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A videogame I am working on.


It's very WIP right now.

I'm playing as the guy in red fighting against the purple guy. There are two ways to damage your opponent

1) Melee. When two players collide, a melee collision occurs. The winner is whoever was moving faster in their opponents direction. The loser gets damaged and knocked back. It's hard to tell when this happens in the video and who wins the melee clash because it still needs graphics for it.
2) Energy Attacks. These are only half-implemented at the moment

There's a red circle around me which indicates how much energy I have. The larger the circle the more energy. When the circle is red energy is being drained, when it's green energy is being gained. You use energy from moving, teleporting, and charging energy attacks. You start to regain energy after a brief moment of not using energy. If you run out of energy, you have to wait a second before it starts to recharge.

The idea is that you want to outmaneuver your opponent to score a hit.

I'm working on a meta-game surrounding this giving you something to fight over. The idea is that what you're looking at would be an individual level, which would be considered an entire world. You'd have to kill everyone on the world (roughly 4 enemies per world) in order for it to be conquered. I'm working on a very simple mount-and-blade like galaxy view where various factions are fighting over the planets.
 
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It's pretty neat to watch, but I am confused as to what the objective is.
Still very cool though!
 
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9001 tabs of acid?

Some really cool functions going on, but like phrack I too am confused what the objective is :S
 

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Sorry, I should have included an explanation in the first post.

It's very WIP right now.

I'm playing as the guy in red fighting against the purple guy. There are two ways to damage your opponent

1) Melee. When two players collide, a melee collision occurs. The winner is whoever was moving faster in their opponents direction. The loser gets damaged and knocked back. It's hard to tell when this happens in the video and who wins the melee clash because it still needs graphics for it.
2) Energy Attacks. These are only half-implemented at the moment

There's a red circle around me which indicates how much energy I have. The larger the circle the more energy. When the circle is red energy is being drained, when it's green energy is being gained. You use energy from moving, teleporting, and charging energy attacks. You start to regain energy after a brief moment of not using energy. If you run out of energy, you have to wait a second before it starts to recharge.

The idea is that you want to outmaneuver your opponent to score a hit.

I'm working on a meta-game surrounding this giving you something to fight over. The idea is that what you're looking at would be an individual level, which would be considered an entire world. You'd have to kill everyone on the world (roughly 4 enemies per world) in order for it to be conquered. I'm working on a very simple mount-and-blade like galaxy view where various factions are fighting over the planets.
 
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Very interesting wip it looks quite fancy to be honest and I look forward to seeing more
 
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Many years ago I made a flash game using these 2D melee mechanics plus kiblast pong (albeit in open-air).
I really love what you've done with the overall geometry 'flame' and destruction methods. Really cool! Have you played around with different sprite concepts or are you specifically aiming for this over-arching psychedelic niche?
 

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Thanks Kynetik. If you still have the flash game around or some screens of it I'd love to check it out. Sounds interesting.

I have no drawing ability. so progmatically generating all art assets on the fly as simple lines / polygon primitives just seemed like the only reasonable approach I could take. I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out, and there's enough features left that I still need to implement that I can't see myself spending time on trying to change the overall visual feel of it.

I'm pretty certain that I'm going to continue down that route with the energy attack system. I'm still playing around trying to get something that is good, but I'm pretty sure I'm going to end up modifying this particle system I built in the past to serve as energy attack graphics.


We'll see, but most likely no sprites there either.
 
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Bulk particle effects are mesmerizing, could watch for hours. I think that will suit energy fx nicely.

I did find the old Flash, but it really makes me cringe now XD




It basically focused more on playing pong with a ki blast, and then allowed melee chain attacks while enemy was injured. You used keys to freely move around, mouse to aim, had a button to teleport, and used left mouse to charge/fire/deflect/melee. If you last deflected the blast it changes to your colour and will follow the mouse, or boost at it directly with left click. But it all plays so ridiculously fast it's difficult to master. Still, was a fun learning point.
 

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That's awesome dude. I'd no joke love to try it out if you're willing to put it online. I understand if not.
 
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It looks cool it reminds me of a very basic 1.1 where you have accounted for LSM by making the hit go to the longer swooper. It’s pretty cool. Idk why but if you were taking suggestions I’m Into very basic stick figures at the moment so I think it would be cool to have those be your person- I realize that there would be a slew of new work such as animating so I see why you wouldn’t want to do that. But like I said before I like the video you prepared with the music and graphics you have, but I do feel like it’s hard to see the objective.
 

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thanks gohan. It's definitely based on trying to translate how ESF plays into a 2d context, I'm glad that's recognizable. Do note though that it's not necessarily the longer swooper that wins a melee collision. Some momentum can be discarded depending on the velocities and positions of the players involved.

