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EntropicOrder
Programming and designing games since 2000. Partnered with Zeebarf on ClickShakeGames.

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Joined on 4/21/00

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Power of Three game Paradox Embrace released!

Posted by EntropicOrder - January 6th, 2010


Play Paradox Embrace

Paradox Embrace has finally been released, so go play it and get some medals! This is our Power of Three submission that Zeebarf, Caulder Bradford and I started working on more than 6 months ago. It's the biggest game I've ever designed and programmed and I'm really excited about finally being able to release it. It's a bit of a casual game but has some nice challenges as well, especially with the speed run medals you can earn. It's got 9 huge levels, 10 music tracks, roaming enemies, and keys you have to find to unlock the way to the trophy at the end of each level. Check out the new screenshot at the bottom of this post.

It's been such a blast working with Z and Caulder. It's so much better working with really talented people instead of trying to do everything myself. I am very grateful to Tom for setting up the Power of Three event, as we might not have met up to work together otherwise!

The thing that took the longest for me to program was the collision detection engine. I coded it from scratch using AS3, though I did reference some things online. The single most helpful article I found is this one: Point-In-Polygon Algorithm - Determining Whether A Point Is Inside A Complex Polygon (yeah, I didn't use hittest()). That algorithm is so well thought out and thoroughly explained that I recommend it to anyone interested in setting up a complex collision engine. I also used line segment intersection functions as well. The rounding error problem became a very difficult, time consuming problem to resolve when checking for collision with complex polygons, but implementing a detailed buffered debugging log that doesn't clog up my trace log that can be flushed at the touch of a button made it a lot easier. Also, one thing that Flash does is mess with x and y coordinates, so 5 might come out to be 5.00000001, or 3.0372 might come out to 3 (this is seperate from general rounding error in programming). I had to use myX:Number and myY:Number for calculations and then set x and y to myX and myY for visual placement only. But enough about programming...

Designing the game was really fun and I worked pretty closely with Zeebarf on this part. Designing the levels took a lot longer than I estimated but they came out much better than I had even originally planned for so I'm really happy about them. I used a level editor I created for the game which allowed me to place, rotate and stretch free-form tiles and lay down collision areas and viewpoints (for the initial level pan). Getting the editor just right took a good chunk of time as well, but it was well worth it.

So I hope you enjoy the game. Either way please leave a review as I'm anxious to hear yall's feedback!

P.S. If you had issues with the D button teleporting you, please clear your cache and make sure the game says version 1.2 on the menu. Progress earned prior to version 1.2 will be lost due to the filename changing so you may need to redo some levels, but I will ensure that problem does not happen again. You might want to rerun some levels anyway to get better times to earn all the medals anyway.

Finally, does anyone know if it's possible for us to post a link to a NG game like Tom does with the thumbnail and all the extra information about the game automatically?

Power of Three game Paradox Embrace released!


Comments

Just about to play the game, but I wanted to say that the polygon point test you linked to (as well as some of the pages it in turn links to) is quite the nice find!

Also, the game thumbnail thing that Tom does can only be done in the forums, I believe. It's done by posting the game page's link 'as is' (i.e. without any html).

For the thumbnail just post it like so:

<a href="http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/523677">http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view /523677</a>

I dunno if it works on news pages tho...

your game is awesome!

congrats on the game, it was lots of fun. really interesting hearing this little post on some of the inside work to it, i dont seem to stumble upon posts like this often on NG

releasing the level editor along with the game could've been a really cool way to give it longer life, although I'm sure that would've added loads of extra work to the development..

do you use any calculations to determine whether a level is actually "finishable" or not, or do you just need to test it and make sure there isn't a way to "trap" yourself through changer-misuse?