After making Turk Hunt in less than half a day, I realized that it’s going to take maybe a year to make Shifter a beta. It can’t be completed in flowlab. Unfortunately, flowlab doesn’t support multiplayer, split screen, animated backgrounds, exporting to console, and lots of other stuff, so Shifter on flowlab is a concept that I’ll need to have ported by coders and completed.
In order to make that money, I’ve thought of making several addicting 8bit games with ads, that I can quickly make in a week or less and update occasionally, to help me save up faster.
I had considered making an off road/city infinite scrolled Excitebike NES style game where you ramp off cars, hills, and even chase and run over 8bit people, while getting score bonuses for doing damage and sweet trick combos. Excitebike is unfortunately a Nintendo game, so I could have an issue with their pesky lawyers if they decide my game even slightly resembles theirs.
Another game I considered was basically 8bit GTA style Goat Simulator but you play as a dog and terrorize a town, barking, digging, eating peoples food, pooping or peeing on their stuff, knocking stuff over, chasing them, or running away from them. Eventually I would add a mission checklist like:
House Arrest: “Bury your owner’s car keys/shoes”
Phony Hawk: “Steal a skateboard”
4 Leg Drive: “Crash a car”
Rocky 5: “Knock out all the packaging boxers in the toy factory”
Santa Paws: “Eat the whole picnic, and steal a toy for your owner’s son from the factory without losing all the weight”
Fake News: “Take the newspapers off the neighborhood doorsteps”
So on and so forth. Personally I believe the dog game could become popular and even sellable.
God I love that game… probably what inspired my Starblast series… anyway, arcade games tend to be the most successful on a phsycological scale. Im paraphrasing, because I cant remember exactly where I heard this: Your mind will always keep nagging at you to complete a task that you had already started (in this case: beat the game), but because there is no end in arcade games, you end up coming back to it eventually over and over, and it gets addicting… if that makes sense.
Thats why I tend to make arcade games rather than story oriented games- which was why I stopped crimson hunters and moved to SB…
I would have just made Vortex, but grazer couldn’t fix the heavy lag, so I’m not interested in anything I can’t make look good. Besides, I prefer making games with a bunch of buttons. I was going to have Vortex be extremely complex and have mini missions and minigames within the game modes. You could even upgrade the ship appearance with attach and get powerups like thrusters and reverse thrusters, over shield, homing, bigger laser, and the absorb enemy to get helpers. Dead game now. It had big plans.
This is crippling lag. You can’t even touch any key on the keyboard without freezing the game. Vortex was a concept, but I could probably rebuild it to be better with clean wires this time.
I think that depends on how many keyboard things you have in a single level.
When you press a key, all of the keyboard blocks resonate- to check if the key youre pressing is the key that theyre set on. And when they all check at the same time- it causes lag. This could explain why ANY key would cause it
This is just a theory though.
A good workaround to this would probably keep a maximum of 6 Keys. WASD/The arrow keys to move. An action key, and a change key. With the change key showing a bar that lets you cycle through the actions.
Also, the desktop version of SB2 seems to lag less than its web counterpart. I think it might have to do with frames going by significantly faster. You might want to download it and see.
SB2 doesn’t lag at all on Newgrounds, but does on flowlab. As for the keys, it has nothing to do with that. Vortex only has S and up left right. The proximity or whatever causes the lag makes any key freeze the whole web browser.
It’s not the lag that’s the main issue. I was going to make an Escape Tetris style game called Block Out, where you are a green block and try to not get crushed by the falling blocks. I spent about an hour or two messing around with a grid, and I can’t seem to get the game to function properly, because extracting x and y is wayyy too slow, so instead of snapping the left and right proximity boxes, they float around and follow behind, making it possible for me to get stuck in a white box, instead of not being able to move when near one. Grid physics requires a constant accurate proximity check, because position ignores solid objects. I can’t complete this game either, because of flowlab bugs. Sigh. http://flowlab.io/game/play/763516
Interesting game, sort of reminds me of The Blocks Cometh. It’s broken, though. If you hold J, you can’t die. You just climb over everything that lands near you. Fatal flaw, exploitable glitch. Didn’t even play 10 minutes and I already exploited 3 bugs.
Sigh… Even at work, I keep getting new ideas for Shifter. I’ll just work on it anyway, so maybe I can get a demo out by Spring 2018 and fund a Kickstarter.