For example, one player is moving with a momentum of let's say (40, 0). Another player hits them from above with a velocity of (0, 30). If the angle was such that the second player is at least slightly behind the direction that the first player was moving in, it's going to discount the x velocity of the first player as not relevant in the collision. The second player will win because they have more momentum in the velocity that mattered, the vertical velocity. I also did some other subtle but probably controversial things in an attempt make angle hits be preferred / matter. I'm not even going to mention what they are because I'm curious if anyone notices it when playing.

The other thing I wanted to say was, in regards to comparing this to ESF, I got rid of the stationary recharge to a more passive recharge which starts automatically after not using energy for a couple hundred milliseconds, which is something I've always wanted to see in ESF. You can however double the speed at which you recharge if you touch terrain (temporary bonus which goes away the moment you use energy again).

As for stick figures, we're on the same page here. So much so that they already are stick figures. It's just super hard to see because I made the characters very small. I should probably increase the size. I'd then have to animate them though (at the moment I'm just applying force to body parts depending on their velocity ingame), which sounds annoying.

Video shows a blown up version of the stick figure that's ingame.

 
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Ah I see I was wondering if angles would be the deal breaker so essentially you wouldn’t try to do head ons. Good job for fixing that broken concept from the esf betas. It’s a good idea and looks like it’s implemented well. I like the concept that you have for recharging, it sounds like you wanted drifting/falling to do this in esf and I can get behind that. Thanks for blowing up the people for me that exactly what I was hoping for. The only other thing would be for it to be a phone game lol I haven’t sat down at a pc/laptop for anything besides TPS Reports and that kinda blows, but this is the way.
 
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Oh man, that takes me back. Ragdolling can be very useful the way you are already using itI think. I did a whole bunch of stick figure ragdoll work way back in the early flash days (Stairfall for example), I still see my code used every now and then lol

What youre doing there smoothly handles a larger number of entities than I ever did tho- I applaud your efforts! I really like your idea of passive recharge, it gives me a plugin idea for ESF.

Oh, here's Spirit Showdown. Cringe away!
I recommend Practice mode so the AI doesn't pick you apart. Cheat codes I remember are 'dende' and 'broly'.
I also once translated budokai tenkaichi into 2D with some tweaks, sadly never got around to doing AI - am currently hunting for the last build in my old drives. A long time ago I tried making ZBALL, same sort of principle of fighting for control of a energy ball, but more like combatitive hackey-sack and you could melee directly. A mix of Soldat and ESF controls, very steep learning curve and too complex. Didn't like running in browsers very well though, despite later attempts to remake it.
 

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nsw316 said:
Ah I see I was wondering if angles would be the deal breaker so essentially you wouldn’t try to do head ons. Good job for fixing that broken concept from the esf betas. It’s a good idea and looks like it’s implemented well. I like the concept that you have for recharging, it sounds like you wanted drifting/falling to do this in esf and I can get behind that. Thanks for blowing up the people for me that exactly what I was hoping for. The only other thing would be for it to be a phone game lol I haven’t sat down at a pc/laptop for anything besides TPS Reports and that kinda blows, but this is the way.
yeah I hear you with the TPS reporting. I'm going out of my way to make sure the game is playable with only my right hand in the arrow keys area, because my left one is destroyed from years as a stenographer / programmer / guitar / years of playing PC games.

There's nothing technically preventing me from putting it on a phone, but unfortunately I don't think it'd work as a mobile game without a massive rehaul of the general scale of things. Part of the reason it's so zoomed out, to the extent that you can barely see the stick figure characters, is that you really want there to be a large heads up before an enemy character appears on your screen. Else it'd be like playing the first two versions of grand theft auto, where you're playing top down and driving cars. You'd hit people / get hit and it'd feel arbitrary and unfair because there wasn't enough warning. I could be completely wrong here but I think you'd have to essentially have your characters as like 4 pixels or something absurdly small to work on screens the size of a phone. That might be a good project to look into later down the line though.

Also yeah, drifting in ESF was where the motivation to make energy work like that came from. I'm pretty sure you understand this game better than every single person who has already played it. Which is entirely my fault for having no tutorial, but yeah. +1 for good ESF players

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Oh man, that takes me back. Ragdolling can be very useful the way you are already using itI think. I did a whole bunch of stick figure ragdoll work way back in the early flash days (Stairfall for example), I still see my code used every now and then lol

What youre doing there smoothly handles a larger number of entities than I ever did tho (barring ICE physics using classic softimage) I applaud your efforts! I really like your idea of passive recharge, it gives me a plugin idea for ESF.

