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Friday, December 31, 2010

Happy New Year!

Alright guys, it's not actually 2011 yet, but with two hours to go (my time), it's close enough. Hope everyone's out having a good time tonight, and that you're all making new year's resolutions that we both know you're not going to stick to.

2010's been a long and productive year for Clash, and as we look into 2011, things are looking ever brighter. The game has progressed in leaps and bounds from the Rebirth release just under a week ago, and we're aiming to make the first release of 2011 in Early-Mid January.

Look forward to playing as Ike in the new test, he's looking pretty cool at the moment, and the Classic Mode and Character Select Menu have both recieved further tweaks from the last time I posted.

I'm heading off now, so have a great time tonight, and look forward to an awesome 2011.

Swifty

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Expect More Soon

Hey Guys,

Stopping by to say that I hope you're enjoying Rebirth, and that we're already quite far underway on the next release. It's staggering how far we've come in three days, in no small part due to the help of Neeher who has been doing some hard development time.


The new Character Select screen. You may not notice that much different, but you can tap the arrows up in the top right to change the amount of stocks. You can also tap on the "Ready to Fight" banner to move on now.


Our new Stage Select screen. It's been updated with the new background, and now has back and next buttons that you can tap to change the game room without having to move to the dpad controls (finally a proper stylus control scheme). Still button controls for the gameplay though, and that's something that's never going to change. You might also notice the icon is there for Battlefield64, which is finally bug free and ready to fight on.

We've got other aesthetic improvements, and a couple of bug fixes also in this build. I'm pretty happy with what we've been able to achieve in three days, and look out for the next test a LOT sooner than you might imagine.

See you later,
Swifty

Friday, December 24, 2010

SSB Clash Rebirth

So, we've finally hit that milestone. Merry Christmas guys (or Happy Holidays to those who don't celebrate). As promised, this post marks the release of SSB Clash Rebirth.

To those who are anxious to get started, the official SSB Clash Rebirth Release can be found here.

The changelog for this game is massive compared to the last test before I took over leadership, but the main changes are:
- Graphical Revamp
- Stock Mode
- Classic Mode
- All A Attacks (Non-Smash)
- Dash Attacks
- Taunts
- Airdodges
- Pause (Not huge news but it's nice, right?)

There has been a lot of hard work put into this game by a lot of very talented people (myself excluded :P) and I think it's only right that I thank them by name.

When I took over this project in November '09, I received the game from the hands of its original creator, E. Without his tireless efforts in setting up such a good code base for the game, it would have been impossible for me to get this out. He's put up with a lot of very stupid questions throughout the adjustment process, and for that I can't thank him enough.

When I first started getting properly into the programming side of things, I found a lot of help in Range, who became my co-leader and the graphical leader for a time. He helped me talk through so many problems I've had along the way and he's contributed so much to the game, not least of all his character sprites. He has recently left Clash, but we are still in contact and working on a project together. Thank you for your help.

As part of the takeover process, I got to become heavily involved with talking to the many members of our community, and I need to thank them too. I want to keep this post to a manageable size, so they won't all get a full paragraph each, but here goes:

Tsunamii is the man responsible for the AMAZING SSB Clash Dojo at ssbclash.info, and I can't say how much I appreciate what he's done over there, especially the sprite uploading and organisation facilities he's provided. He also helped with some of the code for a short time, and managed to help smooth over many of the aspects that needed help. There's also been quite a few stage related things that he's done for the game that I really appreciated (jeez, multi-talented much?).

Gokudo has been the head of our QA Testing team for a very long time now, and has recently become the leader of the Character Spriting Team. His sprites are fluid (with Shadow being one of the best looking characters in the game) and he constantly provides me with invaluable testing and bug reports; providing me with far more bug reports than I ever would have found out by myself. He's the reason the test has a lot more polish than it would otherwise.

EliteKill has been a great member of the team, helping out with spriting and with promotional videos to help get the word out. The original trailer he did had about 6000 views at the time of writing, and his recent promo video is probably the reason quite a few of you are here.

Neeher has contributed quite a lot in the way of helping to program some of the aspects of the game and has helped me to work through many of my problems as a good person to bounce ideas off of, and although he's not always here (understandably), I always appreciate the time that he is.

M64M/Nosmokingbandit are both very talented composers/musical arrangers and I need to thank them for the work they've put into the soundtrack of the game, and apologise to the lack of soundtrack currently implemented into the game. It's something I intend on doing very soon.

Insane0, you're a good friend and easy to talk with about Clash. Rodney, you're an excellent spriter. ShadowSake, thanks for the videos and for your testing. PulsatingShadow your stages are really something to behold. I could keep going on.

