Steven M

Music now, with a little 8-bit-esque something I'm working on called "Ghost Police" - I'm making a push for this game for the upcoming October Ludum Dare. You can try the old tech demo out here, or alternatively listen to the music I'm working on for the upcoming game - there's four tracks done so far. YouTube Account SoundCloud Account

Engine test for a monochromatic shooter. Basic theme of the 'game' so far is flipping between black and white - black ships travel on white space and treat black space as background, vice-versa white ships. The engine itself works well and even comes in two flavours - One Ship (right-click flips between colours) and Two Ship (right-click switches between them), though there's no penalty for same-colour collision yet. I'd like some feedback as to which [One or Two] would be the better option for the final game. Also you can use the mouse wheel to change the size of the bullets so you can shoot all over the level. It's not instant (ship to cursor) so drawing is rather stunted, but instant 'drawing' drives a wedge between the gameplay and the ships. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27392295/ghostpolicec.exe

I've got a SHMUP prototype in motion. The game is strictly monochrome and the player's bullets change the landscape. Black bullets leave black space on the screen, white bullets leave white space (using the 'Paste into background' command). It's almost like Ikaruga crossed with MSPaint. This system works fine so far. Now I've got a system set up where scrolling the mouse wheel changes a global value in proportion to the direction of the scroll. This global value affects the scale of the player's bullets. This system isn't working quite as fine. WHAT I WANT: The player should be able to quickly cover the screen in large swathes of enlarged bullets - if the player has the global value set to 5, then fires across the screen, there should be large bullet backdrops on the screen. If the global value is set to something like 1, the backdrops should be comparatively small. WHAT HAPPENS: The player fires bullets of a size according to the global value. However the sprite that is pasted into the background remains the default (i.e. small) size. Thus a 5-value spreadshot results in tiny pellet backdrops. I'm not sure how to fix this, since enforcing the scale of the bullet in the same event list as 'paste backdrop etc' doesn't change things. Any suggestions would be appreciated. If that all still sounds a bit complicated I've uploaded the source code so you can get a better look at the problem. (*White bullets have a larger separate sprite to the default, so don't be fooled if you try messing with the mouse wheel and white sprite.)

So let me try and understand this process. The person browsing the Booths page on the SAGE site clicks on the banner for a game. Clicking on that banner sets up the iframe window on the page (1) so that the window either redirects to the optimised booth (2a), or redirects to a splash page (2ba) which in turn opens up a new window to that booth (2bb). While we're throwing the term 'stupid simple' around, why can't it just be 'click banner, receive new tab' (which allows for users to browse multiple booths without the clutter of multiple windows)? Or, to put it another way (and to deflect impending strawman arguments around changes in site presentation), what do you have planned with this method (in terms of presentation, programming, extras, etc) that justifies the redundancy?

Personally I'm going to take a rain check on SAGE this year. Call me petty if you want. EDIT: Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with the concept of the iframe on the booths page, mostly, but any system that relies on vertical AND horizontal scrollbars...? I mean, horizontal scrollbars alone are a huge pet peeve of mine. It's the shittiest thing to view a website where you have to keep scrolling left and right to read something, let alone a vertical bar on top of that. And 625*390 viewing resolution? I suppose it's not the other way round at least (that would be seriously unacceptable) but how do you factor in screenshots or YouTube videos too big for the iframe or some quirk of formatting leaves you with two screenshots being cropped by the borders? And... well, what's wrong with 'click link, browser opens link in new tab' anyway? I dunno, I'm a casual when it comes to website formatting so other people will have their counter points or suggestions on this.

I'm not following. I need a splash page as a preloader to another page with the game on it? Is the main SAGE site going to have a booths page displaying a tiny box with my booth in it (that requires both a banner for the staff and a splash page, presumably also on my site)? Why can't I just have a page on my site that says "here's the game, here's some screenshots and a YouTube playthrough, here's the download link"?

So I've got some portrait sprites for the playable characters in this game, and I'd like for you guys to critique and fix them - where have I gone wrong in terms of colour combination, hues, values, etc? Colours per sprite are limited to 16, but most of the sprites don't have nearly that many.

Pepsi Max, glass bottle Coke and Cherry Coke/Dr Pepper.

That would be completely different from what I intended. Would this be a happy or unhappy accident?

The best part? Those floodlights move as well as the background.

That's... that's great and all, but it doesn't really explain to me how to use a shader file or where it goes on the computer. Sorry.

Scenario: I've got a videogame. Huzzah! I want to make it resemble a game at the arcades, and part of that presentation would involve scanlines. I've been told pixel "shaders" would help with this ("CRT" gets mentioned a lot), and I get that it has something to do with "HWA" or hardware acceleration, which is something to do with DirectX...? - which explains why there's no identifiable folder for this stuff in the MMF2 directory - and the files are .fx and .xml type, I thought .xml had something to do with coding websites...? So yeah, newb here. Basically how the hell would I go about this whole process from start to finish? MMF2 Developer R251 btw.

