the way, if you wanna post yours up in this thread.

[edit] Just had my 2nd proper go - 719750!

[edit2] Ok here's the one to beat -

(http://www.spacerecordings.co.uk/score.PNG)

I can't download the game, the link won't work for me. :(

That's odd Melly, it seems to be working at this end.

I'm gonna keep trying, I'll let you know if I still can't.

Thanks Melly.  Can anyone else confirm if this is a problem before I call it a day?

I might need to buy more hosting space.  Also if someone has some server space where I could upload a perl script with hi-scores, that would be cool...

Still no luck. :( It could be my connection.

That's really weird ... it works on two machines here.  Can anyone else confirm the link's broken?

Link works here, and yes i had the free Visual C studio installed.

High score is pretty low so far I think, I will make screenshots when I try again.. :)

Edit: Oh man, i only got up to  420k score, you got about a million more :)

Maybe I'm somehow blocked from seeing your server.

Would it be too much to ask for a mirror? You can just ignore me if you can't bother with it.

I've not had time to try it myself yet, but I could download. I took the liberty of uploading it to my own space here (http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/The%20Germinator%20v0-1.rar), maybe that'll fare better? I can take it down again, of course, if superflat doesn't approve.

I love you :-*

EDIT: Well damnit, I'm finally able to download it but can't start it. Gives me an error message. :(

EDIT2: Oh, right, forgot about the Redistributable.

EDIT3: Aaaaand, still doesn't work. Gives me this: "OGRE EXCEPTION(6:FileNotFoundException): 'resources.cfg' file not found! in ConfigFile::load at ..\src\OgreConfigFile.cpp (line 84)"

@ Melly, sorry you're having such grief with my game mate!

Did you try launching the application itself (in bin/release), rather than the shortcut?  It's looking for resources.cfg, which is in that directory, and that's the only reason I can think of why it wouldn't work.

@sar

Thanks for mirroring it, anyone is welcome to!

I can't find any bin/release folder on the game folder.

EDIT: Oops, sorry, looking at the wrong game folder. :-[

EDIT 2: WEll, no luck, my video card doesn't support your game. Sorry.

Oh what a palava!  Yes, I should mention your card must support shaders (model 2.0 or above I believe) - or it won't cel-shade!

So so far only Checker's played it huh?

[edit:  It gets loads more exciting after the first level or two! Even if you gave it a go but didn't like it, I'd love to know...]

I.

hate.

my.

pc.

 :'(

My graphics card kinda doesn't support it

It worked for me.  It has a nice style, but it's hard to figure out whether an enemy is directly in front of my ship or not.  Because I'm constantly trying to do that perspective adjustment, I never really felt drawn in to the game.

The game was all-white when trying to run DirectX, so I had to do the OpenGL option to get it to run. (Error log from first attempt (http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/Ogre.log)).

Very cool idea, and the music sounds very Rez-like. The game worked well enough, and the color-switching was very intuitive.

However, like Zaphos, I had a crazy hard time with depth perception. I had almost no intuitive sense of how far away the enemies were, or when bullets were just about to hit my craft, even surviving to the third level. (No bosses for the first level is a tease enough, but the second too?) You'll have to ask someone with more experience in 3d design for tips I guess. (More pronounced shadows/lighting? layered aiming reticule?)

Oh, and is the beginning screen and all the transitions supposed to be this really pixellated black/yellow diagonal striped image?

Edit: Played it again through level 4-2. (Still with the boss teasing?)

I'm thinking that making the far end of the tunnel shadowy could help a lot with depth perception. Like, maybe give far-away objects a slightly darker shade while close-up enemies would eventually have the same shade as you. It sometimes feels like the fast shooting speed is an attempt to address this issue without looking at the cause: try shooting one bullet at a time to test this issue. An aiming reticule might help as well.

Might also help to make the bullets stand out more (light flashing?), since shooting red enemies with red bullets with a red ship and a red enemy bullet sometimes gets hard to parse if the angle is shallow enough.

Oh, and the collision boxes feel like they're larger than the actual objects, although I'm not sure whether that's solely from the depth perception or not.

Seems nice, but I'm having a tough time trying to aim. Could you add a cross hair or something like that?

Very pretty game, too. :)

Crash on startup.