To everyone who's ever been a mod or admin at Clash, you don't know how much I value your efforts in keeping the unruly bunch of forum goers organised and having fun. To everyone who is a member of the SSB Clash Forums or has posted there even once, thank you for contributing to the community.

To all people who I haven't mentioned by name, you guys still know that I value your contribution to the game and that I really just don't have the space (or readers the attention span) to give you the acknowledgement you deserve.

To YOU, reading this (if anyone's still reading this far in) I want to thank you for your interest in the project, and I hope you play it and enjoy it. You guys are the reason that I've been doing this for over a year now. I welcome all feedback, either left as comments on the blog or posted at our forums and if there's something that bothers you about the game, I want to know so that I can fix it.

The test was released without some of the features planned, but they're still on the way. Rebirth was the process it took me to get the code from what I recieved to what I considered to be a fair base for continuing onwards. With that now released, you can expect much more frequent releases and hopefully a lot faster updates. (Look for Rebirth v2 within a month with the stuff that didn't make it in due to time.)

Thanks for reading and for everything,
Swifty

PS. I promise these posts will be a lot shorter from now on. :P

Thursday, December 23, 2010

Clash Rebirth Trailer

The new trailer for SSB Clash Rebirth is up! Thanks to EliteKill for the trailer. You can find it on my Youtube account (hopefully).

SSB Clash Rebirth comes out tomorrow guys! I can't wait.

Thursday, December 9, 2010

Polish

There's nothing like having the time to just look over your projects and fix up all of the little things. This week I've been working things off of my Rebirth Checklist (which can be found here).

There've been a lot of sprite updates to characters as well as the landing state, which is finally incorporated into the game. A couple of the other improvements in the game are that random will stay random so you don't have to change back after every match, and at the character select screen, you tap the player's box once to select, and then again to change the state, instead of tapping to select and then repeatedly tapping to get back to the state (Player, CPU, NA).

There's a lot of things still to get done before the release of Rebirth, but we're looking on target for our Christmas Day release date. I hope that when it's finally out there, everyone's impressed with how much it's changed since the last proper release in November of 2009. What can I say though, there was a huge adjustment period for me with the game's code.

Oh, and I've also edited the settings on the blog, so you can comment without any of that login stuff you were required to do before. That system never quite appealed to me.

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Stages for Rebirth

Hey Everyone,

Just thought I should drop by to show you all some of the awesome stages that our Stage Spriting Team has been working on.

Depending on your setup, the entire image may not fit on your screen. In that case, click to view the full picture.

Final Destination (Clash Version) by Range



Castle Siege (Brawl) by Rodney




Geometry Wars by PulsatingShadow



These are all stages that will (time permitting) appear in SSBClash Rebirth.

Friday, December 3, 2010

VB RPG Release and Clash Info

Hey Guys,

This week's been a pretty good week for me, programming wise. As I said last time, I've managed to add ^A and >A to the game. Since then, I've added airdodge, which works perfectly. I've also made quite a few minor updates to character's sprites, so Luigi, Tails, Shanoa and Yoshi all have visual changes. As well as that, there's been quite a few bug fixes.

I'm aiming to get SSB Clash Rebirth finished and released by Christmas.


I'm releasing the first of the three games I promised (for ages ago) today.



This is my Term 4 Assignment for my Year 12 Programming Class. The game is an RPG made in VB6 (which I have only recently remembered how much I hate). It's not polished, and nowhere near finished. I wanted to do so much more with it, and so it ended up pretty uncomplete. It has no real name, so it's called VB RPG.



Regardless of the above, it features a proper battle system, (albeit with only two battles), the beginnings of a story and a world map system. There's quite a lot of little fixing I would like to have done, and may still do quite a lot more with it(including the Battle Tower). If anyone wants a little more of this game, please let me know in the comments and I'll add quite a lot of features to it.



Most of this is also explained in-game. Oh, and for anyone wondering, the "African-American Smith" thing was a response to a joking comment from my teacher that "Blacksmith" was racist.

Thanks to Range for the assassin sprite, and Antone for the knife icon.

The game can be downloaded here.

TL DR:
- Clash has ^A, >A and Airdodge
- Rebirth by Christmas (Hopefully)
- VB RPG released.
- Download it here.

Until Next Time,
Swifty

Saturday, November 27, 2010

New Attacks

I've programmed >A and ^A into the game. This post is pretty short because I've had a fairly bad day. Hopefully things get better, and I can finish with airdodge and land soon.

Until next time,
Swifty

Saturday, November 20, 2010

Quick Catch Up

Alright, so I'm almost finished with Year 12. I've got two days left (not even full days either). Clash is pretty much as it was last week. I submitted my RPG for programming and got 75/77 for it (I lost marks for the manual).

