I'm hosting my first game contest on the GMC Forums so here goes!
Rules:
- Your game must be in 2D (obviosly!). - You can only send 1 entry. - Your game must be posted to me as an .exe file. - You can include any genre in your game exept sexual and drug related content. - The comp starts on the 23rd of June 2012 and ends on the 30th of June 2012. - You can update your game any time but you cannot update after the deadline. - Your game must be made in GameMaker. - You cannot use any Extensions, .dll files or .lib files. - I am the only judge.
Points awarded for:
Points given total 46 at most:
Regular ways to get points:
- Gameplay = 15 - Style = 8 - Atmosphere = 7 - How involved you can get = 4 - How the game name matches the game = 2
Extra points given when:
- Same Genre throughout game = 5 - Similar colors = 5 - Lots of diferent colors = 5
Tell me if I have missed anything and I shall update this post.
Good luck!
Edited by AeroblastGaming, 23 June 2012 - 04:12 PM.
This is the first contest i've ever hosted, so I want to be the only judge for this one.
I will host other contests where me and others can be judges!
That's fine. I was just pointing out the contradiction in terminology. Usually "voting" implies multiple people participate, and awards are based on majority. But I'm just jabbing you.
Maybe you should change that to "Award Basis"... or something like "Points Awarded for:"
Current progress log:
Game name: Dream Racers (working title)
1-2 players
Genre: racing (top-down)
Planned features:
-4 available characters
-custom music and graphics
-Attacks that require MP (mind power) to use
-free-flyer mode
-battle mode
Tracks:
-Hometown skyline: the small little houses of a forgotten suburbia lie thousands of feet below as you transverse the cloudy skies. Watch out for planes, helicopters,
-Magic castle:
-Deep caverns: sharp cliffs surround from all sides. Rays of light attempt to break the darkness below.
-Technicolor void: the blatant rainbow road ripoff. Completely random items are strewn about, floating around in nothingness. This is the realm between dimensions. Without clever use of MP, you're doomed to being stuck in one place.
Characters:
Avery Macintosh: Deanis's big sister. Has somewhat of a low self esteem. Flies with her arms spread out.
Home track: Hometown skyline
MP recharge: slow
Top speed: medium
Attack: strong
Deanis Macintosh: Avery's little brother. Considered annoying by many. Flies with a jetpack.
Home track: Hometown skyline
MP recharge: medium
Top speed: High
Attack: weak
Tyler Jenson: a boy who has lived in the deep caverns for as long as he could remember. Can do MP to do nearly anything with ease. Flies by meditating on a rock.
Home track: Deep caverns
MP recharge: fast
speed: slow
Attack: medium
Tree guy: Has a grudge against Deanis. When you get a tree angry, they chase you forever. Can't use MP. Flies by giant dandelion puff.
Home track: Magic castle
MP recharge: N/A
Speed: medium
Attack: medium
MP
-Will regenerate automatically with the speed dependent upon the character
-Allows characters to make items appear out of thin air
-effect chosen is based upon current standing in race and is otherwise random.
--generic throwable : An object of slightly varying size and base attack. Resembles something from the character's home track. An arrow rotates around the player until used and flies in the direction that was pointed at by the arrow. Knockback depends upon a combination of weight attribute and speed. Items disappear after a set amount of time, depending upon strength level. Items bounce off of walls.
---fake leg
---monocle
---rock
---glow-y crystal
---wiimote
---pillow
---bowling pin
---backpack
---glasses
---large keyboard
--invisible sock : Makes user invisible and invincible for a short amount of time. Can be very confusing and dangerous. Since the back of the sock is open, the user can still smack into walls and can be affected by larger track hazards.
--winged beard: raises top speed by 1 while worn. Wears off eventually or when hit too many times.
Story: Based off of a forum adventure that I'm currently working on where the characters travel to various dimensions and are able to create things with their imaginations to solve problems. The events of this game take place in a dream that may or may not have been dreamt by one of the main characters.
How to play: Fly to all the checkpoints in order and then back to the starting line to complete a lap. Once somebody completes the set amount of laps first, the race ends and they win. Forward movement is automatic. Most likely, you will be able to modulate the speed by "changing gears" (though it will most likely be much more fluid than just 6 gears), allowing the player to go fast, slow, slower, stop, and even go in reverse. Direction will be determined by the directional keys or WASD, depending on if you're player 1 or 2.
