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How good is this entry?

1 (poor) 0% 0%
2 0% 0%
3 0% 0%
4 0% 0%
5 0% 0%
6 0% 0%
7 21% 21%
8 47% 47%
9 (excellent) 31% 31%
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[Coding 2009] ono by Maxim
Post Posted: Fri Mar 27, 2009 9:50 pm
Last edited by Maxim on Wed Apr 29, 2009 7:58 pm; edited 6 times in total
Title: ono

By: Maxim

Quote
ono
---

SMS Power! 12th Anniversary Coding Competition

27th March 2009

by Maxim

http://www.smspower.org/maxim

Story
-----

You are a white circle. You shoot bullets all day long. You wish the world were
more white, like you. But it is all black. This makes you sad.

One day, some evil coloured circles started appearing around the edges of your
world. When your bullets hit them, some of their colour fell off onto the
ground. When your bullets hit them some more, they split into two smaller
circles! And when you shot them, they split too! But the tiniest coloured

circles didn't split, they just ran out of colour and disappeared.

As you idly blasted them into oblivion you noticed something surprising: red,
green and blue colours could mix to produce others! Red and green made yellow,
red and blue made purple... and when you had enough of all of them, it made
wonderful, glorious white! This made you happy.

So you took on a new mission: turn the world 100% white.

Controls
--------

D-pad = move
1 = shoot further anticlockwise
2 = shoot further clockwise
1+2 = shoot in the opposite direction

Disclaimer
----------

I realise the story might sound somewhat racially charged if you were prone to
read unnecessary things into an innocent pile of crap story. So don't.

History
-------

1.00
27th March 2009
First release

1.01
21st April 2009
Fixed collision detection bug
Fixed typos in readme
Added an error handler
Removed real-system-crashing code from music engine



ono (1).png (827 B)
ono (1).png
ono (2).png (1.32 KB)
ono (2).png
ono.zip (13.44 KB)
Download ono by Maxim
ono [v1.01].zip (13.76 KB)
Updated version, with bug fixes

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Post Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 7:28 pm
Interesting facts:
- I wrote this in its entirety from Monday to Friday last week.
- I spent the first 2 days making the title screen. I can't remember why that took so long, apart from the maths to calculate the percentages.
- It's the first SMS game to use all 64 colours simultaneously (in theory).
- It's a blatant rip off of Mono but Mono's much better... so please don't play it until you get bored of this.
- I have a feeling it will not work very well on a real system...
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Post Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 11:01 pm
Maxim wrote

- I have a feeling it will not work very well on a real system...


Doesn't even get to the title screen for me on a real sms...
However I've played it on emulator and like it a lot. Its pretty tough, I have yet to manage getting past around 40% level complete so far.
I thought it used the full pallette, its like a game and random art maker in one! I'm guessing theres limitations to using 64 colours and not every game could do it?
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Post Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 11:22 pm
Meka refuses to run it at all.. same deal wont make it to the title screen, emukon works fine though.

Nice game, I found the controls awkward though. Reminds me a bit of asteroids.
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Post Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 11:30 pm
I spent quite a bit of time with this, pretty nice stuff :D
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Post Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 11:33 pm
The first zip I uploaded won't load in Meka because its zip support is kind of lame (only loads the first file in the zip), but I replaced it with one that works. If in doubt, unzip. It was developed in Meka.

40% isn't bad, I don't think I've made 50% - but then, I have barely played it in its current state.
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Post Posted: Sat Mar 28, 2009 11:42 pm
Hah, very very good. Simple, fun, technically special. My highscore is 45.5%.
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 1:57 am
Last edited by Tom on Sun Mar 29, 2009 4:32 am; edited 1 time in total
This is awesome. But I feel that the collision system is a bit sloppy, sometimes I get hit for no apparent reason, with no enemy circles on sight at all :(
However, my high score is currently 57.1%

edit: 61.4%
But the game keeps on killing me for no reason :(
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 2:25 am
54.8% here.
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 6:06 am
Also get hit for no visible reason sometimes (and that happens in the middle of the screen, so I don't think it is an object spawn). On the other end, one time I was clearly overlapping with a small bullet and it did not register the collision :)

I played for a long time without feeling the need to rotate. It can be quite tedious to aim when rotating. I found it useful just to press 1+2 to invert, switching back and forth when needed and concentrating on my movements only.

I also played for a long time until I realized that I theory I should be trying to kill color circles in the right spot else it is doing nothing. Are you actively focusing on that or after reaching a certain % or just keep shooting randomly ?

It is overall a nice effort and particularly interesting as a SMS game. Can be interesting to high-score if 1/ collisions are fixed. 2/ maybe have a more visible difficulty ramp so it feels more difficult ? Right now it did not feel like there was a change or difficulty ramp.
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 6:26 am
Bock wrote
Right now it did not feel like there was a change or difficulty ramp.
I think the difficulty ramp is fine, actually. After a while (~40%) the enemy circles begin to appear much faster, and after another while I couldn't manage to destroy them all anymore.
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 11:02 am
The collision detection was something I spent a lot of time on, I thought I'd got the bugs out but obviously it still needs a bit more work. I played quite a lot without phantom deaths (which were very common earlier due to various bugs).

Enemies deliberately avoid spawning on top of the player, because that's mean. I considered re-enabling it because it would avoid camping in corners.

