Sombrero - OUT NOW!

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  • digitalsoapbox Just a few questions, sorry if these have been mentioned already...

    1. What is the size of the layouts?

    2. What are you using to control the zoom and scroll on the 4 player matches? It is VERY smooth.

    3. Are you requiring controllers to be used? (If so I assume it is not a windows 8 app)

    4. Are you using anything that is specificly webGL (shaders, particles, etc...)

    5. Is this meant to be a PC only game?

    Thanks!

  • Softloulou Thanks!

    Beaverlicious I'll be doing some form of alpha testing starting in a month or so. I'm in the middle of adding in the additional player character choices, now that we have Spriter character map support in C2. I also want to get at least one more stage map in there for testing.

    BluePhaze

    1-Layout size is 640x360, and scales up to whatever monitor resolution. All of the gameplay is based off of the 640x360 size. The actual STAGE size clocks in a bit over 5k, but the camera zooming & scaling keeps most of it contained within the layout.

    2-Magicam. It is such a blindingly awesome timesaver to use.

    3-Final release will allow one player to use a mouse, but the others will be locked to gamepads. Controls are twin stick + a jump button, and that'd be really awkward with lots of people on a single keyboard.

    4-Shaders are WebGL, for the smoke particle effects mostly, so they blend together nicely. There's also some newly-added shader-based distortion effects around the explosions (that's why the ladder is warped in that last screenshot post). Any tile without interactivity is pasted into a Paster object, so that's also pretty WebGL-heavy.

    Interesting (to me, at least) WebGL stuff:

    Loading times still stay pretty low at a few seconds on initial stage load, though loading speed, and pasting a few thousand objects on stage load, seems to be entirely tied to the speed of the GPU, so those with lesser GPUs may see a longer loading time. Testing on a GTX460, loading time increases, but it's still only around 10-15 seconds and performance at 1080p sticks to 60fps. On a GTX770 it's around 3-5 seconds and the fps is whatever refresh rate my monitor is set to, up to the monitor's max res (2560x1440@120Hz). On a laptop-based Intel 4000 loads times are still pretty snappy at 8-10 seconds, but performance drops a bit - 720p is still 60fps but 1080p gets really flaky and varies between 35-45fps. Poor lil fella can't handle it. For those lesser GPUs I'll probably put in some way to turn off some of the eye-candy WebGL effects that don't affect gameplay. Or maybe Ashley will find some magical way to allow us to change the resolution the monitor is running at .

    5-Windows, OSX, Linux. Consoles once C2 has support for them. I've started reaching out to my contacts at MS and Sony to bug them to respond to Ashley's requests on how to go about adding said support. Unfortunately most of my contacts at both places are on the PR side of things, and they can be...less than helpful, let's say...when asked about tech-related questions. At one point I considered Ouya, but so far as I can tell that's pretty much a dead console and I have my doubts as to its ability to run Sombrero at my self-required 60fps framerate, let alone a smooth 30fps.

  • digitalsoapbox So you are running at 640x360 and it is scaling to show pretty much the entire stage without performance loss and also keeping the graphics very crisp... it is hard to tell from the video but it looks like it is scaling to 1080 without any hickups or visual quality loss. Hard to wrap my head around a 640x360 running at much larger resolutions without any visible perf or clarity loss.... Unless I am reading that wrong...

    Oh and I forgot to ask is it node-webkit or just browser based HTML5 export?

    Oh and also, it looks GREAT! Awesome work!

  • Look alike the game called "Bagman" brings back good memories, one of my favorite games

  • BluePhaze It's all about the scaling. During most gameplay, the zoom scale (in Magicam) is set pretty low - 0.1 to 0.175. I THINK I recorded the video at 720p so that the screen capture on Twitch didn't knock on the framerate too hard. Without video capture running, it stays pretty stable at 60fps/1080p on most desktops, though as I mentioned previously on Intel laptop GPUs it seems to have a bit of trouble about 720p unless I drop the Paster resolution to 50% of the level's pixel size. My target is node-webkit, though it seems to run fine in Chrome when I've tried previewing it in Chrome. On Windows 8 on a tablet, IE11 performance is actually better than Chrome's, probably because it's been optimized to run on the newer ARM CPUs and Chrome hasn't (as far as I can tell).

    iceangel Never heard of it, but I'll check it out!

  • digitalsoapbox Thanks! I haven't checked out paster yet, what does it do for you? My dev machine died so I won't be able to play with construct 2 for a week or two or I would just install it myself.

  • I paste all tiles with no interactivity (7000+ sprites) into just a few Paster objects, vastly reducing my object count - 6000+ sprites get reduced to 7 Paster objects. On the level in posts above, I end up with, max, 687 sprites, most of which are invisible and are used for collision purposes only (standing on platforms, ladders, etc.).

    Doing it this way lets me use a ton of layers in the Tiled (mapeditor.org) file without having to worry about how many sprites I'm potentially bogging C2 down with, as well as reduce the amount of layers I'm using in C2 for parallax, since in the end the "shadows" on each platform end up as part of the same Paster object as the platforms they're "shadowing." It also means I get to keep the amount of actual art pretty low, because what looks like tile variations is really just multiple layered images that get slapped on top of each other in a single Paster object.

  • Another quick update!

    I've become a bit sick of staring at the original stage loading screen, It's animated, which is nice, but otherwise it's just some text on a simple background.

    So, I decided to make things a bit more lively, and now each stage will get it's own classic animation-style title card, featuring unique illustrations for each and every stage. It means a whole bunch of extra work (and rewriting the stage loading), but in the end, I think it'll be worth it. Hopefully .

  • Great. I love it!!

  • For those in the Boston area, we'll be showing Sombrero on June 28th at Microsoft's Cambridge offices. C'mon out, give Sombrero a whirl - we'll be easy to find on the 10ft+ projection screen - and try some of the 40+ other games that will also be there!

    http://www.meetup.com/boston-games/events/180553042/

  • Meet the newest addition to the Sombrero player characters: Jim from Cleveland!

    ...You're not from around here, are ya Jim?

  • Check out the first shot of the newest Sombrero stage, Jones Hill Cemetery! It also shows off the newest feature, destructible platforms!

    Check it:

    Larger version:

    http://sombrero.pixelmetal.com/images/joneshillcemetary_02.png

    Things are moving along more quickly, so expect more regular updates as Sombrero gets closer to its public alpha.

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  • Lovely art style. The backgrounds remind me of the old Roadrunner cartoons for some reason...

  • Lovely art style. The backgrounds remind me of the old Roadrunner cartoons for some reason...

    Because they're supposed to. With maybe a little bit of Samurai Jack mixed in. Clampetts Hideway, Jones HIll Cemetery...look up Bob Clampett & Chuck Jones!

    Also, just finished up the prototype for the stage select screen today. The game pulls in xml files and builds the menu dynamically...which will probably be more impressive when there's more than 2 stages. It still needs some graphical love but hey, it's working! Link: https://twitter.com/PixelMetal/status/489085971770925056

  • digitalsoapbox yep I'm aware of those animators ;p

    But yeah, Samurai Jack! That's probably what I was thinking of but only seen a few eps of that and waaay more Roadrunner from childhood so...

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