The display of transfer points is good in my opinion. You could add a flashing/pulsing effect in the area of the bar, if you have too few points and try to transfer. Other than that ... rather RTFM than clutter the HUD with excessive displays

Sounds like a great idea for those of us who never complete their games :D. I guess, it's better to start small and finish something than to abandon your big dream game after weeks of fruitless labour. I'm thinking about entering; weapon of choice is Java.

A few questions, though:
- How close do you have to stick to the original? Say if you are done after one week, can you add additional features that weren't in the original? I'm intruiged by the simplicity of some of the games because it allows you to actually finish something, even if you are busy at that time. But will you be allowed to add more things if you find time?
- Could you provide (links to) versions of the originals, so we know what to implement (when the time comes)? Game 1-5 are pretty obvious but I've never been a fan of consoles, so my knowledge of Donkey Kong is a bit vague. As for Gauntlet, there have been so many remakes that I don't even know which is the original . Oh and what is Sprint?

Funny and good looking ... the game :D. Stands out from the usual grappling hook games as for once there is action and humour. Playing with dropped weapons is fun. Cannot really go wrong with small-window pixel-art games either, in my opinion

I'm sure there are some free sound archives out there that have these sort of sounds. Then again I think sfxr can make sounds that match the game's style well, or just record your own sounds and edit them until you get the desired effect.

Bugs:
- In the first area, second room, you can catapult yourself over the exit and fly off the screen, outside the level area. Happened the fist two times I tried to get to the exit.

This and that:
- Speech balloons vanish too fast. I could hardly read half the text because it's so small and I had to fight at the same time as I was reading.
- Dropped weapons vanish too fast. I'd like to play with them some more. Can't you just leave them? Adds a bit more detail to levels, too.
- The quality of the title screen graphics isn't as good as the great pixel art of the game itself. Kind of a contrast that makes it look a bit inconsistent.

How about a cave story ripoff competition?  :D

Isn't that ... well ... boring? Lately everyone has been making platformers. Appearantly it's the current big thing because you can easily throw one together using Gamemaker and whatnot. I thought indie games were about originality, new ideas and such.

Ideas that can yield any type of game are much more interesting. VGNG was great in this respect. For example the idea of creating a game you've never played, based on a review, sounds nice. You'd have to make sure people don't pick their favorite game or look at screenshots, though, as this would restrict creativity. Also the good as well as the bad aspects mentioned in the review have to be there

I propose a "nothing like Cave story" competition ... on second thought I prefer the nude horror idea a few pages back :D.

I like the idea that you write your code full of pitfalls and traps to deter the unwary.

...

That's common in interpreted and byte-code languages:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obfuscator

Just write one for Game Maker if you need one :D

I did it! Finally I was able to make it work on all graphics cards! After hours of trying different things. The new version is here! If you were getting the weird stretching problem before it should work fine now.


Download

I also fixed some other glitches:
   -Crashing problem on the boss
   -Game running too fast
   -Player falling through floor when knocked over at some places
   -Blue horse at the begining falling through
   -Title screen shows controls

Thanks everyone who helped out. Please download and tell me what you think.

Ah yes, it works for me. Now I can actually play it . Graphics look good and the first two enemies no longer fall through the floor.

A few issues I encountered with the new version:
- The blue horse still sometimes falls through the floor. Out of maybe 10 times I started the game, it fell once.
- The conversation text with the blue horse is unreadable. It's black text on near black background. I had to turn gamma way up to even see it was there.
- It's HARD, maybe too hard. It was easier to run past enemies than trying to fight them. Especially later when there's half a dozen enemies on one screen.
- Maybe a ranged attack or a block skill would make things a bit easier. I found it difficult to fight 3-4 enemies (well ok, even 1-2 were challenging).
- Those black knight horses have a too high reach with their weapon, in my opinion. You get hit even though it looks like you're far enough away (2-3 centimeters in front of its weapon's ... uh ... swoosh ).
- The "Can Games" screen in the beginning and some arrows have a higher resolution than the rest of the game, which makes it look inconsistent. The rest of the graphics are a good match but these two instances stand out.
- Alt+Tab doesn't work, the game cannot be restored after pressing Alt+Tab.

All in all it's fun for a while, but I think it's a tad too hard.

I'm using Vista, so I'll take what I can get!

Best Vista quote EVER!  :D

Well, it runs for me. Is it supposed to run at the same speed all the time? It looks like it some times speeds up for a second or so.

Also here is my attempt to provide an error intercepting and report module (more information on this in the next posts). When something bad happens it will try to recover and dump the error to the text console, and also offer to send the report back to me via mail. (I especially want to see how this plays out - the sending mail stuff is not very reliable, I think I got to find other ways of retrieving info, like uploading to a Google Spreadsheet…)

How about a Web Service? For example Axis2 (http://ws.apache.org/axis2/) allows you to create Web Services relatively easy (that is if you know Web Services :D; in Java and C). You can collect all required debugging and crash info in your program, ask the user if its ok to send it (it's always courteous to ask before sending such data) and then call the Web Service. The service can store data in a database (or whatever you prefer) and you can analyse it all you want. Users won't have to fill long surveys (which means, you are more likely to get the report), it's automated and you're independent from Google spreadsheets (more flexibility). This requires you to run your own server in which you deploy the service, though.

