Current Status

-Pimping The Great White Destroyer v1.3b-
-Red Ice-
-"Death Pants"-

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Achievement success, plus extras.

That's right, they all work just fine and are do-able! I also added some ">>><<<" to the combo text, they tick down as combo time nears it's end.


When a combo's time would run out, it would flash up the total points earned, there is now an extra effect to help those stand out in the form of a frame.


My main man tester Jay suggested having the achievements visible on the pause screen, which is an excellent idea. I have it functioning, and it only shows what you can get in the stage you are on. Simply move the mouse down and to the right or left to scroll them around to take a look.


I most likely won't be posting anything until after new years, so everyone have a safe merry Christmas, and a happy holidays, and an excellent new years!

Sunday, December 12, 2010

Achievements:They fuction for the most part.

There's still some that need tested, and a few that need fixed so they actually work. I did a lot of work on combo timing, to make some of these easier and let the player try to build up extra points if they like. Jetskis don't blow up as fast either.

Examples of what hasn't worked out...
Drown Their Sorrows(3x drown combo) is being changed to just drowning one person, it's hard for me to even come close to drowning two let alone three!
Push Me, Pull You's(snagged by 2 hooks) code just didn't work period, so I missed something.

I had my doubts about Squid-Kebob(big squidy and little squidy hit with same spear), but I came within 2 pixels of pulling it off the other day. It's possible, you just need to find the right enemy placement and timing.

This last Friday I toyed with the idea to upsize You Got The Shaft for 1024x768. I would make the tiles 48x48 instead of 16x16, so all my numbers would just need multiplied by 3. I also did a few Monsta animations at the new size.

I wouldn't use near as many frames as the smaller ones due to memory. I'm also thinking of ditching the falling block thing and replacing it with combat related challenges. I dunno, what do you guys think of all this.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Achievement art continued.

MOAR!


I've got 24 more to go, 9 of those are just the same images with higher numbers in front so they don't really count. Maybe another day and a half of work. Then it's onto coding the stuff and testing, which I'm looking forward to.

!!!I AM FUELED BY TURKEY AND PUMPKIN PIE!!!

That's my way of saying Thanksgiving was awesome as usual, good family and good food. Now the toilet will feast on my holiday dumps from now 'til mid January!

Also, The Great White Destroyer is on sale at GamersGate now, until the first week of January. The discount will vary, right now it's 40% off.

ALSO also, if you happen to have some commercial indie games and would like to contribute to a fatass compilation video of commercial indie games, check out Pixel Prospector for the dealio. I have to get in gear and submit some myself. The deadline is Dec. 12th, so get movin'!

That's it for now.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

Achievement Art

That's what I've been working on, and will be working on for the next 3 to 4 days most likely. Examples you say? Surely.

This one is "Sharkburned Again!", you get it for eating the good Admiral.
"Faster Food", gotta get a 10x combo meal while non-frenzy.
"Feather Sniper", get it with a 3x bird shot combo.
"Man Fisher", knock some poor swimmer onto a fishing hook.

All the originals are 512x512, but these here are the ingame 64x64 versions. Now, just a few screenshots.

Here's the new addition on the title screen.

And this is what the actual achievement screen looks like.

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Sounds sorted, now achievements.

Right, got The Great White Destroyer sounds sorted out. All the music has been converted to mp3, except for the frenzy tracks, left them wav for fading purposes. I think this led to the game running much smoother in some areas, even when testing in debug mode it's faster than before. The ram needed to run the game has also decreased to around .6gig instead of 1.5gig. Also got the game displaying for 1024x768, by using the view port settings. Everything is still 800x600, it just get's blown up.
[EDIT] Forgot to mention that the game loads up in around 30 seconds now, holy cow! It used to be anywhere from 1:30 to 3 for some people.

On to the achievements! I've never been a big fan of these but they are a central part of gaming now. I have a list of them with quasi-clever names and descriptions. A few examples would be...

-Right back at ya! = Destroy L. Sharkburn's boat with his own dynamite.
-Manfisher = Knock a swimmer onto a fishing hook.
-5Cent Bulletproof? = Get shot by Lil' Snips 5 times before killing Big Snips.

Stuff like that, I think there's 72 listed at the moment. So I have to come up with a place in game to scope these out, make some art, get it coded. That's what's up for next week.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Crapmunch movement and more.

I didn't get all the animations finished this week, had a few busy days. But these three are done.


There's a poo scoop, where he flings dung and sometimes oozes at the player. Then there's a shovel swat. Last is his walk cycle, which works well in reverse also, probably due to him being so large and round.

YoYoGames released their spec info for developing iPhone/iPad games, so I'll be converting The Great White Destroyer(TGWD) and Snowball's Chance over for those platforms starting next week.

