Good to know. You might want to make stuff like that more obvious in the future - I never would've noticed the robot head volume slider without this comment thread. The sound effects are still kind of on the loud side. I had to drop the volume down to what looked like about 10% to get it to a comfortable level.
Ok, you're new. So, I'll give you the benefit of the doubt that you didn't realize that following a code along tutorial and uploading it assets and all to a game/code jam like this is generally considered to be in poor taste.
I wrote it in GameMaker Studio 2.3 with GML code, not in the PGE - but after skimming through the first episode of the Car Crime series, it looks like there's actually a lot of similar concepts in how the camera, geometry, and collisions and stuff are being handled.
Neat idea. Instead of limiting the amount of VR time, maybe it would be better to limit the number of VR blocks that can be placed on a particular level. I dunno, I just feel like the game more suited for a chill puzzle game vibe than a frantic place your blocks before the timer runs out kind of thing.
The platforming physics feel a lot more polished than most of the other platformer entries I've tried, so thumbs up on that. The sound effects are EQ'd way too loud and it would be nice if the moving platform cycles reset on respawn to keep players from having to wait for them to cycle back after dying.
I like how this adds kind of an optional puzzle element to an old school arcade game. The ghost ai gets a little wonky sometimes (like ghosts just camping out in corners and stuff), but I'm really splitting hairs - the game is good.
The game actually runs in 3d space - I'm pretty sure I never commented out zooming the camera in and out with the Q and E keys. When a level loads up, a vertex buffer gets populated with textured cubes. I put the whole game together in about a day and a half - so, there's still a ton of room for optimization. I'd like to add a bitmasking function to optimize the level geometry and right now entire levels get loaded into the vertex buffer all at once (the original intention was to only have a playable area worth of level chunks live at any given time). The included levels are just familiar test levels that I could mock up quickly, but new levels can be made in a text editor and the game should load them in on startup, if anyone wants to try. The long term goal with this would be add an option to load custom textures (internally the game already has support for high res textures, I just didn't have a chance to setup loading external .png files) and a visual level editor.
Those pesky laser mice...
The platformer physics are a nice start, but could use a little tweaking. I'd start by making the deceleration/friction a little stronger to reduce how slippery everything feels and then lower the strength of gravity while the jump button is held (to allow for variable strength jumps like in Mario games).
Thanks! It would've been nice if there had been time to design more suitable levels, but on the bright side the levels are stored externally in the .lvl files (just txt files) and the game loads them on startup - so it shouldn't be that bad to make custom levels. I also would've liked to include better graphics - internally the game has support for high res textures and originally the plan was to load those from external files too, but time ran short. Long term I'd like to get everything (levels, graphics, music) loading from external files and add something more intuitive than raw editing in a text editor for making custom levels - kind of like a more customizable Mario Maker.
The movement feels like an ice level or something. Stopping definitely needs more friction or something. Also, usually platformers have variable height jumps - like you can perform a short jump by tapping jump or a longer/higher jump by holding the jump button. I think Mario games achieve that by reducing the effects of gravity on Mario when the jump button is held. The game over and win screens soft lock the game, you might want to have it so hitting any key starts a new game at that point or something.
The visuals are real nice, somewhere in between a Gameboy Color and a Gameboy Advance game. The controls are mapped a little weird - I would've preferred a WASD option. Screen transitions were a little glitchy in that if I was holding an arrow key down between rooms sometimes you'd get warped to the far side of the new room. Enemy hit boxes felt a little unreliable - especially on the boss. It would be nice if enemies had some chance to drop a health item or something.
You have more patience than me. I tried doing something similar to that like year ago and getting frustrated with that was what prompted me to start getting more familiar with vertex buffers and 3d space stuff.
Since you're using draw_sprite_pos() functions, does this only look right with flat shaded sprites? Like would a brick texture have shearing issues?
Are you doing this with sprite stacking? If so, I'm impressed that you were able to get all the draw order stuff that far along with the time constraint.
The camera could stand to be zoomed out a bit. Also, was there supposed to be any sort of random terrain generation? I ask because I get an identical map every time and it feels like there's a delay when loading up the game as if it's running some sort of procedural generation.
Biomes, caves, ore deposits - I like that world generation a lot! You're like a crafting system and some enemies away from a pretty solid start on a Terraria-like game.
Neat game, it'd be neat to see something based on this get developed out a little further. The biggest issue I encountered was Steves and pigmen getting stuck on their bases a lot.
I get the same glitch with a GTX980TI. Are there multiple vertex buffers getting generated at the same positions? Or maybe something went wrong with uv coords?
I do think there is some evidence that a small handful of entries attempted to manipulate votes. Like there are a few highly ranked games that perhaps don't measure up with general level of polish of the other top ranked games that have a lot of low effort comments from freshly created accounts and very few developer comments. That is a little bit of a bummer - but, I think this shows that leaving any final decisions to the discretion of YoYo Games and Opera was the right call because this reserves them the opportunity to take issues like this into consideration while determining the final winners.
