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Author Topic: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter  (Read 48067 times)

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AFS

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #15 on: March 18, 2016, 10:04:01 pm »
Looks great!
My impressions:
- The art is very nice, well done.
- I like the humor hehe.
- I wish WASD controlled movement only and use the mouse for aiming.
- I wish the camera shaked only when explosions happen. When you shoot it does it and it's a little anoying I think. But hey, that's me!

Good luck!

Wait, so does this mean that the game actually started and loaded everything fine and didn't crash or freeze or burn your computer?

That's awesome!  ;D

- I wish WASD controlled movement only and use the mouse for aiming.

I don't think I can achieve mouse aiming at this point, as the game was made with keyboard-only in mind from the get go  :-\. Shooting with the left click is just by default, though; you can rebind the controls in the menu if that helps.

- I wish the camera shaked only when explosions happen. When you shoot it does it and it's a little anoying I think. But hey, that's me!

I'll add an option in the pause menu to activate/deactivate them: one option for the shaking when you shoot and another for the shaking after an explosion.

Thanks for taking the time to test it. Cheers!

Tukimitzu

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #16 on: March 20, 2016, 09:00:42 pm »
Thanks for taking the time to test it. Cheers!

Sure! It worked perfectly!

piluve

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #17 on: March 23, 2016, 01:25:01 pm »
Love the art style and the idea :D (that firewall tho :P)
The only 'bad' thing for me is that those fast paced games make me a little sick :S

Buen trabajo!

AFS

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #18 on: March 23, 2016, 08:10:10 pm »
Sure! It worked perfectly!

:D

Love the art style and the idea :D (that firewall tho :P)
The only 'bad' thing for me is that those fast paced games make me a little sick :S

Buen trabajo!

Gracias! :P

By the way, I made a small update (v. 0.1.1). I changed the player sprite, mostly because, as some people pointed out, it was difficult to notice the direction that you are facing and in turn it was hard to aim. Also, I added health pickups (a red hammer), making the level much easier...



I also nerfed some enemies and made items more abundant, because apparently the level was way too hard. Also, I changed the default controls to keyboard only (you can still rebind them if you like). Oh, and now you can toggle the camera shaking on and off ;)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/piw5aaqk047fuow/Our%20Dear%20Paper%20Fighters%20v.%200.1.1.zip?dl=0

Cheers!

Hapax

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #19 on: March 29, 2016, 12:14:41 am »
I changed the player sprite, mostly because, as some people pointed out, it was difficult to notice the direction that you are facing and in turn it was hard to aim.
(click to show/hide)
Nailed it  ;)
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paupav

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"Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #20 on: April 06, 2016, 11:46:34 pm »
Wow, very nice. What program did you use for your art?

AFS

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #21 on: April 07, 2016, 11:34:12 pm »
Nailed it  ;)

:D

Wow, very nice. What program did you use for your art?

Well, the paper background is a texture that I found online a while ago, and the rest is made by me using GIMP. The assets are mostly very basic shapes, so even using MS Paint would have been enough.

Most of the stuff is composed by two parts: the drawing and the cutout of said drawing, so the textures are usually like this:



So, when it comes to code, I use two sf::Sprite, so I can change the color of the drawing using sf::Sprite::setColor() without messing the color of the cutout.

I also use a third sprite to make the shadow, which uses the same texture as the cutout but applying a black transparent color using setColor().

So, finally I put all three sprites together, like this:



Same applies to the blades and most of the things that can be destroyed. :P

AFS

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #22 on: April 22, 2016, 06:54:00 am »
Aloha!

I made an update if anyones's interested. I made a new level, which serves as a "prologue" of sorts, so it plays before the original first level in the previous version.



Also, after you complete the prologue level, a cutscene plays to give some context to the game, if you are into that kinda thing :P



You can advance the dialogue during the cutscene by pressing the shoot button (default Space), or you can skip the whole thing by pressing ESC. After the cutscene, the mission in the previous version plays as normal.

I also made some minor changes, especially with the sounds. Music is still as crappy as always, but I'm slowly learning; hopefully I'll manage to make something decent by the time I finish this, but don't cross your fingers ;)

Download v. 0.2.0 (Windows)

Cheers!
« Last Edit: April 22, 2016, 07:03:10 am by AFS »

gamepopper

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #23 on: May 06, 2016, 10:01:37 pm »
I really like the pencil and paper artstyle, it looks like you've done a lot on this in a short amount of time. Hopefully I'll see more updates soon!

