Slick Forums

This is a clone of the popular flash game Copter, but of course a lot more slick.



Play: http://www.terabytelabs.net/projects/sh ... yscod.jnlp

The game still has many improvements and additions to come so stay tuned. Comments and suggestions are welcome.

The url above should now work for those of you on linux. If not let me know!

Nice game.
The distribution of coins is too random in my opinion. Sometimes there are many and then not a single one for a while. Maybe add some behavior to guarantee a minimum number of coins on screen.

I wonder how you did the cave walls? Would you mind to explain how that works (code wise)? It definitely looks good.

Are there more obstacles except the tunnel walls and the mines?

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Right Angle Games | Marte Engine
Back to the past | Star Cleaner | SpiderTrap

Hi Tommy, thanks.

Yes I agree the coin distribution is much too random. That's one of the things I was going to fix next.

The cave walls are done without using Slick. I considered using a polygon object but it would have been pretty inefficient as the polygon is constantly changing. I'd either have to create a new type of polygon that allowed you to add and remove points or I would have to create a new polygon every render. In the end I went with the much simpler approach of using raw lwjgl. That is I used a triangle strip and texture coordinates which seems to be a little bit smoother than constantly creating a polygon.

Currently the only things you have to avoid are mines and the walls, but this is called the Cave of Death so expect more obstacles to come!

Ok lots of changes since the initial release.

Shyguy's now 130% bigger. This makes it slightly nicer to control I think and easier to colled the coins (though harder to avoid the mines :p).

Particle effects have been much improved including the blood and explosion effects. I've added some effects for when the coins are collocted and also the trail of smoke from Shyguy though I don't know if I'll keep them or not.

The cave walls now look pretty. I figured out how to apply textures larger than 16x16px across the walls.

The distribution of the coins and mines is now seemingly less random. This makes it possible to collect maybe 70-80% of the coins now.

The speed of the movement has been slowed a bit to make it slightly easier.

The acceleration values have been tweaked slightly to make them easier to control.

The music has changed. This will probably change slightly in the future.

To do:
High score system
More obstacles
Options to adjust speed
Controls to pause the game and mute the music

Yes, resizing Shyguy surely helped.
The distribution of coins is much better now and the splatter effects are finally visible and bloody

The new soundtrack is also fine though I also liked the first one.

Only minor criticism is the collision area of Shyguy: it's too big!
Make it a bit smaller than Shyguy itself, around 80% (seems to be pretty common).

And the tunnel/cave itself: the amount of getting narrower or wider - is that totally random?
It should get narrower the further you progress into the caves. And maybe add an exit to the tunnel to show some scoring - and then continue with the next tunnel with more enemies, more speed, less coins, other obstacles. You'll get the point

Ooh, and one issue about the smoke trail: Add some fire as long as you press the button to give the illusion of firing the jet engine...

It's getting along nicely - I needed to rip my son from the first version and hope he doesn't see me playing the future versions

Cheers,
Tommy

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Right Angle Games | Marte Engine
Back to the past | Star Cleaner | SpiderTrap

Hehe, thanks for the feedback Tommy.

I think I see what you mean about the scoring. At the moment the cave pattern is pretty much random as you probably can tell after playing it a few times. Basically, the minimum width of the cave decreases as you progress. When you get to a distance of around 1400 you'll notice how tight some of the passages get. Also the maximum width of the cave decreases but not quite as quickly as the minimum width. That's why even when there are some really tight passages they will usually open up into some nice big caves where you can relax a bit. As you keep going past say a distance of 2000 the cave will be pretty unforgiving and you probably won't last long. It's not possible to win in this game. The idea is that you die. After all, it is called the Cave of Death :p

Apart from a few extra obstacles I don't think I'll change the game play too much.

I don't think I'll change the collision area either. You are probably just not used to it from the last version. I find it works pretty well at the moment except perhaps when passing mines. But most of the time it seems to collide realistically. Just stay away from the mines!

More updates.

I've got some new particle effects in.
There is now a level system. Now instead of getting gradually more difficult, the levels are reached after going a certain distance. The higher the level, the faster you'll go and the tighter the caves will get.
And finally a highscore system! You can finally show us your best scores!

Great!

But I think you've got a bug in your scoring system. When the game is over the score is reset to the rounded thousand of the score (that's what it looks like).
So if I die with a score of 2345, the next game starts with an initial score of 2000. So I can manage a new score of 3456 and restart the next game with a starting score of 3000...
So it seems to be pretty easy to constantly improve the score without really progressing in the game

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Right Angle Games | Marte Engine
Back to the past | Star Cleaner | SpiderTrap

Thanks for that Tommy! It looks like some people have already accidentally taken advantage of this bug. Might have to reset everyone's scores

what's with these bots on the forum.

it just closes when i try to run it..

I know. There's some problems with new versions of slick that I haven't managed to iron out yet. I'll get them fixed sooner or later.