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Rescue: The Beagles, public beta is out
June 3rd, 2008 by nenad
With Ablation X in the slow lane I decided to take on a quick mini-project. Rescue: The Beagles is a small platformer made for TIG Source procedural generation game competition. It’s actually a prototype built from scratch in about two weeks time. Pretty intense! Great many thanks to Rich Vreeland and Aesqe who worked on sonic aspects of the project. I’m a bit tired now and my website is behaving strangely so I’m calling it a day. More to come. In the meantime - download the beta.
Mando said:
Very, very nice!
Gratz
FZ
Ritgun said:
Good-! I like its solid game play.
However I think overhaul difficulty is quite hard.
Can you add ‘change game speed option’ later?
I think that will be great. :D
nenad said:
It was meant to be hard - in a sense the classical arcades are hard. I might consider adding a speed option in the future. However I think that’d just water down the action. So, for now, give it your best ;)
KosciaK said:
Great game!
Can you add saving of the config (character, music level and the most important thing - fullscreen/windowed setting)?
nenad said:
Yes, the confing will save automatically in the final version ;)
DrFent said:
Could you upload somewhere soundtrack in high quality? It’s great, really! And, I wanna moar tracks :)
shcraa said:
awesome game
KosciaK said:
Could you add version numebrs? Previous release was 1.0 public beta, the new one is also 1.0 public beta - a bit confusing. And it would be great if you keep downloads of all released version so it’s easy to upgrade/downgrade to compare gameplay.
New rebalancing you’ve mentioned on the tigsource forum - I liked previous version. It was much faster - you had to keep moving and planning your route, now there are moments were you just wait for something to happen.
nenad said:
Kosciak, I think it’s better to have only one version as far as the gameplay parameters go because there’s an online score table so every player should have an equal challenge level.
I might version it in the future although the gameplay will probably stay as is now. The rebalancing wasn’t really that significant. Tell you what, I’ll consider your comment more seriously if you put a score larger than 100000 up on the scoreboard ;)
Tim said:
A challenge from the developer - I accept! ;)
nenad said:
Umm, wait… I meant 200000 :D
John said:
This looks like something very special.
I wish I could get my pixel graphics looking that cute!
Gunnar said:
Love the game… Both gameplay and design are great.
How did you figure out the different color schemes? They’re quite sweet :)
Eric Carl said:
This is a great game! Really enjoying it. Would love to play it with gamepad support.
nenad said:
@Gunnar:
I’m not quite satisfied with the color scheme generation yet. I think there’s still a lot of place for improvement.
Anyway I approached the problem like this: first I made some color composition sketches using a vector graphics program. I analyzed my own color creating process and then tried to mimic it algorithmically. For this to function I needed to recode my color routines to work with HSL model instead of plain RGB. I normally use HSL when producing graphics because I find it to be most intuitive. Its logic is very close to the way humans tend to think about color.
The algorithm does approximately this: First it picks a base color for the terrain. This color can be of any hue but within limited saturation and lightness range. Then it chooses the sky color, again of any hue buy if the terrain is dark it will pick a light color and vice versa. This is done to assure enough contrast between sky and the land and to avoid unpleasant color clashes that tend to appear when colors of different hues but similar intensities are put together. Next step, it subtractively blends these two colors using the random alpha picked from a certain alpha range. This yields the color of the furthermost layer, simulating the aerial perspective to a degree. And last, the sun/moon color is generated using the similar “heuristics” depending on the sky color.
nenad said:
@Eric:
Compo deadline being rather tight, there was no time left to code in the pad support although I wanted to have it because of the arcadey nature of the game. I’ll probably include it in the final release. More likely the more mails I get from people asking for it ;)
Aesqe said:
gamepad support, please :)
Gunnar said:
@nenad
Actually I didn’t realize the color schemes were generated from an algorithm, but it’s a great way of making the levels appear more diverse!
I guess you could always be more particular (especially about your own work) but i think you’ve done a great job already with the color schemes :)
Locomalito said:
Great game 16: Simple, addictive, well designed and beautiful color schemes. It can be a drug… @_@
Dan said:
It’s funny. I started playing it without reading the instructions and wasn’t quite sure what the owls were for. When I read the instructions and started shooting things, the game lost something for me. It was a really enjoyable, cerebral puzzle experience without being able to shoot. You had to think ahead, and work out when to move between vertical levels based on the bad guys that were on the map to make sure you avoided them. Can I suggest to the developer that you try it without every once resorting to shooting anything and see how it feels, puzzle game wise?
Mat Burt said:
Just installed this off the PCZone demo dvd this month, and wanted to pass on my praise. Brilliant fun, reminds me exactly of the games I played growing up. Stupidly good.
Mat
Jacques said:
Damn. It’s the most addictive game I’ve played all year. Thanks for the creation.
dmauro said:
This game is really fantastic. A simple, but excellent idea and very well executed. It’s really the best freeware title I’ve played in a long time.
norb said:
hoping this makes a port over to mac os…. crosses fingers.
gry logiczne said:
This is very intresting game! Maybe it is old but excellent idea…
gry said:
Great website! Thx ;)