Actual progress:
-Basic character parent object started. so far, only faces 1 of four directions based upon direction.
-Speed is set by a variable.
-Ability to move forward is set by a variable (0 by default).
To do soon:
-make a test track (probably technicolor void since it's supposed to be out in the middle of nowhere)
-make the starting line object (increments lap by 1 if all necessary invisible checkpoints are reached)
-make the checkpoint object
-make a test AI (pretty much just a player object on a path)
-make some basic menus
Current progress log: Game name: Dream Racers (working title) 1-2 players Genre: racing (top-down) Planned features: -4 available characters -custom music and graphics -Attacks that require MP (mind power) to use -free-flyer mode -battle mode
Tracks: -Hometown skyline: the small little houses of a forgotten suburbia lie thousands of feet below as you transverse the cloudy skies. Watch out for planes, helicopters, -Magic castle: -Deep caverns: sharp cliffs surround from all sides. Rays of light attempt to break the darkness below. -Technicolor void: the blatant rainbow road ripoff. Completely random items are strewn about, floating around in nothingness. This is the realm between dimensions. Without clever use of MP, you're doomed to being stuck in one place. Characters:
Avery Macintosh: Deanis's big sister. Has somewhat of a low self esteem. Flies with her arms spread out. Home track: Hometown skyline MP recharge: slow Top speed: medium Attack: strong Deanis Macintosh: Avery's little brother. Considered annoying by many. Flies with a jetpack. Home track: Hometown skyline MP recharge: medium Top speed: High Attack: weak Tyler Jenson: a boy who has lived in the deep caverns for as long as he could remember. Can do MP to do nearly anything with ease. Flies by meditating on a rock. Home track: Deep caverns MP recharge: fast speed: slow Attack: medium Tree guy: Has a grudge against Deanis. When you get a tree angry, they chase you forever. Can't use MP. Flies by giant dandelion puff. Home track: Magic castle MP recharge: N/A Speed: medium Attack: medium
MP -Will regenerate automatically with the speed dependent upon the character -Allows characters to make items appear out of thin air -effect chosen is based upon current standing in race and is otherwise random. --generic throwable : An object of slightly varying size and base attack. Resembles something from the character's home track. An arrow rotates around the player until used and flies in the direction that was pointed at by the arrow. Knockback depends upon a combination of weight attribute and speed. Items disappear after a set amount of time, depending upon strength level. Items bounce off of walls. ---fake leg ---monocle ---rock ---glow-y crystal ---wiimote ---pillow ---bowling pin ---backpack ---glasses ---large keyboard --invisible sock : Makes user invisible and invincible for a short amount of time. Can be very confusing and dangerous. Since the back of the sock is open, the user can still smack into walls and can be affected by larger track hazards. --winged beard: raises top speed by 1 while worn. Wears off eventually or when hit too many times.
Story: Based off of a forum adventure that I'm currently working on where the characters travel to various dimensions and are able to create things with their imaginations to solve problems. The events of this game take place in a dream that may or may not have been dreamt by one of the main characters.
How to play: Fly to all the checkpoints in order and then back to the starting line to complete a lap. Once somebody completes the set amount of laps first, the race ends and they win. Forward movement is automatic. Most likely, you will be able to modulate the speed by "changing gears" (though it will most likely be much more fluid than just 6 gears), allowing the player to go fast, slow, slower, stop, and even go in reverse. Direction will be determined by the directional keys or WASD, depending on if you're player 1 or 2.
Actual progress: -Basic character parent object started. so far, only faces 1 of four directions based upon direction. -Speed is set by a variable. -Ability to move forward is set by a variable (0 by default). To do soon: -make a test track (probably technicolor void since it's supposed to be out in the middle of nowhere) -make the starting line object (increments lap by 1 if all necessary invisible checkpoints are reached) -make the checkpoint object -make a test AI (pretty much just a player object on a path) -make some basic menus
Cool! Looking forward to seeing that! Remember to post or send a private message containing your game OK?!
Current progress: -Character select completed! The character that is chosen is tracked by global.p1guy, which is later used in the obj_p1_con object's create event to specify which set of sprites and stats to use. -First moving character! All 4 characters have the basic outline of their stats, though much retooling is needed to give the effects desired. -Working collisions! These were borrowed from some scraps that I had lying around and a little help from DarkLopo's character selection tutorial. His tutorial also gave me a basic idea of how to go about having multiple characters and multiple players that all have the same basic play-style, just slightly modified. -Working camera! I borrowed this one from a recent project of mine. It's a little buggy when the player isn't moving though.
