IC Forum Archive

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

I thought I'd drop by and talk about/share two of my older projects which I'm more or less done with: RRRRRPG and Vertical.

Vertical

This had big plans to be some huge epic game where you climb a massive tower while battling dramatic bosses. It fell apart, and all that is left is this neato platforming engine. I still might eventually use it for something, but not for a long time. Contains: Grappling hooks! Walljumping! Relaxation! No enemies! Lonely game!
Mac version available here.

RRRRRPG

This game, I never had too much planned for. I wanted to make a completely content-free RPG. A number-increasing game, with no plot or characters, just you and the numbers. I don't know how this managed to be entertaining, but somehow it does! Contains: Numbers! Increasing! Polygons! Experience points! SECRETS!
If you want a more coherent goal, then try to beat the game at the lowest level possible. My record is 33.

So there you go. A simple game and a simple engine, both there for your playing enjoyment.

Patrick Alexander · Posts: 29

Re: RRRRRPG: I'm not gonna download it just yet, but I just wanted to say: I'm so glad someone has made this game. Thank you.

L · Posts: 145

What do the four R's stand for?

James · Posts: 1735

professor_scissors wrote:

This had big plans to be some huge epic game where you climb a massive tower while battling dramatic bosses.

I'd really like to play/contribute to a game like this. Could I mail you any ideas I might have on the subject, provided I have some in the future?

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

L wrote:

What do the four R's stand for?

Officially, nothing. Unofficially, Really Really Really Random.

junkboy · Posts: 13

I really enjoyed Vertical. You should use the engine for a ninja game!

Screwtape · Posts: 81

professor_scissors wrote:

RRRRRPG
This game, I never had too much planned for. I wanted to make a completely content-free RPG. A number-increasing game, with no plot or characters, just you and the numbers. I don't know how this managed to be entertaining, but somehow it does! Contains: Numbers! Increasing! Polygons! Experience points! SECRETS!

This one strikes me as more than vaguely reminiscent of a little-known webcomic called Triangle and Robert; although that's mostly because it has the same goals of minimalism and polygons. Perhaps of more relevance to this forum, the same guy has occasionally done game-a-day sprints where he tries to come up with a new and interesting game mechanic every day for a month. As you'd expect, not all of them are ZOMG AWESOME but there's some interesting little gems in there.

Mr. Business · Posts: 1530

Prof, I finally mastered some pretty slick maneuvers in Vertical. It's a crazy game, for sure. And it gets extremely green, the further up I go. The gameplay has a damn lot of promise. Almost makes me wish that I had an idea that I could apply the engine to, because it's quite nice.

I have a hypothesis about what the noise is that I'm hearing when I play the game. How muce file i/o does vertical perform while the player is actively playing. I get the feeling that what I'm hearing is my HDD spinning.

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

Mr. Business wrote:

Prof, I finally mastered some pretty slick maneuvers in Vertical. It's a crazy game, for sure. And it get extremely green, the further up I go.

I have a hypothesis about what the noise is that I'm hearing when I play the game. How muce file i/o does vertical perform while the player is actively playing. I get the feeling that what I'm hearing is my HDD spinning.

Uh.... none. None at all. It loads the sprites at the beginning, then nothing. The tower is randomly generated. As is the color.

mechanori · Posts: 623

Wow, prof. Vertical is fantastic. I mean, it's brilliant. I would only change the grappling hook to a "hold" button rather than a "toggle" button. I mean, I just played it for 15 minutes. If the background slowly got lighter, that would be pretty cool. But as it is, wow. It's just awesome.

Brock · Posts: 421

Any chance of doing a quickie Mac port of these, Vertical in particular?

oligophagy · Posts: 110

I only see an SDL dee-el-el; I'd be willing to throw your Vertical my xcode's way. (WEAK SPOT . . . IN HEART . . . FOR GRAPPLING).

dessgeega · Posts: 3317

vertical is amazing.

i would suggest reassigning the grappling hook to X, since shooting serves no real purpose.

i might tigsource these if that's okay with you.

LegatoB · Posts: 1546

Vertical is awesome mechanics just waiting for an actual game.

