GunRaven shooter, Rev 2

[techbear]

I got a lot of good, tough feedback this week about my shooter project, GunRaven. Based on that, I worked like a dervish, and the result is now available.

Please try this latest version and let me know what's better and what still needs work. Thanks!

GunRaven uses an 800x600 screen, and requires DirectX 8 or better.

Screenshots:
http://www.exegame.com/ss1.jpg
http://www.exegame.com/ss2.jpg
http://www.exegame.com/ss3.jpg
http://www.exegame.com/ss4.jpg

Demo (6.5meg): http://www.exegame.com/gunraven.zip

CONTACT INFORMATION:
Thom Robertson
Aggressive Game Designs
tech@aggressivegames.com
http://www.aggressivegames.com
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[Mark Fassett]

It crashes soon after startup. I can't play it.

Athlon 2100+ - tons of ram, GeForce FX5900 with latest drivers.

[Reactor]

Now that's much more fun. Playing it with mouse without the smoothed controls is a great deal more enjoyable. Also, the music is a welcome addition. I've played a lot of 2D shooters recently, and I think yours is the only one I'd actually pay for. I love the idea of all the different enemies... and your exiting screen really made me excited about playing more. Last time I commented, I mentioned how the game felt a little devoid of passion, but now, after dodging hundreds of shots I can feel it. I think the first bunch of badguys are still a bit too strong... but, great work ;)

Btw, I'm running an Athlon 1800+, and an FX5600... a similar setup to the computer it crashed on above.

[tolik]

WOW, THAT'S A HARDCORE ACTION!!!!!

It's definately a HARD CORE INDIE GAME!

You should put a logo onto the main screen and make an icon for your game.

More balancing notes (turning CASUAL PLAYER EMULATION ON):

1) When I start the game, it would be nice to highlight the last available zone and make the action what user needs to do more obvious.

Example. I just started the game, and I see star map. I click on a Blood Pirate Zone and I see some text. I thought it's like an explanation but later found out that I need to click it.

You should make this procedure more obvious.

2) The game is too hard.
I would suggest to think about the game balance here.
Some of the players might find the avoiding of bullets AND EVEN ENEMIES too hard. I suggest to add LIVES.
In the first level if you accidentaly move mouse for the first time and move it to the direction of the flying ships -- you are doomed, game over man!

Try to make it less agressive, make first level a bit easy with much less bullets (or perhaps implement difficulty if this is not too difficult). Easy will have slower dynamics and less bullets, while normal or hard will be really hardcore.

So, if it's hard to add difficulty, give lives!!! This will allow more casual players to play your game.


I love new backgrounds and atmosphere, it's not fully polished (music is so... low quality), but it's great. I'll keep on playing and post something else.


UPD:
Give quicker ability to restart the player without GAME OVER hanging on screen to long, I guess you could add LEFT button to skip this screen and go into menu, while RIGHT button will be RETRY (don't forget to right it on-screen) and instantly restart the level.

This second level is hard from a lot of points, enemies don't have some safe area where you could just stay and try to avoid bullets instead of avoiding both bullets and enemies.

And the difficulty jumped INSTANTLY!!! I guess first AT LEAST 5 levels should be pretty easy but with increasing difficulty features, then you could start increasing the difficulty but don't forget to implement some "bonus-like" missions which will give a player some break.

CASUAL EMULATION OFF


Your game does remind me Raptor for some reason (looking from the current gameplay point). It's great to feel some classic.

If you haven't played it, TRY IT NOW! It's very similar in the later levels. (may be the amount of bullets and some similarity in patterns...)


UPD:
Don't make the enemies going down and flying with with a huge speed out of the bottom part of the screen, this is way tooo hardcore!


UPD:
Don't make patterns of the enemy behaviours too different in one level.
SECOND LEVEL and these ships FEEL ENTIRE SCREEN WITH UNAVOIDABLE BULLETS!!! OMG, this happens time-to-time and the wave of such bullets instantly kills ship. gr02.jpg
Sometimes ships make a loop underneath the bottom and while they shoot so intensively, these long unavoidable bullets also make a loop and entire screen IS FILLED WITH THESE BULLETS and you die :)
If you want to leave it like this, you should add lives or some kind of powerups already on the second level.


