The Surrounded! Blog

2011 Update!

2011-09-02T14:56:00.000+01:00

Surrounded! is being recoded for iOS! More news as and when! :-)

More new codes! :-)

2009-10-05T19:09:00.000+01:00

conduct : use + and - keys to change the current musical instrument.

zombie: 3 "continues" to restart the level where you died

New code! :-)

2009-08-21T17:40:00.003+01:00

Enter the code musak (via the Options->Enter Code menu) for some musical variety in-game.

(does not work with the demo version!)

Screenshots

2009-08-12T11:17:00.003+01:00

As mentioned before, I think the promo video is a better way to see Surrounded!, however here are some screenshots for those of you with Youtubaphobia. ;-)

Click on the thumbnails for larger versions!

The Deadly Sin That Is Marketing

2009-08-10T14:13:00.003+01:00

I absolutely, completely and, in all other ways, utterly detest marketing. Now that the Surrounded! project is technically finished*, "all" that's left for me to do is sell it. If I can get the word out to enough Gamers-With-Taste (TM), then all will be sunny in my life and I won't have to go get a PJ (Proper Job) and I can continue making computer games.

Following is an example of the BS I've been reading while Googling for advice about marketing:

Create an excitement for your product/service.
Using an anonymous email address, post an article asking if anyone could recommend a good place to find "your" product/service.
Have a friend respond with your site as the best recommendation.
Have another [still creating a non-associated illusion] post that they too loved that site and speak of their experience with "your" product/service.
You, as the webmaster, can then go in and speak of your service/product using your real email address along with your signature.

I hate this sort of crap. And I absolutely refuse to send out spam emails. So what's left?

Well, I suppose, posting on gaming forums. Writing to games magazines (I've tried one already, with no reply let alone any acknowledgement; thanks a bunch!). Buying advertising banners (if I had the money, which I don't; I also have great doubts as to their efficacy). After that it's down to word of mouth...

And if anyone has any brainwaves for alternatives, please fire off an email to me or comment at the end of this post - thanks! :-)

* It's finished, yes, however today I began work on a ship-editor. Would be cool. All the in-game ships were plotted out on squared-paper, numbered, triangularized and indexed, then hard-coded into the game. How awesome would it be to do this via a GUI in five minutes...?! I could have hundreds of cool, complex ships to add to Grob's armada... :-D

Promo Video

2009-08-05T17:10:00.003+01:00

Well, I completed the promo video yesterday. Really pleased with it.

(More techie stuff follows...)

As it turned out, FFmpeg does not paste together .mov files. Therefore, to create the movie, I decided to export clips to sequences of .png frames. I then coded some quick software to order these properly and insert some basic information stills.

The music is the Surrounded! theme, played from Surrounded! but with a different MIDI instrument. That's using one of the secret codes I have put in place... I played it through my PC and recorded it via Audacity.

How did I do the video effects at the beginning without movie-clip software? Well, I already have paint software (I'm still using the now-archaic Corel PhotoPaint 8), so I took the still and applied different percentages of filters (Gaussian blur and "Impressionist") a frame at a time. It really didn't take that long at all (faster than it would have taken me to script it).

To piece it back together, I used FFmpeg again, using the regenerated, resized, reordered PNGs plus the .wav recording of the midi playback.

Redecorating

2009-08-03T11:38:00.004+01:00

Am in the process of sprucing up the look of the blog. Adding a few images. Probably installing a menu on the left with useful links.

Having decided that a simple screenshot doesn't really "wow" me in the same way as playing the game does, I have spent the past week+ researching ways to record a proper video of Surrounded!... Not as simple as I'd thought. The problem being that since the graphic elements of S! are so small, they don't look so great even on MPEG2 video.

I had my laptop wired to my PC via SVideo to record via a TV capture card. This didn't turn out so great thanks to MPEG2 and the fact that my laptop doesn't support anti-aliasing.

