PixelFunk!

[Kirl]

Hello all, I've been working on quite an ambitious game engine sort of thing. Basically it's a sandbox with a destructible and rebuildable environment. What's especially cool, is that it's really a combo of everything I learned from previous DBF challenges.

- Liquids from the Liquid challenge.
- Fire, destruction and collision detection from the Destruction challenge.
- Bitmap editing from the Img Processing challenge.

All effects are rewritten, improved and hugely optimised. The liquid now collides with all shapes (instead of only squares in my liquid entry) and the speed is unaffected by the nr of wall shapes or the size of the environment! Impossible, but entirely true!
The fire is also hugely optimised by bringing the nr of particles way down, compensated with some simple trickery. Also made it a bit more cartoony to fit the style.
The destructable environment is now a bitmap instead of the slow, clumsily masked vector images I used in my destruction entry, this made a lot of other optimisations possible as well. Speed is now unaffected by size or number of shapes and debris color is now taken from pixel color instead of from predefined variables, which makes it much more flexible.

Ever since I started CGI, fire, smoke and liquid effects were notoriously hard to do (I'm talking still images, I wasn't even familiar with "real-time"). Even later with 3d animation software it remained a real challenge. So I'm really proud I managed these fairly decent, real-time effects with my very own code, of all things! Without the challenges I never even would've attempted something so foolishly impossible. So I owe a huge amount of gratitude to the DBF community for providing the bite-sized challenges and the motivation to learn all this!

Next impossible milestone: Understanding the Navier-stokes equations!

So without further ado: Kirl's PixelFunk <-- Reference to the hugely superior PixelJunk:Shooter for PS3.

Up/down = accelerate / decelerate
left/right or mouse = turn ship
Ctrl = shoot
Space = change weapon
Shift = drill function (helps when you get stuck)
+/- = change nr of bullets (gun only)
Alt = draw random wall shapes

I'd love to hear your thoughts, I'm particularly interested in:
- How it runs for you
- What kind of game you'd like to see this become
- Your opinion on the experimental sound FX

[Raizor]

Very cool Kirl! I get ~25 fps (ranges from 19 to 29).

It would be nice to develop this into a game with levels and objectives and maybe enemies too. It's very neat! I especially like the little touches, like the water weapon being able to extinguish the flames

Well done, K++

[benny!]

Wow ... awesome project. Really cool, Kirl. Especially when reading that most of the inspiration and basic knowledge is the result from the competitions here.

Here are my thoughts:

+ Name is cool. Reminds me on FlashPunk somehow
+ Concept of a destructible and rebuildable environment is totally great and well executed
+ It runs at a constant 29fps (did you limit it to 30 maybe?)
+ Like the sounds a lot.
+ Driller mode is cool

- Don't like the steering with cursors, I would recommend WASD (whereas A/D lets you strafe) and keep mouse aiming as it is

All in all ... superb work. Love to see it in more action (e.g. game etc)

Already makes fun to play with!

Best,
benny!

[Shockwave]

I got the same FPS as Raizor, it feels really nice to control.

It would be cool to have different enemies that needed different methods to kill them and by killing the enemies, perhaps you could gain the other weapons to kill other kinds of enemies which would add a puzzle element to it.

It would lend it's self to top-down so maybe some kind of puzzle solving alien breed kind of thing..

It's really cool.. Nice work Kirl!

[Hotshot]

29FPS

Love the Fire Effect !!!

Amazing!!! 

[Rbz]

Very nice, the water extinguishing fire is amusing

[Kirl]

Thanks for testing and the great feedback guys, I got a good bunch of new ideas from your comments! Will be fun to think of some interesting strategic enemies.

I've been thinking about a scrolling map (like in alien breed) but I'm not sure what to do with offscreen areas where stuff is still happening, like a fire for instance. I can't keep running all these offscreen processes and maintain performance, but it would be weird if processes stopped or dissappeared when moved offscreen. So unless I'll figure out how to solve things like that I'll keep the background static unfortunatly. I'll probably increase the window size though.

Yes, the fps is limmited to 30 fps max.

Thanks for the comments all!

[Moroboshisan]

Have had lots of fun with it!... WELL DONE! K++

[Kirl]

Thanks Moroboshisan! 

[ttemper]

for the beginning of something 'unpolished'.... its awesome. for what it is, i like it alot (and im uber picky about things). the movement is very nice, it flows well.

it ran ~29fps for me, nice and smooth animations, controls were nice and smooth, bouncing of objects relative to impact speed was great.

as for what this could become... your imagination is the only thing that may stop you. so imagine.. and if you think its not possible, then you're not imagining properly.

the sfx.... well for a first attempt. its great. its a very polished 'alpha' test release/demo imo. room for improvement of course when you refine things, but damn.... great effort.

keep up the nice work. K++

[Kirl]

Thank you ttemper!

I've got a bunch of ideas for this, but I'm not sure when/if I'll be able to implement them all.