I wasn't able to kill more than 5 ships of the 2nd wave in the second level when I got the pause. It took about 10 bullets to destroy the ship and suddenly when the time ended they decided to change formations and WITH A HUGE SPEED FLEW THROUGH me easily killing.

Wow, that's a hardcore experience.


3 WAVES IN JUST SECOND LEVEL!?? NOW, THAT'S HARDCORE :)
3rd wave is easier than second one, I understood one glitch:
When you get time freeze, the game logic doesn't freeze, but positions on the screen do freeze, so when freeze ends, the ships instantly try to take the positions which they would take without a freeze.

3rd wave is easier than second one because of the specific ship type absence (those, who shoot with slow semi-homing missiles).


Wow, AH-IF Strike Fighter!!!
It's too powerfull for this 3rd level and there's no BACK button from CHOOSE YOUR SHIP. I completed the 3rd pirate level from the first try.

BTW, do bonuses overlap each other so when I take freeze, I can't have power?

And if I take Freeze at some specific point of the game and there are no more enemies on the screen and there's a huge amount of freeze left... Will I have to WAIT for new wave to come?


It would be cool to EXPLODE this "tanks-pills" which some airplane-looking ships drop.


And it's very bad that you could freeze the ships which sit OUTSIDE OF THE SCREEN, I just don't know where they are... May be it would be reasonable to add arrows at the sides of the screens showing the current positions of the ships. Or a radar? No, it would take too much screen...

How about making these health bars semi-transparent so It would be possible to see small time-frozen ships underneath them?


I think these bonuses (like sniper, bonus kill, etc) are VERY COOL, but I don't see how they give points to me. May be you could add some more verbose stats like

ships XXX * X = XXXX
bonuses XXX * X = XXXX
etc

If you would like to add scores for killing some enemy bombs/bullets, don't give too much of them, I remember one VERY GOOD GAME which had the glitch which nobody noticed - you could stay in one corner of the screen waiting for bullets to come and since they costed a LOT (they took instantly 1/2 of your health), you were able to unlimitedly earn scores and later use them in shop.


It took me 5/15 seconds to complete 5th pirate level with SP-X and 1 second pear each wave to get 3 bonuses (xenocide, maniac, etc).
SP-X is way too powerfull to let it be opened on early levels. There should be a hard struggle :) It's very hard to balance such type of games, but your game is VERY FUN and VERY HARDCORE AND COOL NOW!

Is there some way to see OVERALL scores from the STAR MAP SCREEN (hey, add title to this screen, it's not quite clear how it's called).

When bonuses (xenocide/maniac/etc) start to overlap, make another bonus flight really fast into the corner and not overlap each other.

Some of the powerups can appear OF SCREEN if you have \/ range of fire and enemies get killed out of the screen.


MOUSE CONTROLS ARE AWESOME!!!


Ok, summary of the pirate campaign.


2nd level is the hardest to complete since you have only the base ship and three waves of hardly destructable ships, then you get VERY GOOD SHIPS and it gets VERY EASY. It took me 2 tries to complete first one (1st time I was checking the ratio of the damage from being able to flight into bullets and ships), 5 tries to complete second pirate mission (and I call myself pro and I tried really hard) and since then I haven't lost a single ENERGY CELL!


12 seconds to complete first GSTAR level with SP-X.
35 seconds with SP-X on the second level of GSTAR.

gr03.jpg - I think this background looks dull and "too tiled" compared to all others.

gr04.jpg - I think I've seen this explosion effect (rounded one) in Final Fantasy X when some character casts some huge spell or tries to call aeon...

I really like that "one second pause effect" when you kill boss, If somebody have played Burnout, he will find it very familiar and cool.

How about a BACKFIRE (or even a sidefire) option? I remember a game which had an option to switch the direction of your fire - either all way (rear) or concentrate the power on the frontal fire. This would help to kill the enemies which are underneath you behind the screen in timefreeze.


Ok, done with G-TAR, I think the difficulty and life idea was bad after all, it's a HARDCORE game and I would love to replay it without all SP-X being revealed at the initial stage.


BTW I don't get the idea with two sets of scores - one at the top, another one after the completion of the level (without double zeroes)...


