Rise of the Iron Knights [Game Maker Wolf3D Clone]

First topic message reminder :

It's been two years since I released Castle Totenschloss, and here's the sequel that I came up with:

Screenshots:

It has similar gameplay to its predecessor, but has some new features. Nevertheless, get ready to mash some mutants and machines!

Get it here: http://gamejolt.com/games/shooter/rise-of-the-iron-knights/42882/

Have a merry Christmas and happy Hearth's Warming to the bronies out there! /) 

Nice to see you're nearing the end of the game. The scoring's fixed: every killed now drops a much larger score (just like Wolf3D).

The homing missile launcher is more or less a gimmick weapon: sometimes it'll fly around, other times it'll just fly straight, and if you're unlucky, it'll fly back into you (won't hit you but if it explodes, you'll take a lot of splash damage). Use the bazooka just to be on the safe side.

One warning though: the pulse rifle can crash the game if you fire it on full-auto for too long. I don't think the game can support all those polygons and sprites drawn for the projectiles.

The Blake Stone sprites used for the energy weapons were probably used in Goldfire 2010 (I just recolored them) and I think the ROTT launchers' sprites weren't used before (aside from the Blitzgewehr). Attached is a sprite of the four weapons (the other four were presumably ripped from Final Fight).

Attached is a set of handy sprites for modding if you want it.

HA! The homing missiles do come back to me, but they never exploded... yet. They just turn around looking for another target close by.

Thanks for the sprites. I'll see if these can be put to good use. What I'm missing now are those pickup sprites.

VERY CLOSE to beating the last level. Problem is the laser weapons and the regular rocket launcher are useless while in cover in and around open doors. The Chaingun and the Guided missiles are very useful, however using a rocket launcher with bunched up boss enemies causes the game to crash.

It's also VERY HARD to flush out enemies one by one and it's worse when there are 8 boss enemies in a corridor (s) bunched up against one another.

What saved my bacon is the health regeneration. There are not enough extra lives if you wanna play it in harder modes.

I'd seriously consider changing up the last map and MAYBE add a couple more different bullet type weapons (like the rifle and STG44 in Totenschloss) because if you want to take out robots in cover, bullet type weapons are your best shot because projectile weapons (even the plasma rifle) are practically useless in cover and you'd burn out any extra lives faster just by using the chaingun.

I'd also increase the max ammo counts with the rocket launcher(s) and laser weapons some (to possibly 15 and 150 respectively) so you don't have to pick up as much ammo.

It's a good mod for a homage to WSJ (just like Totenschloss), but I will hold off on playing this until the crash bugs are fixed and at the very least change up the last level.

Re-released the game again and removed many bosses from the final level. Now there should be more than enough ammo and 1-ups to defeat all the bosses, but I managed to beat it on the highest difficulty (a bit of cheating, repeated saving and dying involved).

Apparently I didn't learn my lesson with Totenschloss (putting a gajillion soldiers into one room), so I ended up taking it up to 11 by putting in all those bosses. If I remember correctly, the final level in WSJ's 'Eisenritter' had a lot of bosses, which I took inspiration to make this level. Nevertheless, wouldn't want you to ragequit like with Totenschloss, would we?

The next Anvilstein fangame will probably have a much sparser enemy count and more spacious levels to fight in. One of my first ideas for new features was to include some sort of stealth mechanic, maybe make the knife more useful and add a suppressed gun. The rifles will probably return from Totenschloss. If you have any other features to recommend, I'm all ears.

Given the game's extreme proneness to crashing, I just looked up the Game Maker forums and found that Windows 8 doesn't run GM8 games well unlike Windows 7 due to the incompatibility of the former's DirectSound with GM8's internal audio engine (not just my game, tons of others as well). The two ways I can circumvent this is to either try an external audio .dll and keep the GM8 format (more feasible) or port the entire game to GM: Studio (which involves rewriting a lot of code and converting files) with its W8-compatible internal audio engine. Which really sucks since I could enjoy running GM games on Windows 7 without worrying much about crashes (and Microsoft is unlikely to update W8's DirectSound, and Yoyogames gave up GM8 for Studio).  In short, it's gonna be a bit of a development hell from a technical perspective. 

The most far-fetched idea would be to port everything I've made to SDL, ECWolf or not. That will need to be done entirely from scratch.