Originally, the different characters were going to have their own objects, but those four in addition to messing with the p1 and p2 objects made me reconsider because it was starting to get a little too complicated. For sprite changes, I specified in the obj_flypar (the mom of the p1 and p2 objects) to have the sprites changed to variables when the conditions were met. Then in the p1 and p2 objects, I could specify which set of sprites to use by setting those variables equal to those sprites when the global.p1guy variable matched up. While this might seem a bit cumbersome, I'm just glad that it makes some sort of sense. I'm more of a resource creator than a programmer and I wanted to focus more on programming in this contest so that I wouldn't get carried away with drawing and composing and only have the face of a game with no actual game content, like I've made the mistake of doing so many times in the past.
Now, for some pictures!
Spoiler
Here is the menu. Both players must have their character chosen in order for the button to be click-able. A neat feature is that the character can be deselected and the player can get back to choosing and the button will gray out again. This is the test area, smack dab in the middle of the void. The test sprite is just a jigglypuff scrawled down in a 32x32 square, facing a different direction with the current direction (only four directions for the sprites). The placeholder will be replaced eventually. Here the player is going faster than the camera. The camera makes jerky movements if I crank it up to a speed of 8.
So far, this contest has been a great exercise in learning how to utilize variables and global variables. Even if I don't win, this will have still been a valuable experience for me.
To do: -fine-tune controls -fix the camera! -put the 2nd player in the room with a separate camera and view -make the chaeckpoint system -make the mp system -work on some music for the void area -draw Avery's 4-directional sprites
Current progress: It's been going fairly slow lately. Maybe its just general loss of interest. Even though I had ALL DAY to do the things on the check-off list, I instead spent most of my precious time re-reading Homestuck from act 2 to act 4 (why the heck do I spend so much time on reading something that I've already read twice? I'm even weeks ahead of the official re-read schedule!). But regardless of my slacking, I did somehow get something done: -Split-screen multiplayer working! -Avery and Deanis sprites complete! --Deanis's jetpack shoots out a dust-trail of obj_poof every time alarm makes it to 10 -Fixed a stupid bug in the direction facing system (I accidentally put the upsprite variable where the leftsprite variable should have been and vise-versa. As mentioned, stupid bug, easily fixed.) -Started drawing the background for the cave circuit --So far it has the basic lineart, the background colors of the different sections, some random items that do nothing, and shading on 60% of the sheer cliffs. Screenshots!
Spoiler
I should probably change the "ok!" sprite for that now. Avery and Deanis! The direction facing bug can be easily seen from the direction of Deanis's smoke trail
But, the movement engine is very flawed. -Characters only change facing direction if they move in a cardinal direction next to the current one (going right immediately after going left will make them look like they're flying backwards) may or may not be fixed, might be retooled to seem more natural. -Collisions are very stiff and don't allow for any sort of sliding past, thus making the movement mechanics a bit clunky; not the best thing for a racing game --can be used to stop the other player by running into them. Fully escape-able but somewhat unflattering -Controls can sometimes be unresponsive. Not sure if this is mostly a problem with my built-in laptop keyboard (which has been frequently known to skip keystrokes) or if it's an actual programming bug. --Characters also slide forward slowly when no buttons are pressed, stopping only at collisions. Might try to recreate this feature in a stabler form (since this game was supposed to have auto-forward like Kirby Air Ride in the first place).
Hopefully tomorrow's efforts will be much more eventful (as well as more resourceful and implementationful).
*comes back after tons of hours of slacking off and actually working on the game for once*
WHAAAAT?! Now what do I do with this pitiful piece of shame that is my game so far? https://dl.dropbox.com/u/59572658/dreamracersalpha.exe
Go ahead and disqualify me from any future competitions led by you. I deserve it.
EDIT: Also, I'm not even supposed to be awake at these hours of the night. ALL THAT SLEEP LOST... for nothing.
*cries in a corner and punches the wall due to not having very good time management skills*
No chance.
Your a good game designer!!!
