Calus CoRPS' site

Why did you buy a BYOND Membership?

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 15:04:47 GMT

A fairly simple question I have, why did you buy a BYOND Membership?

4 Characters 1 Choice

Sat, 27 Dec 2008 22:51:39 GMT

Sadly, I am having quite a difficult time trying to chose the graphic style along with the character graphic for LineWalk. After a day of looking through a ton of graphics ranging from the game Shift 3 and Exit 1, I have came up with these four choices.

Out of these four characters, one of them will be the one you will play in my game. Of course, the one that is chosen will be revamped to look a lot cleaner. So my question is what character, if any, looks the best? I am willing to take suggestions for both the characters and the game.

Bombard by Leftley

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 17:11:08 GMT

Gameplay
"You have one health point left and there are several enemy tanks surrounding you…"

This is a common situation in Bombard, which is a BYOND classic. Upon logging in, the user is greeted with a general guide that will teach them how to play this simple, yet addicting, game. Players can choose their tanks color by selecting its RGB. Essentially, as the guide states, Bombard is an artillery game where players take turns calculating trajectories and setting up shots attempting to take out their opponents.

The game is fairly simple, but what makes it a little more challenging is the addition of wind, which can alter a shot. You get one point every time you hit an enemy and you get a four point bonus if you take out the player completely. Two points are subtracted from you when you die while four will be subtracted if you commit suicide.

With the points you have accumulated over time, you can use them to buy secret weapons. These weapons can only appear once per game and can be expensive. But the damage they create is priceless.

In order to win this exhilarating game, you must put yourself over thirty points, but this is not as easy as it may sound.

Presentation
The guide in Bombard is rather straightforward, but it is informative. It explains all of the basic rules in this artillery game and it also tells you about each secret weapon.

The graphics for this style of game is tolerable, but I feel that the tank does not fit in well with the terrain. The map is randomly generated each time a new game starts, which will lead to players having a different experience each time.

One downfall to this game is that there is no sound; it would be nice to hear explosions from the missiles hitting player’s tanks and the ground.

Originality
This artillery game really does not add anything new to the well known artillery genre. There are a ton of games which are extremely comparable and there are even some that are a lot better. But with being the first artillery game for BYOND, I will give it a few points in this category.

Overall
Bombard is no doubt a beloved BYOND classic that people of all ages can enjoy. Even though Leftley no longer works on this, users can easily lose track of time while battling their friends or foes. It would be pretty neat to see Leftley update this game with a nice looking interface, but I do not see this happening anytime soon as he has mysteriously disappeared. I would recommend this game to any person looking to waste hours, while having fun!

Drawing a Line Towards History

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 19:51:25 GMT

Ignore the title, it has nothing really to do with this post, I just wanted to include line or walk.

Although I did not receive as many comments as I would have wished, I did speak to a few people who played my demo and they all enjoyed what little they saw. Because of this, it has motivated me to create a few small updates before I officially start working on my fighting concept I posted not too long ago.

For those who do not know, yesterday I created a post about LineWalk which is a demo where the user can draw lines to help them create paths towards victory. It uses several of my unreleased libraries such as c_pixel, c_display, and Pixel Mouse Drag.

This video is not as smooth as I would have wished.

As seen in the video, it is now a race against time in completing this basic map. I am now aiming to make LineWalk a platformer where users must attempt to get to the end (which in this test, is a yummy cake!). Users may be able to upload their fastest times to prove they are the "king of the lines" on a certain map. There will hopefully be several levels that come packaged with the game. I would also like to complete a make editor, where users can create challenging maps for others to play on.

Now I was discussing the following feature with someone, online 4 player racing. Now originally I disagreed with making this project an online platformer. But recently, I got a chance to see how LineWalk worked online; it went smooth although some of the collisions were off (which shall be fairly easy to correct). This online racing mode will allow you to connect with up to 4 other players and try to get the fastest speed on the map. Each player will be a color different than the other players, along with their lines. The person I was speaking with said it would be fun attempting to jump over users and blocking them off with your lines making them having to erase them.

I will like to get more videos out, especially with this online mode. As you can clearly see in the video I posted, it is not smooth, so I will need to find a way to fix that. I also fixed a few bugs such as the one Vermolius reported. I still cannot reproduce the crash bug, which is plaguing this game. But I now found out that it does not only occur when jumping on a box spring, but lines and grounds also. So if you find anything new about this bug, please report it!

Of course once I get this project off its feet I will give it a new name, but until then, it shall stay LineWalk. I also would not mind some obstacle ideas; so far I have box springs and spikes.

P.S. What would you recommend me to do to make these post more interesting? It feels like I'm not giving it enough "liveliness" to keep peoples attention and make them want to reply.

