'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

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ciox
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'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by ciox »

[Mod edit]Locking thread at ciox's request so he can start a new discussion[/Mod Edit]

Hey all.
This is the 3d shmup/stg that I've been working on for about a year, on and off, using UDK. It's influenced a lot by Psyvariar but also many other gimmick-based shmups that came out in the early and mid 00s, many of them settling on the Dreamcast. My aim is to make a gimmick-based shmup that's as shooting-based and satisfying as possible while keeping the unique feel that a shmup has when it's strayed from the roots.
A decent video card (2007 tech or later) is needed to run this game, onboard video will not be enough.

Gameplay video is here
Demo download is here (and here)
Game folder without installer is here


More in-depth info below. Critiques and scores are welcome.


Image
 

---------Controls

Direction keys - movement, hit two opposite directions to roll
Z - fire, hold to fire straight, tap to fire wide
X - brake, stop rolling, if held it prevents rolling from starting

F1 - restart level
Esc - quit
Alt+Enter - go fullscreen and back




---------Game system


Graze bullets or shoot and destroy enemies to fill up your power bar on the right. When it's filled you automatically charge up - becoming invincible for two seconds and doing a ton of damage to anything you're touching. Charging up empties the power bar and raises your charge level.

Rolling makes your hitbox visibly smaller and your graze radius larger, it also speeds you up a lot. To start rolling tap two opposite directions like left+right or up+down, you can press them in sequence, or simultaneously to roll on the spot.
Rolling lasts about 1.5 seconds so you do not need to mash the keys for it like crazy, if you need to stop rolling immediately just hit Brake (X key by default).

There are also two 'variables' that influence your grazing efficiency (Mu) and your shot power (Omega), these are changed by large enemies and bosses to make your life harder, you can change them back however, either temporarily or permanently, by destroying the enemies or certain boss parts on the bosses.
The variables are displayed on the gauges to the left (Mu is at the top) and the ship's voice warns you whenever one of them increases or decreases. High values are good for the player and low ones are bad.

Dynamic enemy sequence is present, destroy stuff too fast and less graze-worthy but more aggressive enemies will spawn. But this is not always the case and some secret spawns can be very graze-worthy.

Scoring stuff:
- start pressing Fire right before you charge up to "parry" it and get more points, you'll get 1000 points instead of 500 for charging up, if your charge level (on top of the power bar) is divisible by 10 you get 5000 points, so you don't want to miss those bonuses, they're kinda like medals. (though there's no chaining yet)
- destroy bosses when the timer is at 10 seconds or less for 25000 points

---------Technical stuff

Only keyboard is supported right now. You can remap keys by going to Grazer\UDKGame\Config and editing DefaultInput.ini, search for "Primary default bindings" to get to the right section.
The game exe path is Grazer\Binaries\Win32\UDK.exe if you can't find it.
 
Last edited by ciox on Tue Jul 23, 2013 7:37 pm, edited 3 times in total.
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BPzeBanshee
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by BPzeBanshee »

A few pointers:

- Installer sucks. A lot. 220 MB download, only to get a .NET Framework 4 installer pop up, download more stuff, then tell me "This computer will restart in less than a minute" with me having no say in the matter. Shut me down in much less than 1 minute, and I reboot to finally looking at something resembling what I expected.
But wait, it's the full damn kit, and now it's installing and going through a whole bunch of other shit that I already have (DirectX 9.0c, Visual Studio, et al)! What the hell? Isn't there a leaner option for distribution than a huge clunky "shockingly sophisticated" installer installing stuff I already have and taking its sweet time to figure this out?

- Finally, after getting past the clunky installer and running it, I'm getting about 3 FPS on a i3 machine. I guess Unreal Engine 3 has quite a lot of overhead even for a shmup. After putting up with an installer like that frankly I'm a bit pissed. At least with my post others will get a heads-up. :(

Thanks to these factors I can't really give you a decent playtest for gameplay as I hoped I would, sorry. :(
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by n0rtygames »

How you distribute your game is equally as important as making it.