I like the shop and I like where you're going with the mode7 stage. On my first attempt to get to the mode7 stage - right before the boss would've appeared I got hit by an enemy, damage boosted through a wall, and got soft locked outside of the play area. I'm going to guess that there was some knockback that pushed the player ship by a value larger than the width of the collision mask on the wall sprite and you could fix it by either increasing the size of the wall's collision mask (easy) or putting together a raycast system for collisions (less easy).
It probably wouldn't be that difficult to implements some sort of height mapping on the floors - the most tedious part would probably either be working out the math to keep the player at the right z value at varying positions between vertices or figuring out the best way to generate/layout the triangles in the vertex buffer to make it look nice. I might try making a racing game or something with hills and banked corners for a future project while working my way up to something more elaborate.
The reflections are mostly just a flipped copy of everything rendered underneath the floor. The most complicated parts of that are keeping the vertex buffers optimized while also controlling the vertex submit order very carefully to make sure that everything that needs to look like a reflection is submitted before the floor and everything else after or the illusion breaks in various ways.
Thanks for playing and thanks for the interesting questions!
Cool! This felt kind of like StarFox. On that note, I think the game could have benefited from a 3rd person view - sometimes I had a hard time predicting how close obstacles and enemies could be flown past without clipping and I think being able to see your ship would alleviate that issue.
There's a lot of technically impressive stuff going on here! I really like the lighting effects and the way you've got the claw model animating. I do like how the gameplay feels a lot, but there should be a casual mode or something that doesn't have the rising laser grid forcing players to rush the levels - and then a mode with the rising laser grid could still be there for the speedrunners and people looking for an extra challenge. As it is, the difficulty ramps up real quick and makes the game kind of hard to jump into.
Very nice graphics and animations. I like the use of positional audio too - audio effects like that get overlooked in too many games.
For the keyboard controls, I would have liked to have had a WASD option. The button mapping on an X-Input gamepad is really weird - movement on the left stick is fine, but shoot is assigned to d-pad up and the face buttons are all some weird sideways inverted movement.
The boss needs some sort of visual indication that it's taking damage and eating a death from that initial popup from the bottom of the screen with no warning felt kind of cheap. Other than those issues, the boss was fun and the artwork is great.
Thank you! Getting the neon effect to look right took a bunch of trial and error to get the textures and the glow shader to work well together. The colors used in the textures turned out to be really important - I had to use darker colors than you might expect to give the shader some (color) space to work with.
Since this was made for the game jam, I was targeting somewhere in the neighborhood of 10 to 20 minutes of gameplay because I figured that would be enough time to get a good feel for what this game has going for it, but wouldn't be so much that people wouldn't have time to finish playing through it while they're trying give the other 200-ish jam entries a try.
Thanks for playing and thanks for the nice comment!
Yep, entirely made with GMS2 - no fancy extensions or anything. One of my goals with this project was to make a type of game that people generally don't associate as something you'd make with GameMaker. Early on, I toyed around with the idea of making a racing game, but then I cranked out a simple maze generator to help test out how I was going to handle collisions and navigating the maze felt really good so I shifted focus to an FPS instead.
Thanks for noticing the visual health indicator things on the enemies. I didn't think it felt good to just have the enemies sponge a bunch of damage with no sign of progress, but I didn't want to just have floating health bars or numbers either- so, having a bunch of light bulbs or something floating around the enemies seemed like a nice way to be a little more subtle and on theme about it.
The letters on the walls represent cardinal directions and were originally for testing so that I could make sure my level generation algorithms were building the vertex buffers and setting the uv map coordinates correctly. As for the wall colors, you have to light up at least 50% of the maze green to activate the exit and when an enemy turns a green set of walls magenta, that does deduct from your active percentage of the maze. I don't think a lot of people have run into this, but if you get an enemy or two to chase you across the maze, they can actually take over big chunks of the maze real quick and make it difficult to get control of that 50% it takes to activate the exit. In a future revision, I'd really like to add something to the GUI that shows how much of the level is under player/enemy/neutral control to make that a little more clear.
Is that sprite stacking? If so, I don't think I've ever seen sprite stacking used quite like that. I dig the aesthetic. The collisions seem a little on the unforgiving side, but flying through the city feels really good.
When I saw that the theme was Neon, I immediately knew I had to learn how to write some flavor of glow shader and that I wanted to run said shader on some high res textures to try and pull off a super clean and (hopefully) convincing neon/florescent light aesthetic. The reflections were born out of a happy accident where I used the wrong sign on a z-axis value while testing something with the system that optimizes the vertex buffers that make up the mazes.
I did create the raw textures with vector software (Affinity Designer), exported them as PNG files at resolutions varying from 256x256 to 2048x2048, and then imported them int GMS2 as sprites. The low pov has been a common critique - so, behind the scenes over here I've been playing around with adjusting a few values and I think the effect I was going for can be better achieved by raising the eyeline up a few units and lowering the ceiling to about 1/3 the height it's at in the jam submission.
Thanks for playing, the feedback, and the kind words!
