I’ve got the 2600 here. It rocks 
Cas
9 July 2007
Finally settled on 4 frames before initiating movement from a standstill. Tuned that diagonal joypad axis detection variable to 2.0f. I tried having it so the player viewpoint shifts slightly over time to show you up to two squares further in the direction you are moving, but it feels a little unnatural, so I’ve commented it out.
The big issue facing us today is the amount of screen that’s visible. With 32x32 pixel tiles, the map visible on the screen is only 10x10 tiles, which makes the game feel rather claustrophobic. It’s only a square smaller than the original Time Bandit but having played that again yesterday… well, that game feels claustrophobic as well. Plus Time Bandit doesn’t have nearly so many puzzles in it, and the complexity of our puzzles is largely limited by what we can fit on the screen.
So I tried changing the game to 480x480 resolution so we could have 15x15 tiles onscreen. Better, but now all the GUIs are out of whack and it doesn’t quite fit the feel of Ultratron or Titan Attacks. The only other option is to make the sprites and tiles all 24x24 pixels wide which would give us a viewable map area of 13x13 or so but I don’t think Chaz can be arsed to redo all the work he’s done all ready so that’s probably out of the question. So sod it, 320x320 it stays.
Anyway: I want some opinions about the “feel” of the game so far… so whack this Webstart link to launch the game! I’ll keep the Webstart updated daily (well, nightly) so you can check out the progress until we get to “beta” stage at which point it goes into closed testing with the Select Few.
TODO tomorrow
[] Confirm delete switch/teleport/script
[] When editing switches don’t record unnecessary events
[] Death (got something special planned for this)
[] Game Over
[] Particles when hurt
[] Powerups
Music: Jurassic 5 - Jurassic 5 LP, Beastie Boys - Paul’s Boutique, Ween - Shinola Volume I, Jimi Hendrix - Electric Ladyland
The feel of the game is pretty good overall.
I think the arrows for allowable travel direction should be highlighted more (perhaps have two arrows like a fast forward button?).
Any chance of a overview map?
I didn’t find it claustrophobic. Since I am able to control my own speed I can stop anytime to take a look at what is going on.
Code for the overview map is already in there, just not wired up to the game screen yet. I’ll put it in at some point.
Cas
What’s this?! A two year old echo?
OH CURSE YOU PrinceC and your l33t g^m3 making skills!
How DARE you cross two of my favorite games, Chips Challenge and Venture, and create this swirling vortex of gaming goodness! I will be the first one to buy this game when you are finished. Looking FANTASTIC already! I had better be in that closed beta…grrrr…
-Chris
P.S. Rocking the Paul’s Boutique…Sound of Science indeed!
Great stuff so far Cas, lots of fun. No exit key?
Bill
Press escape until you reach the main menu. Then there is an exit option in the top left corner. All Cas’s games are like that.
ps. Cas, I would be happy to Beta test for you (hint hint) 
I like this very much! Floating “dots” look great. Mini mode is awesome!
Made it to work via Web Start on my Intel Mac, there were some (Mac Java?) glitches but eventually it worked. When I got killed (last life) the game was stuck though, had to quit via OS menu.
Keep it up, Cas! Sign me up for the beta test as well! ;D
Catch me nearer the time and I’ll sign y’all up for it.
Must put Game Over in : But as I say… there’s something special happening for the death sequence. I think it’s going to be a killer feature if I can get it right…
10 July 2007
Took my mum to the seaside today (Whitby) - on the bike, haha! It’s so big she can’t get off it without assistance. So anyway, a good time was had by all, but rather less work done than usual.
Chaz has done the HUD, which looks nice. Doesn’t need too much more tweaking, but I’m going to adjust the font size a bit. Surprise surprise, he is none too enamoured of my gidrah death “animation” so I will be twiddling with that for him.
Did crappy programmer art for the powerups, wired in the code (mostly don’t actually do anything yet), pinched sound effects from Super Dudester for now.
Found a bug in switch change code that meant after fiddling with the tiles.xml file, sometimes the stuff the switches drew got corrupted. Unfortunately the fix broke serialization so the test map is buggered and I’ll have to do another one. Still, I’m glad I found it now, and not after 2 months of map-wrangling.
Music: Blur - 13, Easy Star All Stars - Radiodread
Yes, I figured that was the case… and it didn’t work. Game was locked up then.
Bill
Hold down escape to totally exit.
Cas
11 July 2007
Found yet another switch change bug that meant my saved map was buggered once again. Most annoying - still, glad I found it now.
