[=.... DEMO LEVEL....=]

=.... DEMO LEVEL....=

We are working on a demo level made with the SHMUP Creator. It will look and feel a little like the great game "under defeat", this is to say, a vertical shoot em up with helicopters and evil planes.
It's a really good opportunity for us to test and complete the last features of our tool with a real life project. It feels good (except when the tool crash, sometimes...), and the result looks like a professional arcade game.

You can see on the pictures that I also wrote an ocean shader, which moves the vertices using a sinus, offset two normal maps, and lerp a foam texture using the height of the vertices.


So, our aim right now is to complete the work on the demo, in order to complete the features and to have something to show soon. This is why we are focusing more on the game aspect this week rather than on the tool : we want to offer a polished experience for people to see (game over, highscores, level complete, start menu etc.).
S.

SHMUP Creator

We are working on a demo level (and on an ocean shader) for the SHMUP Creator :



You can see more on our website:
http://bulostudio.com

Have a nice week-end!
S.

[WARNING! A huge battleship BULOSTUDIO is approaching fast]

I decided to stop using the openAL sound library, and to implement FMOD instead.
My concern with openAL was that users have to install the driver to be able to use it. I’d like people to be able to play a game created with the SHMUP Creator without any installation (if directX is allready installed, of course).
The other thing on my mind is that the Ogre3D wrapper that I was using was a little bit buggy and didn’t support any format at the exception of Ogg. Which is fine by me. But I wanted to offer more choices for the users, like mp3 or wav.
The switch was a breeze: in 2 days I had re-wrote most of the sound related code, and I must say I’m really happy with FMOD.

Other benefits:
It’s really easy to play repeatedly the same sound and it’s not cut by itself : FMOD takes care itself of the channel pooling, so it will find a free channel to play a new sound. You can also play a stereo sound in 3D, which was impossible with openAl and ogreOGG. There are a lot of things I’m not using yet, like doppler effects, reverbs, sound occlusion or Dsp. It’s really feature rich.
Basicaly, I’m really pleased by the way FMOD handles everything.
The other big thing for me choosing FMOD over Irrklang for example, was that FMOD is now free for indies. Cool stuff!



It’s a good opportunity to talk a little bit about what users can do with sound with the SHMUP Creator :
You can of course choose sound effects for explosions, bullets shots etc.
You can stream a different song for the start menu, the game over and every level.
There is also a Sound "gameplay object": you can place them anywhere in the world and they will play a sound, located in 3D or not.
It can also change the level music when it’s awake: for example, you can change the music when the camera is approaching a boss. Or you can play a sound when the player goes inside an area, or when a message appears on screen, like playing a siren sound when the message “WARNING! A huge battleship BULOSTUDIO is approaching fast” is zooming on screen...

Been working on my Shmup on and off for ages now, This looks amazing, would make life soo much easier. Looks great so far.

Thanks for your nice comment!
We have been working on this for a long time, too. It's like writing several shmup engines at once, with a nice level editor on top... To be honest, I under-estimated the scope of the project.
But we are almost there... The past two weeks have been good
S.

A lot of progress on the editor manipulators : now, you can move everything with the mouse.
Still a lot of work to complete the shoot'em up editor, but it's getting better

Happy new year everyone, and back to work on the Shmup Creator!!!

[=.... HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!....=]

=.... HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!....=

We have finished our contract jobs for a few weeks and have been working back on the SHMUP Creator:
. gizmos and manipulators are finished (not a very exciting task, but very useful)
. OpenAL has been replaced by FMOD
. A lot of debugging

And we are working on:
. gameplay (scoring systems, medals)
. debug (again...)

More about that very soon!
S.

Our contracting work is over.
At last!
It was long and hard, and it was impossible for us to work on our project. Not on evenings, not even on week-ends...

Now I need to sleep for some days, and after that, I'll resume, at last, the work on the SHMUP Creator.
It's quite frustrating to stop working on our project like that for two months, but for now, it's the only way for us to gain some freedom financially.

