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AppGameKit/AppGameKit Studio Showcase / ALIEN KING [Windows]

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Conjured Entertainment
AGK Developer
18
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Joined: 12th Sep 2005
Location: Nirvana
Posted: 19th Jan 2018 14:02
This is my contest entry for the November 2017 - Jan 2018 syntaxbomb.com Retro Code Contest.

You can find the ZIP file at the.syntaxbomb.com Showcase Forum

I only began coding this right before Christmas, so I did not have a lot of time put into it.

All of the game assets ... graphics, sounds, music (if you want to call it that) were done in code, so the only thing in the media folder is the bytecode.

I wanted to do that to be be true to the retro theme, but it ate up a lot of my time trying to draw everything, including the animations.

Apologies now if I did not represent AppGameKit the best it could have been, but I tried, so if you don't like it then blame yourself for not entering the contest as well.

Thanks for looking, and I hope you guys like it.


Coding things my way since 1981 -- Currently using AppGameKit V2 Tier 1

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GarBenjamin
AGK Developer
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Posted: 19th Jan 2018 16:23
Looking forward to checking this out tonight. I really like how it looks... looks interesting!
TI/994a (BASIC) -> C64 (BASIC/PASCAL/ASM/Others) -> Amiga (AMOS/BLITZ/ASM/C/Gamesmith) -> DOS (C/C++/Allegro) -> Windows (C++/C#/Monkey X/GL Basic/Unity/Others)
blink0k
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Location: the land of oz
Posted: 20th Jan 2018 22:25
Love the retro look!
GarBenjamin
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Posted: 21st Jan 2018 21:11
Good job on it and great job considering all graphics and sounds are generated by your code!!

I do wish there was a way to make it full-screen or even just scale the window up 5x to 6x. I'm used to playing ultra low res games scaled up all chunky like the games of past. Mainly this would let folks be able to better appreciate the game I think.

Anyway nice accomplishment!
TI/994a (BASIC) -> C64 (BASIC/PASCAL/ASM/Others) -> Amiga (AMOS/BLITZ/ASM/C/Gamesmith) -> DOS (C/C++/Allegro) -> Windows (C++/C#/Monkey X/GL Basic/Unity/Others)
Supertino
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Location: Behind you!
Posted: 22nd Jan 2018 12:31
Worth a play just to see the 'code' produced graphics and sound. will give it a go tonight after startrek.
Conjured Entertainment
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Location: Nirvana
Posted: 22nd Jan 2018 17:23
Thanks for the kind words guys.

I am still waiting for someone (anyone) to post a screen shot of the victory scene at the end of the game.

I thought one of the players at syntaxbomb would have made it to the end, but it seems no one has done it yet.

Coding things my way since 1981 -- Currently using AppGameKit V2 Tier 1
Supertino
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Supertino
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Posted: 25th Jan 2018 11:14
I tired it but on my 1440p screen it was too small to really see what was going on in a 320x240 window
GarBenjamin
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Posted: 25th Jan 2018 15:56
@Supertino LOL same here. I even lowered desktop resolution which helps some but man that window is tiny. If it was scaled up 5 to 8 times all blocky it would make a huge difference.
TI/994a (BASIC) -> C64 (BASIC/PASCAL/ASM/Others) -> Amiga (AMOS/BLITZ/ASM/C/Gamesmith) -> DOS (C/C++/Allegro) -> Windows (C++/C#/Monkey X/GL Basic/Unity/Others)
Cliff Mellangard 3DEGS
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Posted: 26th Jan 2018 12:04
GarBenjamin
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Posted: 27th Jan 2018 00:28
I gave it another go. Reduced my resolution from normal 1600x900 down to 1280x720 and that seemed as good as when I tried 1024x768.

Anyway, the best for me is about 52,000 points on the space shmup stage. Have not made it past that one yet. Took a long time to get past the first level controlling the tank on the ground. Was a nice surprise to see the bonus game between the stages!
Hadn't seen that before now because never got past that first stage til now.

Odd controls but the game seems quite solid. Interesting stuff.
TI/994a (BASIC) -> C64 (BASIC/PASCAL/ASM/Others) -> Amiga (AMOS/BLITZ/ASM/C/Gamesmith) -> DOS (C/C++/Allegro) -> Windows (C++/C#/Monkey X/GL Basic/Unity/Others)
Conjured Entertainment
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Location: Nirvana
Posted: 27th Jan 2018 01:27 Edited at: 27th Jan 2018 01:47
Thanks guys,

The competition required a 320 x 200 'virtual' resolution, lol, so I left it at that size. (careful what you wish for)

I may go back and make it larger, but I will have to add a lot to the draw functions, and they were very tedious and time consuming, so... [procrastinate=on]

The competition was fun, and I am looking forward to the next one. (I will make the next entry big enough to actually see)

Quote: "Was a nice surprise to see the bonus game between the stages!
Hadn't seen that before now because never got past that first stage til now."

lol

One guy at their forum just didn't get the point of the game because the aliens didn't shoot him so he could not die and nothing else happened.