Line Walk Demo

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 14:43:33 GMT

Not too long ago I got an idea of creating a single player platformer where users can draw lines to help them complete levels. I got pretty far; all it needed was more obstacles, a story mode, and a map creator. But I lost interest mid way and stopped working on the game. Originally, this game was named "WoodnString" but I just changed it to LineWalk Demo seeing as this is an incomplete demo.

In this demo I used my c_pixel library. This dealt with nearly all of the pixel related stuff in this demo. For example, it allowed me to define the collision box of an object by setting its x1, x2, y1, and y2. I also used my Pixel Mouse Drag demo which allows me to drag on a tile, pixel by pixel. (Both the library and demo have not been released)

I know this demo is quite choppy at the moment as there are several bugs in this demo, one is with the movement. Pressing right and left and then letting go one of the keys will sometimes make you run faster. Also, switching from left to right, or vice versa, very fast will not allow you to move. I know how to fix these problems but I am far too lazy to do so at this moment. I also cannot find out why this bug occurs, but randomly the game will crash while jumping on the spring box.

Hopefully I'll finish this game one day, I like the concept and potential. I can see a huge community in which they create challenging maps. Have fun with this test demo!

Controls:
Arrow Keys - Move
Left Click - Draw Line
Right Click - Erase Line

P.S. I'm still working on the concept I posted two days ago, I just wanted to stop this from rotting away on my desktop.

http://www.byond.com/games/CalusCoRPS/LineWalkDemo

Game Concept

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 23:18:14 GMT

I have recently noticed that releasing public information about your games progress can be a motivating factor for the programmer. People such as ACWraith and Tiberath have done such a thing and received decent feedback. I guess I can see how showing your games progress could make people anticipate your games release as they already know what to expect due to your open development. I tend to believe close development would work much better for me, but I'll give this open development a shoot.

As of lately, I have been experimenting with several game ideas that I have floating around in my head. One idea I had was quite similar to Ragdoll Masters, which of course uses ragdoll physics. So after reading countless tutorials and enlightening pages, I failed to correctly recreate these physics. But there is no doubt in mind that I will combat to this idea at a later date.

Ragdoll Masters

I then watched several brutal videos of the indie game, Toribash. I then wondered what this game would be like if it was real-time. Obviously I can not create such a work of art right now, so I thought of a basic idea which is somewhat similar to it.

Toribash

Concept

As you can clearly see, this picture displays the joints and bands. Once the game starts the "doll" will be facing you, his left hand will be holding a shield about the size of two hands while his right hand will be holding either a sword or a spiked ball. If you would like to walk, then you must drag each leg to the desired location. For those who have played Ragdoll Kung Fu, manually having to move the legs in that game is what I am trying to achieve.

I never intended the "doll's" to have air combat (as seen in dragonball z) or be able to jump. Though, after replaying the game play over and over in my head, I realized that this may be a necessity. Just walking back and forth attacking objects/dolls will get quite boring after some time. Since it would be hard to incorporate jumping and having to move each arm fast enough before you hit the ground, I may add a slow-mo feature. Perhaps every time you jump the game will slow down. Since this game will not be tile based, I should be able to use tick_lag to my advantage and still pull of nice looking attacks.

Now the fighting system will need to be excellent if I want to keep a player's attention. I am still writing down ideas but the only thing I have down that may be solid is having players drag their "doll's" sword wielding arm towards the enemy attempting to hit them. Then the player can drag their "doll's" shield wielding arm trying to block a counter attack.

What I am trying to avoid

Now I can imagine this would be a very slow paced combat game and nothing similar to Toribash. Of course, I would have several different types of weapons, but the weapons mean nothing if the game sucks. So what do you recommend I should do with combat? I really want to avoid using the keyboard at all cost, unless it is necessary.

Repetition Assumption

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:07:14 GMT

When I first joined BYOND, I was a “game making machine”. I could work on one game for months and easily move onto a new project. But at the same time, I could still work on the preceding project with no loss of enthusiasm. Those days are long gone; I can barely stay with one project for more than a day.

We all suffer from the “loss of motivation disease” while programming. You would imagine after being on BYOND for a few years, and having a pleasant grip on the language, that we could “pop” out great games non stop. But when programming, we usually get far with our project but then move on to something else. Although, you could also blame it on the lack of ideas we have, but I will save that topic for another post.

In my previous post I spoke about several rules which would be great to follow if you want to help prevent the “loss of motivation disease”. Now in this post, I hope to accomplish the task of expanding on the Repetition/Challenge rule.

What I have found, which is widespread knowledge, was that working on a project in which the code is very similar to a previous project will cause motivational loss. Having to construct an extensive proc, which could extend on for a few hundred lines, is just exhausting.

