The Chicken Bandit

The Chicken Bandit is now officially released! Head on over to The Chicken Bandit's new webpage to check it out!

Try the free demo, then buy the full game for only $2.99! If you like the game make sure to give us a good rating on the market! (If you don't like the game, it's ok if you forget.) Tell all your friends!

Thanks to everybody who helped with the game! We hope you like it!

The Chicken Bandit Complete!

We finally did it! The game is complete! It feels like it has been a long time since we submitted the game to the IGF last month, but all the extra time really gave us the chance to add some extra stuff and polish everything up. I'm really happy with how everything turned out! Here are some screen shots of the main menu:

We still have a couple things to do before we can release the game: making a website, trailer, last minute testing/bug hunting, and creating the demo . Unless we run into some big trouble with any of these, I think we should be able to release the game in the upcoming week! I'm excited!

radio

Chicken Bandit #11: Beta 2!

The game is finished! For the most part. We finished up the entire story mode last night, in time for the IGF deadline. I'm very happy with how the whole thing turned out, it is definitely our best game yet. We are still going to take a couple more weeks to make some changes based on feedback, create a cool trailer, and add in some extras to the game.

Current Game Features:

-20 stages
-4 separate 'worlds'
-16 different enemies (including 4 bosses)
-11 types of upgrades
-Options Menu (complete with customizable sound options (on or off))

If anybody would like to take the full game for a spin, let me know! It would be very helpful to get your feedback! You could leave a comment below or shoot me an email at (team@sharkarmstudios.com)

radio

Chicken Bandit #10: All Levels Complete

All the levels in the game are now complete. They've been done for probably around 24 hours now and we mostly have been working on fixing up animations and a bunch of little things. I just played the game the whole way through for the first time and I am really really happy with how it is turning out. It was originally designed to be a somewhat small game and somehow sneaked up on us and turned into this monster it is today.

As it is right now, it takes about 40-60 minutes for me to play through main game. I'm also assuming the game is incredibly difficult because I had a little bit of a hard time beating some of the levels and I (unsurprisingly) became very good at the game after testing it a million times.

So once we have the IGF Version of the game ready, it would be a great time to have some people test the game the whole way through. So if you would like to do some testing for us, let us know!

-radio

Technical B-Ball

We were able to make a lot of progress in the first week of the game development, even though I was only able to work on it for 3 days. I wanted to start making some more technical posts about how I solved specific problems within the game for the purpose of recording it for myself as well as serve as a mini tutorial for people trying to do the same things.

Rectangular to trapezoid coordinates:

The first problem I ran into, is the way the court is drawn. I wanted to keep the coordinates in a rectangle and yet have the court be displayed to the player at an angle so the hoop and sidelines are more visible. The view to the player would look something like this:

In order to keep the coordinates rectangular, I had to change the position that the player was drawn on the screen so that it did not display rectangular, but displayed on a trapezoid. I had to come up with a function to convert the coordinates. My first idea was to use the barycentric coordinates relative to the two vectors that make up the trapezoid, which would convert the display nicely to a parallelogram, but it would not work here because opposite ends of the court angle in toward each other, instead of the same direction.

View mapping

I decided that the angle would change based on how close you are to the center. If the angle at the top left edge of the shape is 10°, then the player a quarter of the way down the court would move at a 5° angle, the center would move at a 0° angle, 3 quarters of the way would be -5° , and the entire other end of the court would be -10°.

An equation to describe the current angle based on player position would be:

angle = 10° * ( DIST_FROM_CENTER / (COURT_WIDTH / 2) )

with DIST_FROM_CENTER being a signed value.

We can then use this angle to find the two vectors describing the shape.

The first will always be along the positive x axis: (1,0)

The second will be: (cos(angle), sin(angle))

And then we can find our draw coordinates. With rectangular coordinates (x,y) we will have new coordinates:

new_x = x + ( y * cos(angle) )

new_y = y

Note: the new_y value is not affected by the vectors because we want the movement to look like the player is always moving parallel to the sideline (not realistic.) I made the error in adding y*sin(angle) to the new y value at first which made the player move along an arc, but since the view is warped to make it easier to see the game, this does not look correct.

