Getting together for developing a Game?

[pmprog]

Are you using C or C++? If the later, could you implement some core bits as interfaces or abstract classes, so it's easy enough to add in

 

[slaeshjag]

That'll leave me out for sure, I don't know C++

 

[pmprog]

Seriously, it's 99% identical to C Trust me, the differences are totally negligable... Classes are basically structures you can auto malloc with "new", and free with "delete", and support functions within themselves

 

[slaeshjag]

I have tried, and I can't stand it. I wrote an exporter for Tiled in C++ and Qt a week ago, I promised myself to never ever ever touch C++ again

 

[pmprog]

Qt is a bit weird with the "slots" business, and I've still not worked out how you populate lists at runtime.


If you want, have a quick look at my alarm clock code (github) for some really simple C++; and see how it makes things pretty easy to extend.


That said, if the preference is for C, I'll go with it...

 

[slaeshjag]

We'll see. If we go for shaders, most of my code will probably be useless anyway, and I don't really have time to write an engine from scratch.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Have ye decided if its going to be a side scrolling shooter or what? I have a story idea for such a game.A story with a few nicely drawn static pictures to illustrate it would be cool.a story helps give the player motivation.I could write a story for this if you are interested.The team idea is great as potentially a higher quality game can be made.


Here's the story: A sinister and shadowy alien race invade and nuke the earth.(dialogue example:In a single moment an entire race were violently torn from the pages of history.Some said that their plaintive screams, like an immense aftershock, could be still be heard long after the event.Nobody on the earth had survived but beneath the earth;beneath the earth one man still drew breath...)All of humanity is anninilated in an instant by an orbiting spacecraft.The only survivor is a lone scientist who was still working after hours on a secret project beneath the earth in a a laboratory.He sees everything that happenened on the tv.He sees the aliens landing and indiscriminantly torturing and killing humans like cattle.Within days once the aliens have had their fun they leave earth and nuke it from an orbiting space ship.The scientist is physcologically devastated.His wife and children are obliberated in an instant and all of humanity is dead.The planet succumbs to a perpetual nuclear winter.The scientist has enough supplies to last him years.Filled with despair and rage he works tirelessly on his project. A top secret warcraft with its own advanced A.I to control it rendering it capable of performing lightning fast manouveurs.There is also room for a pilot.The pilot and the A.I merge minds to operate the ship.Essentially the pilots soul is downloaded into the ship and merges with the A.I. In a desperate move fuelled by despair and rage for the death of his beloved ones and the death of humanity the scientist merges his soul and consciousness with the ship.His body lies stilled by death at the base of the ship.The engines of the great ship roars to life just as two mighty steel cargo doors heave open revealing the desolate world above...The ship is virtually indestructible and is on an unstoppable path of revenge!The spirit of the man locked within its circuitry craves vengeance and will not rest until all of the alien race has been utterly annihilated. Hence the game could be named "SOULFIRE". Their could be a special soulblast that is fuelled by the spirit of the man and the A.I that the ship could charge and release. I also have the idea of a "Warp-ram" Essentially you hold down a button and charge the ship.It warps very fast ahead and the ship itself is the weapon.The ship is temporarily invunerable when in this mode.The ship flys forward hits the enemies and returns to the spot it left from.Sort of like a teleport warpdrive attack.This would be a powerful but limited use move.It would be powered up over time.Perhaps a little aftertouch could be added to control the ships trajectory during this attack.The collision/attack range of the move can be enhance with an accompanying energy field that widens the hit space of the ship.You would progress thru' the aliens differnt colony worlds until you finally come to their mysterious and ancient homeworld. The aliens would be afraid of this ship because it tirelessly hounds their race across the galaxy and so far they cannot defeat it.They have no idea that one human has survived and is powering the ship bringing forth the "soulfire" to eradicate them all. Ive had the idea for a while.What do ye think.A space-ship shoot em up? Any interest in the story? I can start on it this week.I would like to play some part in the creation of a videogame as its something ive always wanted to do.

 

[ekianjo]

Wrath of Kahn, thanks for the suggestion We are not at the story level yet, so no rush on that side. There are a number of technical discussions going on first, as well as scope discussions.


We'll let you know when we are ready to discuss "story" or background elements - this will become helpful when we reach the designing stage, I believe.


By the way, still to be confirmed but expected to be a side-scroller.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Wrath of Kahn, thanks for the suggestion We are not at the story level yet, so no rush on that side. There are a number of technical discussions going on first, as well as scope discussions.


