Attack of the Gelatinous Blob

[sploreg]

Attack of the Gelatinous Blob is a hilarious real-time strategy/tower assault game where you aim to take over the world with the mighty power of hungry blobs.

I have our demo ready for you to try and we also just launched a Kickstarter for it: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/353817188/attack-of-the-gelatinous-blob-rts-game-meets-tower

I would love some feedback of the demo. It's still in development so there are some pretty awesome bugs.
Demo location: http://www.attackofthegelatinousblob.com/

As a little background, my name is Brent and I am one of the core developers of jMonkeyEngine. So feel free to message me and say Hi!

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/9Kaw1rwyias?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/9Kaw1rwyias?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

[wessles]

I love it! It's gelatinous!

[dermetfan]

Really nice! Reminds me of this movie that I watched a while back.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[sploreg]

It is so very gelatinous. With a slimy residue.

[SHC]

I liked it! You've got nice textures.

[sploreg]

Thanks!

[EgonOlsen]

Well done! I tried the demo and was victorious before it really took of, but i guess that's just because it's a demo and a kind of tutorial level.
One thing that i'm missing is the option to select a group across multiple screens. Once you reach the screen's borders, it starts to scroll and you are losing your formerly selected units. Adding units to group by pressing shift doesn't seem to work either. And can i assign them to the number keys somehow?

[sploreg]

Thanks for the feedback EgonOlsen!
You cannot assign groups yet, but I plan to add that in. Also a way to select all blobs of a certain type.

Adding units to the group with shift used to work.... maybe I broke that recently. I will try and fix it asap. Not sure what the scrolling issue is, I will look into that too.

The level is a little too easy right now. I've made it harder and will upload the new version tonight. It will update for you automatically next time you run the game this weekend.

Thanks again!

[Cero]

Actually it remind me of Wayne's World

[SHC]

I had an error: When I clicked the link in start menu



Then I've went into the appdata folder and opened cmd from it as administrator.

1	java -jar AotGBlob.exe .

This opened the splash screen and it said downloading. I waited for half an hour but nothing happened. When I clicked on that dialog, it said not responding and I had to force quit it from the task manager. Why can't you put the original game directly in the setup you provided?

My PC configuration is

Windows 8 Pro 32 bit
Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.46 GHz
ASUS P5KPL-AM/PS motherboard
4 GB DDR3 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 210 1GB Graphics card.

Games published by our own members! Check 'em out!

[sploreg]

Sorry about that error. The version I put up is the 64bit version. I will upload the 32 bit this morning and let you know when it is there.

[Jimmt]

Looks impressive, definitely a very unique graphics style. The artwork is awesome, except the human firing animations seem a bit clunky.

[EgonOlsen]

A noticed a small glitch that happens when you enable shadows. It only happens in the start screen, not in game and only once after enabling shadows. So it's not a big deal but i thought i might post it anyway: http://jpct.de/jpctnet/pics/treebug.jpg (I had to make a picture with my phone because i wasn't able to get a proper screen shot from the game... ).

OS is Window 7 64 bit, GPU is a Geforce GTX 680 using the latest official drivers.

[sploreg]

hmpf that's an interesting one. The shadows seem to be ignoring the depth test. I'll look into it.

The gun fire animation is a bit clunky, I gotta rework a lot of their animations.

[sploreg]

Here's the 32 bit windows version: http://attackofthegelatinousblob.com/dev/demo/setup-win32.exe

[Cero]

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/U4MBZnaz4CM?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/U4MBZnaz4CM?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

Sorry :D

[SHC]

@sploreg

Please include the game files in the setup only! I can't download more than 150 MB a day and your downloader stops at 18%. I can't browse the net in that time too!

@Cero

Funny video comment. Is it you in the video?

[sploreg]

@Cero nice =)

@SHC Hmm, well the game is 360mb. I could put the core game files in a torrent and set that up as the initial download. Then you will have those to start and it will run. It will still check to see if there are updates and will load those automatically, but those are usually only a few MB per update.

[sploreg]

@SHC Here's the .torrent http://attackofthegelatinousblob.com/dev/demo/AttackOfTheGelatinousBlob.torrent

You will need to extract it to a directory that you have admin access to as the program will try to create and copy files from the server when it tries to auto-update.

If you run into issues let me know and I will fix them asap.

[SHC]

@sploreg

Thanks for your time for making the torrent. But is it 32 bit version? I've found 'lwjgl64.dll' in it's contents.

[sploreg]

@SHC you can just delete those two and when it runs it will extract the appropriate dlls for your system

[sploreg]

Hey all. I thought I would post an update on the game.

Well our kickstarter wasn't successful. It didn't succeed for a number or reasons, most not to do with the game itself. Anyways, I recorded a postcast post-mortem about the campaign that I will link to later when it is available.

For now, I want to show what I have been changing with the AI. I'm using Voronoi diagrams to help the computer player decide where to place turrets and send guards. For details on how that is implemented, I posted a tutorial on gamedev.tuts+ you can read: http://gamedev.tutsplus.com/tutorials/implementation/how-to-use-voronoi-diagrams-to-control-ai/

But for an easier to digest version, check out this video where I talk about what the Voronoi is doing.

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/p3AxqLlsuxo?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/p3AxqLlsuxo?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>
Sorry for the quiet audio.

[sploreg]

This week's update: an old-style black and white film effect! If you want to see the code I used for it, you can check it out over on the jMonkeyEngine forums: http://hub.jmonkeyengine.org/forum/topic/old-film-effect-filter/

I plan to use this effect for "cut scenes" and maybe some transitions from loading to in-game.

Here's the effect in action:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/uuQTniSqC7A?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=" target="_blank">http://www.youtube.com/v/uuQTniSqC7A?version=3&amp;hl=en_US&amp;start=</a>

[Drenius]

To be honest:
This looks better.
Maybe a little image noise or whatever these black squares in old films are called.

EDIT:
Oh, already there^^
But maybe a little bit stronger.

[sploreg]

Yea they don't show up too much, definitely need to be more pronounced. Maybe some larger splotches too.

I was thinking of having the filter on for the whole game, but it hides the difference between blobs that have different colors, and many of the other effects. I dunno, still thinking about it.

Thanks for the feedback!

[wessles]

To be honest, I don't really like the filter. The GUI still retains the color, making it look out of place. Maybe you should keep color, but just make it look older with sephia tone.

I don't know, just an opinion  !

[sploreg]

Well there won't be both the color and the black and white effect. I should have hidden the UI from the video and screenshot there =)
One or the other at any one time.
A sephia tone could be pretty cool! Worth playing with to see how it looks.

[SHC]

@Sploreg

You forgot to put up the mac downloads.

[sploreg]

I still need to build the installer for mac. If I just put up the executable it won't be able to grab updates, and that is important for the development version.

I need to find someone with a mac I can borrow for a day.

[Dxu1994]

I got an error