The difficulty ramping is something I had planned, but it required adding more enemy behaviours which can be increased/enabled at higher levels (I'd planned some player seeking behaviour that would get stronger). As it is, the only difficulty ramp is that enemy spawning rate increases as the percentage gets higher. But it takes a bit too long to get "frantic" - the initial spawn rate is too slow.

The idea is to make the screen white, so rotation is needed to get the screen edges and corners filled. Maybe I could have made some feedback when you weren't getting percentage points for a shot. The trick with rotation is to rotate and them manoeuvre the ship to get the fine adjustment.
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Post Posted: Sun Mar 29, 2009 5:53 pm
Well yeah, I gave this a very high vote because this is incredibly additcting (71.1% woo). But not 9 because of that collision issue :(

edit:

Beat this! :P
(though I don't get why it says 91% in game while it's really 90.9%)
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2009 5:40 pm
Wow, you're in danger of finding out what happens at 100%...

I hope I can come back to this and fix up the collisions and the real-system issues (probably the music engine writing to the GG stereo port), but for now I'm fully burned out on Z80.

It probably says 90.9 because the code to calculate the scores in each place are slightly different, and sometimes they disagree. It's another of the things I'd like to work on. Check the value in the save file (it shouldn't be too hard to find) and compare it to 1728 (which is what 100% is) to get your exact score. I could have copped out and used the integer score, I was trying to do something more clever :(
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2009 7:54 pm
Maxim wrote
Check the value in the save file (it shouldn't be too hard to find) and compare it to 1728 (which is what 100% is) to get your exact score.
Ha, found it, along with your subliminal message :)
1572 / 1728 = 0.90972
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 5:38 pm
The sound remind me a game, can i remember which one.
Have you used music from an other game ?
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 5:59 pm
Yes, the music/SFX engine is stolen from another game...
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Post Posted: Wed Apr 08, 2009 6:47 pm
Quote
the music/SFX engine is stolen from another game


Yes but which one, i can't remember.
It's a shame , because i think it's really easy
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Post Posted: Tue Apr 21, 2009 12:27 pm
I posted an updated version with:

- no more collision bug
- more chance to run on a real system (patched music engine to not try to do stereo)
- some other less exciting things
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Post Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2009 4:00 pm
Hmm, I've been trying out the new version, and I'm sorry to say that the collision bug is still there, I died three times in the middle of the screen :(
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Post Posted: Tue Apr 28, 2009 5:59 pm
Oops, I uploaded the original file instead of the fixed one! I'll re-upload when I get a chance.
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Post Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2009 12:35 pm
...done.
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Post Posted: Fri May 01, 2009 3:31 pm
Thank you so much for this.

Let's see...


Getting there


Yeah I'm gonna make it


So few squares left


Ooooh only one more :o


Yay I did it ^__^


What now? <_<


Anyone?

Maxim wrote
Wow, you're in danger of finding out what happens at 100%...
... nothing?

Oh well, I'm proud of this:

:D
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Post Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2009 6:46 pm
I finally got around to trying it on a real sms today, and its quite buggy. All the coloured squares you create flash constantly, theres single fixed in place pixels scattered around the screen, and lastly about two blocks width on the right side of the screen never has any coloured blocks appear in it. Other than that it does play as it should.
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Post Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2009 7:40 pm
I sort of expected that. It's updating 16 palette colours and there's not enough time to do them all, so some of it happens while the screen is on. That causes random pixels. I don't know what's up with the right side, it ought to get updated eventually. If/when I get time and a handy devcart I might try to fix it.
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Post Posted: Sat Jun 06, 2009 8:04 pm
While this topic has been bumped, would you mind if I make a port (or rather, a recreation) of this in VB or something? As a subproduct I'll agree with any license you decide. But I'll need some details and suggestions (e.g. suggested speed for the balls, number of hits needed to split a ball and amount of colour dropped for each hit, suggested speed for the bullets, etc...)
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Post Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 8:15 am
Instead of all that, I suggest you go to http://www.binaryzoo.com/games/mono/ and download their version.
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Post Posted: Mon Jun 08, 2009 10:33 am
Oh, I didn't know about that.
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Post Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 3:22 am
Here, have a 100% video.

After I reach 100%, I keep on shooting randomly for a little while longer until I decide to end the video by crashing against some enemies on purpose, to show the 100% on the title screen.
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Post Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 4:50 am
Great, thanks. Do the in game percentages stop working at some point? I really ought to finish this game, the extra colour-based enemy behaviour would make it much trickier...
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Post Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 9:27 am
The only percentage which didn't show up in-game was the 100% itself, which is why I died on purpose at the end of the video, going back to the title screen was the only way to prove I got a 100% for real.
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Post Posted: Mon Jul 14, 2014 9:43 am
OK - that's probably on purpose as I only reserved three sprites for that display. It only shows when the percentage increments, because I wanted to avoid sprite overflow.
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Post Posted: Tue Jul 15, 2014 11:36 pm
Now you should make a Game Gear version with all the 4096 colors :)
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Post Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 12:04 am
Hmm... Is there a 4096 colour demo for the GG? You'd need to swap 29 palette entries per line, I'm not sure if that is even possible.
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Post Posted: Wed Jul 16, 2014 2:02 am
You're right, it's probably not possible :(
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