Retrofit Contest – Week 1
February 13th, 2010 - filed under Development News, Input Requested, Status UpdatesThe contest is now over. See the winners here!
We are getting some very cool contributions via the contest, thanks to everyone who is participating! If you have content to submit, refer to the rules on the contest page, and send your work to the business email here. If you don’t want your entries to be shown in the blog, or if you want to use an alias, just let me know in your email. The odds of picking up some cash are still good, and as always, if even a single sprite you submit is used, you’ll get a free copy of Jetpack.
Music
Our first week has seen some awesome music. My favorite is from Saga Musix
I always thought trance or an ambient techno would be a good fit for Jetpack. We need music that doesn’t overpower the gameplay, for 3 different level types/moods: light adventure, mysterious puzzle, and challenging action. I’ll let the level authors choose which song should go with their level after the levels & music are chosen.
Music should be about 4 minutes long to avoid restarting during a typical level. If you have a short song, you can just add some looping to your patterns to stretch it out. I need .MOD format music with a max of 10 channels for performance reasons. I’m using Flod for mod playback, it supports 3 or 5 octaves and the following effects:
|
0×00:ARPEGGIO 0×01:PORTAMENTO_UP 0×02:PORTAMENTO_DOWN 0×03:TONE_PORTAMENTO 0×04:VIBRATO 0×05:TONE_PORTA_VOLUME_SLIDE 0×06:VIBRATO_VOLUME_SLIDE 0×07:TREMOLO 0×08:PANNING 0×09:SAMPLE_OFFSET 0×0A:VOLUME_SLIDE 0×0B:POSITION_JUMP 0×0C:SET_VOLUME 0×0D:PATTERN_BREAK 0×0E:EX_EFFECT 0×0F:SET_SPEED |
0xE0:SET_FILTER 0xE1:FINE_SLIDE_UP 0xE2:FINE_SLIDE_DOWN 0xE3:GLISSANDO_CONTROL 0xE4:VIBRATO_CONTROL 0xE5:SET_FINETUNE 0xE6:PATTERN_LOOP 0xE7:TREMOLO_CONTROL 0xE8:KARPLUS_STRONG 0xE9:RETRIG_NOTE 0xEA:FINE_VOLUME_UP 0xEB:FINE_VOLUME_DOWN 0xEC:NOTE_CUT 0xED:NOTE_DELAY 0xEE:PATTERN_DELAY 0xEF:INVERT_LOOP |
Sound Effects
There have been no sound effects entries yet!
Graphics
I’ve also gotten some great graphic entries. Eric F. has made some great contributions, including an interesting take on the bat.
For the graphics, leave the backgrounds transparent, and feel free to send in a larger size, or add frames if you think they are needed – I will do any necessary conversions. I’m also open to any new ideas you might have.
Because animating takes a lot of work, I’ve decided to choose certain characters in the next couple weeks. Once a character is chosen, no further designs will be accepted, so the creator can finish the animation without worrying about his/her time being wasted. This is especially important for the main Jetman, since he has several frames.
Levels
There have been tons of levels submitted that I haven’t had time to review yet. From what I’ve seen, I think we have a lot of hard levels, and could probably use some more on the clever puzzle side, and some on the easy side. We want to appeal mainly to casual gamers – for hardcore gamers there will be a difficulty level that speeds up the enemies. It occurred to me that it may help to know my favorites, so here they are:
- 70: Work Those Leg Muscles – my all time favorite, varied tests of skill
- 40: The Gauntlet – like an obstacle course, a feeling that you’re being tested
- 30: Mission Possible – a feeling of a mission in an exotic location
- 04: The Complex – a feeling of escaping, or intruding into a fortification
- 12: Fuel Shortage – not sure why I like this one, maybe just the simplicity
- 50: Montezuma’s Revenge – has a jungle feeling
- 90: The Volcano – original use of devices, you have to find a way to penetrate the structure
Analyzing these selections, they have a few things in common: There’s a feeling of adventure within the level, each level has distinct sections, you can easily form your own story behind the level, and you have a feeling of outsmarting & conquering something big at the end. They are all tricky without being too frustrating – I’d say a couple of these are close to the limit of how hard a level should be in a casual game.
More Features
Time is tight on this project, and I haven’t planned any gameplay enhancements, but it would be nice to have a couple of new things. There may or may not make it into the final release, but here are a few I’m considering:
- multi-tile scenic objects on the background wall – brickwork, shackles, tapestries, windows, etc
- a new enemy
- a new gameplay/puzzle element
- some physics effects
All the public entries this week are below.
