Of course Space mutants FROM SPACE by our own toadtrip :-). Here is my review (copy/pasted from the above site):

I've actually never thought it would be possible to make a Flash game of this quality, but here it is in front of my eyes. I believe this game deserves much more recognition than it already has - it is a solid game, which can keep you playing for more than a couple of minutes that most Flash games do. The music is very good, the graphics superb and the controls awesome. All this alpha blending might make some older computers to slow down a bit, but i've seen much worse graphics in Flash with less performance. No really, this could be a game you would buy for Wii or XBLA, but you have it right here for free.

An advice for new players: make sure the first update you get is speed and the second the weapon powerup. It will make your life easier.

I highly recommend this to anyone in need of a fast paced shooter.

Ah, btw. There is nothing "retro" with this one - its as new and fresh as it gets ;-)

Forget NeHe for OpenGL tutorials. First it has some bad tutorials and it doesn't really explain much the code. Sure you can copy/paste the code and have some results, but you won't really know what you're doing.

Second OpenGL 3.0 was announced 18+ months ago which deprecates most of the OpenGL 1.x/2.x stuff, including the "immediate mode" (the glBegin(GL_TRIANGLES); ... glEnd(); stuff) which is what most tutorials use. OpenGL 3.1 was released recently which *removed* all the deprecated stuff (you can still use it in most drivers, but you *must* check for the ARB_compatibility extension because eventually these will be removed or wont be enabled by default since the new design is much simpler and streamlined from an implementation point of view with the goal to make it less buggy and faster, which will lead most drivers in the future to enable it "by request").

If you want to learn something now, OpenGL 3.1 or DirectX10 should be what you learn. The differences between these two APIs are minimal from the "what you can do" point, although the way they're done is different. But the API part of any game/engine/whatever is only a very small fraction of the whole picture: what matters is that you know what you're doing which this is much more important than the API and it is the same no matter if you use OpenGL 3.1 or DirectX10 (personally i was using OpenGL for years and never touched Direct3D, but when i got a job in the industry as an engine programmer in an engine that used Direct3D it took me very little time to pick up the Direct3D way of things - and this was in D3D9 which is much bigger and complex than D3D10).

I would recommend, however, to learn OpenGL instead of Direct3D because of its multiplatform nature. It is available to Windows, Linux and Mac OS X, while Direct3D 10 is available only to Windows Vista (not even Windows XP). This, combined with the fact that you won't have to mess with COM, C++, etc (did i mention that C++ is an abomination? no? well, it is - i prefer C or some sane OOP language such as FreePascal) makes OpenGL easier to pick up and use.

If you don't know about 3D graphics programming though, i highly recommend to stop now and instead of using a 3D API, make your own simple software rasterizer. DevMaster has a nice set of tutorials on the subject: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. There is also 3DICA, the tutorial i learned software rendering from. It also covers the required math, however if you're stuck on the math department i highly recommend Martin Baker's Eucledian Space site which includes a lot of information in both human readable (<-- really human readable) and code form.

At a couple of threads here and way too many times in tigirc, i mentioned a raycasting engine i was working on called RayFaster. Well, guess what. After a few months of stuffing around with haXe i turned this into a game of some sorts.

The story of the game is as follows

You are the apprentice of the great Wizard*, sent in the unholy lands to recover the Black Rombo from the hands of the evil mage's castle. In your journey through the lands, you'll encounter several creatures in evil mage's service. Do not think twice before sending them to meet their creator; these are damned souls, lost forever in the realm from where the evil mage came and transformed an once healthy place to a dead zone where only the darkest entities enter.

This isn't only your test to prove yourself worthy of the great Wizard's trust, but also the beginning of a great quest to restore the scourged land to its former status.

(*=not this one )

(sorry for possible grammar mistakes -tell me if you find any- English isn't my native language)

Here is the game: http://www.runtimeterror.com/play/rombo/
A Screenshot



Can you find this? 