Basic 3d Physics:

One of the main tasks in basketball, from what I've learned, is to shoot the ball in the hoop. However, we did not want this to be the main focus of the game, so we wanted to do an automatic aiming system that is based on a percentage chance that it goes in (rather than manually aiming the player's arms.)

He's like the Michael Jordan of basketball.

So we need to find the velocity at which the player needs to throw the ball from any position in the court in order to make it in the hoop. Since the game takes place in a full 3d world, we will have to use 3d kinematics (which is the exact same thing as 2d with an extra d somewhere (it doesn't change things too much.))

We can define a specific velocity in the z (up) direction that we want to throw the ball (as long as it is strong enough to reach the hoop) and we know the height of the ball at start. We must find the amount of time the ball will remain in the air until it reaches the height of the hoop on the way back down. We can use the kinematic equation:

(z_target – z_initial) = velocity_z*t + 0.5 * GRAVITY * t^2

solving for t we get:

GRAVITY * t^2 + 2*velocity_z*t – 2*(z_target – z_initial) = 0

using the quadratic equation:

a = GRAVITY

b = 2*velocity_z

c = 2*(z_target – z_initial)

t = max( (-b ± sqrt(b^2 – 4*a*c)) / (2*a) )

We want to use the max value of t because we want to know the time it takes to collide with the hoop on the way back down, otherwise we would have the player chucking the ball directly at the hoop instead of arcing it in.

So we now have the time the ball will be in the air, we now need to find the velocity in the x and y directions the player needs to throw the ball so that it will make it in the hoop.

We will use the same equation as before, but this time we are trying to find the initial velocity and we know the time. Solving for velocity we get:

velocity_x = ( (target_x – initial_x) – (acceleration*t^2/2)) / t

velocity_y = ( (target_y – initial_y) – (acceleration*t^2/2)) / t

I don't have any acceleration or deceleration while the ball is in the air (acceleration = 0) so I simplified the equations to:

velocity_x = ( (target_x – initial_x)) / t

velocity_y = ( (target_y – initial_y)) / t

And with that, we get a perfect shot every time.

Award Winning Game: City of Doom

I can now official say that City of Doom is an award winning game. I received an email from Softpedia today declaring that City of Doom has passed all of its tests and has been awarded the "100% CLEAN" Softpedia award. That's amazing. Really it is, I don't even know what to say. I wasn't expecting this. I have so many people to thank, so many people that helped us out along our journey. In case you aren't observing our live webcam right now, I'm starting to tear up a bit. I wonder when they send us our trophy?

I'm not quite certain if the "100% CLEAN" award is in reference to there being no viruses in the program or the fact that there aren't any nude people in the game. If it's the former, I'm glad to see that my hand didn't slip while writing the game and accidentally write code to redirect the user's homepage to viagra.com. If it's the latter, it's probably a good thing I never added the feature into the game where you can peek in a window and see a dude on the toilet.

Unfortunately, a hidden frame in Bravehorse would prevent that game from getting the same award.

Our game was also added to the Softpedia database "featured with a description text,
screenshots, download links and technical details". Well from the looks of it the description text is ripped directly from the earlier post on the site which the first line reads:

"In case you didn't see before, City of Doom is another Action 52 Remake like our previous game Mash Man."

It is taken out of context from a blog post on the site and now reads as if City of Doom is so popular that you are some sort of cave-dwelling idiot if you have not heard of it yet (this may or may not be the context that I was going for when I originally wrote it.)

This is a great day for all SharkArm developers everywhere. We finally have an award winning game that we can use to brag about and let other people know we are better than them. This is the best day of my life!

The Softpedia City of Doom page is here.

City of Doom Quick Last Minute Testing

So City of Doom has been sitting around being basically finished for a month or two (or three) now with only some minor fixing and polishing to be done.

Since the semester ended and I've had time to work on it, the game is now about ready to release but I still want to fix up some of the level design in some areas of the game. So we are looking to get a few people to test out the game for us before we completely release it. So if you are interested, leave a comment and a way to contact you, or contact me one of these ways:

REMOVED

Instant messaging will probably be the best way since we just want some quick last-minute feedback.

So expect a release either tomorrow or tomorrow's tomorrow.

