December 16th, 2009
i’m pretty bad at these, aren’t i… okay, so Happy Ball Is Happy has been in the wild for a while now, so time for a quick postmortem.
What went right?
This was my first attempt at an arena-based shoot ‘em up and literally the first piece of C++ code i’ve ever written, in that respect it went quite well! i’m not sure i’ll be using C++ for any further projects to be honest, but it was a learning experience and should i decide to try XNA or perhaps Java development at some point it should be a good grounding. As a game, it played pretty well and although it doesn’t appear to have even registered as a blip on most people’s radars, i quite like it so [ppphhhpppt!]
What went wrong?
The final result was rushed because i was getting annoyed with it not being out the door. There was an issue with Vista Home reported that i simply couldn’t trace (since i don’t have any Vista boxes myself and the only ones available to use for testing were running Vista Business or Ultimate) and issues with how Allegro doesn’t protect the contents of video RAM, meaning that it’s easily possible to trash all of the graphics by tabbing away and then back to the game.
What was learnt along the way?
Well, apart from a smattering of C++ the most important lesson is “yes, having spawning points works” and that was the biggie; one of the problems i’ve noted with most arena-based shoot ‘em ups has always been the enemies spawn into the play area, that means there are moment when they’ll be trying to materialise directly under the player’s sprite. The “boss” nasty in Happy Ball Is Happy means that it’s obvious where each spawned attacker is going to come from even if the player hasn’t learnt the release patterns to know what’ll be along next.
Final thoughts
It’s a hideously simple game really and has that forced cuteness that comes from not quite being able to pull off true cuteness due to a high level of cynicism, but Happy Ball Is Happy did what it was meant to and is still a giggle to play. Perhaps a sequel, redone in BlitzMax with more options, joypad controls and so forth should be on the cards…
Tags: Allegro, C++, game, Happy Ball, postmortem, programming, shmup, shoot ‘em up
Posted in Development, Project 3 | No Comments »
October 5th, 2009
Although there’s an issue on Vista Home which refused to play nice despite every other version of Windows being relatively cheerful about it, i’ve decided to release Happy Ball Is Happy to my fans – all two of ‘em! For anyone not following the development, Happy Ball’s Happy Place has been invaded by an evil Big Happy Ball and it’s army of minions; the overall goal is to destroy the Big Happy Ball whilst avoiding or toasting the smaller ones launched.
click here for more happiness than you can normally shake a stick at and a postmortem will follow at some point.
Tags: Allegro, C++, game, Happy Ball, programming, released, shmup, shoot ‘em up, STG
Posted in Development, Project 3 | No Comments »
July 13th, 2009
Y’know, there was something nagging me… and this is it! i meant to produce a quick postmortem for every completed Illogistix product but didn’t get around to it with Quantizer. So here it is, just a quick couple of paragraphs of what passes for thought.
What went right?
Since the objective with Quantizer was to write a simple, fun shoot ‘em up with an online scoring system to see how busy these things can get, generally speaking the entire project went pretty much as i’d planned; it could probably have been more popular (at the time of writing, the online scores appear to have “stalled” at 198 plays) but for the short term at least a few players have enjoyed it and some of the scores Fossil has dragged out of the thing have been rather impressive.
What went wrong?
Nothing actually went wrong as such, although the overall design could probably have been something deeper or at the least allow for more variety. A few people at the Shmups.com forums complained that the scoring was “broken” although it was a deliberate design choice on my part, mainly because it amused me to think of people trying to avoid actually killing about a third of the nasties in order to milk them for score!
What was learnt along the way?
Well, along with some odds and sods of online score programming (or more accurately, honing what already existed in a very rough form until it worked correctly), i did learn quite a bit of useful information about shoot ‘em ups from Fossil, in particular about drawing order of objects and so forth. There’s also the issue of the multiplier and scoring system, that needs a lot more future investigation i think…
Final thoughts
All told i’m still rather pleased with Quantizer, it might be a very simple project but the result worked out pretty well all things considered.
Posted in Development, Project 2.5 | 1 Comment »
July 11th, 2009
Right, i’ve been busy the last couple of weeks with all manner of non-programming type things (and that’ll be true again in the very near future unfortunately) but yesterday and today saw a major leap in project 3 – and it has a name now, it’s called Happy Ball Is Happy (because he is) and here’s a screenshot of the current code during play:
Happy Ball meets the other happy balls!
The game is essentially finished now that the hiccups that were being caused by the ham-fisted way i was handling the draw cycle are fixed and it’s only lacking some proper attack pattern data to round things off and i’ll take another stab at adding joypad control because right now i’m rather ironically playing my own game with Joy2Key! That lot may well take a while since i have a few other things on my plate (which reminds me… i haven’t eaten much today!) but it won’t be too much longer before Happy Ball is truly with us!
Tags: Allegro, C++, game, Happy Ball, programming, shmup, shoot ‘em up, STG
Posted in Development, Project 3 | No Comments »
June 26th, 2009
Well okay, i’m probably over playing it but C++ has to be one of the most horrifically picky languages i’ve ever dealt with! After half a day of not understanding any of the references i had on paper or found on the web as regards objects (i get the principles, just not how to implement them) the game now uses arrays instead. [Rude gesture at the OOP fans!] And whose bright idea was it to use radians for sin and cos…?!
When i’ve settled on the final “theme” and got something more than test graphics to show, there’ll be pretties.
Tags: Allegro, C++, game, programming, shmup, shoot ‘em up, STG
Posted in Development, Project 3 | No Comments »
