Hi,

More in the world of X++

The final power-up, the pulse weapon, is in now. It's a big old powerful shot, slow to move, slow to reload, but two hits from that and anything is dead.
To try and make it bigger and give it a bit more wow, I've used the particles playfield too. The particles are just little images ( Not pixels, they look too small, and it's something a lot of Flash GWars style games do, either that or they add a big ol' blur effect onto them. Neither being very nice ) which are blitted into a canvas bitmap.
Every couple of frames I run a colorMatrixFilter on that bitmap canvas to fade the alpha down, all straight forward stuff we've all been doing since F8 came along.

With the pulse I just draw() it's image into the canvas bitmap so it creates a trail / thickens it up ( For want of a better term ). Draw() is a bit costly, but I'm only ever running at most 10 pulse bullets at once ( They were always going to be slow to reload, that's why I figured I could get away with doing this extra trail effect ).
I'm really happy with it, it's in keeping with the very glowy nature of the game. BlendMode.ADD is the best thing to happen to Flash for a long time.

Once that was all in and working I did even more tweaking to the difficulty curve, the flockers now get nastier as you go, which is based both on the current level and the number of lives you have left ( If you're not doing so well there's no need to make it even harder ).

Then back to the power-ups again, and the space bar now swaps between them, which works a treat.

It's all going to plan so far, and seeing how we're on what, around 12 ( Full days ) development time, it's pretty good. It'll be nice to add the final baddie type ( Did someone say bullet hell ? ) and then the biggest thing should be the sound, which I'm a little concerned about 'cause there's a lot of things going on, and it'll be easy to just overwhelm the player with sound and make it really jar. Some thought is going to need to go into that.
From there we're looking at presentational issues and then bugs, love and play testing.

Squize.

Things didn't work out as planned today, and I've spent most of the day hitting X again.

I think this is going to be pretty brief as it's just gone 2:50 am and I'm pretty dead on my feet. Main changes are the asteroids now use the bitmap technique as mentioned in the last blog ( Not final images, and the way they animate shows up the circle to circle collision checks quite badly, the final images will animate in such a way as to hide that ), the baddies drop an icon which can be shot to select your power-up ( Again placeholders. The final images will be a lot more colour coded to make it much easier ).

I've decided after a long think today, and some great ideas posted in yesterdays comments ( Vex, didn't reply there mate, but I really liked your timer based idea, but I think for a web game I have to strip away complications as much as possible. Too tired to go into depth right now why that idea could be complicated, bug me in the comments if you really want me to justify it  ), I've opted for something quite straight forward.
A power-up icon is dropped after killing 20 baddies. You can shoot it to change it to a power-up you want, and then collect it. Every time you collect one you boost it's power ( Shown by the 3 new indicators at the bottom left ). Tomorrow ( Today ) I'll add the option to press space to change what power-up you're currently using ( Space was being reserved for a possible smart bomb, but I figure the player is going to have enough fire power as it is ).
Also the pulse weapon hasn't been coded yet, so collecting the icon with a little star on will break things. Not every build I post was going to be nice and neat I'm afraid.

I've also played with the difficulty curve a bit, and it's coming together a lot more. I've got at least one more baddie type in mind, maybe two ( And a third has just come to mind, but I've got to draw a line somewhere ), and then I should really be able to have a big push to finalise when things are triggered, how many shots they take to kill, how much energy you lose etc.
Also the asteroids themselves may drop point based collectables, as there's no combo system in this game, and I do want to give the player an incentive to move rather than just spin on the spot.

Despite my bloodshot eyes it's coming together nicely now, I'm finally starting to get a real feel for how I want it to play. A couple more days of giving it a really big push and we should be looking at something a lot more final.

Squize.

I'm starting a reskin of the bowling game I was working on last year ( Working on a reskin of a game which isn't even live yet, that's weird ) tomorrow, the holidays are over so I've spent a good couple of hours this weekend working on X whilst I've still got time / energy.

Some minor things to start with... the credits have been updated slightly to reflect your input, there's a new section on the title screen called "Notes", which is basically just this blog repeated there. In an ideal world there would be a nice audio commentary but that would take an insane amount of bandwidth, so this is the next best thing ( Maybe a youTube clip with developers commentary at a later date ? )
It's a nice touch and isn't hard to do. It needs some love as I'm not a 100% happy with the presentation ( It's annoying that it's height > 2880 pixels, which means I can't cacheAsBitmap, which in turns means I can't use a gradient mask on it ), but I think it adds to the game overall.

