1. About the game.

For a long time, I've been a big fan of Kris Asick's PixelShips games. The whole idea of collecting something appeals to me a lot, and his projects had all the right ingredients. I always wanted to make my own game in the same vein, but without blatantly copying ideas. PixelBots (working title) is this game.

Despite sharing the idea of "gotta catch 'em all" with PixelShips, PixelBots is different in almost everything else. Rather, it's PixelShips meet X-Com meet Rogue (with maybe a dash of Quazatron). The focus of the game is tactical combat in randomly generated levels, where your team of bots will battle various enemies as they descend to the lowest level of old military installation. You will be able to capture enemy bots to supplement your collection. Each robot have different combination of basic parameters, weapons and abilities. And because I can't even make a Breakout clone without adding a storyline, there will be messages appearing here and there, through which you will be able to discover the past of your hero.

2. About this release.

Current release is not a complete game. It's not even an early alpha. Rather, it's a prototype of combat system. It has no other features beyond simple level generation, combats and some AI.

You can download it here: Pixelbots Downloads

Here's what's in:

Video & Screenshots:

Video:

http://www.youtube.com/embed/kd38eRnYKKc

Screenshots:

Title screen and some options:
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Your bots at the start of level:
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Some enemies! We can't fry them, though, because the line of fire is blocked by wall. There is no fog of war or visibility calculations, as you can see.
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Now this feller is about to get a load of laser blasts in his ugly bot face!
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Somewhat worse for the wear, but still alive. One of the bots have a Forcefiedl on.
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Green bot is the boss. He is not very hard, because he don't have special AI yet and can't use abilities.
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"Trooper" bot is about to use "Grenade" ability.
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3. Bugs.

Since it's a prototype, this release may contain a lot of bugs. If you report them, I will try to fix them, but at this point I mostly care only about game-breakers.

Known bugs:

4. Feedback.

I would greatly appreciate all feedback, because I want to make sure the combat system is interesting enough before moving forward. Post or send your ideas and suggestions!

If the game crashed, it will try to send me a crash report. Please allow it to do so, this way I might be able to find and fix important bugs sooner.

Also, please allow the game to send statistic to my server. It will allow me to get a picture of how people are playing this prototype. The game will not collect or send any personal data or identifying information about you, or your computer.

Ah, that seems to be a problem. UI and window size is really not adaptable. 1024x768 is a minimum Let's see if I can hack resolution selection and scaling into that code quickly...

Allegro crashes when I try to run in fullscreen 0_o in alloc_glyph_region.

      data->page_lr = al_lock_bitmap_region(page,
         data->lock_rect.x, data->lock_rect.y,
         data->lock_rect.w, data->lock_rect.h,
         ALLEGRO_PIXEL_FORMAT_ABGR_8888_LE, ALLEGRO_LOCK_WRITEONLY);

      /* Clear the data so we don't get garbage when using filtering
       * FIXME We could clear just the border but I'm not convinced that
       * would be faster (yet)
       */
      ptr = data->page_lr->data;

al_lock_bitmap_region seems to be returning 0 and nobody checks return value before accessing it.

Maybe something is wrong with my build of Allegro, though, like an old version of Freetype... I mean, page_lr should probably be checked before use anyway, but why is it returning 0 in fullscreen mode only?!

Otherwise, the most obvious reason is that format is wrong.

EDIT: I'm not alone with this: https://www.allegro.cc/forums/thread/612544 Will try OpenGL now.

EDIT2: OK, Fullscreen checkbox added, using OpenGL now, and also you can quit game even from main menu/title screen Archive updated.

[quote]
The first thing I noticed is when a craft moves, the camera follows. I'd just keep the camera in the same spot because it was a little bit disorienting.
[/quote]

It saves some scrolling, though If enough people complain, I might make it an option, or remove it completely.

Your latest version crashed for me. I was going to send the error report, but you need to run my default email client to send it? No thanks, and it kind of pisses me off that you are taking a screenshot of my desktop. Who knows what I could have been working on?

Well in this case the game crashed before the window was ever drawn to, so it still had my desktop in the window buffer.

It'll take me a while to download it again, like 1/2 hour or so, but I can post the files it said it was going to send for you.

EngineLog.html

I don't know where to find these two files though :

crashdump.dmp
crashrpt.xml

The simplest solution might be to change the size of your playing area and keep the rest of it as fixed as possible. I'll keep an eye on this thread.

It still crashes and doesn't show the selection screen. It does show an empty 800x600 window though. I tried to send the report but it kept saying socket connection error and it tried like 6 different IMAP servers, and then it asked me to send it with my default mail program at which point I closed it.

Max, did you develop some kind of crash reporter for this game? Could you tell us about it?

Trent, no, I didn't develop it. I just used quite well-known CrashRpt library. It only works under Windows, and now it seems it does not do a very good job.

I actually was going to use Google's BreakPad crash reporter (since it at least is multi-platform), but when I encountered gyp project generator they use instead of CMake, I decided to put it away for a while, because I didn't have the right combination of Python libraries for it to work.

Edgar, wow, that didn't help at all The stack seems to be completely smashed, there is only one address on it, and even crash reporter was unable to associate any module with it.

I have compiled a version with some debug logging added for you. Let's see if we can get anything from it:

pixelbots_proto01_debug.zip

Also, in this version crash reporting is disabled. In Vista and Win7 you can create a memory dump of running (or crashed) process through Task Manager. Please, post here text from deubg console (which now should be shown along with main window) and dump created with Task Manager, if possible.

Looks like a good start. Kudos on putting the robot stats in text files. By the way, the stats look like the ones from Zoids Legacy on the GBA, which allowed an amazing level of customization of the units. But I'm not sure how it fares when the robots have only their built-in abilities/weapons. (ie. often have only one way to spend their energy)
Are you going to keep the top-view sight ? It may be an adequate view for a plane or car, but not so good to represent a combat robot (on wheels, tank treads, biped, quadruped etc).