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[jph wacheski]

 The Electric Mushroom Tracers is an arena shooter type thing. It is rendered in a blury/gritty style and is a bit flashy (!seizure aleart!),. the visuals are inpired by early morning grainy eye sight effects,. as well as a Mushroom Trip I experianced at a rave in New Orleans during Mardi Gras one year on my way to Mexico for the winter. (sounds insain, and was, but is also very true!)
  The soundtrack is noisey and low-fi squelchy, and features a proceduraly generated lounge piano/wind-chime type element, counter pointed by a gritty drum loop.  The gameplay is a tad slowish or relaxed perhaps, and elements of the action can be somewhat tough to see,. or even obscured completely,. this is intended. Don't move into intensly light areas unless you know what is in there. You have been warned.

Download the demo;
MushroomTracers__050.zip
  it's a single 349KB .exe file that runs on XP/vista. (OSx and Linux can be built now if anyone is willing to test for me)

should look somewhat like this still image;



The game is built with the ZGameEditor [ http://ZGameEditor.org ]
The drum loop sound was created in BUZZ [ http://buzzmachines.com ]
The font I made by hand in the GIMP [ http://www.gimp.org ]

I am thinking there will be at least three shages such as this,. likely 4-7 minuets each and some vague/incoherant story type element to tie those together,. (currently it just plays till you die, go for a high score!) . I hav some other setting type stuff worked up for further stages, and some ideas for more gameplay elemets/stuff to fight with.., I will post more info soon.

I am looking for feedback,. and bug reports.  thanks in advance.

[Alex May]

The purble blob enemies can be too hard to see.
The controls feel wrong... I feel like I should be holding down X to hold my aim, not the other way around. I also feel lik eI want to play with a joypad
I didn't like the way the rate of fire changed over time.

Otherwise I had a real good time Keep it up!

[nyarla]

Screenshot looks really pretty.. sort of reminds me of Spheres of Chaos, but more sedate.

If you build an OSX version I'll test it!

[jph wacheski]

Ok, thanks nyarla!

Here is the generated binary for OS X.

MushroomTracers__050_osX

requirements:
    * OpenGL must be installed
    * SDL must be installed

Let me know what happens,.

Alex May - perhaps I will test it that way (hold X to hold aim),. could add it as an option, as well as game pad,. but those need a menu and a settngs save, bla bla bal,. eventualy. The fire rate you get from just holding down the Z key is organicly inconstant (perlin noise ocillations), however you can fire as fast as you can press the key! I was not going to have ANY 'auto' fireing at all, meaning you would have to press the key each time to generate a shot,. the current system of auto fireing is meant as a weak version of what you can do yourself by taping the key,. w/ just a bit organic timeing, its ok for jsut clearing out the floaty bits.

[nyarla]

Hmm, I guess making an OSX app is a fiddly thing to do from windows or linux, since OSX binaries are usually bundled in "app bundles", which are like a folder disguised as a file, containing the binary, resources, etc..  I'm guessing this is just the actual binary itself?

I tried making the file executable and running it from the commandline, but got a segmentation fault.. I'm not sure how to manually create an app bundle, or if that would make any difference. I do have OpenGL/SDL installed btw..

I'm pretty new to OSX, I don't really know how some things work.. on a PC it'd need SDL dlls in the path or something, perhaps on the Mac it needs to be in an app bundle which contains SDL framework information - I know some other SDL things I have tried contained stuff linking to SDL in their app bundles.   Sorry I can't be of more help..

[jph wacheski]

my mistake,. I am using the latest beta ver. of ZGE and I tryed jsut draging the mac runner from the last stable release over to do the build,. and of course with things changed in the beta the binary is broken,. . I will post a new one when I get the updated runner to do the build with,. check back later,.

but hay, I tryed you shaving game on my DS,. how are you building these?  I would like to try making a simple shooter on DS,. however I have not found a system to build for it that I can use easily enouph. I am more of a tool using monkey,. one button to build type stuff (ZGE, formerly GM).  compilers and tool chains just confound me., I tried to get Flixel working here but now my flashplayer is screwed, I have a hundred megs of useless flex crap on my drive and still can't build the hello world app from the compiler,.     

[nyarla]

ah, cool.

my DS stuff was done with the homebrew toolchain devkitARM, coded in C.

There is a  "GUI games making" type program for doing DS stuff- DSGameMaker. I haven't tried it but from what i've heard it's very simplistic and won't really let you do much.. and the DS programs it produces are quite buggy. So, not worth using, unless it has been worked on a lot since I last looked..   [EDIT] heh, actually I just looked at their forum for a bit... forget I mentioned DSGameMaker at all. i'd steer well clear of that, it looks dodgy as hell. :/

If it's toolchains themselves you have trouble with, devkitARM is very easy to get going, especially on windows. Just run the installer program, it downloads everything, sets up the environment variables, and then you should be able to load and compile the example projects immediately, with the included editor.