There are some issues to be expected and i plan to add extra levels at some point as "addons" (playable from my server of course) or even add the ability to save levels on the server so people can make their own, although this requires some modifications to both the editor and the engine (but its a nice idea :-P).

Currently there are five levels and a bunch of monsters, but new levels will be added soon (and the story is open enough to allow for this :-).

Anyway. Comments? :-)

Allegro is a nice library actually. I used it some years ago to write a GUI system for DOS (with dynamically loadable modules and such). Basically i used it for its video drivers and keyboard support.

The irony is although i spent about a couple of years with Allegro (i worked in another similar project before starting mine) and i basically learned C programming while working with it (my initial C code looked too much like allegro's code), i never used it as a game library :-P.

Hardware surfaces use 2D acceleration, which in today's cards is only a very small part of the whole GPU. Probably shocking, but 2D acceleration is different than 3D acceleration so even simple 2D blits are done differently from the GPU. Given that the market push is in 3D since the last decade, the 3D part of the GPUs have become monsters while the 2D part remained the same as it was in 1998 and the only speed increase comes from faster clocks.

If you use haXe, you can use 'medit' (which is pretty much an advanced gedit) and from Preferences add a tool that calls haxe and another that calls flashplayer. Then using the Configure shortcuts option, bind some keys to these two tools (like F11 for compiling and F9 for running).

Yes, the best nvidia card you can afford :-). Steer clear from ATI cards, their graphics drivers suck so much that they've gained enough mass to be a step prior collapsing under their own weight.

The tools i use are the same in windows and linux: gcc (mingw in windows), freepascal, lazarus, java sdk, netbeans, haxe, gimp, blender, etc. The libraries are similarly the same: libsdl, opengl. And of course a bunch of my own tools and libs.

I said nothing about the language, but if you go there, when i made Nikwi, GameMaker had just started being popular enough to have more games than lame pacman and breakout knockoffs. Also the game was made from scratch, including the tools, in a timespan of two to three weeks. I highly doubt that there are more than a dozen of people being able to do that in Game Maker or any similar tool. As for the screenshot, the game's graphics are constantly the most positive thing i hear for the game and i've got a good review about them in Bytten, not to mention that it was shown on TV. Since i made it opensource it was ported (by others - people wont do that for games they dislike) to PSP and Mac (someone also told me he will port it on GP2X but i haven't heard from him since). It was added to Debian and Ubuntu distributions where so far has a two-star popularity rating. For a new game (it is only there since 8.10) it is a good thing and more known games have a smaller popularity rating. Also i've got positive reviews from happypenguin, the place where linux gamers hang out.

So, as you can imagine, i am proud of Nikwi and i didn't made that comment to say that i wonder why Nikwi didn't sell. In fact i know exactly why it didn't: no music, many bugs, no promotion, the game basically was unknown.

My comment was more about the last part basically. With his antics, even if Bob's game is total crap, he will sell at least one copy because people have heard of it. I'm also totally sure i would sell some Nikwi copies if i had done similar acts (no, i wont do for my next game, i have some self respect).

Btw since when screenshots can play sound?

I thought this was about a common game configuration utility/protocol that indie games should use so you wont have to configure each one separately (like setting the same keys for movement, action, jump, etc resolution, volume control, etc manage account settings for those who use a single account in their machines but more than one person plays the game, etc). Well, too bad :-P

The conference sounds interesting actually :-)

What game you made for PC??

Nikwi was shareware before i released it as open source. It made zero sales.

If you are familiar with Delphi and want crosplatformness, i recomment FreePascal and Lazarus. FreePascal is a crossplatform compiler (supports Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X/Darwin, Mac OS classic, DOS, Win32, Win64, WinCE, OS/2, Netware (libc and classic), MorphOS, GameBoy Advance and Nintendo DS). It also has a turbo pascal like ide. Lazarus is a graphical IDE that looks like Delphi (the classic multiwindow look, not the crap/newer msdev look).

What saddens me is that if he ports it to the PC he might actually make more sales than my game had.

I mean, someone might buy it.