State of the City of Doom

Alright, time for another City of Doom update. The game has pretty much been done for about 3 weeks now. The main problem I'm running into is with the final boss. I've been working on him for a while but I can't seem to come up with anything that I like. None of the attacks or anything are good enough for a final boss to have. I've been trying to play it through in my head (it's nice to have infinite extra guys in my head) and come up with something, but I'm still stumped.

The other problem here is lack of inspiration. After working all week on stupid mindless homework assignments and other monotonous assorted school-related programming tasks, all my creativity is completely dead by the weekend, whenever I have time to work on anything. On the bright side though, this is a great sign that my schooling is effective and accomplishing all it's goals. My transformation is almost complete into a coding robot who takes orders and has no ideas of his own. I can't wait till that day (the one where I finally become a robot), I'll be able to eat batteries and finally have a dance that I'm able to do.

CITY OF DOOM:


It will be finished soon!

Time Lapse #2

I felt that I didn't have enough pictures of myself on the internet, so I decided to take one every minute for about 14 hours.



Most of it is working on City of Doom. There is some Dwarf Fortress playing and some net browsing too.

New website in the works!

I'm currently working on building us a website! Soon we will move out of this little blog into a big fancy website. The new site will have a section for our games, the blog, news and maybe tutorials and other extra good stuff. You can also see that we will be having a minor name change as well.

Angry Boulders Gameplay Video

It took me a bit of time, but we finally have a gameplay video of Angry Boulders up. I don't want to brag but I feel like I did a really great hand modeling job in this video. It could be a possible career path for me if this programming thing I'm into right now doesn't work out. Take a look:



And that's a couch in the background.

SharkArm Goes Viral: Hitting Facebook

It is now official, SharkArm Studios has now hit the big times with its recent release of its facebook fanpage entitled, SharkArm Studios Fan Page. Facebook is a new (and from what I can gather) totally hip website that anybody can sign up for and create a totally awesome webpage 100% devoted to their face. From the very first days I set foot in the universe that you and I call the internet, I knew that someday I wanted to make a website about my face. I would just stare into a mirror for hours and think about how awesome it will be when somebody can bring up a picture of this face on their own personal computer from their home. And not only can you do that, but you can also have a list of all of your friends and pictures of those them too. It even gives you a nice little friend count so you can easily determine who is the most popular kid in school.

Code snippet from a fundamental function of my new Facebook app.

But the best part about Facebook by far, is that you can make sure that people who aren't your close friends still can find out how cool and popular and awesome you are. Think about it. You might meet some girl at a party, and never get the chance to bring up that you play guitar. Or some of your friends might not know that you even went to that party, and they certainly won't be able to tell how much of beer you were able to drink. With Facebook, you don't have to worry about any of these problems.

So I highly recommend this website. I also highly recommend that you check back in a few days for some awesome new secret updates.

Angry Boulders Android Release!

A few months ago I started working on a game engine for Google's Android platform, but only had an emulator to test on. Now that we actually have a device we decided to start making some Android games. We just completed our first one, in about a week's time, Angry Boulders. It is an advanced version of our previous Angry Boulders with way better graphics and some gameplay updates. We wanted to make a smaller game first and put that out on the market before we dive into a bigger and better project. Here are some screen shots:



It took a little longer than I thought to get out the door for such a small game, but I really like how it turned out. I think the game is a great fit for a mobile device with a touch screen (especially if it also has a track ball.)

We are going to be having a whole lot of work for school until the end of the next semester, so we won't have time to start another Android project till we are done. Until then we will using our spare time to put some more time into Grand Feather, as we are eager to get back to work on it. We have an art show type thing coming up at our school, so we want to have a nice small demo set up to show off what we have done so far.

Check back for more updates!

Inside the Walls of Slime

Been working on the insides of the slime cave recently. I always forget how long it takes to create the levels after I haven't worked on a new one in a while. I haven't made any animated screenshots in a while so I'll post some of those!

Some flying eyeball guys and an immobel slime monster who will eventually have slimey veins that connect to a door that will be open when you kill it.

One of the tunneling monsters who lives in the slime caves. He is so scary that I can't even work on parts with him unless it's during the day time.

