My GM shmups - Last Chance,MEGATANK, Flying V, XYX, ZPF

[Rozyrg]

Finally got the GM:S license sorted out. Handily, the Android export module seems to have come with the deal, too... I might be getting my money's worth from that thing finally. The Ouya came today as well, although I'm now officially broke.

I'm quite tempted to start experimenting right off the bat, prior responsibilities be damned; but that's kinda what keeps getting me into these pickles. >_>

[mice]

Yay! (except for the being broke part...)

Just browsed the GM site...is it really, like $300 for GMS + Android export?! That's, like, wtf?!

[Rozyrg]

I literally couldn't buy anything once I had hooked it up.

$300 for GMS + Android export?! That's, like, wtf?!

Seriously. That pricing had to be set back when people were thinking mobile games would somehow eclipse everything else.

I think it might pan out ok for some folks if the Android platform has a decent enough lifespan, mobile gaming in general stays viable and Yoyo does a good enough job of corralling and promoting quality GM produced titles; but yeah, I really dodged a future money bullet there.

[BPzeBanshee]

I don't even like that they've bumped up the price of the standard edition yet again, but $50 for Mac/Windows isn't too bad considering you had to pay more for them separately in the past anyway.

[Rozyrg]

First small step... got Fire Arrow to launch on the OUYA! The controls don't work (at all) and it crashes halfway through the hiscore display; but hey, it's a start.

[rtw]

I will buy Fire Arrow on Ouya

[nasty_wolverine]

I will buy Fire Arrow on Ouya

I will buy Ouya for Fire Arrow

[mice]

I will buy Fire Arrow on Ouya

Word
And I'd be happy to playtest or do any other tests!

[Rozyrg]

Thanks for the support, guys. It might be in debug hell awhile, though, as Studio seems to enjoy throwing all kinds of wacky, unfamiliar errors and random crashes my way.

I'll probably send you a build once I make enough headway, though... for some reason, GM doesn't let me install the game via it's normal method ("Create Application"), and supposedly it runs faster that way. I'm curious to see if that's actually the case.

I did start something else from scratch just to be able to tiptoe through any potential problems, if only to ease the frustration. It might morph into something more as I keep tinkering with it, definitely love finally having all the default gamepad stuff right there to play with.

[mice]

It might morph into something more...

Your stuff usually do, and into the most beautiful butterflies!

[Rozyrg]

/post rage edit

Turns out one of the recent updates to GMS mucks around with the scripting syntax, which pretty much broke what I was working on, so be ye warned. At least they make it easy enough to go back to older builds, though (1044 still works fine.) Once again, this re-affirms my long held rule with GM : As long as it's working, NEVER GET OFF THE DAMN BOAT!

On a positive note, I did work out how to make simple adjustable borders, which I'd definitely consider a necessity for porting to OUYA. It might just be my tv; but even the more polished games have the image bleeding over screen edges slightly.

[Rozyrg]

I've almost got enough stuff for a short demo ready, maybe I can figure out APK packaging well enough to let someone else play with it.

My original objective was seeing how the analog sticks on this thing worked, so this little experiment has twin stick aiming along with all the more traditional shmup stuff. The general ideas and theme are already there (somewhat); I'm just trying to come up with a cheesy enough name for it. Best case scenario, it's probably just going to be a very short freebie game, anyways.

[mice]

Give it here already!

[Rozyrg]

Maybe sometime this weekend? (again, assuming something doesn't go totally awry with the APK export or runner)

I'm implementing different weapons and stuff while the ideas are fresh, basic powerups need to be put in there as well. There still won't be a ton to mess with; but I'm interested in getting some feedback.

(Name ideas for instance...)

[mice]

I say export now and give it to me.
Better to start early...

[Rozyrg]

Made a little toy for building enemy paths. (EXE and GMX)
Might not be too useful for anyone else, honestly, though. The 'paths' are just XY coordinates exported as 1D arrays and saved to a text file. I can put some example code how to utilize them if anyone wants. You can also put width/height values in the config/path file for a custom window resolution if 320x240 isn't what you need.

The bad news...
It turns out I'm going to have to shell out the cash for GMS' Android module after all, dunno why I thought it came with the HTML5 upgrade. -_- On the plus side, it hasn't hindered me at all from testing stuff on the OUYA via USB, so I guess that's fairly generous of them not to put some ridiculous, obvious barrier in place.

[nasty_wolverine]

Made a little toy for building enemy paths. (EXE and GMX)
Might not be too useful for anyone else, honestly, though. The 'paths' are just XY coordinates exported as 1D arrays and saved to a text file. I can put some example code how to utilize them if anyone wants. You can also put width/height values in the config/path file for a custom window resolution if 320x240 isn't what you need.

This is awesome, now all i need is a reader and transform module and thats it. GALAGA STYLE ALIEN FORMATION BITCHES!!!!

[Rozyrg]

The only quirky thing about doing it this way is you might want to set the points relative to the enemy's starting position if you're going to spawn them in different places. You could also have the first point somewhere relatively 'neutral' that any within a formation can seek out first before starting the sequence.

Maybe I should just have a "relative x/y" option for saving based on the coords of point #1, although that would probably require as much work to setup properly....hmm.

