Death Kart!

[Funlife2003]

"You are an orphaned kid, left behind by careless parents. Run aways, stow aways, left adrift in an uncaring world. But there are others like you, living in abandoned buildings, the ruins of an old Renaissance Faire, and other places forgotten in an ever changing society.

And here you will fight. There will be only one winner. Battle with shopping carts, battle to the death. Show them the wild side, and why your parents tossed you aside like old trash."

surprisingly intense backstory. you did this with your kids ?

[zorg]

surprisingly intense backstory. you did this with your kids ?

Life lessons seem to have started early

[Funlife2003]

lol.

[pauljessup]

My kids are both teenagers, and they came up with all of that. All I said was "hey let's do a game jam"...

then my son said "Let's do a cart racer! but only in battle mode!"

And my daughter said, "Yeah!"

And then my son said, "And they fight with shopping carts! Cause they're kids"

And my daughter said, "Let's make them feral kids left to fend for themselves, fighting to survive!"

And thus it happened. They're both later teens with a grim sense of humor, and it's awesome.

[pauljessup]

I used both the executable and the .love file. The executable at least ran better (32-bit Windows 7).

Ah, suckage. Sadly, since I use OSX for my development and stuff, I didn't get a lot of time to test it on Windows, and the only Windows I tested it on was Windows 10. I wonder if it's an FPS issue or something else...

Not sure why it would be the FPS slowing down, I'm not doing anything super intense during the game. Maybe if the fire started it would slow down, maybe...

[zorg]

I can test tomorrow on a 64bit win7 as well.

[pauljessup]

Oh, excellent! Thanks for helping me track this down.

We plan on doing a full version of the game later, with a better solo mode, and improved SNES style graphics, more levels, items, etc. I think I'm going to have tor rewrite the input code and some other issues that keep cropping up before we get that out...

[zorg]

So, i tested the .love file version, and the only real issue i had was that my inputs were eaten randomly; usually every second keypress worked, but not always. (you did mention fixing input so that's probably on the list )

As for gameplay, the movement is indeed like 1-2 pixels per second... at the start; it speeds up if you hold down the y button (which was Z for me due to my layout being QWERTZ; please consider using scancodes instead of keyconstants)

FPS was fine, although idk about sleeping in update; this modification to that function made it work like how it worked previously:

Code: Select all

function love.update(dt)
    if dt >= next_time then
        OFFSETX =            (((love.graphics.getWidth()  - 1280)/4)/2)
        OFFSETY = math.floor((((love.graphics.getHeight() -  720)/4)/2))
        --call fsm.
        fsm:update(dt)
        next_time = next_time - dt + min_dt
    else
        next_time = next_time - dt
    end
end

[pgimeno]

I found the dark humour delightful

My main problem was the responsiveness of the menus. They seem to be sampled at regular intervals, and that's a problem for usability; I suspect that's what zorg has reported. If you don't keep the key pressed until the next time the input is sampled, the press won't do anything.

I think that instead of doing that, pressing a key that causes some effect should start a timer so that this key is ignored for as long as the timer lasts. For example, if you press down to go to the next option in the menu, after going down a timer is started, and until it expires, the down key is ignored, to avoid getting one movement per frame. The timer should be immediately expired if you release the key, so that if you press again it responds instantly.

Here's an example with plain Löve and the keyboard:

Code: Select all

local isPressed = love.keyboard.isScancodeDown
local downTimerExpiry = 0.5
local downTimer = downTimerExpiry -- start expired
local option = 1

function love.update(dt)
  if isPressed("down") then
    if downTimer >= downTimerExpiry then
      -- timer expired - take action here...
      option = option + 1
      -- ... and start the timer
      downTimer = 0
    else
      -- advance the timer
      downTimer = downTimer + dt
    end
  else -- not pressed - reset timer
    downTimer = downTimerExpiry
  end
end

function love.draw()
  love.graphics.print(tostring(option))
end

You can see that the response is immediate when you press the key, but if you keep it pressed, it advances at 0.5 second intervals. If you release and press again, the response is again immediate. So if you want to go faster, you can press multiple times and it will respond instantly to each press.

[pauljessup]

I use a timer with the menu's- I just have to tweak how it works. I have a way of fixing it- the code I used in another game works fine, this one was something I was throwing together super quick for the game jam, so I do know how to fix that.

As for the sleep timer thing- I'm not sure how else to cap the FPS? Other than using vsync, but that doesn't work 100% on all systems...