EDIT: This is an AWESOME game!!! I declear shinyjiggly the winner of the 2D games contest due to having an AWESOME game and being the only participant!
Edited by AeroblastGaming, 30 June 2012 - 12:33 PM.
Sorry for that outburst last night. It was four in the morning and I was kind of tired and self-loathing. Could you disclose how many of each type of points I got, even though it's somewhat irrelevant?
And, while I'm here, I might as well go over what I did in the last hours of working on it before I sent it off.
Actual Progress: -Added the checkpoints! --These things are probably the most important to the racing mechanic. I instead of having to implement a "wrong way" mechanic and have to restrict the racers to a boxed in circuit, I set them up on a breadcrumb trail that is necessary to follow if they want to have the lap registered. With this, it is also possible to accidentally miss a checkpoint and have the later ones not count, making it so that they have to go all the way back without any external help to get back on track. This is made easy by the inclusion of the progress number being visible in the HUD and on the checkpoints, in a way that makes it seem like a connect-the-dots sort of dealy-o. With this margin for error, all of a sudden it isn't too bad that you picked Avery instead of Deanis, since Avery has a larger hitbox and thus doesn't have to maneuver as much to reach the checkpoints (though a careful Deanis can still easily beat her into next Tuesday). --bug: checkpoint number 1 does nothing, since progress already starts at one (note: change default progress to zero) --bug: the player's HUD is also visible from the other player's screen. -implemented a completely different movement system --bug: character always faces right when no directonal keys are pressed. --bug: character sprites don't show up until they at least move once. --gripe: auto-movement is currently not re-implemented yet. -Title screen added! --I really want something that moved on this screen, but I was in rush mode and just scrawled the two main characters onto a default GIMP gradient background. -Level select added --This was fairly easy, just a simple left mouse click room change with a BGM change. There's also a test level available from here with an unused remix of a theme that was used in an [S] update for the forum adventure that this is based off of. -made it possible to win! --Bug: It always says that Player 2 won, even if Player one did all the laps first and P2 did nothing. Will have to do some debug to make it notice the winner flag instead of defaulting. -BGM added --Most of these tracks are old pieces that I've never had a chance to use, revamped for usage in a racing game. The only ones that were made 100% custom for this game was the title screen and the menu BGM, which was supposed to be used for the Hometown Skyline stage. -Gripe: didn't get to drawing the sprites for the Tree guy and Tyler
One thing that I'm particularly proud of is how easy it is to whip up an area with this setup. Literally all you have to do is copy-pasta the test room, arrange the checkpoints, place some rocks, input some variables in the creation code for the checkpoints, and then make a link to it in the stage select room.
Things that I could do if I ever plan on revisiting this game (not counting bugs and gripes, fixing those is a given): -Add a battle mode (with HP and MP bars) --Running out of HP would make the player fall and then respawn with some progress taken away --Implement the item throw system (runs on MP) -have a stage with moving checkpoints -Add a limited use boost (runs on MP) -Add an up-counting timer -Add a time attack mode -Add singleplayer mode (AI should be relatively easy for races, just have them target the next checkpoint and have them sometimes use MP things) -Add a story/career mode (a set of races in an order with text/picture based cutscenes) -Add special attacks for certain characters --Deanis would have the invisi-sock --Avery would have the long-range fake leg swing, which would only be usable when not moving --Tree Guy would have a "tornado spin" move that would immobilize (read as: make them spin around in place) those who touch him while in use. If used for too long, he will be immobilized for a short time as well. --Tyler would have his swarm of fireflies that home in on nearby players but only do a very small amount of damage each. -Have the flying beard do the countdown thing before everybody gets to move
Working on this game has definitely been helpful in learning a couple things, though I wish it weren't so buggy and incomplete. It would have been a little bit nicer if there was a little bit more competition, but at least something happened in the end.
well you need a more original comp than that to get participant. Themeless competitions are completely useless. Also don't you start saying "2D" is a theme, because it's not. Since we all use gamemaker, it basically means "make any game you want" So you need to be more restrictive so people can actually be challenged
edit:
Extra points given when:
- Same Genre throughout game = 5
No, this is completely unacceptable. You mean you actually give more points to people who do unoriginal stuff? D: so someone who makes an awesome multi-genre games with phases of action and strategy and puzzles will be penalized? Try again, bro.
Edited by supmaster004, 10 October 2012 - 11:43 AM.