I dislike non-linear games actually. A linear game gives a clear sense of progression, while a non-linear is more vague. There are exceptions to both of course, but so far the only games i've finished are linear.

For starters, use .tar.gz instead of .zip files. Second,

Code:

badsector@kukuruku:~/Apps/lugaru$ ldd lugaru-bin
not a dynamic executable

Static linking an executable is a bad practice. The program is supposed to link against the C library dynamically which has an interface that is the same for many years (it only gets extended). The C library is a layer between the kernel calls (which change often and it is stated in the documentation that a program must never depend on it) and your program. By statically linking the C library you're basically using the kernel calls directly - that is the kernel calls of the C library version you compiled against.

The best practice, for binary-only distribution, is to include all your .so files with the binary and set up a script that uses the system-wide available version and if those are not found (or the binary fails to launch because something is missing), to use the distributed one.

Besides keep in mind that for years linux was a "hacker's os" (not crackers) and binary-only software was third-class citizen. Now its second-class and as it becomes more known, it'll become first class like in other OSes.

Also people should not depend on Wine. First of all Wine is not available everywhere. Also it is not stable; it can crash for many reasons. It doesn't have the stability that native libraries have. It adds an extra CPU burden due to the implementation. It moves around much faster than the kernel does, meaning that one version might work and the next might break (this can be seen in the appdb). And of course its not native, meaning it has less integration with the rest of the system (like not being able to fully utilise some device features that are otherwise available for native apps - full pixel shader support comes to mind).

You say that it is a flash game, why is streaming not an option?

Due to technical*1, size*2 and distribution*3 issues.

*1 = I don't use (or even have) the Flash IDE. I use the haXe language which provides a cross-platform, cross-target (Flash 6/7/8/9/10, JavaScript, server, PHP, C and i believe soon Java), sane coder-friendly environment, but it lacks some features that Flash IDE provides due to its code-only nature. One of the most important features is preloading, which means everything has to be loaded at once.

*2 = The file must be as small as possible because since there is no preloader, the player will stare at a black area until the game is fully downloaded. Also since i plan to have this and other games of mine in my site, i want to keep the bandwidth usage as low as possible since unlike normal downloadable games, flash games are stored in the cache which tends to be cleaned now and then so if someone likes the game almost every time he plays it, he will have to redownload it. MODs save a lot of space when compared with flat audio formats. Also i can use longer music with MODs and put more variety in the game by using more MODs without sacrificing much space (although in Rombo i don't do this, i plan to do it in some next games).

*3 = Most Flash portals refuse games which are more than one file so i can't use external music data either.


And of course beyond the practical stuff, its also the novelty of being the first (or one of the first since i've heard about someone else using my flash mod player) to use tracked music in a flash game :-P.

EDIT:
1995 rocks.

.

Hey paniq, here is another demoscener (although it has been years since i made anything demo-related :-P and nothing to be proud of).

If you don't mind doing MODs (i know some people *do* mind), i would love to put some music in my Rombo flash game that actually fits the game and is not used there only because the song is free to use if you credit the author :-P.

This limbo game is older than the internet actually :-P

That was in Quake3 not Quake. I'm not really sure if you need this optimization in modern CPUs actually, remember that Quake3 had to run in Pentium MMX class systems running at about 200MHz. Of course knowledge will always be useful since there always will be platforms other than PC (for example this optimization might work on a FPU-enabled ARM system).

phew! we made it! even if I had my doubts  

congrats to everyone  

You know your game is going to be my new love, right? 
Judging from the videos at least, i die for this kind of art style. I think it takes an indie to understand that FPS games does not have to be photorealistic :-).

Congratulations 

(ps. how about a newsletter to get notified the instant the game comes out? please?)

mmh you could subtitle it 'Mademoiselle in the land of the wrong palette'

I remember reading somewhere about an artist who was colorblind and he was making some sort of grass on bricks tile or something like that and some other guy saw what he was making and said something like 'wow very good alien tentacles'. Despite his colorblindness he was considered a good artist in general.