My next ploy was to record the screen using my point-and-shoot camera (which can record in 720p). I set up the tripod and stretched across to use the mouse. There was a slight focus problem, but the quality was better. Unfortunately then I discovered that the video output of the camera was mov and I didn't have a mov-editor.

Well, eventually I stumbled upon a marvellous program called KRUT. It records video from your display. For me that means perfect recording of S! video. Again, though, it only records in .mov. Digging away into the Internet a bit further, I found FFmpeg, which will let me convert the mov to a format I can edit as well as (I think) split and join .mov files. That's where I'm at right now... Next step: the trailer video. After that, I can think more about spreading the word about Surrounded!

Surrounded! Wallpapers

2009-07-24T19:59:00.004+01:00

These Wallpapers feature 49 of 50 levels. :-)

1600x1200

1280x1024

1024x768

Almost there!

2009-07-14T11:29:00.002+01:00

I'm super-excited about the upcoming release of Surrounded! :-)

This follows elation last Friday at "finishing" it, then despair on Saturday when I tested it on another PC to be faced with a black screen and only half the notes of the music playing (and seemingly in the wrong order!).

Yet now those bugs have been fixed. The first was to do with not all computers being able to read 32bit index buffers - absurd, I say! Thanks a lot, MS, for not mentioning this in the documentation. :-P The music was a matter of volume (which must be below 100 to work on some sound drivers, not 128 as is the case on my development PC!). Then there were various installation issues (particularly with regard to DirectX DLLs) and registration issues and even some problems with alpha-transparency.

This morning I re-tested on another PC with no problems. I shall try to double-check this on a couple of others before release. :-)

Odds and Ends

2009-06-27T11:58:00.002+01:00

I have a check-list of odds and ends I need to sort out before the release of v1.0. These include:

- setting up an email address (now surrounded.help@googlemail.com)
- "continues" code (which at the moment is only activated via a cheat-code, which I'll reveal depending on feedback)
- bonus player (one for the girl racers)
- slight improvements to the messaging system
- setup script and graphics
- extra story and "hint" scripts

The MIDI music module went well. I got it to the point where I can play the theme in different keys and in random "blocks" so that it goes on and on endlessly. I had also intended for it to change depending on mood/situation, but I really like it how it is. Maybe for S!2, if I give myself time for more music...

Music!

2009-06-20T10:14:00.002+01:00

Well, progress over the past few weeks has been terrific. I've added some scripting support to add a tactical element to a couple of the levels. I've improved the look somewhat. Added in-game messaging.

Only one thing remains (probably): music.

Now the status of that so far: I have an mp3 file of a piano composition of mine, and it serves quite nicely as the menu theme, but what I want ideally is a way to make it a bit more dynamic. In other words, to have the music change depending on context. I remember old games like X-Wing, for which LucasArts had a system called IMuse (or something like that) to do this. I wondered: is it possible to do similar with mp3s?

The answer: yes - but it would prove too fiddly to implement.

Yesterday, however, I dug into MSDN's badly-documented midi functions, to see whether I could make headway there. Yes I could. I now can play scales of notes in code, in any one of 128 GM instruments. The disadvantage is of course the quality is pants - then again, Surrounded! is a retro game, so what does it matter? Not a jot, says I! So now I shall come up with a way of properly sequencing - from a text file, something like
3GAB4C DEF#G
where the numbers flag a change in the octave index. Perhaps use brackets for chords, and other symbols - ';:po - for quarter, half, full, double, four-beat note lengths.

Well, I'll give that a stab today and see how I get on! :-)

Anti-Cracking Coding

2009-06-05T18:21:00.003+01:00

This week I've been working on adding some anti-cracking code. It's depressing I have to do this but paranoia combined with my general skintness (now a word) means I must. I intend to price Surrounded! very reasonably, so hopefully my prog will slip under the uber-crackers' radar. At some point in the future I'll make a shareware/freeware version with no protection whatsoever. But I wouldn't expect that to happen till at least the sequel!

