[Play] Eclipse Polarity (yeah!)

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Originally Posted by Viza

does this make Vengeance apart of the sN gang?

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:) If only!

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Originally Posted by Viza

How much time has been put into this?

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About ten times more than was meant to. :(

@tomsamson:
I'll take you up on that drink, mate. :) Haven't had anything but water for about 10 hours.

Alright, then, the attackwaves!

Each level has an XML file to store its level data. There are three main nodes: baddies, patterns, and attackwave.

The baddies node is where new baddy definitions for the level are created. It lists the width, height, health, colour, and various shooting information, as well as the path to the bitmap of the baddy.

The patterns node holds the data of how something should move. Not a bézier curve or anything, no interpolation or line equations. Just the distance that the thing needs to move on each axis every frame (one example path would be "0|1|0|2|1|0|1|1" - first frame, moving down 1 pixel, second frame, moving down two pixels, third frame, moving right one pixel, and fourth frame, moving down one pixel and right one pixel.

Obviously it'd be pretty tedious to type all that out manually. Squize made a .fla in which you'd move a box on a shape tween, and once that was done moving, it'd trace a pattern. A couple of the paths I didn't use the shape tween for - scripted their movement instead (hence the sine wave pattern I've used somewhere).

Yes, the paths are pretty long (usually about 800 characters - or more if you're using negative coordinates, since you've got a - sign as well). But it's just text, so the filesize is pretty small.

Finally, the attackwave node. This is where we specify which enemies should appear at which intervals, and what their properties are. We specify the y-trigger (as in how far through the level) of the enemy (has to be in order, learned that the hard way), the baddy type (such as exploding, regular, girder, boss, etc), the pattern number it uses, the x and y position that the baddy spawns at, and the sprite number it uses (as in which <baddies> child it is).

There was a bug which appears to be the Flash Player's fault, whereby sometimes it'd crash trying to load the XML file in the standalone player, but not in the browser (had it embedded in an HTML page). We never figured out what was up with that. :s

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Originally Posted by VENGEANCE MX

There was a bug which appears to be the Flash Player's fault, whereby sometimes it'd crash trying to load the XML file in the standalone player, but not in the browser (had it embedded in an HTML page). We never figured out what was up with that. :s

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Um, the flash hanged once I had started a new game, I think during map loading. It showed the "script is running too slow" message. It was weird really. At that time, I saw the instructions page before the hang, and there was only player ship shown and the bullets but the enemies were not shown(I think not loaded in the game.?), soon after that, after starting the game this thing happened. Hope it can help you in some way.

Edit: It happenned only once with me though, once I refreshed the page, the enemies were properly loaded, I think.

I´ll answer to you render,as yours haven´t been answered yet :)

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Originally Posted by renderhjs

I´d at least appricate that,- because at least to me it´s not always clear of how many people and what kind of were involved, and importantly what your credit is. That´s a reason why I usually don´t know right what to post in the beginning (previews, screens, vids).

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:) ok :)
In the case of SN it generally works like this: All team members working on a game take part in testing and brainstorming on the gameplay side,giving suggestions etc. Musicians and graphic artists work on making the game shine in look and sound and coders,well,they are those brining all together,so they should be skilled in all areas at least enough to do minor changes or better work on full assets of all areas to help out and bring stuff into usable form.
So although Squize was actually the creative director and lead coder for this hes also made some sound work and done parts in art (like the whole gui,explosions and some bullets for example), just like me as project manager i´ve also edited all exisitng art and done the level map layouts,too, next to checking through the code in between.
In small teams its good if all can help in all areas as much as possible :)
So yup,if one of the sn gang posts about a game the team has worked on here, you can expect that all team mebers working on the game were quite busy with it in one way or the other ;)

about the level map design:

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Originally Posted by renderhjs

did you used a 1 layer tile map or multi layer where some sprites have an opacity and that way blend in with different lower layer tiles?- I mean for a tile map it looks pretty clean but it would be even more work for the tile artist doing all of them as 1- layer tiles?

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In the game all levels besides the outer space ones are a 1 layer map, on the art/map layout side it worked like this:

-jeb did tile blocks of the different sections,so normal ground and then other ground types and some transition tiles and then i was busy making the actual map layouts with those,reducing the tileamount more and editing exisiting/creating more transition tiles where neccessary to make transitions as seamless as possible and look as varied as possible with as low tilecount as possible (obviously that worked out better in the later levels than the first chapter, ;) )
Overall though it looks awesome (imho) to have tilebased maps with 3d art based tiles, it is a lot of work to make stuff seamless, varied in look AND in low filesize (3d art just tends to be bigger in dimensions/color count and more organic in shape), therefore i wouldn´t suggest a lot combining tilebased (with 32x32 tiles) with 3d art (i think its easier, regarding amount of time needed, to do 3d art using maps either as art based maps if one has static big bgs, or make really big tiles if one does an offline game where filesize doesn´t matter that much or do the whole thing with something like a supertile engine where dimensions of art per "tile" don´t matter that much) ,but yeah,i still like how it came together at the end :)

sounds nice.

not too sure about the movement though. Wouldn't your xml files be massive? i guess the best thing about it would be speed, simple going through an array and adding those numbers.

i've had crashes like that as well. The solution we've found was to extend the timeline, don't overload the actions being brought into the player. I know it doesn't make sense but it works.

