Not much happening on the code front...

PART 7 of the BEAT-EM UP TUTORIAL IS OUT..Check it out on the template. It's likely that there's a few mistakes so let me know if you catch any.

Right well, haven't been up to much this past week. Hardly any coding in fact. Added a few new graphics to BountyHunter (link updated), though I'm only mildly satisfied with the way they've turned out. The main ship looks a little cack and resembles a flying iron. That'll change. The Monitors are sort of OK but hmmm.t. I think the Hunters look alright though, bit like pizza crusts but ok. And the Mothership mesh I pinched from a Star Trek model website so it's not even mine - it was already sexy.
What I am quite pleased with is the rotation effect of the ships. I tried to copy the original retrosprite from the game Time Pilot, but was originally worried the effect wouldn't work in 3d. It didn't look good at all in the beginning -sort of made me trip out just looking at it really- but now it's not too shabby.

Hmph. That's about it folks. Will pop in soon.

fd

Hi,
Thought I'd drop in with a few words. I've been a bit busy of late. Not just with the coding or work but with playing GTA San Andreas. This might make you laugh, but over in Japan it's just
come out now so I finally had a chance to sink my teeth into it. It's an awesome game, I mean, screwed-up moral issues aside, there's nothing that can top it. Game of the decade. However some levels are waaaay to hard and sadly in all honesty I believe it truly is down to luck and luck alone how you win some races. Never mind though.
Actually I was reading about Rockstar North the other day and had no idea that they were originally DMA, the guys behind the classic 'Hired Guns'. Boy did me and my mates sacrifice some sleep game back in the day between that game and a few joints. It has an atmosphere that still keeps me on edge when I get nostalgic and kick up the old Amiga emulator for a game. Comes to me as no surprise then to hear the same folks invented the equally creative GTA.

Seems like a lot of you are benefiting from the Splatterhouse/Beat-em up tutorials judging by the fairly frequent mails I get. Great stuff. To the guy who asked for the Streets of Rage tutorial- yes this is kind of the direction I'd like to take the tutorials in eventually. I've had an idea in my mind for a beat-em up for ages and will open-source when I get around to starting it.

One thing you should know about beat-em-ups though is that they take a lot of work. Coding a fighting engine isn't the hardest task in the world but creating all the sprites for the backgrounds and the ton of animations for every enemy and proponent takes a lot of time. Still, that being said, watch this space because I'll be making one soon.

Yes you''ll have to be patient though, as I'm in the middle of my little Bounty Hunter space shooter. I suppose you could say I burned out on The Damned about a month ago. The problem was the second level- I simply couldn't think of any way to make it more fun without committing a lot more time to developing the engine and adding some huge changes and wasting a lot of my days piddling around in 3ds Max making models or something else. I tried a kind of spider/man hybrid monster at one point but it KILLED the rendering speed and I kind of well, got coders block after that. People can throw suggestions at you "Chuck in a rocket launcher/Desert Eagle/grenades/flying monkeys"-etc but they forget that you've still got to involve some kind of strategy with the weapon or else it'll make the game too easy. Plus there's the issue of if Flash can even handle half of this stuff. I know that anyone with a shitty computer can't play The Damned over 17 fps and that's just ridiculous. If I just chucked in a load of new weapons that did more and more damage and made the enemies easy to fry it'd be like one of those daft Newground games with no strategy. So, The Damned is currently on halt. That's not to say I won't continue developing it -as it's not my style to leave things unfinished- but I'm kind of chilling out working on my Bounty Hunter game for the time being.




This is a very linear, cutesy little shoot-em up that will only have roughly 16 missions. In fact it's almost done and right now I'm updating all the placeholder graphics with tasty 3d models. I was working on this one 'Hornet' model and the wife is like "What's that?". So I say "It's supposed to be the embodiment of evil within the BountyHunter galaxy", and she goes "It's cute!"..I suppose I, and maybe you, should just be thankful she gives me time to make games at all.

