First, I wanted to say that this looks absolutely delicious.

That said, the gameplay video makes Flo look a bit weird sometimes. The running animation keeps going when she's running into a wall; it'd be good if it stopped.

She has the ability to stand with one leg on the platform, one leg off; that looks weird, and could be remedied with a "whoa I'm falling off" sprite, like in Spelunky.

She doesn't recoil or anything when she lands. It might be a good idea to have one or two frames where she bends her knees, with a variant for when she's running and one for when she's standing still.

Finally, I reiterate:

There's a local challenge to make a shmup, and I felt obligated to participate. The idea of making a polished shmup doesn't really appeal to me, though, so I spent most of the time in design and avoided polishing at all in implementation. It's a B-game in the bad sense.



It's called Intersecshmup, and the basic idea is that you can only shoot enemies that are intersecting. The enemies move in predictable patterns, like circles and triangles and zigzags and sine curves, and the original idea was to have you time your shots based on predictions of when enemies would touch each other (you have a limited amount of shots, you see). Making that fun would have taken polish time, so I defaulted to the standard "shoot like crazy when you have the opportunity".

I was originally going to have a boss that changed shapes to different iconic intersections, like a hammer hitting a nail and a bat hitting a baseball and probably something else. I ended up just using the hammer.
You can download what I made here (.exe link). Arrows to move, Space to shoot, Y to skip past the unreasonably healthy enemies. I also uploaded the source code for no reason.

I do like the idea, so who knows, maybe I'll polish it up if I ever become interested in shmups.

Hempuli wins with his rhino dragon! Congratulations, Hempuli! You have the magic eye.



Now someone put that thing into a game!

A problem with 3D games in general is that 3D is inherently unintuitive. In the real world, we have gravity limiting us to forward backward left right. Paper and screens are the preferred media for most visual artists. There have been a bunch of 3D games, but they all rely on some kind of reference point, like the ground or a linear path or the direction of the nearest enemy. Another issue is orientation of the camera—even in 3D games where you can fly around freely, the camera is often oriented to imply that one fixed direction is down.

It seems like planet-style 3D, where gravity converges towards a point rather than a plane, is a good way of using all three dimensions. Everyone knows about Super Mario Galaxy, and Swear (which is awesome and recommended) is basically non-euclidean Snake. Does anyone have more examples?

I'm slapping together a quick shmup for a competition. It's called Intersecshmup, and you can only shoot enemies which are intersecting.  It looks like this:



The enemies will move in predictable patterns like circles and triangles and sine curves and zigzags. The boss will be a hammer which intersects a nail (which moves in your direction, oh no!).

Immersion!

seconded

It's just that simple.

:D That makes sense.

To be honest, almost-static cockpit images were never too successful at immersing me.  Cockpit-style controllers, on the other hand...

Can cockpits with almost-static images still be awesome? If so, how?

I haven't played many cockpit games, so I don't understand what's cool about them. Is it that you're constantly reminded that you're controlling a big metal awesome thing? Is it that you feel smart because you understand all these dials? Is it that you get to act on information that you can't take in with your eyes (for instance, you can't see air pressure)?

My first impression of cockpits is that they're big obscuring mechanisms. They take over the screen and you can barely see with the small window you're given. That's why Metroid Prime gives you the option of making yours transparent. Cockpits are also overly complicated; you always need to read a manual or run through a tutorial to find out what every dial and switch does. And what's more, fake dials and switches are thrown in just to make the thing look cool, making the whole thing more confusing.

TIGers, teach me cockpit appreciation!

This is really neat! The last level felt disproportionately hard, but that would have felt fine at the time if I'd known that it was the last level. Maybe some sort of indication of your progress on the Click to Continue screen? Speaking of which screen, I keep accidentally clicking through it and missing what it's saying. It would work a lot better if the screen disappeared when you release the mouse.

If you could add tiny squish/splat sound effects, I think that'd make a lot of difference. Adding some feedback to hovering and clicking the mouse icon might be a good idea—change the cursor to a finger, maybe make the circle expand or the color change on click.

All in all, a good show, especially considering that it's 4k!

Sorry I'm late! Let's do this thing.

Compo Link

All the entries are in the link above! Since some people posted several images, assume that they're entering the first image in their post unless otherwise specified. It's not too late to enter, either! If you hop in, poke me in #tigIRC (I'm Super-Dot) to get your name added to the poll ASAP.

The poll will go on for seven days. I omitted astrospoon from the poll because he already won; this is for second place.

The prize is your retroactive innate ability to capture the respect and imagination of your peers!

I like the new layout! With all the art, it was hard to find design and music and dev threads.

Would people get confused?

If the blits are lowercase, I don't think they'll be a problem.

Also, on GAME OF LIFE platformer... do the platforms change shape as you play? Cause that would be kinda awesome.

That's the whole idea!

I like the style you have going! And yeah, Game Maker is awesome.


I'm working on a platformer which takes place in Conway's Game of Life. The programming is a bit tricky!







The final version will be more colorful.

Yeah, but "arf" is easier and funner to type.

 

Now that I can control it, this is so amazingly brilliant. I'm using "the" for run and "irc" for jump

Would a left-facing string be easy to implement?

It's fun if the actions roll off your fingers, but that's not the case for point-and-peckers like Inanimate or Dvorak users like me. Maybe an alternate control scheme that you don't need to know QWERTY to use? Like QWE to run and ASD to jump, or QAZ to run and ]'/ to jump, or left-down-right to run and down-up to jump.

[Rules]

Linky

This is a compo to find the coolest or cutest or whateverest pixel art in a grid of black and white random pixels! Examples are here. This is the only compo you can win by staring!

Rules

• If you modify a sprite to add an outline or something, you have to post the original as well, like so. Otherwise we don't know which parts of the sprite were made by the randomizer and which were made by you.
• Since it's really easy to find lots of tiny images, you can only submit one (1) image. Choose carefully!
• Voting will start around this time next week. You can submit images after that, but then it's harder to win.

Tips

• Refresh the page like a million times until something catches your eye. Or!
• Stare at a single pixelgrid and find millions of images in it, and then choose the best one.

Have at it!

Nice one, Ravey!



I found half a protagonist.



And the head of a dragon



I like this guy. So carefree!


I think I'ma make a find-pixels compo thread, since you can participate by just staring. It's a super-low barrier to entry! And the more random pixels we find, the easier it'll be to make a game with them.

Did you try the second page?

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=3993.0

This is pretty awesome, guys!

Also, I can't load anything on the site except the background and a "red x". Do I need to install something for my browser first?

The page relies on on data: URLs, which IE 7 and below don't support. Pick one of these.

These are sweet 


The cheerful elderly reptile agrees that a compo would be swell. Should it be to create a game, or just to find a neat picture, or to find and animate a neat picture, or what?


Also, goose!