Brett, I was meaning to try your game this weekend, but I'm afraid I didn't get around to it. I will do so, however, either this week or next weekend!

I thought your final entry turned out great. I liked how each of the three characters has a unique strategy to play. Definitely a lot more difficult to play if you use the ancient warrior as opposed to the modern or future warrior.

Brett

There's not a whole lot to say about what I've programmed since the last update, because I haven't really added anything to the game, but I did create an entire menu UI and a system for saving and loading files, something which I've never done before and was pretty excited about. Still am, to be honest - I want to use it again!

Here's the download link, but before you try it, you may want to read a bit further.
https://bitbucket.org/TheMazinTar/constant-through-the-ages/downloads

Due to not thinking about it until I'd mostly finished the menus, and then not having enough time to change things enough to implement it smoothly, there's not actually a tutorial or instructions for how to play the game. The menus should be self-explanatory enough, but if not, I tried to write clear, concise instructions on each screen. Anyways, here are some basic instructions for the game:

Use the WASD keys to move.
For the ancient character, press the left mouse button to attack, hold the Q key while attacking to leap forward, and hold the right mouse button to block any sort of attack coming at you from the direction you're facing.
For the modern character, holding the left mouse button will cause you to fire rapidly from the hip, and holding the right mouse button will cause you to aim the gun more accurately. Once aiming, press the left mouse button to fire - recharge time is high, but each shot will pierce through up to ten characters, making this a deadly tool to be used.
For the ancient character, only one direction can be moved in - forward. Attacking is disabled until the character reaches 90% of its maximum speed, and which point you can hold the left mouse button to attack in one direction, and hold the right mouse button to attack in the other direction.
Okay, you can feel free to try the download now.

And, just for fun, I'm going to claim a whole bunch of achievements.
Law of Live Demos: You show your WIP to somebody. Something goes horribly wrong. (This happened a lot, lol!)
Game Over: You implement the ability for players to lose the game.
Vincent van Gogh: You create your own artwork for your project.
Moral Support: Leave a comment on somebody else's game thread with (constructive) feedback.
Leveled Up: You learned something that you didn't know that you can reuse in other games or other programs. (Writing and reading files all the way!)
Back of the Line: Don't get started until the competition is well underway. (I think I only started programming Constant Through the Ages with half the competition left, so I'm claiming this one.)
Victory: Beat your game for the first time!
Mission Accomplished!: The challenge ends, and you actually have a game to show for it!
½KLOC: Your game reaches 500 lines of code. You're off to a great start!
1KLOC: Your game reaches 1000 lines of source code. Making progress! Excellent!
2KLOC: Your game reaches 2000 lines of source code. Keep it up!
3KLOC: Your game reaches 3000 lines of source code. Your game definitely has some weight behind it! (3,259 lines of code total!)
Silence is Not Golden: Add sound effects or background music to your game. 8 is Enough optional.
The Great Unveiling: Provide a download for your game. (Or two. Or three.)
Applying Research: Spend at least an hour programming when you should be doing something else. (I think I spent about a week programming when I shouldn't have been, lol!)
Jurassic Programming: While making your game run into a situation where you must add a ton of code lines to get something to work. (IE: adding points into a collision detection array) - "I wrote a million lines of code to run this park!" (Both the code required for typing and for reading and writing files, plus for the preset options, took a lot of lines.)
Way to Brag: Claim at least 15 achievements.
Lonely: Program on a Friday or Saturday evening.

As always, I've had a lot of fun and learned how to program better and how to do more things. It's been a blast - I'll see you all later!

I'm not really sure where the UI is going to get to by the end of the competition, though. I've spent most of the morning working on it, so saving and loading games is almost entirely functional now and there's a basic menu-navigation system in place, but none of it is image-based or reacting to mouse input. Basically, I'm just drawing words onto the screen giving simple instructions for navigating the interface with the keyboard.

However, while testing the load options feature, I have had some fun messing with the settings…

Constant Through the Ages looks great so far. I'm impressed how far it has progressed in just 2 weeks. I'll be interested to see how you design the user interface for changing the gameplay.

-Brett

This one was more difficult to program than the others due to some little oddities about it, such as the head needing to be drawn separately so it can fade in and out, or the torso needing to play an animation while the legs stay the same (wow, I just remembered a feature I forgot to program, lol), or even just the AI behavior being a bit more complicated (oh gosh, I just remembered another feature). Funnily enough, it's also going to be the character most likely to be seen and used the least, mainly because it's got fewer play-styles (you can really just charge, slaughter, and be slaughtered, rather than play offensive or defensive) and, when fighting it in swarms, it's both repetitive and extremely difficult. However, when a few of them are thrown into the mix with some modern and ancient characters, I believe that it adds a nice extra flavor to the game, and also can be fun to play as occasionally.

