Fading stuff is great

Fading stuff.. What kind of stuff i hear ya ask.

Well anything really. One of those distinctive marks between a professional game and a quick amateur game is that nothing fades, or most things do. Some fades can be so fast they only have 1 single intermediate frame of half fade. Others can take ages to fade.

Fading up or down, it does not matter. For impact you usually just pop stuff on the screen, but when it's time for that item to leave it is a bit abrupt to just remove it. Take a look at any game you love and see just how much stuff fades in and out (especially text). Then take a look at a lot of the stuff on Xblig and notice how it pops on and off.

Popping on and off is an option, but it should be regarded as such. Writers should consider this type of thing as a design decision. Personally i love fading (oh i mentioned that already). I have not found a place to overuse it yet haha!

So i just got through fading a few more things on my game, screens and text galore. The one i am most pleased with is the level name that overwrites the level at the start of each one. It popped off and it was ugly. Now it fade quite appropriately and at a nice pace, just in time for the level to start. wonderful. I find it is very complimentary to my 3 stage fading of the background and sprites and overlay Scoreline.

so next time you have items coming on and off in your game, please think of the abruptness and fade.

New updated 5th moon lettering

Here is the new lettering i created today for the logo. The most interesting aspects are that i had to create them chunky, as that was the way such things were back in the day on the C64. An oddity of the C64 was that it had double wide pixels. This made it chunky whether you wanted it to be or not. But it only had double wide, not double height. I emulated this when i drw this artwork. I think it came out aok for a rela first pass. I can always back later to tidy it up a bit.

I also changed the 'Arcade mode' option to 'Single Player'. I did this after soem research was done by someone else from the XNA group. I will try to find some links and also put up some of my observations on his research soon. It was very good, thanks ClingermanGW.

Yesterday we sent them

Five golden coins was sent off yesterday to various publishers. I sure hope that some of them , or one of them at least finds the book of great interest. We have sent it to 5 publishers that wanted a paper manuscript, and 2 that wanted electronic manuscript submission.

We worked hard to get the cover letter written and the thing printed, man does it seem expensive to get color pages printed now, at 69 cents a page, yeeouch!

So here we go, and if this one is recieved well, then maybe i can sell them more manuscripts, as i already have anotehr 5 written :)

Wish me luck

Aliens must spawn

Only when i tell em, and not before!
I like it when things do as they are told. In this case it is to do with when aliens will spawn onto the lvel and try to kill ya. We need control, some very accurate and designed control in fact. This will be a much different system than the clever dynamic one i used in Pellmell. Even if noone appreciates it, it was a work of Genius. The fact it held up to all those levels and difficulties and variable speed of scrolling. ahh well.

This one is simple, in fact it is about a simple as it can get. We have a time marker and associated with that we have an alien type. This pair will control the spawning of aliens once entered into a linear table. Once one alien has spawned, we will move the index up one notch and wait till the scroll gets to the time (time is really pixel distance along the level), and then spawn the correct alien. So simple a caveman could do it.

However it took me a while in C# as i find the type sytax a bit odd. In C or C++ i would just use pointers and it would have been done in moments. here is the basic tables i used.

//------------------------------------------------------
// Level Control Data (spawning info)
//------------------------------------------------------
// 'Time' - is distance down level in pixels you want to spawn the Alien
// 'What' - is the name of what you want to trigger
static int[] L001_Time = { 220, 600, 1000};
static int[] L001_What = { (int)TIDS.WASP, (int)TIDS.BUNGEE, (int)TIDS.FIGHTER};

public static int[][] LevelSpawnData_Time = new int[][] {L001_Time, L001_Time};
public static int[][] LevelSpawnData_What = new int[][] {L001_What, L001_What};

As you can see i defined two simple arrays, Yes, i could have made it a Vector or a small class or typedef with the two elements in it, but it's all about being cheap and fast and cheerful, i just couldn't come up with anything simpler than this. Anyway above you can see that i list the simple int array with the spawn timings in it. Then i have a nice table that links to each of the level int arrays (once i make them). That means i am now able to index through the main table to the levels table and then offset that by an index to work through it.

here is the access line for it.
what = cLevel.LevelSpawnData_What[cLevel.iLevel][iSpawn_Index];

Now that is so simple i love it. So now i have a new spawning control. One anyone can use. I may do an editor, but i am not certain at this point.

New title page logo design

I may have mentioned a few times that i want my C64 lookalike shooter to, well, look like it os from a C64 era. Well one of those important features that make it feel right, is the title page. Namely the font used and of course the over enthusiastic use of sprites and movement and sometimes color on that title page.

So i fired up me trusty art package and made me some letters for my title. Ok, so they are not up to much, but they were quick, and writing the code is so much more inetersting that designing letters :S

So above i have a picture of the important part of my title page. It has the name as sprites and they bounce quite happily across the screen in a sine wave pattern. You can also see the work i put into the font, and i went for a completly retro look with the grey. I have to say it works quite well, but at the moment i think i am missing something, probably that lovely C64 music stylin.. Might have a hard time doing something like that to be honest. I'll do my best.

So the logo went from a static picture of 5th Moon, to this bouncing sprite based one. I sure hope it makes people take notice when they first see it's energy and movement. Maybe i'll sell more ? One never knows....

First weeks results for ADLCG

well here is the sales stats. Apparently we downloaded nearly 3Ks worth. Not quite the numbers that would have gotten me excited. Now 5K would have made me dizzy with excitement. But 3k.. hmm. Maybe it will have the preverbial long tail for downloads. I hope so. Aceball does and my otehr game Pellmell does not. So it will be inetersting to see where this falls.

Period Statistics•Trials: 2893
•Purchases: 43
•Purchase/Trial Ratio: 1.49 %

The low sell thru is completely expected, but i really wish i could have sold this for 1 dollar. I truly believ it would have had a conversion rate in the 20% range for that, wheras it is so low in this way. But hopefully i have introduced a whole load of people to this wonderful comic series, and now they can follow on Scotts Dreamland site.

so lets think of the possibilities of it selling 20% at $1 each.. Just for yucks as it were.
578 is 20% of 2893.. So that is 578 dollars earned, and i get 70% which is 404 dollars to me! Which would have paid for the music and the press release, and given me some sandwich money.. Woohoo!
But.. the reality is that
43 copies (ok, i bought 1)...
42 copies is 126 dollars earned, and i get 70% which is 88 dollars to me! Dang not enough to pay anything off.

I sure hope MS lets me drop the price soon, though it is already too late for this product, i would bring out a sequel with more of the amazing story pages.

Till next i Blog, i am outta here (work to do)

Fire from Where?

Above I have anice image i took tonight from my latest game 5th Moon. You can see the nice new ship i have previously blogged about, and you can also see it is firing bullets at the moment.

Notice how those bullets are not quite aligned. Well it wasn't easy to tell what was going on until i took this screenshot. Woohoo! i now know what to do to fix the issue of it looking odd.

The second issue is the fact that the middle bullet is obviously starting further back than the top or bottom pairings of bullets. So i will need to look into that as well, then i will have a lovely 5 way firing formation.

The tip of this post is.. If something looks odd on screen, then screen grab it.