Can you fix Banshee's gripes and submit a build that doesn't require so much bloat?
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ciox
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by ciox »

This is going to be a hard one to swallow, but there is nothing wrong with the installer.

The installer itself takes up 20mb; the rest of the "bloat" is the Unreal Engine (the main exe is 50mb) which is an essential part of the game and cannot be removed. You can test this by compressing the game installation as well as you can. 220MB is nothing in these days of broadband.

The UDK installer will download necessary frameworks if the PC doesn't have them installed, the framework is required by the game and not by the installer. If you've run any modern game (especially an Unreal Engine one), you should have all that stuff already, and the installer takes less than a minute, as tested on my home and work PCs.
If your OS requires a restart in order to install an essential framework that is not the installer's fault.

Now I can try and set you up with an archive of the game's installation - if you want to download 200mb instead of 220mb and then risk having to upgrade DirectX, install redistributables and manually search for the .NET framework on the Microsoft website. But why would I do this? Can you tell me?

--
You have to understand that this is aiming to be a modern shooter, and if you had a port of a modern shooter like DaiFukkatsu on PC you wouldn't protest about the demo being 200mb or that it requires an actual video card to run well or that it has requirements like .NET frameworks or DirectX 9.0c that XBox games use.
I'll admit the main post should mention that onboard graphics don't cut it, I'm adding that now.
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by nasty_wolverine »

ciox wrote:You have to understand that this is aiming to be a modern shooter, and if you had a port of a modern shooter like DaiFukkatsu on PC you wouldn't protest about the demo being 200mb or that it requires an actual video card to run well or that it has requirements like .NET frameworks or DirectX 9.0c that XBox games use.
You know what you did? two very respected devs on the forums gave you advice, and your disregarding it. One of them has built a open source shmup framework, the other has one released game and one is in development. So when they say that something isnt right, listen well.

tbh, its not about the size of the downloadable which is irritating, but the fact that it tries to install more things on your system.

I would suggest, ditch UDK if you cant sort it out. Try something else, or role your own engine.
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by Udderdude »

UDK is massive overkill and it doesn't look like your game needs it at all. I'd suggest ditching it for Unity or something even more lightweight.

You'd be surprised how many people, even ones who have broadband, won't be willing to download a 200 MB game demo that has to do tons of installing just to run.
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ciox
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by ciox »

nasty_wolverine wrote: You know what you did? two very respected devs on the forums gave you advice, and your disregarding it. One of them has built a open source shmup framework, the other has one released game and one is in development. So when they say that something isnt right, listen well.
I know very well who they are and what they do, don't agitate for no reason. :?
tbh, its not about the size of the downloadable which is irritating, but the fact that it tries to install more things on your system.
It's installing Microsoft's official software on your computer that is already running a Microsoft OS, software that is required by many other games, these aren't nebulous "things".

...
Udderdude wrote:UDK is massive overkill and it doesn't look like your game needs it at all. I'd suggest ditching it for Unity or something even more lightweight.
You'd be surprised how many people, even ones who have broadband, won't be willing to download a 200 MB game demo that has to do tons of installing just to run.
It is not overkill in my opinion, it's used to make tiny puzzle games and much smaller arena shmups. Which were successful, read.
I can't "ditch" an almost complete codebase to switch to an engine I know nothing about.
Maybe the demo doesn't look like it, but the final game should look much better and indeed need the power of UDK, that test level you see is a joke.
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by trap15 »

