Paratrooper Clone

Hey all. My dad and I released a game called Spacewar 2009 and week or so ago and now I'm working on a project of my own that is a paratrooper type game with aspects of the iPod game and the original one.

It is still early in development and graphics are being swapped with better ones currently. I need some good sfx still--if anyone has any ideas please let me know!

My dad and I can't figure out why when we move our images they get jumpy and weird but if we aren't moving them they are fine.

Again any comments/help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Please have a play: Download Paratrooper

Spacebar to shoot and arrow keys to rotate turret

'jumpy and weird' is not much to go by:

Does the sprite seem to skip arbitrary steps ahead? Or does it actually jump back and forth instead of smoothly one direction?

Are you clearing your background in between flips?
(Most videoadapters double- or tripple-buffer the video by default, so if you don't clear the screen or redraw the background you may see old content pop back into view 1, 2 or 3 frames later, resulting in flickering after-images. If this is happening to you, clear the screen with CLS or redraw the entire background to resolve the issue)

You can also see choppy motion when using integers instead of floats when doing your movement math -- with integers you may get rounding errors that make it stick longer than expected on certain positions because you're truncating all fractional data completely.

Hey, nice gfx!

I get the same 'jumpiness' here and have seen it in my own games. It seemed to start when I got a new monitor, which is actually an LCD tv. I don't think there's much you can do about it.

Not bad, despite its simplicity it kept me playing for a good few minutes. I suppose the way forward is to add more and more enemy types and weapons.
Also I like the way that you get more points for destroying enemies with less bullets, it stops people from just spamming the fire button.

Oh, something else: Are the dimensions of your sprites even, or odd?

If you have odd-sized dimensions and you use the auto midhandle, then you get some jumpiness between frames thanks to rounding errors as well.

Paratrooper is different as the gun was on a building, the troopers would pile up against the building till one of them could get to the gun then it was game over.

Thanks for the suggestions guys.

xlsior: I am using floats and not integers to calculate speed, and I changed all my images to even values since I am using auto midhandle.

I will definitely try out these suggestions and will keep you posted when I update the game!

-Nicholas

Yup: Three people at either side of the turret would be the end for you.

It also had a bomber come by every each level that dropped a bomb straight at you -- if you couldn't intercept the bomb, it was game over. Hitting the jet itself was bonus points.

In the original paratrooper you could also hit the parachute itself, which would then disappear causing the guy under it to plummet much faster and die on impact

the part that I love about the Ipod game is that you can hit the parachute off of them and they fall and die. can you somehow incorperate that into it. its really an addicting game.. high score 222

the part that I love about the Ipod game is that you can hit the parachute off of them and they fall and die. can you somehow incorperate that into it. its really an addicting game.. high score 222

I think this is more like the c64 game called Paratroopers, which was quite enjoyable.

http://www.lemon64.com/?mainurl=http%3A//www.lemon64.com/games/details.php%3FID%3D1891

The remake would be more like Paratroopers if it had rapid autofire.

If I remember correctly, in the c64 version when enough paratroopers had landed they would walk off screen and return in a big tank! ;)

Another thought, try setting the frames per second in your game equal with the refresh rate on your monitor and see if that removes the effect.

Shooting a paratrooper before he's out of his harness is against the Geneva Convention! ;)

Definitely going to add the hitting the parachutes to make them fall and die. It's just going slow right now as I have school and can't spend as much time on it as I would like to right now.

-Nicholas