itch.io

Fantastic game! Used it at an after work game event yesterday. It was the day after Valentines day and the theme for the event was: "For the love of gaming". This game fit the theme perfectly.

I was worried that the game would be too difficult for the players but we managed to get a perfect match on the first try. Played with 5 players in co-op.

For some reason the game didn't detect my XBox Series X/S controllers so I used rewasd to set up virtual DS4 controllers to get them to work.

Amazingly creative game and well executed!

Does the game work?

I  start the game and it says "press space, loser" but I've pressed space and nothing happens. I've pressed all buttons on the keyboard.  The only thing that works is pressing escape and that closes the game.

Thanks for the update! I played it again. Good fun. It still crashes occasionally but I don’t know what triggers the crash.

I played it now. The itch installation worked perfectly. Solo play is very addictive. I once made it to Solo Level 3 and I've also managed to pull off a few saves. It's easier to see who's about to win now and being able to hold the shoot button is much more comfortable.

I've tried chill speed and casual speed both were very enjoyable.

I found one bug. I now have to hold the start button on the gamepad in order for the game to pause. 

Also the game crashed once, not sure what happened and I couldn't find a log file.

Finding your player in local multiplayer:

One concern for 10 local players is the flashing box. It works well for 1 player, but maybe 10 flashing boxes will lead to too much flashing and it might still be hard to find your player, I haven't tested yet, so I'm just picturing what it would be like.

One idea for multiplayer:

• Some small detail on the ship can be in the player's color and the player's number can be displayed under (or over) the ship.
• The flashing box only appears when a "ping button" is held.

This way you have a way of keeping track of your player and if you lose track you can use the ping button to find your player, which will be easier if not everyone has a flashing box all the time.

Good stuff! Keep up the good work!

Great! I haven't played William's Defender so I looked it up to see where the inspiration came from. Looks like an interesting game. I like how you took inspiration from a single player game and tweaked it into it's own game with a multiplayer experience, bases and tug-of-war gameplay. Well done!

"Aim is currently part of ship movement - while moving up the bullets keep upward moment, vice versa for down, they fly straight when you fly straight. Was this clear or did it seem like the bullets were firing randomly? I think I can fit this info on the join screen."

It took a while to figure out and later I read about it in the HowToPlay. I think it would be good to have an instruction in-game or make it intuitive by tilting the ships in the shooting angle when going up or down.

"The game starts fairly slow and then picks up every 30 seconds until it's frantic and doesn't get any faster at the 2:30 mark but I am considering lowering the top speed a bit."

Ah, so that's what was happening! I noticed the game was slower in the beginning but I wasn't sure if it was a game speed glitch or something intentional. I suggest to add a line about it in the HowToPlay.

"I am also planning to make the bomber and swarmer waves spawn faster. They currently start at 20 and 30 seconds, new speed will be 15 and 20 because I feel like the lander factories are way more valuable at 10 seconds per wave (6 seconds at max game speed). What do you think?"

Not sure what to suggest here. If the spawn time is lower then the bases will be more valuable but also harder to steal with more enemies close to the bases. I guess it's something that needs to be iterated on. Game balance is often a tricky thing to "get right". Maybe find a good setting that is fun to play and then additionally expose the values in a property file or modifiers so people can adjust them if they want to tweak something.

BTW how is the difficulty increased from level to level in solo play? I feel like it ramps up quite quickly for me but I'm not sure how it's done. Do the computer controlled ships get better?

Good stuff! Keep up the good work!

Wow what an interesting game! Very cool concept and I really like the tug of war gameplay. The solo gameplay is very addictive but also very hard. I often got to Solo Level 1 but struggled to reach Solo Level 2.

I can confirm that the game works with 8 XBox One controllers and 2 PS4 controllers, but I have only played by myself.

Some suggestions:

Clearer visualization of win conditions:

I'm often surprised by who won and why. If the win conditions were visualized more clearly it would make the game more frantic near the end because you know someone is about to win. My suggestion is to:

• Visualize the number of humans with a bar (and a number).
• Visualize the bases with a bar in order to visualize if one team is close to getting all of the bases.

Less button mashing:

My fingers got tired when having to press a button for every shot. Consider making it so you can hold a shoot button to shoot several shots.

Make it easier to save a humanoid:

Consider making it easier to save humanoids. Having to both shoot the Lander and catch the humanoid in order to complete a save makes it very hard to save a humanoid. Only having to shoot the Lander would make this easier.

Clearer visualization of which team the bombers belong to: I can see by the outline which team the Bombers belong to but most of the body of the bomber is a random color so it's not as easy as the other types of ships to see which team they are on.

