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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