Looks ******* brilliant! But then I am a sucker for the old-style scrolling shooter.

I don't have sound on at work, I don't suppose it has a bomb-the-base soundtrack?

having only 1 layer reduces alot the map data (so the XML probably),- but like tomsamson already said alot of work ivolved as you need a lot & good set of variety and time to place them propper in the editor.
I was interested in this particular thing as it really looks good for just 1 layer- about the file size I can´t guess it right now but I think it was ok (so bad flash doesn´t support JPEG2000 :( ).
The tile editor is funny (and good to know),- because I thought everyone else would create as well each time a simple editor themselves. Did you at least created a parser that converts the map for you or where you already happy with the eported results of the map editor?- what about special fields/ nodes or information the level needs to hold and beeing refered on map positions (wich might not count for the enemies maybe)?

some performance notes:
I know this old computer might not count still wanted to note it: on this old 700Mhz explosions were nearly the only thing making the game run slow once they occurred. And maybe some of the shots but in overal it was ok for this old computer.

All these great comments are making me forget the pain :)

"Wouldn't your xml files be massive?"

Not really mate, biggest one was 20k, but from level 11 onwards none were bigger than 5k.
The actual attack patterns do take a bit of size, but then they are repeated quite often ( The simple guide / trace fla that V used always spat out a mirror version of the wave data too ), and the initial x position of the waves meant that they don't ( Or shouldn't ) feel so samey.
Also as attack patterns would stay in memory, on level 15 we could just re-use a pattern from level 1, so long as it's done well ( Which it was by V ) it's simple to get away with ( So for example, I think the snake baddies in Chapter 4 use the same attack patterns as the buzzy flying baddies which come in on level 3 ).

Also most of the xml files which did have a lot of data were put into the first xml file for that chapter, so you've got the loading screen to look at whilst we're increasing the load size.

lesli, I would have killed to have megablast in there mate :)
As it is though, I couldn't be more pleased with the music. I wanted a filmic feel to it rather than a drum and bass / techno thing, it had to feel epic rather than hardcore, and I think the slight hint of military to the music just makes it sound fantastic.

"Did you at least created a parser that converts the map for you or where you already happy with the eported results of the map editor?"

I've been using mappy for years now, really can't face a Flash solution, just feels clunky in comparison ( Although Tom has written some sexy map editors in his time ).
Yeah within mappy their is support for LUA, so the exported map is converted into a nice simple output using that which is read straight into Flash as a text file ( The map format is simply a look-up table. When a tile sheet is loaded into the scroller an array is created which stores all the x/y positions of each tile ( eg, tile 0 is 0,0, tile 1 is 32,0 etc. ). So the map is simple a list of numbers pointing to each tile in the look-up table. The map also has a attribute value for each tile too, but with no background interaction it laid dormant in this game ).

"Um, the flash hanged once I had started a new game, I think during map loading."

That's never come up during testing. As it happening during loading it feels like the server dropped off for a bit causing the crash. Not overly worried on that one.
Just hoped it didn't happen during your hi-score owning run :)

K, I'll touch on the collisions later, work to do and all that. Thanks again to everyone whose taken the time to post and play so far, means a lot to all of us.

Squize.

The best space shooter (or shmup if you will) in Flash, by far.

You can feel the love in this game.

Too bad I suck at shooters. :)

Excellent game guys. I felt like I was playing an arcade game for a second. I'd love to know what program the ships and enemies were made from. Overall great job, Tom, Squize, Vengeance and the rest of the team.

what can i say that hasn't already been said? top job guys! :)

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Originally Posted by walsher

I'd love to know what program the ships and enemies were made from...

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probably 3dsmax as their artist from the other jobs used it there as well.

yeah,max all the way :) (though we have more artists than one in the team and some use other apps but yup,this is all max for 3d :) )

Fantastic. Well utterly gorgeous and fantastic. I expect nothing less than brilliance from the team that worked on it and this doesn't disappoint - it's so polished and playable - and fun! As Willoughby says, the best flash shooter so far. Kudos!

Very nice guys, looks great.

More to say once I get further :p.

