ZeroRanger (formerly FINALBOSS) - New DEMO out now!

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Ebbo
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by Ebbo »

FINAL BOSS - Work in progress trailer

Oh we aren't dead yet :lol:

In this trailer you can see some of the new updates. We've mainly focused to fix most of the apparent problems and drawbacks:
- The backgrounds are now darker
- Skull icons have been added to warn player of different threats, such as enemies which come from behind (the skull icons can be disabled from the new options menu)
- Rapid fire's power has been increased, single shot has been redesigned


Currently we are working on:
- Stage 3
- New options menu with many new settings (i.e. redefinable controls)
- ...many, many other things!

Thanks for all your comments so far! And like always, any kind of feedback/criticism is appreciated.
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monkeyman
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by monkeyman »

Darker backgrounds seem much better.

As for the skull icons; they struck me as being a little in your face! Something a bit more discreet would seem better in my opinion (that said I would rather too many warnings than not enough).

Still, I love the concept behind it and look forward to seeing more of this game.
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ZOM
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by ZOM »

I like the skull icons, really. From the looks of it, this is shaping up to be great! Keep up the good work, oh, and new version demo pleez.
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genecyst
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by genecyst »

i really love the graphic style of this game.
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Protector one
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by Protector one »

Did you ever finish this? I'm quite curious how the game ends. :D
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Ebbo
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by Ebbo »

I'm going to blatantly copypaste a pm that I sent to TrevHead:

Final Boss is - unfortunately - anything but "final" at the moment. We (me and eebrozgi) have been busy with school and other stuff and haven't really been able to work on FB for some time. Luckily, summer vacations are just about to start so we've finally some time to start working on this again. It's gonna take some time but we don't simply want to spoil a good thing by rushing it. And we are kinda reserved when it comes to updating our development progress... We want to give you big updates with noteworthy additions and changes.

It's still nice so hear few people have some interest left in our small project. We appreciate that and apologize for such a long absence.
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Ebbo
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by Ebbo »

FINAL BOSS - More WIP footage

It has been a while since our latest update so we decided to share some footage of current state of Final Boss. Yeah we're pretty slow and we've spent most of our time fixing several things... We hope this trailer shows atleast some progress.

As usual, feel free to leave any kind of feedback.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by emphatic »

Ebbo wrote:FINAL BOSS - More WIP footage

It has been a while since our latest update so we decided to share some footage of current state of Final Boss. Yeah we're pretty slow and we've spent most of our time fixing several things... We hope this trailer shows atleast some progress.

As usual, feel free to leave any kind of feedback.
That looks very cool.
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by BPzeBanshee »

Just by the looks of the menu there seems to be a lot of improvements. Scanline function will be interesting to see when the next release happens.

A few questions though:

Speaking of scanlines, are you using surfaces? I'd be very curious to know if you're using a method other than surfaces to generate them.

With the video, are you using in-game sound? There seems to be no sound effects at all just, though I thought I remember hearing explosion effects at least last time I played this.

Will the music be interchangable? The music is well composed but seems unfitting. If its being run off of MIDIs I'd like to be able to have a go at matching it to my Knights of Legend instruments in Mixcraft and have it played in-game as an MP3/OGG to try out at some point.

I also noticed brief moments that appeared as if the game were lagging. Is this built-in slowdown, performance issues with videorecording + playing or is it a trick of my mind?

Here's hoping for continued success in this project. :D
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by eebrozgi »

BPzeBanshee wrote:A few questions though...
The scanlines are there just for decoration, they're just transparent (or not, however you choose) lines drawn on everything else. As the resolution may appear to be 160*240 stretched to double size, It's really 320*480 and the sprites are stretched or drawn in double scale. I'm aware that it isn't very clever, but it does prevent Game Maker's blurring that would occur if I were to stretch it the ordinary way. If you can teach me how to do this in a better way, I'm willing to learn.

The video doesn't have in-game sound. The music has been added after recording, but it is from the game anyway.

