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[Cthulhu32]

So not so long ago, Phubans sent me a simple game he had whipped up in Game Maker as part of an arcade series he was working on. The goal was to shock the user more than actually demonstrate a well thought out game design, but when I played it all I could comment about was how cool the game design really was. So we talked more seriously about it, I wanted to try Flixel (version 1.2 at the time? somewhere in that neighborhood), and we get rocking. During Tigjam 09, I had a somewhat working super-beta prototype with simple tiles, and Paul was doing some artwork to try to get something playable.

Long story short, Polytron announces Gamma, the "Dogs Without Guns" decide its time to create something real from a prototype, and thus Spuck was born! We did not even make it to the final runnings (I figured we wouldn't, our game doesn't really fit the party-indie scene), but we're moving forward!

Here's the current build
http://cthulhu32.kraln.com/misc/phubans/SpeedDisk/
(Gamma Executable) http://cthulhu32.kraln.com/Gamma4/Spuck.zip

And Screenies of the Gamma build:






So, now that you've seen the Gamma build, you can probably see where we want to go with this thing. More levels, better power-ups, level creator/editor for users, so much good stuff to work on.

Plan of Attack for me as the programmer:

- Update Flixel to latest GIT, rip out collisions and replace with Box2D (fps increase according to Golds)
- Create SpuckED, the indy in-game level editor!
- Add Login/Register system in PHP/MySQL and test on local machine
- Create Arcade-like game modes, attempt replay system
- Add User high scores and level creation
- Tons of user testing (I've got a few people in mind *looks at Allen*)

I'll post as I do more work on this, and comments/suggestions are ALWAYS welcome (even if they're negative.) Feel free to also post your high scores, I can get right around 145k.

We'll also be looking for a Flash sponsor when this gets closer to release, so I need to figure out the plan of attack from that end.

[ortoslon]

for easier controls, make it so when i touch a wall while holding X i walljump immediately, also maybe change the puck's color to indicate when i can't jump

[deathtotheweird]

Ahha, saw the thread, thought I would play again. My first try I beat my old score of 131,000 with a new score of 133700 

[Cthulhu32]

for easier controls, make it so when i touch a wall while holding X i walljump immediately, also maybe change the puck's color to indicate when i can't jump

Hmm interesting, yeah we were planning on flashing the puck when you hit a wall (so you know you have a wall jump ready), and I was thinking about what it would look like if there was sort of a white glow underneath the puck. I haven't thought about holding the jump because you have an air-jump any time after you hit the wall so that might be a little confusing, BUT I shall try it and see how it feels

Ahha, saw the thread, thought I would play again. My first try I beat my old score of 131,000 with a new score of 133700 

Nice! Yeah I think a replay feature in the high score list is a must, especially cause I'm expecting some people (like Ortoslon) to get ridiculous scores I could never get, and it'd be really nice if you could watch the entire run through.


So I think today's goal: try to make a Flixel + Box2D hybrid, then move it into Spuck! I also talked to Demruth last night about how I'm going to combine the tiles together to make bigger collision points, and we got into a fun tech talk about his Hazard game (which I HIGHLY suggest trying the demo of.)

[KennEH!]

for easier controls, make it so when i touch a wall while holding X i walljump immediately, also maybe change the puck's color to indicate when i can't jump

Hmm interesting, yeah we were planning on flashing the puck when you hit a wall (so you know you have a wall jump ready), and I was thinking about what it would look like if there was sort of a white glow underneath the puck. I haven't thought about holding the jump because you have an air-jump any time after you hit the wall so that might be a little confusing, BUT I shall try it and see how it feels

My only problem with this is that in area where you need to save the jump you might hold down the button a tad too long by accident and lose it.

Good demonstration, but I think the clock should be gone to properly show what you got so far. I found it a little too hard to beat the second stage, though that just could be me.

[phubans]

Yeah, I didn't want to set such short limits on the time, either, but Luke said we had to keep the entire game under 5 minutes for Gamma (although I noticed other games like Cactus's could easily exceed the 5-minute mark if you don't know what you're doing).

As for the puck turning white for a wall jump, I think that's a good idea, although you kinda get the feel for the puck after about 5 minutes of playing so I could see it becoming unnecessary and distracting beyond that point.

On my end of things, I've laid out some concepts for new gameplay mechanics in the levels; moving platforms, gravity switches, underwater mechanics, etc... In terms of assets things are pretty nailed down already, I'll just need to create more patterns for foreground and background fills, and color variations on each. Once Luke has the level editor finished, I'll be able to make the rest of the stages.

EDIT: My current top score is 157210, but I could probably do better with an unbroken combo in level 3.

[Cthulhu32]

With a little bit of help from Golds, I managed to create a Box2d Flixel sprite with the full rotation and everything built in. It really was only about 30 or 40 lines of code to add to FlxSpriteB2D, and the rest was easy.

http://cthulhu32.kraln.com/misc/FlixelB2D/ (use arrow keys)

So what this means is I can start porting Spuck's collisions over to Box2D, combine smaller tiles into larger collision shapes, and watch the FPS go way up. Also its cool because I can do fancier stuff like exploding pillars, fancy exploding ice blocks, rolling balls that chase you (maybe?), everything that comes with Box2D.

[Cthulhu32]

Paul & I were originally thinking about doing a quick flash game to get Paul some rent moola, but it seems that full-time job + Paul's circumstance made that a difficult one to finish. So now, its back to finishing Spuck before I start working on my masters degree for Computer Science.

So far, Paul's mocking up more cool stuff including a cannon that is timing based (see DKC), along with some other really cool tile ideas like an underground cave theme. I've got the entire source now under a local version control using VisualSVN, which seems to work locally but my port forward is not allowing Paul in. I'll get that one sorted out

Also, updated to the latest Flixel from 1.45 to the latest GIT, and I see a TON of changes beyond what I thought was there. I'll try to use the FlxTilemap to keep everything simple inside of the collision systems, but I might have to do some custom structure if that doesn't work out.

I think I'm also going to scrap the idea of using Box2D for now just for time's sake. I've got until August to get this thing ready to release, so once Flixel is updated, I'll be rolling out a login system and a level editor. Once the level editor is all to Paul's likings and he's rolling out the levels, I'll work on improving any memory leaks and code structure to keep it clean. Then we'll be ready for some beta-testers and then roll it out for full public release :D

[Cthulhu32]

April is apparently a MUCH busier month than I anticipated. Anyway, I managed to get a few mock-ups going, worked on a level editor, rethought some of the original ideas, and things are starting to come together a bit more. Here's some more snapshots of various quickie beta stuff, Paul's going to be doing some really nice artwork and make all of this look good.

User Log-in talking to a PHP back-end


Menu Screen button ideas


Level select, will automatically load images off the server as needed


Finally, the WIP level editor I put together yesterday and Paul is mocking up some GUI stuff for.


Now, the next thing is to get the level editor up to a point where users would want to play with it and where it can save and reload itself. I'm imagining a user playing a custom-level they created, clicking a magic "EDIT" button, then going to this screen and revamping their levels. Then making some restraints like level-size (maybe based on a premium user vs. guest) and giving just a crap-ton of items, power-ups, etc. to the user to play with.

This also is going to make creating levels for Paul a MUCH easier task. All he will have to do is load up an arcade level, click edit, then modify and save out to our server.