ciox wrote:This is going to be a hard one to swallow, but there is nothing wrong with the installer.
Obviously, there is.
ciox wrote:the rest of the "bloat" is the Unreal Engine (the main exe is 50mb) which is an essential part of the game and cannot be removed.
It's still there, therefore it's a problem. If Unreal Engine is seriously 50 fucking megabytes, I think that's a pretty big problem from many many facets.
ciox wrote:220MB is nothing in these days of broadband.
Yes it is, and even if it wasn't, that's still a piss-poor argument to support something terrible.
ciox wrote:The UDK installer will download necessary frameworks if the PC doesn't have them installed, the framework is required by the game and not by the installer.
You mean required by Unreal Engine. Which seems to be a large part of the problem.
ciox wrote:If you've run any modern game
You're on a forum for a genre that died over 10 years ago. What do you expect.
ciox wrote:If your OS requires a restart in order to install an essential framework that is not the installer's fault.
It's your fault for using something that requires a framework that requires a restart.
ciox wrote:You have to understand that this is aiming to be a modern shooter
No excuse for something this bad.
ciox wrote:if you had a port of a modern shooter like DaiFukkatsu on PC you wouldn't protest about the demo being 200mb or that it requires an actual video card to run well
Except there are plenty of modern shooters coming out of the doujin scene that can run on any mid-to-low-range PC from the past 10-15 years.
ciox wrote:that it has requirements like .NET frameworks or DirectX 9.0c that XBox games use.
Typically a port means making stuff native, which means, hmmmmmmm, changing things to suit a particular platform.

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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by Bananamatic »

I don't understand shit about technical stuff like that but this sounds rather stupid indeed
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ciox
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by ciox »

I'm not letting you get away with this, trap. I am very dissapointed in you. :|
trap15 wrote:
ciox wrote:This is going to be a hard one to swallow, but there is nothing wrong with the installer.
Obviously, there is.
BP had issues with it from running it on what is basically a legacy gaming PC. As far as I can tell no one else has tested it, or they might have had normal experiences like I do. I asked a friend to test it and his report is "20-25 seconds to install, no restarts". Did you try the installer? Probably too busy finding the right image macro for this ownage...
trap15 wrote:
ciox wrote:the rest of the "bloat" is the Unreal Engine (the main exe is 50mb) which is an essential part of the game and cannot be removed.
It's still there, therefore it's a problem. If Unreal Engine is seriously 50 fucking megabytes, I think that's a pretty big problem from many many facets.
It wasn't a problem for Waves, or pretty much every Unreal Engine game in existence, of which there are loads and loads. What standards are you using to judge this as a big problem? Are they popular standards?
trap15 wrote:
ciox wrote:220MB is nothing in these days of broadband.
Yes it is, and even if it wasn't, that's still a piss-poor argument to support something terrible.
For a demo, it really is nothing, I don't know how to phrase this any different way but I wouldn't bat an eyelid if a game demo was 220mb, especially in my favorite genre.
Astebreed's demo, a game that was very well received here, is 211mb.

trap15 wrote:
ciox wrote:If your OS requires a restart in order to install an essential framework that is not the installer's fault.
It's your fault for using something that requires a framework that requires a restart.
It has nothing to do with the installer, you would have to install the framework separately without it. This 'framework' phenomenon is nothing new.
trap15 wrote:
ciox wrote:You have to understand that this is aiming to be a modern shooter
No excuse for something this bad.
Excuse me?
trap15 wrote:
ciox wrote:if you had a port of a modern shooter like DaiFukkatsu on PC you wouldn't protest about the demo being 200mb or that it requires an actual video card to run well
Except there are plenty of modern shooters coming out of the doujin scene that can run on any mid-to-low-range PC from the past 10-15 years.
Wait, why do I have to conform exactly to barely-defined doujin scene standards, you think Edelweiss' doujin game Astebreed will run on PCs from the past 10 years? That type of graphics and game is exactly what I am aiming for. How in the wrong are Edelweiss for charging forward and developing such a game in the doujin scene?
trap15 wrote:
ciox wrote:that it has requirements like .NET frameworks or DirectX 9.0c that XBox games use.
Typically a port means making stuff native, which means, hmmmmmmm, changing things to suit a particular platform.
[Mod Edit]image removed[/Mod Edit]

I'll have to take your word for it. Nice pic.
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by Dave_K. »

I'm all for a spirited dev debate, but please leave personal attacks and image responses out of the thread.

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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by BPzeBanshee »

For what it's worth, a few things I'd like to clarify with you ciox.

