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[mcc]

Rszrama-- thanks.

I havent actually been testing single player mode usually, I'll give that a look though.

Also I'm not sure if I said this but the wall collision logic as of that update was a placeholder. You might find the update I'm uploading tonight interesting tho...

[mcc]

Day 26

Mac build (r113)
Windows build (r113)



Status: Working physics! Chipmunk is now completely handling not just collision detection but all movement. This means not only that you can move up and against walls correctly (and there's a fun little bounce when you hit a wall that I think I'm going to try to keep in) but that players can push and shove each other around. (At one point I even had a little kickback when you got hit by a bullet, but I took it out for now because it wouldn't be able to work when you shot a "past self" player).

Downsides: There's now a little bit inertia of when you start or stop moving; the characters move like they have heft, sort of. I tried to minimize this but there's still a little bit. I'm not sure if this is actually something to fix or not. Also, if you just sit perfectly still for 10 seconds until your copy spawns on top of you, your copy actually spawns literally on top of you and it's just sort of weird.

Anyway the physics is a big deal because what I now have is basically a system where "new" objects (i.e. objects being controlled by a player) are totally driven by the physics engine, "old"/"past self" objects are driven by the recorded movements and velocities from when they were "new", and interactions between the two are natural and physics-y ("old" objects can't deviate from their paths, but they can knock "new" objects out of the way). You could at this point fit in any kind of physics Chipmunk supports (like I at this point technically could, and as an experiment at some point might, turn on gravity), or I think without much difficulty drop in a 3D physics library like Bullet, and the time engine would just handle it.

I think I'm considering this the first "playable" demo; there's nothing left at this point to "apologize" for, so to speak. You should be able to play a multiplayer game at this point and it should be fun (assuming the game is fun at all). Everything from here on out is polish, adding maps, and "additional features" like health/ammo canisters. If anyone's able to give this version a play, I'd be really curious how it works out for you (and I need to find someone to play against…). I'd be especially curious, if you tried any of the previous builds, what you think about the new "hefty" movement.

[rszrama]

Having a birthday party tonight (turned 28), so I'll be able to compel friends to play with me as their "gift". Will let you know how it goes!

[mcc]

Having a birthday party tonight (turned 28), so I'll be able to compel friends to play with me as their "gift". Will let you know how it goes!

Lol, that sounds awesome, thanks :D Let me know how it works out.

Couple tiny tips:

- It's better with a analog gamepad
- If when prompted for "fire up" you press ~ (backtick) on the keyboard, your "fire left" button becomes a general "fire last direction" button (this makes it easy to say put two people on one gamepad)
- It does store control settings when you quit and restart

[mcc]

(Will, I at some point really am going to try to answer your technical question at the end of the last page, it's just a little tricky to type out)

[mcc]

Day 27

Mac build (r118)
Windows build (r118)



Status: Abandoned project; will be spending the remaining time in the compo implementing a multiplayer version of VisiCalc.

Wait, that's not it. What I meant to say is that I have implemented a replica of the Apple // text display system which will allow me to do Apple // style menus. In addition to being STYLIZED, these will hopefully be more functional than the old menus once they are done. Huge thanks here to Gerard Putter who allowed me to use his extraction of the Apple //c character set.

If you want to play with the Apple // mode, enter F6 at the menu screen (you can also enter F6 after the game has started for bizarre results). Once in this mode: use arrow keys to move around, type to enter letters, hold down control and type a decimal number to enter a special character, use F1 to save the screen to disk, press F2 to load it again, F3 to enter/leave invert mode and F4 to show/hide the cursor.

This still needs some work, in particular I have made no effort yet to make Apple // pixels map cleanly to screen pixels so there are problems with aliasing and funny-looking seams between characters (click to see PROBLEMS):

[Will Vale]

Downloaded this version and had a play - sorry it's taken me so long to actually try!

It seems stable and fast, the controls work well and the movement has a nice massy quality to it. I found just experimenting in single player really confusing though - it was easy to mix up my current and past selves, although wiggling the controller helped

Is there a limit to how many times time wraps around? I had somewhere between 9 and a dozen copies of myself on screen in one session. I'd sort of imagined from the description that when time wrapped the world reset, and snapping was the mechanic that allowed you to meddle with the past, but I think I had that completely wrong.

I didn't understand was why I would want to snap during play?

Take the above with a big pinch of salt - because I was playing on my own I didn't get the kind of natural evolutionary pressure that comes from having an opponent - I just stayed dumb

The bottom line is that this is a really interesting project. Even more interested now!

Will

[rszrama]

- It's better with a analog gamepad
- If when prompted for "fire up" you press ~ (backtick) on the keyboard, your "fire left" button becomes a general "fire last direction" button (this makes it easy to say put two people on one gamepad)
- It does store control settings when you quit and restart

So, having a gamepad would've been great, but without one we had to play TOOK.  It was a bit of a challenge, but still a fun gameplay experience... I reeeeally look forward to net play, as I'm not often together with other people interested in playing experimental video games with me.

We really enjoyed the game.  It was fast paced, confusing as all get out, and fun to experiment with.  We each tried different strategies during the course of the game, which just felt like a natural response to the game mechanics.  "Oh, what happens if I just snap constantly?"  (Hint: you die quickly... it's a lot easier for your opponent to predict where you'll come back if you're constantly snapping than it is for you to predict where he'll be when you snap.)

