Programmers for Game-Project

[kopperfeld]

Hi sorex,

after trying out with B4a some time, i think it's even possible to do some game projects (one would be fine), maybe in a time of 6 or so months.
My main focus was on oldstyle game-classics in the tradition of the 1980's homecomputers (like C64 and Amiga for instance).
They might be old-baked (like me, HAHA! (haaa..)), but often i see these advantages:
* Not too extremely complex, thus more easy to implement (still loads of work, but which is fun)
* Proven and tested gameplay qualities
* A good template to work with
I know it might not be utterly creative, it's just I guess such projects have good chance becoming something people want to
play with; more than maybe some fancy idea which seems great in my mind first, but ultimately I have to realize and test to decide if my concept really
works, like the way I thought (not that fancy ideas can't develop to something great).

An extension to this idea was to take a proven concept and soup it up it with some extra features you would like to have seen in the original game,
but was not possible to implement at that time because of technical or budget reasons^^, whilst keeping the flair of the original.
I know the idea won't be exactly fresh and unsure how far copyright issues interfere or terminate it all from start anyway (thinking of clones).

Most of all, I wish it to be fun without pressure, and to learn possibly from each other - If it grows to more than a test-balloon also fine.
What are your thoughts? Complete rubbish or top of the notch?

Ah sorry for the loads of text, i'm still learning English and have to learn to better compress ma messages..(??)

 

[sorex]

?too much info error



What kind of game?

 

[sorex]

Well, my roots are also the C64 (still busy with it aswell) and I dislike almost every game that came out since Wolfenstein/Doom

So I also prefer the old style platformers and single screen games (blagger/mutant monty and the likes)

If it goes into that direction I'm interested into the project.

The only problem I see is controlling the player, on a tablet with 1024x800 or higher you have enough space to place a joystick thingy but what to do on the phone that are only 240x400 ? You'll cover half the playfield when moving you thumb.

 

[kopperfeld]

Yes thats exactly what i thought, the controls are one of the biggest issue that really narrows the choice of games you can make.
So you have to put in a lot of thoughts to really figure out the control style in advance as i think the whole game can stand and fall by how you steer everything.

For example 'Bruce Lee' wouldn't be a good choice i think on a small screen, even if you zoom up the sprites. On the 240x400 screen you said the choice of games which work would be really small, i guess therefore you would need to do an extra layout because of the screen size and low pixel resolution.
I think for most game types you would need at least 320x480, but lastly it depends on the size of the screen compared to the size of your finger cover-area, so that you don't hide much more that maybe 1/4th of the area with your finger (compared to 1/2 like you mentioned on the 240x400 phone screen^).

As for a Jump and Run i wouldn't do the controls by tapping directly on the character to move it around. I would do it like you can tap anywhere, and by your gesture you define the movement the main character does. It sounds more complicated than it is - i mean just swipe right and the sprite starts to run right, swipe up-left and the sprite jumps in that direction (or use your other finger to trigger the jump (i know this requires multitouch support which not every device has yet))
Important is that you never hide important actions on the screen while controlling the game, but I know thats not always easy to realize.

For instance i think most racing games would be ok (the ones with cockpit view), as the action is above and you can use the cockpit-area for steering.

 

[kopperfeld]

WOW, what things are you doing on the C64? That would be vastly interesting!
Only thing i have for mine is an old 8Mhz-Card (Flash8-card) to put into the user-port, i think it's still working)
I used it to play Chuck Yeagers Advanced Flight Trainer with fluid framerates.

 

[sorex]

Well, I'm working for the Nostalgia gang in the background and I wrote several 'cross-tools' on pc to speed up their game compiling (level packing, packing, disk extractors etc) and our main focus these days is EasyFlash. Look it up and you'll love it.

About the joy thing... if the res is 400x640 or something you could still scale the game to 480x320 or something that frees up room aswell for the touch event.