I didn't mean to open a can of worms this huge, or make insults, or push my popularity or any bullshit like that, but there's a few valid points here which I think you've either misunderstood or are just plain stubborn about. I hope you don't hate me too much for pushing to make more use of Development only to get this kind of feedback - I figured at worst it'd be best to get this out in the open while in Development rather than on launch. It's a philosophy I find serves me and others here quite well, and should you go with an engine change it'd be easier to do so now than later, but I completely understand your concern about jumping ship to a potential unknown.

I've dealt with installers that require a restart, so I don't think it's fair that you're putting the blame on me here. You've made several references that amount to 'well it's what every other game these days so it must be OK' - core system installers do this, not games, and the core system stuff gives you an option at the end to restart, like a tick box (all vanilla Microsoft installers do this).
This thing did not provide an option, and made its pop up message appear without any warning, with vague information (less than a minute? more like 10 seconds for me). Frankly it didn't look professional or industry-standard or "what every other installer does" at all and I genuinely got worried it was some kind of virus for a moment there. Your idea of 'what every installer does' clearly differs from mine.

Regarding filesize, I'll admit my internet isn't behaving most consistently at the moment. Thing is, I'm not in America with a 10GBPS broadband like "most gamers these days", thus a 220 MB download to try a prototype is already of quite a concern to me. Your idea of modern internet also clearly differs from mine.

I won't say the graphics in the screenshot are bad per se, I care for gameplay over graphics, but I didn't expect to require such a cutting-edge graphics card to run it - you could say it gave me a false impression, something I doubt I would've had occur with "most games these days" let alone Astebreed. Perhaps this is why I'm one of the only people here to test it; went ahead thinking I could run it based on the info that was available at the time, while others thought "oh it's probably going to be a clusterfuck to run, I won't bother". I'm glad you've addressed this in your post somewhat, but there's still the underlying issue of what you're using (Unreal, like BioShock Infinite and stuff) versus what I'm getting (clusterfuck of a installer and simple arcade shmup with some 3D that runs worse than it appears it should be). Your idea of good engine choice, again, differs from mine and the other folks here.

I've also dealt with a range of PCs, new and old, and I have more than one at home to try. I bought the mobo, i3 CPU and RAM July last year for what you're calling my 'legacy' PC that I used to test this - it's running 64-bit Windows 7 and is updated regularly. Moore's Law is 18 months (so it isn't outdated yet), and while it's not high-end, I think calling it 'legacy' is an inappropriate term - my project started on a 'legacy' PC from 1998, and of course I would not expect of ask for anything like this to run on it, because that is impossible.

Furthermore, the Epic Citadel HTML5 demo (correct me if I'm wrong but as I understand that too is Unreal Engine 3) runs on my i3 machine at a nice 45-50 FPS. I realise that's not fullspeed 60 FPS, but I figured if a Unreal+HTML5 app demo making full use of the engine gave me 50 FPS in most places knowing that HTML5 is not as performance-efficient as running a Native Windows app, I could get around that at least for this. Apparently not.

You imply hypocrisy concerning 'everyone's' love for Astebreed, and a lack of faith in my graphics capabilities. I confess I have not played the game, but I did run a trial for Ether Vapor Remaster a while back though (same devs right?), and as I recall it ran just fine. Perhaps once I get consistent behaviour from my connection I should try the Astebreed demo and see how it performs? Or try my 2008 iMac with a Mobility Radeon graphics card and XP installed? I've downloaded other 220+ MB games that have ran better, so I'm not sure I can really take your view on this part seriously.

Bottom line: I think everyone's made it quite clear that the choice of engine does not appear justified at the moment considering the distribution issues, and the choice of engine versus the effective use of it. Your view of what's standard clearly differs from mine, and those who have spoken up here - in fact it sounds like Sine Mora's idea of modern, which worries me a lot. If you can't honestly agree on any of this then perhaps you really are targeting the wrong audience after all. In that case all I can say is, its a damn shame since the video and concept looks really good, sincerely hoping your project doesn't end up like Heaven Variant or Broken Thunder, good luck bringing in the hardcore CoD fan casuals with i7s and GeForce 9-billions, and sorry I couldn't help you more. :(
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ciox
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by ciox »

I'm waiting for this thread to be deleted as it's impossible to have a normal discussion with this introduction and basically shameless trolling, but I'll address your points, why not.

