get a Wacom Intuos 6x8, worth every penny.

[I need 2 or 3 people to help me test an upcoming build.]

ok, I'm back on this again...

I need some help. I need 2 or 3 people to help me test an upcoming build. The only problem is, I need someone who is available when I'm online, which is around 11pm - 2am PST. Would love the help, shoot me a PM or email if you think you can help me out.

:fancy, hat tipping gentleman emoticon:

Quick update, things are progressing pretty well, I've finished the first art pass and moved onto gameplay tasks. I'll hopefully post a build later this week since I have a few days off with the holiday coming.

@Yama, SelfTitled: the good thing is, I can replicate the all-white bug on my laptop. The bad news is, I have no clue what's causing it. It's a directx7 game so I doubt it's due to incompatibility. I have a feeling I just forgot to set something correctly...

As for the low frame rates, I have a potential fix for this. The game should be locked at 59/60 even on slower computers so I'll make it a priority.

@YamROCK: hope those spam dogs taste good!

@AaronP: welcome to the board. I've been here since the beginning and I still haven't cracked 300 posts yet Hope you're more active than me. As for the cursor going offscreen, that's a laziness bug. Every game I've started on with shooting has had that and I'm yet to implement a fix for it. I will tho, cause it's really annoying.

thanks for playing and the great feedback everyone, I really appreciate it.

gorgus: agh, I knew I left a resolution off the list   I'll put 1600 in the next build. Also, shooting the ammo boxes was a bug, I fixed it last night.

JLJac: the plan is to have ammo distribution controllable per level, so hopefully on segments where you have to do a lot of shooting, you'll never feel like you have to overly conserve ammo. I do plan on having some additional weapon powerups, I like your idea of tying them into the music and visuals, I'll def keep that in mind!

As for the controls, I'm hoping to support a few diff options, including keyboard and gamepads. Just further down my list tho...

BTW, is anyone playing this on a CRT? Just wondering what the frame rate is like...

thanks guys!

thanks for the feedback everyone, glad people are enjoying it so far! 

@eddietree: the game is built using vanilla Blitz3D

@Melly: I'll look into that, I noticed something similar on my laptop where random polys would flicker in and out for no apparent reason. What kind of video card do you have?

As for the controls, good to hear about the floatiness. I want to start building out some of the challenges and then tweak based of that, but I'll keep your comments in mind. There's def a lot of room to tighten up the turning speed and float.

Same thing for the shooting imprecision, that's caused by the ship's rotation speed being slightly slower than your mouse movement so it's always catching up. I'll have to see what would make the most sense to alter, either mouse speed or rotation.

In regards to exploration, I def want it to be a part of the game, but how much it becomes the focus remains to be seen. My goal is to make level sets, where you have maybe 10 or so short, connected maps that make up one story. Some stories will focus on shooting, some on tight navigation, and hopefully some on exploration, all loosely within the same universe.

Thanks again, I'll try to keep updating this thread as much as I can.

This is a little floaty game I've been working on the last few weeks, I just started the first art pass so I figured now would be a good time to get some feedback on the controls and core gameplay. You can download the most recent build here:

http://26k.org/dev/zero/play/battery_v012.zip

It's a 3D game but it should run on a pretty modest system. If you are unable to run it or getting odd graphical things (like the environment is all white) please let me know. The frame rate at the bottom left should stick at 59/60.

Collect the yellow cubes to gain ammo. There's no end or goal, I'm mostly concerned with performance and whether or not the floating and shooting feels good and fun.

W/S - thrust/reverse
Your ship orients itself towards the green aiming reticule controlled with the mouse. LMB to shoot
F3 toggles the debug text

thanks, I appreciate the feedback 

thanks everyone!

Sounds visually promising !!!
Any chance to get realtime shadows at some point? 
Maybe just faked one, the same animated mesh, squeezzed on Y axis, all painted in dark gray, should make a proper shadow (while killing the frame rate at the same time )

May I suggest the devilchild library?
It seems to work very efficiently for that.

I agree that shadows would def help, but I'm a bit worried that anything too impressive would break the demake aesthetic. I'll prob just end up doing a little animated rectangle underneath each player and the environment with vertex colors.

I started experimenting with a shadow 'layer', a piece of geometry modeled to look like environment shadows, placed on top of everything at 50% opacity. There's some issues with the angles and seams but I'm hoping I can figure out something by the end.

Some more screens





So it looks like I can have about 20, fully animated characters on screen at once before performance begins to become a problem. Should be way more than I'd ever need.

Funny thing is : you're using the same language as Mc dikie.

thus increasing the challenge ten fold

Short update:
I got punching working last night altho it's still a bit wonky. I need to add some enemy models to see how many animated characters Blitz can handle before dying. At 640x480, I think I'll have some room to play. I still haven't settled on a final aesthetic yet but the game will definitely stay orthographic 3D like it is now.

Awesome!

Also, whenever I see your avatar, lowpoly, I have this strange urge to lean forward and bite my computer screen.