So, I'm tired, but happy to go back to work (in a few days) on our pet project!
Stay tuned, I'll post updates as soon as possible

S.

i can honestly say that it's the only album i've ever related to. not even my favorite, but i can't stop listening to it. all the other music i just listen to for the story/sound.

I can understand this. Pet sound is one of the most incredible album in the rock history. It pushed the envelope at the time, and was written by a true genius.
S.

I took the time, between two contracts, to add animated previews for the weapons library :



I'm looking forward to going back full time on the SHMUP Creator, but I'm affraid it will wait until December...
S.

New animated previews for the weapons library of the SHMUP Creator :

[The 2nd monthly update :]

A new post on our devlog :
The 2nd monthly update :
Original post:
SHMUP Creator monthly update 2


We haven’t worked a lot since the middle of July. Zut

Project status
. 90% Game engine: Collisions, weapons, events, AI, special effects, particles…
. 85% UI: this is the art, layout and coding of the editor itself.
. 32% Assets: those are the 3D models, sprites, sound effects and music provided with the SHUMP Creator

What we achieved last month
. shadows/no shadow in the levels
. Bullet Physic Engine integration for all the collisions with the background
. redesigning the weapon system and building a new weapon manager
. new trigger text
. new alert windows
. we can build a stand alone game for distribution
. we can import animated sprites
… And a lot of bugs were fixed!

Alpha phase at the end of August!?
No. Alas… No alpha for he end of August.
We have had a contract job since the 25th of August and the client haven’t stopped asking for modifications and new features! Damned!

So our next goal is always to reach alpha at the end of… Well I feel embarrassed… As soon as possible!?
It’s always difficult to find a balance between earning money for developing the SHUMP Creator and developing the SHUMP CREATOR and earning money for living.

So now, to reach the alpha
We’ll need to finish the last features we have been working on
. improve the asset import
. editor’s gizmos (constraints) to manipulate objects with the mouse
. debugging the triggers
. finish to implement the game play features like scoring rules
. build a level for testing!

We are really looking forward to reworking on the SHUMP Creator!!!

I might have missed to part on what platform you can export your project on. I assume that this is for pc gaming ?

Yes it is, for now. Maybe, maybe a mac version one day, but no plan for android or ipad.

[motorherp]

Thanks guys for the nice words

And yes motorherp, I still find your old tutorials absolutely well made and still informative.
They are more and more difficult to find on the web though.

Some other links from motorherp for people interested :
   
Art Of Collision [part 1] : Gunbird Collision
Art Of Collision [part 2] : Circles, Dynamic Testing, and Time Filtering
Bullet management

S.

I wrote a post about the problems and solutions I encountered when I implemented splines in the tool. To be honest, most of the solutions are not mine, but I hope this post will be useful!

You can read it there:
Splines and shoot 'em up


And as an update, after posting this on reddit, Gtoknu posted an interesting way to avoid arc reparameterization:
https://github.com/libgdx/libgdx/wiki/Path-interface-%26-Splines

Beautiful Art style, I love it!
Good luck for the TGS

Working on the menu editor for the SHMUP Creator :

Open Season: The Video Game. And Need for Speed Most Wanted 2005.
They sucked.

I worked on Open Season.
But yeah, it sucked a lot 

We'll post a game demo soon to let people understand better the type of games they can make with the tool.
Unfortunately, we are doing contracting jobs for a few weeks right now, which is useful to pay the bills and keep our independence, but really frustrating when we want to make progress quickly.
We'll keep you posted of our progress when we'll be able to go back to work.

So this is essentially the Blastworks editor without the UI that makes you want to throw up your salami sandwich from a week ago, right? 

I don't know about the salami (but I can understand  ) , but Blastworks is a level editor on top of an actual game (Tumiki fighters). So, its use is limited to making blastworks level, in a way.

With SHMUP Creator, we are trying hard to provide people with tools they can use to create any shoot em up, with any art style and such. Which is the hard part, to be honest!

For the whiteness of the UI, we are right now racing to finish the alpha, or maybe pre-alpha as soon as possible. Now ee are focusing on the usability and the menus layout more than the esthetics. So, I'm sure it will evolve in the few weeks