[X] the deep motion [demo | MAY 12] - wasd/mouse boss rush

[null1024]

project is dead due to technical issues
download final release here gmd source included


Was bored, started working on a shmup. Vaguely like scalegunner, except that this is significantly less ambitious enginewise and I'll be a hell of a lot more likely to work on it if it involves less work to work on [how's that for a sentence?].
Polished it up enough to make a release of sorts. Currently has 2 stages. Graphics, patterns, music, etc. all subject to change.

Press F1 for help.
Controls:
Mouse: move - move cursor, left button - fire, right button - bomb
Keyboard: WASD - move ship, space - fire, tab - bomb, shift - slow


Here's a pic. Looks an asston better in motion, seeing stills of this is embarrassing.

Visuals, audio, and code by me. Made with Game Maker 5.3a [thus, whether the display is filtered or not is entirely up to your video card, sadly].
Should run on machines running Win98 or better. Might need a semi-recent PC though [because GM is slowish -- I'd up port this to Studio, but that's more work than I care to and Studio's build times are awful anyway].

[TrippyTaco]

Wow, I really got to hand it to you. This game kicks ass!!
The mouse shooting mechanic is a little bit distracting but everything else is perfect.
Kepp up the good work!

[Pteriforever]

Good job on making it work in Windows 8 ^.^ I wasn't even aware it was possible to make GM5.3 stuff work on it.

I agree about the mouse controls. It feels like it's more suited to maybe an arena shooter than an ordinary shmup, if there was an option for pure keyboard controls it would be nice.

Some of the patterns drag on a little long, but other than that, it's pretty much fantastic ^.^

[BPzeBanshee]

GM6.1/7 had issues with post-XP Windows, beyond that anything goes.

I really cant say anything that hasn't already been said. Perhaps as a solution make the bosses go in multiple directions around the room?

[null1024]

in progress screenshot -- made second boss's palette no longer aggressively green, more orange and gray now

Yeah, later bosses are going to move around the whole screen -- that's why I had mouse control. It'll still be a rather vertically oriented game, but I do want more sideways action to enter the picture. If it's really too hated, I'll rework the game to not have it [and adjust how missiles work, since they expect you to be able to shoot to the side], but I like the mouse system.

I'll upload a new demo once I'm done with the fourth boss and tweak the others a bit. Thanks for all the feedback everyone!
I'm planing to just have the ship always firing, since there's not any advantage to not shooting and it's just distracting. Having bomb on space and mouse click [either button] seems to work better too.

Also, GM5.3 works fine in Win8. GM6 doesn't [there's a way to patch games made in it to work though, but you can't develop with it on Win8], GM7 works fine.

Gonna release a vsync version and a non-vsync version too, since I noticed that sometimes the game seems to have issues with displaying frames on time [even though if I press Insert, the "run at 200fps button", the game does go above 60] when not at vsync, but vsync slows down badly when it does. I usually make GM5 games at 45 or 50fps, and it seems that that working at 60 can have issues [because at 60, the display can always miss drawing, whereas at 45/50, it'll phase in and out of drawing properly]. Could just be my display going between 59-point-something and 60fps depending on what program I last exited [since those are the refresh rates my machine uses], but I dunno.

and for no apparent reason, vsync is a build option instead of something I can enable/disable mid-game

[BPzeBanshee]

Vsync a build option? Jesus. I'm glad they improved over simple shit like THAT over time for all its bugs.

I am aware of an issue that I believe to be present in all pre-Studio versions of GM: that it uses the older DirectSound API, which has caused crashes in Windows 8 after some amount of time. I've yet to see a related crash in this or Zenodyne, but Final Boss and GMOSSE so far have both exhibited errors.

As for refresh rates, I think it's a GM5.3 thing combined with perhaps the weakness of your laptop. Running 60FPS has never been a problem with GM7 onwards at least provided you keep draw events/object count to a reasonable level (which for the most part you do anyway I think).

I guess even this game would be too complex for ENGIMA at the moment?

[null1024]

Porting to ENIGMA would involve porting to GM6 style calls and stuff. It'd be a bit easier than to port to Studio though [there are times when GM's event loop isn't in control and I'm updating the screen myself, which isn't a thing in Studio anymore]. Only a bit.
Might be a liiiitle too complex to do so still as well.

and my laptop's an i5, it's not that weak :Y
I did figure out why my machine was being really jittery though, it was indeed running at 59fps instead of 60. Changed that and all was well.

I know that GM5 is showing it's age like hell though, might be the way that Windows 8 schedules process time -- running some of my non 60fps games look a bit butty. The Win7 machine I made them on is a far, far, far weaker box and doesn't have such a feeling of stutter.
This box is definitely fast enough to draw each frame, but GM seems to be limiting speed wrong or something?

The sound bug you describe is probably not in GM5.x -- GM6 was a near total engine rewrite from GM5, and I know the sound system changed quite a bit under the hood [hell, GM5 still uses a user set amount of buffers for audio per-sound].

third boss screenshot, still working on it -- Very aggressive, lots of fast bullets, extremely high amount of screen motion [uses the entire playfield], spawns ghost clones of herself to keep you on your feet. Lots of fun so far but maybe a bit messy [all the bosses have extremely ugly looking [but completely deterministic!] patterns though]. Also, maybe too short of a fight.

Sprite'll probably change a bit. The boss's design was vaguely inspired by a terrible little platformer I made when testing ENIGMA out called Jane the Jittery Esper. The .gm6 for that is here. Got it to build in Studio, it's just GM is a bit more strict with accidental errors than ENIGMA -- there's a slight issue in the Draw event of one of the objects. Comment the line out and it'll work. It's still terrible, though.

[BPzeBanshee]

Actually, there is now an extension in ENIGMA to support GM5 commands, Sorlok did a bunch of stuff for it a few months ago, seemed to work fine but I personally never tested it.

Your laptop has an i5? Woah, when did you upgrade? Here I was still thinking you were running that Atom thing, or perhaps I'm getting you confused with another old Development guy.

No idea about the other issues though, but I would suspect DirectX changes as a whole. Windows 8 alone crashed Total Annihilation completely until the community did some workarounds, and that ran DirectX 5/whateverversion just fine for 15 years prior. Seen recent things like Akashicverse had issues too, so who knows. I blame Win8.

[null1024]

Today, I upgraded to Windows 8.1.

apparently, GM5.3 games run absolutely awful under it because DirectDraw is depreciated

So, development of this has stopped completely (not much further than what you see has been done though, I did have coursework and other things to deal with).
I can't be arsed to port it go GM8 or GM:Studio, at least not now. Maybe someday.

sorry~

[edit] oh wait, the released build have the boss I showed in the screenshot, I'll post a demo with that later

I literally just installed Win7 in a VM because of this situation.

[BPzeBanshee]

Mate, you give up *way* too easily.

Here's a GM8 port I did in about ten minutes. Took two to get it to not spew errors, the rest was spent replacing image_scale with image_xscale/image_yscale and doing sprite-based fonts the modern way (i was lazy to do the draw routines in the script you had rather than nuke the script entirely but you get the idea).