New SHMUP engine where you can't fire bullets unless the enemy gives them to you. Download it to see what you think, give some feedback on the scoring system (what you like, what feels awkward, what should be changed, etc). 1) Graze enemy bullets to build up your boost gauge - the green circle is the default radius of your parry weapon, though the black circle [your avatar for the time being] allows for faster boost accumulation. 2) Hold down the S button to build up your multiplier (which drains your boost gauge), let go to cancel it out and the green circle flashes white momentarily. This is your opportunity to deflect enemy fire - any bullets caught in the green/white circle will be multiplied in turn and deflected back. 3) The S key concentrates your parry on a select area and provides a strong assault on all sides. The D key uses up your entire boost gauge and sets off all bullets on screen - however this fire is much weaker than your normal parry and should generally only be used if you're in a pinch, rather than as an offensive strategy. 4) If you get hit, you lose your boost gauge and multiplier. I'm not against the idea of score penalties but I will leave that up to play-testers and experts. 5) Bullets will upgrade in size depending on how large the theoretical total count would be (done to prevent a 1,000-bullet storm choking the game to a crawl) - the limits/transitions are subject to change. At high levels of fire the game may slow down deliberately to allow the player some breathing room. http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27392295/missilespamtest3.exe TO DO: More patterns Score penalty on 'death'? Possibly enhance/change the chaining/multiplier mechanics Limit use of D Bombs - earn one per [10,000*rank] points? Dynamic ranks/radius Better audio/visual presentation

Unzipped it into my directory, but nothing's coming up in the 'Create new object' menu? EDIT: Trying to load the .mfas from the Examples folder but they come up with an error telling me I can't load the extension - and I have a nasty feeling that I know why that is. I'm going to keep looking into it nevertheless. DOUBLE EDIT: Alright, no, forget that noise, I fixed it, the 360 object's there. I'm setting it to the deflected bullet object, using the direction/speed command, and it's not affecting the movement of the bullet at all, so I'm stumped. TRIPLE EDIT: 360 movement works, but on only one instance at a time. If you have multiple deflected bullets showing up the object only sets movement to one bullet, even if you set the 360 object to a qualifier instead of the object in the events list.

Any pain-free way to get objects to spawn facing one of more-than-32 directions? Context for said spawn positioning - a half-finished engine: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27392295/missilespamtest2.exe http://dl.dropbox.com/u/27392295/missilespamtest2.mfa F to spawn bullet, S to deflect bullet within range, D for special deflect (needs high green gauge) As you can tell creating hundreds of bullets at a time looks pretty lame when it comes to the direction limit, but the only measure I can think of is some half-baked measure involving trig.

Doesn't matter the engine you use. If it's interesting, people will play it. A generic Sonic fangame made with the Delta Engine will be just as boring as a generic Sonic fangame made with any other series of code.

Since you've been testplaying the hack yourself for so long, you'd obviously be more accustomed to it and have a different perspective on the game from someone who's playing it for the first time. So what might seem simple to you by now might be an illogical deathtrap to someone else.

September onward is a good date for me personally, though I can imagine people lobbying for an August convention.

Yeap, still working on those at the moment I'm afraid. It's more working on a way to spawn the pellets Championship Edition-style in an optimal manner. From the Readme under "TO DO": Small pellets and bonus fruit/item spawning mechanics in Championship Mode New behavior for Dinky ghosts, ala Championship DX (slow movement, rainbow 'homing' mode triggered when in close encounter with Pac-Man) Bombs for use in Championship Mode (to send enemies packing) Multiple courses for Attack and Championship Mode, including boss level(s) in Attack Mode Continue feature and auto-save/level-select system in Attack Mode More music and window-scaling options

Demo v0.25

recycliiiiiiiiiing

Is there a way to change the palette of the ingame graphics (e.g. restrict the colour count to 4/5)? If I had a global value and the number would determine the colours used, 0 = regular ingame colours, 1 = 256 colours and 2 = Gameboy palette, would that be possible?

Bump. Still working on the Lobster engine - ironing out the bugs due to new graphics is a bit more of a bitch than I'd anticipated and I'm not sure how much I'm going to get done in time for SAGE. That said, in the meantime I need to ask you guys a favour. If you guys remember the bonus stage from Be The Bullet (or more specifically the old Sonic Puzzle Attack demo because lolcopypaste) then you should understand the idea behind this mockup - it's basically a jazzed-up version of that gameplay but with different modes. I'd like a decent name for this game if you guys can come up with one. Edit: before I forget, credit goes to Damizean, ParadoxX and Clwe for the basic 360 engine.