Some ideas:

• Right thumbstick aiming (with autofire when the thumbstick is pulled in a direction) could make it feel like you are more in control of the bullets. If this is added, maybe the bullets need to be slowed down so the players feel like they stand a chance to dodge the bullets.
• Modifiers to tweak the gameplay. e.g. options to change: number of players on screen, speed of the game, speed of bullets, etc.

I think you have created something really cool, I hope I haven't overwhelmed you with my suggestions and ideas.

(I'm not able to install the game via the Itch client. Consider fixing this so it's more convenient for people to try out the game.)

I played the game with my son today and ran into some bugs.

On the first run we tried to  start the first level but the VR view was completely messed up. After restarting it looked good again. I think I tinkered with super sampling while the game was running and before the level was started. That might have had something to do with the issue.

Later when we got to the darkness level the game crashed. After restarting and pressing continue it crashed again, also manually selecting the level caused it to crash. 
Valve Index, Windows 10, Swedish locale.

We also tried a secret level that seemed unbeatable. The VR player was sliding forwards by itself since the platforms were tilted downhill. The flat screen player could place a block to save the player at the first gap but after that there was no way of saving the VR player at the next gap and the VR player couldn’t jump.

Cool concept!
I love local VR co-op games and have a curator on Steam that aims to list all simultaneous local multiplayer VR games: VR + Couch multiplayer

Time has come for me to update that list :-)
1 year later ;-)

OK downloaded the macOS version and saw that it's python so I guess the source is already available. Unfortunately I have very little time to work on spare time projects, but if I somehow manage to get it working on Windows I'll let you know.

Thanks for responding :-) 
Glad to hear it may happen in the future. 
BTW is the source available somewhere? 
If it is, maybe I can help make it work on Windows?

Hi,
Game looks interesting and fun :-)
Any chance of a Windows version?
I've managed to play joustmania on Windows and that game also uses the PSMove API.

I realize that this is a bit late but I tried the installer version. It prompted me for admin credentials to install XNA redistributable and then it stopped. Same when I pressed the launcher button again. 

What works for me is: Going to local files and starting setup.exe or just starting the .application file.

Great! It works!

Tested to load of the old levels I had converted extracted and converted to png and it worked straight away. :-)

Thanks for the nogore option as well!

How hard would it be to add support for levels that fit modern screens? Like 16:9 ratio levels. Could be good to have some extra space for 8 player matches.

Nice! Will try again when the magic script has pushed the next build to itch. :-)

Tested now to modify the png files in the custom folder but no matter what I do it still uses the original images. Changing the collision text file works though.

Am I missing something or doing it wrong?

:-D

I know, I know... it's out of scope for now but... would it be easier to use "gobpack.exe -u" (included in the zip I sent via mail) to unpack the gobs to pcx and text files and then convert the pcx to png and in the end use png + text files as input instead of the gob files?

Cheers!
/MODOOSFT

I must be a master of digging out old stuff from the void ;-)
"GOB file documentation:

             THE FORMAT OF GOBFILES

Do YOU want to make your own GOB-files?
Then you have to know the GOB format!
Here you can find a brief desciption of it.
(this is all about how the file is saved)
Note: Everything is saved in Intel byteorder,
ie the least significant byte first.

                  THE HEADER

Offset   Size   Description
 0        2      Number of images in the file

For I=1 to Number of images

   Offset   Size   Description
    2+I*4    4      Offset in file to image data

End repeat

The above offsets are offsets from the beginning of
the file. Each image has it's own image data.
The image data is like this:

                THE IMAGE DATA

Offset   Size   Description
 0        2      Image width in pixels (W)
 2        2      Image height in pixels (H)
 4        2      Hotspot x
 6        2      Hotspot y
 8        W*H    Bitmap data

The offsets above are offsets in the image data (for each image).

The Hotspot x/y of a specific image works like this:
Whenever a sprite is drawn at (x, y) with that image,
the image is drawn at (x - hotspot x, y - hotspot y),
where hotspot x/y are the hotspots for that image.

The bitmap data is just a block of colordata for each pixel.
It scans the image horisontally left/down. This means that
the first byte represents the upper left pixel, the second
represents the pixel to the right of that and so on.
If the width is 10  pixels then the 10th byte of bitmap data
will represent the pixel (0, 1)."

Found it in a text file in this zip:

I understand that it's probably out of scope, just found it very amusing that I actually found it :-)

Anyhow, when I find the time I'll see if I can get an old level working and then see if I can automate the process to get all old levels working.

The original files inside the .dat files seem to be in another format and other file names.

