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Astro-Storm - My new RB+ Game


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Got some time to playtest the latest build this morning. It's feeling quite good to play :0)

 

I got as far as level 20 or so and clocked the score. It then went from displaying either 99999 or 00000 depending on how it felt! How are you handling the score tracking? I'd be interested to know. I realise the scoring and difficulty settings might not be final and this might not be possible for the finished game, but then there are plenty of Jaguar gamers out there better than myself, so I shouldn't be used as any kind of barometer here.

 

The bonus rock avoiding and hoop jumping section feels decent. The only issue I had at first was the directional indicators. As they're the sprites used in the main game to point to your cursor, here they're pointing the opposite way to the danger, so maybe it would be an idea to change the gfxbase to the opposing one for this section and restore it later (thought that would be easier than shuffling them round and managing the change in logic). Going through the hoops is a lot of fun and restores a lot of shield - are the number of hoops and rocks fixed per level? Sometimes it seemed like there were a lot of rocks and I wasn't sure if I could get the shield back up.

 

The 2 + 1 + 2 + 1... level layout works well for this game, it breaks things up nicely.

 

One thing I wasn't sure about was that there might have been a tiny bit of slowdown at the start of the shooting levels when a lot of sprites are moving around fast. Not sure how you're handling them if there's a cheaper way to do it or if there's some other routine that could be adjusted to ease the load. It might not even be there, it definitely didn't start running in 2 frames or anything but there were hints of a small stutter until 1 or 2 rocks were shot down. If you get to try it on hardware (I was testing at 60Hz btw), have a look at that and see if you notice anything.

 

Right at the end when my score lost tracking, I decided to experiment a bit. I spammed the fire button like crazy. There didn't seem to be any sort of penalty for this - I thought I remembered you saying that it harmed to your shield if you missed. There should definitely be something there, even if it's a meter to have your weapon overheat if used too much? Maybe that could harm your shield?

 

Another slight issue was the collision detection seems ever so slightly unfair at times. I get that you have to time your shots well with those fast ones, but maybe it felt that I was having to shoot in front of the rocks a bit too much? How big is the CD box for the cursor and for each rock? I do like how you check every shot vs every rock and that allows you to shoot 2 when they cross, I think I'd have cheaped out and bailed the RHIT check as soon as a hit was detected :0)

 

Hope some of that is useful!

 

btw, it saved my score as 99999 in the table. The character selection for name entry seemed a tiny bit twitchy, ever so slightly tricky to land on the right character.

Edited by sh3-rg
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Awesome feedback thank you!

 

I haven't done a long play through since adjusting the scoring, so I need to look at that and balance it. I could add another digit I guess ;) The score tracking is just an int var. I carve this up into thousands/hundreds/tens/units to then work out which score sprite digit to display. I use the font code from the scoller tutorial for that.

 

I also thought the same thing about the directional indicators, just couldn't be arsed lol. Your suggestion for swapping the gfx is a winner though so i'll do that. All waves in the main game and the nav game are randomly generated (from a set seed) so there might be some unfair levels. If people can generally scrape by then i'm happy with that. I did think about letting people do their own seed too but that would have to not interfere with the main high score list.

 

I'll look into the slowdown - there certainly isn't anything major going on while you're not firing. The main thing would be where it has to check the position of each rock to know if it has to be reset to the other side of the play area. I can't let raptor handle this at the screen edges because you might never see some rocks.

I do need to run through everything still to see what can be optimised though.

 

Spamming the fire button reduces the overall score for that level. It works out your hit ratio as a % and makes adjustments on that. Perhaps as your score was alternating to 00000 it just didn't work it out. I like the overheating idea, I did wonder about doing something like this.

 

We won't talk about the collision detection....... lets just say I didn't even "bail in" to using RHIT, let alone bail out with the rest of it lol. I'm just doing manual box collision detection (only when you hold fire). This is something I should probably change but I didn't bother as it seemed to work ok.

 

btw, it saved my score as 99999 in the table. The character selection for name entry seemed a tiny bit twitchy, ever so slightly tricky to land on the right character.

