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[jph wacheski]

So many nice assets to play with I may do a couple of games,. .

 I will start with a little shmup built around these cool ships and ship parts provided by yokomeshi.  [ https://dl.getdropbox.com/u/1000017/assemblee/clinch4.png ]

Since these are 1-bit sprites I am useing them as masks and generating some nice 'skins' for them to give me some colors and variations of pattern,. (at runtime of course). I am sticking with the name provided by yokomeshi as well; SonnenmördeR, seems to mean Sun Murder?  Is anyone fluent enouph in German to help me do all the text in it? (will be minimal, guess i can use a bot)  Also, did anyone provide any midi tunes in part 1?  I don't really have a simple way to add mp3/ogg music in the engine,. I am using ZGameEditor.  I think i am going to just do simple sounds synthesised at runtime anyway, as the system is not the easiest for working with samples,. and I like generated sounds anyhow.  Should be fun.

Here are the demos in order of dev. these are experimantal and likely to change.

Proto Demo 44kb
Proto Demo2 46kb
Proto Demo3 62kb
Proto Demo4 48kb
Proto Demo5 48kb
Proto Demo5b 49kb
Proto Demo6 49kb
Proto Demo7 49kb  [end of compo]

ARROWS and Z, R to restart. SPACE to pause, M to must sound, C to toggle GUI, ESC to quit.
Press AND HOLD X to 'Fold Space' and WARP to another location! (collect Warp Pods for more)
Gun Heat Level slows fire rate,. release Fire to cool the gun, glows when hot, or catch green shards. (NEW!)

New in 7:
Much, probly too much.  Now there exists these Green Shards that are droped by destoyed Targets, these 'excite' your ship. There is also a bouncy green meter of this at the top of the screen.  The more 'excited' your ship is the faster it moves,. excitment fades with time.  Warp Pods now fire when you do, until you grab them, or they fall off the screen. They do not howevr last forever, they flash when dieing, grab them then.  You can juggle these to get more fire power.  
Added two new enimes, they are using a star camouflage pettern.  I think the big one needs 21 hits to topple.
Highscore is not working yet.  Hope I have time to add it.

New in 6:
-player Ship now upgrades (1 level) you need 5 warp pods to upgrade, and can now only hold 9. At level 2 your ship can take one shot and not die,. it will be reduced to level one. you also gain a Firing BONUS (hint; only if gun is cool!)  
-also added a new dynamic involving the single hit enemies, but I will let you discover it.
-plus it is more tougher again due to retaliation shots from the larger enemies,. etc.

5b: is the same as 5 with a test of a 512x512 FBO for Orel (& ATI users) to test.

New in 5:
-fixed the jackson pollock rendering bug for ppl with shader problems,. (of course I allways thought it was fixed and have been wrong a with a couple of ver.s   )  now if you don't have shaders you should not see the layer.  It should look somewhat like the images below.
-added a new enemy,. small version of the missile aming bluish one,. now they come in groups.
-many many tweeks to flight patterns, hit circles, wave launch structure, graphics and sounds,. it is just way better now,. but far from done.  still just a proto for you to test.  

Added in 4:  
-new enemy!  shootes aimed rockets at you,.  . need to add a small ver. and a larger one.
-many tweeks and changes,. now has some nebula in the far back,. fixed border color bleed.
-may have fixed a shader bug? (0 is not the same as 0.0 under ATI,. while it works for nvidea)

Added in 3:  
-press K key to toggle off the FBO (only the rendering of it,. this will work for ppl that see the white poly in the center) I will see If I can remove all use of it later too much work currently.
-now the Gun Heat shows up graphicly,. orange glow/trail on your ship. Relase Fire to cool the Cannon.
-yokomeshi's bitmap font,. this requred a bunch of bitmap cut and past so I will post the 7x7 ver. of the font on his asset tread should anyone else need it in this format for their engine.
-added the res. selection dialog at the start,. this may allow more ppl to play, if it is running slowly at full screen size try a lower res. setting.
-added a FPS display (lower right)  should be at your vid-card refresh rate. i.e. 60 fps
-fixed the hit circles on the enemy missles,. (halved the size) should make the game a tad easier if you where finding it too hard.
-turend off the self compression (to end false viruse alerts), and the zeroing of unsued code in the engine,. may improve compatability?  (makes my distribution bigger still only 62kb )

Needs a vid-card that support openGL, basic Shaders and FBOs. (any modern ones)



Just the base player ship w/ three different size attacking ships to fight with,. each has a slightly different AI.  I am going for a swarm attack pattern type setup, not defined flight paths but a more chaotic swarming formation forming tendancy type aproach.  I like working with emergent play so I am not bored with the same patterns as I test things,. .



