Please test my game! :)

The Partridge Family were neither partridges nor a family. Discuss.
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chili
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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by chili » March 13th, 2017, 2:39 pm

The flashing looks awesome man, good job.

I think i found a bug. I got sucked into a black hole, then immediately spat out, but the music stopped. It was the 1st black hole by the heart, I'll let you know if i can repro it.
Chili

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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by Yumtard » March 13th, 2017, 3:03 pm

Alright I'll leave the alpha for later then
chili wrote:The flashing looks awesome man, good job.

I think i found a bug. I got sucked into a black hole, then immediately spat out, but the music stopped. It was the 1st black hole by the heart, I'll let you know if i can repro it.
Thanks.

That's weird tried it a few times and happened for me too. Wonder what's causing it, seems like it has something to do with the collision with the obstacle

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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by Yumtard » March 13th, 2017, 5:34 pm

Might have fixed the bug.

I wasn't resetting a bool called firstTransition

Byteraver
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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by Byteraver » March 13th, 2017, 7:57 pm

Took me some time to get it running (wrong branch, the more I use Github, the more furiously I hate it. F****** confusing mess). The game is really cool, some things I like less:
- the only difficulty level is impossible, at least for me
- loading time (do you convert the mp3's to wave files or something?)
- the black hole mini game / sublevel is a cool idea, but the spaceship does not seem to be very maneuverable, am I right? I never last more than a second or so.

Suggestions:
- make it easier
- make the screen bigger (kind of a major change I know) or at least taller
- make the players' jet move faster for more action-intense gaming
- autoshoot (holding space)?
- minigame (blackhole) - make it smoother?

Ok time to go god mode on your game and try again :lol:

EDIT:
Ok now that I made myself invincible I could "finish" the game. Nothing much to complain about really. The artwork (graphics, animation, music and sound effects) is stunning in my opinion. The only thing I might change are game mechanics:
- The boss in the end takes too long to die. Not THAT difficult compared to the rest of the game but way too long.
- More enemies that take less bullets to die = more action, more fun
- Gun power ups: shoot in multiple directions, bigger / stronger guns, etc
- Slower progress (slower scroll): gives you more time to maneuver. I guess the screen is rather small compared to the size of the ships. I'm nitpicking :)

Small bugs:
- if you enter the black hole a second time there are no fires raining on you (no enemies to dodge)
- the credits move in a very jerky / shaky way after a while. I was not like that in the earlier versions of the game if I recall correctly?

OK Now I want more LEVELS!!! MORE ENEMIES!!! COOL BACKGROUNDS!!! :D
Last edited by Byteraver on March 13th, 2017, 8:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by Yumtard » March 13th, 2017, 8:19 pm

Byteraver wrote:Took me some time to get it running (wrong branch, the more I use Github, the more furiously I hate it. F****** confusing mess). The game is really cool, some things I like less:
- the only difficulty level is impossible, at least for me
- loading time (do you convert the mp3's to wave files or something?)
- the black hole mini game / sublevel is a cool idea, but the spaceship does not seem to be very maneuverable, am I right? I never last more than a second or so.

Suggestions:
- make it easier
- make the screen bigger (kind of a major change I know) or at least taller
- make the players' jet move faster for more action-intense gaming
- autoshoot (holding space)?
- minigame (blackhole) - make it smoother?

Ok time to go god mode on your game and try again :lol:

interesting, it's very hard for me to tell weather the game is hard or easy, I always complete it first try with ease since I've done so many test runs during dev I'm way better at this dumb game than one should be :D. Might try to make it possible to choose difficulty at title screen. Maybe make the enemies die from less bullets and load a slightly different level (same level with a couple hard things deleted) if the player choose easy mode.

Screen bigger I will look into, think it might be hard though.

autoshoot is probably a good idea, will try it

the mini game was actually thrown together pretty fast and sloppy :p

Not sure about loading time, it's a bit weird because I don't think it went down at all since I converted the wavs into mp3s

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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by Yumtard » March 13th, 2017, 8:31 pm

autoshooting fixed

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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by Byteraver » March 13th, 2017, 9:03 pm

You finish it first run with ease? Damn I suck :lol:. Good thing I can cheat :D
Thanks for the auto fire. I also noticed something is off with the sprite drawing: the black around the exhaust flames of the player's ship for example is not blended with the background. It is not visible that much because of the black background but you might want to fix it in case the ship flies over a different background (city, desert, forest, etc). But you know this already right.
Also, is there supposed to be no music in the black hole sequence?

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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by albinopapa » March 13th, 2017, 9:24 pm

@Byteweaver
Yeah, if you have read through the dev logs on this forum, he has been trying to get alpha blending to work using chili's Surface class from the 3D fundamentals framework to no avail.

The loading time has also been discussed on this thread between him and chili, more than likely it's because entire songs and sound effects are being loaded at startup. I want to say that professionals probably load in sections of songs into buffers as needed as opposed to entire files at once, but I could be wrong about that. Perhaps as chili pointed out, they use a separate thread to load entire files at the beginning of each level, then just copy a portion of each sound onto a master buffer to be mixed and played. It's been awhile since I've looked over the XAudio API and accompanying tutorials.
If you think paging some data from disk into RAM is slow, try paging it into a simian cerebrum over a pair of optical nerves. - gameprogrammingpatterns.com

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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by Yumtard » March 13th, 2017, 9:51 pm

Yeah the alpha blending is a known issue.

Added easy mode. It's proving a bit trickier than expected. It works but doesn't work if you die and play again since then you load the level again on top of the old one.
Could fix this maybe by having a bool levelNotLoaded. but then it wouldn't be possible to switch difficulty levels

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Re: Please test my game! :)

Post by Byteraver » March 13th, 2017, 10:38 pm

Cool :) I still die of course ;)
For some reason, if you restart the game multiple times from the title screen, the performance drops dramatically making the game unplayable... Somethings' off, time for some debugging ;) You might need a load level / unload level procedure, especially if you want to make a game with more than one level.

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