Rainbow power!!

Just wanted to make a quick post--I have been working on Extinctathon, albeit intermittantly. I've just implemented a new power up, the rainbow (invincibility), and I'm working on the animation for the next power up, high fructose corn syrup. Yum!

I've also started the artwork for some underwater and desert levels. I've got the basic plans for adding some particle effects as well, so I'll be working on that this week and next. My main thing for the moment, though, is content creation.

I've got a super short video of the rainbow powers uploaded, so here it is:
Extinctathon - Rainbow Powers!! (720p, 8.4mb download)

DBP is over!

I've stayed away from Extinctathon for the past week or so, taking a break after finishing my Dream-Build-Play submission. I'm getting back to it this week. I'll post a little more later, but for now here's the XBox 360 ccgame (if you can play this, you know what it is). I'll be making a distributable Windows version of the game some time in the future, most likely when it's at least somewhere close to complete (running XNA games on computers without the XNA dev tools installed is kind of tricky--I don't want to go to the hassle at this point).

I've posted a video of a run of the full game, as it stands at this point. It's about three minutes long and shows off the first four levels including a suuuuper scaaary dungeon level with a suuuper sccaaaaararararyyy boss at the end. Check it out! Feedback would be GREATLY appreciated.

Downloads
Extinctathon! DBP build - XBox 360 ccgame
Extinctathon! DBP submission video runthrough (720p 53.3mb download)

Finishing touches (omg j/k lulz)

Okay, so I've spent VERY little time on Extinctathon of late. This, with two weeks left (from today) before the deadline. Ugh.

Here's what I'm going to do before then:

• Eliminate garbage created by ToString() (called several times per call to draw) by storing strings and updating only when necessary.
• Save the background color (or image, maybe) to be used in the binary level files (because one can only take so much Cornflower Blue). Update: DONE!
  
• I really need to finish three more levels. This has been such a difficulty simply because of the lack of building blocks I have at this time. I've made some additions, but it's not nearly enough to make a fully fleshed out game (I'd ideally like to have 80-100 more blocks, 6-8 more powerups, and maybe 10 more enemies before calling it "done"). A large problem with this is very deeply embedded in the stupid way I designed the Sprite class (yes, that's ONE sprite class, used for 30+ types of sprites) that needs a complete overhaul that will absolutely not be done in any small amount of time. I'm just gonna work through with what I've got for now, and restructuring the sprite types to inherit from a base Sprite class (rather than all being instances of the same class differentiated by a SpriteType enum) will have to come further down the line.
• I need to create the boss character for level 1-D. I already know what it is, and aside from creating the artwork it shouldn't be a problem.
• I need to reload and restart the current level upon death. This will be a trivial change. Update: DONE!
  
• I need to make a Game Over screen for when the player's lives are less than zero. Shouldn't be a big problem. Update: DONE!
  
• I need to make a non-debug mode (all I have are DEBUG and EDIT) for DBP. Don't want to see all the diagnostics 'n' shit on the actual submission. Update: causes a weird bug that makes everything but the player invisible. WTF? I tried to fix it for a good 30 minutes last night but have yet to find the problem. Double update: DONE!
  
• Along those lines, I need to disable entering the level editor for the same reason. Update: works, but of course it's dependent on fixing the above mentioned bug. Double secret update: DONE!
  
• I need to move inactive (i.e. dead) sprites out of the current level's sprite list if performance on the XBOX 360 necessitates it.
• I need to fix, once and for all, the intermittent bugs caused by the sound loading and reloading. Update: DONE!
  
• I need to fix the jumping bug that allows the player to jump after falling off of a ledge. Update: DONE!
  
• I need to make the loading screen show the name of the level (and maybe an image preview?) being loaded. Update: Level name is shown, will add picture preview later.
  

And that's all I've got. These things WILL be done by September 21st. I'll be prepping the rest of the submission package on the 22nd, and turning it in no later than 5:00 P.M. on the 23rd. I'd better get my ass in gear.

New music!

There's not much new to this Extinctathon video, really, except the awesome new music done by Asheville, NC's Eugene Ward just for this game. The video's kinda long, but I wanted to get a good couple of minutes of the song in before it ended. Check it out!

You can download the song from his myspace page, by the way, but he changes things pretty regularly so you might want to hurry (if you like it).

Video:
Extinctathon - Music! (720p 34.8mb download)

Extinctathon: Polish?

