Xeno Versus: Space Melee

#21 Thanks for the nice comments. :)

Andre: the font is Badaboom and it's from Blambot. They have a variety of manga/comic style fonts on there. Some you need to pay a fee for, some are free for use. In the case of this font, it's free for personal publications but I'll have to talk to them about license fees in the (dream) event that the game gets published. I don't think they'd be too steep of a charge though, most pay fonts are around $20.

I wouldn't say the game is either polished or near done. There are a number of bugs needing to be fixed. Game-play needs some major balancing/tweaking. No official music yet. I haven't purchased/put-in sounds. No story. None of the levels are done. Only about 15% of the manga art is done. I'm missing features... etc... etc....

My goal is to get it to that next big tier of quality, then send it out again for comments. :)

#22 I thought people might find this screenshot interesting. It shows two things:

1- Ships can be "previewed" before being selected. The little preview box shows the ship flying around, shooting, etc... such that a player can get a feel for a ship instead of reading stats. As you can see that's not perfect yet, since the top ship has managed to fly out of the visible range of his preview box.

2- Right now 3 brands of USB gamepad can be auto-detected. The idea being that I can add support for a variety of controllers and auto-load the correct button scheme. Plus, this helps players know their color without hitting buttons or wiggling the joystick around. I created my own icons in Photoshop since I've always felt that real pictures of pads take away from the style of a game.

Here's the pic:



Other notes:

1- "Rocky rings" now has rocks in its rings! The next step is rocks the players can interact with. I've tried 3D with mixed results.

2- There are now 3 fully done manga pilots finished and in the game.

3- Not shown is that when a ship is destroyed and the next ship in its fleet is set to arrive, a blade swipes across the screen anime-style for a moment with that pilot calling out something like "On my way!" or "Help is near!"

There's still so much to do! My dream is done by winter, but I don't know if I'm gonna make it. :)

#23 I love the look of this. :) Looks like a real console game.

#24 Thanks Oliver.

Sooo... a public beta is VERY close. In fact, the file is uploaded online right now.... the link just isn't public yet. Right now a few close contacts are getting the link, then after any needed tweaks I'll re-upload, if necessary, and share the link on GG. :)

Some notes:

1- Now 4 pilots done

2- The #3 addition has been removed. It may later be added back in as a different game option, but as it was it disrupted game-flow.

Expect a link soon!

#25 Fantastic!!! I've been enjoying following your progress, Chris -- I'm really glad to see you've gotten it this far. That takes perseverence -- well done!

I for one am really looking forward to trying it out! I'll be watching this place for the link. :)

--clint

#26 The beta is sooooo close. Some minor issues were reported in the pre-beta (late alpha?). I've got two more pre-beta testers to hear from. Fortunately most "issues" were consistent from tester to tester.

I do have one bigger issue in the camera zoom. I'd envisioned large levels, and we'd created some art assets accordingly. But consistently people have complained that once the camera zooms out too far, they can no longer see their ship angle, projectiles, or thrusters well enough to navigate proficiently. Not sure what the solution is there, to be honest. This only effects two levels... but dang it they're pretty levels and I'd prefer to leave the art in its hi-res glory.

Clint: have you come up with any clever camera solutions in your project?

#27 Yeah, that's the same issue that I was running up against.

The best way that I've thought of to solve this one is to have little mini cameras focus in on the players when they get past a certain distance, sortof a dynamic split screen (possibly showing up in the status area of the player). I don't like how small this would have to be though, so I'm not entirely convinced this is the best option.

Another option I just thought of is to mount some indicator sprites onto the player's ships (and possibly on projectiles) and scale them up proportional to the camera zoom. These sprites would be simple shapes that would signify primarily their identity and direction. As the camera zooms further out, the overlays grow larger, so they stay relatively the same size as they were before. So the space ship stays the same (looks very small), but this halo around them expands relative to the camera zoom to give it a sortof overlaid HUD look.

Do either of those make sense?

--clint

#28 Yes, makes sense. Both are basically the same solutions I've come up with that involved not shrinking the big levels. I even fiddled with the dynamic split screen concept, but found it wasn't worth the trouble to debug. An indicator overlay may very well be the way to go!

#29 As I think it over a bit more, I imagine that the indicators would look good if they still shrank on the screen, just not nearly as much as the ships do. It still gives a measure of perspective and scale, but it's not perfect.

I dunno' -- you'd have to try it out, but I just wanted to throw that out as a mental bone to chew on.

--clint

#30 Inching forward even more! Right now I've formally started working with Clint on leveraging his knowledge from Air Locked to improve a couple sections of the Xeno Versus code.

Primarily, his camera algorithm is flat out better than the one I'd come up with. Whereas I calculated the center point between ships for camera position and scaled the zoom accordingly, Clint simply set the target area of the camera based on the furthest out ships. The result is simpler/faster camera control.

Also of note, I've shrunk the beta/demo level even further to help reduce the problem of ship visibility. Combined with my modified version Clint's camera code, this should be far less of an issue.