I get the white screen when trying to run DX, but GL kinda works - I get the pixellated yellow title screen, and then the game, but my ship and all the enemies are black!  :'(

gfx card is a Radeon X850, which I thought would be good enough. I have latest DX9c too... Maybe I need new drivers...

Thanks for checking out my effort everyone, it means a lot to me.

I've just uploaded a version with a reticule / cross-hair, and it plays much better, thanks guys!

I've also adjusted the field of view and baddie approach speed.

The pixellated yellow'n'black thing's an OpenGL issue, I'm looking at it now.  It should be a white-out (and is on Direct X... hmmm).

The main thing I hoped to get in before the deadline was the boss, a Space Harrier-style worm-dragon.  I just collapsed with chronic back-pain trying to get it done on time, so I don't feel so bad about adding him in in the next day or so.  So please watch this space!

I gotta check this out tomorrow, dude. So tired, but looking forward to it.

[edit] Cool stuff!

As self appointed 3D reticule expert, I'd say you need to tween the crosshair depth between its current position and a target's position (so that it snaps less).

Or if you want to be really fancy, you generate a plane based on the three closest enemies to the crosshair, and project your line of fire onto that plane to give you your crosshair position - that gives you a "free" blend when navigating between enemies.

I wasn't sure how to get the colors shooting to work. Guess I should just read the docs, right?

Hi Bezzy - use Z,X & C to switch colour / fire (then you can continue firing with the LMB).

I've put in your suggestion about the reticule.  It moves into position now, except when you're bang-on for half a second and then it locks.  Download again if you like!

Could the people with problems with DirectX please send me your Ogre.log files (if it froze on a white screen)?  You can find it in the ./bin/release/ directory.  Thanks!

I've just uploaded another minor fix which is the OpenGL 'pixellated yellow + black title screen' issue.

If that was bugging you (:'(), and you'd like another try, please download v0-22 in the first post.

Thanks.

The latest file is only 6.6 mb and gives a CRC error ... reupload?

Doh!  It's back up now.  Sorry...

Okay, here's some excessively detailed feedback for the new version:

• Aiming is much better now :)
• Dodging still suffers some of the issues aiming used to have; it's a bit hard to judge whether you're going to collide with an oncoming ship.  It's a similar problem to aiming, after all.  Fortunately the need to dodge is less common.  It might help to move the ship a bit more away from the camera, or to move the camera with the ship more
• When you place enemies off to the side, just out of the zone where I can fire, it really emphasizes the restricted range of the ship.  Why can't I just move a bit more left and hit them?  It would be nice to have some visual explanation of the restricted ship motion, like a translucent wall?
• On a similar note, it took me a while to understand that the range of ship motion is sort of a rectangle bounded by how much the camera will move.  I can see why you would design it that way but as a player it feels like an unintuitive choice.  If you make that boundary more explicit visually, maybe you could have fun with it and change the shape of the region where the player is allowed to move.
• It's relatively easy to kill enemies with the wrong color bullet, so unless the player is score-motivated, there isn't much investment in the colored-bullet mechanic.  I actually didn't realize it was there the very first time I played (I like to play once without reading instructions) and it didn't change the game much to be oblivious to it
• Round length seems too long for me to feel score-motivated -- I'm not so likely to keep replaying for a better score unless replaying is shorter.  This will hopefully be helped by the boss creature you're working on ... although any sharper difficulty curve to kill an unexperienced player more quickly would help.  Personally I would prefer fewer starting lives and some ways to earn extra lives if I'm playing well.
• I also didn't have a good intuitive sense of how my actions affected score from just playing, because I generally don't look at a number in the upper left corner if I'm focused on playing.  So if you do want people to pay more attention to the score, perhaps some visual feedback when they get points would help with that?
• I notice there's a sound which seems to be correlated to shooting an enemy with the right color of bullet, but the sound is too delayed for me to be sure it actually correlates to that?  If it does correlate, perhaps you should play the sound right when the bullet hits; otherwise the player might not understand why they're hearing the sound.
• Have you considered letting people change bullet colors with the scroll-wheel?  Or (for 3 button mice) shoot a different color from each mouse button?  Might be nice to be able to play with just the mouse.
• If I go set the ship in a corner of the screen, it's not in much risk of dying compared to leaving it in the center.  I stopped playing to write something down, and, since I didn't see a way to pause the game, I just left the ship in the upper left corner.  I think the ship was surviving better up there than it did when I was flying it.
• Enemy patterns get much more interesting when the enemies get really close to the ship -- usually, most enemies are dead before then, so you're not really showing off the interesting patterns?  I suppose this makes sense if it's necessary to increase the likelihood that the enemies will actually hurt the player?  But it also emphasizes the difficulty in dodging ships at close range due to the camera position.
• The aiming reticle seems to get a bit too big when the enemies are really close (for example, if you just wait on the bottom of the screen and watch them fly by).
• Enemy bullets don't look particularly bullet-y.  Since they're not destructible by any of the player's ammo, why not make them a different color than the ship colors?  Or even make them multi-colored, or flashy.