I wouldn't go for swipe events, those are good foor puzzlers but not for a bruce lee type of game since you can't really know pixel exact how far the character needs to move. for the puzzler it's just one block to the left/right.

For a racer that would work I guess.

 

[tlasek]

Hello

Interesting conversation... I'm a newbie here to b4a but an oldie to everything else. I recently licensed b4a because I wanted to make the jump to android programming but had a learning curve due to my many years as a microsoft/vb oriented programmer.

I just have to say... so far... I LOVE B4A!!!!

Everything just works and the documentation and support here online seems above normal compared to what I've seen elsewhere. My Hats off to the B4A crew for making it powerful and simple to understand at the same time!! Keep up the good work!

Now back to the conversation...

I too have roots in the old C64 and TRS-80's environments. I remember a lot of peeks-n-pokes for the C64 while on the other hand the TRS-80's had a more basic like structured language to work with. I coded my own BBS and had online games way before the Internet was even thought of!! The good old days.

Anyway I would love to see more here on b4a about game programming. I've only briefly checked out the gameview library and the hardware acceleration examples but its an entirely new concept to me so I have a long way to go.

I think my first attempt at android game programming will be a multiplayer Star Trek like game (just because I'm an old star trek fan). It seems a fairly decent game could be made with a mixture of the webviews and gameviews and a little database connectivity.

 

[kopperfeld]

Just for addition:

Yah what i also thought the controls are critical and not every type of game makes sense on a touch screen. I think the controls are the bread and butter, meaning a game can really stand and fall by whether it's fun to steer it or a pain, no matter how good the graphics, leveldesign or story is. But that's just general bla, bla everyone knows already.

Although sorrily I never got the change to play Blagger on the original machine, afaik i heard from it that time. A game i know which might be a little like similar is Bagitman, which was popular here, or Henrys House (i know they're vastly different in goals & maybe more boring mainstream

You know I like the Joystick way (simply said represented by a smaller ball in a bigger circle) and there's not that much alternatives, also sometimes i think they implement it just for nostalgic reasons. Compared to a real gamepad i see the problems, that you don't exactly know where your finger is as you miss haptic feedback (except vibration^), and can't see the joystick center, because it's hidden by your finger. At least to my view, it can make control harder when your finger loses track in fast game situations, a good example might be the free remake "Paradroid" i downloaded from the PlayStore.
The levels look and play fine just like the C64 Version, it's just I often slip of the joy circle in hectical shootouts against other crazed droids (because i have no time looking if my finger is still at circle center), or well I'm just not used to it or simply disturbed motorics.

I bet you can get used to this, but i imagine an alternative control method for 'maze' games like Blagger/M.M. and 360 Degrees' like Paradroid or even Platformers: Simplified it's to point anywhere on the touchscreen and your guy will move in that direction (its more like mark the target instead of moving the guy directly, think of classic point'n'click-adventures). Thus u can use preferably the screen edges for pointing at and don't hide the central action/player sprite with your fingers, while tapping gets you pixel-exact movement. Also this method has its problems like moving over long distances..

Sorry when i repeat myself (it just costs me so much effort to translate to english that I fall flat removing all the redundancy)

 

[sorex]

@tlasek: I had a Tandy TRS-80 Model III back then, really low res gfx mode but it had some nice games by Yves Lempereur.

The basic did what it had to do but it was horror to use it, it was edlin style so you had to type something like e10 or edit10 and then you could edit that line in some sort of 1 line edit mode

@kopper: I like that border arrows method, the only bad part is if you put the move-up-button at the top you cover the playfield again with youfinger/hand.

On a 9+ inch tablet you can forget fast movements that way since the distance is too far you could use the joy method there if the resolution allows it.

 

[kopperfeld]

Ja, i see my control idea also causes other problems like moving distances, low precision and you inevitably end up hiding the view again when used the upper screen edges, like sorex mentioned. Better to keep it simple and stick to the joy method so far for most cases, maybe add some audio-feedback by a sound that resembles the micro-switches, and/or evtl. visual, by putting a kind of an arrow-cross around your character, which shows the current stick direction (as long as that won't kill the flair).

