We’ve been hard at work on Last Alarm in total silence for a while but things are progressing nicely, it’s really starting to come together now, and whats a good SHMUP without some Asteroids? Well here’s some shots of our take.

The Last Alarm Stage 1 Demo has been made available again, it’s much improved from the original demo so give it a try!

LINK

Incase you’re wondering, it wasn’t entered into Dream Build Play, unpack it and check the directory size to see why.

Also incase you ever missed it the GDC version of Damage Control is available here:

LINK

I’ve put together a new video for Last Alarm, clocks in at 4 minutes so it’s worth a look. Check it out on the Last Alarm blog: http://www.grassrootsgames.co.uk/LastAlarm/

There are stage6 and flv versions available.

The post there describes what you can see of the game in the video, but let me just add a couple of code/design-centric things you can see as well:

• Standardised screen transition, dubbed ‘blades’ by the team, hides the scene swapping and almost completely masks the loading of the stage itself, the pause between the intro screen and the warning screen is still a touch too long at the moment, I’m gonna fix that with some background loading
• Custom GUI Controls: Those familiar with TorqueX will most likely see a lot of ‘wtf’ controls in there, I’m doing a lot with opacity manipulation and I have my own button control set up for the loadout screen. I’ll go into more detail on those at a later date.
• Event driven HUD objects: A health bar spawns for the boss when the player gets to it, this is all driven by an OnRegistered event

As always, any questions feel free to ask.

As part of the GUI design for Last Alarm, I’ve created a fair few custom GUI controls for TorqueX, some of them are probably more easily adaptable to suit your needs than others, the GUITypeWriter is easily the most useful.

It has a number of key features over and above the standard GUIText control

• Writes out multiple lines
• Animated ‘Typewriter’ effect on what’s written
• Animated Cursor also available
• Visible opacity parameter so text can stay hidden until required
• Lots of timers and switches to control the flow of the text animation

You can find the full source code, as well as an example, over here at the GarageGames resource page.

If nothing else it should give you a good insight into how to create your own custom control, which can be a daunting prospect (as i learned).

If you find it useful do me a favour and leave a rating.

New webhost, new Gallery, I’ve decided to have a ‘one stop shop’ gallery for all 3 sites (this one and the Damage Control & Last Alarm) so you’ll be able to catch everything here:

http://www.grassrootsgames.co.uk/gallery/

You may have noticed that things that used to be here…are no longer. My old webserver went down and for the moment I have no access to all the old content so please be patient with me while I get back up to speed. Good news is that everything will be better than ever when I’m finished with it.

If you’re linked to any of my RSS feeds you’ll need to update the links Im affraid.