We did notice the controls saved, but one thing that really needs to happen is for you not to have to exit the game after each round.  We probably would've played further if it just kept a kill count and restarted the round after a simple keypress or something.  The reason this stood out as particularly annoying is I had just finished showing my friend Super Crate Box, which very quickly throws you into a fresh round after death unless you press Escape to go back to the menu.

Now, I'm not sure we played long enough to get over the confusion.  Some of it was owed to the limitations of my keyboard... I suppose it can only handle so many concurrent keypresses, so occasionally we'd run in a direction we didn't intend. But other than that I realized one of the easiest ways to win was to just camp somebody's past form.  Since you can't control your past lives, it actually just seemed much easier to pick on your opponents past form... which resulted in us not often squaring off against each other.  It felt more just like a race against your opponent to camp your past self at times.

But that didn't ruin the game for us.  It was still quite fun, I just didn't feel like we could really implement a strategy to counteract our opponent's strategy.  Maybe if we'd had more play time we could've figured it out.

Game rounds were typically quick, rarely getting us a full journey through the timeline.  When it did, though, it was a lot of fun.  Oh, and we did have several fun self-kills.  I like the frozen snapshot of the end game, as you can easily see when you shoot yourself in the back.

Anyways... keep up the great work.  I look forward to playing some more!  We toast you. 

[X3N]

Awwww yeah. Sounds great. FPS ala http://www.achrongame.com/site/

[mcc]

Day 28

Mac build (r122)
Windows build (r122)





Status: Added attract mode!

I spent way too long thinking about these names. I sort of want to rename the first two to "HANK" and "TARA" but then that looks/sounds too similar to "JAVA". The rule for the names is they have to sound like they were ripped out of a 90s comic book.

Also fixed the aliasing/seam problems with text mode that I was talking about yesterday. Though it's hard to tell the difference because all these images I'm posting are resized to 700x438.

[Will Vale]

The names and menus are completely brilliant.

If you want HANK and TARA, maybe the wonder-dog could be called BARX?

[rszrama]

fwiw, my green player spawned inside a wall... interestingly, I could move up but not any other direction until I found a single tile pocket and was stuck there until my blue player killed himself...

[derivator]

The scrolling doesn't work for me in singleplayer mode, and it seems the game is loading english.png instead of level0.png as the level, leading to the problem rszrama mentioned in multiplayer mode. Another thing is that for some reason, the game instantly minimizes when I start it and minimizes again when I attempt to maximize it. Setting windows to "Disable visual themes" in the compatibility options fixes that though. (It still minimizes when I start it, but i can then maximize it and play) I'm running Windows 7 32bit in 1280x1024 with a Geforce 9600GT... I also have 2 monitors, but disabling the second one didn't fix it, so I'm guessing that's not it.

Unrelated thought: Maybe it would help with comprehending the time loop if the game had a looping background music track? It could be of the same length as the time loop, with easily identifyable different sections, so that you could mentally connect a specific event in the looping game time to a certain musical cue. Another potentially awesome but maybe more confusing idea could be to add more musical layers to the loop with each... loop.

[mcc]

Sorry haven't gotten to all the posts here yet...

- Argh, everyone noticed the english.png bug before I did... that was just an error in last night's build. I was playing with using the font file as a level map just for fun and hadn't meant to check it in D:

- 1-player mode is currently broken

- The music thing is a good idea, working on something like that already actually :D

[mcc]

Day 29

Mac build (r135)
Windows build (r135)



Status: Implemented Ogg Vorbis for storing sound effects and such. Fixed a problem where there was something like a couple-second delay at startup. Added a logo screen (same one from iJumpman). Fixed some stupid bugs in yesterday's build (like apparently I'd accidentally checked in a change where I was constructing the level map out of the image that describes the font... um). Made a bunch of under-the-hood changes in anticipation of level select, the only externally visible effect of which is that the starting positions of the players within the level is now partially randomized. Added a simple option to play again once the game is over.

A random thing: Increpare made a comment a couple days ago about what tournament-style play would look like with the time travel mechanic. I took the comment at the time as joking. Once though I got to the point of adding the Replay? Y/N  box, and therefore making it possible to play the game more than once without restarting the whole application, I realized I was having to do extra work to make sure that objects and events didn't leak through from the previous game. I'm not, at the moment, freeing any of the memory I allocate from game to game, so all the objects from previous games are just sort of hanging out in memory. So it occurs to me that if you had a game based on this engine with time travel controls more complex than just "press button to jump back 5 seconds", you actually could just jump "back in time" all the way back into the last game you played, interact with the players there, make the current game's event tree mutually intertwined with the last one, maybe change the outcome of previous games and watch the "overall games won" counter at the top of the screen fluctuate up and down...

[derivator]

- The music thing is a good idea, working on something like that already actually :D

Haha, awesome!

[mcc]

Day 30

Mac build (r137)
Windows build (r137)



Status: Implemented a level select screen. Fixed the sound, which was actually completely broken in yesterday's build (well, the snap sounds were). I then took a break to contract moderate hypothermia.

Note: There are some camera and other problems with the new levels.

[mcc]

PS: EXACTLY 137

[increpare]

Hah yeah this is hard to test single-playerrrrr

(would be nice to display what the controls were somewhere, also to have esc go to the title screen)

I personally think the 'snap' sound effect is a bit queer.

[mcc]

Day 31

Mac build (r142)
Windows build (r142)



Status: Was kind of sick today so didn't get a lot done. Implemented a player config screen (unfinished, atm just press return to skip past it) and also set it up where user-created levels can be loaded. Will document how you do this later.