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[adam a]

Hello!

I've been trying to make games for a while now but I seem to have a horrible habit of never really finishing them, starting is much easier So this is an effort to make me finish something. I'm hoping that by getting it out in the open I might be more motivated to get to the end.

Magnum House
The game is called Magnum House and is 100% inspired by this building in Dundee, Scotland. The thing I like most about the building is the typeface used above the door, brills-o-clock!

The Idea
The game takes place in a house in which everyone has a magnum (a Dirty Harry style shooter, not the ice cream) and is doing their best to shoot every other gangster in the place. The game will hopefully be multiplayer, and very much in the style of TeeWorlds or Rocket Riot, kind of frenetic, with lots of guns going off. The twist (of course, it has to have a twist!) is a kind of anti-violence, machismo-deriding, art-piece where for every successful murder you commit your gun grows larger. With a larger gun your bullets are more destructive but you move more slowly, take longer to reload and your magnum delivers more kickback. The kickback will enable skilled players to do rocket jumps and crazy maneuvers though, with the idea being that a good player can sustain a high kill rate and a massive gun by being super crafty and directing themselves about with a combination of rocket jumps and normal movement.

The Details
I'm making the game on Linux, but I definitely plan to release it for Windows and Mac and I'm writing it in C# so if it ever gets that far there could be a XBIG version (dreams, ah). I'm mainly a programmer, but I will probably attempt some music, as for art I intend to beg or steal, but for the meantime it's triangles and rectangles.

I have a basic version with jumping around and shooting working now, I'm going to add in some things to shoot but I want to put a demo out as soon as I think I can get away with it, try and embarrass myself into finishing it

Hurrah!

[mokesmoe]

Sounds really interesting, although next to your avatar I keep reading "Magnum Horse", even though your avatar is a donkey.

[adam a]

That will definitely be a character!

Magnum Horse! With Bazookas For Legs!!

[adam a]

As promised here is a demo: http://adam-a.co.uk/magnum/0.1/MH.zip. Fingers crossed it should work on your PC, on Windows you may have to install .NET and Linux and Mac users need to install Mono and SDL too, sorry. If you're on a Mac then please give it a go, whilst it should work I haven't tried it so I don't know, I have tested it on Debian, Win XP and Win 7.

Feedback is more than welcome, especially on the controls and physics.

Currently I have been just getting the basics working (graphics, sound, etc) and mainly messing around with the feel of the physics. I think it's probably a bit slidey and I need to work on the balance of kickback and friction as your gun gets bigger. Also I'm sure it will play very differently with real enemies rather than targets.

I've spent probably 2 or 3 days worth of time on it so far (I know it doesn't look it ) and it has been quite a nice experience generally. I read a blog post a little while ago, sorry can't remember the link, but it recommended the best way to not get bogged down on a project you never finish is to do the interesting bit first. It seems to have worked, at least so far, I have been hacking pretty suspect code and I have made do with the bare minimum of art and sound to try and get a prototype of the interesting part of the game, the rocket jumping, gun size changing bit, working. I also decided that although C++ is for cool people I might as well give up on being cool and just get something done, and C# and Mono have been ok. I have the advantage of a semi-modern IDE and debugger and a language I know relatively well and (kind of) easy cross platform too.

I've been using MonoDevelop, which whilst not as good as Visual Studio for C# is ok. The most annoying part is the debugger, which does work but is slightly opinionated when it comes to your variables, some it will just go ahead and show you, others it likes to keep to itself. The fabled cross platform-ness of .net is kind of true but inevitably didn't work out of the box. I had to spend a good few hours rounding up dll's and for some reason the mono-compiled version would not run on windows, but the VS compiled one runs fine on mono, so there you go.

If I had to sum up this version 0.1 to my past self I would probably say: "2d tile collision: not as easy as you think". So, until next time...

[Sir Raptor]

If the guns get larger with each kill, is there some way to make the guns shrink in size as well? Just wondering.

[adam a]

At the moment I have it so that when you get shot your gun shrinks a little. I was thinking of tying it into the health too, so that once you get down to a certain size you die, but I think that might be trying to hang too much off the same mechanic. I also might try it out with a timer, so if you don't keep up a kill combo you'll start to get smaller. It's a bit hard to judge how to balance it at the moment, the next thing I need to do is get enemies in to test it properly.