Just so you know, that's kind of the 'everything that came to mind' list, so don't take it too seriously! ;)  It's definitely a nice game, especially for a short competition :)

I think most of my thoughts were covered by Zaphos, but I also have some feedback on the new version.

It works well on DirectX mode on my computer now, and the yellow/black stripes are gone. You might not want to default to such a high resolution, since not everyone might be able to support that 1900xsomething.

The cursor and shading definitely helped the aiming. Much more smooth and fun now. Got 1.2 mil. :)

The difficulty curve feels a bit shallow, which might be helped by exaggerating the color mechanics more. The colored bullets don't seem to make much of a difference at the moment. If you want to go for the color as weakness route, it should visibly take longer to kill an enemy with the wrong bullets.

Since you introduce mixed colors later in the difficulty curve, maybe those should be weak to only a certain amount of each component color (possibly visibly draining that color as feedback), so that if you hit it half with one color and half with another, it should have the same effect as hitting a single-colored enemy with that color.

If you just want to colors to affect score, then it could do with more positive feedback, like multipliers for high numbers of enemies killed with correct bullets and score indicators that appear when you kill an enemy.

I tried out a game intentionally without shooting, trying to graze enemies and bullets and it still feels like the collision boxes are larger than I expect.

Sometimes enemies that pass my ship unharmed hang out between me and the camera without being destroyed, blocking my view.

I can't seem to go from R->G->B without letting go of the mouse button first. The other way works, but not consistently.

I agree with Zaphos that the bullet colors are superfluous if they don't affect anything, like an Ikaruga-style eating of bullets the same color or being able to shoot down same-colored bullets. Might help them seem like bullets if they're smaller and flashing a bit.

Very nice improvement since last time! Can't wait to see how this develops. ;D

I still get the all-black objects :(

Can I send you any diagnostic stuff?

@ Zaphos and Noyb,

Thanks so much for your amazing feedback, confirming a lot of what I felt but didn't know how to put into words.

I'd really love to get straight down to implementing the changes necessary, but I've been assigned strict bed rest by the doctor, and unless there's a big improvement I won't be able to do it for a while.  Both competitions have been really tricky for me, my dad died two days after the last deadline, after a two-year fight against cancer, and this one I've worked myself so hard I've messed up my back! 

Anyway, I'm not grumbling, if anything the joy of participating in this community has really helped me through these times.  :)  I just wish I could have got the boss in there.  The code's 90% done, but I didn't want to rush it out unfinished.

Things to think about in v0-3:

- I'm thinking straight away that it would be cool if the baddies flash white when hit with the wrong colour (and maybe take three hits instead of two, so you can really tell they're harder to kill).

- As for the 'mixed' or secondary colours, having one colour 'sucked out' when you hit for example a yellow with red or green would be cool too, and quite inline with my original idea.  I'd have to test it.

- As for enemy bullets, it might be cool if I rapidly cycle through the six colours, giving them a unified, flashing appearance that's still consistent with the game, and then they could be spheres like the player's bullets without being confusing.

- As for the difficulty curve I totally agree.  I think it could be as simple as making the waves more frequent.  It feels like you're just hanging around waiting for them from time to time.

- Round length was tied to the music, but I don't think that's right because they do take too long as it stands (unless I edit the track...)

- Collision detection?  One word - dodgy!  It's using basic sphere collision - I want to get a library like Ode or Newton in there to do it properly.  As it stands, some of the radii aren't set right.

- That noise you heard was actually the 'wave bonus' noise which you hear when you kill a complete wave.  There are two other sound that combine with the explosion sounds to indicate whether the colour is correct.  What I need to do is add some nice text telling you so!  I wanted to tag-up combos too, consecutive hits of the correct colour to reward your colour-switching skills.

