Project One

[MausGames]

Hello everybody!

My name is Martin, I'm a programmer from Vienna, Austria, and I would like to show you my free boss-only shoot'em up Project One. I followed some other good shmups to this site, and after looking around I'm eager to show my game to you and get some feedback to learn from (especially about bad parts). Hope it's not rude that this is my first post here.
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Game:
Project One is a vertically scrolling boss-only shoot'em up with colorful and distinct graphics.

The game is still under development and will focus on unique and challenging boss-fights with different mechanics and patterns. Every boss will provide a new experience for the player and will force him to the limits of his skills.

The boss design is inspired by modern RPGs and action games and aims on non-repetitive gameplay. The player ship has different weapons, with upgrades and firemodes, bombs and companions and can be controlled with mouse, keyboard and gamepad. The game has also Classic Runs, where you can fight the 3 bosses of each area with altered rules, connected events and enemy groups in between.

One of the current main features are the Fragments of Darkness, where some (determined) enemy bullets are black and can be collected to increase the score multiplier. If the multiplier is high enough you enter Darkmode and get increased firerate and avoidance. The game has also a stage select, equipment unlock and selection, of course a basic chain-scoring system and highscoring (is currently on update), a focus on fast gameplay, local coop, and some stuff I currently don't know.
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Development:
Development began in 2010 with the goal to make some money, but I dropped all those plans, and now I'm trying to make this game for free, for fun and to learn from. Over the time I became very passionate in developing this project.

The game is written in C++ and uses a custom engine with OpenGL, OpenAL, SDL and Ogg Vorbis libraries. Because the focus is to learn from it, most of the technical and visual parts are self-made, but it also uses many CC resources from places like Flickr, Freesound and ccMixter (of course with proper credits), because I'm not good with some asset types, especially music and sound.
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Thank you, and if you have any feedback or questions,
please let me know, I will try to read and answer them as soon as possible,
and I also hope you have fun with Project One.
- Martin

The current version is available from:
Currently not available, more info soon
http://gamejolt.com/games/shooter/project-one/14367/
http://www.indiedb.com/games/project-one
http://www.maus-games.at/site/games/project-one

Videos:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emm9Peq ... iq&index=3

Screenshots:


(more screenshots are available through the download links)

[Dave_K.]

Welcome to the forum!

I wasn't able to try your demo (have a Mac/OSX), but judging from the video, it looks like you have built quite an impressive engine!

[railslave]

Hi

Couldnt play it on my on board graphics, xp machine, but it looks like one hell of a challenge from the trailer

Graphics works well and i love the water effects..

[MausGames]

Thank you for the welcome and the compliments.
I also want to make this game for OSX, but I have no Mac to develop and test it.

The graphics workload is still a bit high (CPU is low), but I'm constantly improving the performance. In the actual version it's possible to disable the background, which is currently the biggest frame killer (beside the sprite effects and the menu).
It's also possible to play it with GL 2.0 instead of 3.0+, but with some options disabled.

[MausGames]

Finally updated the game, focus was on technical improvement (e.g. performance),
though I got feedback, that it would lag on fullscreen. *grrr*

I only post the link to the IndieDB article to keep it clean here,
contains update notes and a list of OpenGL stuff I learned:
http://www.indiedb.com/games/project-on ... full-power

[n0rtygames]

Just chiming in before bed to say.. I really like the aesthetic in the screenshots.

Specifically the bullet trails and the way you've achieved that with nice clear visible bullets.

[BPzeBanshee]

I'm guessing Intel Integrated isn't really OpenGL 3.0 compliant or something.

I had to close it by going to close program on the taskbar menu, Alt-F4 and ESC weren't doing it for some reason, and I couldn't ALT-ENTER to get it into a window or proper fullscreen either.

[MausGames]

Just chiming in before bed to say.. I really like the aesthetic in the screenshots.

Specifically the bullet trails and the way you've achieved that with nice clear visible bullets.

Wow, reading that from an experienced player who made already a good shmup is very motivating. Thanks

I'm guessing Intel Integrated isn't really OpenGL 3.0 compliant or something.

I had to close it by going to close program on the taskbar menu, Alt-F4 and ESC weren't doing it for some reason, and I couldn't ALT-ENTER to get it into a window or proper fullscreen either.

Did it start on this resolution? I shipped it with 1024x768 windowed.
Edit: Oh wait, your desktop is 1024x786, mmh, I have no idea.

This is on of the weirdest errors I have seen so far. Looks like the alpha blending isn't working, but the clouds look fine, the color inside the boxes is also too dark, but the text is transparent, but is black instead of white. *head on fire*

Can you try to PM me the logfile.txt (basically a bad shader debug file), maybe this would help. I must say that I was not able to test it on Intel graphics, I have only access to some AMD/ATI and nVidia systems.

Oh, and somehow ALT+F4 doesn't work on Windows with the SDL library, don't know why. Maybe I should finally implement the shortcut myself.

Thank you for testing it.

[BPzeBanshee]

No worries, will get the log file tomorrow. If you need a DxDiag report or anything of the like I can provide that too.

[BPzeBanshee]

Little later than I thought, but here goes: http://pastebin.com/ri44xK3r

Looks like the Intel board doesn't have the level of GLSL support required. And I've got the latest drivers installed too, just checked Windows Update now. Bugger.

[MausGames]

Little later than I thought, but here goes: http://pastebin.com/ri44xK3r

Looks like the Intel board doesn't have the level of GLSL support required. And I've got the latest drivers installed too, just checked Windows Update now. Bugger.

Thank you very much, the problem was my fault.
I added constant declarations to some shaders and knew that they are handled different in GLSL, but because I got no errors on all my tests, I thought that everything is alright.

I updated all distributions and uploaded a separate fix: http://www.maus-games.at/files/p1/Proje ... derfix.zip
Thank you again for your help, hopefully everything works now.

[BPzeBanshee]

Your patch did indeed fix the black box issues I was having. Initially the performance in the menu was horrible, but then I went to the options menu and turned the graphics down. Thanks for having those options there.

However, I was unable to actually start playing. It just freezes and I get the Windows box telling me the application has stopped. If it's any help, new logfile pastebin here.

I also noticed that the menu seemed to want to load something in most of the graphics boxes but nothing would appear. Can't see anything that'd give away the source of the issue in the logfile, but the gjapi_log.txt had a bunch of lines like:

Code: Select all

Network Error: sending non-blocking request failed </scores/tables/?game_id=14367>
Network Error: Timeout was reached
Network Error: sending non-blocking request failed <http://images2.cdn.gamejolt.com/imgserver/game-trophy/75/1889_3.jpg>

Looking at data/trophies I found that while the ZIP had images for them, after running the game they'd turn into 0-byte files. Didn't seem to happen to any other folder though.

[MausGames]

Oh, dang it, never thought that the game has so much problems on Intel GPUs.
Thats something I need to fix with a separate Intel-test-system, and I try to get one in the near future.

That other error with the missing trophy images should not affect the game, that was just coincidence.

Sorry for your troubles and thank you for testing and pointing out some problems I need to fix, you helped me a lot.

[tibone]

Runs fine on my system.
AMD QuadCore CPU + NVidia 9xxx Series GPU.

I liked your game, plays really smoothly and nice.
Not a big fan of the visuals, but i usually like pixel graphics of the yesteryear better. So not your fault.