Development Diaries

qrleon's picture

Well if it isn't Confusing Game Day

Still fooling around with KNP. Need to find a suitable replacement but I'm lazy. Construct might be good.

captaincabinets's picture

heeeeerrrrreeeee's Johnny (Charisma)!

I'm back. This may be difficult to swallow in this age of superconnectivity, but I only got the internet piped into my not-enough-room-to-swing-a-dead-cat-let-alone-have-the-facilities-to-cook-it abode a couple of days ago. Sure, I had my whopping 6mb per day on the university computers, but I felt could not do this site justice by showing up and not being able to download and upload the gruesome trainwrecks. Various other things invaded my life to prevent me from getting the internet - for one, I embarked on yet another "maiden" voyage (boom-tish) which is still so involving that to game-o-bliggity-blog every nuance would require a development team the size of the chariot crowd in Ben-Hur.
A triumphant rhinoceros trainwreck to herald my return will be stampeding its way to your eyeballs and fingers, shortly!

IT'S STUPENDOUSLY GOOD TO BE BACK, GLORIOUSTRAINWRECKS.COM! I MISSED YOU TERRIBLY!

P.S I was on the train platform the other day, and someone actually had a shopping bag which read "Hat World." Don't worry, Six, I served him the cease-and-desist while politely breaking his legs.

EDIT: And here it is, quicker than even I expected! I had the idea for this while outside, pressing 'c'. My gosh, it's lovely to be klikking again.
Presenting:
Oh My Guacemole I Forgot How Big The Internet Was

snapman's picture

The farthest limits of knp

My greatest KliK project is nearing an end: one way or another. Every which way I seem to advance in this project, the physical walls of the ancient KnP engine seem to close in. Adding a score counter to the game now causes the collision detection engine to go haywire after a few minutes of play. Adding even one active object to the play field maxes out the object availability, and ruins my environment engine integrity. Changing the layout of the level by moving one more object into the initial render window drops out the overlay layer.

I'm going to try and finish this thing this weekend. I may have to sacrifice a UI in order to keep the game stable. I'm on version 14 now, with each incremental update warranting a separate save, in order to avoid game corruption. Much like "A.M.O.S.D.", I'm nearing an impasse. Will I be able to surmount it? Stay tuned!

qrleon's picture

Yiepipipi World

yiyiyiy.png

Vin aalgras vu tin ti yok Yiepipipi dans le schliebillia elus! 6 Etats coovo din di yikko Yiepipipi vus yaggrah. Tel noin?

So, Klik & Play has been kind of crashy for me, and despite that I've continued to use it out of laziness. A runtime error in AMOSD broke the last straw, so I'm gonna try to stay away from it except for KOTM.

The race track uses a SEQUENCER!

SpindleyQ's picture

fragment

So, I finally got around to finishing up and packaging up the game that I'd intended to submit to the Poppenkast 3-hour game-development competition. I think it's actually pretty much the best game I've ever made, from a mechanical perspective.

It's called fragment, and you should totally check it out.

qrleon's picture

Screenshot of ZZT (link to an image thread)

This thread (NSFW, very image-heavy) might be of interest. I planned to skim through the entire archive of ZZT games (about 3000), taking screenshots as I plowed through. I didn't have the stamina though, since for every good ZZT game there are 100 so-bad-they're-practically-unplayable ones.

Anyways, ZZT interests me because it had a level editor comparable to what you'd find in something like Sokoban or Lode Runner, with the addition of up to 150 scriptable objects per screen (20,000 bytes per screen, 250~k per game file.) This is more than enough to make a simple adventure, but not enough to go utterly crazy with the scripting system.

The beginning of the thread is mostly my screenshots of crappy games interspersed with pictures from 'art collections' when I couldn't take the horror any longer and needed a break. Later on, others contribute more interesting pictures from a set of better crafted games. I wish I had kept track of authorship, but I guess it doesn't matter that much.

The images were mostly taken in the Summer of 2007, I think, but I gave up on the project in February. In retrospect, the snapshots of message boxes were a bad idea ... much less interesting than actual pictures.

Beyond ZZT, I had similar plans to make screenshot galleries for other games with a lot of user content. But HUMBUG

Here are some samples:


qrleon's picture

A Man of Solemn Dignity WIP

AMOSD.png

AMOSD is the shooter I said I would send to DJKlikster once finished. It's been sitting untouched for a while now, and I thought starting a diary would encourage me to finish it. I'm trying to fix errors on the main gameplay board before I copy it ten or fifteen times.

The attached file includes the engine screen. Please note that it's not a real level and you will easily be overpowered because all enemies are set to spawn indefinitely. The real game will NOT be this dense, except for maybe the final gauntlet. See the debug controls below for help in cleaning up this mess. (or you could wait until I upload a less cluttered WIP.)

Controls

WASD: movement
Arrow keys: shoot
1-9: equip weapons
-, =, backspace, ]: more weapons

Debug

CTRL+Z: wipe all enemies
CTRL+X: wipe all spawn points
Click on any enemy or spawn point to remove it.
CTRL+Shift+Click: Move the player
CTRL+L: add 50 life to the player

(using CTRL+Z and clicking unwanted lairs, you can set up a fight between the player and only a couple of enemy types.)