AH-IM Medium Fighter has GREAT WEAPON, I love it :) I think I also saw it in Raptor...

[tolik]

(continuing)

Ok, in order to think if the combination of the powerups is a good idea, I will need to complete some campaigns on less powerfull ships.


Krite wasn't very exciting for some reason, however I liked dual-bosses blue-ray idea, but I think the blue ray should be more powerfull, however I haven't tried less powerfull ship to see how serious is impact on low-end ;)



I'm at Flame Nebula and all the ships besides SP-X are very weak :(


After the death with RS Hawk shooting with red laser, it still shoots.


I think that some explosions/colors/particles should be specific to a mission region, that will make them look a bit more unique and fun (enemies are unique, I like all the flamy enemies in Flame Nebula, while particle patterns from my explosions are always the same).

gr05 - this guy looks like a shitrock or something, may be texture wasn't properly attached to him when rendering...


Flame Nebula Strike - wow, new "random" looking enemy pattern! I think entire Krite should also have different reasons to be more exciting.


Ok, came to a point when I started to get killed with SP-X.


Saw couple of new explosions and enemies, cool stuff. I'll have to stop, this is too addicting :)


Wow, I was playing at HARD DIFFICULTY all that time!!!

Just discovered INSANE and IT'S GREAT!
I was able to complete "ROGUE FLEET PATROL" on it :)

[Reactor]

Yeah, it's addictive as... okay it's just addictive ;)

I had the SP-X as well, and thought "Ok, this thing is just TOO good. This game needs some serious balancing." Funny thing was though, I still got blown away every mission, even though I was dealing back the damage like a crazy man.

I like.

[tolik]

I guess my first casual impressions were wrong since I was playing on hard level and any first-level ships were too tough to struggle with...

[techbear]

Thanks! I'm glad my changes were for the better!

Your pictures were a BIG help, emuLynx. I was able to see that my pseudo-random code was broken, which is why you had the long streams of shots coming from a single enemy. I've changed that completely, and it should be fixed.

The SP-X unlock pattern has been changed. Now it's much harder to unlock, as was the intention.

I've raised the bottom of the movement patterns. Now they shouldn't jump out at you from the bottom of the screen UNLESS you're playing Insane Mode.

Thanks for pointing out this bug; the FIRST time you play, the mission and ship selection screens should be skipped. That wasn't happening.

I made the You Lose message quicker.

Score display is now consistent.

The player's laser no longer survives him.

The timestop powerup no longer changes the enemy behaviors so radically.

I still have a few things to do, like updating the hints to give better infomation about the powerup rules and such.

Thanks again for your help, and if you want a copy of the latest, just reply and I'll tell you when you can download it!

[JaffaMused]

I couldn't get it to work at first, it'd flash the menu for a second, then exit. I turned my desktop down to 16bpp and it worked, then I turned it back up to 32bpp and it still worked wierd!

First impressions are that the early levels should be a bit easier to get you into the game a little - the enemy ships should take just one shot to kill early on rather than the several shots it currently takes.

Also I thought the explosion rings were a bit over the top for hitting 'standard' ships, save those for the bigger more important ships, it's just too busy when there are lots of them.

One important thing that you might not have noticed (but will probably bite you in the ass), is that the fonts you distrubute with the game say
"Copyright (c) 1992 W.S.I. All Rights Reserved. Redistribution striclty prohibited." Unless you are WSI or you have their written permission you could get into trouble with that.

* OH, and what's with the big green turtle flashing in the bottom right of the screen?

[techbear]

Thanks, Jaffa.

I bought the disk the fonts came from, and carefully reviewed the licence, so I believe I'm in the clear.

The green turtle means the frame rate is dropping below 30fps (it's capped at 40). Is it flickering, or staying on? Is it annoying?

What's your machine spec?

[Hamumu]

It dies for me too... I tried dropping to 16bit and it still died then. It sounded so exciting! It gets into the menu for about 1.5 seconds, then drops to desktop again.

[techbear]

Sorry, Hamumu.

First, make sure there's a /dat subdirectory in your installation. I released this version as a ZIP file, so sometimes all the files get unzipped to the base directory, which is bad.

Second, there should be a file called autolog.dat in your install. That file was created by the game, and if you post it, it could give me a clue as to what's going on.

