Would it be easier to change the controls to keyboard? I wanted to make controlling the plane challenging but not too challenging! You'll learn to control the aircraft better the more you play it. In the full game there is a tutorial level as well to get you used to flying.

EDIT: Oh and in the full game you can tone down the difficulty in controlling the plane. I think i've set this as Medium.

Dunno man your call, give it a shot see how it plays i guess, It could work, I think it would be alot more friendly than what you currently have.

One problem I see with the backgrounds is an inconsistency in the art style...

This shot shows it pretty well the high amount of detail and to be more specific the dithered approach on the sprites is not reflected in the background, especially on that stone bunker. This is kind of making it feel like they are from two different games for me.

That would require redoing your bland ground tiles too , because they suddenly will be the focus, good find though, I think the game is using rendered pfx too, which is fine, but some of the pfx looks handdrawn, another inconsistancy while panda is on it. 

Okay I had a second play through today, It might be just me struggling with the flight controls, but the way the enemies fly at you at the moment is quite bland, I mean, you could pretty much scrap alot of shit and focus on making enemy planes come on screen using a spline or something to add some depth to there movement, maybe even some animation, since im guessing its a bulk part of the game... you know... shooting planes, it needs to be really fun and replayable.

Okay next thing i picked up on, is the bullets feel fake, add a bit of variation to there movements, maybe a pixel up or down, maybe stretch them over time, so they look like your actually spamming hot lead instead of sprites.

Overall I like the concept and with a bit of work on the art and controls I think it could be a realy good game man, best o luck

f2 restarts mmf apps

Okay, yep, controls replace, or rework, the mouse to control altitude is painful, might work if thats all you had to do, but when you throw in bombing, shooting, dodging shit, becomes way too much / seconded handcrafted radio there, Id replace it with directional controls, at the moment it feels like im spending all my time trying not to crash, and shooting shit is a distant second, infact, im just holding fire and sort of trying to dodge.  My second suggestion is, PLZ add some sick air deaths that you can gib the enemy parachuting fighter pilots, would be a nice bonus, blow up there plane and they get slogged off the front of your plane, fuck yer.

link didnt work dude

edit: rokay! all good

skydiving academy was made purely for hwa - 800-600 with decent performance, where to start, first off mmf2 is awesome, every negative point im about to list, remember foremost, its awesome.... AWWWEESOMMME.


The editor is either love or hate, if you dont like writing your code, and can manage the quirks involved with kliking, then cool, its bearable, be prepared for the occasional crash and you pulling your hair out wondering wtf is wrong when your file sizes get fairly large too.

HWA is still beta last time i checked, so alot of the cool shit doesn't work yet (fullscreen?), but its worth learning as I have faith clickteam will kick some serious ass on it.

The way game frames are setup in that you have to recode your engine for each frame makes developing certain genres very hard, anything that would span across several scenes that you would need to recode core functionality, or write your own level editor, loading system, depending on what you want to do.

Theres more minor shit, but ill skip that, PM me if you want the full list haha.

Okay good points!

Its probably the best prototyping tool I know off, especially for someone whos a artist primarily, the whole program is realy setup to knock out some sweet games realy quick in, keeping everything fairly artist friendly.

Java support comming is promising...

Theres lots of examples provided around, and extentions keep pushing mmf2 forward with extended functionailty, realy the most overlooked thing I think.  Theres extentions out there for alot of shit, takes the effort out of doing alot of the ground work.

Another thing that no ones really mentioned yet is mmf2 compiles clean, all your icons etc are handled easily, all your graphics that are actives are compiled into a clean exe, music also, theres usually no wierd runtime quirks, its pretty much to guarenteed to run on most windows comps, saves you time fixing wierdass runtime errors, and keeps the whole application nice and compact.

pixel shaders 

good job dude, ran perfect for me upto lvl8, where i was pwned, full marks.

i had a bit of a co-op session with a friend today and my verdict is that this is a shitty game.

im all for retro remake, and let me state again that ive never played the original but WHY THE FUCK CANT I JUMP UP, DOWN OR SHOOT UP? what the fuck. i get it, you couldn't in the original so you shouldn't either. what im getting from this is that the original probably wasn't a very good game, and i didn't miss anything.

i can respect the purity, but i just dont think those limitations were any fun. i guess they really want you to make the most out of that arm, but it controls so horribly itself that it turns the whole thing into an exercise in frustration.

horrible controls.

and those top-don levels arent any fun at all either.