Next up, the explosions are in their final state. Shoved into tilesheets and dropped onto the stage by directly adding the bitmap ( Rather than using a sprite or mc as a container for that bitmap ), which is a sweet tip that Pany posted here. They're animated by using scrollRect ( To just show a small "window" of the tilesheet ) and look pretty damn good. I've got to convert the player's explosion frames to a tilesheet ( It's painfully boring ), but I'm still mulling over exactly how to blow the player up, so that can be put on hold for a little while.

Along with doing the explosion tilesheets FireWorks was fired up and a lot of the existing final images were compressed as 8bit pngs, which dropped the filesize down a bit.

The homing missiles have been optimised too, seeing how no one flagged up any issues with them from the other build it wasn't really needed but it all helps.

Finally, the first baddie type is in. Nice and small "Flockers", which strangely enough are exactly the same as the Flockers in Orbs. Weird that.

They teleport in waves of 5 in a circle, and I'm pleased with them. I need to tweak triggering the player's shield if they teleport in on you, but aside from that they're pretty much done. Oh, the images are place holders before anyone asks.
( Also as I've stressed before over and over, the game play balance isn't done yet. So some levels you'll have cleared all the asteroids and just be sitting there waiting for the baddie waves to appear, other times all the waves will have been destroyed long before you manage to kill the remaining asteroids etc. ).

A good productive weekend for me, as you can see on the X Dev page.

Next up a bit of a tricky one, ideas are more than welcome. I need to allow the player to get power-ups one way or another.
My current thought is to just level up the power-up every level ( The power-ups will all max out at level 5 ), but I'm going to have 3 different types ( Spray, missiles and another one I've not quite sorted out in my head yet ). So how would the player pick which power-up to use ( The mouse wheel would be nice, but then Mac owners are left out in the cold ) ? I'm still in two minds about having a smart bomb, which means the space bar would be used for that.
My original thoughts were to have power-up icons dropped like in Polarity, and the player can shoot them to change the type before collecting them ( Think of the old 19xx shooters ). Perhaps that's the way to go, and just level up the weapon every, or every other, level.

I'm loathe to have a shop in there were you can buy upgrades to your power-ups. It's a lot of extra code and design, and will break the flow. This isn't a game of strategy and missions, it's pure score attack. Even with a shop, it would mean the baddies / asteroids dropping credits for the player to collect, and then there would still be the issue of being able to select the power-up you want to use.

The old style collecting tokens and then selecting a power-up from a list is out ( Nemesis and it's sequels ) because there just isn't the real estate on the screen for a list.

I need to play some old shooters and have a think, but really if you have any ideas please comment me up.

Squize.

I've already mentioned that I got Left 4 Dead for Christmas, and it's sex ( If you've got a 360 and a gold account, there's no good reason not to buy it, it's stunning ).

Whenever I get a new xbox game I often wonder what it would be like if it was written in Java and fits in only 4k. So far all my dreams have been dashed, but not any more.

Left 4K Dead

If that alone isn't the best title for a homage I don't know what is.

Squize.

There's a newly posted update on the XDev page.

This isn't really a "I did all this last night" build, it's what I've squeezed in during the holidays, and is I guess around 8/10 hours work in total, so counts as a 1 day-ish. I'm not trying to be totally anal about how long each build takes.

Now I've actually got to remember what I did. The first main thing I managed to drop in there was the asteroids bouncing off each other. The small ones ignore each other as I think it'll be far too cpu tasking, and too much of a head fuck to be honest ( It'd be like pinball with 30 balls ).
It all seems to work quite nicely, it's pretty subtle, you've got to be watching for it, but I know it's doing it and that's enough for me.

In saying that, I think on later levels ( Level 6 seems to be the first real "kick off" level, around that level it feels pretty sweet ) I may have to drop the checks, or at least test for the number of objects running and skip them when there are too many to test.

Next up I added the "waves". Basically, not all rocks come at you at the same time, there's a trigger point where extra ones will be released. This will need some balancing ( Like all the gameplay, which for me is a long way from being done ) when the baddies are in there.

I guess the biggest thing, in terms of the blog title anyway, is the power-ups. Firstly I added the spray power-up ( I don't think I'm going to stick with that name, it conjures up images of dogs and lamp posts ) which is your standard weapon, plus friends. It looks really good when you've maxed it out at [ Weapon ] level 5.
For all the power-ups there's give and take. For example with the spray power-up, yeah you get 5 shots at once, but the reload time is increased to try and balance that out. It helps me as the coder because it means the games not running as many bullets as it would be if I didn't increase the reload time and will also hopefully bring some balance to the game ( If you max out your power-ups and you're as hard as hell, how do you still make the game fun ? Do you make the baddies that before died with one shot now take 5 shots to keep the challenge going ? If that's the case, you've not actually got a useful power-up, you've just got more sprites on screen. Do you increase the sheer volume of baddies ? Then you could slip into a grind if their easy to kill. It's always a tricky tricky problem ).

