[Vorporeal]

You might want to limit the player to one spear on screen at a time. Otherwise, the game gets a little too easy.

[Enverex]

Indeed, in Pang the extra spears were a power-up (will you have powerups in the end?)

[Rockthesmurf]

I am thinking that the version that ships with PandoraPanic will just be the panic mode of Pang, which, if I remember correctly, gives you two spears. I've added a bunch of different levels, which are trigged via the level stuff in the PandoraPanic framework (although I'm not entirely clear how that works, as the level numbers seem to go up forever, is there not going to be a limit?). But PandoraPanic aside, I can see potential for making this a standalone game after PandoraPanic has been released, the main thing that would need adding is ledges/ladders, which would require a bit of collision/logic code, but I would have thought should be do-able. I don't think I'll be putting in powerups in to the PandoraPanic version, but once again that could be added to a standalone version.

Oh, and something else, I ended up just calling the SDL timing function (to get milliseconds passed) as I couldn't quite get the timer class to do what I wanted, one problem I have at the moment is the time I get is in milliseconds, where as something with a bit higher accuracy would be ideal, although not crucial.

Steve

This post has been edited by Rockthesmurf: 24 August 2009 - 07:48 AM

[MarkoeZ]

Hi people,

Since everyone is throwing around video's, i thought i might as wel join the party.

The first draft of the Maze game (WIP)

Graphics are mostly placeholders from Jumper, some ugly bits to clean up, and features to add. But it basically works.

Cheers!

Edit: Oh and as always: comments, tips and suggestions are appreciated

Edit2: @ Steve: Game is looking great! looking forward to the svn update

Edit3: I uploaded the basic, but very playable, first draft to the svn. Did not alter the minigames.h etc. since most will have their own configuration for development

This post has been edited by MarkoeZ: 24 August 2009 - 10:12 PM

[MarkoeZ]

Well i'm not going to edit the last post again, so here's a new one...

Been working on the graphics side of the Maze thingy, and i'm curious about opinions, so i made a new youtube update. Currently without music, but i will update once upload times here are normal again

Check it here, get that thing out into the world ;)

Now to figure out a way to make the timer less intrusive, but still visible enough to get your nerves up...

Edit: Much better with music

This post has been edited by MarkoeZ: 25 August 2009 - 08:23 PM

[foxblock]

The graphics are really unique and I like the somewhat geeky style ;) but I would swap the background for something more simple, maybe just a gradient or a solid color, the way it now is it is much too disturbing and also hard to see the maze and enemies.

About the timer, well you could make a bar at the top/bottom which is full at the start and is slowly draining or make the music go faster (which is tricky when have different time limits)
or a nother idea in addition to the background change: you could make the letters very big and put it behind the maze. Also change the color to something similar to the background so if it is dark blue the text should be light blue. The way the maze now is one would still be able to see it without it getting into the way too much...

[MarkoeZ]

Quote

The graphics are really unique and I like the somewhat geeky style ;) but I would swap the background for something more simple, maybe just a gradient or a solid color, the way it now is it is much too disturbing and also hard to see the maze and enemies.

hehe, thanks. the graphics are just made by me, and im no expert. I will try to enhance it some more, all in the current style because that's all i know : P The background was one of the things i did not get to yet, but i needed something otherwise sprites would not be deleted..

And i made the counter go behind the maze and enemies when the hero is near, but im planning on making things flash quite a bit if time gets short

[Rockthesmurf]

Just another quick video update:

New Video

Has players spear fixed so it clips properly with the floor, has animation for player, and has some scrolling clouds at the top of the screen. The scrolling clouds actually took quite a while to do because they move really slowly, so by default you really notice them jumping along each time they move across a pixel boundary, so now they are rendered three times, once at the current location, once a pixel to the left, and once a pixel to the right. The right/left versions are blended in and out to give a smooth (ish) transition.

Still more work to do but I thought I'd do a quick update!

Steve

[PokeParadox]

I'm loving the recent updates, all you guys rock!
I know I have come across as being a bit of a lazy ass recently. That's not strictly true, but I'm not working as much as I feel I should be. The new computer(because of laptop) has caused time to be spent on setting up and stress with the hole it burnt in my wallet(I'm not rich so £413 on a comp is a big deal...(pm if you feel like paypalling me something :lol: ))

Anyway regardless I'm trying to fix some annoying animation related bugs that Dragons_Slayer pointed out to me(you really should add them to the bug tracker though...)
I'm setting a Penjin test suite project for this sort of thing to try and reduce some of the more annoying bugs. I will add this to the Penjin repo as soon as I have anything real to show.

