New Boss Health bar

This is my boss from A Shooter. This version thuogh has a brigth green bar stuck in it's nose. This is in fact the boss's health bar. It shrinks from the left to the right and changes color as the health diminishes. In much the same way your ships health bubble does. I am not sure I like this at the moment, but i have put it in to see if it is useful. so far one playtester has confirmed that they liked it. So it might be here to stay. this is a proposed change to the health bar that shows at the bottom of the screen for the boss, but so far i think both might stay. The boss health bar was highly requested and in fact I tend to like it myself. the issues with the one on the ship is that it is relatively hard to see,especially when the ship is moving, also the fact that it is so small means it does not have a lot of granularity per pixel. The big bar is way obvious and has currently 8 times the granularity. I will ponder the situation more.

I am late posting tonight as I have had some people round to chat about stuff and it was a great night chatting with them till 2:30am this morning, WOW how time can fly.

While they are here I managed to get a Four player test in on the Xbox. It went so well i am shocked. We pounded it first try on Easy mode. then I set it to hardest, and this eparated the men from the boys and it killed us all on level 9. this seemed good to me and I never saw a single bug :|  I am shocked too haha. A great fun experience. Now i just have 3 player mode to test :)

G'night.

A Shooter Boss 11 - Advanced Boss Design

Here is a little picture of me Fighting (ok, dodging at this point) the Boss from level 11. Which is the start of the games Advanced levels.

End of Level Boss #11

Now that picture makes this boss look like a walk in the park doesn't it. Just let me tell you that looks can be deceiving though. This is one of those cases. I have not modified the picture in any way, you can even see the debug text on it still. So what makes him nasty, after all he doesn't even move. Yep, you heard that right, he doesn't even move a bit, once he is on.

So just how hard can it be to kill a stationary boss. Well that is one of the things that makes designing bosses interesting. Challenging the player to come up with on the fly decisions or skill to figure out what to do. Most bosses are about methods, even the simple ones. Shooter players know this, and it is an important skill to pickup and improve on. This shooter will teach you how to play shooters, no doubt in my mind at this point.

So lets move onto the main section of this article. What am i going to do with my next 10 bosses ?

Advanced Boss Design

The 11th - 20th bosses will be on what i am calling the advanced levels. This is where i will take what you have learn't and see how well you learn't it. The Bosses however are a completely new breed, yet seem very familiar in some ways.

1. First issue with the advanced bosses is that you can cycle around levels that contain them. This is done by beating all 20 levels, and then wrapping back to level 11 for the 21st etc. So these bosses had to be able to be expanded and made more difficult easily and fairly.

2. They needed to be evolved from the Simpler bosses found in the first 10 levels. I want players to feel advancement, even if my graphics do not loko incredibly new (or new at all :O)

3. These bosses needed to be a taste of new, and especially with boss 11, a view into the future and hopefully a view that will scare people into realizing the possibilities of what these bosses can become.

How do i do that ?
1.... These bosses contain an element that will be so easy to increase the difficulty on. Namely the spawn of the support aliens. If i spped up the spawn by a small amount (say 10%) each time you encounter this boss, it will get harder and harder by an approximately proportional amount. Simple, and yet sooo effective.
2... These bosses now have the power of Spawn. They no longer have to fight alone, and they themselves will also get more aggressive and manouverable as the Advanced levels progress. advancement in most every way. Some more obvious than others.
3... This new view and peek into the future advanced bosses should scare anyone with an imagination. Even though the Boss himself could just sit still, it is possible to spawn support aliens all over the screen, from every angle. Just think of your most hated alien from the previous levels(where they were introduced) and realise that they could be helping a voracious Boss.. I hope you can see my point.

So my Advanced Boss Design follows some simple elements, which is one reason i am confident they will work out. The only tip i can really give is, Complex aliens do not nescessarily make good aliens. Combinations however can be anything and are much easier to control and balance.

I hope you enjoyed this article. If you did, please take a moment to Digg the Site.

Thanks
g'night

Level 10 is done for A Shooter

ok, so when i say 'done' i should use air quotes or something. what i mean is it is now in Alpha-Beta state :)

Either way, i now have the first half of the game created. Tonight i solved bugs in the single and multiplayer games. I added some niceties that i probably shouldn't have bothered with, but i like them.

for example.
When you play as a single player game, you start the game in the vertical middle. Seems correct now.
when you play as a two player game, you are both offset from the middle by a nice looking amount.
Three player games are the similar vein. One in the middle and two spread nicely out to the sides.
Well i like it, so i guess that is all that matters. Stupid professionalism. bah! costs me time ;)

Anwyay, i got level 10 in, and then decided to play through all the first 10 levels again. To my dismay i got beaten up on the Boss from level 8 again. This is the 3rd time in a row now he has manhandled me. I may have to change him. Or just practice him, lol.