I haven't planned about making the music interchangeable, but I'll think about it. If you feel that the original music is unfitting, then... well, too bad. :d Maybe I'll do better with the next songs.

Some fps drops do occur in the video as the recording program is quite heavy for the computers reflecting our (nonexistent) budget.

Thank you for a cool post.
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Ebbo
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by Ebbo »

BPzeBanshee wrote:Will the music be interchangable? The music is well composed but seems unfitting. If its being run off of MIDIs I'd like to be able to have a go at matching it to my Knights of Legend instruments in Mixcraft and have it played in-game as an MP3/OGG to try out at some point.
Just for the sake of my curiosity, could you post some examples of more fitting music?

Adding an option for interchangable music shouldn't be a real problem though - as long as eebrozgi knows how to do it ; ) But it'll probably stay pretty low on our to-do-list for now.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by Udderdude »

Seems like it's still not possible to kill 100% of the popcorns flying around the screen. Going to fix this?
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eebrozgi
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by eebrozgi »

Udderdude wrote:Seems like it's still not possible to kill 100% of the popcorns flying around the screen. Going to fix this?
Oh, is that a flaw? I thought it's a matter of taste.

On the other hand, it clearly makes you see your ship getting more powerful as you gain new weapons a bit later. But it has to be admitted that the level design is amateurish.
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Ebbo
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by Ebbo »

To clarify: we design the levels/bosses so that you can clear&no-miss them by simply using your regular weapon. However, new weapons are designed so that they can improve your scoring potential and make things easier if you know how and when to use them. If we designed the levels so that you can destroy 100% of enemies only with your regular blaster, it would pretty much make all new weapons pointless - which is the main reason we changed the score system completely.

As eebro said, maybe you see it as a design flaw but for us it's really just a matter of taste.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by BPzeBanshee »

I'm being a necro so sue me, but I spotted you were still posting around Ebbo. You still working on this?

Also, sorry for not answering the questions, I totally forgot about this project and I don't even have the game on me anymore. Is the December 2009 build featured in the first post still the latest version?
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Ebbo
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by Ebbo »

Oh, we are definetely still working on this. There have been just lots of other things going on and even some quite inexplicable halts in the development. And in the end, this project is still just a hobby and since we don't have any real deadlines or anything, we don't want to take too much pressure or rush things for no good reason - we just want to make a good game, no matter how long it takes. However, we are doing our best preparing next demo which hopefully will be released before eebrozgi leaves to his army service at the beginning of January - which will most likely last for six months and that means hardly any freetime to work on Final Boss.

So again, thanks for your patience. And yes, the December 2009 (damn that's long time ago...) is the latest build but it feels just so bad after all the improvements we've made that I highly suggest you'll just wait for the next demo :wink:
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Re: FINAL BOSS - A love letter to the shmup genre

Post by BPzeBanshee »

Sounds good. Looking forward to the next release! :D
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Re: FINAL BOSS - 2nd Demo out now!

Post by Ebbo »

So, Final Boss finally receives a proper update.

FINAL BOSS - 2nd Apocalypse Trailer
DOWNLOAD LINK

Image_Image_Image

Holy shit we are slow.

Although I'm happy we finally managed pull this one through, I'm also disappointed we had to rush many things in order to release this demo in time. For instance only the first half of Stage 3 made it for now... Yeah we really did spend those last two years good didn't we.
Although things are still rather WIP, don't hesitate to point out possible glitches or any other problems you may stumble upon. Any kind of feedback is welcome as always.

Despite all the time constraints we did our best to make this demo feel a worthwhile effort and there are quite a lot of different changes, such as improved options menu and new scoring system. Soooo... Give it a try and find yourself pleasantly suprised! Maybe. Atleast it's better than the very first demo.

And last but not least special thanks for Tregalia providing us some cool character art, such as the Player 2 pilot seen in that Ketsui cover shout-out.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by BPzeBanshee »

VERY nice. All of the feelings of bullshit shots I was getting hit with in the last release are all gone and it feels a lot more....well, better overall. :D

The Ketsui-style character art looks very nice too, though I haven't seen it in-game. Is it just a picture or am I missing something?

