Chinchilla And The Beast

Posted by oddbob on February 11, 2008 · Lovingly Filed Under Development Log 
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So Retrovision this year has come and gone, and once again I didn’t attend. Also, this year - I didn’t write the “official” RV game, instead it was handled by Wired Worm. Something I’m quite glad of given the time I’ve had to put into development - well, pretty much since the last RV now I think about it. But I wanted to give it a shout out anyway as it’s quite a nice little blaster and far, far better than I could have turned out in the timescale Top job Pete!

It’s called Warpforce Chinchilla and you can cadge yourself a copy here. Although I will say this as my only real gripe - S for smart bomb. S FOR SMART BOMB? Are you a crazy? Still, I suppose it’s one way to put people off using their bombs!

As regular readers will no doubt be aware, I wrote Beast Invaders 2 (which I’m quite happy with) and Beast Invaders 3 (which I’m not) for previous Retrovision meets.  After rushing to finish BI3 for the deadline last year, I ended up with something that wasn’t even a tenth of what it should have been or what I wanted. And it’s something I quite regret. As when things go tits in such a major fashion though, it’s very hard to have an objective viewpoint on precisely what went wrong - and so after playing Warpforce Chinchilla earlier I decided to revisit BI3 to see precisely where I went wrong and now, it’s very easy to see how it’s fucked.

It boils down to three major factors:

1. Speed.

The first thing that struck me is how wrong everything feels with regards to speed. I know precisely how this came about too, I was originally building it to run much faster but as I bodged parts together quickly in the final 48 hours in order to make it remotely playable I made some compromises with the level design that necessitated dragging the speeds down a bit. I also judged this poorly meaning you end up with a ship that moves too slow to respond to some of the incoming waves, the bullet speeds are at times too slow and others too fast and the shot speed is far, far too slow. Mainly the game feels like wading through treacle and this is a bad thing.

2. Visibility

I like things that glow. I like effects that break your eyeballs. BI3 has the former and a very shoddy attempt at the latter. Instead of effects that provide visual feedback to the player it has stuff that glows for glows sake. Far too often, the enemy fire is lost amongst the glows. This shouldn’t ever happen but in BI3 it does. Often. There’s also a massive inconsistency in the style - obviously when you’re pulling a 48 hour marathon to cadge something together there’s compromises - but what started out as a consistent vision ended up a mess.

3. Fluidity

The way I began designing Beast Invaders 3 was to base the level structures around a very rigid design. Level one was meant to ease you into the game gradually so that you begin with facing off simple waves and by the time you reach the (thing that never appeared) end of level boss, you’d be fully aware of how the difficulty ramps up and patterns become more complex and require more than just mindless shooting to survive. And so, once you’d been armed with this knowledge - the subsequent levels whilst being more difficult and challenging - you’d be prepared for anything it might throw at you. With only 48 hours left and a distinct lack of content for later levels beyond my design plans, I threw most of this out the window and you end up with Level One having more in it than it should, stopping about half way through my design - Level Two being a hastily thrown together extension of Level One, Level Three being a complete hash up from start to finish and best forgotten about.

There’s no consistency or fluidity to any of the stages whatsoever and it puts the player on the back heel from the very beginning. This is a bad thing.

Jumping straight out of BI3 and playing G-Force was a revelation. I’m happy to say that I believe I’ve got the balance on G-Force bang on. This makes me happy. I’m also happy to report that despite being an entirely different beast from either BI3 or G-Force, Mega Arcadian does things right also. But anyone expecting an easy ride from MA will be sorely disappointed as it’s fast, furious and unrelenting. The game is a continuous barrage and designed to reward playing your best and for score. There’s 20 wave types, with 5 variations on each - increasing in speed and difficulty with each variation you clear. Points are awarded for both shooting the enemies and collecting the debris they leave behind, so whilst you can happily play it safe and have a reasonably relaxing game - it’s only by taking risks and getting up close to the enemies that you’ll find your way to big points.

I’m also happy to report that despite the screen looking something like this for most of the time you’re playing:

Mega Arcadian

You can still see everything you need to see. So, very much unlike Beast Invaders 3 then… I’ll follow this post up with a more in depth dev-log post over the next few days as I want to go a bit into the look and feel of Mega Arcadian in more detail, and also it’s bizarre relation to putting together MFOR. For folks eagerly awaiting G-Force, fear ye not, it’s not dead I just need a breather from it before I go crazy.