Maybe i should do anotehr gameplay video of just how nasty he is. He is the one that fires a stream of trajectory bullets that number... 65. Yup, he rapidly fires 65 bullets at you. It's freakin cool!

I really need to sort the audio out better, but i guess it's just on my list. Which is actually quite a short list after tonight. Mostly i have 10 more levels to do. then balance them all together. So far, the first 10 are pretty good.

I'll do another video of what's going on real soon.
G'night.

A Shooter Boss #10 Gameplay Video

So i figured it was time to bring out the fraps. I just wanted to show one of the bosses i am currently wokring on. It is a tough boss that exists at level 10. This is not the final version of the boss for a few reasons. The main one being that he has not been balanced for his position relative to the previous levels.

Balancing bosses nad levels will take more time, but also means each one must be balacned with the ones either side of it. so this Boss is set up to easily alter his difficulty by changing just a single value.

So i am going to try and link in the video, and i hope it's possible on Blogger, as this is my first attempt.

As a bonus, i also recorded the 3 Smart Bombs that created. I hope you all like what ya se.

Laters

Intercept bullets

Or Predictive fire.

Here is a little story of how my night went.

I really wanna get some Intercept bullets done. Ones that will predict wheer you will be if you carry on with your current heading and velocity. Sounded easy and i need this to add to the arsenal of the Aliens that wanna kill ya.

Woah, writing this was so easy. Just speed of me enemy bullets multiplied by the place where they think the player to be, which is just the time it would take my bullets to travel to him (using current position, no fancy refactoring for this game!). Then multiple the players veloicty by that travel time and add it to his bas position. There ya go. Easy.

In fact i wrote it very quickly, and after it didn't work i realised the age old problem for programmers. If ya don't call the code, it cannot do anything!! haha!

So i fixed it up. and when i did the bullet seemd to predict a distance way too far ahead of where you could possibly be. so after checking my code i decided to play it once more. When i did, i found it to be quite accurate, only. It looked crap!

Yup.... it looked crap. Bullets flying off allover the place, none coming near me as i quickly moved up and down in the same place. BAH! i say!

So what to do? Well i simply dampened down the predictive accuracy. I set it to exactly half and OMGoodness, it actually now works like i really wanted and imaginged in the first place haha.

Here is an excert of my conversation i was having with a friend currently residing in Colorado. Via msn messenger. (yes my text is red in messenger too!)

robert says:

OMGoodness
robert says:
I decided to just halve it's accuracy, so it goes not as far out.
robert says:
and OMG it is freaking awesomeness
robert says:
and truly hard, haha!
robert says:
i loves it!
robert says:
so part design, part coding and part hacking, i actually have what i desired
robert says:
i love writing games!

And here is a look of what it did to my streaming enemy bullets as i wiggle up and down.

There are a couple of bullets from this boss that were fired from a different place and a different method. But mostly this is a really fast stream he fires at me in the middle of his attack sequence.

So the moral of the story is... "You can get what ya want, but not always the way ya expect to get it!"

G'night

Boss Health Bar

I am feeling a bit tired lately. Maybe it is the late nights and early mornings. They call it burning the candle at both ends, but i think i maybe burning the candle in the middle as well. I have a real day job as most will know working for Mass Media, and i have this Indie part time job. I am also a father of two with a wife and other interests, like keeping the house and stuff working :O

anyway, i have been procrastinating for some time now in putting in a heath bar for my bosses. I felt it wasn't retro enough etc. Well i put effects on the boss to show how damaged he is, but still i wasn't satisfied. Here  i got plain lazy. I just didn't wanna go to the hassle of puting up a special health bar for the bosses.

Tonight that has all channged, as i decided i should bite the bullet and put one in. Then see if i liked it or not. and .....

There it is. And i lurve it. LOL. If i had known how much i woulda liked it, i would have put it in weeks ago. Shows ya that although you can resist a good idea, it is hard to really justify not doing it. In this picture you can see the Boss firing a stream of bullets at me and at the very botton you can see my debug text, telling me where i am on a level (great for placing aliens).

Being tired like this i always want to go for short cuts. Not do an effect etc. With this planned as an 80MSP game, i should be taking shortcuts.. But somehow my consience and pride cannot do it. Oh i won't do all i could. That was put into Pellmell, and i know where that went. The way of original and complete games. So this one is complete, but a LOT more obvious what it is...

Could be time for some playtest i think. Even though i have test graphics... or do I ?

G'night all.

An article on Game difficulty

I just read a very interesting article on game difficulty. Is so highlights my own feeling about the fact that computer games should not cheat etc that i thought i would highlight it here.

