Recent posts by eatjason on Kongregate

Topic: General Gaming / Dark Ages TI-83

oh boy, a guide to my goofy calculator game. I think I’ll make some additions…

Bless is a weaker form of Power Boost, I believe they boost defence and power at the same time. Bless just boosts less than Power Boost. Life is a revival spell. Therefore, the character you use it on has to be dead for it to work.

A tip for early battles, you want to fight groups of slimes with maybe a stronger monster in the group. Focus fire the strong monster, because taking hits from slimes isn’t as punishing.

Here’s a the list of monsters. The Hit Percent is also the percent chance the monster will use a special attack, using the inverse. So % chance using a special = 100 – % hit (For Evil Mage: 100% – 45% = 55% chance of using special)

Slime:
Hit Points: 5-9
Power: 1
Resistance: 2
Hit Percent: 35%
Gold: 2
Experience: 1
Specials: None

Troll:
Hit Points: 2-19
Power: 4
Resistance: 8
Hit Percent: 45%
Gold: 8
Experience: 4
Specials: None

Scorpion:
Hit Points: 10-19
Power: 6
Resistance: 10
Hit Percent: 50%
Gold: 10
Experience: 7
Specials: Posion

Evil Mage:
Hit Points: 10-15
Power: 7
Resistance: 8
Hit Percent: 45%
Gold: 18
Experience: 12
Specials: Fire, Sleep, Heal

Wyvern:
Hit Points: 15-24
Power: 10
Resistance: 10
Hit Percent: 22%
Gold: 14
Experience: 35
Specials: Sleep, Heal

Death Knight:
Hit Points: 20-27
Power: 18
Resistance: 14
Hit Percent: 65%
Gold: 28
Experience: 20
Specials:

Golem:
Hit Points: 30-34
Power: 20
Resistance: 25
Hit Percent: 58%
Gold: 34
Experience: 23
Specials: None

Zombi:
Hit Points: 25-34
Power: 18
Resistance: 20
Hit Percent: 55%
Gold: 48
Experience: 30
Specials: Posion, Quake

Wraith:
Hit Points: 30-39
Power: 20
Resistance: 24
Hit Percent: 60%
Gold: 56
Experience: 35
Specials: Posion, Lightning, Plauge

Will-O-Wisp:
Hit Points: 30-44
Power: 16
Resistance: 28
Hit Percent: 62%
Gold: 68
Experience: 40
Specials: Lightning, Mass Heal

Ugly Beast:
Hit Points: 40
Power: 20
Resistance: 20
Hit Percent: 52%
Gold: 50
Experience: 30
Specials: Fire, Posion

Dragon:
Hit Points: 60
Power: 30
Resistance: 30
Hit Percent: 60%
Gold: 65
Experience: 32
Specials: Sleep, Quake

Warlord:
Hit Points: 100
Power: 50
Resistance: 45
Hit Percent: 65%
Gold: 70
Experience: 1
Specials: Fire, Heal, Mass Heal, Quake, Plauge, Instadeath

Rabid Monkey:
Hit Points: 100
Power: 90
Resistance: 70
Hit Percent: 35%
Gold: 500
Experience: 1
Specials: Fire, Sleep, Heal, Posion, Lightning, Mass Heal, Quake, Plauge

Rabid Monkies are found at the top most left of the swamp, the one swamp square surrounded on three sides by mountains. They must be defeated to get a perfect no death score.

Equipment:

Weapons (increase power):
Dagger: +4
Staff: +9
Copper Sword: +14
Broad Sword: +19
Magic Sword: +24
Dark Sword: +30

Armor (increases resistance):
Clothes: +4
Leather Armor: +9
Chain Mail: +14
Plate Mail: +19
Magic Armor: +24
Demon’s Armor: +30

Items:
Herbs: Restores 10 hit points
Potions: Restores 15 energy points
Curing Salves: Removes effects
Water of Life: Revives character to life with 2/3 of HP (must be dead to use)
Bottle of Holy Water: Used to finish the Warlord
Monkey Idol: Important

Topic: Kongregate / Introducing Underdog Week!

Maybe it would be best if there were no points, but some sort of medal just to show you did it, to keep it seperate from the high rated games. Maybe there should be polls to for people to vote for which underrated games should be featured…. Or maybe just have a link with featured underrated games.

Circsplosion was interesting, I would have overlooked it had it not been displayed at all.

Topic: Game Programming / Additional Files

Ahh, thanks for the suggestion, worked like a charm :).

In case anyone else had problems with this, the way it works is that you get to upload all additional files in a single zip file. The kong server then automatically extracts everything to the same folder your swf goes into. It preserves directories from your zip, so you can have any file structure you like.

One more important point is to know that when testing locally, the windows file system is used, making filename case not an issue. Once uploaded however, Urls are case sensitive. Some of my files had a .PNG extention instead of .png, and since windows doesn’t always display extentions, I didn’t see that.

I now have the preview up and running.