I spent some time this morning fixing or improving tiny bugs, and trying to get the background music to play throughout the game (rather than being started and restarted at the beginning of every level). That caused some problems, so I'll need to come back to it later. I'm gonna have a lot of time to work on Extinctathon starting tomorrow (several hours per day), so I'd like to get the following things done this week:

• Get the music to play in the way that I want.
• Create at least five new background sprites to make the levels more visually appealing.
• Create at least five new block and enemy types which are necessary to make this more than a one level game.
  
• Make three more levels which will create one more or less cohesive World 1.
• Try adding some particle effects (pixel-y particle effects, of course) to make things more interesting.

The next month is all about content development, as I want to have something that isn't RIDICULOUSLY simple to have to turn in for Dream-Build-Play. Yeah, I know I'm not winning any prizes--that's a given--but it's really important to me to have something half decent to submit.

No video today, but I'll have something to post on Wednesday night (hopefully).

Level transitioning: GREAT SUCCESS!

Hurray! After putting in a fair amount of work yesterday and today, I've gotten the level transitioning to work. Now--shock and awe--when you get to the end of one level, you can move on to the next! WTF!! The future is here!!! (The next level here is exactly the same except with gray bricks instead of red ones, but it is an actual separate file.)

The only thing I really need to do is make the transition prettier (since now all it does is just stop and immediately load the next level). I'll need to flesh this out a little more over the next couple of days, but I'm pretty happy with what I've got going on right now.

I'm gonna spend the bulk of my time in the following week designing some new levels and some new blocks and enemies. I'd like to get a solid four levels together just to mess around with and show off to people. That'd be nice.

On an unrelated note, I finished Braid today and it was absolutely perfect. If you haven't bought it yet, buy it NOW. It'll be the best gaming purchase you could possibly make.

Video:
ExtinctaLevels (720p, 14.4mb download)

Incremental updates ahoy!

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Okay, so I've been really really busy in the real world in the past several weeks. Unfortunately, I've had little time to work on Extinctathon. I have done some stuff in the past week, though, so here's what I'm working on:

• The levels now have barriers that keep the walking enemies (i.e. everything but the bees at this point in time) bound to a particular region, primarily keeping them from walking off the edges and commiting enemy suicide. These are inserted manually in the level editor, an idea that seemed retarded (in that there must be a smarter way of doing it) until I saw a similar mechanism in a commercial 2D level editor.
• The barriers, along with the previously mentioned checkpoints (see previous post) now turn invisible outside of the level editor. I'm listing this as an additional feature to make it look like I did more work this week so I can feel better about myself.
  
• The major bounding box issues have been fixed, but a smaller problem still remains. Projectiles, as you may recall, are reformed from existing projectile objects which avoids using new (since the XBox 360 is racist against news). The problem was that the bounding box was being semi-manually set after the creation of the object in a spectacularly stupid way, so when the bounding box for the object changed (like when a fireball turns into a bible, which is bigger), it wasn't getting updated in the code. At first I tried to work around this by referencing the data from the sprite sheet, which does have the bounding box information for every sprite in the game, but that was REALLY slow. At the moment, it's copying the box from the sprite sheet at object creation/reformation time, which is doable (since the sprite sheet should never be changed, this should be okay).
• And, finally, aside from the necessary addition of an end, which I'll get back to in the next section of this post, I'm done with the basic construction of the first level of the game. I'm happy with it, and I'm sure I'll tweak it, but I want to have something roughly set in stone so I can look beyond it on to other things.

What's next? A lot.

• The biggest thing--and I mentioned this in my last post as well--is level transitioning. When the player crosses the final checkpoint of the level, a little animation needs to happen, perhaps a summary or a ghetto cutscene, and then we need to move on to the next level. This is going to be tricky, and I am going to have it done by this time next week. It will be done. Seriously. I have to do it. So that's what I'll do.
• I need a couple of tweaks to the powerup system, including the ability to set what type of powerups come out of the box inside the level editor. At the moment I'm just procedurally saying "the box has been hit, pop out a fireball!". Along these lines I need to make the brick blocks breakable and give them similar behaviors to the questionmark blocks.
• A whole bunch more, which I'll maybe get in to in a bit.

As always (at least usually), here's the video:
Extinctathon: Barriers, checkpoints, and bug fixes (720p 10.1mb download, recommended)
The same video (YouTube)