Thanks for your help!

[Hamumu]

Yeah, it was unpacked in directories (after all, the title screen DID show up!). I've already deleted it, but I looked at the autolog before that and it said something like "CPuma initializing, looking for screen modes" (or something), and that was the only line. As if it should've listed screen modes below that, and it couldn't find any (bit if not, then why did it actually begin working briefly?). I should say that was from the 32bit attempt, but it acted exactly the same in the 16bit attempt.

[techbear]

Wierd. My autolog.dat looks like:

-----------
Autolog for GunRaven v0.500000, 10/15/04, 17:04:18

nv4_disp.dll
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200
Desktop is 1024x768, 60hz, Format 22
Mode: 0320x0200, 0060hz, Format 023
Mode: 0320x0200, 0070hz, Format 023
Mode: 0320x0200, 0072hz, Format 023
Mode: 0320x0200, 0075hz, Format 023
Mode: 0320x0240, 0060hz, Format 023
Mode: 0320x0240, 0070hz, Format 023
Mode: 0320x0240, 0072hz, Format 023
Mode: 0320x0240, 0075hz, Format 023
etc.....

You don't see anything like this?

[Mark Fassett]

I got it to break into the debugger - it's getting a divide by zero error somewhere. The end of my log looked like this:

sound ptr: 11276496
loading sound: dat\enemyDamaged.wav
sound ptr: 11276320
loading sound: dat\enemyDamaged.wav
sound ptr: 11283664
loading sound: dat\enemyDamaged.wav
sound ptr: 11283328
loading sound: dat\enemyDamaged.wav
sound ptr: 11282992
loading sound: dat\enemyDamaged.wav
sound ptr: 11282656
loading sound: dat\enemyDamaged.wav
sound ptr: 11282320
loading sound: dat\bossExplo.wav
sound ptr: 11281648

[Hamumu]

It could be I was looking at a different file, I noticed there were a couple log-type files in the directory... sorry!

[techbear]

There's a new version up which does better error checking with the audio. IF you couldn't get the game to run, please download it again and try again.

Thanks for your help!

[arcadetown]

Sweet game! The basic fun action of old and brings it to a whole new level.

I think the difficulty is balanced about right but realise I'm a hardcore shooter type... was a two fisted robotron freak as kid, ok still am. However since I'm a hardcore shooter game type that may mean you're hitting your target audience dead on!

Overall the production quality is quite good, game play is good and solid, and the action is great. The only complaint I might have is some of the sprites could maybe be a bit more polished.

[arcadetown]

Also might want to add more full version nagging and link back to site from the main menu. Ask me I think these's guys do a great job on the full version nagging how it displays an awesome sequence of some of the best features in the game. It really drives home what the full version brings and makes you want to pull out the wallet.

Intensity XS (http://www.midnightsynergy.com/intensity/)

[tolik]

Damn, your game is addictive. Accidentaly ;) I've downloaded it to my notebook and had a lot of fun playing it from start again. I have biz-class notebook with shitty Trident CyberBlade videocard so it was a really SLOW gameplay (P3-400 (no extra power) / 800 (socket)). I remember turtle from quake 1 multiplayer test ;)

What else I wanted to say...

It doesn't run at a constant speed on my computer :(

One thing is very JERKY: Once all the enemies ended flying and stopped into formation, they go out of the formation into the flying path with a constant speed. I think this looks very "jerky", may be you could add some "speed increase/boost effect" for them so it really looks like they are starting to fly and increase speed.

You should add up a routine which ends time freeze when you've killed all the enemies on screen and all other enemies are outside of the screen.

I think touching the boss shouldn't kill you, bosses should have some kind of magnetic shield field preventing you from touching them.

I think even if you had a game over, the summary (mission results) shouldn't show you ZEROS. If you are going to add overall score screen, you will have a statistics like

TOTAL SCORE: 10000
MISSION SCORE: 12000
NEW SCORE: 22000

In case you lost the mission, this score will not get added to the new score... Or something like that, a lot of games have good examples of how to make it.


If you really want more response for me, let's go over the mail :)

[JaffaMused]

The green turtle means the frame rate is dropping below 30fps (it's capped at 40). Is it flickering, or staying on? Is it annoying?

What's your machine spec?