We also finally got in some of the real graphics for the 'life bar' that you can see at the top of the 1st picture. We tried to make the health system unique by using different foods that you find throughout the world for your health. Different foods give you different amounts of health, like the apple/tomato type food shown here can only take 1 hit, but getting a banana would give you 3 extra hits. You will start the game with 3 slots for health and you will be able to find plant seeds which will allow better food to grow in the 'safe gardens'.

That's it for now, keep checking for updates! I think nate's going to be doing another interview real soon, so come on back!

Slime Cave Entrance

We are really really close to having a demo testing version ready. We just need to do a bit more level editing and add in a few more cutscenes (and one boss).

Here is the entrance to the slime cave along with a small new tileset which consits of grass that looks like it is covered a little bit in slime that you see leading up to the entrance of the cave.



We actually have a ton of new stuff since the last update. Brand new enemies and fun stuff for the slime cave, so I might post them up in the future. We will be finishing up the slime cave level editing and then adding in the slime boss real soon. More updates to come!

Companion Menu

Finally got around to adding in the companion menu system. We wanted it to look like an actual system that Jack would use to log the different creatures he finds, so we made it look like a notebook with sketch-like drawings of the different animals.
I'm really happy with how this turned out, especially because I have been dreading making it for awhile now. It turned out that it only took about 3 hours to code into the game and everything worked perfectly according to plan the first time. That's not a common occurrence! It was also nice coding something new into the game, since I've been doing a ton of tweaking for a very long time now.

We are also thinking about adding a log of all creatures, in addition to your companions, to encourage the player to explore more and try to find all the creatures in the game. For now though, we will have to put this idea aside and focus on the core gameplay, additional features can come later if we still have the time. Because if we work on a game with zero pay for too long, we may end up finishing it inside a refrigerator box along the street somewhere, and I don't know how long my computer is going to last if it's plugged into a cardboard cutout of a power outlet.

We also (mostly) finished the first boss in the grasslands. I spent a lot of time, and still am, tweaking his moves and stats and that type of thing. At the moment he is still way too hard for people who seem to not be me, because I get way too good at the game from all the testing I have to do. So I need to make sure the boss is not too hard but still provides a challenge for the player. I wish there was some way I could get really bad at the game. Maybe I'll slam my fingers in a door or something.

Getting very excited about level design again. I added in a few new sections yesterday and am just about ready to start work on some different areas. We should be working more on the slime cave in the next coming days, as soon as nate puts together the tile set. The first dungeon should be coming up very soon too, and most of the tilesets are already complete for that area. All I need is to add in a little bit more level designing and some cut scenes and the beta test demo should be ready to send out to those of you who would like to play it and give us some feedback.

Our current goal is to get the demo ready by the end of the month, so I think now would be good time to start to take some signups for beta testing. If you would like to do some testing and haven't told us yet, make sure to leave a comment or send us an email at team@sharkarmstudios.com.

Semester Ends, Time to Really Get Some Work Done

We were forced to take some time off from working on the game the last 2 weeks due to the semester ending. We had to focus most of our time on finshing up projects and taking tests and that kind of boring stuff. I wasted about 3 full days working on a 'Toll Booth' programming project in java for one of my computer science classes. The worst part about doing programming projects for classes is that you have to put a ton of work into it, and then when you are finished, you don't even have something cool. You just have some stupid worthless program that isn't even fun for anybody. But it may come in handy if I'm able to somehow fulfill my wildest dreams of becoming a toll booth operator (the ability to open and close a little gate, I can feel the power surging through my body just thinking about it.)

We were able to sneak in a few hours of working on the game though, and there are still some updates that I haven't talked about yet since the last post.

The coolest update is probably the new ability for Elkwood. We have given him about 4 different powers now, but keep changing which one we want him to have. Since he is a main character and you get him near the begining of the game, we want to make sure his ability is useful, but not too powerful. He is now able to make the player dash, by pulling on his shirt. This gives the player a short boost of speed and also allows him to dash-jump, so he can jump farther distances.

And, you do an awesome flip whenever you dash-jump.

The other abilities that we had Elkwood doing before will most likely go to other companions that you will get later in the game.