@ squize/tomsamson:

I read your scrolling technique in your blog a while back.....I like how you split the plotting of tiles across frames, rather then a whole row/column being loaded at once as in the GAS engine....but my question is:

what if you had a game, like a shooter or simialar where you needed collision of the player/NPCs/bullets/lasers etc.....with parts of the level itself....how would you adapt your scrolling engine for that?.....would you create/have an extra layer in the scrolling with tiles that colide/interact with all the other elements?....another bmpdata.....tile objects in an array?.....just curious how you'd go about that.

I modified a GAS engine to bmpdata, but still using the same gas principles of scrolling...however it has two layers....the real background tiles....non-interactive, and the interactive ones for collision with everything else....visually the two layers can be indistinguishable, or otherwise, but the two, interactive/non-interactive layers approch works pretty well for me.......just wonder how you'd go about it, considering your engine.


thanks,

paul.

wow, lots of fun, very fast too, and as always stunning gfx :D I want to make games like that!

interactive data would have to exist in an object and update mapData or position data (where the object is)

when erasing or creating a new area, check to see if a moveable object exists within the space of this area, if so attach, if not remove.

the method i use is to always have your moveable objects in a movieclip. The renderer doesn't render them anyway if there offscreen and if their supposed to be moving offscreen then let them. There's no point in running another loop to see if a graphic should be atatched.

am i understanding your question correctly?

Nice job guys, a very accomplished piece of work.

I'd love to play this with a little more vertical screen space, however. Like most flash shooters (or flash games in general, I guess) it suffers from feeling a little cramped in sometimes. I understand it's a necessary design aspect due to coding for slower PC's, but would love to see more flash games scaling up for those of us with monster PC's. By that I mean more actual play area, not just larger dimensions. :)

Well. Played second time, but stuck there after finished the second level. Suppose to have 16 levels isn't it?

Holy god that's good.
Production is top notch and it plays really nicely. I love that you've gone the Ikagura route rather than the gradius 'die once on the later levels and you might as well quit' route.
I've only played it on normal and the difficulty seems just right for me, if a little easy. On my first try I've just got to level 9 using one continue - had to stop because I'm playing it at work. A save progress funciton would be lovely.

Definitely the best shmup done in flash, without a shadow of a doubt.

Thanks everyone for the continued good words :)

Flashkit, you set the benchmark of quick successive releases mate, I'm just trying to catch you up now ( Two games in a week isn't bad ) :)

pentru, the map format allows for an attribute value for each tile, so if I wanted background interactions I'd just set those values and do it all tilebased ( The same map format was used for my Day of the Warm Beer game, but just running in a gAS engine ).
It was decided from the original design doc stage that this game wouldn't have that though, as I always realised it would take a chunky pc to get the number of sprites we wanted without adding more to it.
We did have player>background collisions on chapter 3 with the girders, but those are just sprites.

DancingOctopus we did actually increase the height of the playing area, and the horizontal movement along with the black border is also there to make it feel much bigger than it actually is.
All the way through it was a struggle to keep the fps high enough ( Right until the very death we were tweaking stuff to try and get any more speed out of it ). I've got quite a meaty pc, and in FF it's not as smooth as it should be ( As much as it pains me to say it, but IE is so much better at playing the game back ).
The sickener is, when testing I had it at 40fps because on the desktop that played roughly the same as running it at 60fps in IE.
If we could do a d/load version, we could crank everything up so much and run it at 60fps with no issue at all *sigh*

Noticed someone asked how long it took to make, I'm not sure about the other guys, but I record all my time taken on stuff ( Freelancer, need to know these things, I'm not just being badly anal. Well... ), but in total I spent 51.5 days working on this bad boy.

Squize.

standing ovations ;)
but that´s what you get if you aren´t allowed posting anything about that for so long

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...but in total I spent 51.5 days working on this bad boy

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that´s alot of time and it propably shows people here how much more effort it includes what can´t be seen first.
again also from me: awesome project (to sad I couldn´t enjoy dev. comments or infos beforehand)

I presume that's 51 eight hour working days?

Also, forgot to mention that the only thing that really annoyed me was that once you start the game there's no way to turn off the sound without quitting to the main menu.

Thanks render :)

Yeah personally I'd rather document the whole development process, but with everything being commercial these days I really can't, which is a pity.
Although once a game's out I'm cool with explaining as much or as little as people are interested in hearing.

Sam, yeah 8 hour days ( Although it wasn't exactly laid out 1 day after another :) ).

As to the sound, it's damn near impossible to cover everyone's presentational bases, and every option just incurs so much more work in relation to the benefits. If we had a key set aside for sound on/off then that would have impacted on the key bindings menu, in that the user wouldn't have been able to select that key, or if they did they'd then have to re-set the sound toggle key.
There was no way I was going to have an on-screen sound button, just would have stuck out like a sore thumb, so the only other option would have been to include it in the pause menu, which would have made that screen very busy text wise or would have meant having a separate menu screen to go to in there.