Originally:
Level images are .PCX
Sprites are .GOB
Sound effects are .SMP
And music is .MOD

See here for description of the files: http://www.aiei.ch/linux/jumpnbump/level-making/

If I want to get the levels working I guess I need to convert the level images and rename those files to match the filenames currently in the custom folder. Does the game currently support the custom sound effects, sprites and music?

OK. I’m considering making a solution where double clicking on a level file will automatically place it in the custom folder and start the game. Should work.

Neat that the nogore option is in. :-)

Custom level loading would be really great even if it was just a command line option.

I’m happy to be a supporter of this project even though I understand that the donations don’t cover a lot of dev time.

Good luck with them de-makes!

It’s an issue with XBox controllers. I have XBox360 controllers but it should be the same for all XInput controllers that don’t have a magic switch on the controller to force them to use Direct Input. What kind of controllers were the 4 usb controllers? 

A lot of frameworks allow at least 8 Direct Input controllers and a maximum of 4 XInput controllers. If they do this they use the XInput API for the XInput controllers and Direct Input API for the rest. When doing so they filter out all XInput gamepads on the Direct Input side so they don’t get duplicates. There is no easy way to know which 4xinput controllers are accessed via XInput so they filter out all of them from the direct input enumeration. Some frameworks have a way of disabling XInput altogether in order to access all controllers via Direct Input to get past the 4 controller cap for XInput controllers. As I understand this is only a Windows issue.

Good to hear that it’s at least been considered. Would’ve been a cool feature if it had worked out.

Might actually be what happened :-O

I found  it via the archive of: jumpbump.mine.nu

https://web.archive.org/web/20080223055443/http://www.jumpbump.mine.nu:80/

The link was  “Level Mirror #1”.

:-)

It could be. I downloaded them many years ago. I was pretty thorough so I wouldn't be surprised if they are all there.

I found this archived site too: https://web.archive.org/web/20110830033044/http://jumpnbump.spaceteddy.net/

The all levels zip still works.

Levels are now sent via the contact form. Let me know if there are any issues accessing them via the link.
If you want to preview the levels I dug out an archived version of brainchild designs website: https://web.archive.org/web/20160303200345/http://brainchilddesign.com/bottom.ph...

Donated :-)

Sounds like a good spawn strategy. Guessing some of the levels don’t have 8 spawn points so they’ll need to be tested and maybe categorized depending on how many players they support.

I don’t have access to the levels from where I’m at so I’ll send them some time on Sunday or Monday. 

Great!

Sure, I’ll send the levels. Going away for the weekend but I’ll get them to you after the weekend if I don’t manage to do it before. I’ve even fixed the spawn points on several of them so they work with 4 players. If I recall correctly Jump n bump had spawn points on every other tile is it the same for remastered?

Tested the game with a fifth Xbox360 controller but it doesn’t work. Looks like the game accessed XInput controllers via the XInput API which has max 4 controllers. More info about this issue can be found here: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/morethan4localmultiplayer/discussions/0/135514...

I don’t have any experience with the Godot engine though so I don’t know how easily this can be fixed.

Which is better for you, donate button or purchase on itch.io?

Awesome! I love Jump 'n' bump! Used to play it a lot with friends back in the days. Now I can finally enjoy it in full fullscreen again instead of fullscreen with a small viewport since I couldn't get scaleup to work on my graphics card. :-)

Really cool that you support 8 players! I have 8 controllers, do you know if Godot supports more than 4 XInput controllers via DirectInput?

I have over 250 levels for the original jump 'n' bump on my drive, would be really cool if they could be used with the remastered version.

Also the old cheats were quite interesting to spice up the gameplay:
jetpack, bunniesinspace, bloodisthickerthanwater, pogostick, (lordoftheflies... well actually I don't miss the flies.)

Also the -nogore switch was handy for times when you play with kids.

Are there any plans for supporting the custom jump 'n' bump levels and cheats?

Great work in keeping this old gem alive!

Yes that’s exactly right. XInput controllers are enumerated both by direct input and XInput so if there wasn’t some kind of filtering out on the direct input side you would control 2 players in the game. Hopefully your attempt to “not listen to XInput” will disable the filtering as well.

The first version of Defend the night worked with 8 XInput controllers but the controllers were a bit too sensitive so some additional dead zone needed to be added. Hope this is a clue to get it working again.

Thanx! I'll check it out. :-)

BTW is it easy to  make an XInput disabled build of Defend the night update 2?

Interesting concept!

I’ve seen games use split controllers to get 8 players with 4 controllers. Is this something you’ve already considered?

Cool! When I get around to it I’ll add it to this list: https://steamcommunity.com/groups/morethan4localmultiplayer/discussions/0/154644...

Interesting. How many players does it support?