AFS

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #24 on: May 10, 2016, 07:11:33 pm »
I really like the pencil and paper artstyle, it looks like you've done a lot on this in a short amount of time. Hopefully I'll see more updates soon!

Thanks! Lately I haven't worked too much on this due to my job, but I'm still making progress, albeit slowly.

I made a IndieDB page last week, by the way: http://www.indiedb.com/games/our-dear-paper-fighters . It got a warmer reception than on GameJolt, which was nice, so I'll probably stick to it.

Cheers!

AFS

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #25 on: May 21, 2016, 04:55:45 pm »
Hi.

Slow progress on the game itself, but I managed to make a new video regarding level creation. It's sped up, like those timelapse videos about paintings and stuff, but crappier.



Cheers!

Hapax

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #26 on: May 25, 2016, 09:37:29 pm »
Nice!

I really like the visual style of this game and very pleased that you're continuing work on it :)

This may be a silly question but what do the scissors at do?
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AFS

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #27 on: June 02, 2016, 03:26:40 am »
Nice!

I really like the visual style of this game and very pleased that you're continuing work on it :)

Thanks a lot, man. I'm really glad that most people seem to like the art style, because like I have said many times before, I'm not an artist at all.

Now I'm trying to tweak the gameplay, because apparently it's too random. I'm thinking of making the levels with fewer enemies, but making them more unique, with different patterns and stuff, because right now the few enemies available just shoot straight at you and that's it, there's nothing to learn, so the combat is not very engaging, you just brute-force your way through them.

I'm also trying to learn how to make music, and while I'm slowly improving, I still don't like how they are turning out. I searched for free music online, but so far I haven't found anything that fits, unfortunately, so for now I'm just practicing to make my own music a little less crappy.

This may be a silly question but what do the scissors at do?

Oh, the scissors are just for background, they don't do anything gameplay wise. I use them in some cutscenes and in the main menu screen:



I'm thinking of adding pencils, glue and stuff like that as well :P

AFS

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #28 on: March 17, 2017, 08:21:40 pm »
Hey.

Sorry to bump the thread, but I didn't want to post this on the Screenshots one, as I've already posted there twice.

I've been working on the game very slowly (only a few hours per month, although lately I've been more productive), and I've made some progress since last post 9 months ago. Here are some of the changes, including some GIFs:

Rubble particles:

I already posted this in the Screeshots thread, but I'm reposting them here. Using a VertexArray (which, when I first started using SFML a few years back, I thought it was called VectorArray, ha!), I made some "particles" that appear when objects are hit with bullets or when they explode.



The particles stay on the map, even if you go faaaaaaar away and then come back, so after you complete all your objectives and are tasked to go back to base, it's nice to see all the destruction that you managed to make.

One exception of the "stay on the map" rule is in the space mission. In this case, the particles simply go flying and once they are outside the camera they disappear.



Those are some old GIfs, though, when the particles were as big as oranges. They are considerably smaller now, with some random variation in size, so the effect is a little more subtle.

Secondary weapons:

From the very beginning I wanted to have three playable characters, Green, Blue and Red, each with a primary weapon and a very powerful secondary. I inmediately had an idea of each primary weapon, but I had no clue about the secondaries.

A few weeks ago I finally took the time to implement some ideas about the secondary weapons, yay!

For Green, seeker missiles, which took me more time to implement that I want to admit:



For Blue, a melee charge (or whatever you want to call it. I just call it Kaio-ken):



And for Red, a freeze ray. Enemies drop a different rubble particle if they are frozen.



In all cases, the idea of the secondary weapon is to complement the primary and to get out of trouble. Blue has a very hard to aim primary, so the secondary is used to clean lots of enemies quickly; Red as a shotgun has a primary, so it has trouble with long range enemies, so you can freeze them to get close and BAM!; finally, Green has a machine gun as a primary, so it's kinda good against everything but the helicopter itself is pretty slow, so the seeker missiles serve more as a "panic button".

Once you use the secondary, you have to wait a little bit to use it again.

Gameplay changes:

- Fuel is now spent by movement, not time: At first, fuel was spent by time, but the game has dialogue popups. If the player stops the helicopter to read the dialogue in peace, he's spending fuel. Basically, I was punishing players for reading the dialogue, and that's not ok. So, now the fuel is spent only on movement, so you can stop to read without having to worry.

This was HUGE for balance, because I tested levels on which I both ignored and read the dialogue: in the former case I ended up having plenty, while in the latter I barely had fuel to complete the mission. If I put more fuel items on the map, you ended up with way too much fuel if you ignored dialogue, but if I didn't put enough items, the mission was unwinnable if you did read them. It was a nightmare to balance a mission, but with this change now I don't have this problem.

