[Pimp] Toxic Shock

[Squize]

...or to use it's proper title, "Professor Sauernoggin and the Landfill of Doom!"

It's a platformer targetted at the 6-16 year old demographic, and is in this world to both promote Toxic waste candy and a healthy eco message.

There are html pages coming with both wmode and non-wmode tags in there, hence no direct link atm. I can really recommend playing it in IE, Firefox just struggles so badly with it ( As a side note, the game was developed when we all had the shiny speedy F9 beta's, so when the release version was much slower again we were too far down the development path to claw back on the scope. The Firefox "version" has suffered because of that ).

A huge shout to Marmotte for always doing such great work and our very own RayB who did such a good job of keeping it all together ( A good project manager knows when to leave alone, and when to kick ass. Ray nailed it all the way through ).

And I think that's it. I'm really pleased with the end results. If you find any bugs, do me a favour, and keep them to yourself, let's not spoil a good thread by showing how crap I am

As always, I hope you enjoy it.

Squize.

[luxregina]

Looks and plays very nice!!!

I love to put the little dude on fire : not sure if it's intended, but you shouldn't have made it "that" funny

EDIT : oh, and by the way, it plays perfectly fine in my Firefox, here at work ( Xeon + Quadro )

[Viza]

Pretty neat little game there Squize.

Not my cup of tea for a platformer, but I can certainly see my younger cousins playing this until their fingers bleed.

Everything positive that I said earlier still applies now.

Just because I like being a 'bug finding pr*ck', I'm going to point out some things I noticed while playing:
- When moving onto a different slope gradient (angle of slope changes), the screen sorta 'jitters'. I'm not sure if this was just the game dropping frames, or the scrolling itself was having a seizure, but it looked like my character was creating an earthquake.
- That bug at the second checkpoint (I think) is still there. It's not a big deal at all, and I'd probably ignore it, but I figured it was worth giving a better explanation/diagram this time.


Anyway, nice game. Good luck with it, and I'm sure you wont have to worry about any homophobic reviewers for this game.

Viza.

[Squize]

Cheers Lux, always great to hear good words from you.

And yeah, the client really wanted lots of funny ways for you to die ( My favourite is falling into the river of goo on level 3, which is a really stunning looking level, Marmotte just surpassed himself on that one ).

Visa, you could break diamonds mate I swear it
Now get your cousins playing it til there eyes bleed, 'cause if they finish the game or get in the top 5 ( Or 3 ? Can't remember ) they'll get a discount code for some candy. So it's an all round healthly win,win for them

Speaking of the code, I fogot to mention that nGFX did some last minute and very easy to interface with backend scripts for the hi-scores and the discount codes.

Squize.

[renderhjs]

very solid gameplay and mechanics and also very solid graphics (little to solid all in all for me)
I guess that means you did a great job

[8bitjeff]

Squize,

I'm not sure how it is supposed to play, but in my Firefox is works like a charm. Very well done as always. I suck at it, but I plan to keep trying.

-Jeff

[marmotte]

Cool, it's finally live! ^^

Great work boys! And thanks for your nice words about the art Squize
And yeah, the sewers level looks nice, especially the animated background (there are still several tiles I don't like too much, but anyway...)

(And wow, it looks like I'm the creator of every Squize's avatar...)

(And your thread has already many more posts than Barack*Paper*Scissors, huh? Naughty boy )

Anyway, enjoy the game!

[ImprisonedPride]

Just because I like being a 'bug finding pr*ck', I'm going to point out some things I noticed while playing:

If you find any bugs, do me a favour, and keep them to yourself, let's not spoil a good thread by showing how crap I am

^ LoL.

I have to agree with Viza on a few points. Namely that as far as a platformer, it's just not something I can play for very long. Searching for crap isn't what a platformers for... personally it should be for blowing the hell out of everything and zooming at top speeds, but client requests are client requests. I tried the two things Viza mentioned. The second one didn't happen for me, but the first one stood true to his word (the flicker with scrolling on slopes)... oh hell I think I'm doing it too...


Enough bashing the game though. The sounds were great, the visuals were great, and it had an altogether very smooth flow to it. Would love to do another game with you guys sometime soon. Keep up the good work gang.

[Sietjp]

Huhu, nice job. I understand now your new avatar and your threads about wmode, and the performances of the beta F9
Very neat graphics.

