[WIP] Devader (AntiMiner)

[Marius]

it's hard to load all the pictures in a HTML5 Games

The people want a HTML5 games fast and easy. But nice work !

[marcgfx]

good point. it's something thats on my todo-list and I have an idea how to improve the loading speed. thanks for playing!

[marcgfx]

there are now "boss-fights"... or lets say special guests? you can see two leftovers from the tentacle-monsters and the boss that killed me. most of the destruction was caused by the tentacles, as I was not paying enough attention. I think I need some way to convey to the player that there is a large damage dealer on the field. balancing over all is terrible.

[marcgfx]

I was having a horrible time trying to get utf-8 symbols to work. on my macbook they all turned into colorfull emojis. not what I wanted  . I don't know how much time I wasted trying to fix that mess, but I gave up on the idea and made my own symbols. should have done so from the start...
new:

old:

[marcgfx]

I've continued to work on bosses. I'm not really happy with anything yet, but at least some look quite cool by now.

I've worked on the controller use. It's amazingly challenging to make a game work nicely both with keyboard+mouse(pad) & gamepad in javascript. keyboard an mouse provide event handlers for down/up, so they are pretty much the same to handle. but the gamepad has nothing like that. you can only check on the current state (down or up) at any given time. I should probably have written my own wrapper for the gamepad and provided event-handlers myself. but thats not what I have done. I currently store 3 states for every button. 0: nothing, 2: pressed, 1: just released. 1 can be used as a clicked event. 

but then I also want to support mouse-pad. with a mouse i can use the mouse-button to fire, place turrets and fire nukes. with the mouse-pad firing is not a good idea. it's also a bad idea to have to keep a button pressed with your left hand while steering the robot. so I added an auto-fire button. this has draw-backs but it's still the best solution I could find.

[Fatalist]

Fun game! Got to wave 15.

One problem - I press ESC and "options", wanted to see the keyboard shortcuts but it did nothing. 

[marcgfx]

thanks for playing fatalist and glad you enjoyed it

the in-game options are not implemented yet, still a lot to do...

[marcgfx]

I was working on performance again today. There are a lot of tentacles in the game now, but the more tentacles I make the more performance drops. As I was starting to overdo it, I was noticing some nasty slowdowns. But tentacles are cool, so I came up with a solution to help out, or so I thought. The idea was to move all elements that can not collide with each other into a separate nc-list (no collisions).

I was not happy to find out my changes did not seem to help, I even had the feeling things had gotten worse. So I did some profiling and noticed my fast collision function was using a ton of cpu resources. Within the function vector-calculation were the most resource heavy, but I managed to simplify them and noticed a large improvement in the profiler. Unfortunately not in the game.

Console output showed me I was sometimes performing 100k collision-checks and the number seemed to be rising. Then it dawned on e, I never removed any of the objects I was adding to the new nc-list... quickly fixed that and now tentacles are much lighter on resources. So now I can really go crazy

This is the cute little guy I was using for testing:

[marcgfx]

In the last few weeks I was too lazy to write, but quite a lot has changed.
The most important changes are that the game has been renamed to Devader and the game link is now:
http://data.cyberlympics.com/html/game.html?param=Devader_1

- tentacles are a lot easier to destroy
- more extra drops
- improved performance (still more to do, e.g. the profiler tells me the minimap is pretty terrible)

worked on the tower boss. it now shoots devastating lasers at you, I think it's still too difficult

worked on the final boss, aka adios boss. there are now tentacles coming from the main body

I started working on visualizing the weapon power ups last friday. They are stackable, what I find very cool, but also poses some bigger problems. You can end up making so many bullets, that performance will be impaired. My solution is to make the pickups time out.
The time-out is not obvous for the player. So my original idea was to add the power-up symbol to the GUI and maybe add a visible countdown or let it start blinking shortly before the power-up is used up. As I am using a combination of HTML and WebGL this is actually not that easy. The power-up image is in a texture atlas and the color of the power-up is done by the shader. This means I would need to do a hybrid HTML-WebGL GUI. Unfortunately not that easy, as the screen can zoom. To make things worse, I am considering making the game 2 Player. Everything I paint in WebGL normally would get rendered in both views. If I want to add WebGL GUI elements, this would require me to change the data for the second player. Kind of a lot of work for something I don't think would look that great anyway.

So I came up with a new plan of adding the power-ups to the bot. I decided to place them around the waist at first. This took me far too long to achieve and I was everything but happy with the result. It was kind of cool, but it was not really visible. The amount of collectable power-ups is unlimited, so I can't make them big.

After some sleep I came up with the simple idea: limit the power-ups to 3 and display them on the back. much better! 

They seemed a little out of place, so I reduced the size slightly again:

[malinscky.ilya]

Game is great

thank you very much:)

[marcgfx]

glad you like it. I always find something I hate about it, every time I play 
I guess it's finished when I stop hating anything!

[danneu]

Wow, great game. I love how bizarre these bosses are, like the black rings that creep towards you.

When does the upgrade panel appear? I got it after wave 1 and sometime after wave 6 or so. Does it trigger on certain score milestones (which would explain the +score upgrade) or is it just hard coded?