Oh yeah, if you put the points too close, the demo mode might freak out a bit (has to do with the way it seeks out the next one in line.)

[nasty_wolverine]

I dont think its that hard to obtain relative positioning with some smart coding. I think designing a graphical tool to write out the patterns is something of a bigger challenge than converting absolute positions to relative positions. Hell, if you cant do this much in code, you shouldnt be coding to begin with. I can even do something like that in MS Excel.

[Rozyrg]

Good point.

I was just worried about covering all possible bases, really. I always forget to add/fix something, anyways. (Like the fact that some of the help text bleeds off the side in 240X320) >_>

[BPzeBanshee]

The only quirky thing about doing it this way is you might want to set the points relative to the enemy's starting position if you're going to spawn them in different places. You could also have the first point somewhere relatively 'neutral' that any within a formation can seek out first before starting the sequence.

Isn't that what xstart/ystart is for?

[Rozyrg]

I didn't think about relative stuff at all while putting it together, all the coords it generates are absolute. It's strictly an ease-of-use issue, if yall think that would be more useful that way, I can hack it in as an option pretty easily.
-------------------

edit: Finally got to test it properly, works pretty well in my little OUYA project. I found a fairly simple solution for the 'point 0' problem, basically just locking the enemy's starting point to the x or y of point 1 depending on path's direction and a handful of other variables.

I also made some minor changes to the pathmaker:

• - Rounds x,y values. Scaling, etc. would occasionally cause them to have fractional extra bits.
  - Erases old path data before saving. Previously, it would keep any old values that were higher than the current path's maximum point count, meaning you could accidentally copy over unused points when transferring it to the game.
  - Added 'organize' option on main menu. This puts everything in pathlist.txt back in a more sensible numerical order.

[railslave]

Still planning a ship design, pixel art video it would be realy cool to see your design process


VERY COOL!!

[Rozyrg]

Oh shit, forgot about that, sorry. -_-

Pretty much just as an exercise and to have something already done by the time I can hop onto the marketplace, I'm 'porting' Megatank over to OUYA.

• - (some) new gfx
  - 60 fps
  - full 360 degree aiming
  - whatever else crosses my mind in the process

FA and anything else will probably have to wait until I have the license stuff sorted out for GMS, though. I really want to see if the proper install will at least fix some of the framerate issues I've had before I charge headlong into the vast bug minefield. Pretty much anything I can get running ok and without a massive hassle will be fair game for porting at that point.

Also, thanks to Mice, I've verified that there's no problem going straight from what I've been tinkering with to vanilla windows exe versions, either. GMS' built in generic gamepad code seems to work perfectly fine across the board.

[Rozyrg]

I finally got to play around with GMS' new sound engine while I was trying to work in some music/sfx volume controls for the Megatank port. It does seem quite a bit better; but there are still quirks.

What's annoying is that it still treats mp3s as some other category that you have to use totally separate (and less) commands for. The quick and dirty solution is to simply convert them all to WAV; but I've had too much experience with GM to ever trust it with gigantic uncompressed audio files. Trying that out blew up one of the original music tracks to around 40MB, so no thank you!

Sadly, I couldn't get volume adjustments to work for the music at all, so I ended up just chopping that specific bit out. It works fine when testing the exe; but Android/OUYA doesn't like a certain GML command or something and never bothers to actually change the volume.

It does work very well for sfx, though. Sound emitters are quite handy just to serve that function - any sound played through them will automatically adhere to their 'gain'/volume setting. I ended up just manually adjusting the volume for the music files in Audacity, setting it so that the highest sfx setting could slightly overpower it.

[BPzeBanshee]

I thought the new engine supported Ogg Vorbis now? Why are you still trying to use MP3 knowing it has gaps with looping?

[Rozyrg]

Well, that's another quirk... it exports all audio to OGG for cross platform compatibility; but you can't actually load OGG files.
edit: supposedly it can in v1.2 now. I doubt this fixes my specific qualm, though. Barring Mark Overmars kicking down my door and holding a gun to my head, I'm still not upgrading. >_>

I'm sure there's an extension to deal with this (SuperSound did this stuff just fine, for instance); but going outside the Windows safe zone means you kinda have to go dry on that sort of thing. Pretty much irrelevant when it works fine as-is for vanilla Win export; but whatever.

I know I probably missed some intricacy since other people report having no problems with audio_music_gain ,audio_master_gain etc. on other Android devices; but I was satisfied enough from the definitiveness of testing side by side : works on here, doesn't work on here. That's what I really like about gadgets like the OUYA, console hardware uniformity means less sleep lost over 'maybes'.

[BPzeBanshee]

That's odd. I could've sworn there was a way to load OGG files into it. Might have to give the Free License version a spin again.

[Rozyrg]

Made this for mostly just fun (and the fact that MT's 'tutorial' is utter shit and out of date); but it's good for demoing what all the buttons do. It'll probably end up in all of my OUYA ports/originals in one form or another.

I might have to go back and give it tiger stripes or something, though. >_>

[mice]

Oh, the colors!
I've been trying to mimic your coloring so many times, but it just won't work.