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[Montoli]

What a difference a day makes:

So after posting that last screenshot, I went to bed, and woke up, and was like "I know why I'm not thrilled with it yet!  I know what this needs!  While the sunbeams are the right shape, they are made of embarrassingly few bullets!  Why that looks so easy, even I could dodge it!"

So I went back and... spiced it up a little.  Here's the same thing, the next morning:



And.... after that I spent the rest of the weekend playing TF2 and reading Terry Pratchet.

All in all - A good weekend!

-Montoli

[moonmagic]

I'm jealous of your bullet patterns! This reminds me of the Sun / Moon boss from Kirby's Adventure, turned on its head. Can't wait to play it.

[raiten]

This game looks really interesting! Btw, I saw you mentioned The Competitor - but there's another, much older game on a similar theme - Inverse Shoot 'em Up. I'd say it's closer to The Competitor than to your game, actually.

[Montoli]

Oh nice!  I like the idea behind the inverse shoot 'em up, although I don't think I understand the gameplay.  (Or at least when I tried, I don't think I ever managed to get the ship below around 20% armor, even on easy mode.  )

Also, yeah.  The Sun and Moon boss from Kirby was one of my favorites.  And while I tried to avoid directly ripping it off, I'll freely admit that I thought about it more than once when I was setting up the cloud boss.

Also, had a bizarre conversation with a friend yesterday, which ultimately lead to me putting in a new bonus mode in the options.  (It was fairly straightfoward to implement, and I'd been needing some kind of bonus to give people who clear 100% of the challenges anyway...)  I don't want to give away too many surprises, but I'll say this.  It's called "Unicorn Mode".  And it is every bit as absurd as it sounds.

[Montoli]

Whew!  Versus mode is done finally!

I had convinced myself it was done before.  But really, all it was was just the regular game except with a custom AI for the ship that listened to keystrokes instead of performing its own evaluations.  This had the downside that the games always played out the same way as survival mode.  (Namely that the boss always died, and the only real variations was how long it lasted and how many spaceships it took down in the process)

So while you could still make your own rules, ("let's see if you can kill me in less than 3 minutes this time!  And no dying more than twice this time either!") it occurred to me that it wasn't much of a versus mode if the same side won every time.  Really, if I'm expecting this sort of play pattern, then shouldn't I be doing more to support it?  At the very least, the victor should get some little graphical flourish announcing their triumph at the end of the game, right?

Well, today I finally got around to doing exactly that.  Set up an interface so you can define rules like how long the spaceship has to kill the boss, or how many respawns it gets in the process.  Changed the game-end message in vs. mode depending on who won.  And even gave the players a hook to decide how frequently ship powerups dropped, since that seems like a useful thing to be able to control in a competitive setting.  I already had most of the hooks I needed in the game, so mostly this just required setting up a UI.  (Bleah!)

Also set up a way to swap which player got which side of the keyboard, since my left-handed friends were starting to grumble.

Unfortunately, UI work does not generate the most exciting screenshots.  Oh well.  Have a boring screenshot then, of my versus mode UI.  (Layout subject to change, but this has the basics in place at least.)

[Montoli]

I really should post things to this Dev Log more frequently.

Because whenever I do, it never fails - within a short amount of time after clicking "post" (the exact time varies from minutes to hours) I figure out all sorts of things wrong with the pictures I posted.

Today is no exception!

In today's case, I have abruptly realized that as it turns out, UIs look a lot better if you have some kind of consistent border between controls/widgits!  And also better if you don't have a giant, conspicuous hole with nothing in it!

For example - Previous screenshot....  but better!



The astute will notice that I have snuck in an extra control to fill in the white space.  It is something I had considered adding before, but had neglected because I was feeling lazy.  Ironic that while I was able to ignore the part in my brain saying "you should hook it up, it will make the game better", the thing I was NOT able to ignore was the accusingly empty spot on my versus mode UI screen.

Oh well.

-Montoli

[mokesmoe]

Since you made such a amazing code that makes it easy to create bosses, you should let people make their own bosses in some sort of editor mode. Perhaps adding a scroll bar to the versus mode screen to accommodate more bosses?

[Wander]

Since you made such a amazing code that makes it easy to create bosses, you should let people make their own bosses in some sort of editor mode. Perhaps adding a scroll bar to the versus mode screen to accommodate more bosses?

that.

[Montoli]

I agree completely!

In writing this, one big thing I have realized is that "making bosses and patterns is just really fun!"  It's sort of like playing with LOGO.  There is sort of a manic joy in putting random instructions together and watching them form compelling patterns.  Even when it doesn't do what you expect, it still is often really cool looking.  (Often my mistakes are cooler than my intentional plans...)