BountyHunter is leading up to a bigger better idea I have to use the engine for related to the old C64 game Magnetron(on top). Magnetron was the first game (bar the prequel Paradroid) that utilised the idea of 'occupying' the enemy robots and using their more advanced skills to further yourself through the game. It was addictive as hell- desperately trying to dance around bouncing bombs to conquer their owner, and turning your cyborg into something worth worshipping. I was playing around with my 2d GTA car demo -something I've been trying to figure a use for- the other day and thought, "Wouldn't it be cool to have a space game where you start off as a little pod or something and you have to attack and defeat stronger enemies to get their craft?" When they're ready for boarding you have to dock the new ships in your spacesuit, but you have to be quick, leaving yourself open for easy annihilation.

Flash is kind of ripe for this sort of little idea, and I may even look into making it multiplayer. Imagine that, a very simple game (no missions) where you roam the galaxy looking for the ultimate space fighter to capture and inhabit, or else defend your already powerful mothership from little bastards chasing you around the galaxy. Every ship you become will have different (randomized) statistics and a variety of secondary weapons. But every ship gets weaker and weaker and eventually you're relegated back to being a crappy pod looking to catch some passing ship when it's weak so that you can inhabit it. Once in an update I'll chuck in a new type of weapon or a passing free-for-all super ship at a set location on the map so that people have to race to get it. It would be interesting to see who gets the highest score for a game like that.
As far I know, anything more complicated would be a stretch as a multiplayer in Flash, but a simple game like that? Actually possible. And really not that hard for me to code since most of the current engine for BountyHunter handles most of what I've already mentioned.

So, let's work on this puppy together, what do you say? Anyone who contributes a REALLY good idea will get credited for it.

All for now folks.


p.s.I'll rustle up the next beat-em up tutorial (losing lives and dying) sometime during March.

Hola amigos.

How's it cookin'?

SO, what's new, not so much, mostly I've been working on The Damned first level again, the next chapter in the beat-em-up tutorial 'Weapons' (99% done) and I also rustled up a little Streets of Rage-style fighting game prototype the other night too. Making moves link to other moves when attacking was easier than I thought, and didn't require any complicated methods to achieve.

I'm quite chuffed with the way the revision of the first level of TD (The Damned) is going. In retrospect I can't believe I was prepared to simply let it be at one stage. My thinking was that maybe people would notice it, then the next game would be more popular. Then I noticed some of the effort some of my peers were putting into their games on this http://board.flashkit.com/board/showthread.php?t=717716 thread over at FlashKit and frankly, was inspired to keep pushing the game until I myself am truly satisfied with it. First things first, there's not enough weapons so I decided to chuck an assault rifle into the first level, which is becoming seriously playable now- if I don't say so myself. It was a teeny bit tricky to get the rapid-fire action of the gun done in AS as there is no such thing as a MouseButtonIsHeldDown handler in Flash, and so you have to fiddle around with things like boolean values instead. Also getting the rat-a-tat sound going wasn't as simple as you might think. I broke the sound into a single 'tat' and stuck it on the first keyframe of the firing animation and that works quite well.

Also, I was told by some folks that there should a wider variety of enemies to kill, and so after a lot of trial and error with different types (had ghosts and shit flying over the lake at one point) I decided it might be cool to make a mask-wearing harder version of the lake zombies. Enemies that are slow but take a good and proper mowing down to kill, as opposed to the ones that come at you like Olympic swimmers. On top of this, ammo is now limited and must be collected by shooting the occasional ammo box that pops up through the waves (because they just do that sometimes!), accompanied by my own sexy "AMMO!" voice, audio edited Audicity to sound much cooler.

I also contributed a few minor cosmetic changes, the sliding text boxes used for Rick and Jennifer's speech have been reenvisioned to be more 'antique' and decorated with steel engraving. A flashy extra ammo text box pops up now too. Oh, and the loading screen has been updated.

I'm surprised nobody has guessed what game this is a secret prelude to yet. Hint, Rick, Jennifer? Lots of gore? Masks and things? Certain beat-em-up tutorial on this very site?
Nope, I guess I am old.

