Release Forget Me Not - new shooter/maze game from Nyarla Labs

[ZXDunny]

Hurrah! The man himself


Milkshake, your idea is a go - please make it so. Nyarla, you'll have to register with the repo, and then people can donate. I've secretly got plans to port anything you can throw at me - if you aim at iOS devices before your PC ports then Pandor will handle them... and although cash isn't your main motivation, having donations from the pandora community will certainly help to encourage other developers to get their games ported.

Chunky mode doesn't *have* to be 2x scale.. eg you could scale it by weird amounts to make the game area the same size as on iPhone, but scaled to fit the screen. It will most likely look bad though, ugly uneven pixels...

I had the same idea about an hour ago


My test plan is as follows:


1. Use paint package to scale the spritesheet up 2x, no filtering - remains blocky.


2. Enable bilinear filtering in GLES for scaling whilst drawing enemies and tiles (but not text)


3. Add a "smart scale" mode which scales all mazes from small to huge (current non-chunky, max size) to the available area.


This will have the benefit of smoothly scaling the display up, but maintaining blockiness due to the 2x pre-scale. at say 1.5x, you'd not get uneven scaling due to the bilinear filtering.


I'm planning to make all text 2x scale anyway, as it's almost unreadable at the current 1x in non-chunky, so will make text independent of the scaling engine.


This will likely be more of a headache than previous adventures with FMN, so results might not be forthcoming for a couple of days. I intend to bring my laptop to work for this job


D.

 

[milkshake]

excellent news.


@Nyrla if you register on the repo I can transfer ownership of the package to you which means you can have your own donate button on the repo, you can also chose to keep Dunny on as Maintainer of the app via the app administration panal.


but its up to you guys how to do it, this would be the most effeciant way me thinks

 

[ibisum]

Wow, this is really a cool thing to see .. first, the game rocks. Second, the relationship with the author and the porter: rocks. Third: Nyrla, get yourself a Pandora, toot sweet!

 

[Mr_Loon]

@ Nyarla : welcome to the boards, it's great to see a dev of your obvious talent allowing their stuff to be ported as freeware and taking time to chat with our little (but soon to be growing) community. Here's hoping you get enough donations to get yourself a Pandora .


@ Dunny : Amazing work, you sir have some serious coding skills, great to hear that most people on IRC were so helpful. Regarding the speed issues on Pandora, I find that overclocking to 1Ghz makes the game run just fine even in non chunky shuffle mode, though I've not seen any screen filling mazes yet. As far as I know almost every Pandora will overclock to 1Ghz at OPP5. The slight problem that I've come across is that with your 'man' moving a little slowly compared to the PC version on some larger levels, you can be eating the dots almost constantly an still run out of time and have the lights go off. My personal preference would be to increase the time limit before lights out rather than increasing the speed of your 'man'.

 

[milkshake]

@Nyarla is there any change you could port the game to windows phone i will buy it right away when you do i love the game THAT much i want it with me everywhere (which my windows phone usually is)

 

[fusion_power]

To be fair, although this looks 8bit, it's really not there's a lot of alpha, vertex lighting and suchlike with a *lot* of graphics updated every frame - it would certainly not run very well on a C64


Chunky mode is basically scaling up by a factor of 2 - hence the performance increase. I've skinned down the number of sounds that can play at once as far as I can - each sample is played in a separate thread - until it sounds the same as the PC version. I'll be looking at the GLES code to see if I can optimise further. Because of the nature of the game, the entire maze is redrawn every frame. Maybe some frameskipping code might help? I really don't know. Another option is some code to detect changes to the maze and only draw portions that have changed - but the enemy movement might really scupper that one too.


We shall see!


D.

I know it just looks retro but it isn't. I also know that Alpha seems to be a problem on the Pandora but I'm sure there could be an workaround (NEON?). ^^


Now that the Dev himself is here (hi! ) I would like to know how the game is "built". Is this all tile based or are all the lines Vectors? Because the Pandora should be powerfull enough to fill the entire Screen with a gazillions of Sprites/tiles or on the other hand, alot of Vector lines.


If you are new to the Pandora Scene, I can tell that our Pandy is powerful enough to run Quake 3 decent without overclocking. So no worries about that point. ^^


EDIT: Oh, ZX Dunny already wrote that it is tile based, sorry. ^^" I guess the redrawing every frame really makes the difference compared to only draw the maze once. Would be interesting to know if it could run faster when the Maze would be Vector based.

 

[nyarla]

thanks guys =)

excellent news.


@Nyrla if you register on the repo I can transfer ownership of the package to you which means you can have your own donate button on the repo, you can also chose to keep Dunny on as Maintainer of the app via the app administration panal.


but its up to you guys how to do it, this would be the most effeciant way me thinks

that makes sense... registered as 'nyarlulabs'.

Wow, this is really a cool thing to see .. first, the game rocks. Second, the relationship with the author and the porter: rocks. Third: Nyrla, get yourself a Pandora, toot sweet!

haha, that would be nice.. must admit i hadn't paid much attention to Pandora but they seem really cool.

The slight problem that I've come across is that with your 'man' moving a little slowly compared to the PC version on some larger levels, you can be eating the dots almost constantly an still run out of time and have the lights go off. My personal preference would be to increase the time limit before lights out rather than increasing the speed of your 'man'.

good point, the level timeout should probably be tweaked. it's made for iOS where the game is running locked to 60 FPS.. it's been a bit of a problem on some fast PCs too, going dark too quickly.... making cross platform stuff work properly is hard ideally the whole game would have a delta time system so it adjusts all its timers depending on framerate, but i didn't originally plan for porting it to platforms other than iOS!