- Secondary weapons now recharge by kills, not time: Players (and by "players" I mean "me", ha!) could just use the secondary, wait the 15 seconds it takes to recharge, and use it again, basically completing the whole mission without using the primary weapon. This was even more effective after the change in fuel previously mentioned, because now you are not spending fuel by waiting.

Now I changed it so that the secondary recharges after 10 kills, that is, enemy helicopters or turrets, but not neutral buildings. Now you HAVE to use the primary, and use the secondary more wisely, because there's a limited number of enemies on the map, and therefore, limited recharges.

- Item detector tabs: The game uses objectives tabs to represent, well, your objectives.



You change this with the keyboard, and a little arrow will point in the direction of the objective you have selected.

An unrelated problem was that it was difficult to find items, like fuel or health. You basically stumble upon them by pure chance, and the worse thing was that you actually spend fuel by looking for items. This was not cool.

So I decided to simply add tabs for each item, so if you need something in particular, you simply select the tab and the arrow will point to the closest item.



Yes, this makes the game easier, but I prefer an easier game than a tedious one.

- Checkpoints!!!: Before this, if you died, you had to start the level all over again, including waiting for dialogue, uugh. Now you only start since, well, the last checkpoint, which is usually after your last objective completed. Thanks to this, I can make the game harder 8)

To implement this I don't save a copy of my Level class in memory, because not only that's very slow, but I also have the problem of pointers pointing to incorrect places in memory. Instead, considering that each mission is stored in a text file in an specific format, I simply save the level at that checkpoint in that same format (but in memory, not in a text file) and then load this level in the same way as If I'm loading a level from scratch. As far as the code is concerned, I'm loading an entirely different level, not a checkpoint.

This works surprisingly well, althought it was a little tricky, because it's not as simple as saving the positions of each enemy and call it a day, I also had to tweak the events (scripting system) up to that point, which includes timers, variables and stuff like that, but all in all, I was happy with the results.

- Ammo: This game is inspired by the Strike series of games from the MegaDrive and SNES. In those games, you had to manage your armor, fuel and ammo. In my case, I decided to scrap ammo pickups and just leave armor and fuel, so your weapons have unlimited ammo, but a few weeks ago I thought: "ah, what the hell?" and added ammo anyways. It's not the most significant change, but at least it stops the player from just holding the shoot button for the whole mission.

And I guess that's it. Not that many visual changes, more like details, but the game feels better overall, like more fun, less tedious. I'm actually liking it.

By the way, I'm not making this game to sell it, I'm just making it as a personal thing, but with the recent news that Greenlight is going away, I started considering putting the game there, for curiosity more than anything, and if the rare event that it gets greenlit happens, sell it for like a buck or something (as the game is pretty short), but on the other hand I fear that I'm going to get destroyed in the comments.

Anyways, sorry for the long post. I'll upload a video of gameplay soon.

Thanks for reading ;)
« Last Edit: March 17, 2017, 08:33:14 pm by AFS »

Hapax

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Re: "Our Dear Paper Fighters" - Top down shooter
« Reply #29 on: March 18, 2017, 12:51:21 pm »
More things! Yay! ;D

Checkpoints sound like a massive improvement on playability but this, of course, depends on whether a player prefers to play the game or compete with the game.

The different vehicles (red, green and blue) are interesting and it's good to have variety and choices for play styles.

The fuel "burning" during dialogues could have been solved with a much more simple solution: pause the clock! ;)
This allows fuel to burn when hovering (as one would expect), for example, but keeps balanced whether or not one reads the dialogue.

Secondaries charging by kills is an odd choice. You've already mentioned that they're a panic button (missiles/charge) or to be used in conjunction with the primary (missiles/freeze). Charging by kills means that once you've used it up, you have to be fine without it or you will die. Charging by time allows the ability to evade until the weapon is available where you can then engage properly.
If 15 seconds charge makes the game easy, increase the charge time! :P

Another option for secondaries appears with ammo. You can require a certain amount of ammo to use it or maybe have specific "charge" items to pick up.
For example, charge fully in 2 minutes, add 10% charge for each kill, and add 25% charge for each normal charge item picked up.
That way, you can have repeated usage with constant engagement (kills), begin engagement with a full charge (time and/or items) and have the option to build up that charge during evasion (items).

Sorry to bump the thread, but I didn't want to post this on the Screenshots one, as I've already posted there twice.
I think Project threads are (or should be) exempt from this rule, particularly with posts from the creator. How else would updated information be shared? Another (newer) thread would be horrible, right?
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