For TGWD, I'll be downsampling my sound effects, hopefully without them sounding too bad, to save on file size. Having the music be .MP3s will be a huge help, they're .WAV currently. Also I'll be working on screen size related issues, a control scheme suited to portable touchscreens, achievements, improving performance, all kinds of crap. I'll try to do it in a smart way so there will be a new PC version as well. The same goes for Snowball's Chance, I'll probably add even more stuff too, content wise.

Saturday, October 30, 2010

Friday Bullcrap is Saturday : Back to the Shaft!

Ok, first up is a report on the Trick or Treat sale. There is nothing to report. It still continues until Halloween eve.

Back to You Got The Shaft. No video since my work on it this week is all just art, so I'll post it for ya! Been working on that mini-boss from the first stage, I have 4 of his animations completed so far.



His name is Crapmunch, he eats crap with his shovel. A rundown of those anims.
-#1 is a prefight idle, he's chawing on poo. It's a pretty simple squishy animation.
-#2 is also prefight, he's shoveling some more stuffs into his mouth. You'll notice his arm stretches out there, anatomy can take a back seat on this one.
-#3 is an intro of sorts, he turns to face Monsta when he gets close.
-#4 is a combat idle, I will be a tad slower in game than in that gif.

I've got a handfull more to do, hopefully they can be wrapped up this next week sometime.

Everyone have a safe Halloween!

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Trick or Treat Sale! The Great White Destroyer


Let's play a game. The Great White Destroyer(TGWD) will be on sale all next week, a special sale, one of choices.

On Monday, TGWD will be $4. If someone chooses to buy a copy, I want you to look on the order form under where you enter your name, there will be a "Company" field. I'd like you to enter "Trick" or "Treat".

Why you ask?

At the end of the day, I'll be counting up all the Tricks and all the Treats. You see, a Trick will increase the game's price by $.10, and a Treat will lower the price by $.10. So after it's all added up, we get the new price for the following day. If a purchase is made and the "Company" field is left blank or something off the wall is put there, a coin toss will decide the outcome, heads will count as Trick and tails as Treat. There are limits. The price will never drop below $2 or go higher than $5.90. Will the price go higher or lower? Time will tell.

I'll list the results the following day.

So there it is, the game is on.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

A slug and a bug.

Working on some characters for this new venture to nail down the art style. Got a couple finished ones here. I'll be hashing out a good handfull more while throwing down crap on paper, then I'll actually start putting some game together. Trying to decide on doing single player first and adapting multi later, or just start multi. Ahhh anyway, characters.


Monday, October 11, 2010

Contrasaurus Launched!

My buds over at STRd6 have finally got Contrasaurus ready for the public consumption. For those of you not in the know, I worked on the pixel art for the game. It's a sidescrolling action romp with a t-rex who gets snatched up from the past, loaded to the brim with explosives and amunition, and thrown into a conspiracy blender! You are the t-rex, YOU ARE THE CONTRASAURUS.

It's all made with HTML5, so if you're going to play, throw IE out the window. You need yourself some Google Chrome, possibly Safari or Opera.

Links for the link god!

Here's the official STRd6 launch.

It's in the Ludum Dare October Challenge!

Give it a go people!

Sunday, October 10, 2010

Multiplayer headspinning.

Only because I don't know crap about coding that kind of thing. If I understand it correctly, server code actually runs the game and is purely computational, while client side does all the pretty stuff, and they communicate back and forth. Is that a propper stripped down explanation? I don't know. Anyhow, been roughing out ideas for this next venture, doing research, deciding on how it'll play and look. All that fun stuff. Plus I'm pretty sure I've gained what I can from the Torque2D tutorials, as soon as I have enough down on paper I can get to prototyping.

Monday, October 4, 2010

What's going on!?

Ok, so Contrasaurus work is wrapped. Finished up with a little Robo-Reagan energy beam attack. No pics, because I don't feel like it.

I took the plunge and got me some Torque2D. I've been going through the tutorials and think I'll be just fine. There are some extra steps code wise compared to what I'm used to, but that's ok. I was going to take YGTS and start porting it over, but I don't think so. Frankly that kind of game has been done before, and I've had some genre mixers bouncing around in my head lately, stuff that as far as I know hasn't been done yet. So, I'll begin full steam ahead on that in the next day.

I hate leaving a game on the floor like YGTS, but there really wasn't that much done yet. That was maybe a months worth of work(or less) over a period of 4 or 5 months. It may get revisited down the road, who knows.

YoYoGames has plans for Gamemaker regarding the iphone and ipad, which means I might get the Shark on there down the road, maybe even Snowball.

That's it for now, I'll be back when I got's stuff.

Saturday, September 25, 2010

Friday Bullcrap 9-25-2010, no-vid edition.