Feb 5th
Here’s our first submission, some sweet tunes from coda:
Coda: Rad
Coda: Puzzling
Coda: Phenomenon
A level by Nick R.: nickr_1.zip
Feb 6th
A stomping track by Saga Musix:
Saga: song1
Some hard levels by Joe C.: joec_1.zip
Feb 7th
A bassy tune by Travis R.:
Travis R.: Bass
More hard levels by Saga Musix: saga_1.zip
Some more levels by Joe C.: joec_2.zip
Feb 8th
More levels by Saga Musix: saga_2.zip
Levels by Ben T.: bent_1.zip
Levels by Eric F.: ericf_1.zip
Feb 9th
Some simple graphics from Eric F.:
More levels by Eric F.: ericf_2.zip
A cool teleporter concept from Eric F.:
Feb 10th
Lots of contributions today!
Another level by Saga Musix: saga_3.zip
A pack of levels by Sebastian M.: sebm_1.zip
A pack of levels by Joe S.: joes_1.zip
A tight robot by Eric F.:
Some new bat graphics by Henry F.:
Feb 11th
Another song by Travis R.:
Travis R.: Icy
New graphics from Eric F.:
A few new tiles from Jason W.:
And a bunch of levels! If you find any favorites when playing these, point them out to me and I’ll give them extra attention.
ericf_3.zip
arthurm_1.zip
jonasr_1.zip
sn_easy_1.zip
sn_hard_1.zip
The contest is now over. See the winners here!
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February 13th, 2010 at 7:27 pm
Coda’s music sounds about fifty times more amazing when downloaded and listened to using a real music player.
Saga Musix’s Step into the Cave has a nice beat, but the buzzing bass-like instrument is only played on the right side of my stereo headphones. Makes it somewhat unpleasant to listen to. Different instruments are played on different sides in the flash player, too. Dunno if this is some limitation of the MOD format or what.
Bass sounds incomplete. I know it’s supposed to be a background tune, but it sounds like it’s missing a layer even so. Also, it only plays on one side of my headphones in your flash player. It sounds OK in Totem.
Icy is good, but it suffers from the instrument split in the flash player again.
February 13th, 2010 at 7:36 pm
You’re 5 minutes too soon! I just uploaded a new flash player that fixes a lot of the issues (hopefully). Do a hard refresh and give it a try now.
February 13th, 2010 at 9:20 pm
E1 – Nicely done. The two gems in “quadrant3″ of the screen gave me some difficulty. After some timing, though, I was able to pull it off
February 14th, 2010 at 3:04 am
I vote for Coda to do all the music. It’s the best of the three and keeping a similar feel going throughout the game is important.
February 14th, 2010 at 3:14 am
I like all the music tracks so far, they’re surprisingly fitting.
Feb. 5: I think Avalanche is a perfect fit. It’s simple to the point of being straightforward, but actually dodging all of the steel balls as the player goes back and forth is a nice, small challenge that changes every time thanks to the random nature of the teleporters.
Feb 6: I don’t really like Blue Ball. The player is immediately in danger as a steel ball rolls through a complex series of switches…it’s really too much because the player has no time to react.
Cavern, Rock Maze, and The Run mostly involve collecting gems away from localized, even boring enemy placement, so I don’t like those too much either. Out of Gas is alright, but there’s no variation between the three teleporter segments. The only level in this set I like is The Shrine, but I think another half fuel tank might make it more manageable for most players, and having more than one homer in a level seems redundant to me, unless there’s no room to maneuver them into one.
I’m planning on submitting a few levels as well. In the meantime, I’ll try to go through the other submissions…
February 14th, 2010 at 7:23 am
@Facebook User: As Adam says, the player has been updated to support 8xx panning. I do take care of panning, you know, and I was not very happy at first when I heard that FLOD doesn’t support 8xx panning.
But the track sounds pretty good now in FLOD.
February 15th, 2010 at 5:41 pm
Please do not choose a character!
It is very annoying to work with other peoples made character and animate them….
I personally was planning to do the whole sprite set on my own, and I expect more people were planning too. If you take a bit of the one sheet and a bit of the other, you will get a big mess of non complimenting cheap images….
If you want a nice look in one feel, you have to have 1 guy on the job. Or at least split it.. Like someone entering all the BG images, some guy entering all the character animations, etc….
But don’t just take whatever random image you like best and put them all together..
Also, to the competitors: Watch that size limit! Those large images look cool when large, but when shrunken to 30×30 (strange size, why not 32×32?) they look terrible!!!!
You will hear from me soon, I have a week vacation and planned to spend it on this sprite sheet!
Daniel, pixel artist ( http://www.mrlollige.com )
February 17th, 2010 at 6:01 pm
The shrinking problem is true for a lot of images, there are ways of lessening it though. If in doubt, send in both sizes.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to do the whole sheet, but I appreciate it!