I am working with the latest ZGE beta (1.9.9) and ustilizing the new FBO and multipass rendering setup to do some cool feedback trail syle effects,. I am liking the results from this so far, however I could easily go too far and over do it. I am trying to keep it restrained.  
Gameplay is rather old-timy so far,. almost Pachinko in nature! Not sure how it will develope or how much time i will have to mess with it, but been fun so far.  
peace.

[Synnah]

Good to see you back again! Your game already looks awesome; I'll try it out when I get home. I love ZGE's visual effects, and the real-time colouring of 1-bit sprites works really well.

[s0]

Sun murderer, huh?

This looks pretty shiny  . I like the procedural graphics idea. Maybe you could rendomize color the patters a bit, for additional variety?

[moi]

Wow Awesome!

[Lon]

Fun, sounds good, look great!!

Looking forward to playing future releases of this game.
Nice work jph wacheski.

Now excuse me as I return to sun_murderer__proto1

[s0]

OK, I played the demo now. Graphics look fantastic, but I found the controls a bit sluggish and unresponsive. Of course I realize it's a very early version, but still...

[Lon]

I enjoy the variety of the enemy ship's behavior.
If I am correct, some rush (try to crash into you), some are more aggressive (putting them selves in harms way to damage you), while others are quite evasive and opportunistic fighters.  Really adds a lot to the game.

The rushers/chargers/what-ever-you-wanna-call-em force me to move vertically, that and bullets coming in at more horizontal angles.  I like it.

CAsinclair is correct, movement seems a little on the slow side (as of proto1), and graphics look awesome.

EDIT:  In fact, I was (and am) designing a shootemup up for this competition.  I like some of the design decisions you made.  You have interesting enemy behavior, unpredictable play through and you encourage vertical movement of the player.  Very fun and re-playable game you have got there.  Looking forward to a high-score table/chart.  I've also learned that I am not very good at playing Shoot-em-ups  .

[yokomeshi]

  Yay!  This looks amazing, especially considering the terrible assets you're working with. 

I speak German, if you're needing something translated.

Oh, and you're right -- Sonnenmoerder means something like "those who kill the sun" or "murderer of the sun."  Whee, agglutination!

[dbb]

Hey, I've played a couple of your games before. This one looks very promising.

[Kazerad]

AVG is telling me the exe contains malware... anyone else getting this problem?

[s0]

Nope. I have AVG too and everything is fine.

[Lon]

AVG is telling me the exe contains malware... anyone else getting this problem?

Virus total report:
http://www.virustotal.com/analisis/cc4892abf7cf654643515d265d03c20acbd174341f7e5361d436ea592db62803-1260243189
Scanned with Avast, MalwareBytes, found clean.  Works great here on my end.  Must be a false positive. 

[s0]

AVG seems to have a lot of those.

[lowpoly]

your shooters are always so fun and this is no exception. Can't wait to see how this shapes up, loving the Galaga/Galaxian vibe so far

[oryx]

nice 

[longshot]

This looks wonderful, the graphics remind me of the 80's, like a mix of Rainbow Brite and the backlit animation of Tron.

[Tryum]

It's running at ~1fps on my laptop

[dbb]

This is fun already. I like it.

But I'm getting a persistent white square in the middle of the screen. It's in the background (sprites get drawn over it) and I'd guess about 100 px big, although I think it occasionally changes size.

I'm running WinXP on a Dell Laptop. I don't know what graphics card it uses. Whatever the default one was when I bought it a couple of years ago.

I can post a screenshot if it would help.

Anyway, keep up the good work. I might have to try zgame engine - I'm inspired!

[jph wacheski]

New version posted at the top,. added a cool new space foldeing warp feature press X,. (is this a novel feature? I can't recall having seen this in a shooter) increased the player speed just a tinny bit,. and shot rate. although now there is an experimental Gun Heat type limitation as well,. still testing this. Hope this aliveates that sluggish fealing some had. I find it fun to warp in and drop shots then warp out,. also pods are droped (9xkills) and can be collected (for more warps),. basic scoreing is added too, and a million other tweeks and tests.

Thanks for all the comments;

Tryum - what are the specs on that lapy?

virus warnings are likely from the small file size,. and self compression.  uses UPX [ http://upx.sourceforge.net/ ]

Thanks yokomeshi I may hit you up with a few lines of 'story' text if i get that far,. hay "agglutination" as also a great name!  could be a puzzle game where you have to stick things together in patterns,. .  

[Tryum]

My rig specs:
C2D 2.5GHz with 2Gb of RAM
intel GMA x4500.

Fact is i have lot's of problems with openGL under linux, but under windows, it normally goes OK.

Damn i hate those chipset, but atm i just have a sony laptop for work (this rig), and my macbook :/