PMS

[bigsofty]

Here is my new game, PMS. It's a 3D all vector tube shooter, very old school in design.

I've added quick video of the first couple of levels. Only two baddies on the first levels but I think they are better for demoing it as its a bit less chaotic.

95% pure GLbasic + 5% inline C code for some GL work. Also, "P.M.S" is the alpha name, "X.T.C" will be the final name.

Important! Don't play the video from the Dropbox website, go to the top right and direct download it to your computer before you play it or it will be visually a mess.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/1v0f9oj3nmtw3fx/pms.mp4?dl=0

About the video: For some reason Dropbox adds an extra level of compression when streaming, its already very compressed as I wanted to keep the video 1080p & 60hz, so it's a bit washed out a compressed to begin with. Drop box kills the res and frame-rate, no idea why. But my upload speed if 44k, so this took 2 days to upload! I'm a total noob with dealing with video recording and uploading. Oh and I'm sorry for the overlong pause at the main menu, that's me fumbling for the video overlay. Also, you may have to full-screen it as it's 1080p.


Oh, an you may notice the saturation go up an down a bit, I've rigged a filter to emulate old CRTs that is activated when I press back on my joypad hat for testing, kinda forgot that while recording and hit it by mistake a couple of times.

I'll add a progress report from time to time on this thread. Comments welcome.

Thank you for your time.


...OH, since the loading screen was cut off at the beginning...

[r0ber7]

Wow... that's intense stuff. 

I actually really liked the menu screen with the warp / rotation effect.  Kind of reminds me of AudioSurf.

[dreamerman]

Simple awesome. Just put it on Steam and count $$.
I always liked such glowing/blur effect like in Tron movies, and here it fits into game perfectly, and looks great.
Menu transitions are really nice, all that level creating stuff - like enemies pop-in from the ground gives that feeling that game is really polished.

Since final title will be different, is that loading/title screen style final? Only that does not fit as for me.

[MrPlow]

Wow! Arcade fans and Tempest fans will lap this up!
 
I think this will do well!

[bigsofty]

Thanks guys, your opinions are important to me.

The game is about 80% complete. It needs a high score table, options screen, bonus levels and bonus pickups. Couple of tweaks here and there. But the actual game engine is in place and the hard bits have been done.

Currently I’m doing more and more polishing which is always more fun than the usual engine dog work. For example the camera needs some smoothing too as it’s following the character too closely and gets janky on some of the non-convex levels.

The hardest parts have been the wraparound level design and the fact that everything on screen is alpha blended. This was a restriction of the original XY vector monitors, Tempest, Asteroids etc. It’s been real learning experience TBH as far as game design is concerned.

@Dreamerman: Nothing is definite, I quite like the guy burning up but I am not sure about the rest of it either.

[mentalthink]

Graphically is really Nice... I liked a lot...

[bigsofty]

Thanks buddy! 

[Jayenkai]

Not a bad looking game.  A little slow, perhaps, but I imagine (/hope) the speed will ramp up as it gets harder.

Motion Sickness Rating : 8/10 - Fairly queasy after just a few seconds.  (Don't think of this as a bad thing.. I have terrible motion sickness!!)

[bigsofty]

Thanks Jay! Actually I’m redoing the camera movement as we speak(I’ve noticed this too), it will follow the player using an easing equation to smooth things out a bit. Rather than what it’s doing just now which is just a linear division of the players coordinates, which can be quite janky certain levels.

Keep them news letters coming BTW!

[Jayenkai]

a=a-((a-b)/c)

Might be helpful to smooth things out a bit.
eg,
CameraX=CameraX-((CameraX-CameraXTarget)/8)   (tweak divider to make faster/slower)
CameraY=CameraY-((CameraY-CameraYTarget)/8)

Also
ScoreDisplay=ScoreDisplay-((ScoreDisplay-TrueScore)/4) ; if Abs(ScoreDisplay-TrueScore)<4 then ScoreDisplay=TrueScore; Print ScoreDisplay
gives more of a "ticking" score display.

You can probably find a bucketload of other uses for the incredibly simple bit of maths.

[bigsofty]

Thanks for the tips Jay, that’s an interesting take on camera movement(the scoring mechanism is something I’ve not seen before either). I’ll give it a go as I’m intrigued to see how this animates the display. I’ll probably add some sort of distance calculation to only move the camera when it’s a certain distance from the player as well. This should contribute to smoothing things out too.

[Slydog]

Wow, looks amazing!!  Looking forward to the full release.

Ha, PMS?  Does that stand for "Perpetual Motion Squad"?  Big Bang Theory reference.

[bigsofty]

Thanks Sly! Ha, no real reason for PMS, although currently it could start for Perpetual Motion Sickness! 

[erico]

Very impressive!
I loved everything, reminds me of a KentaCho shmup (Torus Trooper), the only bit that got me a little confused was the instant ship flip.
 

[bigsofty]

Very impressive!
I loved everything, reminds me of a KentaCho shmup (Torus Trooper), the only bit that got me a little confused was the instant ship flip.

Thanks Erico, much appreciated! I’ll need to look up KentaCho.

I know what you mean, originally I had a nice handbrake spinning turn with the camera rotating around the player but I found that you could get killed in the time this animation took place. To make things worse I didn’t want to allow the player to shoot while spinning, as it was against the gameplay design, so you were not able to defend yourself while this was happening. So I just used a flip instead. I may add some sort of visual indication to make it more clear that you have done a 180 flip.