
BERT THE BARBARIAN - public demo version #1.

This game was originally intended to be a reasonably soft re-introduction
to game programming (I haven't gotten down 'n dirty with a computer since
the days of the Z80), and my first projet with Div games studio. Many moons
have passed and the damn thing still is nowhere near finished, but I have
decided to show it to the world nonetheless since I am in sore need of some
feedback and hopefully a bit of encouragement too!

Please take the time to read my comments below, it would make me feel much
better about letting people see the game in its current state of disarray
if you kept the following in mind (humour me -there's also a couple of quite 
important things in there):




WHY HAS IT BEEN TAKING SO LONG? - MY EXCUSE...

(NOTE: Feel free to skip this bit if you're not interested in the processes
 involved....)

Programming-wise, everything has gone very smoothly and Div has proven to be
a very quick and easy way of getting the action onto the screen. What has 
been eating up my time with this project has been the graphics. I grossly 
underestimated the difference in workload between producing claymation for
film, and for videogames. With film, you place the models, take a shot, move the
models, take another shot, and so on. The same is true for games, but with the
added headache of cleaning up each frame by hand! Every frame has to be cut 
out - a blue-screen makes this easier, but since a PC monitor is a lot more 
unforgiving than a TV screen, and you don't have the option of anti-aliaing
the edges, I also go over each frame by hand and remove any stray pixels I 
find for a cleaner look. Also, in order to use the palette to maximum effect,
rather than using full colour models, I use grey models and hand colour them.
This means that I get maximum use out of each of the 256 colours Div allows,
and also lets me do palette switching effects (like the different coloured 
enemies) but is quite time-consuming. Add to this the fact that when working
in film, the animation proceeds in a linear fashion, one frame after the other,
the same is not true for games - any frame of animation could potentially lead
to dosens of others depending on what course of action the character decides to
take, but these frames must all lead on from one another as seamlessly as 
possible. Quite often I will resort to butchering a frame quite severely, moving,
rotating, even redrawing by hand elements of the frame in order that it smoothly
match up to other frames that may have been shot weeks ago.

All of this means that I spend an average of around half an hour getting each
frame ready. Bert is not a particularly ambitious project programming-wise, but
graphically he and his buddies call for quite a lot of different animation 
sequences - I think there's over a thousand different maps in there now...with 
many more to come no doubt.
Even more crazily, when I started, I decided that rather than simply mirroring
the graphics for left/right versions of the actions, I would shoot each frame 
seperately from both sides! My reasoning for this was twofold:

First, it would ensure that the shadows would always be on the right-hand side
of the character for added realism - this seems trifling, but having the shadows
on the wrong side of an element in the scene can make the whole thing seem quite 
wrong, even if you can't quite put your finger on what it is...I have been trying
to make the whole thing seem as much like a real claymation world as I can...
although I can never fully achieve this until div supports proper alphablending,
(for edge antialiasing and more convincing shadows, mostly) I still want to give
it my best shot.
 
Second, Bert is holding a sword in his right hand. If I mirrored him, he would
then be holding it in his left hand. if I wanted the frames to link up properly,
I would have to have him switch from one hand to the other in the frames leading
up to the mirroring, and this seemed unnatural. I wanted Bert to look as much as
possible like a little animated guy come to life on the screen, not just a few
frames slung together.

Following this reasoning, my course of action seemed clear, even though it 
effectively meant doublng my animation workload. Do I regret it now? Ohh yes.
I can still justify it...but it's small consolation for having to do everything 
twice.





THE BERT CONCEPT

It started as a very simple idea for a straightforward arcade style game. Imagine
yourself as a little claymtion guy in a claymation world. Other claymation guys 
attack you from all sides. However, your guy has a very large, very real (not clay)
sword, and he can slice through the enemies with it like butter.
I thought it sounded like fun - you can judge that part for yourself.
However, it's been a huge effort to get this simple vision realised, an effort which
perhaps the simple premise can't fully justify. I'm starting to think maybe I should 
spice up the gameplay a little more for added depth...I'm not talking about more 
enemies, backgrounds, timing traps, moving platforms, etc. - they're on the way for 
sure - but perhaps a MILD problem solving element too? 
Kind of like Shadow of the Beast III for example. Perhaps the odd key to collect,
lever to pull, rope to cut, barrel to push in the river, that sort of thing. Maybe
take the emphasis off straight fighting a little bit, perhaps have the occasional
little parts where enemies AREN'T advancing on you non-stop...I'd be interested to 
hear what people think about that.





SO WHAT'S DONE? WHAT'S STILL TO COME?