- The playing field as you noticed is constrained to a 2D plane just larger than the screen width, but some baddies spawn outside of this area, and you're right it does break the fourth wall a bit, so in the next revision I'd like to constrain them to the shootable area.  Also interesting you found a safe zone in the corner - I think this is down to their being a set amount of pre-defined paths, most of which concentrate on going down the middle - the next stage would be to make the paths PG too as well as the wave characteristics.

................

Anyway, thanks again guys, you've left me a lot to think about, and as soon as I'm well enough, I'll put it in, post-compo or not!


Hi shrimp,

Please do - just PM me the contents of Ogre.log in the 'bin\release\'  directory.  I have a funny feeling it's because your card doesn't support shaders, but I'll have a look!  Can you play other games with shaders (eg Doom 3?)

Well I shouldn't have, but I got bored of my bed-rest so I could have a go at the new version...

There's no boss still, but I think this version's a world apart from the previous ones.

Thanks to Zaphos and Noyb, I've implemented the following:

The Germinator v0-3

(Downloadable in the first post as a '.rar' - 13meg - or as a patch from v0-22 - 2meg).

- Everything's faster and more arcadey. ;D
- Popwerups! (1up, 2-Way, 3-Way, Shield, Smart Bomb...)
- Correct Colour Combos.
- Many small glitches sorted.
- Enemies flash white if hit with the wrong colour.  They also take three hits instead of two.
- Enemy bullets are now flashing ellipses ala Space Harrier, they're semi-homing now, so no corner is safe!  There's loads more of them, and they fire in waves.
- Enemy waves are much improved, and they stick within the playfield.
- Collision improved slightly.
- Full text feedback about game, such as 'most recent powerup collected', 'wave bonus' etc...
- The rounds are much shorted and sweeter.  There's no waiting for an imaginary boss now!


All in all this version (dubbed 'Bullet Hell Edition') is really quite playable and fun now.  I hope you give it another chance if you already tried it and went 'meh...!'

Get well soon -- don't hurt yourself making the game! :o

But it is really fun to play now, great work :)

Thanks Orel and Zaphos. 

I'm so glad you enjoyed it.  Makes it all worthwhile.

I'm sorry you preferred the older version Orel - in fact I understand what you're saying about it - that the new version has maybe become a little too intense.  I'll definitely roll back the amount of bullets  in the next version (I just want to upload one more build with the online hiscore table - thanks to Terry!) 

Did you find the baddie bullets hard to see when you played it with the shaders displaying correctly?  To me it seems hard not to tell the difference, as they're flashing!  But then again we take things for granted when we play our own games.

You're quite right about the fog - the shaders ignore it (although fog seems to work in Direct X but not OpenGL for me.)  The thing is, I only learnt about shaders for this project, and I've got lots still to learn.  I'd have to ask on the Ogre forums about it. I just edited a demo shader that came with the Ogre SDK.

I like the idea of using billboards for bullets - I considered it myself.  I guess I wan trying to keep a consistent look: everything but the background and smoke would be cel-shaded, only 6 colours + white, no alpha (although there's some on the smoke just so you can see what's going on!)

As for the fov, I actually ended up reducing it, as I found it easier with depth perception - with a more fish-eye perspective objects in the foreground seemed to move too fast.

I like the idea of top-down, but then again I might as well have made it in 2D haha, and my original brief was 'cel-shaded Space Harrier inside a computer'.  For better or worse, I have to stick with it now!

I could definitely do a non-shader version, with flat-shading, if there was enough interest.  So if anyone would like to see that, let me know!

Anyway, here's a :beer: for you both.

Agh! Just got around to trying this, and afraid it doesn't work :'( I get an error about the application configuration being incorrect :(

I'd be surprised if my little laptop can run it anyway, so I'll try again later on with a more powerful machine :)

I think that error means you don't have the silly Visual C++ Redistributable thing.  But if you're on integrated graphics I wouldn't expect it to work anyway haha.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, just don't expect it to be quite as polished as yours!  ;)

I get the same OGL black objects problem with the latest version, but... DirectX runs fine now!

I'll play a bit more and give you some feedback later. Stirling work!

Thanks Shrimp, nice of you to say so.