The Difficulty with Difficulty

When i have new teams mates and we are writing games, i always make it a point to tell them not to cheat. now they can make the AI as good as can be, which would mean perfect... Or at least perfect in the control scheme that is present. That is why they must also make AI's use the same controller inputs that the player uses. This usually helps stop them cheating speed etc. This kind of thing really helps keep players from feeling cheated.

laters

Method Boss Design... Issue

Here I am, having just completed two more bosses for my shooter. I am going with the evolutionary design if you haven't read my Blog before. Which means to evolve the Boss from one level to the next.

Evolving the boss does not mean that you play in the same way with him, and just get faster etc. In fact i am finding to my delight that small changes in the boss can make significant changes in your play tactics.

So what's the Issue i face?
Well it seems i have created a monster, a monster of a boss. He is only slightly evolved from the previous level boss, but this one does a firing sequence that makes you have to dodge his bullets in a rather unique way.. or DIE!

Questions..
Is this bad ?
I do view this as bad, because a player will come to this bos at the end of the levl and have no idea how to survive, as most if not all players will die on his third firing sequence. Nasty huh! Yet i know the secret to defeating him, and it is fairly easy...
Is this Good ?
I do view this as a good thing. It means you will have to think a bit more creatively. It means you will have to even go to video if you fail to figure it out yourself. Old school shooters and arcade shooters had learning curves and boss method learning in them.

Conclusions...
I love this, i dislike this. ARGH! some people will enjoy this challenge, but some will throw their controllers. Which pill should i take ? The red or the blue one ?

I would LOVE some input from the people that read this blog, but as you are all anonymous and also so very quiet i guess i shall have to figure it out myself.

One thing is for sure. I personally love this boss. My partner is gonna hate it, lol

Laters

Music and Sound are important, but balance is supreme

Anyone who thinks that all it takes to put music and sfx in their game is to find the sounds. Is Sorely mistaken. I and friends spend so long on getting not only the right sounds, but also then balancing them properly together it is insane. It always takes ages, and can be frustrating if you haven't alloted the time, but it is also, soo well worth while. I can recommend spending more time on audio for every game you produce. That also includes me!

My friend and I spent a long time tonight just accumulating some basic sfx and a few scores of music. It went well, and after a mere 3 hours i have 5 sfx and 3 music tracks to use for the moment. Some may last the course, some may not. We shall see.

I am however having more issues with that crappy Xact 3.0. We made a completely new xact project and put in our sound. But as soon as i turn on compression, the xactblder just malfunctions. This is very frustrating, and will mean that i have less music. ARGH! i want more music darn it! so i guess i will waste some hours trying hard to fix this for this project.

Only down side to tonight is that i have not got anything done on the press contacts for Pellmell the rebirth, bah! However i now have 3 EOL bosses working :)

G'night

Boss Evolution

Start simple is what i think, especially when ya have so many of something to give. You can incrementally add more each time. This is a great system unless ya get people bored on the way to the exciting conclusion. So many movies and also games suffer from this.

But i am here to talk about the fact i have 'finished' my first and second level bosses. This is a proof of concept for me, to know that i can keep expanding on what this boss does, but keep it exciting and challenging enough as it develops. Yes, that is right. I aim to use the same boss for every level. This means that he needs to evolve.

Here is the boss from my first level...

When he comes on he basically just sits there shooting bullets at you. He fires a simple sequence of a trajectory fire, and then a dual-split trajectory fire. The second one causing two bullets to go either side of you. You must dodge through them to shoot him, as he will not be moving into your bullets, obviously.

Here is the second level boss...

This is the same boss i hear you cry! Well duh! But this boss once he comes on does NOT stand still. Nope siree, he starts moving in a very simple up and down pattern. while he does this he fire a nice trajectory bullet as he passes over the vertical center. Then when he changes direction at each end he fire that dual-split trajectory bullets. This means now bullets are coming from different directions at you. They are also a slight amount more up tempo (fires faster, as you can see from the pictures). This means even more dodging than the lazy dodging of the first boss. This boss is actually quite exciting, and he actually does move into you firepower (not that i am showing that!).

This bosses test graphics are probably frightening most of you readers away i am sure. Well Gameplay is king in my house. And though i love Mommys best games, and what they are achieving. Shoot1up (which i own), is not truly my kind of skillfull shooter. It is a bit messy, and relies on getting enough new ships to combat the ones you WILL lose. However this shooter should be able to be completed with no loss of life, and in fact i will be testing the difficulty to make sure that i do not even take a hit while playing properly. The extra hits your ship can take are there as a catch, or safety net. But now i am waffling about general game design philosophy. so time for bed.

G'night.