A Man of Solemn Dignity WIP

qrleon's picture
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!

AttachmentSize
amosdWIP.zip88.17 KB

Comments

qrleon's picture

Four slot weapon inventory

Four slot weapon inventory is in. Weapons can be equipped and dropped, but the execution is a little crappy -- the player must reselect a weapon after dropping to ensure that he can't use the dropped weapon; new weapons are inserted into the top row key shortcuts instead of appended. A few more events could fix this maybe. I'm not terribly bothered by it, though, and dragging conditions tends to crash the editor. (It always has.)

Tried adding sounds. It was terrible ... so no sound!

Modified the dynamite to pause its explosion if there are too many sparks on the screen. This sucks but it's necessary: approaching the 256 object limit, collision detection starts to fail and the player inexplicably becomes invincible for a period of time. It reminds me of the weird explosion handling in Perfect Dark when too many bombs are set off at once.

A few more error fixes and creation of a couple more enemies, and I will be set to copy. I need to make some enter/exit conditions so that the game will know where to place the player character on screen start. Some additional spawn lair types may also be in order.

Please don't crap out on me Klik & Play...

SpindleyQ's picture

This game is super-pretty

This game is super-pretty and very impressive. I'm looking forward to playing a level in which I don't die constantly.

qrleon's picture

I made some changes this

I made some changes this weekend, but I haven't touched AMOSD for a while because of the way KNP hogs resources whenever it's running. It still has a lot of weird glitches, especially if you switch weapons while several of your shots are onscreen, but the game play is technically finished and I can start copying the test level pretty soon.

in keeping with the spirit of a diary, changes made:

*Shower gun no longer sets off dynamite.
*Modified life/maxlife counters. It should be more obvious what they stand for now, since they're pink like the player.
*added a 32x32 graphic for every lair type.
*fixed an error where dropping a weapon caused all weapons of that type to vanish after a period of time.

need to do:

*formalities for entering/exiting various screens
*reserve a global variable for tracking game progress
*still need to put those ghosts and rocketlaunchers in

EDIT!

DEAR DIARY,
*realised there was no standard control over the flow of the game, so i have inserted some very basic keys and locked doors. keys are number coded and collected linearly, so key inventory can be kept with a single number. it's the coward's way out (a better way would have been to assign bits to each key), but I'm getting sick of working on this test screen.

qrleon's picture

EUNNNNNNNHHHH

EUUUUUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNNNNNNHFNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGG

RAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

Well... I guess it's on to Game Maker.

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EUNNNNNHHHH.png3.64 KB
SpindleyQ's picture

Man, that sucks. I hate to

Man, that sucks. I hate to see something this ambitious get thrown out.

Do you know what you were doing that caused it to crash? Or was it just some bug that only shows up when things get too big?

qrleon's picture

Destroying objects in

Destroying objects in certain situations will cause this runtime error. it happens in the magic bubble game when ghosts are destroyed, and also in one of the johnny charisma games. I don't know what causes it.

in any case, this is a good excuse to learn game maker, so i'll just go with it and work on a conversion.

GRAPHIC EXTRACTION COMPLETED

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amosd2.png27.81 KB
qrleon's picture

Did some work on the GM

Did some work on the GM conversion. After a few more sessions of transferring enemy/weapon behaviours, I will be in the same place I was some months ago in KNP, only with a bunch of scripts instead of a big spreadsheet that I can barely make sense of now.

It occurs to me that I never had the chance to design levels before the old work broke. Still not sure if it should be a long adventure with tool collection, or just a straight shooter.

Will post a WIP when there is something to show.

qrleon's picture

I haven't touched the game

I haven't touched the game since December, but here is a WIP anyways.

Most of my screen ideas vanished once I actually drew some up in GM and realised that the gameplay is kinda tedious. Also, I'm not happy with how enemies handle touching walls, but that can be fixed later. Now that doors, keys, switches etc are in, I see where sound effects could improve play.

AttachmentSize
lid_face_wip_2.zip1.33 MB
dessgeega's picture

i wish the demo wasn't so

i wish the demo wasn't so difficult because i really like all the building blocks you've made for yourself.