Zombies are first

Well a few people gave me feedback on which of my five enemy types i should do first, and in what order the others should follow on.

Now i have to say before i reveal the order that i had in mind to do the Zombies first. simply because they are the easiest to actually implement for 10 levels on two different maps. however i didn;t really want to do the cliched zombies first. It felt a bit like a cop out and that is all I might be judged on. Now several people have experessed the Zombies should be first, i am just going to go with it and know that the other enemies will add the gameplay depth that this game will hopefully allow people to enjoy.

So without further Ado, here is a simple single screenshot.

Yeah, it really doesn't do it justice huh! Here are a few notes for the above picture.

• I (the player) am mostly hidden under the explosion in the upper middle, slighlty to the left.
• Lots of gore on the floor from where i have been shooting Zombies
• Those boomerangs are not boomerangs at all but are in fact Zombie arms. Each Zombie can throw two at you. Currently they throw them way too fast.
• Are ya wonderign what the circles are? Well they are my zombies.
• The circles with numbers in them are the animations of when my Zombies will claw it's way out of the ground. at that time they cannot be hit or touched.
• Once above ground they will come hunt you down. I have supplied simple arrows to make sure they are doing the correct animation.
• Of course my son is still there as a civilian, waiting to be rescued.

Once i get real animations this whole scene will come to life. I feel good that i can already imagine these suckers coming out of the ground and heading towards you in their ungainly shuffle. Though i also know that when those graphics go in, i will still be amazed at how great this will look.

Hmm, i keep talking about this in motion. Maybe i need to make a video of it, maybe tomorrow.

Laters

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.

Could this be the A Shooter Art style ?

I know what you are thinking. That it would be a travesty to remove my georgous programmer graphics from the game. The cahrm the loveliness they have etc. But there comes a time, when one must think of the game.

Anyway, Here is a video excerpt from the game using some graphics that me mate Terry has had in his posession now for many a year. I put them into the game in various places. Not that i did a good job, and some of the sprites are being colored still by me. The big red spaceship looks much better in it's natural colors etc.

Other things to note in the video are...
1. My changes to the game via the Feedback from Peer Playtest.
 1a. High score in game
 1b. The popup help at the start
 1c. The more screen safe placement of text.

On with the show


Hope ya liked the video.

G'night

Tidying up A Shooter

Time for a quick tidy up. Getting rid of all those untidy and unwanted functions from my code.

In tidying up i have managed to save like a whopping 18MB off the zip file, haha! I would never have thought it possible. Now i have enough room to put more music into the game, woohoo!

I was gonna rant tonigth about cheap ass games. Or ones i see as cheap ass anyway. These would include most of the Avatar games on the XBLIG service. And i think it warrents a more detailed approach than the one i would end up doing this late tonight. so hopefully i can get it together tomorrow and alienate and annoy some of my fellow developers, cos i think that might happen. Even though i won't mean it personally i tell ya!

Oh back to 'A Shooter'. I have been filling in sections like the Upsell screen. EVERY XBLIG game should have one. YES i mean you!
An Upsell screen is where you go to befroe your Trial ends, it is where you get the chance to try to sell the features or exciting parts of your game to the downloading public. so make it short, make it sweet, and ya never know. You might pursuade them to buy your game.

Next i went onto tidy up my credits screen. This was fairly easy as it is a copy of the one from Pellmell, and the credits haven't changed much at all. So that was fast. Then it links to my X-Marketing screen.
What is a X-Marketing screen... Erm.. Don't tell me you don't have one of those in your game! Your excuse is that it is your first game ? Well that isn't good enough. do you have a second game in the works? Then advertise that one. If nope, then make one up quick, or do anotehr developer or developers a favor by putting their game in your game. You cannot afford to waste any chance of promoting XBLIG my friend. My X-Marketing screen has my previous 3 titles on it, Aceball, Pellmell and A Dreamland Chronicles Game. So it looks pretty full. This time i took the decision to IGNORE SDTVs. Ya hear that Peer reviewers ? I am going to IGNORE screen safe for this screen. It has none essential info on it, and i am Good with that. Phew.. And i wasn't gonna rant :O haha

With this tidied up i took out a buncha debug code and am now going to go onto looking at the saving code i have. It is pretty solid, but i believe there is possibly a hole in the try-catches... Somehow i reckon a Code 4 can squeeze out of. That is not acceptable to me.

Then i am going to play through my levels once more tonight and balance them again. This will be an ongoing job for the next several weeks i am sure. I do need to get this into Peer review at some point. Though not sure when exactly.

Finally i need to start looking at J Wattes Highscore code to see how i can make sessions work, as he has sharing of leaderboards working, and i would love to have them. Though i really need to save more custom info alongside the Highscores. I'll look at it while the graphics are being done i hope. Though without a second Xbox i am not sure how to test it :|

G'night.

The Midway latest Sandbox test

It went very well. I love starting with something so incredibly positive.

We have been plagued the last few weeks with performance issues, and with no real tuner to help sort this out we have made sevral stabs in the dark to make the whole experience faster. Then a few days ago we made a breakthrough and with that breakthrough we managed to shave off 7ms of time when playing the minigames. Woohoo!

It was great. So much code was aleterd though that we had to get another test in. Always best to retest altered stuff, however confident the programmer or team are that 'It's all good, the same as last time!!". Never believe them.

So we got a few new bugs from this test, ones probably made during all the reworking on the performance or server flooding we have done. Easy fixes though. but just as the test was ending we asserted in some Sony code. Yeeouch, i hear ya say. I would be depressed about this at this point, as it crashed all 18 people in the scene. But i am not gonna be, as i have no control over this. It might be my bug, but I need help from Sony to show me the way, or simply put.. WTH does their assert really mean.

So onto another stress test hopefully on monday then maybe submission, only 2 weeks overdue.....

Laters