I've finished (and passed) my Certificate II in IT (Games Programming) and both of the XNA games I worked on as part of the final project are in a playable state. I want to give them both a little bit of polish before I release either of them though.

With that said, I'm off to study for my final exams.

Swifty

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Week 8 - Immenent Releases and Clash States

Hey Guys,

I've recently got the last of the sprites that I'll need to add the Land, Taunt, ^A and >A states to Clash. They'll be in at some point soon, but I'm really busy right now; with just one week and two days until I finish Year 12.

On the Immenent Releases front in the title, I'll be releasing three unfinished/prototype games next week(hopefully). The first is Custom Robot Gladiators (My final project for the games development course I'm doing), the second is Project Shift which is the project from the other team in my course. I did a little bit of level design on this one, and some small coding work here or there. The final project I'll be looking into releasing is my programming assignment for school, which is an RPG-lite game made in VB6 (which I unfortunately have to use for the course).

Until Next Time,
Swifty

Friday, November 5, 2010

Week 7 - Custom Robot Gladiators and Solo Menu

Hey Guys.

As I said last week, I haven't worked that much on Clash over the week. I've started on adding the Solo Menu for Clash. I'm not too far into adding that yet, as I've been busy with my school work.

Here's a screenshot from my XNA game that I'm working on for my course. (I know my blog doesn't leave enough room to show the screenshots I upload, I'm going to get some thumbnails or something sooner or later).



It's a screenshot of a slightly old build, but you can sort of see where we're going with it. I'm planning on some big additions for Clash soon, and I'm just waiting on some sprites for the game.

See You Next Time,
Swifty

Friday, October 29, 2010

Week 6 - SSB Clash Rebirth Features

This week, as well as adding Taunts (read last post) I managed to come up with a proper feature set for the SSB Clash Rebirth release.

On top of what the characters are already capable of (moveset wise), I'll be adding two more moves to the game, leaving us with:
- AAA
- vA
- >A
- ^A
- Dash Attack
- Neutral Aerial
- Taunts

That's a total of 7 moves for the game, and will cover all of the A attacks for the game. Due to the nature of the DPad however, I'll have to remove the options for Tap Jump and Always Run because they would remove access to ^A and >A respectively.

There will be the following new stages:
- Battlefield 64
- Shadow Moses
- Castle Siege
- Peach's Castle (N64)

And The Following Modes:
- Stock Mode
- Classic Mode
- Training Mode

However, having said all of that, I've got two weeks left in which to finish my Year 12 studies, so I'll be focusing mostly on that for those two weeks. This means that there probably won't be any updates to do with Clash for the next two weeks.

I do programming at school though, so I suppose I will still have some stuff to update about the state of my assignment for that. I'll also still be working on Custom Robot Gladiators, so that doesn't leave me completely without updates for that time.

Before I go, I have one last thing I want to say:

Pour l'ensemble de mes lecteurs français ... Merci à tous pour le soutien. Vous les gars ont le plus de points de vue depuis le début de mon blog, battant facilement le deuxième pays, Royaume-Uni par plus du double.

Oh, et désolé pour la grammaire terrible. J'utilise un traducteur web.

Until Next Time,
Swifty

Monday, October 25, 2010

Taunts

Taunts are now in game again, and they're working a lot better than they did last time. As a side note, I'm planning on releasing the SSB Clash Rebirth test once I've added >A and ^A and added some stages.

It may be a while off, or it may be close. I really won't know until I feel it's ready to release.

Until next time,
Swifty

Saturday, October 23, 2010

Week 5 - Stage Additions

Hey Guys,

This week's been a little less productive than usual, due to the wonderful time waster that is Golden Sun, which I've almost finished now.

This week I've started adding additional stages into Clash. So far I've only got an (arguably) playable Battlefield (N64), but I'm also working on some other stages such as Shadow Moses and Brinstar.

I should have the stage fixed up relatively soon which will leave me with more time to work on other stages.







Until Next Time,
Swifty

Thursday, October 21, 2010

Custom Robot Gladiators

This is an update on the Custom Robot Battles project, which is now called Custom Robot Gladiators.

The game is under development by Team Lasershark, which is me and a couple of rather awesome guys. We've currently got a running battle prototype and an awesome menu system.

The game is due November 18, so we should have it finished just before then.

Saturday, October 16, 2010

Week 4 - Down A and Dash Attacks

This week I finally got the Dash Attacks working for Clash, and followed it up with working vA attacks. There'll be a playable test up for the members of the Clash forums soon, but for everyone else, you can have a look at the attacks in action here.