We'll let you know when we are ready to discuss "story" or background elements - this will become helpful when we reach the designing stage, I believe.


By the way, still to be confirmed but expected to be a side-scroller.

Cool pm me if you need a story at some point.My offer stands.

 

[mjohansson]

Wrath, I thaught it was a great concept! The feeling is ace and the weapons very anime and emotional, I can totally see them deployed in my head with shimmering rainbow colors flashing around the ship as it bursts across the screen ending with major explosions all over the place as the ship slowly falls back to the left side of screen, and the soulfire as a gigantic laser beam shimmering in all colors as it burn all in its path to a crisp!


Concerning the effects, it should definitly look and feel like a 16bit game, we should make half resolution sprites, so each pixel consists of 4 actual screen pixels, and the effects should be limited to this res also, otherwise it looks modern and weird. Except the dark cave effect and mayby wavy water, we will see, but the soulfire for ex can have a texture with half res pixels describing a offset for whats behind, that requires a drawToTexture call but Im sure a single call wont sink the framerate, we will see.

 

[mjohansson]

How about some anime faces popping up on the screen on boss encounters for ex so the main caracter can chat with that boss caracter and have some dramatic story, only short sequences but it could be cool and highten emotion.

 

[mjohansson]

hmm you dont necesarily have to drawToTexture, if the wavy effect only affects the background parralax layer since that is a texture that can be used, if it is a texture, if its out in space hmm no it should always be a texture definitly that can get distorted by wavy effects, if ships teleport into the screen there can be a wavy effect there for ex, wasnt it like that in Super Macross SNES for ex?


For simplicity the wavy laser effect can be done with animated texture were the texture consists of horizontal lines, and the color determines how much left or right it reads from the texture, it needs to calculate the position its originally in, if the background is parralax the 0.0 to 1.0 scale can consit of more then 480 pixels height for ex, so we need hmm well it should be simple, if background is 2 large triangles its just to see wich one of them XY ship coordinates are inside and then interpolate texture coordinates, I can do that.


The water can have same line texture type also, if we build the level of blocks it needs to be special blocks for the rock and then water is the lines instead of transparency, and then shaders check if theres only R channel collor for ex, that limits rocks to not being able to have red color only, it needs to have atleast a little value in atleast another channel. And all blocks with water needs to be animated then.


There should be loads of animation everywere all the time anyway, animation brings the world alive and creates emotion.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

Wrath, I thaught it was a great concept! The feeling is ace and the weapons very anime and emotional, I can totally see them deployed in my head with shimmering rainbow colors flashing around the ship as it bursts across the screen ending with major explosions all over the place as the ship slowly falls back to the left side of screen, and the soulfire as a gigantic laser beam shimmering in all colors as it burn all in its path to a crisp!


Concerning the effects, it should definitly look and feel like a 16bit game, we should make half resolution sprites, so each pixel consists of 4 actual screen pixels, and the effects should be limited to this res also, otherwise it looks modern and weird. Except the dark cave effect and mayby wavy water, we will see, but the soulfire for ex can have a texture with half res pixels describing a offset for whats behind, that requires a drawToTexture call but Im sure a single call wont sink the framerate, we will see.

Thanks alot im glad you like the idea.Im ready and eager to flesh out the story some more whenever ye would like and yes the idea is to have an emotional element to the story for the player to relate to and it gives purpose to the actions they perform in game. The idea of faces popping up on the screen is a great one too.The story could be related in this fashion too. I really think you got my idea as regards the soulfire.The rainbow colour effect you mentioned would imply the human spirit aspect of the ship perhaps.In that it is powered by the scientists soul. I have had the idea for the warp-ram(thats what I named it)for quite a while.I also thought that maybe it could be used as a finishing move when the bosses energy is very low.Imagine the ship ripping through the boss.Perhaps You would only have one warp-ram given to you for boss fights.I am totally up for contributing to this game in any manner as being involved in the creation of a game is frankly a dream of mine.Im open to suggestions and ideas and would be happy to collaborate on this.Ye are welcome to pm me anytime.I can check on this thread too.Bit of a ramble.In short If you want a story/ideas etc im game.Edit and yes as per your other post a 16 bit style to the game is a good idea imo.

 

[mjohansson]

What about a mecha instead of a spaceship? Then the warp-ram can be some kind of super punch.