The installer restart issue, this is exceedingly rare and has not been reported by anyone else, a friend triggered it only by running it on an old laptop with Windows Update disabled. Indeed, Microsoft knows about the reboot bug in their NET installer and says the NET 4 framework is supposed to be handled by Windows Update normally. link

You say the demo filesize is bad but I don't see it, have a look at demos for games like Saviors right here, 249mb, or a much, much smaller iPhone game Danmaku Death with a 50mb demo, zero complaints or trolling there for some reason.

I said you don't need cutting edge graphics, my card is a Radeon 4800 series from '08 and currently heavily underclocked to deal with this mad heat, 60fps with some acceptable shmup-like slowdowns. Why won't you have a look at the requirements for new games like Saviors or Jamestown? I reckon you'd be surprised by their graphics demands, and people somehow like those games.

You didn't read the part where I mentioned Waves, this engine is definitely not just for high tech FPS, here is the link again - http://www.unrealengine.com/showcase/udk/waves/
The Epic Citadel demos, all of them, are essentially masterpieces in optimization, this is why they are so popular in the first place. I doubt either of us even operate on that level.

It's true the rest of your specs are up to date, but the graphics card is still very outdated. I doubt you had such underpowered graphics in the 97/98 era of Starcraft, Quake and so on that you couldn't play any of them at all.

Ether Vapor is a great game but the graphics are not demanding, the remaster is mostly about higher resolution and some detail to previously barren textures. You might also want to check out Saviors.
I don't understand what you mean by other 220mb games running better, since the archive could be padded with just about anything, you also said games and not demos.


The engine does not appear justified for the 1-man prototype yes, but the whole game which would easily take a year to complete most definitely will justify it.
What you're saying about standard and Sine Mora is very strange given the scores I submit here, you think after studying and clearing Raizing shmups on Advanced (check the bakraid thread) I'm going to make Sine Mora instead of applying what I've learned? Too little attention is being paid to the game itself..
That's a cheap shot with the Call of Duty stuff, you know you don't need that kind of graphics hardware for this demo in the slightest.
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by Despatche »

"reboot bug", huh? all i see from that link is "it needs a reboot, deal with it"

also fuck net 4.0, not even installing that shit for supercade
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by sentry »

hi ciox,

Don't worry about the filesize.
When the game is ready and you have some awesome screenshots nobody will really care about how much mb it is.
As for the forced restart in some cases; just show a warning before installation begins so they have the possibility to cancel the install and save their work.
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by Udderdude »

ciox wrote:I'm waiting for this thread to be deleted as it's impossible to have a normal discussion with this introduction and basically shameless trolling
:roll:
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Re: 'Grazer' dev zone (PC, alpha demo available)

Post by BPzeBanshee »

You know what ciox? I feel you completely missed each and every one of the points I was trying to get at, and while I agree some of the posts here aren't too constructive, you aren't even handling the good ones very well at all. I was considering trying this on my other machine but if the feedback from that is going to end up on deaf ears like these I won't bother.

Here's the bottom line, which I understand won't be easy for you to swallow:
* I'm running a modern PC. 2012 modern. NOT a legacy PC. Big difference.
* Your game runs like horseshit. It's hard to focus on gameplay when I'm getting 3 FPS.
* Your installer is clunky as fuck.
* You had nothing in your post warning of filesize or graphics requirements until I showed up. Glad to see you've somewhat remedied this, but the actual problem of said requirements still stands.
* Most importantly are refusing to see any of the criticisms put here because of some mindset that everyone else here is at fault for being 'out-of-date'. This last point is exactly the kind of bullshit I was referring to when mentioning Sine Mora.

If you seriously can't see any of this and think it's 'normal', 'professional' or 'industry standard' then we can't help you. Can't test a game running at 3 FPS made a guy who won't listen. Make this game actually approachable to test in the first place, make REAL use of this forum, and THEN we can actually focus on the gameplay and make a diamond from this lump of coal, without focusing on these 'stupid filesize nitpicks'.
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