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[Pineapple]

Earlier this year, I made Overheat, a shmup. Since then I've had the idea of a sort of sequel. Now I'm making it.

Here's a mockup of what I want the finished product to generally look like:


And here's a first screenshot of the actual game. At the moment all you can do is move your little ship a bit left and right.


And a more recent screenshot:

[Landshark RAWR]

Overheat 2: The cooldown

but seriously this is a really good example of how your roguelike engine can be used for other things

[moi]

Oh man, you and your ascii engine, you're tearing ass.
Is this a real text engine or are these just graphics made out of text?

[Pineapple]

I'm not totally sure what you're asking, but it boils down to displaying a monochrome (though not strictly so) tileset of 256 tiles (though not strictly so) using a pallet of 256 colors (this part is pretty concrete) and mapping them to the screen on a grid. The intention is ASCII graphics but that's not nearly all it's capable of.

In short, these games I've been making have proven an excellent way to hunt down all the little quirks and missing functionalities of my engine (with the biproduct of nice games as a result) for a very ambitious project I have in mind, the ultimate goal being something loosely along the lines of a high-level language with an lua interface designed for the creation of rougelikes with a complex simulation comparable to that of Dwarf Fortress.

[moi]

Yeah I wanted to know if you were just using sprite, but apparently it's more like a real text mode.

[flavio]

It's very cool! I want to see it in action!

[floatstarpx]

In short, these games I've been making have proven an excellent way to hunt down all the little quirks and missing functionalities of my engine (with the biproduct of nice games as a result) for a very ambitious project I have in mind, the ultimate goal being something loosely along the lines of a high-level language with an lua interface designed for the creation of rougelikes with a complex simulation comparable to that of Dwarf Fortress.

tell us more about your engine! - hows does it work? and what is the ambitious project??

[Pineapple]

At the moment, its capabilities lie only in displaying text graphics. I have plans to make it into a full-blown simulation (in a top-down 2d environment) intended to be used for rougelikes. I'm planning on making it possible for the everyday user to make games with it through an lua VM.

[floatstarpx]

At the moment, its capabilities lie only in displaying text graphics. I have plans to make it into a full-blown simulation (in a top-down 2d environment) intended to be used for rougelikes. I'm planning on making it possible for the everyday user to make games with it through an lua VM.

Seems a bit limiting to restrict the colour palette to shades of red only, surely?

(comedy drum roll)

[wogan]

Oh man, you and your ascii engine, you're tearing ass.

wtf are you serious? a 16x16 grid of coloured ASCII characters is "tearing ass" now?! it's about 10 minutes work!

[Pineapple]

I haven't worked on it a lot since posting this (I've been busy with Christmas stuff) but here's a screenshot. The stars are parallelax.



@wogan

First of all, the game you see is a 32^2 grid. Second of all, this is the fourth game I'm making with the engine (the others being my LD19 entry, *Sweeper, and Thaumaturgy. There's also WEPaint, which I'm constantly updating to keep up with the engine.) Though it doesn't look like much on the surface, there's a lot going on technically behind the scenes.

[wogan]

I haven't worked on it a lot since posting this (I've been busy with Christmas stuff) but here's a screenshot. The stars are parallelax.



@wogan

First of all, the game you see is a 32^2 grid. Second of all, this is the fourth game I'm making with the engine (the others being my LD19 entry, *Sweeper, and Thaumaturgy. There's also WEPaint, which I'm constantly updating to keep up with the engine.) Though it doesn't look like much on the surface, there's a lot going on technically behind the scenes.

Oh, 32x32. sorry, I wasn't counting.

Well, yes - I've had a look at *Sweeper.. so it's a grid... of coloured ASCII tiles.
It uses a sprite font (curses_fg and curses_bg) to draw a grid. I get that much. I wouldn't call that an engine... and the colours come from the pallete image.
so what's the behind the scenes stuff? Game Object management? Game state management? I don't understand...
i'm sure there's no more going on "technically behind the scenes" than in the original minesweeper, surely? there's no magic I'm missing out on here?

in fact - actually, I can read the source... graphics.bmx?

i'm not putting you down, I just don't think we should be getting all super excited about a grid of ASCII tiles.. let's keep things in perspective!

[Pineapple]

It does a lot of things automatically. It's not just "a grid", it's multilayer, supports transparency, has particles, is optimized, etc.

The point isn't for it to be something incredible and new, the point of it is to speed up the development of games, and its main purpose is to be used with a rougelike engine I'm making.

I know it's not difficult to get the same outward functionality, after all, it's just a grid of ASCII characters, but the way in which the engine works makes it extremely fast and easy to write a game with. I've put more work than is probably apparent into making it flexible and capable, and you looking only at the surface before deciding to put it down like this is very insulting. The source code is included in most of the downloads, if you look at it maybe you'll get a better grasp of how it works.

[wogan]

well, i had a skim through graphics.bmx before i posted.. but that's not really important.

fair enough. i just didn't get why people were getting so overexcited about a screenshot of some ascii characters, while some amazing looking (ambitious, exciting) projects on this board get ignored or slated. 

[Pineapple]

Progress!

[Pineapple]

Due to a bunch of awesome ideas flooding around in my head, this shmup is becoming a lot more than I originally planned.

I'm renaming the game, probably to Aftokratoria tou Iliou (αυτοκρατορία του ήλιου)

That's Greek for "empire of the sun", by the way.

[AndroidScholar1]

You're targeting this at an English speaking audience though, right? I'd suggest abbreviating the title or making a word that's catchier but based on it, because people tend not to remember long titles with foreign words.

An example of something like that affecting commercial games is if someone saw an advertisement for the game, and wanted to look it up later, but were unable to because they couldn't remember or spell the title.

It's a nice title though. Some parts of it are catchy, but together it's a bit of a mess, so using just a bit of that phrase would work a lot better - 'Iliou', 'Aftokra', etcetera.

The games looking nice so far though Pretty much on the dot with your original idea in the mock-up screenshot.

[Kit]

Digging the ascii engine. So it's sorta like a demake graphics version of the first one? :D

Love the schmup spaceship genre. Super Ken Senshi was a good one. Any chance of two player mode?

[Pineapple]

I'll keep multiplayer in mind, but I can promise nothing there.

[BlueSweatshirt]

while some amazing looking (ambitious, exciting) projects on this board get ignored or slated. 

It's not like this board is more deserving of games that have better graphics.
This is a board for people with aspiring projects and ideas that they want to share with the community. And Madk's idea is no less worth sharing than mine or yours. Aye? That's how I see it.

Anyway.......

I personally love the ASCII aesthetic, and judging by the HUD, I feel like the gameplay is going to pretty different than the standard verto-shmup.

I do agree about the name, though. Not change it, but give it a shortened name or abbreviation so people can have something to remember.(It really sucks when you're trying to recall a game but can't recall it's name)