I think it should be able to be powered up at will, by some sort of select system like in Gradius were you choose what weapons you want to build or spend cost on shield thats a temporary boost.


Also I realized how the parralax layers should work, they should simply be quads that fill the screen, no more no less, and then movement gets added to texture coordinates instead, the parralax layers can scroll endlessly at any speed and any direction without a problem, and you could even seamlessly exchange images, like a check if(X>1.0) X-=1.0;


Then the scale is always predictable, so if you add a new texture hmm well if it has a full width of old image it would still be noticeable, but not with double width!


For ex, the background is space, then as you come across a new section the background becomes a planet or something, and it just comes into view seamlessly as it had always been drawn on the original texture, this is done by having 2 screen widths of old space texture before the planet starts in the exchange texture, no that wont work still, it needs to change to a repeatable planet texture immidiatly, instead the edge of the planet needs to be a seperate temporarily sprite, and it can find its right spot by that texture coordinate system. Or the background can just dim to black and then come back with a different texture, now I remember seeing that in some games, that still look cool and is easier.


But I thaught of this from seeing the Aero Blast videos in the pm, theres a boss fight with the background circling around really fast and that looked so ace, it could easily be done like this.

 

[Wrath Of Khan]

What about a mecha instead of a spaceship? Then the warp-ram can be some kind of super punch.


I think it should be able to be powered up at will, by some sort of select system like in Gradius were you choose what weapons you want to build or spend cost on shield thats a temporary boost.


Also I realized how the parralax layers should work, they should simply be quads that fill the screen, no more no less, and then movement gets added to texture coordinates instead, the parralax layers can scroll endlessly at any speed and any direction without a problem, and you could even seamlessly exchange images, like a check if(X>1.0) X-=1.0;


Then the scale is always predictable, so if you add a new texture hmm well if it has a full width of old image it would still be noticeable, but not with double width!


For ex, the background is space, then as you come across a new section the background becomes a planet or something, and it just comes into view seamlessly as it had always been drawn on the original texture, this is done by having 2 screen widths of old space texture before the planet starts in the exchange texture, no that wont work still, it needs to change to a repeatable planet texture immidiatly, instead the edge of the planet needs to be a seperate temporarily sprite, and it can find its right spot by that texture coordinate system. Or the background can just dim to black and then come back with a different texture, now I remember seeing that in some games, that still look cool and is easier.


But I thaught of this from seeing the Aero Blast videos in the pm, theres a boss fight with the background circling around really fast and that looked so ace, it could easily be done like this.

gradius 5 was ace and the weapons system worked well in that it let you choose and find a setup that suited you.The gameplay balance was pitch perfect too.a mecha is possible the scientists soul could be merged with this in the story.I always thought it would be so cool to have a proper transforming mecha ie from ship to robot with differing powers for either transformation.Fast transforming on the fly would be cool maybe.I love the talk of parallax scrolling too shadow of the beast eat your heart out! Some of the stuff you described sounds good.Edit a sort of crumbling lore filled ancient cities vibe kinda dark in places atmosphere would be nice. In terms of evoking a time and place and a deep sense of the world I would say shadow of the beast a500 did it so very very well.

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Ship/mecha transformer by Technosoft: Hyper Duel.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/f_0zqZfXxvo?feature=oembed

 

[Binky]

Perhaps colour depth / pixel size could be used to contrast good and evil


e.g. have the alien world and spaceships in 8bit pixel-doubled graphics, but not the player's ship and its weapons..?

 

[pmprog]

TBH, if you're going for a retro "large pixel", using alpha channels are kind of contradiction IMO

e.g. have the alien world and spaceships in 8bit pixel-doubled graphics, but not the player's ship and its weapons..?

I think the art should remain consistant throughout the game.

 

[mjohansson]

The alpha channels would mainly be used for the typical sprite cut-out or what to say, but I think it will work well for other things to, R-Type had water in the second game, shooters have all kinds of flashy effect all the time.


I made a shader renderer prototype, I shall do a few more things with it then I post it here and you can decide what to use and not. It oughta be easy to incorporate into any engine as a render system only.

 

[pmprog]

So are we using this thread, the PM or the google doc? It seems rather silly to use all three

The alpha channels would mainly be used for the typical sprite cut-out or what to say, but I think it will work well for other things to, R-Type had water in the second game, shooters have all kinds of flashy effect all the time.

Okay, I'll go with the flow...