Some things that are still left for us to do in the time before Pandora launch:

• Feature freeze and tidy. There are minigames with more serious bugs than physics glitches and logic errors(memleaks/segfaults) These either need to be fixed or cut from the first release.
• Readme.txt - we as devs may know how to setup and play the game, but this game needs to be accesible to an end user too.
• PXML - there is a draft version by MarkoeZ and I believe it is in the repo. The PXML format has had some revisions, the PXML file should be brought up to the latest standard.
• PND packaging? I don't know much about this really, but if that's the format were expected to follow then it's something we need to look into.
• Finilised Pandora controls - Last time I setup Pandora controls... Joystick buttons weren't really working in SDL on Pandora, I had to map some of the keys instead... I will look into this... again. If anyone can shed some light quickly, then that will help things!
• Anything else I've overlooked.
• Build a final Pandora build and package everything and send it to ED to put on the CD! :)

I know I've said things WE need to do and that's because I really do need all you guys to help get this finished, I'm struggling to have a thinking mind with my crappy bar job, I hate it... but anyways I'm doing what I can if you feel you are able to take on something on this todo list, then please shout up here!
And with that I'm going to try and fix those animation bugs, catch ya later!

[Vorporeal]

I can look into the newest PXML standard and put together a PXML file for Pandora Panic.

[Dragons_Slayer]

Just added the AnimatedSprite issue to the Penjin bug tracker, When I find other bugs I will add them immediately :)

I will also try to finish one complete art style for my arenagame and fix the code as there are still some pointers that don't get deleted and that is not good.

[fusion_power]

PokeParadox, on 29 August 2009 - 01:02 AM, said:

• Finilised Pandora controls - Last time I setup Pandora controls... Joystick buttons weren't really working in SDL on Pandora, I had to map some of the keys instead... I will look into this... again. If anyone can shed some light quickly, then that will help things![

How many games do actualy support the Touchscreen? :) I can imagine many funny games that take advantage of this input method. I hope, Pandora-Panic will not be gamecontrols-only.

[foxblock]

fusion_power, on 29 August 2009 - 03:03 PM, said:

PokeParadox, on 29 August 2009 - 01:02 AM, said:

• Finilised Pandora controls - Last time I setup Pandora controls... Joystick buttons weren't really working in SDL on Pandora, I had to map some of the keys instead... I will look into this... again. If anyone can shed some light quickly, then that will help things![

How many games do actualy support the Touchscreen? :) I can imagine many funny games that take advantage of this input method. I hope, Pandora-Panic will not be gamecontrols-only.

Currently no game uses the touchscreen, but I can imagine some fun games using it too (I once started making a Flash minigame collection with touchscreen controlled games - for the Archos 605 and 5, around 15 games are done by now). But currently all games use button or nubs control and as the game is pretty fast it would be too hard / frustrating / confusing to have to switch to the touchscreen for a game. Maybe there will be some dedicated touchscreen games in the future, but not now and it's better that way...

Btw, good to see it is coming all together, maybe someone should ask ED about the deadline for the CD so we have a fixed date...

This post has been edited by foxblock: 29 August 2009 - 03:03 PM

[fusion_power]

Of course I mean games FOR the touchscreen, this kind of mini-Game-compilation is actually made for heavy Touchscreen Usage, I wonder why nobody has made a game for this cool Pandora-feature.
Imaging "wipe the screen clean" games or games where you have to connect things with a drawn line or "paint a way through a labyrinth" or one of these puzzles where you have to move the elements to reveal a coorect picture...
so many possibilities... :)
Or is it just to complicated to code Touchscreen-input?

[dflemstr]

fusion_power, on 30 August 2009 - 10:13 PM, said:

Or is it just to complicated to code Touchscreen-input?

It totally isn't, everyone's just lazy (or too used to the GP32 or whatever) :P

The touchscreen is just a mouse per default, and a mouse is all you need for the things you talked about.

I would also like to see some touchscreen-based challenges.