Pandora Pandora Panic

[fusion_power]

• The Birthday Cake game is now in the repo. You currently can't lose this game... will work on it some more obviously.... and I do have ideas of how to turn it into more of a minigame.
• The controls are A to blow the candles and Dpad to move. (Z Blow, Arrrows to move on PC) You have to blow out all the candles. There will be a time limit and I'm thinking to relight the candles at a certain rate to make it a bit more tricky so I can scale difficulty.
• Also I've removed NubTrouble from being included in future builds. When the Pandora is out we can test Nub code and work on getting some Nub games in release 2!

blowing out Candles sounds like a good Game for the Pandora built in Mic.
And do the Pandora-Nubs really not work? I thought this part is finished and done, including available Code. ^_^
It would really a waste of Pandora-Hardware-Skill not to use the Nubs or the Touchscreen, I hope this all will be added when coders finaly have their Devices in Hands.

 

[Rockthesmurf]

Just to let you all know, there is now looping background music in Pang, and sound effects for fire and spear/ball collision.

I have also rejigged the difficulty so it goes from level 1->19 then loops 10->19 with ever increasing gravity/ball speed.

Still far from perfect, but an improvement on before!

Steve

 

[PokeParadox]

• The Birthday Cake game is now in the repo. You currently can't lose this game... will work on it some more obviously.... and I do have ideas of how to turn it into more of a minigame.
• The controls are A to blow the candles and Dpad to move. (Z Blow, Arrrows to move on PC) You have to blow out all the candles. There will be a time limit and I'm thinking to relight the candles at a certain rate to make it a bit more tricky so I can scale difficulty.
• Also I've removed NubTrouble from being included in future builds. When the Pandora is out we can test Nub code and work on getting some Nub games in release 2!

blowing out Candles sounds like a good Game for the Pandora built in Mic.
And do the Pandora-Nubs really not work? I thought this part is finished and done, including available Code. ^_^
It would really a waste of Pandora-Hardware-Skill not to use the Nubs or the Touchscreen, I hope this all will be added when coders finaly have their Devices in Hands.

This is precisely the problem... select people have Pandora hardware and even fewer have all the bells and whistles including nubs. For this reason (and the existing bugs remaining in the only game with nubs) we trimmed the game for first release.
When we each have our own Pandora to test things, we can add some more Pandora specific goodness.

The mic idea is sound... I don't know how to go about accessing it this very second though.

 

[MarkoeZ]

Grats!! and while this thread dates back to oktober, i'm pretty sure we have been working since september 2008. Although i was very hard at work learning "Hello World!" at the time

And i've said it before, but this remains on of the only community/homebrew project for the Pandora that has seen steady progress since the first release hype.

While im posting, minor update: Currently working on cleaning up the backgrounds for my games, and small gameplay fixes for Maze

 

[foxblock]

Well as everyone seems to be 13 again, I might as well....OMG OVER 1000!!!!11

Anyway, here are the first two ideas for a logo (original size 256x256 and 32x32):

----------

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The idea of the first one is to show that the game features a variety of different games and all kinds of people have worked together on it (symbolized by the different colours).
If this image is chosen, every dev could specify one favourite colour for one of the small squares.

The second idea is a recreation of the in-game logo - it has some recognition value.

So what do you think?

foxblock out

PS: Too bad pages.google.com is shutting down, it was a real great place to upload images you could link to (I personally don't like ImageShack), also my free web hoster of choice does not support embedding of images...
Anyway, if you happen to know a good free webhoster which I could (ab)use for image uploading, please tell me via PM.

 

[dflemstr]

OK so I'm really picky when it comes to image aliasing and stuff like that, and just for the case that someone else is, too, I've created vector images of the above images that you can find here:
http://www.mediafire.com/file/jkudnvtvwm1/ppicons.zip
...which can be rendered at any resolution to provide crisp, non-aliased icons:

No offense to you, foxblock; I know that you'd have been able to render the images more anti-aliased if you had wanted to.
Really nice icons BTW, they scale very well.

