Xmas Bonus Beta (Please Test)

OK people here it is!

[edit] Testing over, just get the demo from ...

http://www.cloverleafgames.com/game.php?id=1025

Min Specs: 500MHz, 64Mb RAM, 800x600x32bit colour, DirectX 1, Win 98/ME/XP, 10Mb Disk Space, Sound Card (recommended)






Fancy an XMAS BONUS? Then download this festive puzzle game from Grey Alien Games. Line up the seasonal shapes against winter snowscape backgrounds, but don't chill out too much or the candle will burn out before you've cleared the grid. Swap shapes to score points with the help of exploding puddings, shooting stars and crazy crackers, topped off with some of your favourite Yuletide tunes. Come and join the festive fun!

Features:

# Seasonal fun
# Addictive gameplay
# 100 levels
# Crazy bonus items
# Boss Key!

This beta actually only has 50 levels, I'm making the others right now! Read the readme.txt for interesting keys like B (Boss Key) and for the credits.

It's time to anounce my partnership with Indiepath on this one, they have been absolutely brilliant with this project, professional, supportive and helpful all the way, thanks!

OK, I know its a shape matching game, but I think it's nicely done with some original stuff; give it a go and see, it's very addictive! The theory is that this sorta game will sell well in what's left of the run up to Christmas and also, as it's my first commercial release, I didn't want to spend 4 years developing a 3D masterpiece only to see it flop ;-)

[EDIT] Please read the instructions as some people don't seem to get that you have to make all the tiles gold to complete a level.

Feedback of course is appreciated, especially of the constructive criticism type as opposed to utter flaming. However, there really isn't much time to make many changes so, if you have a list of things, please make sure that I can see clearly what the major things are; smaller things will go on my wish list which is already pages long. I may well update this game and release a different version next year if this one does well.

Known Issues: The game doesn't like you pressing Ctrl+Alt+Del on Windows 2000 or XP Pro, but it's fine on other OSes, weird.

[EDIT] How to get DEBUG STATS: Press D in-game which brings up the debug stats. You can see the draw time (current/max) and the FPS (current/lowest). Sometimes the FPS lowest value really drops when redrawing alevel or using the menu so pressing D twice (off/on) resets it. The game should run at the same refresh rate as your video card e.g. 60Hz or 75Hz or 85Hz etc. If any lower I'd like to know about it! Can you post system specs?

Any positive feedback will also help immensely at this nailbiting time :-o

Thanks in advance, hope you enjoy the game!

Hey, good job, grey. It seems to work fine on my machine but you knew that already. :)

Just wondering why you're using blitzclose.dll - I thought B+ lets you detect when the close button is pressed?

Well done.

Big10p: Well, I'm not using the BlitzPlus GUI and CreateWindow I'm actually using a Graphics window that's modified by windows API calls and when in Graphics Mode, Blitz Plus doesn't pickup standard windowed events like close, nice eh? btw thanks for your help, also watch this space for Fruitola, coming soon ...

Very cool man. I like this! Tis hard tho :D

This is pretty good, if only I hadn't been playing this instead of writing docs for my module, ah well, :)

you love you sinus text, don't you? ;)

downloading now...

Grey,

I said it somewhere else too - Fabtastic man!

If you haven't tried this - go try it now - it's very nicely done indeed.

Looks great! Sounds great! Addictive (just one more go) and lots of levels to test your skill on - I can't get passed level 2 yet! Doh!

IPete2.

Sweet... Very polished. I hate xmas music, but since this is a xmas game... ;-) Nice and addictive.

great thanks all, very positive feedback. So it might be too hard eh? Those first 8 levels are tutorial ones and are easy. You haven't even seen the bonuses until level 3 and a new one is introduced each level until level 8 so get to it! I think if you've played these sorta games before it's not too hard, by now I'm a flippin expert so it's hard for me to gauge how hard they are. I was worried people would finish them too quickly which I why I'm making 100 levels not 50, lol.

VP: Yeah sinus text is old-school, I just had to put some in, better than a static font, if a bit cheesy. Looks good in game though, unusual in these days od 3D alphablended whatnots too.

Yeah sorry about the music, it's cheesy as hell but fitting so it had to be in there really. It can be switched off in options, just keep clicking until it goes past 100% to 0%.

Works good. Suprisingly fun. Seems a little slow (as in FPS) but it didn't impede gameplay.