I honestly thought bionic commando was broken in a good way, sure the controls are frustrating sometimes, but when you finally nail the whole, modern day tarzan swinging from grapple to grapple over a giant spiked pit, it feels fucking awesome. I think its something that gets better further you get into it also, but valid points about the topdown sections, they are indeed, the ghey.

she displayed a glorious red ring today after 10min of braidage, just bam, 3 red rings, now nothing.  Microsoft phone support were realy good about it though, gonna fix it free of charge, pay the shipping, etc, so all thumbs up there.

not sure to be honest, but it froze up when I was BC'ing, now it basicly freezes up within 30sec to a minute of booting, It seems im not alone though, theres forums filled with these sorts of issues, partytime.

Somehow I think a higher power is telling me to finish something....

boxart has already won me 

okay guys.  Bionic commando just bricked my xbox 

Not sure if its still under warranty anymore either, got it on release day? Ironic hey, 2 games I actually want on it (Braid....), gettin into them, then bang, fuck you microsoft.

Back to actually doing some gamedev...

yea I could understand someone jumpin into it first time would think the controls are bad, I think alot of the challenge is working with the goofy claw shooting controls haha, either that or my 360 control is boned 

almost done the 360 version, its pretty awesome so far, if u liked the original its spot on + more, full marks.

dude! dude fucking sweet game man, like shit yea.  Derek largely nailed it with the art, being in the same position myself, i would add gibs to infantry that get bombed.  The characters, tanks and alike look realy awesome, but the ground looks way to tiled and meh, same with the sky, try n break up the tiling a bit, and desaturate those red houses :> . Also its hard to tell whos shooting in the new vid, maybe add some muzzle sprites to make it more obvious where the bullets are comming from. Apart from that Id buy this for 10 bucks in a instant.

brisbane australia here

All I know is I made a well received game but have not sold much at all in comparison to the massive amount of piracy it got. 

That sort of made a difference, and if I had a game on console it would at least feel more safer than on PC.

yea man that sucks, all the proof you need that the problem exsists, even with a cheaper price and a great quality game.

A difference between stealing a BMW and a game, which is something that shockingly nobody thinks when comparing these, is that when you "steal" a BMW the (legal) owner doesn't have it anymore while when you "steal" a game, the (legal) owner* loses nothing.

I think it only happens because its easy to do and fairly risk free, and who says they loose nothing, its arguable that if piracy wasn't as rampant and easy to do, then they would be loosing a sale.  Either way its theft, you can try n justify it all you want, but end of the day the legal owner is still loosing something, even though its significantly less than stealing something physical.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080810-developer-to-pirates-tell-me-why-you-steal-and-ill-change.html


Personally, I don't think piracy hurts gaming, or developers much. If you make not as much money as you hoped you'd make with your indie game, then that's not piracies fault. The people who like your game and support it WILL buy it (even maybe after the pirated it first) and the other people, if they couldn't have pirated it, probably wouldn't have played it anyway. So, in essence, you can be glad that these people at least played your game after all.

The best way to reduce piracy is either to reduce the price of your game (although the prices for indie games are already ridiculously low, including Aquaria and Braid) or just making your game so awesome that people who pirated it will pay for it afterwards.

And before I get flamed to death, that's just my opinion, I could be entirely wrong

flame on.

Do you think its cool to steal shit because its too expensive?  If I just stole a BMW cus I thought it was too expensive then that would be A okay? Prices are set for a reason, especially with big games, the high risk factor and the millions in development would have something to do with it.

Pirates make loads of excuses to justify stealing other peoples work, makes me want to stomp there offspring into the pavement. 

holy shit thats awesome, those graphics = win

yea all the sfx is done, just needs to be added to the engine, Joel from studio13.ca did it, and a kickass job i might add 

alpha vid 3, need more music.... anyone make good rock trax?