DragonWrath

About

This is my submission for KrampusHack 2020 (Gift for RmBeer who wanted a fury of dragons!! 🎉).

It's a shoot-em-up where you, a dragon protagonist, take on waves of dragon enemies in an attempt to restore peace and tranquility to your kingdom. There's currently 1 level (which you can actually edit! ) and a boss.

Screen Shots

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Downloads

• DragonWrath Repo on Github

• Source and Data Files

• Windows Binary

• MacOS Binary (not as app package)

Instructions

• Use the arrow keys to move the dragon up and down

• Press the spacebar to shoot, and hold to repeat refire

With more time, I would have added a limitation that you can only refire at the set rate. Currently you can re-press the spacebar quickly to refire faster than the rate limit.

Giftee Wishes from RmBeer:

1. DRAGONS!!! I love dragons and you can't miss it!!! IT CAN NEVER BE MISSING!!! \o/ (A horrible punishment awaits you by the worst art >:@ )

2. Make your game exciting and overloaded, like Counter of Sega Genesis style, although it does not have to be action platform like in the game, all you need are fast movements, explosions, races, missiles and shots, whatever crazy chaos you may have it occurs to you, even if it's a quiet puzzle game take it out of its place.

3. Write a funny story for the game. Apply animations, pixart, dialogues, or whatever seems most comfortable to you as long as you can add the story to the game.

Notes:

As far as the wishes, I managed to get in dragons and picked the most furious genre I know of, which is a classic arcade shooter. It's missing a compelling story and storyboards, but should have a decent flurry of classic side-scrolling fun.

What's missing most is the behavior for the last boss, which currently is just him staying there and taking damage if you shoot him. Hopefully you don't run into him and lose a life in the battle!

By the way, if you wanted to, you could modify the data/levels/level_1.generated.json file and make your own waves of dragons! The structure should be pretty clear what each of the elements represent, and you might take a look at the scripts/ folder which has the ruby scripts I use to generate the json for the first level .

I hope you enjoy it!

Excuses / Pleas

• My submission was submitted a little late, but I've provided the entry as-is without any post-deadline-added features.

• If I had more time, I would have liked to expand the boss behavior which is what I was in the middle of doing before I crashed hard at the end of the day. The game is probably only about an hour's work away from having the final boss dragon being a compelling enemy.

• I had hoped to work in animation on the player dragon and enemies. They are currently static, and the only animations at this point are the poof explosions.

• I hoped to add a ton more explosions. I have the assets and sound effects for them, the engine should support a smooth install of any new animation frames/sequences, but I didn't get to it and preferred gameplay tweaks instead.

Celebrations / Achievements

• I'm really excited about this architecture, which is one of my favourites so far and a culmination of a lot of hard work and attempts and iterations from years of past work, most notably previous KrampusHacks.

This time around, the system showed itself to be able to handle much more abstractions, and I feel like the next instalment might approach a development style that's more "game-out-of-a-box". I absolutely loved the workflow of switching between the different platforms to test builds.

Live Streaming

This year I did a lot of live streaming. What an amazing experience! It was challenging to talk as I coded, but it ended up being so much fun I got a sweet mic to level up the experience. I also managed to iterate over my setup several times each day (I tried to "pick one simple thing each day to improve the stream") and finally got an incredible setup where I could switch between development on MacOS and Windows, all while switching the streaming feed seamlessly. For what that was like, here's a clip I recorded from about day 7 :

https://youtube.com/v/9SB8iDNoVws

Edit: For some reason allegro.cc is pruning my screenshots/attachments. I've re-uploaded the attachments and moved files to Google Drive so hopefully it works.

It's very good. I liked it. I like art and its style, it reminds me of arcades. You achieved the wish I most wanted, I'm already satisfied. xD

The game is very well done!!

He still has some problems. Since I'm unable to change the screen resolution, I have checked the source code and all the size values are scattered throughout the code. It's also slow, it even causes delays in events, I don't know what the problem is.

I would like to see it finished, with more levels, if you plan to continue working on it. :3

g++: error: unrecognized command-line option -ferror-limit=1

This error appear in linux, you need avoid this parameter also in this system.

