Misadventures of MADS Somewhere in Time - platform game

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#1

I posted an early version of this game about a year ago. It only had a couple levels back then and the graphics were pretty simple. My brother re-released his book that the game is (very) loosely based on so we decided to re-release the game. We updated the graphics and brought it up to 5 levels. Other than that it’s really a pretty simple game. You guide the Professors time machine back in time and bonk dinosaurs while picking up coins. It’s goofy, simple fun. There’s a time bonus and bonuses for picking up all the coins and whacking all the dinosaurs.

It’s about 70% Brackeen’s code from his book Developing Games in Java. I added some for extra lives, scoring and a few other simple bits. We probably won’t do much more with this game because we’ve already started work on the next game based on the second MADS book - Live from Atlantis. That game is much more customized. We shrunk the tile size down to 32x32 pixel (from 64x64) and may even go further. We are replacing the midi music with wav, aiff and it will not be as linear. You can have multiple doors going to multiple levels and even come back to a level. I hope to have a preview posted in about a month.

But back to the game at hand. There is a webstart version and a single, downloadable jar version. I haven’t tested much on Windows and Linux so will be happy to hear feedback regarding those platforms.

The url is www.themisadventuresofmads.com/madsapp/sampleGame.jsp

There’s a feedback email link on the page.

Here’s a screen shot
http://www.themisadventuresofmads.com/images/madsSIMss2.png

#2

Just added a small update. I replaced the lame dinosaur graphics with actual animations. Also finally got around to gettting it to work on javagamesfactory.org.

#3

Hmm game seems to run slow for me. Specifically around the first level where you approach the first two “pillars” (the ground), where it goes about 60% of the normal speed, and pretty much anywhere around the 3rd level (I only was in the first area before I quit; section with the scorpion blocks and such) it drops to about 5 fps.

2 ghz Pentium 4
1 gig ram @ 266 mhz
6600 gt video card

#4

Wow. Hmm. Maybe I introduced something with the new animations. I’ll have to check on my PC at work which is half your specs. It used to fly on my 1/2 gig Thinkpad. Thanks for the feedback.

#5

Adding in the animations definitely brought the performance down. I’m seeing the slow down on my system as well. I just didnt test into the level far enough to see it. I’ll work on things a bit. Thanks.

#6

I cleaned up some things that I think helped but I notice the biggest slow down occurs when there are lots of coins on the screen. I added an FPS counter and it drops to about 15 with a lot of coins but goes up to around 30 at other times. At least on my g4 Mac. I won’t spend much more time trying to optimize this because I’m going to be concentrating on Live from Atlantis. I should have an alpha posted in a couple weeks.

Toggle fps display with the f key. You can also pause now with the p key.

#7

I’d give you some feedback but unfortunetly, my monitor doesn’t go up to 1024x768 (only 800x600, and no further).

#8

how old is your monitor? if your monitor isnt like 4 years old, you might wanna check if your video driver is installed correctly o_O

#9

Ha! You think 4 years is a lot? It’s more like 8 to 10 years old, tops. It’s a MAGNAVOX Super VGA.