Oh, here's Spirit Showdown. Cringe away!
I recommend Practice mode so the AI doesn't pick you apart. Cheat codes I remember are 'dende' and 'broly'.
I also once translated budokai tenkaichi into 2D with some tweaks, sadly never got around to doing AI - am currently hunting for the last build in my old drives. A long time ago I tried making ZBALL, same sort of principle of fighting for control of a energy ball, but more like combatitive hackey-sack and you could melee directly. A mix of Soldat and ESF controls, very steep learning curve and too complex. Didn't like running in browsers very well though, despite later attempts to remake it.

I also once translated budokai tenkaichi into 2D with some tweaks, sadly never got around to doing AI - am currently hunting for the last build in my old drives. A long time ago I tried making ZBALL, same sort of principle of fighting for control of a energy ball, but more like combatitive hackey-sack and you could melee directly. A mix of Soldat and ESF controls, very steep learning curve and too complex. Didn't like running in browsers very well though, despite later attempts to remake it.
In regards to the stick figures, yours vs mine is probably just the difference in speed between c++ and actionscript.

Spirit Showdown is awesome, I'm glad I asked and I'm glad you posted. You should be proud you made that, there's nothing cringe worthy about it. It's really damn hard. It seems like the type of thing you could get good at with practice though. Had a smile on my face while trying it out. The energy effect looks good. The characters look good too. I laughed when I heard the ESF sounds.

Please post ZBall if you ever find it

edit: All right, melee is for chumps. I've found I can kill the AI if I just spam strong beams.
 
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Thanks man, that means a lot. It's not terrible, but there's many things Id do differently if I did it again. One thing I really hate is I didnt do the blur effect properly on the ki blast relative to camera zoom.


Going thru my archives Ive come across so many bold and unoptimised mothballed projects that never went anywhere, a great memory trip. Regarding the DBZ-esque I did find the last build of ZBall. It was one of my very first flash game projects. It has a lot going on, and when run on a browser it has lag and collision issues that make it almost impossible to play as intended. I also found one of the last builds of Flash Budokai. Largely unfinished, but still has lots of cool content and control. Press O to instantly refill your ki gauge. Also very laggy on a browser, which is annoying because i dont get any lag playing it locally.
 
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KYnetiK said:
Thanks man, that means a lot. It's not terrible, but there's many things Id do differently if I did it again. One thing I really hate is I didnt do the blur effect properly on the ki blast relative to camera zoom.

Going thru my archives Ive come across so many bold and unoptimised mothballed projects that never went anywhere, a great memory trip. Regarding the DBZ-esque I did find the last build of ZBall. It was one of my very first flash game projects. It has a lot going on, and when run on a browser it has lag and collision issues that make it almost impossible to play as intended. I also found one of the last builds of Flash Budokai. Largely unfinished, but still has lots of cool content and control.
Nothing is ever perfect. All anyone can ever do is put forth their best effort, with everything just being a result of its time and place. For video games, something that isn't a tool meant to solve a specific problem, I think one can pretty much work indefinitely on any given project without ever running out of things to do.

I personally have more than 100+ git repos which amounted to little more than a few hours of work fooling around with an idea before abandoning it. I have even more than that lurking on the depths of various harddrives. I think to a certain extent that's inevitable and fine. It's all part of a learning process. There's a civilization-like game that I've been working on since 2012 which still is in terrible shape in terms of being an actual game, but working on that has been invaluable in terms of being a learning process, as well as a reference for how I should do things going forward.

More importantly though, I know that making things like what you were making is challenging. I'm obviously biased in that I'm making something which is pretty similar to the stuff you posted, but still, it's cool stuff in my mind.

I like that ZBall has the type of physics that it does, in that you don't continue floating in place when flying. It's a good feel to it, and it's something I never really liked about LBZ. Also liked the 3d-level-edge effect. Both run at about 30 FPS but I'm thinking they're probably hardcoded to 30? Feels less playable than Spirit Showdown, I couldn't even manage to get a melee hit off, but I think the timing of your clicking with the melee collision impact is what puts it over the edge there. Maybe that's just the browser collision issues though. I got my ass handed to me.

Flash Budokai seems a lot more fleshed out, but also a bit paradoxically more incomplete due to it being more ambitious? This sounds lame but it's cool that all the menus are fleshed out. The stats screen is nifty. You can actually rebind your keys which is a feature that a lot of indie games I have paid money for lack... You bothered to have a transition / animation for the fight intro. It looks like there's no AI but it's clear to me that a lot of work went into this. I imagine it'd be fun if it was in a little bit more playable of state. Thanks for posting man.
 
