GunWings - Single Level Preview

[Holmes]

Hello iDevgames (long time no see!)

Gunwings is a new game by Danlab and I. I'm am doing the programming, and he is of course lending his wonderful art. It is a vertical scroller, and the crazy gameplay is pretty well illustrated by the screenshots below. I've posted a single level test for you iDevGamers to enjoy and provide feedback on. This link will be updated regularly but may be unreliable as it is directly from my computer.

GunWings Download Link (http://sr6177.resnet.ucsb.edu/~holmesf/)

http://sr6177.resnet.ucsb.edu/~holmesf/gunwings2.jpg
http://sr6177.resnet.ucsb.edu/~holmesf/gunwings3.jpg
http://sr6177.resnet.ucsb.edu/~holmesf/gunwings1.jpg

Controls:
Movement - Arrow Keys
Fire - Space

Super Programmer Keys:
b - skip to boss
d - diagnostics
q - super speed
w - invulnerability on
e - invulnerability off

A note on the "pod" powerups. Each color gives you a different type of pod:
blue - single fire pod
red - dual fire pod
green - shield pod
purple - iPod (just kidding)
white - no pod (don't get it when it's white!)

:p

- Holmes

[Frank C.]

Nice! :D

Personally I think the autofire takes some of the fun out of it, but the enemies look great so far (good variety) and I really like how you can see their shadows before they drop down on you - makes things a little more fair with the tight vertical space in a 4:3 screen aspect.

[Holmes]

Nice! :D

Personally I think the autofire takes some of the fun out of it

Super arthritis fun time? :p

Actually I get what you mean. Manual stuff is fun. Maybe I'll add in a secondary fure for this. I just hate how games like this can cramp up your hands.

but the enemies look great so far (good variety) and I really like how you can see their shadows before they drop down on you - makes things a little more fair with the tight vertical space in a 4:3 screen aspect.

Thanks :)

[aarku]

Overall very good! The worst thing by far is the in-game music. It sounds like it was hacked together in 6 minutes (gotta load the samples) and doesn't fit the game or title music at all, me thinks. The title music is great and really goes well with the visual style.

-Jon

[Frank C.]

Super arthritis fun time? :pHa! Ya I guess newbies to the genre might appreciate auto fire, but I was weaned on Raiden and 1942 and am a bit of a connoisseur ;)

Raiden/1942 actually compromise a bit and use semi-auto fire. If you hold the button down for half a second it'll spurt out a bunch of shots then it slows the firing rate down a bit. This way you get into a goove where you're still constantly hitting the button (so it feels like you're in control/doing something) but it's not too stressful.

If yer into MAME, try to to find the DoDonPachi (or even DonPachi) ROMs - That series had an awesome auto-fire vs button mashing trade off; Holding the button turns your weapon into a tight stream, while mashing gives you more of a spread.

[Holmes]

Overall very good! The worst thing by far is the in-game music. It sounds like it was hacked together in 6 minutes (gotta load the samples) and doesn't fit the game or title music at all, me thinks. The title music is great and really goes well with the visual style.

-Jon

Music is placeholder as of right now.

[Frank C.]

The worst thing by far is the in-game music. Hmmm... I don't hear any music on my system (it's in the bundle though). There's also no firing sound - I just assumed some sounds where missing, but there may be a bug at work?

[Holmes]

Hmmm... I don't hear any music on my system (it's in the bundle though). There's also no firing sound - I just assumed some sounds where missing, but there may be a bug at work?

There is no player firing noise, but there are many other noises.

[Najdorf]

Really cool!

Only problem is that the ship is too wide, it makes too easy to get hit... and often I had the impression "well THAT didnt hit me!" (but maybe it's normal...) Maybe you could make collisions with the wings less sensible, I mean if something just touches your wing let it pass... Or just make a smaller ship, maybe some kind of prototype of an F-18... with double wings... (hint hint...)

And I like the idea of fire that has to recharge a bit...


Also I prefer side scrollers since you see before what's ahead of you and you dont have to move a mile to manage to hit something (I mean, it takes more to go from the left to the right of the screen than what it takes to go from the top to the bottom) which makes it more manageable, but then it might just be me...


EDIT: I checked better the collisions, it appears that when a big red airplane crashes frontally against you, it esplodes really too soon (you should allow more space also because of the perspective) and also the small red airplanes have a bit of the same problem.

[Danlab]

Really cool!
but then it might just be me...
:love: yea its you :love:

[arekkusu]

This is pretty keen. Especially the excellent title music, it reminds me of Lupin the 3rd. CPU usage is also a very friendly 10%.

Criticisms:
* No VBL sync. Big annoying tear the whole time.
* No resizable window or fullscreen.
* No pause key?
* Window minimization = white. Can't see the pretty paused graphic in the Dock.
* The demonstration only seems to run once, afterwards it just loops the character/title graphics.
* The explosion animation is very repetitive. How about rotating the quad randomly, or adding some fire particles in addition to the smoke?
* What is the money good for? Upgrades between levels?