Hey nice! What did you write this in? Blitz3d?

wrote it in blitz plus all the effects like alphablended fonts/logos, screen fades, dims, brightness, sine waves, particles etc are software rendered. I used a quintuple buffering dirty rects system to totally optimise the drawing on low spec PCs.

Octothorpe. Can you run the game and press D which brings up the debug stats. You can see the draw time (current/max) and the FPS (current/lowest). Sometimes the FPS lowest value really drops when redrawing alevel or using the menu so pressing d twice (off/on) resets it. The game should run at the same refresh rate as your video card e.g. 60Hz or 75Hz or 85Hz etc. Can you post system specs? I have noticed on one other PC a very low FPS of 12-13 even though the draw time is perfectly reasonable and the PC seems good. This seems to be a VWAIT issue. Try going into the .ini file and changing FLIP FALSE from 1 to 0, this can solve VWAIT problems on some cards.

Oh, one thing I forgot to mention grey - may not be a bug, though.

I was playing in fullscreen and pressed the Boss (B) key which minimized as expected, but when maximized again, I was stuck in windowed mode. This then became the default mode when restarting the game. I had to go to options to explicitly change back to fullscreen. No biggie, just thought I'd mention it.

thanks big10p, that's totally intentional as to minimise the game MUST go into windowed mode first and then call the minimise command. Whenever you change full-screen/windowed it get's written to an ini file as the default, this is what you got. But you know, keep trying to break it ;-)

lol. Be careful with your words - I haven't even tried Alt+tab yet and I'm on win98, remember. Be afraid, very afraid! :)

It's great, Grey. I'm not into this kind of puzzles, but I couldn't stop playing till I reached level 8 and it crashed :( (it exited while playing, no errors or anything) I hope it did save my progress, so I can continue later

It's hard but still is addictive as hell. Good job!

big10p: I've protected against alt+tab and windows key ha!

Ferminho: It will have saved your progress, don't worry. Btw level 8 is commendable! I'm disappointed it has crashed as I've played over 100 levels on it with no problems. No errors on exit is normal for Blitz Plus I'm afraid. Were you in windowed mode or full-screen? If in windowed mode did you go out of the window or anything, can you remeber exactly what you did, clicked a bonus or something? Really it could be anything I guess, I thought I had all the bugs licked, sorry :-( Anyway I;m really glad you like it :-)

Really? If this works, I'm going to want to know how you've done it. :)

/me goes off for some alt-tabbing...

I can still alt+tab out from fullscreen mode. Doesn't seem to break the game, though. I guess you're not using stickykeys.dll as I can't see it in the folder. That doesn't work on win98 at the mo, anyway. :(

Oh sorry for the confusion Big10p, I've used sticky keys as you know, before in tetroid, but not in this game as I want to allow users the option, I just made sure all the graphics are restored properly!

Ferminho: I have the answer! You played it for 60 minutes and the beta HARD EXITS, bet you can't get in again now? Hope that's it.

Ah, I see. Unfortunately, that's not something we can do in blitz3D. :(

Yes you can (I think), I did windows calls to detect if the app lost focus and when it came back I redraw all the screens thus restoring corrupt VRAM graphics, tehre was a thread a while ago where I posted my code.

OK the final version is for sale here:

http://www.cloverleafgames.com/game.php?id=1025

wish me luck!

Nice - looks great - I enjoy the music ;?

Good luck!

lol Grey! well it must be that. I haven't played again, been busy lately, but yes - in the middle of the game I went to have lunch etc so maybe it was after 60 min... no need to worry then! :)

but does that mean I cannot play anymore if I don't buy it? :_( sniff sniff

Got to level 4 on my first try, ran out of time there.
Looks pretty smooth!

Ferminho: 'fraid you need to get you wallet out, it's only $14.95, get someone to buy it as a present for you :-)

Thanks xlsior, good first effort, so you saw the bombs! Level 4 is actually quite a challenge.

The release version should reset the Beta Time Limit.

Yes and no.

Didn't realize what they were or what they did for a long time until I 'accidentally' set one off.
I guess it would have helped to read the instructions. ;-)

I'm not sure if *most* people don't read instructions or just programmers! RTFM lol.

If everything else fails, read the manual.

Version 1.01 uploaded.

Verion 1.02 uploaded.