I did get a runtime error after the second upgrade panel where I apparently unlocked turrets. Upon pressing "E" to place my first turret: "VM258:7 Uncaught TypeError: window._shotpack_ is not a function". (Edit: I can reproduce it by laying a turret immediately after unlocking them. Latest Chrome on OSX)

This game is surprisingly good, from the graphics to the unique bosses.

[marcgfx]

Great to hear you enjoyed what worked... Thanks for catching that bug, I will look into it!
The upgrade panel appears every time you get collected, that happens every 5 waves. After 0,5,10,15,20...

The score upgrade is something I am not so sure about, I might ditch it, if I come up with something better. I have to rework the scoring system anyway, as it is a bit broken at the moment.

[marcgfx]

I found the issue, it was an outdated game link. The game switched from AntiMiner to Devader, but I had not updated the game link. Thanks again for telling me about the problem!

http://data.cyberlympics.com/html/game.html?param=Devader_1

[marcgfx]

I've just entered my game on steam greenlight. 
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=784005325

You can find the demo here:
http://falkenbrew.com/index.html

I received a few friend requests from promo-groups. Does anyone have experience with this? My marketing skills are 0.

[marcgfx]

I'm still working on Devader, but progress seems very slow. I am doing a lot of small fixes and working on GUI. The GUI part is surprisingly hard with html, as I want the whole game to work nicely with controllers. I created my own controller-input library just for the GUI a while ago, but it still had a lot of things to improve. It allows me to move around from button to button, selecting and activating buttons. Handling multiple layers is still a pain, but I have managed to get it to work for the most part.

Would there be any interest in my releasing something like that on github?

The new selection screen for Nuke or EMP

Selection screen for choice of Turret


Game play wise the changes have been rather subtle. Today I changed the weapon power-up handling. So far the power-ups just timed out after you picked them up, no matter how often you fired. Now I've switched to an ammo based usage. This forces the player to think more about how to use the weapons he has.

 

[marcgfx]

My artist made some new background images for the main screen and also a kind of logo. Not sure if its in the right style for the game, or if it's too playful. At least it's not as sterile as my original design.

Orginal:

Silhouette

Eyes

What do you like best?

[Goblet Ed]

On 3/12/2017 at 11:53 PM, marcgfx said:

My artist made some new background images for the main screen and also a kind of logo. Not sure if its in the right style for the game, or if it's too playful. At least it's not as sterile as my original design.

Orginal:

Silhouette

Eyes

What do you like best?

The logo is an improvement but I think the backgrounds are worse than your original.

The new backgrounds do not read like anything. The 'silhouette' version Is a little better than the 'Eyes' version because it pulls your attention to the logo. With the eyes version the lamps at the bottom are too bright and it makes the composition unbalanced. I think the silhouette version could work with adjustments so it would be more clear what those shapes were.

Hope it helps.

[marcgfx]

thanks for your input! there have been some new iterations, a lot of people disliked the graffiti style logo.

these are the current contenders.

[Goblet Ed]

Much better! First and second are best IMO. The green one is too bright behind the title logo but I like the colors in that one.

[BitOfGold]

Lot better, the color contrast of the blue version is cool! (I would try a little blue/green gradient or something greenish in the blue version. A bit monochromatic imho.)

 

[csganja]

Nice one, but i almost shit my pants when i opened the game....

[gamelover]

On 1/7/2016 at 11:38 PM, marcgfx said:

http://data.cyberlympics.com/html/game.html?param=Devader_1

controls:
WASD for movement, mouse to target and shoot,
E/right click releases a large rocket at the target
Q/middle mouse button to place turrets

aim of the game: don't die and kill those pesky spiders that are eating the hexas. if you die, or all the hexas are gone, you lose.
the game was created for a small fun contest with the theme "mining and herds", this was my take on it.

I'm still missing a start/end screen with a highscore list. not quite sure if I should try to use facebook api for this.

Hello ,

 

Nice game concept.I would like to inform you that the link you have provided is slow /not showing the game.However,I found this game interesting.Would you post some more pictures of the game?.We also work in HTML5 Game development.

[marcgfx]

@csganja sorry about the pants, that was never my intention

@gamelover thanks for the info, I never updated the first post. the game is no longer online, as I just could not handle the different browsers and it was really hindering my progress. So now I am aiming for steam, using NW.js as a base. download can be found at http://falkenbrew.com

[marcgfx]

I just came back from Gamescom in Cologne on Saturday. First time I've ever been an exhibitor and I was a little nervous to start with. I did not know what to expect. The first day was really hard on me, instead of sitting in silence for 10 hours, I was standing for 10 while talking. But it was a good start and I met and talked to a lot of interesting people.

Not everything went well. First off I was presenting on an iMac from 2011 with similar GPU power to my MacBook. So I ended up presenting on the lowest settings I had available. I also had to hack in some code to reduce the amount of scorch-marks as the fill rate of the graphics card seemed to be reached rather quickly.
There were also the occasional bugs and I spent much too much time explaining to people what to do. This resulted in further midnight fixes and improvements in minified javascript code. Not the most enjoyable way to pass the time.

Most notable changes since I last wrote here are sand and multiplayer. But I don't have a screenshot of the multiplayer, so at least I will show you the sand.

Gamescom Idle Trailer