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Jan 30, 2010 • 15:58 Profile Photo jzagal

Hi,

So I’m organizing and participating in a Game Jam event (more details here http://gamejam.cdm.depaul.edu) and I’ve decided to try my hand at making a VB game! I only have about 24 hrs left…but I plan on sharing my progress (and asking questions! here.

The basic idea for the game:

Channel Sweeper

The player controls a turret (reticle) at the bottom of a sea channel and must harpoon swimmers as the try to get across (from left to right or right to left). I plan on having a HUD with lives, score and whatnot. However I only want the HUD displayed on one eye. (it would be semi-translucent). The idea is to make the game trickier to play by forcing you to focus on the HUD (thus lose visual focus on the background). I’m not sure if this is technically possible or even if it will work…We’ll see. I’m not aiming for a stereo effect here, rather I want to take advantage of the two displays to make the player focus their eyes (rather than their attention) on the screen in different ways.

  • This topic was modified 14 years, 10 months ago by jzagal.
31 Replies
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Jan 30, 2010 • 18:18 Profile Photo HorvatM

The URL you posted appears to be invalid, at least to me.

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Jan 30, 2010 • 18:19 Profile Photo KR155E

That should be http://gamejam.cdm.depaul.edu/

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Jan 30, 2010 • 18:19 Profile Photo jzagal

(compiler trouble)

So I haven’t been able to compile gccvb. I followed all the instructions on the dev wiki but it crapped out at the end with a bunch of different errors. (this after 1 hr downloading and installing cygwin…sigh).

For now I’m able to compile with the older compiler (gccvb_06-20-05).

I also just noticed that the repository forum is gone!

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Jan 30, 2010 • 21:32 Profile Photo RunnerPack

I don’t think it’s a good idea to have an image only on one screen, but you can still get the desired effect of forcing the player to change his focus: just put the HUD much closer to the viewer than the action. When you focus on the HUD, the game will automatically go out of focus. Of course, you still might have a lot of complaints about headaches, but far fewer than if you tried your original idea.

Also, maybe if you post the first few errors you get we can help you get GCC compiled. I’ve done it more than once on cygwin (in fact, I plan to do it again really soon), and I don’t remember having a lot of trouble. Maybe you forgot to download one or more needed packages.

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Jan 30, 2010 • 22:12 Profile Photo jzagal

Now I’m having trouble with VIDE (sigh)

I’ve followed the instructions here:
http://www.atari2600land.com/vbdev/

But when I replace the INCLUDE.vpg it dies.
(to be more precise, when I replace it, I can no longer startup VIDE…)

I’m trying to create a map from this (attached)

Attachments:

  1. crosshairs.bmp

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Jan 30, 2010 • 22:17 Profile Photo jzagal

RunnerPack wrote:
I don’t think it’s a good idea to have an image only on one screen, but you can still get the desired effect of forcing the player to change his focus: just put the HUD much closer to the viewer than the action. When you focus on the HUD, the game will automatically go out of focus. Of course, you still might have a lot of complaints about headaches, but far fewer than if you tried your original idea.

I’ll try that too. Well, assuming I can get to actually compile something…sigh.

Also, maybe if you post the first few errors you get we can help you get GCC compiled. I’ve done it more than once on cygwin (in fact, I plan to do it again really soon), and I don’t remember having a lot of trouble. Maybe you forgot to download one or more needed packages.

I thought I got everything…but I’ll try to compile it again and send a screenshot.

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Jan 30, 2010 • 22:36 Profile Photo jzagal

Compile fail….

Attachments:

  1. screen_compile_fail.png

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Jan 30, 2010 • 22:42 Profile Photo DogP

I’ve never heard of that event… that sounds pretty cool. And I think you could get away with an image overlaid in one eye… kinda like a helmet mounted HUD.

But I think you’d want to keep the focus about the same (I believe most real HUDs are focused at infinity), and just overlay the necessary stuff, maybe in a darkish shade, or maybe keep everything else dark and have that be the only thing in the brightest shade.

I guess you could probably do something similar to Silent Scope (arcade) where one eye looks through a high power scope and the other eye looks at the overall screen, but not with enough precision to actually hit the target without using the scope. Note to self – that’s actually a really cool idea 😉 .