Secondly, we're in the process of validating his torpedo data computer code, which for some reason does not work at all angles for my game. Once working, this should help improve my AI, which struggles to hit targets at long distances. (It tends to fire short of its target.) This update, however, is not a gating factor to the beta.

So with that said, hopefully I can the camera change done. Then a few ship balancing tweaks. And hopefully I can get a developer snapshot and blog uploaded with beta information this weekend. :)

UPDATE: I came oh-so-close to getting it ready this weekend. A couple tiny snags held things in place.

#31 It's looking great Chris... glad to hear you and Clint are collaborating and you are making further progress, what Indie dev is all about :)

#32 Thanks Matthew.

For those that don't read the blog posts, I've got the beta up in a Yahoo group here:
groups.yahoo.com/group/xenoversusbeta

Two new testers already in, both commenting that the camera "still ain't right." ;)

Also some debate over whether auto-aim is a good or bad feature!

It should be an interesting 2.5 weeks of testing, for sure. :)

EDIT: Yay, snapshot is up! :)

#33 Okay, I'm calling the Yahoo group idea a flop. People seem to be weary of joining it. I personally like the service, but can understand the issues people might have.

With that said, I'm just going to post the link here. If you could post feedback in this thread (such that I know where the link was found), that would be super. I'll probably post a new blog as well.

ZIP file (Win XP): www.xenoclone.com/downloads/XenoVersusBeta.zip
Short Guide: www.xenoclone.com/downloads/xvsbeta_guide.pdf
Hidden key maps: www.xenoclone.com/downloads/xvs_keys.txt

Biggest issue needing discussion: How to tweak the camera -- once you injure the little yellow ship, you'll see what I mean.

NOTE: This expired on October 6th. A new beta should be available in late November.

#34 Just saying Hi! in this thread too.. And add that I still get a kick out of looking at the screenshots even while I've known about this game for a few months already. It looks great and very consistent.

--Eino

#35 Chris,

The single greatest area that needs work is the camera. It is very jerky and quite often you lose track of your ship. Unfortunately, if you want to have large areas to fly around, you will need to come up with a better way of displaying the ships.

I feel that ships move too slowly and they have too little energy stores. You should be able to move around quickly and fire rapidly. I understand the sentiment for the energy bar, in that you dont want people to be able to hold down the fire button and spin around, etc. I think that maybe you should have a larger bar, but have a large penalty for emptying it, say, 2x the reload time or something.

Also, when bullets are fired on the edges of the world, they do not wrap around.

Appart from that, I think its been very well made. Congrats to getting a product to this level!

#36 Thanks Eino and Phil.

Yup, camera and ship-responsiveness/speed are the major issues that everyone has reported. Both are undergoing some much-needed revision. Bullet-wrapping and energy display were also noted by people. Overall, the issues reported have been even across the board. It's great to have consistent feedback from person to person... it helps to know what's important to fix!

As a note, there is a small penalty for exhausting the battery already. So upping that to a noticeable level is pretty easy. :)

#37 I thought I'd post a little update / question here. As people who've followed this game know, there have been some issues with the camera. I did manage to write a camera algorithm that correctly mimics Star Control 2, but it is fundamentally limited to two ships.

A number of people have pitched to me that I should change the camera concept as a whole. Rather than use the dynamic zoom that keeps all players on screen, I should just split the screen to either 1-way, 2-ways, or 4-ways depending on the number of humans playing. Each camera just focuses on that player's ship. And each player can change the zoom of his/her camera. Admittedly, this would get slightly cramped for 4 human players on 800x600 resolution but it would allow for easy resolution changing (something I've intentionally not supported up to this point).

How does this concept sound?

My other idea is to use the SC2-style 2-player camera and have 4 players take turns in a winner-stays-in sort of multiplayer scenario. But maybe no fun for those waiting to play?

#38 Or another option could be perhaps to remove the screenwrap. If you think about it, in space you can go as far away as you want and you're not going to suddenly teleport to the other "side" of the universe.

It might be a good idea to just impose some sort of limits. Not physical ones, but if, for instance, you got outside of a certain distance of the battlefield, you lose points or power or life or something for some reason. This would encourage people to stay within certain limits while still giving them freedom of movement.

#39 Deozaan:

Ya, I've heard that one before. I've been resistant to the idea. But then I've resisted split screen for all this time, only to decide that it may be the right route after all. I like the idea of a "soft" boundary... I'll give it a shot and see how it works.

I did try 4 player split screen over the weekend. Props to TGB for being so easy to prototype up that sort of test. It actually works fairly well. A person definitely needs to zoom out his little box. But I think it works OK. There are some issues I need to overcome, but nothing major. It actually allows me some "features" that I had to clip with the common-to-all camera. I hope this turns out to be the best solution. I'd certainly like to move on to other aspects of the game that need my attention!

#40 The only other place I can think of seeing a similar camera style used with more than 2 players is in the Super Smash Bros. games. But wandering out of the camera's view results in a slow loss of energy or death if you go too far.