Just had a crash:
I was running another game (EverQuest II, which uses Direct3D) in windowed mode at the same time. After some time Droid Assault suddenly crashed without any error message. Also my savegame, which I loaded before the crash, was gone and I had to start from the beginning. I wasn't able to reproduce the crash. After I started Droid Assault again from the beginning it didn't crash for several levels.

It didn't really run on my computer. Well it did start but it wasn't playable.

• Graphics appear to be broken on my machine:
• • It looks like its stretched beyond the visible area of the screen. The right part seems to be off the screen and everything looks like its horribly anti-aliased.
  • Some sprites have artifacts (black lines) on their border.
  • When I start a new game, some enemies seem to be falling through the floor in front of me.
  • I didn't see any text in the intro conversation, just empty boxes.
  • According to my screenshots the game uses a resolution of 639 x 479
  • Screenshots:
    Menu: http://img201.imageshack.us/my.php?image=horse1qp8.png
    In-game: http://img201.imageshack.us/my.php?image=horse2fm6.png
• Alt+Tab breaks the game, I just get a white window. Music continues but graphics don't seem to reinitialise.

I have the latest DX 9 on Win XP

Same here, the new version doesn't start. No error messages or anything after the web start splash screen. The previous version worked flawlessly.

On:
Windows XP, Java 1.6.0_05, Radeon X1250 (latest driver), 2gig ram and a 4ghz dual core AMD

Well, this looks like fun.

What I like:

• Graphics are very nice.
• The large variety of bots (at least as far as I got) makes it interesting and encourages to replay the game.
• Gameplay is smooth and fun.
• Minimode is a nice feature.
• Difficulty seems about right. You don't die too easily if you're careful and it requires some effort to stay alive.

What I REALLY don't like:

• You have to start over at level 1 if you die. That's too frustrating in my opinion. A checkpoint every few levels would be great.

A few things that slightly bothered me:

• It's hard to distinguish your bots from the enemy in the heat of the battle. I ended up shooting my own ones occasionally.
• As mentioned above, when you finish a level it gets too dark. The only way to find a route to the exit was to constantly shoot and bump into walls. Maybe add rotating red warning lights to walls or use a differently coloured lighting instead of turning off all lights.
• Stationary turrets should be destroyable. I think it's somewhat frustrating if you cannot destroy them. Plus your own bots don't survive areas where turrets are around. Edit: appearantly they are destroyable later on. Couldn't tell whether a certain minimum weapon strength is required, though. I was firing for quite some time on them before but they didn't seem to care .
• I couldn't use transfers very often; partially due to the cost of transfers and partially due to the fact that your own bots die very fast while not under your control. To me the transfer seemed important and unique. However by the time I needed a new body, my other bots had already been destroyed. It's not like the game should be easier but as some sort of unique selling point (if it's intended to be one ) it's used too seldomly.

I like the idea of making a game about your favorite song. However I think that copyright issues would most likely arise. So you'd have to say: this game is about song XY, go buy it to see if it's true. Hooray for creativity-killing laws!

Very well done on the engine and the game. On a side note: beating hoes appears to be tolerated by the police. As long as you don't have any drugs on you, you walk away without consequences :D.

I agree with the menu issue, you cannot close it fast enough. The game should pause while you buy something.

Oh, it sounds like you need to Go and rest in your cabin

Thanks, that did the trick.

I really like it. Story and graphics are good and I don't think that controls are cumbersome.

I'm stuck on the space station, though. What I've done so far: <spoiler> talked to Ace's old buddy, got an ident-upgrade for my computer with the coupon, caused an "accident" at the fountain and bought the female cop dinner</spoiler>. I've got no idea what to do next. Could anybody please give me a hint?

Sorry for not releasing the game because of random unwanted things that happen.

Noooo ... does that mean it will never get released? Even after the competition? The screenshots looked so great  .

I love the music, especially song 1 and 2 .

"Tom, never talk this way again!"  :D Fun.

Updated: Fixed the bug and included the requested option. Download the patch or the second version from the links on the first post.

Wohoo! Thanks. I can't believe for how long I watched them kick each other around :D.

The penguins look adorable. It's fun and totally chaotic :D. Sound, graphics and gameplay are a great match.

One bug: if I get enough points to enter my name in the highscores, the game crashes whenever I want to start a new game in the menu. Appearently the scoretable file isn't saved correctly. It's 0 byte after I enter something in the highscores. I have to restore the scoretable file from the archive to get it working again.

Also could you hide the highscore table after a name has been entered? I'd love to just watch the remaining penguins for a while .