@Nyarla is there any change you could port the game to windows phone i will buy it right away when you do i love the game THAT much i want it with me everywhere (which my windows phone usually is)

argh i'm glad you like it that much! i don't know anything at all about windows phone... i'd be interested in porting it if possible, but to be honest it's quite unlikely.. just had a quick google for info and it sounds like windows phone 7 stuff has to be done with C# and XNA, no C++ and OpenGL, if i understand correctly - which would mean a full code conversion, rather than just changing some wrapping code... a pretty big job. i don't have much spare time atm, and most of it is spent messing with a new game i'm working on... sorry...

 

[nyarla]

My test plan is as follows:


1. Use paint package to scale the spritesheet up 2x, no filtering - remains blocky.


2. Enable bilinear filtering in GLES for scaling whilst drawing enemies and tiles (but not text)


3. Add a "smart scale" mode which scales all mazes from small to huge (current non-chunky, max size) to the available area.


[...] This will likely be more of a headache than previous adventures with FMN, so results might not be forthcoming for a couple of days. I intend to bring my laptop to work for this job

Does sound quite a headache.. I think it'd be too much hassle for me. You're a champ! I'll be interested to see the results. That smart scale mode sounds like a really good idea, it would give it a nice varied feel having the actual gfx scale change depending on level size. Maybe I should try and implement the same thing in the other versions. (OI. Stop coding my game better than me! ;D)

EDIT: Oh, ZX Dunny already wrote that it is tile based, sorry. ^^" I guess the redrawing every frame really makes the difference compared to only draw the maze once. Would be interesting to know if it could run faster when the Maze would be Vector based.

I wouldn't know where to start with doing vector graphics code! And my drawing code is definitely quite inefficient. I'm not very experienced with this stuff myself... The maze drawing could be optimised to only redraw the necessary parts probably, but since it changes so much (colour cycling, lighting, destructible walls) it was easier to just keep redrawing the lot. It would be cool to do it with OpenGL ES 2.0 and use pixel shaders for the colour fx, but I don't know how yet.

 

[milkshake]

Ok, I have added you as the package owner and ZXDunny as a maintainer, thought you can change this or add other maintainers by the app admin panal.


to add your donate button you need the paypal code which you can get easily by using paypal to generate a button for you and the code will be in the html that it generates, you can add that in your my account section -> account details.

 

[mcobit]

Gles 2.0 seems slower in most cases on mobile devices though...

 

[fusion_power]

I wouldn't know where to start with doing vector graphics code! And my drawing code is definitely quite inefficient. I'm not very experienced with this stuff myself... The maze drawing could be optimised to only redraw the necessary parts probably, but since it changes so much (colour cycling, lighting, destructible walls) it was easier to just keep redrawing the lot. It would be cool to do it with OpenGL ES 2.0 and use pixel shaders for the colour fx, but I don't know how yet.

If the colour cycling and lightning is not needed, you maybe can disable it or make it optional? Then, the Maze only would have to be redrawn when it is changing. I guess this would gain alot of speed.


Well I'm not a coder and so I actualy can't make any coding suggestions there. I'm just an "graphics guy" that makes some theoretical thoughts. ^^""

 

[milkshake]

i like the way it works now where the clow around your character changes gthe colour of the maze, please keep this in, its little touches like this that make me love the game.

 

[Magic Sam]

Hi,


Weird and addictive game, just what I need


Welcome on board nyarla !


Bye and thanks, Magic Sam

 

[ZXDunny]

Hi,


Weird and addictive game, just what I need


Welcome on board nyarla !


Bye and thanks, Magic Sam

SAM! Have you fixed that game you ported yet?


D.

 

[Link]

I played this game for hours yesterday flying across the US. I will be posting a write up/review of this game on my blog/shop site. Thank you again Dunny & Nyarla!

 

[ZXDunny]

I played this game for hours yesterday flying across the US. I will be posting a write up/review of this game on my blog/shop site. Thank you again Dunny & Nyarla!

Thanks, Link - I'll pass your praise onto Nyarla (if he's not read it already!).


I'm still looking at ways to improved the Pandora version, and so far I've got plans to do auto-scaling for small mazes in non-chunky mode so that it doesn't get too small to see but it's going to take a long time to divorce the game arena off from the UI stuff. And of course, I'm no c++ coder in the slightest so it's going to take me a long time.


D.

 

[Farox]

Thank's a lot for the port (ZXDunny), this is a very nice game, and thanks also to Nyarla for creating it.


Looking inside the PND i see a Bass.so library...so where is available the sources of this lib ? or at least the include for that lib ?


i have some port in mind that need such library.


Thanks

 

[ZXDunny]

Thank's a lot for the port (ZXDunny), this is a very nice game, and thanks also to Nyarla for creating it.


Looking inside the PND i see a Bass.so library...so where is available the sources of this lib ? or at least the include for that lib ?


i have some port in mind that need such library.


Thanks

Just download the header file from un4seen.com (BASS.h) and include that - then rip out the bass.so from my PND. et voila, a nice lightweight sound lib


D.

 

[Farox]

Thank's a lot for the port (ZXDunny), this is a very nice game, and thanks also to Nyarla for creating it.


Looking inside the PND i see a Bass.so library...so where is available the sources of this lib ? or at least the include for that lib ?


i have some port in mind that need such library.


Thanks

Just download the header file from un4seen.com (BASS.h) and include that - then rip out the bass.so from my PND. et voila, a nice lightweight sound lib


D.

Nice thanks

 

[Link]

Wrote a little something about this game because it just keeps getting better and better:


http://ithic.com/drupal1/node/33


Let me know if I should add anything or change anything.