T.R.Schmidt Games – Casual Games

Zerocron Release on Steam

Finally ZEROCRON is up on steam. Well, at least as “soon to be released” for now. Made some final tweaks, now adding some steam-achivements.

Before I was stuck in the optimization loop of death for quite a long while.

I hope anyone else beside me will like and play it ;)!

What also took me much too long was composing a bit of music myself, just two songs, for bosslevels and the extro. But that also was an interesting experience.

Thanks to my children for motivating me to finally release it! 🙂

Shotsucker

Added another enemy in the later levels (around 60+), it attracts your shots and charges itself with it for an attack.

Zerocron better vapour trails

Vapour trails now look smoother and need less performance.

Also the extro is finally finished and I added difficulty modes. Hopefully everything finished so far, maybe I´ll add some more gimmicks, just for the fun of it ;).

Zerocron Trailer

Published the Trailer for Zerocron, created quite a while ago.

Also, added Dual-Stick-Controls for running in an actual arcade cab.

I added an enemy/bonus pointer (the red thing floating around the player) which shows you the direction of the nearest enemy or, if not available, the nearest bonus item. You already have a radar, but especially at the end of the level it makes is much easier to find what is left.

Zerocron Beta 0.9.38 – new enemies, more money

I added two new types of enemies, one who follow each other in a row, chasing you and another one waiting and charging at you if come near enough.

Also I made it a whole lot easier to get credits and even reduced the weapon-prices.

Zerocron Beta 0.9.37 – minor bugfixes

Fixed some minor bugs and restructured some code.

Free FRAPS Alternative: Open Broadcaster Software

Since my PC is too slow for most game-capturing software (Core2Duo E7200/Radeon HD5700) while running Zerocron, I finally seem to have found a nice and free open source alternative: Open Broadcaster Software (OBS).

All others I tried either were too CPU-hungry and/or had trouble recording sound.

OBS also didn´t perform so good out of the box, I first had to tweak the settings a bit. Basically I changed the H264-encoding to “ultrafast” with medium quality, resulting in low-cpu and hdd-usage. In case you have the same problem, I thought I´d share my settings with you, relevant stuff is marked yellow. Screenshots are from OBS Version 0.657b.

Zerocron Beta 0.9.36 – better credits, deathcount

Replaced the boring credit-scroller with something more original, fixed some minor bugs and added a total death-count.

So, additionally to maximizing your highscore you could try to keep your total death count low.

Zerocron Beta 0.9.32 – better audio

Today I tweaked Zerocrons audio-effects, it sounds more balanced now and if there´s a lot shooting and explosions simultaneously there is no more acoustic inferno. Also internally, I updated all audio-functions to Game Makers new audio-system.