On another note:

I just wanted to say publicly that Terry was an enormous help yesterday, sending me all the info and a mini personalised tutorial on how to implement his online hiscore system (in Self Destruct).  Not only that he went one stage further and uploaded a database and Php script on his own server space, all so I could get this done in time for today.  Sadly (if you've been following this thread) due to bad backache (and in part due to the sun finally showing its face  ::)) ... I didn't make it on time.  Hopefully it'll make it into a post-compo update, along with the boss who never made it.

Anyway, I just wanted everyone to know what a legend this guy is (not that they didn't anyway!)  Thanks Terry!   :beer: :gentleman:

Terry pilots the Awesomesaucer. With Allegro!

Yeah, he sure does!   (Whatever that means...)  :D

aw, shucks :beer:

No, I'm giving you the  :beer: sir.  I'd make it a black though, if that tickled you, and there was a suitable emoticon.

Mini emoticon creation compo after this one. Please Derek? :-*

Very cool man. It looked and played very professional. The cellshading was really nice...fuckin sweet shooter man. Devlp firthr pls!

Thanks Tommunism, I'm really glad you enjoyed it.  I wish I had time to put in online hiscores, bosses and also to tweak the difficulty (I think it's a bit too hectic!) 

Also I kinda wished more people could get it to work, but that's what happens when you use shaders. 

I actually enjoy playing it and have a play now and then, which is rare for my games.  I'd love to know what score you got!

It looks and sounds GREAT!  Why can't I restart at the end?  quiting is the only option??  I find it a bit difficult to judge the alignment of the player ship and the enimies/shots,. and the player ship is much too large,. perhaps I just need more practice but haveing to re-launch the thing each time, that is sorta' unlikely.  You do have the sound and graphics working VERY well,. nice job. perhaps just more tweeking of the gameplay would help,. .  for the overall experiance.

I like the new difficulty curve. The colors definitely feel more important now. Sometimes it's hard to tell at a glance the difference between the distance where enemies do their secondary pattern or the distance where enemies are about to crash into the player. Then again, it didn't feel too bad when trying to do so without shooting, so maybe that's just me having trouble focusing on all elements at once. Very well done, and best of luck in the job search.

Thanks Noyb. 

I find that the game does get better after a few goes - I've enjoyed trying to beat my own hiscore (2.32 million!)  I totally agree about the secondardy attack - I wish it was slightly further away - that's the only thing that feels sort of 'out of your control', for me anyway.

I also tried out the game with 1 second more between waves and that felt really good, so maybe I'll upload that version sometime.

[edit]

JPH I didn't see you there.  Thanks for the review...  I agree with all your points!  Glad you enjoyed the sound especially, as that's what I was most happy with.  I actually planned to put some 3D effects in there too, and make the music more interactive, but there wasn't enough time.

The tracks's called 'Fire' and is from a little side-project I've done called 'The Mystery Machine'.  All th game sounds are made from elements of the tune.  By day I'm a drum'n'bass DJ / produced going under the handle 'Sonic' (and sometimes 'The Accidental Heroes'...)  If you're interested at all, my myspace is www.myspace.com/sonicspace (http://www.myspace.com/sonicspace).

Cheers!

Silly question: How do I make this work? It refuses to play. Apparently the "application configuration is incorrect." Tells me to re-install. So I re-install. Apparently the "application configuration is incorrect." Tells me to re-install. Ad infinitum (thrice).

In conclusion, I wun play, but can't.

G-Worthy did you download the Visual C++ redistributable thingy in the first post?

Who's a what now?


Oh. OH! OH! THAT C++ Redistributable. I thought you were... you know!

:tired:

JUST IN: YAY! It Work! Bloody Hard, though. My depth perception is broke. Oh, and way pretty. It's like the entire game is coated in a crisp candy shell. With smooth, DIFFICULT chocolate on the inside.

Errr... yeah?

[edit] You got it to work?  Wicked!  Well I'm glad you appreciated the look - I agree it's too hard - in fact I just uploaded a slightly re-balanced version (tiny tweaks only...)

楽しかった〜☆　とてもかっこいいグラフィックが好きです☆ :-*

Moon runes! Cannot understand! :o

Time to live in 2008 Melly. :-X

I'm hardcore so I used a dictionary and a kanji list to read that.

I'm too indie for your stupid internet translators.

Hey my thread's being de-railed! 

ビメコさんありがとうございますうれしいです！ :)