shmups.system11.org

Bulo Studio is happy to present you the "SHUMP Creator: build and blast"!

Bulo studio is an independant videogame studio founded by two industry veterans.
Since 1995 we have been working on the videogame industry: from Fears on Amiga to several AAA video games like Far Cry II and Assassin's creed...

We have been hard at work for months on the development of a tool which will enable you to create your own Shoot’em up: the SHMUP Creator!
This tool will help you create your own games and easily build your levels without coding at all.

The SHMUP Creator will be in Alpha at the end of the summer, well we are doing our best to reach this goal.

To make the time go faster, some features:

. create 2D or 3D games
. vertical or horizontal shmups
. state of the art 3D engine: shadows, shaders, particle effects, post processing…
. scoring systems
. bullets patterns editor

… And a lot more!

You can learn more about the project on our website : http://www.bulostudio.com
and on Twitter : https://twitter.com/bulostudio

We'll be glad to share with you the progress of the project on this forum!

Enjoy some preview screen shots:

. Do you want to know the progress of our tool "as fun as a game"?
We wrote a report progress of the SHMUP Creator development!!
http://bulostudio.com/?p=306

. Now we are working on the weapons tool and bullet patterns. It's starting to be really fun!

How much coding-ability is required to make something with this?

Hi Doctor Butler, the idea is to permit people without any coding ability create games. So you don't have to code anything, everything uses the mouse or menus.

The challenge for us is to present users with the maximum choices possible without scripting or coding, but we are doing our best
S.

I would live to use this software for my new shmup. Is their a price point? Will their be a free version?

I might actually use something like this.

Though you might want to change "collisionable" to "collidable".

Thanks for the info, Lord Satori! English is not our native language, so I'm afraid there quite a lot of English misspellings in the tool. Don't hesitate to shout if you see other mistakes


Thanks for your interest, mehguy!
There is no plan for a free version, as the idea behind this project is to continue working on the tool full time as long as possible.
For the price point, we don't know yet, but we'll communicate on this before the end of the year. The only thing I can say is that it will be quite cheap for a tool. Don't hesitate to ask if you have other questions!

S.

We wrote a post about the way we are using splines for the Shmup Creator.
This post talks about the problems of using splines and the solutions we found.

You can read it here:
splines and enemies for shoot them up

New animated previews for the weapons library:



S.

That certainly looks very nice.

This definitely looks interesting. As someone who has zero coding ability a tool like this is perfect for me. Look forward to the release.

Hey !
This seems like amazing tool ! I am always looking for new inspirations considering object movement / shooting / spawning patterns, so I will definitely take a look. Do you know when this could be released ?

Thanks

Regarding the release date:
We have on our blog a post explaining where we're at, and we we are going :
monthly update #02

The truth is, we are not financially independant yet, and thus we have to do contracting work at the moment. We plan to go back to dev on the end of november.
Then... We *really* are committed to release the thing at the beginning of 2015!

S.

Looking forward to it!

Looks cool. I've got an idea or two rattling around in my head.

Nice, man! I'm a noob developer, and I'm one of four editors of blog "FILOSOFIA SHMUP/TASBPAN", specialized on SHOOTER GAMES. I'd like to show your tool when it be released . Please acess www.filosofiashmup.blogspot.com and check other news about shmups!

Even if I can't read the text: great blog!
I spent some time browsing it and watching pictures and videos. Keep up the good work

You can use GOOGLE TRANSLATOR or other tool for translate. Have a nice read!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!



We have finished our contract jobs for few weeks and have been working back on the SHMUP Creator:
. gizmos are finished (not a very exciting task, but very useful)
. OpenAL (sound library) has been replaced by FMOD
. A lot of debugging

And we are working on:
. gameplay (scoring systems, medals)
. debug (again...)

More about that very soon!
S.

Yeah there's one problem with FMOD, if you intend this to be as a base for new games that people will make, what if somebody who's starting out will want to use this for commercial projects (And yes I know there can be viable alternative solutions), FMOD has a paywall of $100 if you want to even sell the game and you have to pay BEFORE the release (not counting other fee related stuff including possibly paying to license it out from you guys for his product).

From what I understand of the new FMOD licensing for indies, from March 2014 it's completely free to use it for games with a total dev budget of less than 100k$.

S.

Reading from here: http://www.fmod.org/sales/

It seems they have two products now and the Indies Commercial license applies only to FMOD Studio. FMOD Ex on the other hand is not covered and is strictly non-commercial only.

Out of curiosity suny, why did you switch from OpenAL? Does FMOD provide something OpenAL does not?

FMOD Ex doesn't exist anymore, it's a legacy product now.

OpenAL is a good library. When I switched, I thought it was not developed anymore. Since, I found out that some people are still working on it, though. I had some other concerns, (like the fact that people have to install the drivers to properly use it), which I'll talk about soon. I wrote a small post about it which will be online in a few days.

I'm not a very technical guy, so I'm open to any thoughts about this subject

Cheers,
S.

These past weeks were really busy: the end of our contract work, then christmas, then the end of the year, too much food and alcohool...

Anyway, I found some time during the evenings and week-ends to work on the gizmos constraints for the editor manipulators (translations, rotations, scale etc.). Again, an uncool task: if done well, everybody will take it for granted, if not done well, everybody will be angry at me!

It was not working so well for the axis contraints when the camera angle is too close to the angle of the selected axis, so I had to rewrite some code to choose the best raycasting plane when someone clicks with the mouse and move an object on the screen.
Another thing was that the mouse gizmos were only working for the player and the enemies, but not for the sub-objects: the weapons, particles emitters or the collisions boxes. You had to use the GUI to select and move them using numerical values, and it was not very intuitive and sometimes, really awkward.
Now, you can click on a weapon and move or rotate it with the mouse like everything else, and it's more easy to manipulate, more fun, and more user friendly.

Last week I also worked on some more debugging (some tasks seems stay forever on top on my to-do list, I don't know why...) and I must say I corrected some big bugs in my code.

This week I'll go back to the weapons and the different scoring systems.
Gameplay, at last!

Stay tuned,
S.

New post about sound for the SHMUP Creator.
I'm talking about why I choose FMOD instead of OpenAl, and what we can achieve with sounds with the tool:
http://bulostudio.com/2015/02/06/sound-with-the-shmup-creator/

S.

I don't have any constructive feedback to offer on this, other than I am looking forward to this release. I want to jump into developing some arcade STGs (for coin-op arcades) and it seems like this tool would be a better fit than Game Maker or Unity, at least for me as I am not a programmer.

Then, there, how can I test it!?

We still are completing the last features.
As in "working, but not good enough" state.

I can't give you a precise time estimate, but the dev is in good shape.
We'll have to spend some time debugging and polishing before going public, though. And this is the most unpredictable phase,

Before this, we'll distribute soon a game demo to show the kind of quality we can achieve with the tool (and, to be honest, to help testing the compatibility and have some feedback).
It will be a kind of Under defeat level
S.

We are working on a demo level (and on an ocean shader) for the SHMUP Creator :



Have a nice week-end,
S.

Superb software by its look!

I cant wait to try it on a demo version.


There will be support to 2d sprites only (not mixing with 3d)? Because I like shmups with dodonpachi style.