My next goal, then (aside from those two features I remembered), is definitely getting options able to be chosen in-game, such as which character you'll play as, or what percentage of the enemies that you're going to fight are a certain type, and hopefully even some more specific things, like how accurate the enemies are when shooting, or how fast they move, et cetera.

Good luck to all of you and your games as the competition winds down!

As for mine, I've made some pretty good progress over the last three days, although I may not be able to finish everything that I want to by next Monday. Here's what I did:

- Added the current day character, the soldier, and completely finished that.
- Finished any odds and ends I still had to do for the ancient character, which actually turned out to mostly be completely reworking the AI to be simpler and also to raise the shield to protect themselves when getting shot at. Okay, so maybe it wasn't quite odds and ends, haha!
- Added an infinite grassy background.
- Began work on the future character, which is about half done, maybe less.

If you're interested, you can try the second download here (v0.3) to play as the soldier fighting a mix of modern and ancient characters, but if not, no worries! (Same controls as before, except that you hold the left mouse button to keep shooting, and hold the right mouse button to aim - when aiming, firing speed is a lot slower, but each shot pierces shields and goes through about ten people before stopping. Press or hold the left mouse button when aiming to fire like that.)

See you all later!

I think the top down graphics look great. This looks like a tough perspective to draw since you can only see their shoulders and top of head, but you made the sprites clear and simple. Working on a project you care about makes a ton of difference.

Brett

I've done a good amount more programming on Adrift since I last posted, getting a background drawing, fine-tuning the movement, setting up a system where the player won't go off the screen, changing how particles are affected, and even camera-centering once the player slows down, but then I stopped working on it. See, there's three kinds of moods/phases I can be in when programming: the first is highly excited, constantly working on my project, at least when I have the time, and always knowing what to work on next. The second is after the initial excitement phase has passed, and I'm still working on and enjoying programming my project, but the goal is mostly to finish it. The third, then, is when I'm just not feeling it, I don't really know what to do, and I'm not getting much done. Chances are that the rest of you know exactly what I'm talking about with all three of these.

Unfortunately, this project fell into the third category, and, considering that we're in the middle of a competition and, when I was thinking this through on Monday, at the beginning of a week I have entirely free, I wasn't going to spend it just feeling 'meh' about the whole thing.

So, I ditched it.

This game is going to be relatively simple, since I only had about half of the competition left when I began, but it's both more fun to program and gives me the opportunity to play with a new toy I discovered the other day, which I've been wanting to do for a while, learned courtesy of RB's extremely useful C# Player's Guide, which I haven't read all the way through for some reason. I dunno why, because I'd learn a lot. (In case you're curious, what I learned was how to write and read files, which opens up a lot of possibilities for saved games, saved preferences, and the like, which I'm excited about!) Sorry for the sidetrack, getting back on topic now.

So, Constant Through the Ages is going to be/already mostly is a top-down 2D hack-and-slash game, at least for the most part. There's going to be three kinds of characters, which are fighters/soldiers from different time periods: the barbarians, as you see above, modern-day soldiers, and, of course, future soldiers. In the end game you'll be able to choose which one to play as, and what percentage of the enemies you'll be fighting are made up of any type of character. (For example, you'll be able to choose to play as a future soldier, with 50% ancient warriors, 40% modern-day soldiers, and 10% future soldiers as enemies.)

I think this is my first time doing hand-drawn animations in a game, and, as surprisingly decent-looking as it turned out, I'm not anxious to do it again, haha!

Finally, to wrap up a long post … I'm going to give you a download.
https://bitbucket.org/TheMazinTar/constant-through-the-ages/downloads

Controls are pretty simple: WASD to move, use the mouse to point, left mouse button attacks, holding the right mouse button blocks, although only in the direction you're facing, and, as you take damage, a visual aid will begin to appear on the screen, colored a beautiful bright red. =] Also, when you start the program, no enemies will spawn until you press P, so be sure to do that.

Let me know what you think!

For this competition, I wanted to do something a little bit different, so I'm planning on making a 2D sidescrolling(ish) puzzle(ish) game set in space, with the player controlling an astronaut that, for some reason, has to get from point A to point B. If I can get the base gameplay done, I also want to add some enemies that, for some reason, want to stop you, and they will have dagger-like weapons to attack you with, and an energy-based shield to block shots from your blaster (ha! I'm still sticking with the sword and shield theme). Also, I'd really like for an actual story to be in the game by the end of the month, but that probably won't happen. Oh well.

Now, for a little confession. I actually started programming this at the very end of December, but really only for an hour or so each weekend and, due to an overhaul in how things work last weekend, the only thing I had done going into this competition was basic movement in no gravity. So yeah, that's where I'm starting at, rather than from scratch.

And here's a link to my BitBucket repository, with a download of what I've got so far:
https://bitbucket.org/TheMazinTar/adrift/downloads

Well, that's it from me right now. See you guys more later!