So I've turned all my attantion to Contrasaurus as we're close to having the art done. This way I can close out faster, and not burn out as I did while doing both this and YGTS.


So, here's some stuff I did for the C-saur this week.
This is a cutscene where they're getting ready to ship C-saur off on a mission in South America.

Another cutscene. C-saur traveling through time.

Here's a gunboat boss. All the guns are actually seperate with animations and/or death frames.

These next bits are a crate, and commando animations.


Annnnnnddddd, that's it. I'll resume work on YGTS as soon as C-saur is wrapped up. Have a good weekend folks!

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Friday Bullcrap 9-18-2010, hey wait that's a Saturday!

Before we get to the video, here's a few pics from YGTS for those of you who'd like to regulate your shaft intake. There's some Contrasaur toward the end of the vid if you'd still like to check that out. Anyhow..

An overlay is added to give atmosphere to the stage.


A new stage in progress.


Ok, vid time.

Saturday, September 4, 2010

Friday Bullcrap on Saturday, 9-4-2010

Before movie time, I wanted to mention that there's been a lot of traffic on my TGWD highscore tables. Most of the entries appear to be gunk, I don't know if someone is screwing with them or what, but some of the entries' scores don't even get sorted right. I'm pretty novice at php, so bummer on me I guess.

Also, Metroid: Other M is pretty slammin' so far. I know it's minor, but they do a slick job at transitioning from pre-render to in game, damn fine job. That's always been one of my bother areas, back in the PS1/N64 days, I hated pre-render due to the jaring difference between it and the in game look, I prefered in-engine cutscenes like Vagrant Story and Ocarina. Oh well, video!

Saturday, August 7, 2010

Friday Bullcrap 8-7-2010



I did get more Contrasaur stuff done this week, for whatever reason it slipped my mind. I did a parachute animation for the soldiers, some debree for exploding vehicles, and Reagan getting up from a kneel.

Anyway, here's those photoshops, feel free to take/use 'em.





Saturday, July 31, 2010

Friday Bullcrap 7-31-2010 + Shark Month

At the end of the vid, I announce Shark Month. All of August, The Great White Destroyer is half off, plus I'll be putting up great sharks in history. Have a visit every Monday and Wednesday, won't you?

Friday, July 9, 2010

Friday Bullcrap 7-9-2010

Some stuff about YGTS's stage 1 background art and animated tiles. Also, Contrasaurus art.

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

Contrasaur walking, sorta, and YGTS minor stuffs.

My contract time ran out, but most of C-saur's walk is complete, just need to add the minor spots and scale pattern overlay. It's taken 15 hours so far, but in the process I've devised some new tricks(new to me anyway) to help speed up future animations of this size. No examples, I'll put the animation in this weeks video.

Managed to put in a few more effects for YGTS last night. It's just a shadow effect that takes place during power moves, the higher your power meter, the bigger the effect.





I'm going to start working on the first stage tileset today, hopefully have something to show for the weekend.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

Contrasaur ready to animate.

The design is finalized, but before I throw up the final version, here's a few more steps we went through to get him done.

This style sheet here has the features chosen from the first put together. STRd6 wasn't sure about the skin pattern yet, so I had the go ahead to experiment. I looked up various random predatory animals and threw down their looks on the dino.



Number 1 was picked out fo that bunch and refinements were made, as seen in the next sheet. Note the larger eye, smaller brow, smaller calve muscles, rounded knees, straighter back, and less back pattern.



And finally, for my own personal use, a pic of the final design with the basic shapes involved and my process for creating the beast, just to help keep him consistent while animating.



Now, here's some random pics from YGTS. I've got some special effects for when you hit stuff, normal and power. Power punching a row of blocks will transfer the energy to the end block and cause it to move over one square. The same for a power upercut, but to a lesser degree due to gravity. I also fixed the air uppercut to drain power as it hits things, in the same manner that the air faceplant does. Blocks break into pieces now, don't know if that was done for the last post or not.





The end, for now.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Where'd Friday go?

Had a busy weekend with family, didn't really have the time to work in a video. So it's Monday!

I've done some gameplay tweaks to YGTS, blocks that come down on your head will now deal you damage and break if they pin you, I still have to make the "Ouch my effin noggin'!" animation for it. I've also set up a sample stage 1 to test out the falling block aspect, I need to get an enemy in there to test that out as well.

Since last Wednesday I've gotten a few animation done for Contrasaurus, namely the soldier death and soldier bit in half. It's not that gory, which is a change for me, I would have geysered that stuff, rainbow(all red) even! Today I worked on a style sheet for the Contrasaur himself. It's got 3 different designs with 3 different color patterns and a couple hue swaps.



So the client looks it over and tells me what they like from where, and then I make up a new one which should be close to OR the final design. I don't think Tyranobee is a very strong contender, but I may use that myself somewhere down the road.