Helibrawl

Massive update, massive radio silence

So yeah, I’m not the most frequent writer. But on the other hand, I’ve been working a lot on the game and I’m happy on how it’s shaping up!

I had the game shown in a nightclub thematic night and was pretty fun with the of help of my friend Tembac of Chimango Games. Gathered lot’s of feedback and even could record a new 4 player gameplay video!

Lot’s have changed since my last update: I’ve started using Scout to profile memory and code speed with great benefit, tweaked memory leaks and bottlenecks and now runs smoothly even in my shit-end PC. Tweaked/changed/added some gameplay and mechanics and feedback to improve comfort and readability. The guys have bigger weapons, to know which one you currently hold, and bigger heads to compensate, making it look kinda chibi, and so on, and so on.

Also added the ever awesomely simple sinuous underwater effect:

You can (probably wont, I wouldn’t) check the detailed changelog since my last update:

Improved aiming, gameplay, In-game UI, match modes, etc.

Hi, welcome again to an Helibrawl update tuesday!
Thanks to some feedback I’ve been making a lot of gameplay improvements! Special thanks to Bennett for providing valuable input.

Remade the in-game UI

Making the score always visible (although a bit translucent) but events like dying, fragging or pickups still tween in and out fully opaque. And the one that leads has a yellow border.
Beefed up the power-up graphics. Changed syringes for medkits because they looked like a “heart in jar” apparently, hehe. And some tiny aesthetic fixes here and there.

Game modes

Worked back in the last-man-standing mode, but without a level reset each time which was awful. You get points if the rest are dead and then they re-spawn.  It goes until the level ends, a time limit or a score limit (eventually).
For 2P would be almost the same as deathmatch, but in deathmatch you get a point per kill, instantly. In LMS you get one if you survive until the rest respawn. There’s also a Quick-LMS that ends the match after just one round.

Worked a lot of improvements in aiming

You can fine-aim with analog sticks, aim from inside the helicopter, it has an arrow graphic overlay for better feedback on the direction, better controls, etc. It still needs testing and tweaking but it’s getting there.

Miscellaneous

Now characters collide with manned helicopters, get body damage besides beheading, and it’s harder to hijack as it’s only possible if actually touching heli from below (it was very easy, even from the top which made no sense!). Also they’re slower than helicopters, to see how that spans out. Before, with a static locked camera and invisible constraints, it wasn’t an issue but now a player could fly to the top to force others inside helicopters to drop off-screen making choppers virtually useless.

That’s all for now, thanks for reading!

BIG FUCKING UPDATE!

And I mean big

Sorry guys for the lack of updates on tuesdays, I was eager to show some stuff but the builds were always broken and I got a bit sad because I tested the game at it was awkward and hard to maneuver, so I had to do a lot of changes. Prepare for a lot of gifs! Including:

New weapons: Uzi and grenades

You can now actually see visible bullets, it’s better feedback on the general direction you’re shooting.
Greandes explode with a blast radius affecting helicopters and players.
A sword is coming soon too (infinite thrusts, or you can throw it), between several other weapons.

Shooting from inside the helicopter

Seemed stupid not to allow it.

“Elastic” camera

No more hard-coded limits for the choppers, you can move around to some extent. But beware! If you fall off the bottom you’ll die.

New color scheme

Both characters and helicopters coloring has been updated to match them better and avoid confusion.
Now, everytime you enter a helicopter you change it’s color to yours.

And a SEO static image

Because gifs are never friendly with social network previews

Some other miscellaneous improvements:

• Changed to deathmatch by default (respawning until level ends). Every level reset was a ball buster on last man standing mode.
• Used an ANE (Air extension) for joystick handling because I spent like a month dealing with Adobe’s GameInput API bullshit and it’s (lack of) tech support, a funny story for another time. I can’t understand how something so easy could become this shitstorm from the depths of hell. They only needed to see how SDL2 does it!
• Aiming has been locked to 45° angles and keeps the angle while attacking, even if you change directions. I’ve have to experiment some more until I get make it super comfortable.
• Had to disable the big guys mano-a-mano for now because it was utterly confusing. I think I’ll leave it for sudden death scenarios. Somehow it’s getting in the game.

As always, thanks for reading!

COCAINUM! The Mercasaurus monster hates to be disturbed by nukes

WELCOME TO UPDATE TUESDAY THIS TIME I HAVE SOME COOL UPDATES FOR YOU GUYS

The monster

Besides fighting each other, now the game will have NPC monsters like the Mercasaurus, a sleepy head which hates to be disturbed by a nuclear alarm clock.

