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[Tadakuni Amano]

The first level of Billy Bob is complete. I have no death animations at the moment so I'm not going to post it download.



The final game will release this weekend. It may not be as expansive as I like, but because of personal reasons, this week is the last I can work on it.

[handCraftedRadio]

oh man it looks awesome. i can't wait!

[Melly]

Tadakuni that's looking great.

[MaloEspada]

The first level of Billy Bob is complete. I have no death animations at the moment so I'm not going to post it download.



The final game will release this weekend. It may not be as expansive as I like, but because of personal reasons, this week is the last I can work on it.

Reminds me of La Mulana wii + Spelunky, haha.

Looking great.

[Perrin]

I'm in the final home stretch on Critical Bypass now. Got all four levels in there now fully playable. All I've got left is to balance out the difficulty on the levels, add in an ending cutscene and then polish/bug fix.

Was hoping to have a fully playable beta up tonight but thinking more like tommorow now.

[GZ]

There is a lot of high quality stuff here so far. I'm looking forward to a lot of these games!

if i could make a suggestion, please increase the framerate from whatever it is now (30?) to something higher. games that run at 30 frames per second feel really amateur game-makery. besides that the concept of your game is cool, but the grapple controls are a bit fidgety.

I probably would have forgot this, my laptop is old and overheats easily and I don't do 60FPS games on it because of that. I changed it though, and the game runs in 60FPS now. Would it be alright if I included a toggle button (ie. F2) to switch between 30 and 60 FPS on the full game (defaults 60FPS)? The game can run in both with the way I have it set-up, but if you think this goes against the design of the A52O package I'll just release it as only 60 FPS.

GZ you got any of the rest of targ working on it with you?

I'm the only one, everyone else is busy with other things or is unable to help.

[Tadakuni Amano]

Thanks! It looks like I might have hit a little snag in development though. Game maker has suddenly reverted to lite mode with no explanation. Unfortunately since this is the 7th time this has happened, I'm not sure if softwrap will renew my code again, but lets hope so!

[Scattle]

Hey guys,

After some thought, I dont really like how the character/enemies are looking for Lollipops (I'm REALLY not an animator, haha)

So, would any of you talented artists out there be interested in animating stuff for the game? Just shoot me a PM if you're down for it :D

UPDATE: Cow is now animating for Lollipops! Thanks Cow!

[sergiocornaga]

Progress is going well on Robby 'n' the Robots. I'm still using placeholder graphics at the moment, so I don't have much to show yet, but my next post should be filled with eyegasmic screenshots.

(I'm REALLY not an animator, haha)

Heh, neither am I, but I'm still planning on hand drawing and animating most of my game's assets. Hopefully it will work out...

[oranda]

if i could make a suggestion, please increase the framerate from whatever it is now (30?) to something higher. games that run at 30 frames per second feel really amateur game-makery.

Would it be alright if I included a toggle button (ie. F2) to switch between 30 and 60 FPS on the full game (defaults 60FPS)? The game can run in both with the way I have it set-up, but if you think this goes against the design of the A52O package I'll just release it as only 60 FPS.

If it supports 30 and 60, does it support everything in between (and below)? If you've got your update loop nicely decoupled from the framerate (with a delta_time variable or something like that) it might be better to just put an automatic frame rate limiter in there that draws as fast as it can up to 60FPS. That way there is no configuration needed and the game runs as close as possible to 60 on any given machine.

[L]

A full level complete - Silver Sword build 4.

I added a direction lock key, C. You might need it to succeed against the screens immediately after the first boss.

[sergiocornaga]

L: I'm really digging both the element-changing and save/respawn mechanics!

[pgil]

L: When I select One Player on the menu, the game just freezes up, like it's stuck in an infinite loop.

[L]

Hmmm.... okay, I've updated the executable with something that might solve that problem. (Download again.)

[pgil]

Tried the new version. It works 

[Melly]

That's actually looking pretty interesting L. I'll give it a try when I can.

