Chroma Cell - Vector Shoot 'em Up

WIP games, tools & toy projects Archived Projects
#1

Some of you might remember the post I made about my game this spring when it was in early beta.

Now it’s officially released!

http://www.oyvindbyhring.net/CC.jpg

It’s made in Java using OpenGL rendering through the Processing library.

It got nominated for best sound, visual style, concept and “game of the year” in this years Norwegian Game Awards but sadly did not take home any of the prizes.

Link to game on Steam Greenlight where you can download, see videos and screenshots and more!

I’m now trying to spread the word about the game, and if you wish to support me, please thumbs up it on steam greenlight so I might one day get it published for real!

PS: since my new topic post got merged with the 6 months old one (where I showed off a beta version), the first 15 or so posts in this thread will not be relevant for this topic. Look at the dates of the posts to determine which were for the old post.

#2

That’s coming on nicely. Bit of a JOGL glitch on startup (screen went grey until I alt-tabbed out and in again) but other than that worked flawlessly. I’d turn down the gun volume a little as it’s quite a grating sort of sound after a few minutes.

Cas :slight_smile:

#3

Thanks for the feedback!

I’ve had that grey screen bug reported by someone else aswell. It sounds like it’s something you’ve encountered before? If so, it would be great if you could point me in the direction of a fix :slight_smile:

I’ll take the gun sound problem into consideration. It’s been the sound effect I’ve had he most trouble with, exactly because you hear it all the time :slight_smile: For the next version I’ll probably try to make it either lower in volume or make a new sound with a softer feel.

#4

'fraid I can’t help with the JOGL issue - never used JOGL myself.

Cas :slight_smile:

#5

Really nice ;D
Runs really smoothly on my computer, no bug to report. I went until wave n°11, had fun and difficulty is well balanced !
I 'm just missing the possibility to change keyboard keys, as not everybody has a QWERTY keyboard…
Nice game !

#6

@ princec :

Did you run the game with two monitors? The other person with this bug had an external monitor connected (he was using a laptop) when he launched the game, but when he brought it over to my place the bug was gone.

#7

As it happens I’ve got a 2 monitor setup (Vista64 (sorry :emo:), Nvidia GTX280)).

Cas :slight_smile:

#8

It’s bad news from me I’m afraid, It doesn’t work properly at all. I click on it and I do get that grey screen for a while then the menu screen. If I start a game, the menu screen stays where it is. I can HEAR the ship shooting, I just cant see anything but the menu screen.

I know this is going to sound terrible from someone who is trying to make a game but I don’t know a thing about computers, or graphics cards or anything. But let me know if you need any information from me about my setup.

Oh but it looks stunning when I watched the video!

#9

That’s really weird :S

Are you able to enter the settings menu from the main menu and move the slider around?

#10

You know how the buttons change color when you have the mouse over them? Well the buttons stay changed even when my mouse is over another button.

It will let me enter the settings. In the settings when I drag the slider, it does move but it doesn’t erase it’s previous position so there are trails. Also is the title still supposed to be on settings page? Cause it is.

It seems whatever is going on, it’s just to do with it not erasing the previous image that was shown to the screen.

#11

I might have an idea about what is wrong. Try entering settings and moving the “Glow Intensity” slider to 0 (OFF). Does it work now?

The bloom/glow/neon effect uses an offscreen graphics buffer, and it sounds like this buffer is not being drawn, but if you turn off that effect, everything is drawn on the same graphics object as the menu. (What a great sentence! ,_,)

#12

It works fine with the glow settings off. I’ll let you know what I think after I’ve played it some more.

#13

Good to know! That means there is something wrong with either the library I’m using or your hardware/drivers ;p

What OS are you using?

I got an error with this part of the code from another guy, but for him the whole game crashed horribly.

#14

I’m using windows 7.

I really really love this game! This is a game I will continue to play for a long time. When I was younger I had a vectrex and a game called Minestorm. It was simliar kind of game to this. I loved it and I’ve never really played any retro space shooters that came close to it until I played this. It’s so fast paced and it’s hard but without feeling unfair. Controls of the ship feels really natural. Alought you might want to have the option of shooting with awsd and moving with the arrows.

The sounds of the gun sounds fine to me. You would expect it to be loud. There is one sound effect that seemed a little too loud when compared to the others. I think it was the sound when a spaceship leaves one of those little boxes.

The whole thing looks great and I love the explosion effect. I also like the way you can see how many points each baddy is worth. There is one thing that doesn’t seem to be as stylish as the rest. On the event game the explanation marks that the space ships come out of, I thought could be replaced by something better that fits in with the game more. Not sure what though! Only a small nitpick and I wouldn’t mention it if it wasn’t the fact the rest of the game looks so good. I think it’s because I’m comparing your game to Minestorm, and that has this creepy spaceship that drops off the mines. It really adds to the atmosphere.

Well done. I’ll checking back for more updates.

#15

Another thing I forgot to point out. When I’m playing in event mode. (It might be the other mode I haven’t checked), when I lose and the enter name thing comes up it starts entering the current key that I have pushed down. The key i’m using to control the ship, so I have to delete, it. It would be nice if it would remember my name from the last time I entered it too.

#16

This game looks just awesome! Too bad I have a mac, though… :slight_smile: I love the glow. How did you do that?

#17

The glow effect is called “bloom”. Basically, you take the rendered image, extract the pixels with a brightness value over a certain threshold into a new image, blur it, and add the blurred image as an overlay (in rough terms).

Then you get a transparent blur on the brightest parts of the image.

#18

Wow, thanks! You just made me a happy game developer :smiley:

The exclamation mark is supposed to be a warning sign for where enemies are about to spawn next.
Most people who have tested the game for me in person have misunderstood what exactly is is/means in one way or another, so I think there is some small design flaw there that I haven’t quite found yet.

My local version now has a small delay between dieing and the dialog for entering your name in the highscore appears. I also made a new, less obtrusive menu background animation and a 3 second countdown when you unpause the game. Hopefully I’ll get some work done on customizable hotkeys soon, and release a new version :slight_smile:

#19

Beta version 1.02 is now up for download at www.oyvindbyhring.net.

See the original post for more details :slight_smile:

#20

Well it’s still great! lol

But what was your motivation for making the spawners larger? Were people complaining it was too hard, or did you just think they didn’t look right? I guess they look a bit better now, but it made wave 8 ( i think it was wave 8 ) a lot easier. Again why have you changed it so the spawners die when you die? I guess I like my games to be tough. Probably because a game is much more addictive to me if I don’t have to play for a really long time to beat my highscore.

You see this is what happens when you find someone who really likes your game. They will bitch about every single change you make! haha