I decided to take a break from physics stuff, and try to finish my first something!

So I've got this little arcade game here... It'd be real cool if I could get some information from people who wouldn't try to sugar-coat things.

I'd be much obliged if you'd submit one or more of the following, if the mood so moves you:

1. FPS [hold F1 (capped at 100)] and system specs. (CPU speed and RAM's all I really need to worry about, being that there's no hardware acceleration, and no external files to access, right?)

2. Any bugs you've experienced?

3. Any other...general comments or advice.

WASD and mouse.

Thanks in advance.

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[edit] Attached screenshot.
[edit2] Extended window size to 800x800, tweaked difficulty and used alternate method to show player health...it's much better. Attached new version.
[edit3] Updated attached exe: if some dimension of your desktop is less than 800, the game plays fullscreen at desktop resolution.
[edit4] Attached source code.
[edit5] Attached new version 1.0.1 and source!

1. That's real weird... I'm running with an AMD Athlon 64 3200+ at ~2 GHz with just 1 GB RAM, and I can't do much to get it to flicker under 100fps... ...?

2. Cool!

3. a. The playing field is most definitely cramped... But I wanted the main difficulty here to be keeping your head on straight as long as possible, with things going crazy everywhere. I'm trying to find a balance between easy beginning / frantic ending (or...frantic 'after your gun is more powerful, when enemies are killed by a single bullet'-time...).

b. Agreed... I'm trying to find ways to have as little information directly presented to the player as possible...trying to have things be intuitive... I was happy with how the enemy health thing turned out, but I don't think it works as well with the player, seeing as how the health is reduced much more gradually, over a longer period of time.

c. I'm actually aiming for as little text/HUD as possible... one of the main things I was hoping to learn by asking here is whether or not it would be okay to remove the gun level and kill-o-meter from the bottom of the screen.

d. Yeah, it really would be nice to have a restart button, but I don't think I want a top score table... I like the idea of having a single executable that doesn't require anything else to run, or leave anything behind when it's done... So unless there'd be some magical way to record it into the exe...?

e. Glad you liked the shaking and lighting!
[edit] And I think of the 'lighting' as more of a...proto-retro-RGB disco floor going on under the action... Or something...

I tested it under Vista, which may or may not have affected the frame rate.

Nice game, but crashes when too small resolution is set. I have 1280x800 resolution on my laptop, so obviously the 800x800 window can't be set. So you should at least let the user know, that he/she should change the desktop resolution or something.

I needed to run this game on secondary monitor.

Same problem for me too

Opens window, then disapears to task bar, then crashes.

Specs are Pentium 4 3200MHz, 2 Gig RAM, nVidia 6800GT.

I don't ask because I plan to read it, it's just that I can't run Windows binaries.
But if you don't want to release the source that's your decision.

Because it's Vista.

This actually made things worse for me, as it meant I had to focus on the keyboard as well, which further lessened my chances of seeing enemies coming.

This won't affect most people, since most people can use up to four keys without gettng cvonfused. There are some people like me however who are totally uncoordinated, so if you want the game to appeal to a wider audience, you might want to make it start slow and easy and then get harder.

I've never had a single performance problem with Vista.

Yeeeah I don't really know if WASD + mouse is the best control scheme for this, but I generally seem to assume that it's the best way to control anything, just because I spend so much time playing first-person-shooters, and I'm so comfortable with it.

Speaking of first-person-shooters, a friend of mine switched from XP Pro SP2 to Vista, and his FPS in Quake III: Arena dropped from a steady 333 down to ~170. If I remember right, his FPS in UT2k4 also dropped about 20%.

Would drivers be an issue with software rendering like this?

1) 19-27fps. P3 600Mhz, 392Mb RAM but I would get the same speed with 128. The bottleneck here is the speed at which the image can be sent to the video card, and the AGP 1.0 (2x) port of my motherboard sets the limit.

2) no bugs

3) Basic game. I like the precise player control.

The things you guys are describing are really weird... Are you building in Linux too, kazzmir? All the source files are definitely there, maybe some platform issues?

The number at the top of the screen is the player's score. 'Shrapnel' is created every time something is destroyed. For bullets, this is when they collide with an enemy or a wall (edge of the screen), and for enemies and the player, it's only when they run out of health. The 'pixelated' (and colored) background turns blue when near the player, red when near an enemy, and green when near a bullet. After a bit, I decided to comment out the bullet-drawing function, and so you should be left with just 'greens things' whenever you shoot.

Yeah because allegro sometimes (when possible in fact) use hardware accelerated thing like blit, clear, ....

If your drivers are in a total mess, ...

When you declare something, never assume it to have a value.
Some kernels waste time zeroing data, some kernels let you have whatever was in the memory last. I'll take a look at the code now.

EDIT:
That worked!
I'm going to play it for a bit before posting my thoughts.

EDIT2:
- I think there is a bug in the enemy highlighting code. A lot of the time they didn't have red 'pixels' behind them, and sometimes a triangle in the bottom right was filled red.
- The game is almost impossible to play. Either the player and enemies should be slower, the playing space should be larger, or the player and enemies should be smaller, in my opinion. It's not that I like playing easy games, it's just that there is no way you can play the game like it is. I know you're trying to make it that you have to keep your head when it's all madness, but there's no time for keeping your head because by the time you see the enemies they're on you.
- It just froze when I died. A message saying 'GAME OVER. Press ESC to quit' would be a bit nicer.

On the other hand, I thought it was a very interesting concept. If it was a bit easier to play it could be a great game.
Another thing I'd suggest, if you plan to spend some time on it, is to get graphics (programmer graphics aren't good - if you can't draw, leave them how they are). Also, different types of enemy would be nice. The game could choose enemies based on how many points you've got. Congratulations on the game, though. I think it's pretty good.

EDIT3:
After playing it a bit more, it gets easier. A larger playing area would be nice, but by no means necessary, having played it a bit more.
Power ups would also be nice. For example, when the player gets low on health, it is obvious that he is going to die soon. It'd be nice if there was the possibility of a restore health power up. Also, temporary gun improvement power ups could work.
Every time I play your game, my opinion of it improves.