I also just finished the story document that is the closest thing to a design document that we have so far. I wanted to write out in detail all of the scenes and everything that needs to be known to fully understand the story. I'm glad that I'm finally finished writing it, it was drug out for about a month (and it's only about 14 pages long.) I don't really like writing this stuff down too much because we like to have the game sort of develop itself as we go along. At least now we have the main points written down and other people (such as a musician) might be able to get the idea of what we envision the game to be.

Did some more level editing too. Going to be working on a different section soon, hopefully, and most likely they won't take as long.

Fixed up and finished most of the cutscenes for the starting part of the game. I spent a lot of my time tweaking and trying to get them to look exactly as we envisioned them. It takes surprisingly a lot of time to do this though, but it will be well worth it. We still haven't come up with a good starting intro cutscene for the game. I spent a couple of hours making one before, but didn't like it, so we decided to axe it completely and start over.

Here is a shot of one of the scenes. It also shows the new text system with a new font that nate made (a few fixes have been made in the font since this screenshot.)


So now we are on break so we will hopefully be able to make a ton of progress on the game. Next up to work on is the companion menu system which will allow you to equip/unequip different companions. We are also about to add in the first boss soon. Really soon. Like I am just about to start working on him after I finish this blog post.

And that means that we are going to want some testers to do a run through of what we have of the game so far. I mainly want to make sure that the game runs well on other computers, as well as get feedback on what other people think about it so far. So get your testing fingers ready!

The Law is Against Us

So we got locked out of the building that we have our studio in one day when we were trying to work on the game. Apparently it was Thanksgiving and people don't go in to work that day or something stupid like that (but apparently the guy who walks around with the key and locks people out of buildings was there bright and early that morning.) It wouldn't have been that big of a deal but we were working late the night before and left our computers and all of our stuff there that we needed. And even that wouldn' t have been that bad but we also accidentally left a space heater, which was very very old and not-safe looking, on the night before, and didn't realize it till we got home. And I mean, that heater was old, it looked like it may have been the same space heater Abraham Lincoln used to heat up his room when he was writing the Gettysburg Address, and the power cable gets so hot that we usually have to wear gloves to unplug it. So we were kinda scared that the place might burn down and tried to get in there early the next morning in order to save the studio from burning down, and more importantly, the harddrives which contain all our work on the game. So we had to get a police officer to let us in the building, to take armfuls of computer equipment. He was suspicious of us 'long-hair hippies' the whole time, he kept his one hand on his batton.

Ok so back to the game. I've been working on the next section of the Grasslands, which is going to be a lot longer than the first part, with a lot more variety of enemies and landscape. We also decided to add an optional 'Slime Cave' which will be infested with slime monsters and even a giant slime boss:

He's some sort of big bear creature covered in slime with a fish, birds, and some other creatures stuck inside of him too. We want to make him have sort of a split personality with the fish, being wild and only wanting to kill, and the bear, being more calm.

I also recorded a timelapse video of me making some of the grasslands sections with my level editor:


There is also a section in the middle where Nate and I take a break to play Block Towers, the awesome game by JLJac.

Also, added in the ability for Elkwood:

He has a spins around the player like a shield and can defend against the attack. There will be a better animation soon, the current one is a place holder.

Animated Screen Shots

So I think it's time for an update, it's been awhile so I'll have to dig through everything we did since last time.

I made my own built in screenshot taker for the game which outputs ordered bitmaps to a file. And along with this, I was able to make it record each frame so that I can compile them into an animated gif of the actual gameplay of the game.

So we've been adding in different gameplay elements for the grasslands area. I can't believe we are still working on this same area, we are itching to get into the more interesting areas, but we want to make each part of the game as good as we possibly can. Anyway here are some of the new things:

A pretty basic new element is the bouncing blant, which isn't anything too new to platformers but a basic part of platforming.

A turtle-like creature who walks around and blows wind out through a hole in his back.



A new enemy.

And a funny glitch that I decided to record. When I was adding in the ability for the bird to shoot pellots out of his mouth, I accidently made him shoot out other birds! That's just crazy! Birds don't shoot other birds out of their mouths! Believe me, I know, I watch Animal Planet.

