[RELEASED] Fast paced platform shooter

You may have guessed after playing Crabator and UFO Race, I like fast paced action games :P

I started to work on my own object oriented game engine after reading this post, it works smoothly and doesn't use much RAM with 16 enemies and 16 bullets flying all around the screen, with 12 different weapons so far (rifle, pistol, grenade, RPG, mines, laser, etc.)

Find the final game here : Super Crate Buino.




Update, new graphics and more


So far the game is strongly inspired from Super Crate Box, but I will also take elements from Super Meat Boy and Farg later (I'm not a great game designer so I only mix existing games together haha)

I'm looking for an artist to help me with the sprites and animations, if any of you is interested please tell me :)

A few words about the engine :

First, I use only integers instead of floats, It saves a lot of RAM and makes the game much faster. I use a scale of 8 between the ingame distances and the screen distance to manage subpixel accuracy.

I have a base class named Box which contains the variables int x, y, vx, vy and that's all. All the other properties like width, height, gravity, friction, bouncing and all are gotten through virtual getter functions which can be overridden by the subclasses (Player, Enemy, Bullet).

The class Bullet, for example, has a variable byte subtype, which is used in the getter functions for the bullets to have different behavior depending on their type (1 for pistol, 2 for rifle, 3 for shotgun, etc.).

To sum up, only integers and everything that is common to several objects of the same type is returned by getter functions so it doesn't need a variable in RAM to store it. So far so good.

Hello Rodot,

that looks really great!

I know there are a lot of better artists out here, but I gave it a try. 6x6 is the sprite's limit according to the animation/screenshot? That's tough :-) Is gray allowed or do you want to keep it strictly monochrome?
Did you have cartoony, non-human characters and enemies in mind, or humans?

Here some random doodles. The gray tone may have turned out a little dark.

Thanks ! :)
Cartoony is okay and will probably easier to draw.

Player and monster are 6x6 (might be increased to 6x8 if needed). I will add larger monster, maybe 10x10. The tiles are 6x6. The bitmaps can be slightly larger during animations, for example legs and arms (if any) can go out of the 6x6 box when walking.
One suggestions is that the body moves up and down by 1 pixel when the monsters are moving to create the gait feeling.

I can't say about the gray yet. I think it should be ok, but haven't implemented it in the library yet. Anyway we shouldn't rely on it too much as it's contrast dependent, plus the game is moving fast.

oh maybe i can use this Code for my Projekt.
if you allow it :?:

Yeah sure do whatever your want with the code, but it's neither finished nor commented ^^
I just did some tests about gray, it looks ok when the contrast is set, so I think I will add the GRAY color to the display library. But it will only look good on static or slow moving objects, like the player or the tiles. Monsters are moving fast so they need to be a big piece of black pixels to be correctly visible.

Ah, I'm loving the different weapon physics. Very cool.

I was thinking of doing the scaled integers instead of using floats, but I didn't want to have to say "/ SCALE" all over the place. (or, your friction which multiplies by 100 and divides by 100). I considered finding an "fixed point" type library for the arduino, but they're all pretty big. Then I considered making my own, but now it's looking like dividing by the scale before drawing is the easiest way :P

Absolutely amazing. Gave a good third of it a read and I already have a ton of questions. I wont ask em though, I'll wait for you to finish and comment. Thanks for this!

Great! Particle fx are really cool so far. Keep it up!

I updated the game, now the player can actually get KILLED. And also many other additions, so it starts to be playable, even if there is still a lot of work to be done.

Somehow I got reminded of Jazz Jackrabbit :-)

6x6 really is a tough one, at least for me. I suppose one could borrow a few ideas from Atari (and similar older console) sprites. For 10x10 a lot is possible (I even started animating some of my project's 8x11 sprites).

There seem to be a few 6x6 sprites on sprite websites, for example http://www.pixeljoint.com/pixelart/69072.htm, but most utilize color to differentiate eyes, weapons or limbs.

Last doodles, I promise ;-)