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That's exactly right, every developer no doubt has a huge archive of mothballed stuff. It's all a part of that critical learning process. We dont always go back and sift through it though, and boy what a time capsule that is! A lot of the things I wanted to do were overall rather complex, but in my mind its all about mastering a 'sophisticated use of the basics'.

Getting a certain functionality to work, giving it the polish you want, and getting optimum performance out of it are all very different beasts worth taming. And revisiting them in different variations too. With flash, I loved that it let you easily dip your toes in and become adept in all areas of the media - drawing, animation, sound, script etc, and design topology in general. I personally loved doing every aspect myself - until I had to compete with smartphone app developers XD

Budokai was very ambitious at that time. I was at a point that I had a more complete idea of what the core shell of a game required, and had learnt that I needed to be able to make simple yet complex gameplay while using as few buttons as possible. It reflects my appreciation of the design principles that went into Tenkaiichi that many overlook. Many aspects of movement, melee and finisher attacks are direct analogues.

That project forced me to attempt many functions I hadnt done before and put them together, like all creative urges should. One thing apart from the key mapping and transition animations you mentioned was also dynamic/cinematic camera functions that you may notice during certain super moves. It also taught me a lot in how to deal with a large number of player and camera states for increased animation control, which served me very well in later platform/fighter projects. Sadly there is no AI, but I did slowly get into that more later (albeit with far less complex player states XD)

Sadly the last game I got paid for considerably was The Gauntlet. This is a fairly straightforward 'runner' type game. Most runner games let you press Up or Down to dodge obstacles. Believe it or not, this game was literally the first runner title that let you use Left and Right as well, and had more special functions too, as well as powerups, traps (watch out for the red one that flips your screen upside down!), a Bonus Stage, and scoring system. Unfortunately the High Score system is broken since my website is long gone now.
 
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KYnetiK said:
That's exactly right, every developer no doubt has a huge archive of mothballed stuff. It's all a part of that critical learning process. We dont always go back and sift through it though, and boy what a time capsule that is! A lot of the things I wanted to do were overall rather complex, but in my mind its all about mastering a 'sophisticated use of the basics'.

Getting a certain functionality to work, giving it the polish you want, and getting optimum performance out of it are all very different beasts worth taming. And revisiting them in different variations too. With flash, I loved that it let you easily dip your toes in and become adept in all areas of the media - drawing, animation, sound, script etc, and design topology in general. I personally loved doing every aspect myself - until I had to compete with smartphone app developers XD
you know, I've never used flash, but everyone that worked with it seems to have a lot of good things to say about it. I know there are performance and security issues, but it seems like it was a solid API / workflow. I got pretty familiar with HTML5's Canvas due to needing to use it for work, and from what I understand, that + some of the libraries I used wrapping around it (mainly EaselJS) were designed to mimic the way you worked in flash. It's very different from the way things are structured in 9001, but it's good.

Also yeah, aside from the logo and some third party c++ libraries (to handle json manipulation/saving/loading, multiplatform window creation / audio playing / drawing simple primitives to the screen) I've done everything in this project myself. I went pretty minimal on the third party library use too, creating my own code for things which probably should have been third party libraries like a thread pool system, entity component system, physics, a custom slot map container class for storing data in compact contiguous arrays while still providing a stable ID to retrieve and reference data... Actually now that I think about it I'll probably end up finding some royalty free music for this, I don't think it'd be realistic for me to try to create my own music. Mostly though, I definitely relate to that.

KYnetiK said:
Budokai was very ambitious at that time. I was at a point that I had a more complete idea of what the core shell of a game required, and had learnt that I needed to be able to make simple yet complex gameplay while using as few buttons as possible. It reflects my appreciation of the design principles that went into Tenkaiichi that many overlook. Many aspects of movement, melee and finisher attacks are direct analogues.

That project forced me to attempt many functions I hadnt done before and put them together, like all creative urges should. One thing apart from the key mapping and transition animations you mentioned was also dynamic/cinematic camera functions that you may notice during certain super moves. It also taught me a lot in how to deal with a large number of player and camera states for increased animation control, which served me very well in later platform/fighter projects. Sadly there is no AI, but I did slowly get into that more later (albeit with far less complex player states XD)
Man, a surprising amount of thought and work needs to go into making a good camera. If it's doing its job correctly it's something the player should never think about. Highly recommend watching this video which is a developer of the game Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet going into how their camera works.


