T.R.Schmidt Games

I wasn´t sure if it still was possible to buy Warblade / Deluxe Galaga (see my last post…) or if my money would be lost on some paypal-account, but I just had to try and some days later I got an email:

First of all We want to regret that it has taken a long time and that you have
not received an answer or the product you paid for.

We are sorry to inform you that Edgar has passed away this spring (2015) after a short illness.

We are currently working to send out the Warblade game to everyone who bought the game.

We also want to thank you so much for buying Warblade !!

…

Yours sincerely
Warblade Team

So, better late than never, I guess, thanks Edgar and whoever now manages the warblade-orders. And since then I had a lot of fun playing the full version of warblade with my son. It´s not easy to keep up with him, he´s quite good at shmups ;).

I just found out that Edgar M. Vigdal, author of one of my favourite SHMUPs died earlier this year.

I remember how impressed I was that he constantly worked on Deluxe Galaga and its successor Warblade since the good old Amiga times in 1995. Thats 20 years! Hell, he even had a successfull kickstarter campaign running for Warblade MK II and started a Deluxe Galaga Remake. God, how that frustates me.

While visiting my favourite Arcade/Flipper-museum (http://for-amusement-only.de), my games had their first betatest, which was quite helpfull.

Especially Zerocron got a lot of small changes afterwards:

-no more shootable asteroids in the shoplevel (too confusing)
-the size of the levels now increases while progressing, which reduces the difficulty a bit and gives the turbo more sense
-the first level of all weapons is now free
-credits are worth more
-replaced the radar into a less original but more intuitive box, originally it was surrounding the player
-tweaked a lot of effects, added screenshake for smartbombs
-added a rebound-shot as bonusweapon

Thanks to Ariane Fugmann for betatesting!

I still wasn´t happy with the look of the ingame credit-coins, so instead of pixeling, this time I rotoscoped a real coin with the same setup I built three years (yes, years!) ago for the asteroids.

The whole process took me about four hours for bulding the setup, removing the background, stabilizing the image and, ridicoulusly the most, experimenting with a proper darker border and size ingame.

Large version:

Small, ingame version:

Old, pixeled version:

Doesn´t look like that much work, does it? 😀

I tweaked QUERX a bit, fixed some bugs and added a background.

Get the new version here.

In the last three days (well, more evenings), I created a new mini-game called QWERX.

It´s a very simple arcade-style game, you have to collect marbles while avoiding to hit the QWERX. Every level you have to collect one more marble, attached marbles increase your inertia. Until now I didn´t get past level 30 :).

Controls are Cursor or AWSD and space to release all marbles.

As sprites I reused Ron Buols wonderful marbles, which I already use in Marbellous.

I called it QWERX because the enemy reminded me a bit of Qix.

It is still beta, if you find any bugs please report them to me.

Download QWERX (Windows, 2.6MB)

This time from the nearly-finished alpha-version of Zerocron. Just missing some more backgrounds, all 99 Levels are finished.

Attractmode:

More Attractmode:

Ingame:

 

Marbellous is nearly finished, I just have to add some more levels.

Last week I planned to make fotos of some marbles to use as sprites. Sadly I couldn´t find my marbles anymore, so I looked around a bit and found a website containing impressive fotos. I asked the owner, Run Buol, if he allows me to use some of his pictures for my game.

He did and even attached some incredible fotos. So, behold the result! 🙂

 

Some work-in-progress videos of Zerocron, here still worktitled “Blast” and, for testing purposes, featuring the incredibly cool introsong from Hybris (Amiga) by Paul van der Valk.