[The Helmsman]

Sweet game!
Very relaxing, I really enjoyed playng it!
Like graphics and controls - simple concept but attractive and entertaining.
If you point it to the childrens auditory you'll reach them.

[random10122]

Howdy,

Great looking game.. as always, i made sure to play through to level three to take in the sewer graphics. The slightly out of focus animated background is definately a treat. As said by a few others, not really something i can play for long, but then im not quite the target demographic ;-)

On a side note, i made sure the 'gaming your way' blog was in my rss reader last week, im embarrased it wasn't for so long..

Keep it up!

[Squize]

Thanks for all the replies everyone.

Cheers render. The game may seem formulaic because it really is. My first platformer, so I just wanted to cover as many cliches as I could. It was a bit of a fan boy build to be honest, like Polarity was meant to be all the good stuff that I loved from shooters all in together.
Of course, if that's not what you meant by being too solid then ignore the above

Thanks Jeff. If it's all good in FF then great It was running too slow on my old machine, but since getting a quad core last w/end everything runs like a dream, so fps is just impossible for me to gauge now.

"And wow, it looks like I'm the creator of every Squize's avatar..."

You're my avatar bitc'h, you know that. I only get you in on a project so I can get a new avatar from it :P

"client requests are client requests"

Yep, you know it mate.
Just to go into the rational behind it, the client has existing IP, ie the Professor and Hazmat the rat.
Including Hazmat as the guide was a bit of a no brainer, it was an easy way to include him in the game as a constant ( Rather than a "Rescue Hazmat" style mission, where only people who played it to the end would actually see him ) and he's there to help non-gamers through the game ( This is meant to be a parents playing with their kids kind of game ).

The prof being the main character meant he had to be easily recogonisable, which meant he had to be big. Which meant the scrolling area had to be big otherwise it would have affected the game play ( ie not being able to see jumps or baddies until you were right on top of them ).
This meant a big ol' scrolling window, which meant it could never really be a tearing around at high speed style game. Also that would have made it more difficult for the target audience ( Not to mention the fact that as a character he doesn't really lend himself to high speed sprinting ).
We want as many people as possible to actually complete the game, and if you want to get the big ass scores you can collect the parts of the formula or the gems ( Those features are for the gamers who like to really knock the hell out of a game ).

Thanks Sietjp

Ta Helmys, ( I'm really sorry mate, I owe you a pm about your JiG game, I'm just running behind. I've not had chance to play it properly yet so I've not got anything overly constructive to say about it. Your thread about it highlighted a lot of things I'd noticed though ).

random, wow you and Lux in the same thread. Hopefully this is the start of both of you getting back here more often ( Now where's strille ? ).
Yeah level 3 looks great, I'm really happy with it. Also hopefully it plays differently to the previous 2, it's meant to be more "jumpy".
I like the idea of giving gamers really ultra basic rules with which to play with, and then once they've got to grips with it, altering the enviroment to test their new found skills.

Thanks again to everyone for taking the time to play it, and the good words ( Oh, and the bug reports ). I know it's not everyone's thing, and it was never meant to be, but if you all enjoyed it a bit then great, job done

Squize.

[nuke22]

I really like it. Very cool graphics, smooth / high frame rates. nice job

[tidenburg]

Congrats Squize on yet another fun polished game!
The graphics were really nice (I was wondering what you avatar was all about ) but one thing that annoyed me was that you seem to only check collision at the centre of the player and not at the edges of his feet aswell, only minor of course but apart from that its great.

[nuke22]

What the heck is the deal with frame rates in browsers, anyway? I've found the opposite where I.E. will sometimes struggle where FireFox plays back really smoothly.

[tonypa]

lol the professor on fire was funniest thing for whole day

Worked very well in my Opera.

[mr_malee]

thats a cool game. Nice job, love the colours.

Very smooth engine too, very smooth indeed.

[EvilKris]

ooOH them's some juicy graphics...
good work on the coding too there Squize.

How do you do your sprites marmotte? Drawn by hand and scanned in?

[lesli_felix]

I love the look and feel of the game, very polished indeed.

I found it a little slow-moving and samey at first though, but that's probably a good way of breaking people into the gameplay.

Thanks for making the jump key one of the cursors. I find it so much more intuitive having all the movement keys together. So many people get this wrong.

[bomesar]

Great game! Neat graphics and simple gameplay.
I've died on the first level to see the death animation and saw that all the garbage was respawned and I could collect them again. Is that normal since my score wasn't rolled back to 0 or to the value I had on checkpoint?