Finally, one last question - you're just drawing lines on the screen to do scanlines like I was in earlier builds of GMOSSE right? So are the slanted scanlines just that - lines drawn slightly unparallel?
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by mjclark »

Really impressd by this. Looks and plays great plus it's got a lovely x68k feel to it right down to the orange pumpkin ghost faces.
1) Any chance of a ship speed control (as per x68k/PC-98 classix)?
2) Is the multiplier simply generated by number of enemies destroyed? Any other scoring mechanics?
3) Is that Sanskrit on the title screen borders and what does it say?
Anyway this is gorgeous! More please :D
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by Aru-san »

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Ebbo
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by Ebbo »

Thanks for your comments everyone :)
Could you possibly send me the errorlog? It should appear in the same file as the game whenever something like that happens and it would most likely help eebro to locate the problem.

@BPzeBanshee: About the scanlines; Yeah, it's just that.
The Ketsui-style cover doesn't actually show up in the game, just a nice little touch we came up with. However there are few character portraits hidden in the game as a small extra, something along different endings of Metroid series.

@mjclark:
1) We really haven't thought about the different speed control settings but that doesn't sound like a bad idea, although I'm not sure how speed control could affect the weapon balance. Nevertheless, I think that's something to look more into in the future.
2) Okay, I'll do my best to explain the basics and some of the finer nuances of the scoring system, although it's arguably still rather simple.

Destroying enemies increases your multiplier, maximum being x6,4. Some objects, such as the boxes in the second stage or destructible parts of the enemies don't increase the multiplier yet are still affected by it scorewise. Obviously you want to keep the multiplier as high as possible but the higher the multiplier is the faster its "juice" starts to run out and once that happens, it resets back x1,0 which also happens when you die. "Juice" can be easily replenished by destroying more enemies, but simply shooting them also halts the decreasing for a short moment. Sometimes it's a better option to wait till juice has almost ran out and then destroy a smaller enemy at the last moment or slowly drain bigger enemy's health - different weapons can make this job much more easier. Homing laser and Charge shot (weapons you can receive after defeating second boss) also have some added depth to them in this case: simply locking on enemy with Homing or absorbing enemy bullets with Charge also replenishes juice back to maximum level. And while touching walls in this game doesn't kill you, it does speed up the decrease of multiplier juice.

Aside from multiplier there are also extralife and time bonuses at the end of each stage.While destroying bosses as fast as possible is encouraged, e.g. second boss has several turrets worth of lots of points. Destroying them fast enough might just be worth the effort.
Finally, there are these small Se!-bonus icons worth of 500 points. Sometimes they're simply hidden until you shoot them, other times fulfilling a special objective - such as shooting a certain enemy formation - reveals them. Currently they play a very minor role in the game because we weren't quite sure whether or not people would enjoy these kinds of scoring tricks.

And that's the basic gist of it. Pretty simple in the end and if you happen to have any ideas or suggestions to make scoring more interesting, we're listening.

3) That's sanskrit but doesn't really mean anything aside from looking nifty.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by Aru-san »

Ebbo wrote:
Could you possibly send me the errorlog? It should appear in the same file as the game whenever something like that happens and it would most likely help eebro to locate the problem.

Code: Select all

ERROR in
action number 1
of Alarm Event for alarm 7
for object controller_hud:

Error in code at line 1:
   instance_create(parent_levelcontrol.x-2,parent_levelcontrol.y-256,game_over);
                                      ^
at position 37: Unknown variable x
This pops up when you lose your last life and press ESC, but don't do anything after that.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by Udderdude »

Level 1 felt pretty balanced and well done.

I was doing fine until I got into the later part of level 2, where those giant skull blocks destroyed me almost instantly. Are you just supposed to not shoot them or something?
They're really trial-and-error ish and I don't like them at all. Consider changing them so they have some sort of warning or take a few more shots before they go nuts and squash you.

