having worked in one group and finishing the project we were working on it didn't seem like there was ever much of a problem...

I did all the code and my partner did not bother me about how I should be coding something.

He did all the graphics and I didn't bug him about how the game should look.

If he did graphics for some new piece of gameplay I would code it in no problem, if I wrote some code for a new piece of gameplay he would make graphics for it no problem.

I thought it worked out very well because we both had clear roles and we both were willing to implement the other persons ideas.

Quote from: dustin on April 03, 2008, 11:31:49 am
I would read more about it but I'm scared I will like it and be forced to learn it.  I've kinda promised myself that I'll stick to trying to write games instead of learning languages for a while.  I get enough of the languages in school...

I don't really understand this comment. Afraid you would like it so you don't want to try it? I would think if you found something that you liked to use, you'd spend more time writing games than if you are limping along with another language/library. Also, it's just java with a teensy bit of lazier (i.e. quicker to write) syntax, not an entirely new language.

Yeah I know it sounds strange but, well it probably doesn't apply to everyone but I'm very interested in computer science type stuff so I like to know all the little details of a language instead of just enough to hack together a game. 

Right now I enjoy writing code with my current setup, it is fast (processing speed time), and I have actually gotten games done using it.  I want to get a couple games out before I think about spending a bunch of time searching for the perfect language again.  I did that once but was distracted to easily so ended up switching languages before I could ever get a game out...

I would read more about it but I'm scared I will like it and be forced to learn it.  I've kinda promised myself that I'll stick to trying to write games instead of learning languages for a while.  I get enough of the languages in school...

i'm deeply into indie music, i love arrested development and i have too much time on my hands.

yes

yeah I just didn't vote because partially because I wouldn't play all the games but also so I didn't have to deal with this.  That said I found 3 others I liked better then mine so I would have just voted for those...

usually people use textured plains for sprites that is correct.  However because your game will be vector based it would probably just be flat filled triangles and so you would just need some way to convert your vector shapes into opengl style shapes...  You don't have to just use plains.

Quote from: Pacian on March 31, 2008, 02:13:45 pm
I like the Hollow Earthers - if by 'like' I'm allowed to mean ridicule.  Especially the ones who argue that there's no gravity - it's just that the Earth is increasing in size.  ie. you don't fall down, the ground comes up to meet you...

Ridiculing people serves no purpose whatsoever.

Besides, it's possible that what they say is true. Have you ever been to space and seen for yourself that the earth is curved? I'm guessing you're not the source of any of the evidence upon which you base your scientific beliefs. How do you know that all research is not corrupted, somehow, and that it isn't censored and manipulated by the world governments? You don't.

Am I allowed to not believe the earth is increasing in size instead of their being gravity because I have done first hand experiments on the subject? 

Well, this is going to be entirely 2d; would OpenGL have any point in that context?

with opengl in 2d games you can render crazy amounts of sprites and also do neet things like trasnparencies and rotation and shaders and such all with little/no cpu time

Seconding the C++/OpenGL/SDL combo.

Just a question.  You mean using sdl to set up a window etc. and opengl for drawing?    I remember when I first used sdl I thought it was rendering using openGL but I think I was wrong about that.  SDL renders in software  not hardware right?

I'd love to edit the reviews and give more positive feedback when I have time, but writing 48 separate reviews isn't easy, so I kept them short. I only had time to list one or two of my biggest complaints, before I went on to the next game.

Even a one-sentence review can be very helpful, though. With a single statement, you've told me that lack of game balance and poor level design choices were the biggest problems with my game and fixing those issues are top priorities after the competition ends.

I agree I found the one sentance review of my game (the only one I can really judge) very accurate.  I'm glad to know that the game was fun for a while but repetitive.  I  was pretty sure this would be the case having played it a lot myself but still it's nice to hear from someone else.  Now next time (If I was going to continue on with this game which I'm not) I can make sure to add more enemies and throw in twists to the game play.  Just because I wasn't told how to fix the problem doesn't mean it's not helpful.  I'm capable of fixing it on my own.  Like I said though I can only really see how helpful the review of my own game was I can't tell if the reviews for other people are helpful to them.

I am down and ready for a long web game and I always wonder why there arn't many...

That said I would want it to be more in the style of portable games ie. Fire Emblem it's epic and long and a srpg but you can stop at any time and continue where you left off.  It's good in short bursts.  That's what I think your game would need too.

Thanks for writing all this up!  I know it must have taken a long time and would love to see reviews from anyone else who has them .

edit: Also, thanks saint for writing up all those reviews in your blog.  I'm glad you both could get my game to work.

If you find anything out please let me know.  This was my first java program that I've needed to be able to start from anything other then the command line (you can start this from command line I think but I can't rely on everyone knowing that ).  So even if you can't figure it out any advice you have would be nice.

I am shocked and appalled that no one has mentioned dune yet (either that or I missed it but I think I searched all the posts)

That book is amazing...

cool game the two things I found "wrong" were...

I got two "stuck" blue pixels I don't know how it happened but they were blue in the middle and then up/down/left/right were light blue I assume this is because of the 4 times stretching.  They just stayed blue the whole time it was weird...

By staying right were you start and shooting you never die (or at least i didn't I played for a while this way but didn't want to wear out my keyboard z key )

arg this is so frustrating!  It has worked fine on the 2 macs and 2 pcs i've tried it on.  It does use opengl acceleration but if you have other lwjgl code running then I see no reason why this shouldn't work.

I would download the non windows one and double click savage balloon 3000.jar but other then that I don't know what to say...

Also I uploaded 2 mirrors incase the first links don't work

I'd check out this article it's about hiding secrets in platform games but still it's very well written and useful

http://www.sirlin.net/Features/feature_platformsecrets.htm

There are also a ton of other articles in the side bar to read...

ooo I just added in collision masks and I'm liking it.  Super clean code and looks nice.  Thanks guys!

yep I was talking about midpoints.  I know for sprite on sprite collision I'll just use rectangle-rectangle collision as it's so easy.  For the backgrounds though I just wanted to be able to draw something and have my sprite run around on it, not spend time figuring out what the rects are so pixel was the only way I could go for that...

I can see why the midpoints would cause some overlap but they never seem that big a deal really when the screen is so small .  I changed my code to make it check the whole line now so ya.

I've alredy got the tweening figured out so that's no problem.

I've never used collision masks before maybe I'll give that a try just to see how it looks at this early stage...

OK guys so I've made a platform engine before but the problem is that was for the DS so I had to be very very cautious of how much computational power I was using.  For that reason the collisions were all tile based.

Now I'm making a computer platformer and this seemed like the easiest/best way to go now that I have computing power.  It was super easy to code up so I already have it coded up and I think it looks pretty nice but I would like to know if there are any problems I'll run into further down the road if I use this model and if so what model should I switch to?

Right now it looks like this...

I have a sprite with 4 points on it one on the top,left,right, and bottom (this part is the main part I'm not sure about should I be checking just these 4 points or the whole line of the collision box?)

Each of these 4 points gets checked against my collision map.  If one of the 4 pixels on my sprite lines up with a solid pixel on the collision map the sprite gets pushed in the opposite direction of the collision and I run through collision checking again.

Does that sound right?

I just want to find out if this well mess me up somewhere down the line before I get that far in code

yeah I know what you mean about adding a ready to be angry animation.

Also yes I do know you can control him after he pops I left that end for dramatic last ditch efforts to pop the bee hive even through a hord of bees.  I didn't think about hitting space to skip the level but it doesn't really bother me as it just means those who reach higher levels can get higher scores.