Personally, the camera system in my game is pretty terrible. It doesn't do any dynamic zooming depending on how far away enemies are. It does keep track of the player and nearby enemy positions / velocity and attempt to position itself accordingly, but it's hard to do it right. There's a point in the second fight in the second video I posted here where you can see my camera messing up, where the enemy is just off screen to the right, and there's space to my players left for the camera to scoot over just a little for both characters to be in view.

KYnetiK said:
Sadly the last game I got paid for considerably was The Gauntlet. This is a fairly straightforward 'runner' type game. Most runner games let you press Up or Down to dodge obstacles. Believe it or not, this game was literally the first runner title that let you use Left and Right as well, and had more special functions too, as well as powerups, traps (watch out for the red one that flips your screen upside down!), a Bonus Stage, and scoring system. Unfortunately the High Score system is broken since my website is long gone now.
Played it for a bit, until the point where I got the arrow signs to go away. Solid and complete. The animations, specifically the teleporting in somewhere is something that I've been wanting to do for my project. I was thinking each fight would start with a teleporting in and then a countdown like in a fighting game. Have been putting it off because I'd have to come up with some graphics and animations for it which isn't something I'm particularly good at doing.

It seems like the mobile market and, to a lesser extent, Steam kind of ate the lunch of flash developers. Same can be said for modding. You don't see many total conversion mods like ESF or any of the Half-life mods for modern games. If you have the talent to do that, you probably are using a free game engine which doesn't need one to buy another game before playing your owrk. You're also probably charging money for your game.
 
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That video was great, I really love how they visualised their debug display too. Very clever approach finding the perfect virtual center for smooth fixed tracking across multiple entities. I used a similar principle for sharing screen space with enemies and attacks, however in the past I too often used cam velocities so the cam would chase a simple average point & scale which indeed has the potential for transition issues. If you can calculate that ideal averaged coordinate for every situation, just lock to it ^_^

Dynamic zooming is annoying to get right, very contextual and reflects the speeds of the objects in shot. Ideally, a soft lock system that when in range of entities the cam follows the virtual collective center and area, and when out of range follows the player. Also, taking into account the edge boundaries of the level in determining that center is important too.

Regarding those sorts of transition scenes, I've found it more helpful to put them in as early as possible - even as placeholders - than try to supplant them in later. They can also be useful for a buffer period for certain things to initialise, or as a general system that can be applied to other objects and make them function easier. And sometimes the proto 'art' can often be more instructive symbolically and define the overall artistic character moving forward - for example with The Gauntlet the proto backgrounds became the plot setting, as more detail meant sacrificing speed, vision/contrast, and overall reliability.

I'm actually curious how 9001 handles attack cooloffs and wall/surface collisions. Cant quite tell if melee is always a swooping attack or if there is a standing melee also? How would it handle both players using standing/low speed melee against each other at once. Also, no teleport?

Yeah, a lot of markets simply swallowed actionscript, and development in general became a lot more accessible and commercially organised. Back in the day, individual creators would get thousands of dollars for their work. The market permeation skyrocketed, stakes got higher, and more staff want their cut.

Flash originally allowed some hacky shortcuts since you could execute pure code, but also run code along a timeline. The concept of art, time and frames was already a part of the system, so it made a lot of things quick and easy to build - that really appealed to artists and those who understood what the software could do. When it switched to almost pure object-oriented scripting methods, it made a lot of basic things more annoying and time consuming to build for the sake of runtime efficiencies you might not even be taking advantage of. I struggled to learn, relearn, and adapt in time to keep up.

For example, what could be built before within minutes, later took an absurd amount of time even setting up and awkward to work with thereafter. A 3 step process often became an 11 step process, even simple buttons. So a lot hinged on making many useful libraries well before you even started your project. It made it nigh impossible to loosely experiment anymore. Sometimes there were improved native functions to use, sometimes you lost functions. I don't enjoy working when literally everything is completely abstracted. But it worked well for organised teams with a cogent project assignment.

I tentatively was looking into learning HTML5 recently to get back into the game, but am undecided. I can handle pawn somewhat when making amx plugins. I started learning BASIC at school at when I was 14 (building simple games in class instead of the class work), then got onto animating and AS shortly after, so I know I'm more of a scripter than a pure coder - I simply enjoy a mathematical and design challenge (to a point). Even now if I have a random idea or want to explore some mechanic or geometric conundrum, I hop on old versions of flash and I'm firing away immediately. Hell, even recently I was working on dynamic pendulum physics (like Worms ninja rope) and zmapping data (like Roash Rash) just out of random curiosity to understand them better. And since my kids are currently in love with playing old mega drive roms I get all sorts of intriguing thoughts come to mind XD Bless the patience of old school assembly coders!
 

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