Missiles are a bit of a sore spot for me at the moment. Sometimes it seems like your ability to blow them up before they hit your ship is too hard to predict. I've been blown up by missiles I was almost certian would hit my shots before it hit me. They're just really fast and hard to deal with IMO. I've had more "Mystery deaths" with those missles than anything else.

Does putting the game on hard give you some sort of advantage in terms of score? Are you planning to add seperate highscore tables for easy/normal/hard and let the player
choose before the game starts?

The fullscreen+stretch mode looks ridiculous on a widescreen monitor, I'm not sure why you even have the option. Just add some art on the sides of the screen IMO.

When I quit the game, it had done this to all of my windows. I really, really hate it when I run a game fullscreen and it completely squashes all of my open windows into a tiny area where the game was fullscreened. If you can figure out how to fix this, you really should.

http://rydia.net/udder/!crap/squashedMyWindowsArgh.png
Last edited by Udderdude on Tue Jan 10, 2012 1:23 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by mjclark »

Udderdude wrote: The fullscreen+stretch mode looks ridiculous on a widescreen monitor, I'm not sure why you even have the option. Just add some art on the sides of the screen IMO.
But it's very pleasant on my 4:3 and much more satisfying than having borders- please keep this mode!
Last edited by mjclark on Tue Jan 10, 2012 5:37 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by Udderdude »

Guess you have a point there, I would still add a 4:3 stretched mode with side art though.

Crappy mockup incoming

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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by BPzeBanshee »

The squishing of all of the windows comes from running the game at a lower resolution which is really Windows' fault for even behaving that way, and your own for setting the game resolution to something besides "unchanged" in the Options menu. I've had XOP do it before running it at 640x480 screen and so on.

As for sideart, unless you devs are able to keep the game behaving the same way while changing the room size to accomodate having said sidebars I don't think that'll be easy to implement. Would be a neat addition and good way to show off character portraits or complex ship sprite design though.
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mjclark
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by mjclark »

Whether you incorporate a sidebars option or not, please keep the fullscreen stretch option as well cos that vertizontal look works beautifully with this game in 4:3.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by Udderdude »

BPzeBanshee wrote:The squishing of all of the windows comes from running the game at a lower resolution which is really Windows' fault for even behaving that way
I know there are specific games on which this happens, it has something to do with the way the screen mode is set. One way uses DirectX and the other is changing the desktop resolution improperly.
BPzeBanshee wrote:and your own for setting the game resolution to something besides "unchanged" in the Options menu.
Wait, what?
BPzeBanshee wrote:I've had XOP do it before running it at 640x480 screen and so on.
I've never had XOP do that on me. If you've got any proof, please present it. I know Allegro uses DirectX to set the screen and so this should never happen.
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Re: FINAL BOSS - Latest version: 2012/01/09

Post by Ebbo »

Udderdude wrote:The fullscreen+stretch mode looks ridiculous on a widescreen monitor, I'm not sure why you even have the option. Just add some art on the sides of the screen IMO.

When I quit the game, it had done this to all of my windows. I really, really hate it when I run a game fullscreen and it completely squashes all of my open windows into a tiny area where the game was fullscreened. If you can figure out how to fix this, you really should.

http://rydia.net/udder/!crap/squashedMyWindowsArgh.png
Sorry to hear about those fullscreen problems. Actually eebrozgi tried to add option for sideart but as BPz said, it turned out much harder to implement than expected. I don't know all the details myself and I'm sorry I can't provide any better answers for now but I'm sure eebro will address these problems more thoroughly once he gets a chance.

I agree, those giant skull blocks are going to demand some reworking and replacements for something less trial-errorish and the missiles could probably be less durable as well.

So far difficulty settings don't affect scoring that much. There are some changes in enemy placements but that's about it. There will be probably more chances as we polish all the difficulty levels and yes, we're planning to add seperate high score tables for them too - the current high score table is very bare bones and still needs lots of work.
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