Topic: Game Programming / Additional Files

I uploaded a zip of additional files for my game, all images that are loaded into the game at run time. It looks like they are all there in the preview list, but I have no idea where they are exactly. I tried to just load “image.png”, but it didn’t work. Are they located at another Url? Is just the zip uploaded? I didn’t see any more information on this topic.

Also I can’t just import everything, I would have to change the code way too much.

Topic: Game Programming / Inconsistant Browser Framerates

Tracking with getTimer() is clearly the way to go. I can get my 60 fps without even skipping rendering frames. I use all bitmaps, so rendering happens really fast. One or two computer browsers do something strange and make it go 12-25 fps, but most seem to keep up. Even with 12-20 fps, my game logic always keeps up at 60 fps, although it gets choppy at that point. I have the stage frame rate set to 1000 fps, just to get it to call the function as fast as it possibly can.

http://eatjason.googlepages.com/monkey.html

Topic: Game Programming / Using blend modes to get lighting effects

Doing that only copies the alpha, but doesn’t merge it in any way. I guess that would work without a gradient, or if I never allow lights to overlap. I’m doing something now that starts out with a fully transparent image, then draws inverse spotlights onto it. The draw function already merges the two, making it more opaque when the inverse spotlights overlap. Ofcourse now I just have an inverted light mask, I wonder if there is some way to invert the alpha values without iterating though every pixel. Is there anyway to create custom blend modes or filters?

*EDIT: After messing with display objects and different hierarchies, making sure the right parent had the blendMode.LAYER I finally got this demo going.

http://eatjason.googlepages.com/lights.html

Topic: Game Programming / Using blend modes to get lighting effects

I have a BitmapData that is an all black, totally opaque image. I have another BitmapData that is a circle alpha gradient that is opaque in the middle and transparent along the edge. I need to use a blend mode to draw the circle on the black screen, to “cut out” areas that should be seen by the player. I’m thinking BlendMode.ERASE is my answer, but can’t seem to get it to work. I’m thinking it has something to do with the fact I can’t set the black BitmapData’s blend mode to LAYER (like the actionscript reference says the parents needs to be) I need some blend mode that subtracts the alpha of the source from the destination bitmap. The subtract needs to happen because I want to cut out a circle for each light source, so where they over lap will have the least alpha value. Then I take the resulting bitmap and do a copyPixels to main screen BitmapData, making any place without light sources darkend to the player can’t see.

Topic: Game Programming / Inconsistant Browser Framerates

This time I had each frame counted until the timer got larger than the start time by one second. It seems to stay between 25-35 now, 35 only happening for a brief moment. Now I’m really curious as to how I somehow got my Mozilla to play them at the proper framerate (stays consistently at 35) It only works on this computer, and not even my new one that is 10 times faster than this one. What kind of settings would make the swf play at the proper speed? I’m actually noticing that every game on here runs seemingly a bit too fast in this browser and this computer…..

Topic: Game Programming / Inconsistant Browser Framerates

I guess I need to test lower frame rates more, but I was mostly concerned with its inconsistancy. I was afraid it was something I was doing, and if I set at 30 it would be something like 10-30 fps. I’m going to try locking at 30 fps, but then having to world updates each frame. The simulation is slightly smoother with 60 fps. Plus I made some snes style tile and sprite engine, usually snes was 60 fps, but I guess that will be fine with 30 with 2 updates as well.

*EDIT: That does seem to be the case, that when I lower it to 30 fps, it jumps around from 13-29 fps. Which is really bad. Even when I just leave it at one world update per frame. I guess I have to do some testing without any logic going on.

Topic: Game Programming / Inconsistant Browser Framerates

I set it to 60 fps. Maybe I will have to add setting for if someone happens to have a browser/setup that actually maintains the set frame rate, otherwise some people would have it be too fast. I don’t see what not updating the fps counter would do, I turned it off entirely, and can tell it still falls to 30 fps. Thanks for the info.

Topic: Game Programming / Inconsistant Browser Framerates

I made a little demo program that runs fine at 60 fps when I run the swf directly in flash player, but jumps around from 30-60 fps in browsers. Do I have to just cut back on the processing and expect lower frame rates in the browser? I tested many computers and browsers, and for some reason Mozilla on my desk top ran it at 60fps, but internet explorer didn’t. Plus a friends computer (that accually has better specs) didn’t make 60 fps on either browser. Am I missing something here? I am using AS3 and CS3 to compile the swf.

Here’s a link to the demo:

http://eatjason.googlepages.com/collide.html

Topic: Game Programming / Kongregate Server Hosting

I see alot about future arragements, but I am curious how it is done at the moment with the current mutliplayer games. I see server side logic being mentioned, do they have something already that doesn’t have server side logic? Like can I open a socket to their server, and have messages be transmittied with no logic? That would work just as well for many things. The only other option would be to have seperate server hosting somewhere, since flash can’t do peer to peer.

Topic: Game Programming / Kongregate Server Hosting

Does Kongregate have any server hosting for multiplayer games? I see that they have an API in the works, but are they serving SmartFoxServer or any other server software? Or are all the mulitplayer games on there run on seperate servers?