Rendezvous Delano

Gaming Indie Works
1

I decided to only partially do a copy-and-paste this time!

Oh, how hard I have been working on this, my friends! I started Monday (6/22/09, 12:53 PM) and stayed up late every night trying to finish…something. I have completed much, but I lack the resources to do some things–certain graphics, sound effects, and especially music (the current music)… Anyway, what we have here is a nice demo that’s just beginning to show how Metroidy a shoot-em-up can get. Power beam, missiles, wave beam, charge beam/missiles, energy tanks (currently not obtained, but they will be later), morph-ball ship, the ability to explore by choosing paths… There are some incomplete sprites in the current version, so don’t mind how the space pirate ships (which were done by Kenji Imatake) say “TAILL” where there should be a tail. Also, I’ve recently added an option in the pause “menu” (I’ll make all that stuff pretty later on) to check if there’s a newer version than the one you’re playing. Of course, it won’t update itself, but at least then you’ll know! And it’s really quick and painless!

Things currently included:
Flying saucers, asteroids, space pirate enemies
Morph ball ship item + ability (it’s a handy defensive maneuver)
Power beam, missile, wave beam, and seeker mine field weapons
Charge (beam/missile/mine) ability
Exploration (via Y junctions)
Weapon energy system
All sorts of things that nobody cares about but the programmer who’s doing it
HUD with health, weapon energy, and charge amount bars
Health and weapon refills

Some of the things planned but not implemented:
Upgrade containers
Bosses (such as Sylux, possibly Ridley)
Actual graphics for several things
Nebula
Varia shield (to protect from nebula and partially resist energy weapons)
Music that isn’t stolen
Multiple areas (with ability to revisit)
Map-thing (basically would just show which half of a junction has been visited)
Fancier animations (including for Samus’s ship exploding, getting hit, charging two out of four weapons, and weapon explosions)
More sound effects (charging, charged shots, weapons hitting)
Difficulty settings
Some neat little background effects (ie. bosses subtly flying by in the distance)

http://dpmm.110mb.com/temp/RendezvousDelano.zip

Screenshots:



2

there’s a giant gray cock in that picture xD

3

Aarrrrgh. I make two topics on different forums, get only one reply within the whole first weekend day, and it’s about a freakin’ flat two-color blob somehow resembling genitalia. I’m sure you thought it was a Rorschach test, but I want a real response to my Nintendo DS game that I have been working hard on constantly every day for a week. I am so ticked off. :angry:

4

It WOULD be nice if we could play it…

But it looks good.

5

There’s a download link up there. You just gotta get a Nintendo DS emulator to play it on. I use iDeaS.

6

That actually looks really good so far. The graphics will need work, but for what you’ve done so far… Incredible.
I’ll see what I can do for music.

Is there any format you need them in?
Any themes you want remade? (Kraid, Ridley, Magmoor Caverns etc…)

7

Thanks. I made all the graphics myself other than the asteroid and space pirates… >.> I thought I had to stay in the color limit with several things, such as the explosions, so that’s why some of them look crappy. (Well, I do have to stay in the color limit, but it’s 256 per palette, and I kept thinking 16 like GBA.)

Music has to be in MOD format. I couldn’t stand the GUIs of the MOD-making programs I found…

I was kinda hoping for several of the classic themes to be… not remixed, really, but a whole new song made out of 'em with some allusion to the originals.

Also, it’s video time! It took me possibly two hours to get VirtualDub to stop being crap for long enough to record this.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63OUeKeFs3M

8

MOD? Like chiptunes? Hm… I’ll see what I can do.
…and I though GBA was 32-bit…

9

MOD is basically MIDI that requires you to come up with your own samples.

GBA has a 32-bit CPU. Each palette is 16-color (in the usual mode), and I believe it can handle 32,678 simultaneous colors. DS coders tend to use up to sixteen 256-color palettes for sprites.

10

…the DS’s thing is better right?

11

I played this on my ds lite and so far, i’m impressed. I like the music, but it comes off as midi-ish and cheesy. You definitely need a spriter because i had a lot of trouble distinguishing beams from other objects and backgrounds. Also, when you gat that energy tank, i noticed that the large white ship overlaps the text and you can’t see anything. Good Job though!

