LittleBear
says: Wake up and spill the coffee.
Cactus has released Protoganda (more info here). Simply put it’s another great bit of fun from a talented and prolific developer. Apparently a sequel is already planned… though due to scheduling conflicts we’ll probably have to wait until Monday for that 
I’ve had a shmup project idea in the back of my head for awhile, and recently I’ve been discussing it a bit with failrate. It’s an iterative or remix concept, something similar to last year’s Rect Winder. After its original release by kenmo it saw updates by Omega (Rect Winder NT and Rect Winder REDuce (go to the bottom of the page) ) and Kou Mikage (Rect Winder HB).
So consider this post an informal poll, and a request for comments. What I propose is a similar experiment. All those wishing to be involved, development-wise or not, can 1) suggest possible games for the project, and 2) vote on the game that gets “iterated”. After that, anyone who wants can play around with the elected game and take it in a new direction. I guess it’s mostly one original and many remixes, but it would be great to see even those get iterated. I don’t know that there needs to be a start and end date, either. This could be kind of an ongoing thing with many different “seed” games.
I think such an experiment would be a great way for both rookie and experienced developers alike to learn. I’ve always found there’s nothing like taking someone else’s code apart and seeing how it works. There’s also the benefit of having some interesting games to play around with, and some likely provocative discussion. I think it would be a lot of fun.
There are also some concerns, of course. I foresee it being difficult for everyone to maintain their enthusiasm, especially if the game selected is not their first choice. I also would want to make very sure that the original author of the game approves of this… and obviously the source is either already available or could be made available.
Thoughts? Is this even workable, or does it have to happen spontaneously in an ad-hoc fashion?
The Ablation X development blog is up now. This shooter by nenad is one of the nicest looking games currently on the dev horizon. Here’s a replay of the video to further whet the appetite. Thanks Tim.
Adler Zone is a fun little NES style shooter that battlegorge is working on. Classic game play all around, there’s one level so far.
Ah, The Iron Council. The red-headed step-child of the SHMUP-DEV Competition 2k7 Round 2. I actually submitted something “official” just in the nick of time, though the submitted “game” is extremely far from finished. It’s a bit of a mixed bag then. On the one hand it’s almost always good packaging up “something” and assigning a version number. On the other hand, it’s further proof that I should change the site byline to “Home of the Partial Project”
So here then is a quick and dirty postmortem of the contest submission:
What went right?
Splines. I modeled the train tracks on Catmull-Rom splines. Not that the type of spline is all that important, but having a track that is defined by a series of points worked out very well. A Track object uses a spline to render itself, while the TrainCar objects “ride” the track. They all have access to the spline data and can adjust their angles accordingly.
Graphics. I tried a new style out, using Inkscape to draw vector-style sprites that I then converted to textures. This allowed me to create some pretty good (for me) art in a reasonable amount of time.
Choice of Theme. It’s a classic shooter match-up, Helicopter Gunship vs. Armoured Train. Well, at least I really like it.
What went wrong?
Time. I started off by putting a month or so of work into something I call DS5: Release the Hounds while keeping The Iron Council in the back of my head. I realized the latter was a more playable game idea and switched projects part way through. This left me with less time that I would have liked, but the extra month might not have made all that great an impact anyway. Real life family and career commitments caught up with me as well.
Scope. I quickly scaled back what I thought I could get done, removing things like cartoon-style 3D terrain, but even then the game had a large scope. I managed to sneak in the choice of option armaments (Gatling Guns or Seeker Missiles) but the missiles don’t seek and the level design did not take into account the offsetting pros and cons of the two types. In a nutshell, I wanted to do far too much with the game than I possibly could in the time frame.
Pre-Alpha Prototype. There’s no sound, no scoring, and no boss to fight. In fact, there’s really only a train, a couple side tracks with smaller enemies on it, and a lot of bullets. I think there’s a lot of potential there, but what was released is hardly a game.
All the negatives aside, though, ultimately I had a lot of fun working on it. I definitely want to spend some time making the graphics more consistent, and adding the features that got missed. Yet another project to be added to my “chore jar”.
Java Webstart or Windows download.
the2bears © Copyright 2004-2010
William R. Swaney. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
License. 