Well, all these changes might be for naught, but I'm having fun actually making a game that is becoming more playable by the day. Links on the right-hand side, folks.

p.s.Saw III is awesome. For those of you who haven't seen it yet, I'll say one word to convey a hint to what was my favourite scene, 'pigs'.

Ahh bollucks to it..

I'll post what's done of The Damned online. It's all work-in-progress so don't come crying to me about this and that not working, these graphics are crappy, etc.

There will be constant updates so keep checking in. Working link is on the right.

Okay, a quick post.


Check this out

New demo I've been working on. The physics behind it are all sound, converted from some online projectile motion mathematics I found to code. However I haven't quite equated how to get the arrow to rotate properly yet.

My inspiration for this little diversion came from the game Bowman Prelude which is by far my favourite Flash game on the net - the only Flash game I could play for hours and hours instead of five minutes. In the game you have to defend your castle by firing a variety of arrows at an attacking army and you can also destroy their castle. After every victory you can use the cash you earned destroying enemies to buy better, more powerful projectiles and other types of army. It would be perfect, well, more perfect if only for a couple of teeny little issues.

Bad Points

*No bonus cash for destroying the enemies castle
*Capturing the flag carries little incentive save making the levels shorter.
*The enemy can conjure all sorts of cool baddies but you're stuck with the same basic groups for your armies.
*Graphics do the job but they're boring.
*Repetitive sound loop gets on your nerves after the first hour (though you can turn it off).
*All the levels look the same.

In fact, while we're on the subject let's discuss my favourite Flash games followed by my analysis of just why they are so good.



Guardians of Altarris is my second choice for best Flash game on the net.
If you're into Final Fight clones, you'll love this. The graphics and sound are some of the best ever seen in a Flash game, IN FACT me and most other Flash games hobbyists I know were like "Shit is that really Flash?" when we first saw it. If I ever come across the guy who made the ambient music for this game I'm going to lock him in a room and force him to do the stuff on all my games. His stuff is that good.

Wow. The gameplay ain't half bad either. Though it isn't Aliens VS Predator, it's of a high calibre and stands head & shoulders above pretty much all other fighting games out there for Flash. As it is, it wrestles for the crown with Dad & Me (next review) for best fighting game on the net. With a bit of work on the fighting engine, it could easily be the best Flash game, period. The engineer behind the game (Scott Stoddard) in my opinion is probably the greatest Flash games programmer out there at this point in time. Not in an outstanding technical sense - though his games are obviously well-programmed - but rather in the way that every game he makes is sweet. I played his latest prototype over on FlashKit the other day and it's as addictive as hell.
Certainly a benchmark setter for us other wannabee legends.

Bad points
*Takes a looong time to load (kind of unavoidable for a quality game)
*Kind of slow at times.
*No weapons. Health icons, etc.


Dad & Me is a highly stylised beat-em up. I love everything about this game from the slick presentation to the comedic touches. I mean Tom Pulp and his lot sometimes go over the top with their twisted sense of humour but has genuine moments of hilarity such as boyscouts in front of buses and throwing lawnmowers at punks.

This is the best game on Newgrounds (after Bowman), and I often wonder why they didn't take this one to the N64 or whatever it was instead of Alien Hominid, which was nothing special. Though it can't beat Guardians of Altarris for graphics Dad & Me more than matches it in style and has a more responsive/flexible fighting engine that incorporates some nice physics. Also very well done is the soundtrack, which keeps the same melody throughout and yet changes depending on the environment.

Well, check it out! 6000 almost exclusively positive reviews on Newgrounds can't be wrong.