You win. Don't need to play any more now you've maxed the score :)

The twitchyness might be the 50/60hz difference as I balanced it to 50 for the input.

 

Thank you ever so much for the detailed feedback. Most welcome as always.

 

I'm having a little break from this game at the moment as I wanted to prototype another idea (still in rb+). That shouldn't take too long though, then i'll revisit this and try to finish it off.

Edited by Sporadic
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The main thing would be where it has to check the position of each rock to know if it has to be reset to the other side of the play area. I can't let raptor handle this at the screen edges because you might never see some rocks.

 

Same issue in Rebooteroids - the simple fix? Don't allow angles near the cardinals ;)

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I use the font code from the scoller tutorial for that.

hah, I like that, good work.

 

I also thought the same thing about the directional indicators, just couldn't be arsed lol.

:thumbsup:

 

 

We won't talk about the collision detection....... lets just say I didn't even "bail in" to using RHIT, let alone bail out with the rest of it lol. I'm just doing manual box collision detection (only when you hold fire). This is something I should probably change but I didn't bother as it seemed to work ok.

Oh right, you did your own CD? I was going to suggest maybe limiting the size of the rock's boxes and increasing the size of the missile for performance reasons, but I have no idea how Raptor handles this, only CJ would be able to say if it'd be effective or not, but if you're not even using it... :0)

 

Thank you ever so much for the detailed feedback. Most welcome as always.

Thanks. I try to be constructive when I offer my thoughts on work-in-progress games. I know some testers I've worked with can be very blunt and give you the cold hard facts in no uncertain terms, so it's always made me wary of coming across the wrong way. Even still, some people have taken things totally the wrong way and gone a bit emo on me... but I can see you're not the type to do that at all, lol. I just want to see your game done and out and have it be a great example of what people could be doing with their Jaguars if they only got off their arses and made it happen, and that's exactly what it's shaping up to be.

 

I'm having a little break from this game at the moment as I wanted to prototype another idea (still in rb+). That shouldn't take too long though, then i'll revisit this and try to finish it off.

Great news! I like to wander off and have a play with other ideas as well, but it's mostly not really game-based... more just arsing around. Then I try to think if it could be some how useful in a game... totally the wrong way to go about anything :P So have you made many games in other languages/for other systems? If so, can I take a look?

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hah, I like that, good work.

 

 

:thumbsup:

 

 

 

Oh right, you did your own CD? I was going to suggest maybe limiting the size of the rock's boxes and increasing the size of the missile for performance reasons, but I have no idea how Raptor handles this, only CJ would be able to say if it'd be effective or not, but if you're not even using it... :0)

 

 

Thanks. I try to be constructive when I offer my thoughts on work-in-progress games. I know some testers I've worked with can be very blunt and give you the cold hard facts in no uncertain terms, so it's always made me wary of coming across the wrong way. Even still, some people have taken things totally the wrong way and gone a bit emo on me... but I can see you're not the type to do that at all, lol. I just want to see your game done and out and have it be a great example of what people could be doing with their Jaguars if they only got off their arses and made it happen, and that's exactly what it's shaping up to be.

 

 

Great news! I like to wander off and have a play with other ideas as well, but it's mostly not really game-based... more just arsing around. Then I try to think if it could be some how useful in a game... totally the wrong way to go about anything :P So have you made many games in other languages/for other systems? If so, can I take a look?

 

Many, many prototypes, nothing really published. I have always tended to mess around more than get anything finished lol

 

I released an Invaders clone for Android. See here;

http://www.sporadicapps.co.uk

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Managed to test 1.2 on my PAL Jag tonight.

 

I think I spotted the slowdown sh3 mentioned. Need to do some optimisation I guess :/

 

Also, I can see some wierd flickering particles at the top of the play area. They kind of flicker horizontally I think. Not quite sure what thats related to yet. If things are slowing down then it could be related but it didnt used to do that. Not sure if it has anything to do with the particle line issue from before either.

 

I'll have to play around and see what effects it.

