Music Hacker - S2E2

Unfortunately, the audio quality is mucked up pretty bad. Can't really find a way to fix it,

Infiltrator Part 9

The legacy of the project of nine lives continues! Or, at least five lives so far...

Anywho, this is what I think is a fairly important milestone. All five weapons are primed and ready to be used to destroy things. All five enemies have artwork ready, as well as a base to build the AI/behavior around. Any number of enemies can be loaded from a level, as well as any kind of level backdrop, with any number of any kind of walls or obstacles. I'm actually at the point where I need a level editor. I came to this conclusion sometime while I was hand writing the coordinates for 90 different objects in the level file. If you're wondering what they were, they're the walls surrounding my test arena. I dumped level boundaries in favor of wall objects that use Box2D.

Box2D turned out to be mostly just pure awesome... WITH HACKING TABASCO SAUCE!

Sorry, I got a little carried away. It's good, okay? All the enemies, level barriers, players, and everything neatly and easily slid into place. The physics look convincing and realistic. Box2D is a well designed, easy to use-erm... well black box.

There's really not much to say about the sound effects. I threw them all together in audacity, except for the AIFSA sound effect. It's basically a cut-up, remixed, re-organized hackjob of some chainsaw sound effects I dug up online. All the sound effects work well and match the weapons though, so I'm satisfied.


Now, for a word on the control scheme. You see, I originally had a unique control scheme. Forward and backward always moved relative to your ship, which was facing the cursor. Left and right ALSO moved relative to the ship, which led to an abnormal and somewhat unintuitive flip in left/right motion relative to the screen if the ship was facing the bottom. Confused? Don't worry, it would be even worse if you were flying the ship.

The control scheme was little more than an extremely direct circle-strafing system. It worked, but was a little too unique. Ideally there will be a few camera/ship control modes available via the options menu in the final version, but right now I've decided to stick with something a little more simple. The ship simply points at the cursor, but moves relative to the screen.


This is the mark of version 0.0.30. It's all very pretty, but it's starting to be a pain in the face to write out levels by hand. A level editor is in high priority, but I need to port my particle system from SDL to SFML, and make use of it too. This level is getting pretty boring, so I need to come up with more level assets, and hopefully break up the chunky square tiled look it has right now. Additionally, I need to make projectiles explode when they collide with objects, add some basic enemy AI, create a menu, start on the HUD, think up a story, etc. I'm beginning to see this as a smaller and smaller milestone... meh.

I'm doing this to have fun, and it's working. :P

        --LazerBlade

Cognitive Observation #17

Transmusical Distortion now 100% on youtube!

Great CD from a Christmas party. Of course, had this been any other holiday I would have said it was great for that. Meh.

Playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3265A73F5656A79A&feature=viewall

Infiltrator part 8

See how I dropped the season number? Cute move huh? This session doesn't look that different aesthetically from the last, but a lot of changes have happened under the hood. Let's look at a scree-no let's not look at a screenshot. It wouldn't look any different. The invisible difference, is that physics have become integrated via Box2D.

That's right, I've spent all this time bending my game and Box2D to mesh together. Realistic physics can add or take away a lot from a game, and this is a case where I think it will add. Unlike my escapades in the original Infiltrator, I've already solved all the problems that slowed me down and eventually stopped me.

This is the part where a few things start to fall into place and make an experience. Before, this was merely and experiment that spat out data in graphical form. Only a few pieces need yet to be connected before it creates an experience. So la-dee-da for me. Yay.


        --LazerBlade

Cognitive Observation #16

Music Hacker - Season Debut

This episode ended up running a lot longer then I originally thought. I think it turned out for the better though.

Infiltrator - Sound Effected

Physics are being the usual pain in the face. If you recall, this is what brought a number of my other projects to a halt. I feel like I'm making progress, but slowly. Thus, I've started adding sound FX so that I have some new content to show you.

See the sound FX? I hope you're good at reading wave-forms, because I haven't figured out a good way to showcase them yet. Obviously, I'm constructing them totally in Audacity, starting with generated tones and or white-noise. It's pretty fun, and is a great way for me to keep Infiltrator developing while I'm tackling this huge problem called physics.


       --LazerBlade

Cognitive observation #15

Seriously. There is snow on the ground right now. I'd have no problem with snow if it weren't cold.

Icicle Cyberpunk Theme for LMMS

Well gents, I've gotten more than a little fed up with the stupid aesthetic and logo shipped with LMMS. I decided to create my own.

The Icicle Cyberpunk Theme is a work in progress, but still pretty to look at. Above this text is a my new splash screen, which although not amazing, I consider to be much better than the original. I've chosen a cyberspace style and designed the theme accordingly.

I don't know when I'll be done or to what level I will change the look. Hopefully I can get something more appealing and sharp than the usual dull grey look though.

I will note that it's really a pain that LMMS doesn't read certain colors from the theme file. This forces the same boring grey in several places where it should be customizable, leaving manual patching of the hardwired code as the only option. This may delay completion of my theme, but hopefully won't be too much of a hassle to deal with.

Just to dream a little bit here, I'd love it if I could eventually replace the default theme and logo. They've  been in need of a makeover for a long time.

        --LazerBlade

Infiltrator - Season 3 Part 6

This session was mostly a raw content boost. I've decided that enemy screenshots are not going to be counted as spoilers. So here:

I not only setup all five enemy types, but I also set the level reading class up to load these enemies from a level file. As you can see, I then took advantage of my carefully constructed framework to add in a few simple lines of code which caused the enemies to face the player.

Some basic physics are being set up, but they are quite experimental, and prone to breaking. I would need a video to show you how the physics work anyway, so I'm not going to be showcasing them this time around.

As an additional bonus, I setup a second camera mode. In this mode, W,A,S and D always move your ship like arrow keys, regardless of which way it's facing. At the moment it's a hardwired option, but I'm hoping to have a few camera modes available for selection in the menu of the final game.


        --LazerBlade

Cognitive Observation #14

And so concludes this comic series.

Advanced LMMS - Season Finale

Shut up. Plenty of shows have 15 episode seasons.