TunnelStorm

[swooshy]

Hi everyone, well this is my very first post here so forgive me if I do something silly :)

Anyway, I've just finished(ish) my new game TunnelStorm. It's quite simple in scope, fly down a tunnel dodging and shooting stuff. The twist is that it let's you use your own .mp3s as the soundtrack and also analyses them as they play to effect the games visuals. It's also got a built in editor to tweak and create your own tunnels.

Currently this is only for the PC, it was written on an AMD 2800+ with a GForce 4ti 4800 SE so that should give some idea of the spec. Sorry Mac+Linux people, one day maybe!

Videos and screenshots can be found on my site here (http://www.swooshysoft.com/tunnelstorm.html).

It's not perfect, there's still things I'd like to add and change but we've all got to start somewhere :)

Anyway, feel free to let me know what you think, any problems you had etc... Any ideas I like I'll add to the to do list, no promises but I always do what i can.

[Abscissa]

Welcome to the board. :)

That game's pretty cool. It could still use a little work in some areas, but it shows a lot of promise.

Some constructive critisism and suggested improvements:

- Fairly often, the ship will stop following the mouse cursor for a few seconds. That gets pretty frustrating, and makes it very diffucult to play the game.

- When you start a level, the first few seconds are rather choppy. If you don't have a way to prevent that, then try waiting a few seconds before starting to spawn any, umm, "things".

- The "About and Credits" page should probably be renamed to something along the lines of "Help and About" or "How to Play" or something like that.

- It's difficult to figure out the gameply mechanics. For instance, what the "things" on the screen are, what they're for, what they do, what all of the stuff on the HUD represents, under what conditions you're considered to have run out of energy (since it seems that there's three types?), etc. You put some of that in the "About" screen, but I didn't think to look there until I had played a few levels and couldn't figure things out.

- The "Audio sensitivity" option need to be a little more obvious. I thought the tube was supposed to stay a solid shape the whole way through the level, until I just happened to read the About page which mentioned the -/+ keys. There should also be a some sort of note to the effect of "Don't crank the sensitivity all the way up or it'll just skake like crazy, you want a balanced setting".

- Might want to think about saving the sensitivity setting for each individual song.

- You need a way to change the song that's playing. For instance, have next song/prev song keys, and if the user clicks on a song title in the song selection, start playing that song.

- It would be good to support an arbitrary number of songs, instead of just 8.

- If the audio library you're using supports it, you should allow alternate music formats like ogg, mod, or whatever else you can support.

- I'm not sure what could be done about this, but it's very difficult to line up the shots. The "line" helps some, but not a whole lot since there's no depth perception, and I can't tell where the "things" are in relation to the line. The best I can do is fly around until I see the targeting lock-on thing. (Which seems that it doesn't always mean my aim is direct enough to hit the target?)

- You seem to be using an additive blend to display the text, right? It's nice, but it makes it hard to read when there's a lot of white behind it. See if there's some way you can take care of that. Perhaps a solid outline or something?

I'm tempted to recommend you include some default music, but I'm thinking that might be risky. If it's not that great, or if it's a genre the user doesn't like, then it might turn people away before they put in their own music.

The system I ran it on is: WinXP, 1.2GHz AMD, Radeon 9200SE, 512 MB System RAM

[swooshy]

thanks for the feedback, and the welcome! really appreciated :)

yep, mouse collision detection is poor - i really must fix it - it's much better with keys/joypad.

nice idea about the initial delay

fair point with the about.. naming :)

again good point with the info - maybe some kind of info splash screen at the start - i'll ponder that one, same deal for the audio sensitivity thing

the various audio suggestions make sense - i'll have a think about ways to impliment them.

i'm planning on having a look at ogg, mod is a good idea too - most libraries just handle playing the song, i need access to the audio data which can prove tricky with some of these formats, but i'll do my best!

targetting is tricky, the lock on thing just indicates your lined up -now- but most of the things drift around, so it can be a bit awkward i agree.

making the menu's easier to read is already on the to-do list :)

the default music idea would be lovely, if enough people seem to like the game i'm tempted to approach a few amateur/hobbiest musicians about including a track or two - would seem like a nice way to get there stuff out there too.

thanks again for the comments - all appreciated, i can't promise to get it all done quickly, or even at all - but i do my best :)

[Abscissa]

i'm planning on having a look at ogg, mod is a good idea too - most libraries just handle playing the song, i need access to the audio data which can prove tricky with some of these formats, but i'll do my best!
I have no idea if this would be a good approach or not, but I'll toss it out there: There's probably a way to access all of the sound data that gets sent to the speakers. I've seen programs like Audacity that somehow do that to record all audio that's played by the whole computer system and save it to a sound file. And I know that it's possible on an application-by-application basis on the Mac (I've seen a Mac program that let you choose which running program to record), although I don't know if you can it per application on Windows. It might only be possible to grab all playing audio from all apps, including AIM sound effects, etc (But maybe that would be good. A player could load up whatever music they wanted in iTunes/etc, start up the game, and use that. Although they wouldn't be able to do next/prev track from within the game.) Just an idea to think about.

the default music idea would be lovely, if enough people seem to like the game i'm tempted to approach a few amateur/hobbiest musicians about including a track or two - would seem like a nice way to get there stuff out there too.
Little bit of a shameless plug: You may want to check out the group ShadeFix. They're good friends of mine, and they do some very good electronic music (mostly progressive trance). I've used some of their older (but not best) stuff in an old game of mine, Mechapede (http://www.tpgaming.com/download/mechapede_demo.exe). They're pretty cool about that sort of thing, too. If you want, you can check out some of their stuff on iTunes (http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=23543834&originStoreFront=143441) and ACIDPlanet (http://www.acidplanet.com/artist.asp?AID=164107&T=221335). Their best released ones IMHO are Bulletrain, Lucid, Method of Shaolin, Evening Urban Run, and Spring Roll.

[soniCron]

I have no idea if this would be a good approach or not, but I'll toss it out there: There's probably a way to access all of the sound data that gets sent to the speakers. There is, and it involves recording wave output. Unfortunately, by doing this, he'd have the sound effects interferring, and since the whole thing is based on sound output, it could cause some nasty "feedback". On top of that, I believe you have to explicitly set the "Wave Out" as the recording device in the device mixer. Obviously, there'd be some way to do it, but I think his best bet is to find out where the sound library's output buffer is and just read that. It's probably very easy if you know where to look.