 

[foxblock]

OK so I'm really picky when it comes to image aliasing and stuff like that, and just for the case that someone else is, too, I've created vector images of the above images that you can find here:
http://www.mediafire...wm1/ppicons.zip
...which can be rendered at any resolution to provide crisp, non-aliased icons:

No offense to you, foxblock; I know that you'd have been able to render the images more anti-aliased if you had wanted to.
Really nice icons BTW, they scale very well.

Well, the images are made of vectors already, I just resized them with IrfanView, because I really don't know why...
I probably should have mentioned that to save you the hassle...
Btw, I really don't like the non-anti-aliased part (left side of the black and yellow outline) of the 2nd logo (it's the only thing not made of vectors for various reasons), will definitely fix that in case the logo is chosen.
The first image should be fine, imo (it consists of only vectors anyway).

Anyway, thanks for the compliment

Btw, what's the best file format to use? I created them in Photoshop, so basically anything not too fancy in possible (but no SVG)

 

[bzar]

I like the "P!" better, but somehow I feel it needs... something. It's too egdy and contrasty. Maybe shadows? Blurred background? Something to soften it up a bit without losing the clarity.

EDIT: Oh, and use a large-ish PNG for file format. Do NOT use JPEG or any other lossy compression or I will haunt you h34r:

 

[dflemstr]

I like the "P!" better, but somehow I feel it needs... something. It's too egdy and contrasty. Maybe shadows? Blurred background? Something to soften it up a bit without losing the clarity.

EDIT: Oh, and use a large-ish PNG for file format. Do NOT use JPEG or any other lossy compression or I will haunt you h34r:

+9000 for the "P!". I have to agree that there's something missing, though. Maybe a thicker yellow border to increase the contrast? Removing the star in the exclamation point point, maybe... But it's difficult to really suggest anything since the icon has to fit with the theme of the game, and the theme of the game looks good already so, I dunno...

And for the PND, PNG is the only supported format, but the other alternative in the open source world would be SVG if you want to send someone a lossless version of the icons. Illustrator can export to SVG, but you'll have to make sure that the image is completely made out of vectors (even "stroke" effects are forbidden iirc; the export plugin isn't that great).

I usually make my icons in Inkscape, since it supports the complete SVG standard (including progressive radial color-keyed gradients with position-dependent Gaussian blur... yeah. Or Spiro effects; gotta love those when you want nice patterns without having to spend hours on the vectors).

 

[SiegfriedCroes]

I also like the "P!" logo, but maybe it would work better with a background color, I think dark blue doesn't look that bad...

with a nice border around it, it would look even better.

 

[PokeParadox]

I like the P! although it kind of reminds me of the Bleem! emulator...

 

[bzar]

I like the P! although it kind of reminds me of the Bleem! emulator...

You're right! I thought it looked familiar! Dragons_Slayer, that looks a lot better, however I'm wondering how it blends to a UI. If the UI supports alpha-transparency, the background could maybe have radial transparency fading. Also keep the star, it gives it a dash of personality.

 

[foxblock]

Ok thanks for the comments so far.
I designed the "P!" icon very close to the existing PandoraPanic logo and actually nothing else.
You are right it is missing something, I like the dark blue background, not sure about blur though. I will try around a bit and see what I come up with.
I am totally for keeping the star, it adds personality, like B-Zar said and also is a major part of the game, as it is the icon of the lives.