 

Dangerous territory now though cause I've got this other prototype on my mind. Must focus!!! Get the last 10% done on this and then I can move on :)

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Just had a quick tinker around. I think the horizontal flickering particles at the top of the screen I saw in v1.2 have gone now. I also can't see the slow down at the level start any more. Have tested on PAL Jaguar.

 

Changes;

- During navigation section, swapped the directional indicators around. This make it feel more natural now.

- Small performance tweaks.

- Slowed down highscore input slightly. Hopefully a bit better on NTSC now. PAL feels ok to me.

 

 

Next on the to do list is to balance the scores so they dont get so high so quick and test the level timer which I may or may not have broken.

 

Enjoy.

AstroStorm121.abs

Edited by Sporadic
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  • 4 weeks later...

Hi guys,

 

Regarding what sh-3 mentioned a while ago about NTSC cutting off the top of the screen.

 

Would someone be able to confirm if I moved the Level and Score text to be on top of the 'monitor' border at the top, would that be enough to get everything on screen?

 

Crude quick example of what I mean;

 

post-42253-0-21246700-1443617369_thumb.png

 

Obviously i'd fit it properly etc

Edited by Sporadic
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Okay, it took me a while but I just took a pic from my 14" CRT TV of the "level complete" picture

 

post-10979-0-45967600-1443865875_thumb.jpg

So I can only see two pixels from the green letters. I suppose this can give you a hint on your adjustments! (from your last screenshot I think you should be ok)

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Okay, it took me a while but I just took a pic from my 14" CRT TV of the "level complete" picture

 

attachicon.gifghetto_tv.jpg

 

So I can only see two pixels from the green letters. I suppose this can give you a hint on your adjustments! (from your last screenshot I think you should be ok)

Wow, amazing how much gets chopped! Thats about 20px.

Thanks very much for doing that for me. As you say, looks like the new layout will be ok.

Which is good because I've already made that change lol

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Hi all,

 

Thought i'd post a new version.

 

Changes;

 

- Gun overheating. Hold fire too long and the gun overheats and locks out for a short time. LEDs added to show temp.

- Stats screen added after each shooting level.

- Scores reduced by 10x to allow bonuses without getting crazy scores and maxing out the score.

- Screen layout change to fix NTSC cutoff

- Slight performance tweaks but nothing major.

 

Something i've noticed is minor stuttering on some of the rocks depending on their speed/angle of travel. I think this is due to the way i'm defining the random values they use. I will probably look at this at some point but it's not really noticeable. Could be attributed to the slowdown sh3-rg saw?

 

Have fun and as always, feedback welcome :D

AstroStormV13.abs

AstroStormV13.rom

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Great stuff!

 

Just a small plea though - the fonts we shipped with raptor and rb+ up till now had some small caps letters positioned wrong. I just gone and fixed this on head repository. Would you mind grabbing that and replacing the 3 fonts with the new ones? :)

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Great stuff!

 

Just a small plea though - the fonts we shipped with raptor and rb+ up till now had some small caps letters positioned wrong. I just gone and fixed this on head repository. Would you mind grabbing that and replacing the 3 fonts with the new ones? :)

No probs. Will do. Will be in next release ;)

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Great stuff!

 

Just a small plea though - the fonts we shipped with raptor and rb+ up till now had some small caps letters positioned wrong. I just gone and fixed this on head repository. Would you mind grabbing that and replacing the 3 fonts with the new ones? :)

Actually, I'll probably redo my score and level number fonts too as they're pretty untidy.

 

Also considering redoing the "garage door" graphics and texts too as they are pretty blurry. The texture of the door interferes too much with the text.

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  • 3 weeks later...

Currently blasting through the last 10% (always the biggest percent) of stuff I wanted to get in the final version.

 

Recently added/changed/fixed;

-Intro

-Credit screen

-3 new bosses, each with their own pesky method to slow you down or hurt you. These appear on every even level once you have shot some rocks.

-Rock sequence score bonus. Max those points by shooting the correct colour order.

-Updated to latest rb+

-further performance tweaks

-gfx tidy up such as score fonts

 

In progress;

-More sound fx

-Investigating music

-Testing and difficulty balancing

 

Hopefully that will be it once I'm happy with the above bits.

 

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