Sorry, not a rant, just wanted to show how much thought has to go into all of it, how a little change just goes down the line and affects other things ( It's always tricky trying to explain to a client, or even a designer. What seems a simple request sometimes is just the biggest pain in the arse you can imagine ).

Squize.

Well that was quite fun. :)

I just played as far as I will probably for a long time, got to four bosses that spun around me on hard mode. (7th on the highscore :))

Great job guys, that was a lot of fun and quite intense as it progressed. I wish I could just play through the bosses again(A sequel of just bosses? :P), but I'll guess I'll have to fight my way back.

I really enjoyed the power-ups, specifically the homing rockets and the large spinning ball of doom(those were a lot of fun).

Congrats guys on a great game!

I gotta be honest. I really didn't care for this game right after the release. Then, about 20 minutes ago, *sheepishly* I finally figured out the whole polarity thing (though I find myself getting confused mid-battle if I'm supposed to be same color or opposite color... got myself killed LOTS of times). Anyhow, now I think it's truly a stellar game. Netted myself 2nd place on the scoreboard. Woot. (V, you're wave patterns really piss me off. That whole 1 step over, when step down... ARGH!). Only got to level 8 though. Though I'd love a unlockable "boss-rush-mode" to add on to UG's suggestion above. Great game.

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Originally Posted by ImprisonedPride

V, you're wave patterns really piss me off. That whole 1 step over, when step down... ARGH!

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:s really? I find them about five times easier to get past than Squize's. :/

Well I probably just suck, but that pattern I mentione got me nearly every time because I tried to tag ever last one of them and they'd crash into me. Sigh...

Brilliant, it's great to read people actually playing the game rather than just viewing it ( If that makes sense ).

btw, the H-Chain ( Was originally a Kill-Chain, but child friendly and all that ) is the best way to bump your score up really high. Only really possible on the first chapter 'cause then it gets too hard, but that's my little insider secret.

Squize.

gah, so annoying, keep trying to set aside time to play this properly - but by the time I finally get round to it this thread would have packed up and gone home! From the 5 mins I've had to have a go it looks ace! Now if you could please get on with converting it to my gameboy so I can play it on the tube we can all move on!

This game rocks. The polarity stuff is what makes the game unique. Well done. My first thoughts were about graphics and animation quality. Wow!
I had more or less understood the polarity system on my first step but I've found the game too hard/frustrating on the first levels. I would have done waves of blue followed by waves of red, but not blue and reds on the same wave.
The learning period is quite long but it is proportional to the game quality which is fine :)

(Spoiler)
I found problems with the game. I am not tiring to wine but there are things that make this game less enjoyable and sometimes frustrating.
The ship isn't fast enough to counter the shoots. It moves slowly across the screen. The enemies and your ship are too big and have less space to move around and prevent crashes. When there is a swarm it’s almost impossible to kill all the bugs and you are forced to go to a corner where it’s very easy to get shoot and hard to get back into the action. Enemies can pop out from any where which isn’t really a problem if the ship could move a little faster. The last Boss doesn’t move which wakes it easy to destroy and there is not an ending, plus some minor small glitches that could happen. And maybe the power ups could have lasted a little longer and wouldn’t fly away from your reach so fast. That is all I have to say that could have made this game more interesting and had people coming back for more.

I think its cool when people still play a game till its end ages after its release :)
That said i agree with all your crits and should we ever get to work on the game again or on a followup we´ll work on addressing such issues.
Thanks for your feedback :)

hmmm he registered an account just to say that.. it must be tomsamson plugging his own game!!!!!!!!

haha,right,what better way to plug your own game than to only talk about the negative sides of it? :D

Frogking21 I could reply to each and everyone of your comments, but this game has served it's purpose now.

Yes there are quite a few faults with it, some things that at the time we weren't happy with, but there is only x amount of budget, x amount of time and x number of people with different views on how the game should be.

Good work for getting to the end though. It would have been nice to hear your feedback on some of the "unique" levels there were in there ( Such as the level that is just a big boss you chase down a valley ) which I still think is pretty cool, but should I ever do another vertical shoot'em up there are lots of things I'd do differently.

Squize.

I understand Squire.
In case you should make another vertical shooter, I got an idea.
You could make it a racing game with power ups like turbo, and different guns. In this game you would have to speed across a level filled with enemies and explosives while also racing against a computer opponent.
Like the game "Diesel and Death" except it would be like an arcade vertical shooter
http://www.andkon.com/arcade/racing/dieselanddeath/