I've been meaning to change it too, hopefully before you damage your computer

I'll try to be more thorough with this compo then in the past, so here's some REALLY early screens of a rigged prisoner, running around.

really awesome, just don't nerf the pyro please :D

Plese let this be Hard Time devolved.

ding ding winner :D

oh this could be AWESOME 

[Fighting Prison Brawl]

Fighting Prison Brawl* is a demake of a certain, amazing prison game that swept the nation with it's open world action and intense morality infused gameplay. However, FPB will feature neither of those things instead focusing on incredible brawling action all presented in stunning, software accelerated orthographic 3D for your IBM/PC running DOS 5**

some wip screens down below, awesome to follow

* name subject to change
** lies

light rays!

kinky

back and forth, forever.

played the hell out of this game, good times. The weird gibberish language they spoke and hitting cars with the water cannon and getting money for washing people's cars... such a weird but fun little game.

What's going on this thread? :D :D

You should still finish this.

Still working on it, I'll probably have to make a new thread for it since this compo is over but it's coming along nicely. Definitely going to need some playtesters in the near future...

ok, the Blitz stuff. Check out Mark's (the developer) worklog for the initial announcement and some status updates:
http://blitzbasic.com/logs/userlog.php?user=1&log=1043

He's posting every week now and things are really looking good. He's basically making a charged up version of the current engine, but with support for all the DX8+ stuff people have been asking for over the last few years. So we'll get built-in shadows, shaders, physics, and even support for LUA all while keeping the ease of use at the same level. Lots to be excited about.

The great thing about Blitz is its simplicity and versatility. It's a great starter language that you can really grow into (and maybe out of) and do some pretty solid work with. The $100 price point may seem steep for no-budget indies but after 5 years I feel like I've gotten my money's worth even if I've never made a dime from using it. Think of it as a long term investment I guess.

Ah. I haven't found the missions too hard so far. Except for this one. Where I have a shootout with these dudes, and the cops always come in the middle of the shootout, so I'm being pwned from both front and back. Sure, I've failed a few times on a mission, but usually my failures end in hilarious ways so the frustration doesn't kick in 'till the third or fourth try. But I'm only about a quarter through the game.

ya, therein lies the problem. Expect to see that, but more of it, over and over again. More of the same, 90 times. The first half of the game I was totally locked in. By the time I opened the third island, it all just became a tedious chore and all the humor of the game mechanics really wore thin.

That being said, the actual script part of the storyline is still great and obviously worthwhile enough for me to trudge through and complete the game. But that process really caused a large disconnect from the characters, which is a shame because some major stuff happens to them by the end.

[TLDR]

a day removed from finishing the game now, I guess the takeaway point of my mini-rant there was to say that, altho the world in which you play IS fantastic and does in fact live up to the hype, the actual storyline that you are intended to play is mired in game design just one step above that vicious hack of Super Mario Bros where the guy died every few seconds to bullshit hidden coin blocks.

In the case of open world / sandbox video games, you are talking about 2 different game experiences at the same time. On one hand, you have the free roaming, do as you please game/murder sim and on the other you have the storyline, complete with cutscenes, boss battles, and all the other stuff that usually defines a game. In the case of GTA4, for me, the storyline part was so much a frustrating disaster, that it overshadowed how much fun I've had in the open world and multiplayer portions.

TLDR, if you're going to have someone play a game for 40 hours, seething hatred for the developers and apathy for the game characters is not what you want the player to take away from the game. Unless that was your intended goal of course...

[I've never played a more frustrating, cheaper game then this one.]

I finally finished the story. took me 40 hours in-game (I'm not positive that includes deaths)

I've been playing games for a long time now and I understand how difficult they are to make. The amount of work and artistry that went into this game is unrivaled and the developers should be commended for delivering such a fantastic game world and living up to the monumental hype that surrounds this game.

That being said, I've never played a more frustrating, cheaper game then this one. Maybe I'm just fucking old and slow, but the missions in this game are absolutely unnerving. They are repetitive, tedious, and completely stain everything that is great about the open world/sandbox portion of GTA4. I'd say more than 1/3 of them feel like tacked on time-filler in order to hit the 30 hour mark games these days need. It's a real shame because the story and cutscenes are well written and I was very immersed in Niko's story. Sadly, the missions typically derail into the same formulaic pattern of find someone, chase someone, catch and shoot them, then run from the cops who couldn't be bothered during the massive shootout 5 minutes ago. Pray you don't die or worse, get caught in some horribly cheap scripted roadblock sequence during a chase, because the penalty usually means returning to the mission start point, driving cross town, and doing the whole thing over again.

Of the 92 missions I played, I failed a total of 58 times. While it's possible that I do in fact just suck, keep in mind I only was killed 18 times (some of which happened outside of missions).  That's 40 times of 'Blah Blah got away'.

I guess I'm just really disappointed. The prolonged length of the story, the tedium of the missions... it's just so aggravating when you compare it to how right they got everything else. By the end of the game, I couldn't care less about Niko's story and just wanted to be finished and done with the whole thing. Not exactly the kind of memorable, enjoyable experience games are supposed to provide you.