Nice GUI, toastie! I've always wanted a real-time particle effect editor. Does it do events too, as well as continuous emmitters?


Well, this isn't exactly something I've been working on, but one of my best friends just successfully completed NaNoWriMo!   

I'm so excited. I've been acting as a cheerleeder for a month now, and it's great to see the project completed.

If any of you are interested in writing but have a little trouble finishing projects, you might want to check out NaNoWriMo. It's a whole lot like a TIGSource competition, but you write a novel in a month instead of making a game. The idea is to raise people's confidence and help them get over their self criticism.

Is that freehand? It looks like a drawing, but it's hard to tell.

If so I'd love to see it without all the filters. It's a good drawing.

Salade- Wow, I had no idea. Honestly my platformer experience fairly limited. Could you point me to a game that uses the mechanic? I'd love to see that in action.

JLJac- That might be neat. The closest thing I've seen to that is in Cave Story- the Booster v. 2.0 lets you jet downward if you want. Another game that comes to mind is Street Fighter. With some characters (such as Dhalsim) it's often useful to use down-travelling attacks in order to cut a jump short.

I like the little engines you've added, those are ace.

I really like how clean the lines of your original model were. I wonder if there is a way to add detail in a way that compliments the original shape, rather than making it busier.

I'm sure whatever you come up with will be great, I really like the look of the demo. Here's looking forward to the game!

I love the binary counter and the Langston's Ant programs.

You know, I've never been big on rigidly defining what a 'game' is... I think semi-autonomous systems like this and Conway's Life really have every bit as much to offer as more conventional fare.

I love Lovecraft. He's my one of my favorite authors- I've read nearly all of his stories. Great theme for a competition. I came so close to entering... but I already had a game in the works. Can we do another Lovecraft competion in, say, January?

I volunteer to seed, but I can't afford to download every entry. Gods, there are a lot of neat looking games! Great work, everyone!

Quite fun! The main character is fun to handle, and the enemies are interesting and have a lot of character. I also like the main character's animation.

It seems like you've got enough of us yammering at you already, but since no one mentioned it I would like to draw your attention to the collision detection. Quite frequently I found myself standing with my feet several meters below the ground, especially when jumping between platforms. Also in the section with the series of ascending platforms (maybe 5?) my head often intersected with the platform above, and prevented me from jumping.

While I like the main character's moves, he's often kind of clunky to maneuver. Sometimes archaeologists would stand right on top of me and attack repeatedly, and I would be unable to damage them without backing up and turning around. It's also often hard to eat dead archaeologists, most notably when they fall into small concavities in the floor.

But don't get me wrong, this is a good little game and I greatly enjoyed playing it. Thanks!

I'm getting ready to do some playtesting for the spaceman game I've been working on.
Mostly done:

• engine
• controls
• first three levels
• enemies for first three levels
• scoring system

To do:

• refine layout of first three levels
• fix camera
• improve title screen
• message print out / disappear animation

That's funny- I was just about to post and say I like that one the best .

It goes to show how subjective these things are. I like the range of shapes, and you're seriously making me want to play the full game.

If I were to make a suggestion, I'd say that these tend to have good large scale forms, but there aren't enough small and mid-sized elements in some of these. The Stargate is a good example of how including all different sizes of elements can make an object more interesting. Does that make sense? I think I could have said that more clearly...

What's the polygon count on these?

Oh, I read the beginning of the N tutorials, but after a few pages I ran away and hid.

I'm not really a coder either, but doing simple bounding box checks isn't too complicated. Kobel's approach is good.

For me, the complicated part wasn't checking for collisions. It was figuring out what to do after that. If you're using simple rectangles, you can measure the offset needed to push the player to each side of the box, then just pick the shortest one.

Code:

are boxes overlapping?
    right - get offset
    top- get offset
    left- get offset
    underside- get offset
   
    compare offsets, pick the smallest one.

Thanks for sharing, these are really neat. I'd like to see more people experimenting with alternative rendering styles.

You know, I've always wanted to see a game done with low resolution 1-bit real time raytracing. I'm imagining the engine would randomly dither grays, so the image would have a slightly loose look to it. No specular highlights, just flat shading.

Lovely dialog .

Oh, how did I miss commenting on the shirt animation.
I also really like the walk cycle.

You should definitely check out Flashback. I like Another World better, but Flashback has some truly amazing character animation.

Friendly introduction take 2:

Hi Stratobit, welcome to TIGSource. It looks like you've put a lot of work into this game, and that's certainly worthy of respect. In general you'll get a better response from people here if you briefly introduce yourself before asking for feedback.

I won't go into detail, but my initial impression is that the game is pretty competent, but has quite a few problems that should be addressed.

It's a bit busy visually. This makes enemies and projectiles a lot harder to see. Despite the high detail of the graphics, the main character's animation feels stiff (especially the jump). The controls are intuitive, but don't seem like a good fit for some of the situations you encounter in the game. The main character's inability to shoot while moving backward was a problem during the parts of boss fights where they move toward you. Also many boss firing patterns seem to be impossible to dodge due to the player speed and size.

This seems like a fun game, unfortunately I'm getting a bit of slowdown. I'd love to get a chance to play around with it on a machine on which it runs better.

From what I could tell, the player movement had a nice feel to it.

P.S. - I quite understand the appeal of framerate based events... In fact I'm still pruning all of them out of my current game. But agj is right. Time-based is the way to be. So, err, go team! Go forth and make games with robust and framerate independent events!

Mine is empty when I'm on top of things, and cluttered with downloads when I'm not. I usually leave it blank, but sometimes I set the background to a recent screenshot of the game I'm working on, for inspiration.

You guys make me wish I was a programmer! Nice stuff.

Inchworm (originally conceived as moving blocks from one pile to another)

Code:

eeeeeeee*e*e*e*e*e*e*e*
[[*w*]*[*e*]*w*w*]

Better version:

Code:

e*e*e*e*e*e*
[[e]*[w]e*e]

widening diagonal lines

Code:

*[[w]*[s]*]

Happy accident

Code:

*[[eenn*ww]*[nnwww*ss]*[wwss*ee]*[ssee*nn]*]

Code:

*[[en*w]*[nw*s]*[ws*e]*[se*n]*]

There's a bug in my outward spiral!

Code:

*[[en*w]*s[nw*s]*e[ws*e]*n[se*n]*w]

How did you find my web site? What site did you visit?

I'm not actually sure, to be honest. I think it was via a game blog / portal, but I'm not having any luck figuring out which. 

I look forward to your demo.

I'd be happy to help test.