Nice entry, liked it. Remind me of old NES/SNES games.
A few things:
-Had to build it myself because it's compiled for msvc but the dlls are not provided (not a big deal, thought it's giving a giga tons of warnings)
-Speed, power level and stuff got reset when I met the boss. I was having a super blaster/full shield/one speedup the instant before the end of the level, and then it went back to basic.
-The last boss was not moving at all nor throwing things. I just had to stay in line and wait for him to die

The makefile did not work (and the .exe was missing DLLs so had to build myself):

compiling object file src/allegro_flare/path2d.cpp...g++: error: unrecognized command-line option ‘-ferror-limit=1’

However just removing that option fixed it!

The game is really nice, reminds me of Pegasus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AJZPxw8nmkU

I wish there were more levels (and a way to resize the window to 2x the resolution).

This appeared on Windows during compile, too. You're on Linux? That flag is used entirely for development and can be removed. Essentially it makes it so a single error doesn't spill out into the terminal as a cascade of error messages that I have to scroll up on.

Ah, I completely neglected to include the dll files . I have a list somewhere. I may have some time after work today to fix it up.

On both of these, I actually had a "releaser" program that was designed to do all this work for me, dlls, cleanup Makefile. I should have leaned on that. I did write some documentation on it at some point.

Ah, thank you. I appreciate that. I definitely learned a lot this time around. Again, the architecture is designed to be maximally flexible. I was watching Contra: Hard Corps yesterday and was watching all the varieties of enemies and designs for bosses and backgrounds. In principle, DragonWrath should be able to handle those designs. The majority of the work is explicit design and programming work on those enemies, backgrounds, and environments directly, rather than "making it work" in the system . Once I get past the hangover of the hackathon and starting back work again in 2021, I hope to have some time to really explore that and design some really compelling gameplay, which is a level of game programming I've never been able to get to .

OMG it's the saame game!! 🤯🤯🤯

Thank you. My typical approach in the past has always been to do everything myself (graphics, music), but that is such a major time sync and that make it harder to have a birds-eye view. I've never "finished" a project, and I believe this is one of the major reasons why.

Also at work, when we talk about advancing in your career it usually comes with a discussion about delegating tasks to other people. So, I've tried to take that a little more seriously in order to get projects closer to completion.

I really liked the general design. I would love to have a small team (composer, graphic artist) who can dedicate their craft as I focus on the engine. Ironically, I don't find myself compelled as much with the gameplay design. So many different hats.

Cool. Maybe I could setup a Raspberry PI to run linux builds just to be sure there's not bumps on the platform.

DLLS, yea I completely dropped the ball on that.

Ok, I can make a Windows binary bundle and will hopefully upload it in a few days. I do have a list of the needed DLLS in a text file somewhere.

Can't play it:

I'm using Windows 7. The window is massively big and part of it overfloods the destktop (the title, so I can't move it). Initially I presumed it was because I use two monitors, but I've deactivate the second one and it just returns a runtime error (Windows doesn't give any detail, you know, a "it just failed and Windows is looking for a solution" type of
dialog).

The window should be a standard 1920x1080. What kind of monitor do you have? Is it a retina? I've had some issues with other programs creating windows that are way too large, but I don't believe that should apply in this case.

This is what my krampushack game uses:

ALLEGRO_MONITOR_INFO info;
al_get_monitor_info(0, &info);
int w = info.x2 - info.x1;
int h = info.y2 - info.y1;
al_create_display(w * 3 / 4, w * 3 / 4 * 9 / 16, ALLEGRO_RESIZABLE);

My game itself uses a fixed 1280 x 720 resolution but I call al_set_clipping_rectangle() to limit drawing to the largest 16:9 ratio area in the center and create a transform with al_scale_transform() and al_translate_transform() to map any coordinates from 0/0 to 1280/720 into that area. For drawing I use it with al_use_transform() and for mouse coordinates I apply the reverse transform.

Of course I'm not using any pixel art so that makes it easy to just transform coordinates

1366x768

I think this is true.

At my work we have a "sympathy station" where we have a "typical customer"'s computer so we can understand what their day-to-day is like.