Bricks! [In development - Test demo available!]

Advice on general approaches or feasibility and discussions about game design

Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby rodot » Fri Nov 14, 2014 10:34 pm

Your game is looking great! Thanks for sharing your progression :)
I understand the development is still in progress, but I have one small remark : either my contrasts are high enough for me to clearly see the ball but the grays are black, either I lower the contrast to get correct gray but I can barely see the ball, as it's moving. Could you make the balls maybe one or two pixel wider ? But then it would be taller than a brick, so i'm not sure it's a good idea. Or maybe add a trail to the ball so it will show up black instead of gray.
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby Drakker » Fri Nov 14, 2014 11:45 pm

Thanks for the comments guys!

I have the same problem on one of my displays. I guess I could elongate the ball, like when you grab the M (stands for megaball). Maybe as an option in the final version.

On my displays, the less things there are on screen, the more visible the ball is. I don't know why, but that's something I started to notice recently. The more pixels flicker, the harder the ball is to see. It is as if the screen can't keep up with too many pixel updates. This is also noticeable in the gray experiment app I posted in the utilities section. The horizontal stripes gray makes the text at the bottom of the screen blink and be grayish, but it is supposed to be black since it is there every frame.
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby Drakker » Sat Nov 15, 2014 12:13 am

MexxNapster: check the code in there: viewtopic.php?f=12&t=2058

Code: Select all
if (gb.buttons.pressed(BTN_DOWN)) { frameRate = max(frameRate--, 1); }
else if (gb.buttons.pressed(BTN_UP)) { frameRate = min(frameRate++, 99); }
if (prevFrameRate != frameRate) { gb.setFrameRate(frameRate); }
prevFrameRate = frameRate;


This should work.
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby Drakker » Tue Nov 18, 2014 3:58 pm

Level editor:

Image

It is a standalone app for now, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to cram it inside the same executable as the game later on. It still won't save because I do almost all my programming on the bus/subway, and I don't bring my Gamebuino with me (and fiddling with an micro SD card on a bus = bad idea)... and Simbuino doesn't support SD read/write yet. So I'll probably have to write the save part during the xmas holidays or something.
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby erico » Wed Nov 19, 2014 2:34 am

All is so beutifully visually created, why not try something different for the powerups instead of letters?
Even if it is not that intuitive, the discovery is part of the thrill! ;)

Absurd amazing work, I can´t wait to get school out of my way and head to get my Gamebuino at my parent´s place(2 states away :( ).
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby Drakker » Wed Nov 19, 2014 2:42 am

Letters are easy to recognize. I've thought a lot about icons, but without color, and with a few pixels, they wouldn't look like anything useful. At least, the letters are easy to associate with functions. But I would love to be proven wrong if good icons can be made in 8x3 or 8x5. The other reason is that letters come "free". More icons mean more progmem used, and I'm quickly running out of it. The funny thing is that my code uses like 960 bytes of ram, but 24k of the 30k available in progmem already, and I need to fit petit_fatfs, menus, level loaders, more bricks and items as well as the level editor in there.
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby Drakker » Thu Nov 27, 2014 1:29 am

Alright, I think the gameplay is settled and feature complete. Guess it's time to work on the boring stuff like menus and game over screens.

Here's a link to the new binary and sources: http://www.drakker.org/gamebuino/bricks/
There are still some rough edges in the code but it's getting there.

New items include the exploding balls (X, explodes the next time it hits a block), ball warps (W, warps straight up), fast balls (F) and slow balls (S). New blocks include weaker bombs (108) and randomly reappearing blocks (6). Levels are now stored in a proper 2d array instead of the previous flat array. Since it is still a test version, you still can't lose your first ball. Bug reports are always welcome.

Here are two more videos:
ImageImage

Todo (as a reference for myself):
- Fix the items drawing over each others.
- Fix items pickup height
- Add a few animations (items pickups, death, etc).
- Make the ball more visible (elongated maybe?)
- Draw the ball differently when it is about to explode.
- Level loading/saving from/to the SD card.
- Time the game for high scores.
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby jonnection » Thu Nov 27, 2014 3:33 pm

Hi Drakker

An easy old school trick to make ball more visible:

1. Wipe oldpos of ball from previous loop
2. Store current pos of ball as oldpos
2. Draw ball in new pos, do not wipe current ball
3. Loop to 1

You can extend this to wipe also earlier positions (current - 2 positions back in tine) if ball is still not visible enough. Basically you get "a ball with a trail"
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby Drakker » Thu Nov 27, 2014 4:18 pm

Thanks for the tips. I'm considering something like this, but the slow balls would still be small, albeit, it might not be a problem since the slower balls are easier to see. I was considering drawing the ball ahead of its movement based on its velocity and in its current position, so the middle of the trail, the position that will be most visible on the lcd, is actually the real location of the ball. I'm also trying to avoid having to store the ball location multiple times because it is stored as two floating points, even though I use float16, its still 32 bits every time, and I already allow 5 balls at the same time. Some of my functions (i.e. explosions) are recursive, so I'm trying to save as much RAM as possible to make sure the game doesn't crash or do something weird if a level is full of exploding blocks.
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Re: Bricks! [In development - now playable!]

Postby rodot » Sat Jan 10, 2015 10:35 am

Hey, I was wondering if you are still working on this game? It's already a great game, I hope you won't give up on it ^^
By only adding the ability to detect when the ball touches the floor and to go back the the title page it could be considered as an enjoyable beta version (because when people realize they can't loose they are kinda disappointed haha)
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