I have 2.4GHz Pentium 4 (Mobile) with 736MB of RAM - my bottleneck is the crappy Intel 82855 video card (it's a laptop). I'm not sure what resolution the game was running at, but my native screen res is 1280x800* (it's a widescreen laptop).

The turtle was sometimes solid for a while, sometimes flickering, and sometimes off for a good while. The most annoying part for me was the flickering and the fact that it's so damn big!

At first I thought it was to do with the time freeze bonus I just picked up ;)

Hope that helps.


*Advice to all: Make sure you check the screen aspect ratio of the target machine before deciding on a resolution, I've tried at least 2 different indie games that saw 1280 wide and assumed my screen was 1024 deep - it's not, and because of the trend of putting menus at the bottom of the screen half the menu was missing and I couldn't move my mouse pointer down there. Widescreen machines are more common than you think - especially laptops, and that's probably a big chunk of the college market.

[Pi Eye Games]

Hey, I get the same problem as Hamumu :(

>> It gets into the menu for about 1.5 seconds, then drops to desktop again.

Unzipped okay, title screen looks 100% to me (runs well/smooth).
I downloaded from your original link (above) after you mentioned the new version. I've got a GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB.

Here's the files the game generates :

*NO* 'autolog.dat' file.
als.dat : "0"
VideoCardInfo.txt : "PUMA video system enumeration"

Cheers,
George

[techbear]

MAN, that's wierd! The autolog.dat file gets created RIGHT after the als.dat file.

George, Hamumu, try to run the game with the -W command line argument (windowed mode). Perhaps that will show some sort of error message.

Thanks!

[Devman]

I also got a crash right after it tried to launch, Integer Divide by Zero:

http://www.heroicvirtuecreations.com/images/gunravencrash.PNG

It's at memory address 0x00420eed. If you build a map file with your exe's you could look it up by subtracting the base address of the exe and 0x1000 the PE header file size.

I did not have an autolog.dat created. The als.dat I tried to open in notepad and it just had a 0 in it.

I have a Dell Latitude D600 laptop (only four months old).

I hope you figure it out!

[Pi Eye Games]

Mixed results, it definatly works for longer with the -w flag. I get the green turtle a bit though. Unfortuantly it crashed out (Standard crash window - no debug info).

I did get the autolog.dat with the crash ... it's fairly long, ending in about 50+ 'playing sound' entries - maybe this explains the crash ? Not sure if they're playing at the same time (eeek!), or if there's only 'play sound' events being logged over a few seconds (possibly add a time stamp to log entries ?).

Something else I noticed (sorry if this is a repeat) : In windowed mode it's really easy to loose the windows focus, because the real mouse cursor wonders out of the window.

The same thing also happens in full screen mode for me (I had it running fullscreen for about 5 mins earlier - looks like fun :D ) - I've got dual monitors and when I 'fire' on the right hand side of the game (which runs on left hand monitor), windows drops back to desktop.

As your ship seems to home in on the curent mouse position, maybe try reading the cursors actual position, rather than generating a position from the cursors delta movement ? - or maybe lock the mouses focus so it can't go wondering off : something like that, I don't know ; )

Cheers,
George

[techbear]

That does narrow it down, George. Try this. Try immediately going to options and turning off music. Let's see if the streaming music code is the culprit.

Thanks!

[Pi Eye Games]

No joy I'm afraid ... it got a little further with sound turned off, then it bombed ... then I tried again and played for about 5-10 minutes with the sound on before it bombed !

(BTW I've had it crash with sound on, and the 'play sound' entries weren't there, so it's probablly not related ?).

... but ... it's stop crashing now ! - just played it for 15-25 mintues (I love the explosions : ) - The only difference I saw was a complete lack of the green turtle - which often appeared before. When it crashed after the 5-10 minute session (with sound turned on) I did notice the turtle briefly. Maybe try slowing down your computer ? - I tried a virus scan and running my game in the background, but no turtle !

Sounds like one of those nasty intermitant bugs :eek: good luck !

[techbear]

Yay! I BELIEVE I fixed the div-by-zero error that many people were getting.

In the turtle symbol code, I was dividing something by (thisFrame - lastFrame). I thought I'd put in code to insure that the two would never be equal, but I was mistaken. Anyway, it's fixed.

