Crushers - v2.5

Crushers 2.5 is here! I made all the changes I discussed in a post a few days ago and a few more. Essentially all bugs have been fixed. I think the most distinguishing feature of this update is the adaptation to widescreen - this is the first game of mine to have that update.

Download Crushers 2.5 (EXE: 4.3 MB)

Crushers - Polish That

I have been pretty stressed lately, and playing my old arcade-style game Crushers has been a really awesome way to relax. I consider it my best production, but it is currently in a state of half-brokenness because I ran out of time a few months ago while I was doing lots of updating/refactoring. With crosscountry done and another unit of communication class almost over, I want to use a little of my free time for a few days to polish Crushers.

Currently, it has a bug in which blocks are sometimes spawned not aligned to the usual 16x16 grid, which causes weird glitches, teleporting, and disappearance when they collide with another block. I have a pretty good idea of how to fix it, but it will take a little bit of time to go through the block spawning code (which needs a good refactor anyway).

Additionally, since I and pretty much everybody else have widescreen monitors (16:9 aspect ratio), there are blank black bars to the left and right of the Crushers game area. Adjusting the view properties to use a widescreen size will be trivial.

Some adjustments need to be made to the suffocation mechanic, like having the air particles track the player when he is in a 1-wide hole. It could also benefit from a dynamic grid of oxygen sources , but that's a pretty advanced programming thing.

The antigrav dimension could use some work, like being rebalanced to not be a guaranteed death trap. It could also be incentivized, maybe with some score bonuses for being in it or diminishing returns in the normal dimension.

I have other grand ideas, but for now I want to get bugs fixed and get the full v2.5 out.

Crushers - Seedy

I was in the mood to play a little Crushers today. Shortly after playing a few games, I was in the mood to make some additions and changes to it. First, I fixed a bug that allowed the player to suffocate in thin yet open areas. After I saw some amazing events unfold in-game, I decided that I wanted a way to seed the RNG with a value that would cause it to repeat all the block-related events. It took me quite a while to figure out that, if I wanted block falls to be repeatable, player actions could not be sources of randomness. Once I got the idea, it was trivial to remove randomness from the oxygen particles and add a seed dialog to the main menu. Now, players can replay awesome situations!

Crushers - Expansion Time

Crushers: a small platformer arcade game I started developing quite a few years ago.  Last year, I did a flurry of updating and fixing, bringing it to a presentable state.  Though I won't have much time for doing silly stuff like that this year, I do want to keep expanding Crushers, which has earned a place in my heart as my best work in the genre.

Today, I did a bunch of tweaking to allow block spawn rates to adjust for arbitrary room dimensions.  Also, I did a lot of refactoring to ensure the GUI works properly no matter where the player is in the arena.  It took quite a bit of doing, especially the parts where I did my own rendering, but everything works again and I successfully tripled the size of the room without sacrificing scale.  Expansion time, guys!