DogP

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Jan 30, 2010 • 22:57 Profile Photo DogP

I’m not sure about the problem you’re having… I’ve never seen that in the few times I’ve built it. You did make sure to install: make, gcc, flex, patch, tar, gzip, autoconfig, gperf, and bison with cygwin, right?

DogP

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Jan 30, 2010 • 23:16 Profile Photo jzagal

Yes. In fact, I think I pulled ALL the packages…just in case. For now (as in tonight), I’m just going to go with what’s been working for me… sigh.

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Jan 31, 2010 • 02:06 Profile Photo DogP

Ugh… well good luck! The old version isn’t too bad anyway, and if you’re making a game in a hurry, you’re not likely to use the extra stuff the new compiler has to offer anyway.

DogP

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Jan 31, 2010 • 03:53 Profile Photo jzagal

I couldn’t get the graphics to work at all (VIDE trouble…sigh) so I’ve gone with an all text solution!

There isn’t much of a game there yet…but hey…I’ve only been going for a few hours… and I haven’t done any C coding in 15 years or so…eek!

Attachments:
  1. channelsweeper.vb
  2. asciimap.h
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Jan 31, 2010 • 04:29 Profile Photo DogP

I dunno if this helps any, but here’s a zip of my working VIDE directory.

DogP

Attachments:
  1. vide-1.zip
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Jan 31, 2010 • 15:48 Profile Photo jzagal

I’ll try that out!

For now I went the “text only” route….

Here’s my current build

Attachments:
  1. channelsweeper-1.vb
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Feb 01, 2010 • 16:17 Profile Photo jzagal

Here’s the “final” game I submitted. Definitely room for improvement! But hey…I only had a few hours.. 🙂

How can I submit it to the website homebrews?

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Feb 01, 2010 • 17:10 Profile Photo KR155E

Well done for such an extremely short time frame! 🙂 I am sure we’ll see very nice stuff from you in the future.

Currently the common ways to submit stuff are either posting it on the forum or using the submission form.

I’ll add your game right now.

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Feb 01, 2010 • 17:15 Profile Photo jzagal

Awesome, thanks!

Yes, there are a few things that I want to add to the game and I’m curious about. In no particular order:

(a) Add sounds (associated to different “events”)
(b) Add more “levels” (with different shapes/sizes as well as enemy types)

(c) Add some stereo effects. I wanted to have the text messages in the “back” with the level in the foreground, but I wasn’t able to figure that out in time. (is it possible? with the ascii font?)

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Feb 01, 2010 • 17:21 Profile Photo e5frog

I tried it in Reality Boy and when it said “press anything” I tried squeezing my wife but nothing happened…

😀

… first thought was if you fade out the intro screen you should fade in the next screen. It also looks like the old text appears again before the new screen is displayed – vould be an emulation bug I don’t know but otherwise a screen clear command could be issued after the fade-out. So fade out, erase, draw new screen and then fade new screen in…

When I crash with the $-signs the game ends, when I crash with the “E” the E disappears, wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

Great work by the way, I couldn’t have done it in that amount of time!

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Feb 01, 2010 • 17:25 Profile Photo jzagal

… first thought was if you fade out the intro screen you should fade in the next screen. It also looks like the old text appears again before the new screen is displayed – vould be an emulation bug I don’t know but otherwise a screen clear command could be issued after the fade-out. So fade out, erase, draw new screen and then fade new screen in…

Hmmm..I’ll have to look at that. I don’t recall at the moment if you can notice that on the hardware.

When I crash with the $-signs the game ends, when I crash with the “E” the E disappears, wasn’t it supposed to be the other way around?

Great work by the way, I couldn’t have done it in that amount of time!

<>

1. You need to be in “grab mode” to hit collect a “$”. (press A or B and then run over the $.
2. “E” stands for enemy. 🙂

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Feb 01, 2010 • 19:18 Profile Photo HorvatM

Hey, that’s a pretty nice game! Good work. Will you add more levels, possibly larger ones with more enemies?

On a side note, is there a way to print text to only one screen? That way you could make 3D-looking sprites with text characters. (I’m asking because I want to make something text-based, with 3D effects)

 

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