Bad Points
*Too short



Hmm....
If I was going to make a walk-along-beat-em-up I'd probably make my game more like Spike Out. There are two games I still consistently play in video-arcades, and never get tired of over here in Japan, StreetFighter and SpikeOut. Both are old games, though they contain the kind of perfect gameplay that never gets tiring. Good beat-em ups are all about the timing.
SpikeOuts strength lies in the multiple power meters which require perfect timing to operate. Once you've mastered it though, you can pull off some amazing floating combo's and progress through the game further than before. The bosses are genius, and kind of timing needed to defeat some of them separates the casual gamer from the expert. But if you're good enough, you can literally play the whole game through on one credit.

If you don't incorporate the necessity for good timing in a fighting game, it will never become a classic. Even Final Fight gets boring after a few levels. Aliens VS Predator is a good beat-em up that works not because of the skill level involved to play it, but because of the unique variety of moves available to each character.


Right well, I'm going back to the archer demo now, catch you later.

p.s. Just saw SAW III and it was awesome. Almost matches the first one.

Got some hosting babeeee...

Temporary hosting that is. One kind bloke I know from my other website "Young Dudes Guide to Japan" offered to help me out since I'm having such a bugger of a time getting a visa card over here in Japan.

I want to show you dudes the game- it's just that it's too close to completion now.
However, you can check out my first ever YouTube post, a render test for Usagi Yojimbo, the main character from Samurai Warrior.



Nothing flash (pun intended), but it's only the bare bones so far. I haven't even decided if I'll remake the game (Samurai Warrior) for sure yet. Pretty likely though.


I finally solved the sound doubling problem I had with the Damned. Turned out I was using two Mouse listeners instead of one. Like an idiot, I thought that you needed to declare different variables for every state, ie onMouseDown, onMouseUp then make a listener for each. Nope, one listener takes care of anything the mouse does after you initiate it. Stupid. This is very cool though because really now the only problem I have now is getting my external loaders to work. And I know why they don't, because the AS is all on the first frame, and all the movieclips are dynamic.

Will post some pics soon.

Just dropping in...

Well well, back again, if only for a quickie.

The Damned is very close to Beta stage now. Not only are all 3 levels complete, with new death-scenes and a few extra tweaks, but they've also been tied up to the main menu swf, which now loads them as external files. The menu swf file keeps track of the amount of continues you have left and everything. However, I really, really, wish I had done this fromt the start because it's been an absolute struggle to get the swf levels working smoothly now that they're external. I had simply shitloads of problems, everything from setIntervals continuing after the level had ended to enemies not appearing at all.

In fact I am utterly stumped by one tiny, annoying little error with the gun sound object retriggering on every instance of an external swf being loaded (in other words, every time I load a movie/level, the sound of gunfire 'doubles'). I've a hunch it might have something to do with the function for firing being triggered by a _global variable, instead of a local one. It's such a pain in the arse having the game this close to going live and yet not making any progress because of some idiotic little malfunctions in the code.

In my burn-out time I've been working on some other stuff. You might notice a new 2d engine demo posted on the blog. That was a tricky bugger to pull off at first, but isometric is my bitch now. This might well be the engine used to the Friday 13th game I have planned, or a remake/remix of the Last Ninja (another one of my aspirations)- you heard it here first. p.s. if any of you folks out there who read this are big fans of either game and think you could render up some sweeeet iso graphics for me to use, send us a mail. I won't hold my breath though...

I've got big hopes for The Damned. It's my first game, so it's not supposed to break any new ground in terms of coding excellence or gain much of a fan base, but I do hope a few folks out there enjoy it enough to anticipate a bigger and better second version. Now that I've laid down a concrete engine for the game, I know that the next one will be so much better.

I at least get some kind of a good starting rep in the Flash world. I am very excited that finally for the first time in my life I have the opportunity and the capability to make the games I always wanted to make. Call me a nerd or whatever, but it's almost like my highest ambition to be on the same ladder as the older generation of games makers. Individuals like Rob Hubbard, Matt Gray, Archer MacLean, and the folks in teams such as System 3, Thalamus, Sensible Software, CodeMasters --agghh..like movie stars to me, man! I want that! So if you like the game when you play it, remember that a lot of love went into this baby, and a lot of respect for those who inspired me to become a game author.