If in the meantime, you’d like to know a bit more about Project MFOR - then why not nip on over to the ever wonderful home of the Gnome, Gnomes Lair where he recently put me in the black leather chair, shone a light at me and interrogated me over Mersey Remakes, MFOR, G-Force and game innovation amongst other things. It’s not often I enjoy doing an interview quite so much (there’s only so many times you can answer the same questions about RR - believe me), but I can say with hand on heart that for Gnome - it was an absolute pleasure. I also kept my swearing under control, something I’m quite proud of.

On a lighter note (ha!), I collect my blood test results today so I’ve got my fingers crossed for finally finding out precisely what’s been kicking me down these past few months. Whilst I wait, why not indulge yourself in a few more screenshots of Mega Arcadian in its current form? Or go and tell Rich to crack on with his lovely looking shooter?

Mega Arcadian Preview Shmup from Mersey Remakes

Mega Arcadian Preview Shmup from Mersey Remakes

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8 Responses to “Chinchilla And The Beast”

  1. gnome on February 11th, 2008 3:56 pm

    So very glad (and oddly honored) you enjoyed the interview dear Bob and really hope those exams were properly good. Let us know of the good news… Cheers!

  2. Richard Phipps on February 11th, 2008 8:10 pm

    Thanks for the link Bob. The difficult thing is that your games are all flashy effects and super speed action while mine (with the exception of Neon Wars) tend to be slower paced, more quiet tactical affairs.

    It’s a tricky one, my games naturally seem to have less effects and flash than other peoples.

    For Neon Wars the whole game had to have a real amount of flash, but even the UI and status panels didn’t do much in that way..

  3. oddbob on February 12th, 2008 3:10 am

    So you don’t have to overcompensate like I do, this is a good thing no?

    I really enjoyed playing Iconic Shooter - it’s different and not in a shit way. If everyone made games that look the same it’d be, well, wank wouldn’t it? Not everything in this life has to have glowy vectors y’know :D

    FWIW, I thought it was ace.

    Anyway, results in and much to the shock of the doc, everything came back normal - so his best guess is wear and tear on the joints - likely from when I lost a lot of weight whilst ill a few years back and my body never quite sorted itself out. So, something I’m stuck with but should be manageable with anti-inflammatory pills. Just got to make sure that when the swelling goes down I get out and do some serious walking. I can manage that, given the one good thing about where I live now is that I’m only a short gander away from nice walks into the middle of nowhere :D

  4. WiredWorm on February 12th, 2008 11:20 am

    Thanks for the mention Bob, although I’d also like to take this chance to publicly thank you for all your help. I’ve learnt a lot from reading through your code and looking at your projects.

    I hadn’t even heard of GameMaker until you told me about it last year. It’s fair to say that the whole dev process of WFC has been pretty hectic. I left it far too late to start development (the whole thing was banged together in < 3 months) and I didn’t appreciate the intracacies of the development tool. Sure GameMaker can do stuff via drag-and-drop - but with some clever bits of GML and design-work you can make some simply eye-popping stuff.

    We’re already starting to design WFC2 now so we’ve got a whole year to hopefully put something together - hopefully something with more glowy stuff in it - because I like that as well!!

  5. gnome on February 12th, 2008 12:25 pm

    Hoorah! Great news then and I’ll give you a Wii Fit thingy when I meet you!

  6. oddbob on February 13th, 2008 5:45 pm

    Pete, hopefully my next post will be of some use to you then if it’s glowy you’re after :D

    TBH, I think it’d likely take a lot of pressure off given the amount of assets you had in WFC (better choice of initials than WC ;)) if you were to go that route. Mind you, there’s also the low res trick I used in BI2 that saves a lot of time too. Small palette and chunky pixels make light work.

  7. oddbob on February 13th, 2008 5:46 pm

    Hah, cheers Gnome! I think a WiiFat would be more appropriate for me, though.

  8. gnome on February 14th, 2008 10:20 pm

    Right. Wii Fat. Care for something to drink?

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