At the moment Bert only has a very limited repetiore of moves. Basically he runs,
swipes, crouches, creeps along, can do little rolls (press down while running - 
this is handy for taking out knife throwers, but dangerous against sword guys), jumps 
and can do big overhead chops (press attack while jumping sideways). An important 
element of the concept was that Bert would be able to pull of a respectable variety 
of moves and combos, so you can really go to town dicing up those guys. Given the 
amount of effort I'm putting into the animation, this will take some time, but try 
to imagine, as you're playing, Bert doing all sorts of other cool moves with his
sword. An important element that's not yet implemented is the ability to skewer the
enemies. After a skewer, Bert will be able to do several things to the unfortunate guy - 
including flinging him over the shoulder and kicking him off the point - these last
two moves, I'm planning, will be able to knock down any nearby enemies approaching 
from behind and in front, respectively. It won't kill them, just slow them up a bit.
Also, some quite important things are still missing from Bert's repetiore - like the
ability to attack while jumping straight up! And some moves can be quite unresponsive,
for example jumping straight after a sword swing. This will be sorted out in time...
but it shouldn't bother you too much for now, since another important aspect that's 
missing is the part where Bert gets hurt! Do me a favour and pretend like you're trying
not to get hit anyway.

The enemies are pretty darn basic at the moment too...some more exotic ones are planned.
Also the ones that ARE there don't do all the things they should. So they behave quite
strangely sometimes - like walking out into thin air! These aren't really bugs, it's just
half finished code and missing graphics etc, so please try to ignore it.
Also, the bad guys just appear randomly at the moment. This isn't the plan. Soon I'll be
incorporating bad guy placement into the level editor which I'm guessing will make a big
difference to gameplay. At the moment you don't get many bad guys if you run around a lot,
so I suggest staying in one spot and letting them come to you if you want some carnage - 
try defending the bridge for example.

The background should be considered STRICTLY PRELIMINARY, I haven't really spent much time
on it yet - finished levels will have much more detail and variety, as well as animated
aspects like waterfalls, fluttering flags...once again, please use your imagination.
What I have included here is not a real level, just all the stuff i've done up till now
slung together quite haphazardly.
 
There will be traps, moving platforms, jets of flame, falling boulders and stuff like
that in the finished version. At the moment, however, I haven't even yet done the ladders
yet! (although the swinging ropes are pretty much done, however Bert's swinging on them 
still needs work. NOTE: to grab a rope, HOLD DOWN the jump button. If you release, so 
will Bert. Is this counter-intuitive, or are you okay with that? I'd like to know).

You also can't finish the level yet. Nor can you die except by falling off the bottom of
the level. And even then you won't lose a life cause that's not done yet either. If you
get to the end of the level, all that will happen is you will rather disappointingly fall 
off the edge of the map and get put back at the start. Sorry - consider this your fair 
reward for finishing a level where the bad guys can't hurt you yet!

Also, the ripped music is just temporary...until I get some proper music recorded. Title
music to come too. In fact, all the sound effects should be considered temporary (most of
them are just the closest thing I could find in the div library) until I get around to 
recording the real thing.
UPDATE: - I have removed the ripped music file and replaced it with a small, blank pcm...
 since it turned out the file made the zip twice as big....so, you can still turn the 
 music on and off, but now the music is just a short looped silence...feel free to whisle.

High scores, credit sequence, that whole bit: still to do.

Numerous bug fixes and general housework and tidying: ditto.

There is a wierd bug concerning redefining the keys...sometimes pressing the cursor up key
returns a keyboard code it shouldn't...and for some reason the left and right keys return
this same code too...I've gone over the code, no problem there...and it only happens some
of the time...so I guess it's either a Div bug or something screwey with my PC...please
let me know if this happens to you, I HOPE it won't...!


SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS

I'd be interested to hear your results. It should run at 26 fps (the fps is displayed top 
left), but the minimum requirements have been steadily creeping up....I estimate you'd 
probably need a 350mhz by now...I'm not going to let that worry me too much for now, I'm
just going to add everything I think should be there, and see how high the requirements
are at the end of it all. I might even add a couple more layers of parallax yet, that should
eat up a bit more CPU...
When it's finished, I'll probably go through the code and produce a "low spec" version
(lower graphic res, less non-essential stuff going on) for people with slower computers. 
I'm not sure how much RAM is required either...there's a fair amount of graphics loaded in,
and it's going to get worse! So if you have less than perfect results,
please let me know.





OTHER STUFF YOU MIGHT POSSIBLY BE INTERESTED IN

if you press "1" during the game, you can switch to an alternative set of clouds.
if you press "m" during the game, you get to see the hardness map in action.

Of course these will be removed for the final release!






QUESTIONS? COMMENTS? CRITICISMS?

Please e-mail me at jilliant@ihug.co.nz. 
Thanks for taking the time to read this. Hope you like the game.


- Anthony


PS all this work - graphics,code etc is (c)2000 to me - a mere formality....