Chaz has done half of the “rating” animations in the HUD (pathetic, cowardly, timid, etc). and I’ve got a preliminary angel for the death sequence. When youy die, a little angel flies out of your body, leaving you as a ghost. You’ve got 30 seconds to earn an extra health dit (by scoring 1,000 points) to resurrect yourself.
At this point the ghost player is just a white alpha’d version of the real sprite and it doesn’t look too interesting, so we’ll probably have that redone at some point. Also, I’m not sure whether to make it so you can just float through gidrahs or not when you’re a ghost. It makes resurrection somewhat easier, which is important for our market. Nobody likes really hard games any more! The original Time Bandit is absolutely unforgiving in this regard. That’s probably why it’s got a multiple slot save game feature. I wonder if I’ll have to implement the same thing in this game.
Game Over is now in as well so fortunately the game finishes when you die properly (ie. when you fail to resurrect yourself in time).
Done:
[] Psychotic powerup, which turns you psychotic and gives you ultra zappy lasers for 15 seconds
[] Invulnerability powerup, which does what it says on the tin, for 15 seconds
[] Extra Health powerup, just gives you a free health dit
[] Ghost powerup, turns you into a ghost temporarily
[*] Freeze powerup, freezes all the monsters for 15 seconds
Haven’t done the gobbler powerup - this one turns all the monsters into edible treats so you can just run around eating them for points. Think I need to do some more monster AIs, or tweak the existing ones. Question: do I prevent monsters from walking over each other or just leave it the way it is?
While Chaz slumbers I will do more odds and sods. There is a new build up for playing with. Not much in the map this time since I lost the last one. Er, might need to clear your caches.
Music: Blur - Think Tank, Hexstatic - Listen & Learn
Damn, you’re fast ! :o The game looks almost ready to hit the market .Just some more maps and stuff and it’s ready to go ! Good job
Actually, there was one more thing I meant to say about the game - the graphics style is cute, BUT it seems a million miles away from anything related to a “Treasure Tomb”. The style suits the deliberately retro style of some of your other games, but in the context of a “Tomb” it seems quite wrong. To me, the gfx style implies high tech rather than dusty tomb.
Don’t know whether that bothers you or not, but there it is
That’s because this is the “Alien Moonbase” tileset. There’s a Dungeon, Volcano, Garden, Pyramid, and Pacman tileset to come. And another couple we haven’t thought about yet.
Cas
Ah… cool!
12 July 2007
Chaz has redone the sprites for the psychotic powerup (now distinguished from the maximum bravery rating, which is now called “BEZERK”), and also the sprites for the angel which now flap, and the ghost sprite too. Still need a “death” and “resurrection” animation.
I’ve added a little animation for when you earn an extra health dit - it flies from the screen where you earned it and lands on the health dit-o-meter on the left. Lovely but pointless.
Had a bit of an amusing bug once the player had died. What we’ve done, is when the player dies, he becomes a ghost and has to run around as outlined yesterday. Now we’ve decided that to resurrect you don’t have to score 1000 points, you simply need to collect a jewel. When you resurrect now, the screen flips back to where your body lies and the angel drops back into you. This is quite a cool mechanism - I can create puzzles which involve you having to actually die so that you can walk through an otherwise impassable obstacle tile to step on a switch and then collect a jewel to return to your body! Anyway - if you stepped on a teleport, when you rematerialised it unfortunately always rematerialises you in PHASE_ALIVE state - not so handy when you’re meant to be in PHASE_GHOST state. Easily fixed.
Also, prevented the player from moving onto an arrow tile that would immediately move you back again - it was just annoying to do that.
I’ve just realised that we’ve done over 50% of the coding on this game already, in about 4 weeks flat. Another 4 weeks at this rate and all the coding will be done, it’ll just be the long, hard slog drawing the giant world map and inventing puzzles and scripty adventure bits…
Latest build is up. See what you think of “death” in game now. You can practise dying by tapping Z repeatedly to kill yourself.
Music: Led Zepellin IV, DJ Food - Solid Steel, Chemical Brothers - Push the Button
Damn… webstart really sucks. It really does.
I’m desperately trying to get the console-output either on screen after the crash, or in some file.
But whatever I try, the console-window is disposed immediately, and nothing is written to stdout.
Some uber-webstart-hero help me out here…
So… in short: the game crashes a few seconds after the javaws dialogs show up, and before anything GUI-wise gets loaded.
[quote]You can practise dying by tapping Z repeatedly
[/quote]
This forum needs a Quotes Top 10.