Here’s a screenshot of him in action, clawing a dude to smithereens (in-game):

UPDATE: Now in GIF animation form!

Here’s a mockup of some of the ways he’s going to act:

Alert bubbles

In order to avoid unpredictable chaos, I’ve also implemented some alert bubbles to know beforehand if danger is coming. Also for power ups, to either get them for yourself or to dominate that location to stop the others getting it!

Hellbent city background animation

Welcome to another Update Tuesday! It’s Saturday you say? Hahaha, nonsense.

It’s been a couple of weeks I haven’t updated anything but I made a big change! Now the background is in the shittiest 3D even conceivable. As realistic as a hippie checking references. So unappealing that it will make your testes retract into your skull. Et cetera, et cetera.

Here’s a gif but you can see it better in it’s own online version of the sneak peek background

It will spin around as your helicopters move around and now you have a timelimit until all players fall to the water together and die (tie). I intend to implement a sudden death underwater but it’s not yet done. But in the meantime, as many people pointed out, before it didn’t feel like you were falling or sky diving. Now some particles go up and the background shifts to simulate that.

It took me forever to figure out that the 3×2 Matrix for image transformation can only make affine transformations (i.e. can rotate, skew, scale but not warp for, e.g., making perspective trapezoids). So I ended up using Flash’s native 3D transformations and that’s that.

Cryo-Skulls of Flappy Temple

Welcome to a brand new “#Update,FuckTuesday”.

I’ve been working on a small side project called Cryo-Skulls of Flappy Temple for the Flappy Jam. The GFX are being made by the great artist @delfeipls.

It’ll be out in any second (deadline is in 3 days), but I still have to improve the AI and tweak some parameters before is showable. Nevertheless, here’s a screenshot:

It’s been also my first test exporting AIR to an Android device. First I failed (old device) but later succeeded on a newer one. I found the hard way ARMv6 cpus are not supported by AIR. It’s a shame ‘cos a lot of people like myself use low-end cellphones.

Thanks for reading!

Background scene editor (now in 3D!)

Here’s another update tuesday and I’m porting everything to Unity!
Nah, just kidding. I’m using it as a 3D editor for the background scenes.

The Editor

It was about time I made a more proper editor that wasn’t ad-hoc and duct-taped.

It’s been a slow week, felt sick and tired most of the time and didn’t do much besides this simple but useful background scene editor, which was easy specially using Unity as an editor because of this tutorial and some other random internet snippets.
I didn’t imagine Unity would lack a Big Endian binary file stream, though (I have to swap bytes myself? really?)

Rendering

Thanks to some algebra help from my friend @zurashu I tweaked the game’s background “rendering” capabilities, but I couldn’t test it because now it needs more info and the much needed 3D editor is almost done but not solid yet.

General

Besides that I tweaked the fly-diving physics in-game to test it for more responsiveness and fixed the angle the bodies took for some aiming directions.

Parachutes for power-ups

Parachutes!

A new update tuesday! I made cute parachutes for powerups: If the parachute is shot the powerup falls faster, if the power-up itself is shot the trajectory is changed (to piss off other players):

Helis

Cleaned up the code, some conditions taken care off (dead pilots, etc.).

Melee

Some squares pop up from the little characters towards the bigger melee to help undestand what’s going on.

General

Removed some redundant operations when rendering and made some general AS3 optimizations.

Also made an IndieDB entry for the game (took me forever for some reason). Might be under

Blood splatter and some upkeep

Working to make some blood particles react to the heli for a bit more gore dynamism: Blood splatter from rotors and ricochet from everywhere else. FYI I’m not comfortable with the results yet, have to work it some more.

This is a tuesday update of many more to come! Barely made it thou (11:37 pm here.)
Why tuesday? because fuck it, I don’t even know in which weekday I’m living most of the time.

So… I also made a big rework on the Heli class, removed some temp code, cleared some to-dos, sped up heli-regeneration via wrench power-up (before it just reloaded everything, even gfx!)

Also had to rework the scoring system a bit. Like, if you get beheaded by a rotor is one thing, but if the pilot was already dead on the out of control heli, well…

Also head-shooting someone because of rigor mortis (involuntary last shot) that is inside a cockpit while spinning out of control: MEGA POINTS

To do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do to do …

Thanks for reading!