At least on my phone, i also noticed an input lag or delay of min. one frame, which i think is system inherent (event-callback) what would mean you can't really completely get rid of. My swipe idea or any indirect control method would just add to this delay, so let's keep it simple and i stop my complicated thinking^^..

I'd favor to do one of the following gametypes:
Sports (Track&Field), Racing (StuntCarRacer), 360-Shooter (TimePilot/Gyruss), Paint-Area (Qix), Space/Vector (StarWars or similar)
The idea is to choose one which benefits most from the touchscreen control.

 

[Cableguy]

Sorry to medle in your conversation....

"Back in the Days..." I started with a Spectrum ++, doing some QuickBasic stuff...(yeh, lots of peeks and poke...),then did some assembler...found it too hard to pursuit...
Played a few interesting games back then... Marauder, PaperBoy, Wolfenstein, SnurfsVilla, Super Hang-on,etc
On the subject of controling the game... in the racer type of game you can always take advantage of the built-in acceleration sensor, using the phones tilting, rotating movemens to control the game ...
On a scrolling kind of game, you only need to focus in the "action" the player needs to do... again the tilting is usefull to control...
Also I have seen an arcade game-pad dock for a Tablet device, so I guess that is also possible to target...

 

[kopperfeld]

@sorex: whoya Easyflash looks really great. Can you do that besides or as a main profession? If anyone had had such a cartridge back in the days he would have been ultimate King. I wish i could earn my bread still with hacking the c64 these days, after spending so many ages fiddling around that it became my 100% passion (instead of doing school homework - or anything else like going outside). Did you also program assembly back then? It was very hard and abstract for me to learn at first, and my 'equipment' was not much more than the monitor-assembler and a reset-switch, but i felt forced utilizing it to soup up the Basic 2.0.

 

[kopperfeld]

Yey Cableguy very interesting you started with the Spectrum.. i think it had fever colors, but more CPU power than the C64?^^
Assembly is hard, isn't it? Like painting the reichstag with a toothbrush (apologies for the comparison)..
Great if you liked QBasic, too: I'm busy converting an older QB-program to B4A (i kept my horrible Basic source code and emulated the commands instead). The 1st level is playable already, but so far it depends on devices with 480x800 res. Also i have that LG P990 where i get 30-35 fps at most. Is that normal? (guess that's what people like me deserve who just use the canvas for everything). I think i should make it adapt to different resolutions before posting, so more people can try out.

 

[sorex]

no, the EasyFlash & c64 stuff in general is just none profik geek stuff and yes we still code in assembler but instead of using turbo assembler on the c64 we use fancy pc editors (like pspad or notepad++) and pc based c64 (6502) compilers to gain speed and make things easier for larger projects.

 

[kopperfeld]

That's so neat stuff. I don't know, but i could imagine many in the '64 demoscene also use well tested and (maybe opcode-)optimized code blocks/templates to squeeze ever more effects into their demos, is that true? When watching these artworks to me it looks like they must have been created by technical masterminds and design geniuses, else I can't explain how on earth they manage to pull rotating half-screen sized textures out of effective 700 khz clock speed. Even if you used all the opcodes and only look-up-tables, isn't it just impossible even in theory (?) )) - For me it stays magic, the fastest line-drawing routine I ever managed could not do much more than 5K pixels per second, or merely 4 lines per frame.. compared to above, these efforts are a joke)). (Somebody once told me that they also utilized the second processor of the 1541-drive to make the Elite-vectors faster back then already, but its maybe just a legend (?)

 

[sorex]

well, speed code is in most cases unrolled loops, clever lookup tables etc.

and you're right some demo's used code in the drive.


Just wondering, did you already have game idea's to try out?