GameDevBlog

Really Cool Game - The Fourth Wall

Just stumbled on this yesterday - it was a free game pick of the week on an indie blog, but I forget which one. http://thefourthwallgame.com/ 

It's really clever. I wish I could erase my memory so I could play it again for the first time.

And it turns out, coincidentally, that Logan Feith, one of the guys who made it, is in my class at DigiPen. What are the odds?

sixty second shooter version 1.0 official launch!

Chrome 15 was released today - so, in theory, you can now play sixty second shooter with no hoops to jump through!

So - I've made some last minute fixes and polish and I'm calling it VERSION 1.0!

This doesn't mean I'm calling it 'done' yet - there's one big thing I still want to do, and that's implement a friend's list leaderboard. How I'm going to do that I haven't quite decided yet. It hasn't been a priority, because not enough people have been playing it yet for that to matter, but hopefully that will soon change.

I just gotta say - I love this game. I can't stop playing it. I hope y'all like it too.

And Isaac was again the leader on the leaderboards before I did this mid-week update.

Strange coincidence: this also happens to be the 500th post on GameDevBlog. Weird.

What are you waiting for?  Play it!  If you've installed it before, you'll need to remove it and re-install it.

 

sixty second shooter update day!

So, last week, Isaac took the title of sixty second shooter world champion away from Tomo. What do you want for a prize?

This week, (before I even managed to get the update in) I seem to be leading the pack, but I'm not eligible for the nonexistent prize. One jvoung already has a pretty solid score, in the 200K range. 

For me, this was another week filled mostly with stuff that was not-working-on-the-game.  

But I did manage to get some window-filling goodness in there.  Ben Guildenstein's been asking for it for weeks and I finally did it.  (You see?  I do, eventually, respond to feedback.)

Turns out that extra 20% screen real estate makes a big difference!

And, sorry Ben, it doesn't automatically go full-screen, but if you full-screen Chrome yourself (that's F11 on Windows) it's pretty sweet.

Or, if your framerate sucks, you can play in a smaller window and get some more performance.

And people with small monitors will be able to see the leaderboard now - it won't be wrapped off the bottom of the screen.

To do it, I had to spend what felt like a stupid amount of time mucking with CSS to more-or-less get the browser text to where I thought it should be.  It makes me miss the days when I only had to support 4:3 and 16:9. I should now probably write an article on CSS for NaCl / webgl / maybe even HTML5 games.

Nearly forgot the link.

sixty second shooter belated update day!

Okay, got most of the bugs I know about worked out, including one with logging in that I don't know how many people got hit by. 

I did a fair amount this week - but it's pretty rough:

• a macrogame: earn and spend energy to give yourself an edge (and, because I haven't yet implemented a "bonus energy of the week" or "bonus energy of the day" system, Tomo starts with nothing. Now's your chance to beat him.)
• worked on bringing some clarity to the game mechanics: little score readouts when you destroy enemies, and it gives strategy tips between games
• new powerups: double-fire and energy coils
• a few tweaks, such as making powerup-collision more forgiving (I may not have gone far enough there)

Let me know what you think.

Tomo's still world champion - one of the anonymous players came close to beating him last week, but not quite.

 

sixty second shooter update day!

Tomo is still the world champion at sixty second shooter.  WILL NOBODY UNSEAT HIM?

I didn't have much time to work on the game this week. Tomo helped me decide that last week I went too far in tightening the game up and lowering variance - this week, things will be more random and building chains is easier than ever, so we should all be able to rack up higher scores. 

Also made some changes to the way leaderboards work - Tomo will only be on the main leaderboard once now, so he won't scare anybody away - and there's a leaderboards page where you can examine high-scores by level.  So if you don't want to compete in the Big Show you can always stay on level one and see how high a score you can get there. 

And I put in some half-assed antialiasing. I'll make it three-quarters-assed this week.

FIGHT!

sixty second shooter mid-week update

A lot of people thought the game didn't work because they couldn't see the text: in particular the text that said "press 'x' to start" - I've made a hacky fix to that, using browser text and CSS absolute positioning so the game is playable without the NACL_ENABLE_PPAPI_DEV flag.  Downside - some people will see the text twice, and there's a framerate hit.

A more permanent solution is on its way.

But until then.

sixty second shooter alpha version update day!

It's my goal to make Mondays the day on which I update sixty second shooter - and to reset the leaderboards, so we can all play king of the mountain each week. Last week the winner, hands down, by far, was Tomo, and he wins ... me implementing some of his features. Soon.

I've gotten some great feedback on the game already, but haven't been able to respond to that feedback yet, because I've been busy adapting to Chrome 15 and getting sixty second shooter into the Chrome Web Store.

This means it's easier to run! You just need to install and run Chrome 15, install sixty second shooter in the store and run it from there - you don't need to set environment variables or command line parameters.

Sort of.

But.

Actually.

You kind of do still need to set environment variables because the text rendering is still in development, which means to see, like, your score you still have to put NACL_ENABLE_PPAPI_DEV=1 in your environment variables.

For me, that's Control Panel->System and Security->System->Advanced System Settings->Environment Variables...->New... and then type in NACL_ENABLE_PPAPI_DEV and 1.

Sorry about that. I didn't realize font rendering was going to lag behind the rest of 3D - in the interim I'll put score information, etc, in the browser. I'll have that in by next week, if you want to wait.

This is supposed to be a developer blog, but so far I don't really have much to say other than to try it out and follow the instructions - so...does anyone have any questions about developing for NaCl?

Whoops

If you jumped through all the hoops to get sixty second shooter running, and it still didn't run, it could be because I provided the wrong link: I linked to the dev channel of Chrome, not the beta channel. The link is fixed now.

It could also be becuase you're running Windows XP, which doesn't do GL stuff unless you force it. If you're brave, you can pass --ignore-gpu-blacklist into the Chrome command line and WebGL and sixty second shooter may start working. You may also get a blue screen of death.

 

sixty second shooter alpha version launch day!

It is with a racing heart that I'm revealing an alpha build of the native client game I've been working on - to the world!  If the world is willing to jump through all the hoops one has to jump through to get it to run.

It just so happens that the current build in the Chrome Beta channel can run it, so I thought, hey, why not.

I'm eager to hear your feedback - if you're able to play it. In theory, it should run on any x86 machine that supports WebGL.  In practice, I've only seen it run on 64-bit Windows 7 machines.

The game is here: sixty second shooter test.

The hoops you have to jump through to actually play it are here: sixty second shooter support.

Prototypes

I've made a handful of digital and not-digital game prototypes over the years.  The ones that I've made for Torpex I'm going to continue to keep secret, but I've decided to share the rest.