I hope you get back to it sooner rather than later.

Zmann · Posts: 21

Vertical is unplayably slow on my laptop ;_;

And being a poor college student, that's all I have.

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

oligophagy wrote:

I only see an SDL dee-el-el; I'd be willing to throw your Vertical my xcode's way. (WEAK SPOT . . . IN HEART . . . FOR GRAPPLING).

I'll toss it at you.

dessgeega wrote:

vertical is amazing.

i would suggest reassigning the grappling hook to X, since shooting serves no real purpose.

i might tigsource these if that's okay with you.

Let me touch Vertical up a little first. I'm probably gonna just get rid of the shooting all together.

oligophagy · Posts: 110

Vertical on your Mac, check Help for controls: http://professor.fireandrobot.com/vertical.dmg

Sawtooth · Posts: 2350

awesome! Thanks! New forum heroes itt :D

dark steve · Posts: 3002

What are you guys getting for performance? It's choking the life out of my G4.

Sawtooth · Posts: 2350

Yeah, just tried it, and it's a bit slow. G4 here too, 1.5 ghz.

oligophagy · Posts: 110

It uses SDL, and SDL goes mad slow windowed on Mac, I'm remembering (didn't notice with dual G5 oops). Will add fullscreen.

Sawtooth · Posts: 2350

oligophagy wrote:

(didn't notice with dual G5 oops)

oh you

thanks for keeping your obsolete laptop homies in the loop!

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

Updated links in the first post: Windows vertical now has speedrunning mode (press 'r'), which records your best times of climbing very high, very fast. Linked mac version should have improved performance!

oligophagy · Posts: 110

about the mac improvement: i forget to change to pure opengl from a deprecated opengl / sdl hybrid mode, which is why the windowed mode here was so slow even Zombie City Tactics ran fine. so it should work as is now; let me know if not.

(if you really want, apple-f will go fullscreen, but this is really slow for some reason i can't yet comprehend. but i'm learning!)

dessgeega · Posts: 3317

( b^_^)b

Screwtape · Posts: 81

oligophagy wrote:

about the mac improvement: i forget to change to pure opengl from a deprecated opengl / sdl hybrid mode, which is why the windowed mode here was so slow even Zombie City Tactics ran fine. so it should work as is now; let me know if not.

I think this latest version runs perhaps even slower than the original on my G5 1.6. For comparison, Umihara Kawase runs at about 50% CPU in SNES9x while Vertical pegs it at 100% every time. :/

I think I might have spotted some dithering activity in full-screen mode - you're not picking a mode with a mismatched colour-depth, are you? It does seem to run a little faster in 'Thousands' rather than 'Millions'. Also, are you doing the ol' double-buffering-and-SDL_Flip() trick so it waits for vblank? My occasional forays into SDL stuff tended to get much more CPU friendly with that.

Other minor suggestions: I second mechanori's suggestion of making grappling-hook a 'hold' rather than 'toggle'. Also, how difficult would it be to make the game read keycodes rather than characters? I'm one of those cursed Dvorak-keyboard users, and it's a bit annoying to have to switch to US-English every time I want to play. Alternate solution: add support for gamepads.

I'd like to know how far I've climbed, although putting a stark number on the screen would rather destroy the nice sombre atmosphere. I like the gradual colour change, except that it loops and I'm never quite sure how many iterations I've seen. Perhaps 'one loop' could be calibrated to be the high-score?

L · Posts: 145

oligophagy wrote:

Vertical on your Mac, check Help for controls: http://professor.fireandrobot.com/vertical.dmg

Well hey it won't run in OSX 10.2.

oligophagy · Posts: 110

L wrote:

Well hey it won't run in OSX 10.2.

oh man did i do everything wrong this time.

this i can fix; just forget to switch the target SDK from 10.4 to 10.2.8. will post soon. but these performance issues? STUMPED.

Toups the Elder · Posts: 508

I bet SDL is not getting an accelerated context to draw in. That can really kill performance.

schmeetz · Posts: 353

No problems here, using a G5 though. Good stuff though!