Devman, THANK YOU for pointing out that I had to remove 0x1000 from the error offset to find the problem. I'd made a map file, but I hadn't known that. Your help was critical.

Everyone, please go to http://www.aggressivegames.com and give it one more try.

Thanks again!

[Pi Eye Games]

:p Works for me ... Turtle and game coexist happily (luckily the turtle gets fed up about this and goes away after a few seconds).

[Devman]

Hey techbear,

I just downloaded the latest version and the crash is fixed! Way to go man. I was able to play the game with no problems at all.

I am glad I could help with the map file tip. Those things griefed me for a long time trying to figure them out. Eventually, I bought an entire book on debugging Windows programs and it had a good explanation of how they work.

Good luck with your game!

[wazoo]

Drat. Can't enjoy this game as others are, since it crashes for me fairly intermittently..

I'm running XP home (blech..not by choice) on my laptop with SP2 and it crashes either on the main menu, or right when I press the spacebar to fire my phasers for the first time.

The autolog.dat file doesn't look like anything weird is happening. It seems to enumerate the video modes properly and stuff..

Anything else I should look for?

[techbear]

Download the latest version, Wazoo, and let me know if that doesn't solve the problem for you. If you see the crash again, try to write down the hex number of the crash location (under windows XP, you have to look at the window that sez "send this error to microsoft?", and click the "more technical info" button).

The number is critical to me. Thanks!

[wazoo]

AppName: gunraven.exe AppVer: 0.0.0.0 ModName: gunraven.exe
ModVer: 0.0.0.0 Offset: 00020eed

Is that good enough? That's pretty much all that the crash information gave me..

[Jim Buck]

This game is pretty damn good. I had to download it after hearing all the good comments about it. :) I kept playing it until I beat every level that I was allowed.

Only thing I'm curious about is why are some of the later ships that get opened up in the demo less useful than earlier ones that get opened up? The 2nd new ship that you get is way better at clearning the levels than the ones after it.

[Sunshine]

Wow that was intense!
Great work!

Did you use PTK to make that?

[techbear]

PTK? No, I wrote the whole thing in C++, using Visual Studio 6. The engine was written on top of the DirectX 8 sdk.

[wazoo]

Just downloaded the latest version to my dev box. Still nada.

This time I get like 2 seconds of the main menu screen before it bails. And no debug information has come out yet. :(

Anyone else having these difficulties? Sucks to read about how everyone's having a ball with something that refuses to work for me :(

[techbear]

Okay, Wazoo, are you sure there's no autolog.dat file in your install directory? I could use that, too.

Thanks!

[wazoo]

It seems to crash most often on the sound effects. (ie. JUST when I hit space bar to fire my phaser)..

Maybe an invalid pointer somewhere?? :confused:

I'll attach my autolog.dat file..I hope I didn't snip too much out of it.

Though this might explain why the game is very slow for me...all the logging?

[techbear]

Rats. All that autolog tells me is that the normal play mode initializes correctly.

You could be right about the sound. Have you tried turning off the sound and music in the options menu of the first screen?

Thanks!

[wazoo]

Nope, tried that from the main menu and it still crashes. :(

Boy it's a weird error/problem. Everything initializes okay, but then blammo.

Does it dynamically load up sounds before each round/level? Could there be a small bug with memory locations there?


Rats. All that autolog tells me is that the normal play mode initializes correctly.

You could be right about the sound. Have you tried turning off the sound and music in the options menu of the first screen?

Thanks!

[Sunshine]

Hey, might want to add a little instruction blurb at the beginning.

I got to like level 20 before I figured out to only get the blue powerups
:D Big advantage to that

[merovingian]

It crashes soon after startup. I can't play it.

Athlon 2100+ - tons of ram, GeForce FX5900 with latest drivers.

Crash boom bang P4 3.0 GHZ plus GeForce FX5600 - I sense a pattern in the force...

[Adam]

When i downloaded the zip at the top of this thread it crashed after showing the menu for a fraction of a second. When i used the exe off your website to install i had no problems.

[wazoo]

Hmm good suggestion Adam. I didn't even know it was available on the website (as a different location other than the link to the zip provided)..

I'll try that tonight and see if that makes a difference..