Even creating an essential login snippet bores people. But what exactly is boredom? Wikipedia defines it as an emotional state experienced during periods of lack of activities or when individuals are uninterested in the activities surrounding them. We are not interested with the current section we are programming. This is why I previously said to pick something that will challenge you when you attempt to program it.

It is tedious for us to repeat the same action over and over, so having the television on while programming just lengthens the process of creating your game. Mainly because what ever is on the television is a lot less dull.

A question comes to mind, “How can I complete a game if repetition will eventually ‘kill’ my project?” The best answer to such a question is by making a Modular System. What I mean by that is, once you finish lets say a death check proc, you can easily transfer it into a new project without having to change it much. By doing such a thing, you will no longer have to repetitively generate a 100 line proc from scratch.

OurPad 1.01: Release

Sun, 07 Sep 2008 20:36:24 GMT

OurPad is a handy text editor (notepad) which allows users to share text easily online. Files that are opened and saved with this program are typically the .txt and .dm extensions. Currently, such extensions as .doc and .docx can not be opened by this program.

There are several nifty commands you can use with this program. One is the send button; you can type your information in the text field, press send to allow everyone in the world to view it. Once the information has been sent a new tab will open in the ‘Dream Maker Window’ area. Users can also delete tabs that they are currently viewing; they can also open that current tab into a resizable and movable window.

There are some menu options also, such as New, which clears the text field. Users can use Open to select a file they wish to open. All files opened will be shown in a new tab to the world. Users can also save files; all saved files will be saved where the OurPad files are located.

Features are a nice part in every program, and this has a few which will help developers. OurPad uses Lummox JR’s, Syntax Highlighter program. OurPad also has a built in DM Guide and a DM Reference, which is located under the Help menu. Please note, to reduce accidental deletion, all files that have the same name as an existing file will have its text added to the file’s current text once saved.

After seeing all of this information you may be asking yourself, “How and why would I want to use this program?” Users who are currently working with a team do not always live near each other. This program will allow a better transferring of project files and also allow users to help each other out with current programming problems. Users can also help their friends out with their homework.

The best way to use this program while programming is to either open up your file from File>>Open or copy/type your code in the type field. Once done, press the send button so the world can view your progress.

Special thanks to Tiberath. I asked him to view this program and he suggested the multiple tab system and also helped me with programming some of it.

I will greatly appreciate it if you report any bugs on the forums, also feel free to suggest ideas.

http://www.byond.com/games/CalusCoRPS/OurPad

Motivational Rules

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 07:55:34 GMT

For the past 2 years I have found myself getting quite bored with creating programs/games. It just does not excite me as it did when I first joined BYOND. I open up Dream Maker and 5 hours later I have yet to do anything. Recently I have been following some of these rules which have so far kept me motivated.

Go a different route when creating something you have done before. Time after time what ends my projects is doing something I have completed in preceding projects. So try going a different route when making it, read up on different programming methods and maybe try it out. Modular programming is a good thing to look up.

Construct a game which will be a challenge when programming. I thought the faster and easier the game was to create the longer motivation I would have to work on it. I was wrong, in my opinion programming is very fun when you are doing something new and challenging. It feels great to finally get something operational that you have been working on for a day.

Take breaks, just working on your game for days straight will drain you and your motivation. Try working on your game for a couple of hours and then go on a nice break away from your developing environment. I tend to thinking of great ideas when there is nothing on my mind, this will motivate me to go home, write these ideas down, and then work on the game later on.

Balance the challenge, in any game there will be parts where it is quite easy to create that piece of code. As said before, challenges should motivate you, but if you do all of the challenges right at the beginning you will run out of them. So you should balance them, first create something basic and easy, once you are finish go ahead and doing something hard.

What to do with graphics? For me, it all depends on what the project is. If it requires interesting graphics such as aliens then I will work on the graphics before I start programming. But if I have to draw basic items such as a human and swords I will leave them till later on. Many times I have seen people discontinue games because they can not find a graphic artist. Your game does not have to be the next realistic game on BYOND. Try using some basic graphics, such as a square for a human and maybe a line for your sword. If you wait weeks just for a graphic artist while doing nothing productive to your game you will loses motivation.

Feel free to add your own rules; it will only help me and possibly other users out more.

Renewed

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 14:17:18 GMT

Well it looks like Teka/Timmy is on a "buying spree" as so far I have seen him buy three memberships for the community today. I was going to renew my membership once I had something interesting to post about but now it looks like I do not have to worry about it for another year. Now I shall remake my CSS as I have been using the same one since 2005.

Thank you Teka!