That means he never encountered the forward progression timer (which will kill your tank), and he never finished the first level (which is a long one).

Oh well, I guess not everyone has the patience or determination to beat the game like us old school gamers who don't stop until Victory! (OCD maximus)

As you already know, you can definitely get killed in level 2 !

You should get a kick out of the third level once you get there. (I will give you a spoiler for the boss - there are rocks in the stalagmites at the bottom of the screen)

I admit that I did not put a lot of thought or planning in to this because I got started late in the competition, so I pretty much got ideas as I was drawing each thing in code.

Then it was a matter of coding those ideas to work and drawing more stuff for the ideas too.

Hard to believe this had over 7,000 lines of code, but a lot of that was white space and comments for formatting the code for easy reading.

Most of the code was drawing functions for everything you see, including each frame of animation for all the ships, player items, etc.

The function for the 17 sounds generated was big too, even though some sounds were not used very much.

If they code a game with no external assets, then they might like this one more.

Quote: "I tired it but on my 1440p screen it was too small to really see what was going on in a 320x240 window "

Yeah, my vision is noticeably worse now after making this game.

Coding things my way since 1981 -- Currently using AppGameKit V2 Tier 1
GarBenjamin
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Posted: 27th Jan 2018 04:07 Edited at: 27th Jan 2018 04:18
Making the window larger is easy. All of my games are ultra low res with tiny actual "screens" (and probably always will) but I scale them up using SetViewZoom.

That is all that is needed. Say everything is coded for a 256x144 display and I want the actual game window to be 1280 x 720 for players I just do this...

This is one thing I really like about AGK. It makes it so easy.

In practice, I wrote a custom InitDisplay function that I call to handle this stuff.

Then I just pass in width and height in multiples of 256x144 for the actual display size. Normally 1280x720. Sometimes 1024x576.

Anyway if you get bored try that SetViewZoom. Damn handy it is.
TI/994a (BASIC) -> C64 (BASIC/PASCAL/ASM/Others) -> Amiga (AMOS/BLITZ/ASM/C/Gamesmith) -> DOS (C/C++/Allegro) -> Windows (C++/C#/Monkey X/GL Basic/Unity/Others)
Conjured Entertainment
AGK Developer
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Location: Nirvana
Posted: 27th Jan 2018 14:58 Edited at: 27th Jan 2018 15:04
The problem came when drawing lines.

If I had 320 vertical lines being drawn to create the grass, then changing the size created gaps between lines because the lines are still only 1 pixel wide.

So, my 320 lines are still being drawn, but do not fill the screen (leaving a gap between each line) as it is now 640 wide (2x size).

I was not aware of SetViewZoom() though, so maybe that will resolve that issue.

Thanks



EDIT

Still no go.

Drawn lines are 1 pixel wide regardless of screen settings, so scenes created with drawn lines are fixed to the size you use when creating them.

Any commands to zoom or change the resolution will work, but drawn lines will still be 1 pixel wide and give gaps.

I need to add in more lines being drawn is the solution, because drawing boxes or ellipses works fine when changing the screen size.

Coding things my way since 1981 -- Currently using AppGameKit V2 Tier 1
GarBenjamin
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Posted: 27th Jan 2018 17:28 Edited at: 29th Jan 2018 21:52
Ah I see. You are right. Those drawing commands are not scaled I guess.

If you used a single render image and 1 sprite to display that image then SetViewZoom should work. I think?

EDIT... UPDATE

I just did some experimenting and found a very odd thing...

if I add these two lines right before I draw lines...


And then just the normal Sync() at some point after... the lines are scaled up by SetViewZoom. Without using a renderimage at all.

I have no clue how it is working though. What those statements do is set the virtual resolution back to the "real" size of the screen and along with that of course set the zoom to 1. But what I don't understand is how everything still ends up scaled up 5x on the actual window.

It's like it is somehow using the original SetVirtualResolution(1280, 720) and the original SetViewZoom(height/144) (which is 5) when actually updating the screen despite the fact I just changed both of those to handle the line drawing.


Anyway I get you may not want to mess around with it but wanted to share what I found in my testing.
TI/994a (BASIC) -> C64 (BASIC/PASCAL/ASM/Others) -> Amiga (AMOS/BLITZ/ASM/C/Gamesmith) -> DOS (C/C++/Allegro) -> Windows (C++/C#/Monkey X/GL Basic/Unity/Others)

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