The other thing that has taken up a lot of time recently, has been rewriting the entire companion system. Because the original game idea has changed so much and the companions were one of the first things I put in, they were long overdue for a reworking. I managed to get most of it finished and back up to the state that it was in before, but this time a lot better. So now the dog follows you a lot better and hardly ever misses a jump, making 'teleporting' back to you less common. Flying companions following you now looks a lot more naturual and not as jumpy as before. I'm still going to work on some tweaking of the companion AI but for the most part I am done with that.

So I moved back to working on the cutscenes and the actual game content. I started building the next section of levels a little bit, I plan to do the whole rest of the grasslands next week. I also added in the next couple of cutscenes, which are very time consuming to create, and realized that we needed a better way to organize the story and map out the game. For the most part right now we are remembering it all up in our brains. So we decided to write out a document that has an outline for all the characters, every cutscene, and every area in the game we need to create. I started working on it today and got a solid 4 and a half pages done so far. Unfortunatley it only leads up to about five minutes in gamplay (though a lot of it was history of the story before the game even starts.) So this document is probably going to take a while, but it will be worth it.

Hmmm what else did we do since last post? Oh yeah this!


Another awesome piece of work by Gutter.

Ok well I think I'm going to leave it at that for now. There will be more updates soon.

Friday Night is for Partying?

Wrong. Friday night is for working on video games. For the second Friday in a row (and probably more to come) we have been having game jam sessions from about 5pm to somewhere around 7am of almost pure non-stop game development madness. I keep coding until I get so tired that I start making stupid mistakes and would probably do more harm than good to the code.

Me around 5am. Mmm I miss all of that food I don't have anymore because I ate it.

And we also have a new SharkArm work station, which is pretty much the same as our old one but rearranged.

Those long hard flat things on four legs are 'tables' and we use them to set things on.

So lot's of new stuff being added to the game. We have been working on the story and main design of the game a whole lot recently, which I will go into more depth probably next post. I've also been coding in the cutscenes, which has turned out to be a very very time consuming process because we have been tweaking them so much to get every scene perfectly the way we want it. It's a lot of fun though, and I highly recommend it to anyone who programs for SharkArm. They are turning out really well so far for the most part, and I even almost released a video of the opening cutscene. Then I realized that it needed to be changed completely so I'm going to pretty much scrap the entire thing and redo it differently.

My favorite part about programming these huge projects is when you realize that huge portions of code that cost you hours has to go. About a week or two ago I was facing a problem that had to do with the draw order of the front tiles and the entities on the screen. Whenever a front tile was placed on a solid tile you can jump through, the player's graphics would be shown in front of the solid but behind the front tiles and it would look strange while in the air. Like this:

I don't really know if you can tell what I mean from the picture, it's a bit hard to explain, but in order to solve this problem I wrote this sorting algorithm for sorting all the entities based on their Y values and the tiles so that they would be drawn correctly and the front tiles would only be draw in front of the player when they are below the player's feet and did all this complicated stuff to get this one small problem to work right. It took about 6 hours. Then, the next day I figured out an insanely simple solution to this problem and fixed it a lot more efficiently that way, and threw all the work I did the day before in the trash can. You have to know when to part with code, even if you put a lot of hours into it. Same thing with your dog after you realize training him to fight in a kickboxing tournament would not score him a lead role in the next Air Bud sequel.

Yeah, ok he's a dog that plays basketball, soccer, and beach volleyball, but kickboxing
is too unrealistic? Get real Walt Disney, a dog roundhouse kicking a 300lb fighter
could totally happen, and would sell more tickets than you could ever dream of.

We've been trying to add in a whole lot more companions to the game, so we can see what kind of different gameplay elements we will be able to add in to each of the levels. And because it's totally awesome. I also just put in our first rideable companion, Rake, who can suck things in and blow things away. He is used for pulling in and pushing out blocks, to make bigger jumps and that sort of thing. I suppose he would be good for helping you blow out your birthday candles as well.

Jack riding Rake. Arif the fire bird and Roger the dog following. Tree.

Alright so there will be a pretty big update real soon, where a long awaited announcement will be made? What could it be? You'll have to find out. And I'm going to have another video out really soon because I realized how long ago that last one was made and how much different everything is. Almost all the graphics have changed and there are actually enemies in the game and things that move!

Oh yeah!

Stay tuned for updates. Real tuned.