Cool I like the 3d and the 2d map. Did you see mine and decide to upload? If not that is a fairly amazing coincidence.

This definately is fun and maybe we can combine some of the stuff in ours. I'd say room for improvement in the player animation and maybe some more things like high score list.

When I started uploading my project, your project was not there. After I finished uploading (it took a while to grab screen shots, zip the files, upload) I saw that yours was there. Totally a coincidence. I didn't take great pains in the player animation yet because 3d animation isn't directly supported in XNA yet. I simply built multiple 3D models with a slightly different animation frame and I swap them out as needed. Once 3D animation is supported, I'll update the animations directly in the 3D model instead of using the swapping workaround. A high score list would probably only take about 10 or 15 minutes, but I just didn't do it yet.

This game must have mysterious powers for all these coincidences to be occurring. I figured you were friends with the other Bezerker guy, but if not that's an amazing coincidence.

Here's another coincidence: I woke up at precisely the second that the other Bezerker was posted. When I looked at the project I saw that it had been posted "1 second ago".

It's a total coincidence. I guess there's only so many ways to conjugate "Bezerk".

This game's really funny. I like the textual taunts ("You cannot win!") and the little bit of voice. I laughed. Did the original game kill you if you touched the walls?

Yes. In the original, you died if you touched anything.

Your Bezerker runs fine. Although I haven't let it run for 5 minutes yet! ;)

Evil Otto starts coming out so soon.

Let me know once you get to five minutes ;). (I still haven't been able to reproduce the Snake five minute issue... )

I played around with various Otto times, but really wanted him to be a menace to the player.

Well it runs for more than 5 minutes fine.

However, the "You cannot win. Give up now or die." quip is correct. I cannot get past level 10 because it seems impossible to leave without getting blasted to smithereens.

Yeah. It gets really hard. I thought about reducing the Robot firing rate but then thought: "The original was really hard (the all-time world record is something like 15,000 points)" so I left it alone.

Actually it did hang once again - after I died it simply wouldn't resume. I can see exactly why:
if (gameTime.TotalRealTime.TotalSeconds - this.dyingStartTime >= Bezerker3DGame.dyingDelay)
yadda yadda

Obviously, if I replace that with TotalGameTime it'll work for me. Whether I'm the only person on the planet for whom this happens, I don't know, but at least it's consistent...

I was thinking that an improvement to make this somewhat more playable would be to allow pressing a button to maintain firing in the same direction. This way you could walk to the right while firing to the left. As soon as you let go of the modifier key, it would fire in the direction you're walking.

So, while I realize you were being faithful to the orginal (and therefore the original was seriously flawed), a game that forces you to die because it becomes impossible is flawed design.

Okay, I'll bite the bullet and change all of my TotalRealTime to TotalGameGame and let you see if that fixes the problems you're encountering (in both games). Stay tuned...

I didn't allow firing a different direction than you're facing for exactly the reason you mention (the original didn't allow it). I didn't want to start deviating from the original because I know that once I start deviating, I'll never stop adding stuff. I may cap the difficulty at a lower level to make things more fair...

I just uploaded an update. In this update, I now always utilize TotalGameTime (instead of TotalRealTime) to fix the problem sonyice is experiencing. I also made the game a little easier. I decreased the Robot max speed, shooting rate, and probability of moving so that the robots don't swarm you quite as much on later levels. The game still gets hard, but it should no longer be impossible. If you want to play with the difficulty in the downloaded version, you can adjust the following constants in the Robot class: maxMoveSpeed, maxShootRate, maxMoveMotivation (larger number = harder, smaller number=easier).

sonyice,

I also updated my Snake game to change all occurences of TotalRealTime to TotalGameTime to fix the problems you were having.

Pretty cool game!!! Thumbs up!!!

I just updated the project to change the name of the project to avoid confusion with Bezerker which is also on this site.

relsoft: Thanks for the feedback. I appreciate it.

Thanks bdev13. I made it to level 21, with no hanging. It's definitely not so insanely impossible any more. I was suprised at the detail of the models when zooming in close. Another nice job...

I should probably submit my TotalRealTime bug to the XNA team somewhere.

Thanks, sonyice.

Yeah, I'd be interested to know how prevalent the TotalRealTime problem is...

After playing your snake game, I decided to give this a try too. I guess my comments echo most of the others... technically, it's very good, and quite fun to play.

But I disagree that you are matching the difficulty of the original. Evil Otto didn't come out so fast in the original. The original certainly did ramp up in difficulty quickly, but it did so by putting more robots on the screen, not by forcing you to face the unkillable Otto so quickly. This gave you a chance to get good at shooting things rapidly instead of forcing you to run away.

Also, it looked like the robots could fire through walls, although I haven't looked at the collision detection code to be sure, so maybe this was just a case where the 3d rendering didn't look quite right.

Another nitpick is that I would have preferred the control scheme to use both thumbsticks (like the original) rather than forcing you to run in the same direction you are firing.

I hope you take these comments as constructive criticism. I'm being harsher on this game than on other XNA games I've played because you've already proven to me that you're a good game programmer!

Despite my criticisms, this is definitely in the top 10 XNA games I've played.

Sonyice -- you made it to level 21?!? Remind me not to play Halo deathmatch against you...

taylesworth, thanks for the comments.

I can't say that I put a lot of in-depth thought into Otto's delay interval. I more or less just picked a number. It's pretty easy to change/delay Otto's appearance in each level. There's a variable that is used to scale his appearance time. I don't have the source in front of me, but it's in the OttosRevengeGame class. You can look at the constant declarations and the readLevel() method to see how it is used and can be modified.

If you look at the radar, you will see that the number of robots does increase with each level like the original.

I know that there are some collision issues with shots and robots and/or the player near walls. The issue is that the distance travelled per frame by the shots can exceed the wall width so the bounding spheres sometimes "miss" the intersection. I'd probably just need to extend the collision detection to consider the area travelled during the frame as well as the current position of the shots.

I didn't think the original used two joysticks (one to move, one to shoot). I know Robotron does, but I didn't think Berzerk did (but I played the Atari 2600 version more than than the arcade version).
Updating the game to use both thumbsticks wouldn't take that long (Probably half an hour or so).

Thanks for all the feedback. I know there are some rough edges. The most difficult thing about casual game design is keeping yourself interested in a given project long enough to keep polishing it.

> I didn't think the original used two joysticks (one to move, one to
> shoot). I know Robotron does, but I didn't think Berzerk did (but I
> played the Atari 2600 version more than than the arcade version).

Whoops, you're right. Guess I've been playing too much Robitron on XBLA recently...

> The most difficult thing about casual game design is keeping
> yourself interested in a given project long enough to keep
> polishing it.

Amen to that. I'm trying to stay focused on my next XNA project but I keep thinking of other things that would be fun to try to do...

>> Yeah, I'd be interested to know how
>> prevalent the TotalRealTime problem is...

It's a confirmed bug: http://forums.microsoft.com/MSDN/Show...

Thanks for the info. That's a pretty remarkable bug. This reminds me of how they broke the Plane constructor in moving to beta 2 a while back. Finding that bug was hell for me.

(I was referring to the Plane constructor that took three points of a triangle.)

sonyice,

Yeah. I saw your post on the MSDN forums a little earlier. Weird that it only seems to manifest on some machines...