12

Text doesn’t matter; it’s temporary. You’ll be able to distinguish beams from other things when I make them flash, I’m sure. The music in it isn’t mine and is also temporary. :stuck_out_tongue:

(Actually, I don’t know what you’re talking about with the beams. Most of the beams hurt less than actually running into the enemies, and the background is just stars. The only things that don’t bother you are outlined in a shimmering blue box, although my idea was to put them in a sort of metal block that you have to blow open first.)

Cougheditcough
Updated the boss and added explosions for all the weapons. I’m up to version 9! (I decided to use a 0-65535 version system instead of the common 0.0.0 system.) :stuck_out_tongue:



13

Whooaaah!!1

When I left on my trip one week ago, you had a spinning sprite on a scrolling space background, sound effects were still kind of broken, basic engine features were still being designed, and bugs were showing up in the memory management of sprites.

I get back and you have a whole level made with multiple paths and weapons and upgrades and a boss, and it is awesome.

Very impressive progress.

14

Ok… Mod music ain’t happening. The only software I have to make those with is MilkyTracker, and that’s confusing as hell.
Sorry bro, unless WAV, MP3, OGG, AIFF, or any similar filetype is ok, I’m worthless.

15

If you came up with sheet music (or a MIDI, or something like that) and audio samples I could probably handle converting it to MOD. Yeah, I’ve seen a few MOD making programs, and they all have cruddy interfaces. You gotta click on a certain part of a certain row, then it moves, then you have to double-click it, and then you have to select the note and an instrument each from a drop-down menu… That’s MODPlug Tracker’s GUI. I found one program with a piano roll editor, but it’s easily the worst piano roll editor I’ve ever seen…can’t tell the difference between long notes and rapid notes. :stuck_out_tongue:

On the topic of progress, I got a map system and a checkpoint system working, and then I set up an entire area’s worth of exploration, but I’m wanting to get enemies put into that area before I upload it.

16

Wow! This is awesome!

If there is any graphics you need, I’m only a PM away. Try to remember that.
And I don’t want any credits or anything, so that isn’t the reason why I want to help.
I just want to help with anything I can because I [u][b]love[/u][/b] SHMUP’s and yours is awesome!

17

Wow… I think that’s the most positive, most enthusiastic thing anyone has ever said about any of my programs (with the possible exception of little kids who forget about it five minutes later). Thank you so much. I needed that.

I can definitely use help with graphics. I’ve got two people working on two large things for me right now, and I just designed ~12 new enemies (although some are completely taken from past Metroid games) that are going to need graphics.

Bombu/Atomic, metaree, waver, Kago and its spawn, and a sentry drone are the ideas I’ve taken from other Metroid games. I’m sure you recognize most of those, but here’s a Super Metroid enemy sprite sheet from The Shyguy Kingdom for reference:
Super Metroid sprites - 6th one down is Metaree, 6 below that is the Kago with its spawn just to the right, two below the Kago is the Atomic, the Waver is the 5th down on the right half of the sheet, and as for the Sentry Drone… Here is an interlaced screen shot of the cloaked drone from Metroid Prime dying, and here’s the concept art.

Color conservation isn’t entirely necessary, but I like to keep my count fairly low, and sizes are limited to 16x16, 16x32, 32x16, 32x32, 32x64, 64x32, or 64x64 for enemies. :stuck_out_tongue: Transparent color is pure black, and animations must be vertically stored on the same sheet.

18

:smiley: Sweet!
You will get as few colors as possible from me.

Could you PM me some of the graphics you are using right now?

19

Several days’ worth of updates, including a few more enemies and a complete first area, have been finally uploaded. Pause the game and press X if you want to have all the weapons/abilities. (Some parts of the first area are meant to be played with certain ones.)

http://dpmm.110mb.com/temp/RendezvousDelano.zip

The leftmost path is the easiest, and it takes about five and a half minutes to complete. The game is set to the easiest difficulty level (I’ll put in a GUI for players to change that later) and I can beat it without dying, so it’s surely not hard, although several parts (especially in the rightmost path) may take two tries because you can’t see what’s coming until it’s too late. :slight_smile:

20

This game is now on my top three list of DS games.