Doppelganger - XNA based shoota!

[PaulCunningham]

Doppelganger is a frantic 2d side scrolling blaster in the vein of classic shooters like Defender and (Jeff Minter's) Iridis Alpha.

* Simultaneous 2 player action.
* Player profiles, Achievements and online Leaderboards
* 2 Game modes: Points Battle and Time Attack.

Written in XNA and available for free for Windows and XBox360
http://www.pumpkin-games.net/doppelganger.php

If you get any problems try the Direct X Web Installer - seems to fix up most problems.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=2da43d38-db71-4c1b-bc6a-9b6652cd92a3&displaylang=en

[Maupin]

Looks good. I'm a fan of Jeff Minter so if I get some free time I'll check it out.

One note: your screenshots are a little over-compressed, and the resulting jpeg artifacts are very noticable. I'd suggest resaving them (from the originals) at a higher quality setting.

[kay.altos]

Don't work on my computer - just stars and scrolling landscape.

[PaulCunningham]

Did you change to full screen? There is a known bug that loses the menu when swapping from windowed mode - I haven't been able to fix the little blighter yet.

Does it do it every time - what happens if your run the game again, maybe in safe mode (which just deletes the config file so all options get reset to default).

There may be an error log file written (shortcut in Start Menu) - anything in there?

[kay.altos]

Yes it is happen every time, I didn't switch to full screen. The same in safe mode.

[kay.altos]

that's basically all i see

[joshg]

It just crashed for me instantly; maybe my video card doesn't support the shaders you're using, but it'd be nice for the game to actually check for that and tell you so instead of seeing a Windows crash dialog.

[PaulCunningham]

Sorry guys.

@kay.altos - well that's a bit weird! I have a bug where the menu disappears but the aliens too - never seen that. Possibly a shader based problem - what gfx card / OS are you running?

It should look like this..
http://www.pumpkin-games.net/images/screenshots/doppelganger/Doppelganger3.jpg

@joshg - you need at least a Shader Model 1.1 graphics card. If the game catches any errors you should see a box pop up with "Application Error" as the title. Not sure why the Windows app error gets displayed - probably crashes before my game initialises itself. It might have created a (sumo.)log file in the install folder (there is a shortcut in the start menu) if it had enough time to init.

Have either of you run the Direct X Web Installer linked to in my first post?

XNA is a lovely environment to code in but I am getting a fair few crash reports :(

[ZeHa]

I just see a big flickering mess in the background. At first, I thought that's a weird menu background style, but as soon as I start the game, it continues to flicker and I randomly see my ship nearly half as big as the window. I can shoot and see huge bullets, but I can't tell what's going on.

So, I couldn't even play it, but let me say that it annoyed me that you have to use "X" to select a menu option. Who should be able to know that? I tried Return, Space, Alt, Ctrl, Alt Gr, Shift, and some random keys, but not X. Why only X? In my opinion, a good menu should react to several of those "standard" keys, most notably Space and Return.
I had to open the Readme file just to see that the X key is the one to use. That's pretty bad, I think. If the screenshots wouldn't have appealed to me so much, I wouldn't have done that, but instead I'd have directly uninstalled the game. So please take my advice and make a usable menu :)

[PaulCunningham]

Sounds like a driver / DX sorta bug. What GFX card do you use? Are your drivers up to date? Have you tried running the Direct X Web Installer? Basically what state is your PC in? Is it mainly used for casual games or is it more on the bleeding edge?

This is the Direct X web installer

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

- it should look at the DX components you already have and only download any it deems necessary. Is it worth you running that?

As for the menu I think you're right for the audience here. You guys tend to be used to slick, polished efforts and resorting to a readme is probably on the top 10 things not to do list. I usually just release my stuff to the folks over at YakYak who are a bit more forgiving and will usually cut things a bit more slack.

I was intending to support keyboard, 360 pads and DX pads and getting something to work nicely for all of those seemed a bit troublesome (especially when the keys can be configured). I may go for the controller graphics in the bottom left of the screen idea you get on most XBLA games (with keyboard keys too).

e.g.

x / A select
z / B back.

If they get this YouTube for 360 idea up and running I might just abandon the PC altogether.

EDIT - and here's a link from the Creator Club site detailing many other developers with XNA distribution woes..
http://forums.xna.com/thread/18703.aspx