Anyway, for the record, it won't take a genius to crack my prog. Low-to-medium props only therefore to anyone who manages it. Not so much a challenge as a bore, I expect. :-)

Now, I myself used to crack games for cheats (not piracy, mind). That's the problem with some games: they make them too damn hard. Unfortunately, the crack can then make the game too damn easy. That's the Xenon 2 Dilemma. Balancing difficulty is quite a skill. I hope I've managed it for Surrounded! ... Time will tell. I do intend to add some official cheat codes... Anything not covered, I hope you ask me first. ;-) It's easy enough for me to add cheat code.

As a former cracker, I can tell you that cracking something is a whole lot easier than coding protection! I'd really love to blog on some of the things I've learned this past week. ...But I can't! Ha-ha! ...Well, not yet, anyway! :-)

EMP!

2009-05-29T17:54:00.003+01:00

So, I lied in the last post about having added the EMP weapon. I hadn't. But now I have! I think it's become my favourite weapons (although I have said that to myself with every new weapon I've added). There's something intrinsically cool about a weapon which doesn't destroy your enemies, but does cause them to spin around in circles like Darth Vader's ship at the end of Star Wars.

If I can think up another "pacifist's weapon" I will! :-)

News Update. Update. Update. Summary!

2009-05-15T14:12:00.002+01:00

Ha-ha, so I'm getting back in the habit of blogging. :-)

Since my last blog, Surrounded! has come a long, long way. It now features:
- 50 unique levels
- >20 enemy ship types
- upgradable primary weapon
- secondary weapons (wide cannon, laser, mortar, satellites, mines, homing bullets, and EMP)
- powerups
- cannon/shield power redistribution
- scripted formations and swarms

I read my previous entry and had a little giggle. I've made Surrounded! "easy to learn, easy to master." Well, I'm not targeting kids with RSI in their thumbs, but laid back fellas and lasses who want to Keep It Simple (Stupid), with enough variety in the weapons to win the game in different ways. I think the game might challenge laptop users with thumbpads, and those who think holding down fire and pointing the ship in one direction is all that's required (even though sometimes it is)...

Right now I'm busy polishing off the levels and sorting out some more music and sfx. Maybe a cheat mode or two...

:-)

Download Surrounded!

2009-01-01T00:01:00.000Z

The current version is 1.0.1. You are encouraged to test the game out before purchasing by playing the first five levels. There are 45 more in the full version.

This software should be free of Malware. Additionally, Surrounded! has no need to connect to the Internet. But please don't take my word for it! Ensure you have the latest anti-virus and anti-spyware software installed on your PC.

Minimum Requirements

Windows XP SP2
10MB free disk space
DirectX 9c

(I have tested on Vista but not on any other versions of Windows)

Download the installer now!

(3,936,844 bytes; CRC d5abb2e7)

Buy Surrounded!

2009-01-01T00:00:00.004Z

You may download and play the first five levels of Surrounded! for free, as much as you like.

The full version is temporarily unavailable! More news soon!

Thank you!

2009-01-01T00:00:00.000Z

This message is for those who have bought a licence for the full version of Surrounded!

Thank you for supporting this game! I will get back to you ASAP with your registration key. You should get an email within two working days. If you haven't, email me at surrounded.help@googlemail.com to chase me up. :-)

Surrounded! Aims

2008-11-21T14:13:00.002Z

The driving idea of Surrounded! was to mesh two of the most brilliant games of all time, Asteroids and Space Invaders.

It needed to:

be easy to learn, difficult to master;
have as few keystrokes as possible (currently, just move the mouse and left-button to fire!)
be addictive and fun!

I wanted to give it a retro look, and use vector graphics where possible. No overblown 3D, no high graphics card or CPU or memory requirements.

As of right now, the basic game is working reasonably well, with three types of enemy ship, and one weapon type. Before I release v1.0, I want to add many more types, and formations, and power-ups (good and bad).

Hello, World!

2008-11-04T10:49:00.000Z

Welcome to my blog for Surrounded!

(Another thing to check off my to-do list! Hooray!)