Boris - A 2D Tower Climber

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

I’ve been working on this 2D platformer for a while now. Its not finished but hopefully you can have some fun with it in it’s current state.

You play as Boris, a hard working and devoted employee. You arrive at the office as you do on any other morning, but today is no ordinary day. During the night a space fleet from the planet Jobswerth descended on the office block and now the hallways are teeming with alien beings. I don’t know how they expect you get any work done!

Battle your way up the tower, popping aliens for points and harvesting the spawners for health. Climb as high as you can before succumbing to the alien horde.

Controls

  • WAD to move and jump
  • MOUSE to aim, LEFT CLICK to shoot
  • ESC is pause
  • E to open doors
  • 1,2,3 selects the weapons

TODO:

  • More Patterns (the level generator is a bit repetitive at the moment)
  • More Enemies
  • More Weapons
  • At least local leaderboards
  • Options Menu
  • Fullscreen mode
  • Mod support starting with the ability to add extra patterns to the generator

Known Issues:

  • The launcher is a bit crappy. Windows users are having some trouble.
  • If the character stops aiming at the cursor then move the cursor out of frame and then back in to reset it
  • The frame rate for the particles tanks quite badly. This doesn’t affect speed of gameplay much
  • The grenade guns that the enemies have cause some pretty buggy movement. I left them in because explosions are fun.
  • The enemies have been known to spawn in the same spot, resulting in a huge shower of blood when they shoot each other in the face
  • Semi-random crashes caused by particle and mob cleanup routines

Yeah the launcher seems to be a bit rough around the edges. If the launcher won’t download, just download the zip instead and tell me which OS you are on. If you follow the instructions in the README then hopefully the launcher will see the files and act like the game is up to date.

Hopefully the above problem is fixed. Let me know if this is not the case.

Here is the download page
http://basicmelon.com/boris/download

#2

Sweet :slight_smile: Nice work!

Random map generation?

Some issues: (Using Win7 64)

  • I started the launcher: It notified me that i hadn’t downloaded the game but wouldn’t do anything. So i clicked on play an it downloaded boris.jar into the my %appdata% folder*. The play button stayed grayed out and nothing happened. Restarting the launcher didn’t do anything.
    Opening %appdata%/boris it had 3 empty folders in there (bin, saves, mods) and a tmp folder from which i could start the game. The tmp folder contains your .dlls and boris.jar

  • The Launcher doesn’t re size itself to fit in the elements (browser)

  • The game freezes add random points. Only could replicate the behavior where it freezes sometimes when i re-size my window

  • The fact that your arms & weapon are seperated from your body looks kinda wierd :slight_smile:

  • Most enemies kill themselfs when shooting at me (for the first time)

The fact that i can’t destroy the spawers is annoying - like that :smiley:

  • I really don’t like when apps (without a nice uninstaller) do this : / But thats a personal preference.
#3

Noted.

I think that may be part of the problem with the launcher on windows. All the files download but then the function that transfers them to the bin directory fails.

Can you explain the window resizing thing a bit more, does the game just completely freeze or just the cursor?

Those enemies that appear to be shooting themselves are actually two enemies on the same spot shooting each other. I’ll have to rework the AI a bit to stop them doing that.

And you can’t destroy the spawners? That’s worrying :-\ Do the sparks fly off them when you shoot them?

I hadn’t thought of thought of an uninstaller. That’ll be added when I fix some other issues ^^

#4

@ Window re-sizing: Yes the game completely freezes. Happened first time at the very start of the level. (No enemies, particles, … on the screen)

The enemies are a real PITA ^^ I just try to get to the door as my health resets in the next level :wink:

Now i can destroy them. Either it was a bug or i was just too stupid ^^ It is kinda hard to aim. the 3 bullets you shot rarely end up where your aiming at ^^

#5

The starting launcher:

The next screen: (I’ve manually copied all the files in tmp to bin)

The resized issue: (Scroll bars need to be at the ends)

Clicking on Play just closes the game. Manually launching the “boris.jar” runs the game but the health quickly decrease. Though, nice design.

#6

Have you tried the other weapons? The machine gun bound to 3 is slightly more OP.

So the health just drains out and you die instantly?

#7

Not instantly but somewhat fast.

#8

Unimportant question (just curious), which libraries do you use?

#9

Newt, jogl and jinput right?

#10

Yup. There’s also LuaJ in there as well which i’m using for scripted AI behaviours ect…

I’m stumped on the health drain thing. I can’t think of a single reason why that might happen. ???

#11

The problem is that the damage done on a single shot is more. Can you reduce it?

#12

Oh wait, do you mean you’re dying too quickly because the enemies are shooting you? Or do you mean that the health is just draining away for no reason?

#13

The enemy bullets come very fast with more damage.

#14

From what I can see they’re dealing about 3 damage per shot, which is correct according to the code. Is that what you’re getting or is it more drastic than that?

#15

Nice concept, interesting use of the camera controls and also particle effects. Of course tons of bugs and changes to be made but a good start none the less.

N.B.
1707 Points, before I had to go for dinner.

With a variety of levels, maybe some rpg weapon upgrading element to it I can see myself playing this for hours.

BUG REPORT

  • I can be knocked through the floor if I stand in a corner for too long
  • Weapon missiles from first weapon despawn after short distance
  • Enemies aimed at me, so over longer distances they would always miss
#16

Thanks for having a go. Glad you enjoyed it despite the bugs ;D

I agree that the computer’s aiming abilities aren’t the best. The AI makes an assumption that bullets fly straight. So at some point I’ll have to work out how to calculate the path of the bullets and adjust behaviour based on that.

I was thinking of adding an upgrade system. I thought rouge-like upgrades would be a good idea. You would get upgrades over the play-through then start from scratch again when you die. This would mean the playing field was always level if people were competing for score. It would also make the gameplay more varied because the upgrades would change the weapons throughout the play-through.

#17

The launcher says that it has 100% of the download and does nothing then.
When restarting, it wants to download again.

But the ‘story’ sounds funny!

#18

Yeah there’s a problem on windows that causes it to hang when it’s moving the files out of the tmp folder. If you move them manually to the bin folder the launcher should say you’re up to date.

I promise I’ll get the launcher fixed ASAP :-*

#19

It works, but only when starting the game without launcher.
Some location stuff (eg seperated arms) is quite confusing, but a nice beginning!

#20

I’ve issued a patch for the launcher to fix a few problems highlighted yesterday.

I’ve tested on a couple of windows machines and this update seems to have solved the problem. Do let me know if this is not the case.

Changelog (Launcher):

  • Fixed problem with downloading and running the game on windows machines.
  • Fixed newsfeed not resizing to fit the screen.

The launcher won’t update itself so you will have to go and re-download it from the website.
http://basicmelon.com/boris/download