RubixsQube

[Release] Shoot That Pizza

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I have no experience making video games.

 

That being said, I think it'd be really fun to make a game here, just to join in the fun. And, to make my life easy, I'm making:

 

"

" - a flash rhythm space shooting game, about pizzas, and following directions.

 

(In the above linked clip, you can hear Nick Breckon say "shoot that pizza slice," presumably referring to this

mini-game)

 

I'm going to be making the game in Stencyl, which I spent two or three hours playing with last night. It's not ideal, but I think that once I get the hang of it I can probably do what I want. One of the tutorials was for making a Space Invaders style game, so that's where I'll be starting. My goal is to make a kind of silly

mini game. I'll leave the real big deal games for all of the more experienced folk. It'd be great if you played as a space turret shooting moving pizza slices in time with some fun song, but, in the same vein as Rhythm Heaven, I might want to include audio clips of myself with directions ("shoot that pizza" is just a funny thing to say out loud, much less give as an order).

 

My tasks then, are:

 

- Get a game running whereby I can shoot a target (pizza slice, duh) that moves across the screen.

- Add in the functionality such that I can provide a list of times that trigger the target to move across the screen.

- See about getting the timing worked out such that the pizza slices are hit on the beats. (This is probably going to be one of the harder aspects to this project, I am sure, but other people have thought about Stencyl rhythm games)

- Add in the assets, like art and music. 

- Polish, polish, polish.

 

My goal for tonight and this weekend is probably just the first two tasks. Thinking further down the line, ;ast night I was listening to some of SpacemanToby's music, and I might ask to use one of his tracks. Essentially, I just want this to be mega, mega silly. I'll be using this little thread to record my progress (and to lay claim on a great and dumb episode title), and I hope that I don't end up "ruining the surprise."

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Tonight, I'm game-making, using unattractive temporary assets, mostly to see if I can get the behavior working initially. Hey there, temporary turret and temporary pizza.

 

31RtIX8.png

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epKQ7PB.gif

 

I find this gif real funny. I really wish I knew why the bullets, which are set to kill themselves on collision, are kind of ricocheting after destroying the pizza (you can't hear it from the gifs, but there are sound effects).

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It's looking good.  You've already done the episode-title justice, and it's Day 1 !

Is there some sort of behavior-screen that you can screenshot, I haven't used Stencyl, but something might pop out about the ricochet if I see a depiction of the game's logic.

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RUctXfJ.gif

 

Wow, it was pretty easy to get the pizzas to fly across the screen at a set interval.

 

The logic for Stencyl is pretty goofy, here's where I had thought I was setting the bullet actor to kill itself on collision:

 

98hCFSY.png

 

And, according to the easy to follow crash course guide, that's what I needed to do. It's just not actually doing it. The collision detection is also pretty wonky.

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Hrm, actually, I just made it so that when the pizza actor collides with the bullet, it kills the bullet itself, which is kludgy, but that's the only thing that's ever gonna collide with the pizza, so, fine. Now it works.

 

R7AnEON.png

 

Also, it's super funny to me, too. Just the ugliest game, and these funny rotating pizzas. (Edit: I got them to explode, too) 

 

4L17aR5.gif

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I am making myself laugh until I cry / I don't care whether or not anyone else finds this humorous

 

OuFmZeN.gif

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Man, I just started playing Rhythm Heaven two days ago, so I'm entirely sold on this concept! Those GIFs are also amazing.

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Ok, so, in the last few hours, I did the next step, which is the mostly internal task of letting the game know when I've shot something that I should have shot. The game, right now, randomly just picks whether or not to send a pizza slice across that you should shoot or not shoot, but now, the game knows if you succeed or fail at that task. 

 

kelZcja.gif

 

This has been a fun learning experience already, although I'm mostly just learning how my weird astronomy coding skills can be translated into this goofy form of "programming."

 

Oh, and as a last goofy thing I made it so that when the pizzas are destroyed, they spawn little pizza pieces that choose random directions and go spinning off and fading. And I added a start screen. 

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So, the timing is a little tough, since I don't think that Stencyl allows for as fine of control as I want. It seems as if sometimes, the game syncs up well, and sometimes it doesn't, and I don't know why that is the case. I think that rhythm is just a tough genre, so I am abandoning the kind of fine tuning that is required of a true Rhythm Heaven style game. However, that being said, I'd love it if the music and the voice sample sync up somewhat, so I'm still messing around.

 

I'm pretty happy, at this point, that I've made it so that I can upload a file that has the set of timings (in beats, not seconds!) for the various pizzas, and the game can read that and interpret it, since it makes things a lot easier as a result. 

 

I think that pretty soon I'll be able to start trying to create the final art for the game! This is going to be real challenge, since I am not the greatest pixel artist.

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I made an opening splash screen tonight:

You can almost hear the

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Fantastic! I don't know if you had anything in mind for audio on this screen, but if you want I can take a 'Wizaaaaarrrrd' clip and downsample it so that it sounds like the 'SEGA' sample.

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Oh man, Synnah, that'd be great! I was planning on trying out something myself (this whole project has been a lot of me doing things and thinking: "there is probably a better way to do this" and then just plowing ahead anyway), and I was going to just keep it similar to the

, but with the word "wizard" before the little ending "pling" noise, if that makes sense. 

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Okay, see how this sounds: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3250291/Music/WizardJam/Wizard-Sega.wav

 

The bit-rate is probably lower than the Sega sample, because I wanted to make it sound a bit crunchier; I think the Sega voice sounds the way it does because of the quality of the equipment it was recorded on, and the fact that it's quite compressed compared to the musical notes. With the Wizard sample that I found, there wasn't really much I could do to change the mix, so this just felt like a decent trade-off.

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Okay, see how this sounds: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3250291/Music/WizardJam/Wizard-Sega.wav

 

The bit-rate is probably lower than the Sega sample, because I wanted to make it sound a bit crunchier; I think the Sega voice sounds the way it does because of the quality of the equipment it was recorded on, and the fact that it's quite compressed compared to the musical notes. With the Wizard sample that I found, there wasn't really much I could do to change the mix, so this just felt like a decent trade-off.

 

That's amazing. 

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Here's a "playable build," but I have more that I want to do later this week

 

You press "z" to shoot, which is the only real input. Also, it's a flash game, since of course that's what stencyl makes, so hopefully you have flash installed. On my browser, chrome requires me to click an icon to allow flash animations/games to even load. 

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Putting it in the GBA frame makes it seem like a lost WarioWare microgame.

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Oh, shoot, elvaq, I should go and do that, yeah. Making a quality vine might require some video editing, though. Let me see if I can whip that up.

 

In the mean time, not to jump on the 90s cockpit bandwagon, but I'm not super happy with the turret situation, so I threw together a little pixel cockpit:

 

gzchhtu.png

 

And I think I'm going to make the pizzas a little more pixelated, as well, to fit the theme. 

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