Never heard of bleem! before, but looking at the wikipedia entry... well the only similarity I see is the exclamation mark

Also, the image will probably be PNG, I can't directly export SVG and I don't see any big advantage, as I had to use some other program to create that file so parts of the image might get messed up (like in the icons dflemstr converted earlier) and it has restrictions, also I don't think there is a need of an image size > 256x256. Additionally file size should not be a huge problem, SVG might be smaller, but ít currently is around 11kB which is not really huge

foxblock out

 

[PokeParadox]

Ok thanks for the comments so far.
I designed the "P!" icon very close to the existing PandoraPanic logo and actually nothing else.
You are right it is missing something, I like the dark blue background, not sure about blur though. I will try around a bit and see what I come up with.
I am totally for keeping the star, it adds personality, like B-Zar said and also is a major part of the game, as it is the icon of the lives.

Never heard of bleem! before, but looking at the wikipedia entry... well the only similarity I see is the exclamation mark

Also, the image will probably be PNG, I can't directly export SVG and I don't see any big advantage, as I had to use some other program to create that file so parts of the image might get messed up (like in the icons dflemstr converted earlier) and it has restrictions, also I don't think there is a need of an image size > 256x256. Additionally file size should not be a huge problem, SVG might be smaller, but ít currently is around 11kB which is not really huge

foxblock out

I was only stating that the icon reminded me of the b! Bleem! icon. When you directly compare the P! with the b! there only real similarity is the "!" and a single character... But the P! icon triggered a bit of nostalgia for me, that's all I was getting at, not that you copied an idea or it looks to similar, because look:

 

[foxblock]

Ok, never saw that icon, anyway I was not offended at all, I was just pointing out my opinion.

But enough of that, maybe it's even a good thing it is a bit similar as it might remind other people of the "old days", too

oooh, btw 100th post, I am now HARDCORE!!! woot

 

[Prometheus]

It definitely reminded me of the old days (in fact, I almost certainly wouldn't be here today had Sony's fuss over bleem! and Connectix Virtual Game Station not brought emulation to my attention ). For that reason, I very much like the background-free version of the "P!" icon, myself. Nice work!

 

[PokeParadox]

Just a quick note that I've made a few updates to the Repo...
Also we NEED the PXML file completing... MarkoeZ would you care to finish where you left off on that?

Also it seems we don't NEED to bundle the app as a PND file as just the PXML file is needed for the auto discovery... if I understand this correctly:
http://pandorawiki.org/Libpnd_hub

 

[dflemstr]

Just a quick note that I've made a few updates to the Repo...
Also we NEED the PXML file completing... MarkoeZ would you care to finish where you left off on that?

Also it seems we don't NEED to bundle the app as a PND file as just the PXML file is needed for the auto discovery... if I understand this correctly:
http://pandorawiki.org/Libpnd_hub

Yes, the alternative is that you distribute your project as a folder (that has to exist extracted and plain in a discoverable location by the PND discovery daemon; not very flexible for the end-user).

If you need a PXML file, I'd be able to make one if you want me to; just send the one you have now and I'll add all that's needed to it (it's not like it's difficult or anything)

 

[MarkoeZ]

Thanks dflemster, but i'll finish the PXML file (which by the way is currently in the repo in the main directory, but should probably be in the built folder) it will be a good exercise for me. I will start on it tonight, dunno when exactly i will have it finished as i'm also working on my games on the side, but it'll be before the weekend.

About the logo: although i like the P! logo design wise, i really think it should say PP! , but that's just my humble opinion.

Edit: I can't seem to make PP! look as pretty as P!, so might want to forget that last suggestion

Cheers!

 

[MarkoeZ]

Hello, Update:

The pxml file was pretty up to date, but is now moved to the right location and updated to latest specs. im not 100% sure about the executable file, but that's up to Poke.

Descriptions can be added for all languages ofcourse, send them to me, post on this forum, or update yourself if you have svn acces, be original

I personally think that for the title there should be no translation in other languages since that is just the game name. Not sure about other character languages...

Also i made a preview folder. i just made some screenshots (yes, one of my games too ; ) , ofcourse changes/additions can be made, but we need to make sure the size of the folder does not get too big. Think about those poor 4gb cardowners

I do have a clockspeed line right now, but that might not be necessary, dunno

That's it for now, cheers