Main Enemies

Ninja Head: the main enemy. Follows and shoots smokescreen, which affects the player's shot accuracy.

Slime: acid splashes back when you hit it.

Eye: Moves in a swirling pattern and slowly closes in on the player. Later on, they will be created 16 at a time, one every 0.2 seconds, to make a snake enemy.

Yellow octopus with eye: a sniper whose shots go through walls. weak on its own since it doesn't follow the player, but they can make being cornered by other enemies much more dangerous (or impossible to escape). They can also be boxed into areas and be used as permanent turrets. I should probably lower their starting life a bit.

Knight: moves only in the cardinal directions (NSEW), and twice as fast if aligned with the player. Knights are knocked back by the sword weapon.

Exotic Enemies

Orb: a slow ball that splits in half occasionally. these don't spawn from lairs; they're just an additional hazard.

Beetle: Small enemies with 1HP that spawn quickly.

Rocket Launchers: not implemented. periodically shoot 8-16 rockets away from the player, which slow down and then reverse course towards him.

Ghosts: not implemented. they will probably just stop&go through walls.

Robots: move along a set path, usually through a narrow maze. they will shoot smokescreen if you destroy them.

Weapons

(eventually i will set it up so that the player has only 3 or 4 weapon slots.)

1 - Normal
2 - Longer range, lower rate of fire
3 - Low range, passes through walls
4 - Sword, deflects projectiles except for smoke. Slimes don't counter it and knights cannot charge through it. several swords layer on top of one another making for a rudimentary charge-up, allowing the player to destroy some enemies instantly on contact.
5 - Boomerangs!
6 - eggs/pellets. for when things are chasing you in narrow corridors and you want a higher rate of fire.
7 - 'flamethrower'. high rate of fire and low range. useless in corridors as it will hit the walls and disappear. if the player runs and shoots in the same direction, this weapon will make a rudimentary shield against weak enemies.
8 - shower nozzle, very weak with a high rate of fire, only useful against 1HP enemies such as beetles. very bad against slimes.
9 - cannonball, high damage and very low rate of fire. it will pass through multiple enemies.
0 - rebounding shot
-, =, and backspace are rare combinations of the above. \ is a broken version of the normal gun, and ] is a debug weapon.

OTHER STUFF

Sliding spikes: hurt when touched. cannot be shot through.

Sokoban boulder: it can be pushed. these would basically just be used to aggravate narrow mazes.

Dynamite: can be pushed, detonates if shot by player or hit by a sliding spike

Purple walls: can be destroyed by dynamite.

...

See the below comments for more updates on the project.

edited for clarity!

snapman's picture

KlikVoxel: a KnP flightsim

klikvoxel.gif

I've been in a kick of doing strange things with KnP lately. I'm working on a 2vs2 stealth action game (that requires a large piece of cardboard to enforce split screen exclusivity) and I'm probably going to finish up that HUGE KNP TECHNOLOGY BREAKTHROUGH that I've been none-too-subtly alluding to during nearly every single KOTM. But what I have here today is not that breakthrough, but rather something incredibly impractical in KnP, done for the heck of it!

I had recently seen a simple demonstration of the new version of flash drawing an isometric voxel landscape. Since I've never done anyting with voxels before, it struck me as to how simple it really was. After the idea sat in my head for a while, I decided to try the effect myself. On a whim I decided to do it in KnP. I showed it to someone once I got it to render a single static landscape. They helpfully suggested I make a flightsim. So a few events later I had a scrolling isometric voxel landscape flightsim in klik! Since it hits the active object limit almost from the start, it's a little on the small size. Press fire to keep the joust-like plane aloft! Watch out for clouds, their cold air will stall your plane!

SpindleyQ's picture

Mike Tyson's Jungle Beat

Do you love Mike Tyson's Punch-Out!?
Do you have a Wii that can run homebrew?
Do you have a pair of Gamecube bongos?

THEN PREPARE TO EXPERIENCE THE GLORY OF MIKE TYSON'S JUNGLE BEAT -- THE ONLY NES EMULATOR WITH BONGO SUPPORT!

CONTROLS
Each bongo has a top and a bottom button. These naturally correspond to high and low punch.
To dodge, clap.
To use your star punch (or to "Press Start"), hit both top buttons.
To block, hold the start button on the bongos.

Unfortunately SD card support does not work in the latest development copy of FCE Ultra that I used as a baseline, so you will have to run the included injector program with your legitimately acquired Mike Tyson's Punch-Out! ROM. Fortunately, this means that running the game from your Wii takes you DIRECTLY INTO THE ACTION!

Download mtjb.zip to get started!
mtjb.diff is the patch from the SVN trunk as of today (June 27, 2008). The hack is pretty straightforward, so it's not very large.
InjectorSrc.zip is the source code for the injector program, in case someone wanted to compile a Mac version or something.

SpindleyQ's picture

Mike Tyson's Jungle Beat Update

iMovie is SLOW AS BEJESUS and my built-in MacBook webcam can't take pictures of my TV for shit :(

Hopefully you'll get the jist, or else take higher quality video footage of your own.

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