[L]

Query for Mr. P: What are the allowed controls for simultaneous two-player? (Fire Breathers, any other game that wants it)

[Perrin]

Critical Bypass v1.0 - Done

SCREENSHOTS

 

 

DESCRIPTION

I have tried to take a very bland top down scrolling shooter and turn it into an epic on the rails 3D shooter akin to Rez or Panzer Dragoon. I've kept a lot of elements from the original, especially in the first level, including the UFO ship following a road attacking coloured blobs and blocks and I've created some music that includes the original melody.

Obviouslly I've added a lot more on top and padded this out to a 4 level adventure taking the player across the galaxy.

DOWNLOADS

Action 52 Owns Windows Build

Stand Alone Windows
Stand Alone OSX
Web Player


DEVELOPMENT NOTES

Built using Unity, Sketchup, Sculptris and Photoshop.

I've been working at this as my main project for a month now and feel like it's time to move on. There are still some areas that could be polished some more and I'm hoping to spend a bit of time tuning and improving this for an updated release. Right now though I want to jump into some other stuff that's been on hold. Otherwise I could spend another month fine tuning this as 3D seem to be such a tremendous time sink.

The stand alone versions have a resolution selector while the A52O build jumps straight into the game so it fits the compilation better.

[L]

It was pretty good... but... you regenerate health far too quickly?! It's pretty much impossible for the enemies to kill you. In fact, I ran the first level and just didn't fire at all, and it took until the last four-fifths of the level for enough enemies to appear to blow up the UFO.

My advice: toss out regenerating health outright. Slice it out and leave nothing behind. Then, my friend, we'll have a game on our hands!

Also: the health "bar" isn't even a bar graph but a rectangle that changes brightness depending on damage, despite the fact that A) it's the same shape as a bar graph, and B) a bar graph is probably much easier to read than having to differentiate between different shades of cyan. (If you're awfully keen on the colour thing, I suggest making it fade from cyan to red instead.)

Alsoalso: learn from the ultimate lock-on targeting game, Increpare's Trigger, and make the combo lasers do more damage - 1 laser does 1HP damage, a 2-combo shoots 2 lasers that do 2HP damage to 2 foes, and a 3-combo shoots 3 lasers that each do 3HP damage. Then give the enemies 3HP apiece to 3 foes. This will be entertaining!

Alsoalsoalso: a few comma and grammar mistakes here and there. The opening story switches from present to past tense halfway through. And in the ensuing dialog: "What's going on? Are we under attack?" And in the level proper: "Release X to fire. Lock up to 3 enemies for combo."

[Perrin]

My advice: toss out regenerating health outright. Slice it out and leave nothing behind. Then, my friend, we'll have a game on our hands!

Yeah that's not a bad idea, set amount of hits per level. Can do that.

Also: the health "bar" isn't even a bar graph but a rectangle that changes brightness depending on damage, despite the fact that A) it's the same shape as a bar graph, and B) a bar graph is probably much easier to read than having to differentiate between different shades of cyan. (If you're awfully keen on the colour thing, I suggest making it fade from cyan to red instead.)

It's not actually changing brightness but alpha, was hoping it would give you a decent sense of amount of damage you've taken rather than an exact amount but if that's not working can change it work as a shrinking bar.

Alsoalso: learn from the ultimate lock-on targeting game, Increpare's Trigger, and make the combo lasers do more damage - 1 laser does 1HP damage, a 2-combo shoots 2 lasers that do 2HP damage to 2 foes, and a 3-combo shoots 3 lasers that each do 3HP damage. Then give the enemies 3HP apiece to 3 foes. This will be entertaining!

Probably not going to do this. It actually sounds good but requires a huge amount of additional work, would need to reanimate all the attack patterns to keep them on screen longer so you have time to get the multiple shots in, and rewrite all the enemy handling code.

You are definitely right and once I'd got it running I realised why Rez runs through long slow routes with enemies attacking you slowly, gives you a lot more time to take multiple swipes at them. At this point I've backed myself into a corner and hopefully it's fun enough without that.

Will post an updated build this weekend, give other people a chance to post some feedback too.