Thread: New GameDev Guys site - 2 new games

Hey everyone, it's been a while since I've updated the GDGuys site, but it's finally done and we have all five of our games on there now.

Before I move the new site to the root domain, I wouldn't mind some opinions: typos, things that should be changed, tips on better images, etc...

http://gdguys.thejefffiles.com/new/

Thanks, and enjoy the games too! Hunger Strike! is our latest game which we took 1st place for in the last game development competition.

Site looks great. I like how the "theme" changes as you select games and things. My only complaint is that the content window is quite small. It should take up more of the space IMHO

I haven't added any support for all the low-end browsers yet. I have to take in to account quite a few things like no iframe support, no javascript, etc etc...I'll get around to that all eventually.

Originally Posted by Perspective

Site looks great. I like how the "theme" changes as you select games and things. My only complaint is that the content window is quite small. It should take up more of the space IMHO

We might be able to increase the size of it a bit. Right now it seems to fit the content decently so if we get many more people saying it's too small it won't be too hard to bump up the size in the psd.

Text-only browsers I would classify as low-end. The way the site's set up right now it'll be very easy to have multiple versions of the website ranging all across the board.

I want a version optimized for my PSPs screen resolution... and one for my cell phone too.... and a pod cast of the content...

*dies in a burning room of fire*

oh god, thats what Karma is

Originally Posted by Bubba

How do you guys go about organizing who does what and how do you ensure the code bases are compatible?

This doesn't really apply to our team, seeing as I'm the only programmer and then Josh always does music, and then we have a different artist every time.

Originally Posted by Bubba

It's very difficult when we all have full-time jobs, different time schedules, and live in completely different areas of the globe.

So true, which is why we do the 72 hour competitions to touch up our skills.


As far as teamwork goes and dishing out jobs for people, we've gotten that down to a science as far as managing our time wisely (which is why every single one of our games is complete and relatively bug-free). We start off the competition brainstorming ideas until we have determined what we want the game to be like. Then once we have a firm idea in our minds of what type of game we would like, we start building the game using a bottom-up approach, starting with the most general engines and over time focusing on the more detailed engines.

For example, in Roidian: Final Hour, I started off by making the enemy ship patterns, arguably the most detailed part of the engine. This moved on to making backgrounds and then collision detection with the player's ship.

Editor-wise, for the sake of time I incorporate everything in to the engine by hand, so for example in Roidian's case, to make a level this is what I did:

Level 1 snippets

Code:

struct wave
{
	float pts[8];
	int numShips;
	int type;
	int FIs;
	int FIgap;
	int waitAllGone;
	int forceText;
};

const wave waves[5][39]=
{
	{// level 1
		{ { 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 }, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0 },	// Empty
		{ { -32,-32, 800,300, 200,400, -32,632 }, 10, ENEMY1, 170, 20, 0, 0 },
		{ { 832,-32, 200,300, 400,100, 832,632 },  6, ENEMY1, 170, 20, 1, 0 },
		{ { 400,-32, -32,300, 800,300, 400,632 },  6, ENEMY1, 170, 20, 1, 0 },
		{ { -32,300, 100,300, 200,300, 832,300 },  3, ENEMY1, 300, 50, 0, 1 },
		{ { 832,500, 700,500, 600,500, -32,500 },  5, ENEMY1, 300, 50, 1, 0 },
		{ { -32,300, 200,500, 600,550, 832,632 },  6, ENEMY1, 150, 50, 0, 0 },
		{ { 832,300, 500,500, 200,550, -32,632 },  6, ENEMY1, 150, 50, 1, 0 },
		{ { 300,632, 350,300, 450,300, 500,632 }, 10, ENEMY1, 150, 20, 0, 0 },
		{ { 200,632, 200,632, 200,-32, 832,632 },  4, ENEMY1, 190, 30, 1, 0 },
		{ { 600,632, 600,632, 600,-32, -32,632 },  4, ENEMY1, 190, 30, 1, 0 },
		{ { 0,0,0,0,0,0,0,0 }, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1 },	// End
	},


const int waveTimeWaits[5][40]=
{
	{// level 1
		6000,
		2500,
		1000,
		6000,
		1000,
		800,
		500,
		200,
		3000,
		0,
		1000,
		500,
		-1
	},


const int textTimeWaits[5][7]=
{
	{// level 1
		2000,
		0,
		-1,
		-1,
		-2,
	},


const char textTexts[5][6][256]=
{
	{// level 1
		"WELCOME TO THE ROIDIAN COMMAND POST\nRECRUIT. HERE YOU WILL BE TRAINED IN THE\nUSE OF YOUR ROIDIAN FIGHTER.",
		"THIS IS A ROUTINE TRAINING MISSION, SO\nIT SHOULD BE A BREEZE FOR YOU.\nIN A FEW SECONDS, A WAVE OF ATTACK\nDRONES WILL FLY BY.  ELIMINATE THEM.",
		"CONGRATULATIONS RECRUIT. NOW SEE IF\nYOU CAN HANDLE THE NEXT FEW WAVES.\n",
		"GOOD JOB RECRUIT.  YOU'VE COMPLETED\nBASIC TRAINING! MEET AT THE BRIEFING\nROOM FOR YOUR NEXT MISSION.",
	},

That's the entirety of level one, described in numbers and text. If you play through level one you'll see all of these events taking place.

As far as incorporating this data in to the engine, the engine itself is very complex and needs to work out many things such as which stage it's at, the correct timing, etc... so there's a lot of thought that goes in to designing these engines.

I have a question for you, jeff. Why is that table based?

You could do it so much easier if you just used CSS to lay the text for the links and the iframe over one image that has all of the background stuff in it.