Also some implementation things:
* You can make your about box credits font match with <FONT FACE="Lucida Grande" SIZE="2">
* Edit menu? Print?
* 15 megs on disk!?
-- separate file for each font character? Why not one texture atlas?
-- don't use TGA, ever. switch to PNG or high quality JPG. I resaved all TIF and TGAs as PNG and the app drops to 8 megs.
-- there are a few images duplicated as both png and tif.

[arekkusu]

Also, when you respawn, the horizontal pan is instantly recentered. It'd be less jarring if the pan was scrolled back to center.

[Holmes]

Thanks for your thourough examination, arekkusu!

This is pretty keen. Especially the excellent title music, it reminds me of Lupin the 3rd. CPU usage is also a very friendly 10%.

Criticisms:
* No VBL sync. Big annoying tear the whole time.

If anyone knows how to enable VBL sync (in Cocoa), please tell.

* No resizable window or fullscreen.

Fullscreen will be added later. The window is not resizeable because the game is 2D.

* No pause key?

Click on another application for now, this will start the autopause. I will implement a key later.

* Window minimization = white. Can't see the pretty paused graphic in the Dock.

I saw your post on this. I'm implementing your code, thanks.

* The demonstration only seems to run once, afterwards it just loops the character/title graphics.

Will check out

* The explosion animation is very repetitive. How about rotating the quad randomly, or adding some fire particles in addition to the smoke?

Will look into

* What is the money good for? Upgrades between levels?

Money = bonus points and extra lives. We may do more with it.

Also some implementation things:
* You can make your about box credits font match with <FONT FACE="Lucida Grande" SIZE="2">

Done, thanks.

* Edit menu? Print?

Apple interface guidelines reccomends you keep these menus even if you have disabled their functions (which I forgot to do, actually). The lack of these menus creates a perception of instability in your application.

* 15 megs on disk!?

Yes, deal with it (sorry). We are using very high quality sprite animations that take up a lot of room on disk. They are stored in .png (compressed). The audio is ogg vorbis (compressed). 15MB is not asking for much these days. We may be able to compress a few things still, but in the end the application will actually be bigger, since we'll be adding more graphics for the new levels.

-- separate file for each font character? Why not one texture atlas?

This is easier for us and allows us to do any number of characters that we want. If we wanted to add é è û ï, ect, for say French support, this would be easy - just drop the files in the folder and the new characters are detected and mapped by the game by their file names. This is not so easy if we used an atlas. We also don't have to worry about having text characters accidently exceed their bounds and bleed into other characters, a common problem we had when developing Argonaut, which used an atlas.

You might say, "but more textures must be bound, decreasing performance," and that's true, but according to OpenGL profiler, less than 0.1% of OpenGL time is spent binding textures in GunWings.

-- don't use TGA, ever. switch to PNG or high quality JPG. I resaved all TIF and TGAs as PNG and the app drops to 8 megs.

We are using .PNG as the game's standard file format. We forgot to convert some of the files. Thanks for alerting me to that.

-- there are a few images duplicated as both png and tif.

Thanks for pointing this out. Deleted the .tifs that were copies.

[Holmes]

Also, when you respawn, the horizontal pan is instantly recentered. It'd be less jarring if the pan was scrolled back to center.

Good observation. This is because the horizontal scroll is a direct function of the plane's horizontal position. Will fix.

[OneSadCookie]

[myOpenGLContext setValue:1 forParameter:NSOpenGLCPSwapInterval]; or something :)

[Josh]

I, for one, am highly disappointed with OSC's incorrectness here ;)


const long vblSynch = 1;
[context setValues:&vblSynch forParameter:NSOpenGLCPSwapInterval];

[OneSadCookie]

btw, the reason for failing to load the level that I told you about earlier is that my disk is formatted case-sensitive, and the name of the file in your code is not the same as the name of the file on the disk :p

[arekkusu]

If anyone knows how to enable VBL sync (in Cocoa), please tell.
jabber answered this, but it's also a FAQ. Search the board (http://www.idevgames.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3283).

Fullscreen will be added later. The window is not resizeable because the game is 2D.
So? What if I have a 640x480 display? Or a 2560x1600 display? Or I want to run fullscreen, at 1280x854, or 1440x900? You're not going to scale the viewport?

15MB is not asking for much these days.
Yeah, I don't have a problem with using disk, especially when the eye candy is good as this. But I do have a problem with inefficiency, and TGA blows.

This is not so easy if we used an atlas.
Well, that's true... but a single 512x512 texture would allow you 256 32x32 characters, which covers MacRoman fine. Of course if you intend on adding kana or Korean or something then your approach is better.

The bleeding can definitely be an issue, but (from a brief look) you already appear to leave a one-pixel border at the edge of each character so it shouldn't be a problem.

Atlas vs. separate files is a minor quibble compared to TGAs, though. So no worries.