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

NEW VERSION 0.4 of Vertical released!
New features:
-Tower no longer has walls, but instead has Kid Icarus-style horizontal scrolling.
-Less-boneheaded programming means the game will run MUCH faster and consume less CPU power.
-Pressing V toggles between normal view and a zoomed-out view.
-Pressing S when not in a race enters Space mode.
-Pressing 2 when not in a race enters Doublejump mode.
-Pressing H will toggle a display of how high up the tower you are.
-At extreme heights, the tower becomes more difficult to climb.

At this point, I'm going to promote it from "engine" to "toy."

GrimSweeper · Posts: 530

Yay! My laptop couldn't handle the previous version well (it slowed to a crawl). Let's see if this is any better.

It is, excellent. However, whenever I try to initiate a race, moving while throwing my grapple hook will make it cancel. I'm not THAT good to make it to any height just by jumping around.

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

Argh! I could've sworn I had gotten rid of all those.

Bug fixed, download at same location.

EDIT: New minor update at same URL makes the Space mode physics more fun.

Screwtape · Posts: 81

oligophagy: Mackertosh lovin' for the new version of Vertical?

*puppy-dog eyes*

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

MAC VERSION of latest version of Vertical up. Needs testing.

Screwtape · Posts: 81

professor_scissors wrote:

MAC VERSION of latest version of Vertical up. Needs testing.

Works fine on this here G5 1.6GHz. Having no walls as backups sure makes life more challenging... as intended, I guess. Space mode works remarkably well for such a simple debasement of the original rule-set, as does double-jump mode.

I shall play with it further!

duckzero · Posts: 244

Works fine on my g4/400 with 512mb of ram, i was actually a little suprised how well it ran on my old hardware. This game is fun though!

oligophagy · Posts: 110

framerate is go?

YAY.

Monthenor · Posts: 455

Why can't I stop climbing? I hate you, professor_scissors. I can't stop climbing.

This one I should probably not bring to the office.

EDIT: Uh...now what?

Screwtape · Posts: 81

Yeah, I hit a situation like that last night, where the next platform above me was just a few blocks higher than I could send my grapple straight upward, even if I jumped first.

Other things that have occurred to me recently:

When my grapple is dragging me sideways and I get stuck on something, when I slide past that something I suddenly zoom sideways, as though horizontal momentum isn't being zeroed by hitting an obstruction the same way vertical momentum is.
A tiny field of movement inside a large, static desktop gives me motion-sickness after a while; a full-screen mode would be great.
I got bored in my lunch-break at work the other day, and decided to find out how difficult it would be to port to Linux (my workstation at work runs Fedora Core 6). Having snaffiled the source-code, I got a makefile together fairly quickly but I got stuck when I discovered that the published code depends on the Windows-only "glaux" library. Obviously oligophagy must have gotten around this somehow for the Mac port, is the 'portable' version of the source available?

Monthenor · Posts: 455

I'm actually now at 8879. It turns out the tower re-rolls the random platforms if you get far enough away, so eventually it gave me a platform to hang onto. Also I've finally gotten the hang of slingshotting straight up in the vast void.

Oddly, past 7500 there are occasional platforms again.

Screwtape · Posts: 81

Monthenor wrote:

Also I've finally gotten the hang of slingshotting straight up in the vast void.

I have decided I shall direct my scientists to research this exciting new technology.

Monthenor · Posts: 455

Screwtape wrote:

Monthenor wrote:

Also I've finally gotten the hang of slingshotting straight up in the vast void.

I have decided I shall direct my scientists to research this exciting new technology.

This makes the climbing go much faster: fall down below a block and shoot your grapple straight up so it'll catch just at the edge of its range. Hold Z and steer so you're just to either side of the block. Release grapple when you're even with the block. Catch major air.

It's all about the rubber-band physics. With careful falling and slingshotting you can conquer even the great empty spaces in the Upper Wastes.

professor_scissors · Posts: 1033

You should also hold Up during these slingshots, to minimize the length of the rope for extra pull.

I'm aware of the horizontal momentum glitch, but I am also pretty baffled as to what causes it or what to do about it.