The spray PuP didn't take too long, so I moved onto the homing missiles ( Which I knew would ). I've optimised these quite heavily already, but I still think with 4/5 running with a lot of objects there's a performance hit, and that's why I've left them unlocked and maxed out in the current build, so if anyone whose got two mins could give the game a quick play ( 'til around that magic level 6 would be good ) and feedback on their performance and specs that would be great.
If they are generally running crap for everyone ( Fine here, but quad core machine. This baby could run seti@home on it's own, so testing a swf in a realistic enviroment is tricky at times ) then I've still got some ideas to try and claw back some speed whilst still keeping the same look to them.

Squize.

It's time for our annual review of what we've managed to achieve over the previous 12 months, so bring that hangover and stale mince pie with you as we go back in time and space...

Jan:

This saw our first birthday, and Olli experimenting with web servers and the Wii. Quiet month, I'm putting it down to hangovers.

Feb:

The most loved up month of the year saw what has got to be one of the most camp games ever,

We're back, hurray!

Hope you all had a good Christmas and got lots of new things to play with ( Left 4 Dead was the best thing Santa gave me, it's the best marriage of "proper game" and multi-player I've ever ever seen. Everyone is going to copy that soon and just ditch the single player mode all together ).

I'm still in a holiday frame of mind, so the posts here may be sporadic as I alternate between working, and eating crap food / watching tv ( I think Olli's the same too ).

There's a new update to X. This is more of a "presentation" build, where I just can't be bothered to try and code anything clever.

The pause mode is in, which is always a nice thing to have done. To try and make it less drab, there's a bit of eye-candy in there, which is a Lorenz Attractor and was ported to as3 from the code at the always excellent Levitated ( I had played with this a couple of weeks ago using setPixel, and just wasn't happy with the results. Rather than let it go to waste I used the bubbles from the depth of field vector effect in 651 and a bit of blur and the add blendmode along with the old faithful infinite bob effect, and it looks ok-ish now. One thought that came to me was the code may be handy for running some types of baddies, could be quite a nice movement pattern and wouldn't require me to think of any more code ).
One thing is that I don't kill the animation during pause, so asteroids keep spinning, explosions keep exploding. This is because the use of movieclips is only a temporary measure, I'm going to wait til we've got final assets before ripping that code out and using tilesheets instead.

The other major chunk of work done is the stats / medals. The medals needs some images drawing for them, and then code to actually trigger them in-game, but all the internal guts is in there. The stats I think are done now, which is cool. Just don't get too attached to them, as every new build will reset them.
I've also added some stats to the level complete section ( I've been brainwashed waiting for things to load on the 360, where they display tips / stats to help you forget you're waiting ) which I'm really happy with.

Following on from a comment from Tonypa, the current level is now displayed, and a level progress bar. I've noticed a lot of casual games show the level progress ( Zuma, Luxor2 etc. ) and it's a simple nice thing to have. It's maybe not that useful now, but perhaps if the asteroids were to come in waves later in the game ( That's a clue btw ) ?

Squize.

Merry Christmas everyone!

At this time of year we'd just like to thank you, all our beautiful constant readers and our sexy newer visitors, for helping make this blog what it is. Without you we'd just be talking to ourselves, and I'm no doctor, but that's got to be a bit mental hasn't it ?

So thanks a lot for keeping us sane, it means a lot to us.

Turkey, tv, unwanted gifts, eating until your eyes bleed, visiting relatives when you just want to play on the xbox, something about the little baby Jesus, a big fat man breaking into your house in the middle of the night, paranoia that you can smell burning every time you turn the tree lights on, getting a card from someone at the 11th hour when there's just no way you can get one back to them on time, wrapping presents far too late and making a really bad job of it, having to spend Christmas with relatives and their weird not the way your family does it rules ( "We don't open the presents til after lunch" ), it's just all good isn't it.

Have a great one,

Squize & nGFX
x

(ps. edited by nGFX):
So Squize was done with posting a good deal earlier than me, so instead of having a second post I decided to add to this one...

If you're not quite so much into Christmas (like me, although, only the stress before it spoils it for me as early as November) here's my usual:

Happy Hogswatchday!

"ER...HO. HO. HO."
-- Death makes a career move (Terry Pratchett, Hogfather)