I realized this a ways into the dev cycle, and it's too late to try to graft that on to the current project.   But I am really seriously thinking that my next project will probably be a "Boss Editor" of some sort.  (I think there is enough "meat" there to be a full game, really.)

So yeah.  I agree with you guys 100%.  The actual act is enough fun that I absolutely need to figure out a way to make it into a game that people can play without editing the source code.

[Montoli]

In other news:  Still cleaning up last bits of code.  SOOOO close to release.  Makes me frustrated!

Couldn't sleep last night though, so rather than do something productive, I spent a half hour in bed with my laptop writing totally frivolous alternate render modes.  Following the recent popularity of large-pixel retro looking games....

Behold!
Retro Mode!




After writing that, I realized that while it was cool looking, the antialiasing prevented it from looking TOO much like old atari games.  So just for giggles I added SUPER retro mode, which is even more retro than retro mode.


This, friends, is the true horror of sleep deprivation.  The fact that I'm so close to done, and in spite of that, the only thing my brain decided it was willing to work on was figuring out ways to make the game look worse... 

Oh well, I'll probably make them bonus unlockable options or something.  They're fun for novelty factor if nothing else.  They're no more absurd than "Unicorn Mode", at least.

[Terrorbuns]

 :D Retro and SUPER RETRO ATARI NES STYLE A GO are awesome looking. I can't WAIT to play this! 

[Doktor_Q]

"Unicorn mode?" 

In other news, I shall eagerly anticipate the release of this delectable game.

[Montoli]

Yeah...  Unicorn mode is the result of a very odd conversation I had with a friend.  (Tim at Final Form Games), in which I was talking about how one of the attacks the Cloud had would probably be a Rainbow, and he was like "I hope there is an option for the rainbow to have unicorns on it!" and I was like "... there isn't.  But  what if there was an option for the whole GAME to have unicorns on it?"

And one thing sort of lead to another, and it turned out, funny thing, it only took like 4 lines of code, and a quick copy-paste of art assets, (which I already had laying around from Post Apocalyptic Unicorn Uprising)....

And the game went from this...






to something more like this...



So yeah.  Probably another [the final, most likely] bonus unlock.  Gotta give people SOMETHING worthwhile if they complete the entire game, right?

And I'm pretty sure I speak for everyone when I say that there is nothing in this world, NOTHING that is more worthwhile than unicorns...

-Montoli

[Terrorbuns]

Oh... my... 

I want to unlock that. And I'd play the game. In that mode. The whole time. 

[Montoli]

I know, right?  That's why it has to be the final unlock.  Because, I mean, after you unlock that, what else is there to look forward to?  Where's the motivation to find anything else?  YOU HAVE ALREADY ACHIEVED PERFECTION.

[Montoli]

The devil is in the details.  I have been pretty sure I was on the cusp of being done for about a month now, but I keep thinking of things that need to be done.  Not big things like "make multiplayer work" or "figure out scoring".  Little things like "It really needs a 'return to main menu' button in the options" or "I guess they probably need a menu to turn on cheat modes, since they can't directly edit the global variables file..."

Anyway.  Today, I had a good day!  Saving and loading game state and accomplishments from disk is a go!  Return to main menu button is a go!  (It turned out to be slightly more complicated than expected given how my state system works and where it was being called from.)  And cheat options menu is a go!

More boring UI screenshots, since I can't really show screenshots of save games.  This one was more fun than most menus, since at least I got to draw some icons.

[moonmagic]

This is a congratulation. UI stuff is hard!

[Montoli]

Audio going in!  It is starting to sound like a real game!  Any time I get a big asset drop from someone and put it in, I'm always amazed at how much the game jumps forward, and how quickly.  The sound and music I received from my audio guy is no exception here!  I am very happy with how the game has come out.

This really is the final stretch.  After I finish the audio, all I have left are some [simple] dialogue boxes and some text editing.  I'm starting to think crazy-thoughts, like that I might actually finish sometime this week!

After that, a final round of playtests/bugetsting, and then I get some fast [and most likely disappointing] lessons in economics as I try to find license deals via FGL and direct email pestering.  Will be instructive at any rate.

[mirosurabu]

Interesting take on shmups indeed! And I love your vector art. Awaiting to be uploaded on FGL.com

[Montoli]

A productive day!  Realized I need to talk to my audio guy some more, since the cloud boss didn't actually exist when he was making sounds, so it has no sound effects, and is different enough from the others that it's hard to reuse their sound effects for it.

Other than that though, got the rest of the audio in.  All the boss sounds, music and UI is in and working.

AND I even figured out the weird bug where I was having some sounds play extra loud.  (Was playing the same sound more than once at the same time.  For example if a boss had 2 guns that shot the same bullet, each would play that bullet's sound, so the result would be one super-loud effect.)

AND I drew a picture on my whiteboard of a dinosaur, who is also a ninja.

All in all, a productive day!