Overview of current projects.
I don’t post nearly enough but I thought I’d make a post about what open projects I have going on – just so you know I’m not watching TV all the time. 
If you look in the menu above there are three titles – Psycho Pigs UXB, X-Quest 2 & Horace in the Mystic Woods, but I have two more titles I haven’t written about yet.
* Star Castle. This is a classic vector graphics game and it’s nearly done. Actually I could probably upload it as it is, but I’m not quite satisfied with it yet so I’ll work on it a little longer. Visually it’ll look like Omega Race 2009 and you can click >here< to see a preview of the menuscreen.
So, Star Castle should’ve been done now, but “unfortunately” I’ve been distracted (again…as usual 
) by a new project which I started about a week ago. A new competition over at Retro Remakes to make a PBeM game (Play-By-Email) caught my attention and I thought it could be a fun project to work on.
* ALIEN. I’ve always liked Laser Squad and I originally wanted to remake that for the PBeM competition but I realized it was probably a bit too much to try to remake that in two months. Instead I decided to remake the ZX Spectrum game, Alien – which is a singleplayer game, as a multiplayer game and I think it’s going to work. It’s still early days so there’s not screenshots yet.
When I have something interresting to show I’ll post it in my thread on the Retro Remakes forum >here<.
The game will allow up to 5 human players to play against each other. Well, up to 3 player can play humans and 2 players can play the aliens, so it makes sense to play humans against aliens. The game is set on the Nostromo and will play like a Lite version of Laser Squad. The competition will run for another two months and end on april 1st. so hopefully I can finish this one and get on with Star Castle and then those pesky piggies.
YEAH!!!…3 games completed!
Wow, this feels pretty good. I don’t have to biggest output of games – one, perhaps two games a year, and now I’ve made 3 games in 3 months and that’s pretty impressive if I must say so myself…and I do feel pretty proud of having produced 3 pretty solid new retro remakes in such a short time…
…but how do YOU feel about them?…let me know by leaving a comment on their respective pages.
The 3 games are of course made for the Retro Remakes 2008 Big Competition (go there if you don’t know what it is) and the 3 games, Zektor, Space Fury & Dingo are NOW available from their respective pages which is found in the menu above, or by clicking the links above.
Special thanks goes to: Oddbob, InfamousUK & Rich Douglas who all contributed to the audio part of the games.
You’re welcome to leave any questions or remarks about the games. Just do it here.
It’s been a busy 3 months but now I can finally take some time off to go on vacation and that’s exactly what I’ll do. Later today I’ll hop on a plane and go backpacking in asia for 7 weeks.
Dingo – Update #1
I’ve been sitting on my hands for about a week now, but I’ve been productive the last 4 days so now it’s time for an update.
After a few nights wasted programming the “AI” for the Dingo’s (which left them pretty brain damaged) I’ve redone the code from scratch and now it’s much better. They’re bouncing around the maze just the way they should.
They now also have the ability to pick up fruit, which they do by stopping up for a moment and stomping on it, and they will (so far) randomly throw the fruit around. I still need them to aim for the player – just once in a while at least.
Colission detection works between fruits thrown by the player and the enemies, so if two pieces of fruit collide they will both be destroyed.
Things still needed;
* Player can’t die yet.
* Enemies can’t be stunned yet.
* Level completion and progression is still missing
* 90% of all current graphics still has to be redrawn.
No pictures from the game yet as it’s still mostly using temporary graphics.
One piece of graphics I’m satisfied with though, is my logo (which I made about a month ago).
The original game is by A.C.G. so I’ve made the new logo look like Ultimate Play The Game‘s logo.
All in all, it’s coming together nicely.
New remake started: Dingo
Time is flying and I’ve been sitting on my hands for a week now, not being the least productive, so I’ve just started another remake. The singlescreen arcade game “Dingo” has been in my mind for a while so that will be my third game for the competition.
I like it because it’s a small and simple funny game…and possible to do in the time I have left.
As an added bonus it’s from Ultimate Play the Game…well A.C.G. but that’s really the same thing. ;)
Here’s two screenshots, from the arcadeversion, so you know what it looks like;
(not much to show from the remake though, as I ‘ve only just started)
(click pictures to enlarge them)
Changes and new features in Space Fury.
Here’s a little update on Space Fury.
The docking procedure/upgrade in the original game works like this: between every wave you get a chance to dock and get a better ship. The original has 3 extra ships to choose from, which is ok considering there’s only 5 enemy waves. If you get shot in the original game you die but you keep your upgraded ship.
I’d originally made the remake like that as well. However when I decided to up the number of waves from 5 to 20, I also added an extra 4th ship to chose from. But suddenly the docking option became extremely intrusive – coming after every wave, so now I’ve changed it to appear only every third wave which is much better…considering there’s also 4 times the amount of levels now.
Here is a couple of pictures of the docking sequences: the left one is from the original game, the one to the right is from my version.
On sunday I had a friend over and I showed the game to him. Then he asked a question;
Him: “So, do you lose your upgraded wings if they’re hit?”
Me: “Err..no. Is that a good idea?”
I hadn’t occurred to me before, but after thinking about it for a few minutes I had the thought that “Hell yeah, lets have the player lose the upgrade if the wings are hit“. That was actually a pretty good idea, because it solves the problem of the upgraded ships being extremely powerful, so now you can’t just circle the centre of the screen and blast everything in sight anymore.
Oh, and I should mention that in the original game there is no collision detection (or at least only minimal detection) on the upgraded wings…bullets often pass right through, but last night I added collision detection to the upgraded wings…well, I had to if I wanted them to be destructible.
So now you’ll still die if the red part of your ship is shot, but you’ll start again with your upgraded ship (if you have it), however, if your wings are shot they will explode and disappear but you’ll stay alive.
I think it adds a bit of depth to the game…which it could use.
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Come back soon…