I'm still not sure what attack I should program in next. Comment on the post if you have any preferences, otherwise I think I'll lean towards ^A for the next one.

I think I should also mention before I go for this week that the concept art from last week was drawn by Range from the SSB Clash team, and we're still in the very early concept stages.

Monday, October 11, 2010

Extra Edition

Hey Guys,

I'm just popping by to tell you that I've finished fixing up the Dash Attack, and SSB Clash now has a third attack. I'm pretty excited, and I hope to have a video or something of it up in time for the next post. (I've fixed the colours on the videos too).

Until Next Time,
Swifty

Friday, October 8, 2010

Week 3 - Early Edition

Hey guys. This week's post is early because I'll be pretty busy throughout the rest of the weekend.

This week I've managed to set up the Team Match system correctly for every conceivable gameplay mode. Team Attack is always on by default, though I suppose I should also add an option to turn it off. The only thing left to add is the ability for users to change the team mode on, and to change the teams at will. That will probably be finished rather soon. Currently, the teams for Classic Mode are working well, leaving only the Master Hand battle left to program before I feel like I can really call it a worthy classic mode.

I've also changed most of the code I added back when I first made stock mode to make it run smoother and to allow easier loops (both to write and process). It's not a change that most people are likely to notice, but it will make adding new modes a lot easier.

Team Matches took up most of my time this week, so that's pretty much all I got done on Clash, excluding a couple of bug fixes.

To round out the week, I have one piece of concept art to show you from an as yet unannounced game:
Photobucket
(God, how many games can I possibly be working on at the same time?)

Until next week,
Swifty

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Week 2 - Classic Mode, Referee and More

Week 2 of updating my blog, and this week is all about Clash.

First up, for anyone who wants to give a very early Classic Mode a try, download the SSB Clash Rebirth Preview from the link in last week's post and boot it up. When at the main menu, hold either L or R and TAP the Solo icon on the screen. (Pressing A to select will not work). Please note that at the moment the teams aren't fully implemented so it is in fact a free-for-all in every match, there's no Master Hand boss and no special stages (Target Test etc).

I've made a couple of changes to SSB Clash's Classic Mode including the continue screen. This should make the mode more completeable for people who are having trouble finishing it. There's a short gameplay compilation video of Classic Mode here. (Sorry for the terrible quality, the screencam sucks).

The basics of Dash Attacks are in the game, but it's proving a hard thing to polish and clear for bugs. Yeah, it's throwing up a whole bunch of problems but it should be ready for playtesting within the week. No promises though.

In the process of testing for the Dash Attacks, I've added a "Sandbag Mode" for CPUs where they'll just stand there so I suppose you can say that we have a basic training mode as well. Also new this week is a new option in game, a damage multiplier (1x through 5x) found in the options menu.

Also finished this week is moving the win conditions for matches to the referee class, which as I mentioned last week will allow me to add in new modes (like Time and King Modes) with relative ease. There are some other, purely cosmetic changes to Clash as well, but nothing really worth mentioning.

In other news, I'm planning on porting Custom Robot Battles to the DS after development (only for the DSTwo though). I've still got relatively nothing to share on that though as we're on holidays during the very early stage of development. I've got nothing to show off from this game, but should definately have something to show by the end of the month.

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Week 1: SSB Clash Rebirth Preview & More

I've decided to try updating this once a week for a while and see how it goes.

First piece of news:
I've released a playable preview of SSB Clash Rebirth. The preview can be found here.

The changes and everything can be found at the SSB Clash Dojo here.

I've been playing around with adding some other things to Clash as well as finishing off a referee class that will help me add more game types to the main battles.

On other non-Clash related news I've started another project for my programming course called Custom Robot Battles (or something equally as generic) it's being developed for XNA (Windows Live/Xbox 360) and should be finished before the end of November.

I've also got a youtube account now, which I will probably start using to post gameplay footage of SSB Clash and a couple of my other projects when I have something that I want to show off. It can also be found here.

Until next week,
Swifty

Friday, July 23, 2010

Long Time Gone

I'm pretty sure that no-one's found this blog yet, so in the meantime I should probably update on what's happened since that initial post for anyone who cares.

I left Minigame Madness ages ago, and went on to become the lead programmer of SSB Clash, a fangame for the Nintendo DS handheld system. We're currently working towards a release of SSB Clash Rebirth, the latest test, and following that test, we will be able to develop at a much faster rate, with the impending inclusion of Guard, Airdodge, ^B and some A Attacks.

That project has been eating up most of my time, but I've still got some other as yet unannounced projects on the backburner, but I'll leave those for another time. I'll probably update this blog more often as it becomes the place to talk to people interested in the development of SSB Clash or any of my future projects.