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DS homebrew announcements > Geo Wars

#138419 - sumiguchi - Thu Aug 23, 2007 11:02 pm

Hi Everyone,
SpriteAttack & I released a game called Geo Wars that won the Dev-fr competition in late July. It's been picked up by some of the popular DS news sites, but if you haven't tried it, please check it out!
[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
---
It is a space shoot'em up game. You must battle through waves of enemies to save Trinity and all of humanity.

Characters
There are two playable characters and you must progress through the game as both characters. (Progress for each character is stored seperately) There are some difference - primarily in the bombs. Alice has radial bomb controlled by the stylus and Mortymer has guided missles also controlled by the stylus.
The game is easier if you play as Alice but I think you can get higher scores with Mortymer once you master your bomb control techniques.

Modes of Play
There are 10 missions, 10 Zones and 2 training missions to play. Missions allow you to unlock new areas and upgrade your ship. In Zone, you always start with basic weapon capabilities and can get better weapons/bombs by collecting power ups. Be sure to enjoy the stereo sfx with headphones. Audio options are in the pause menu during gameplay

I hope you will submit your scores online to show your capabilities in case of a similar strike against Earth. Online Leaderboard

Please enjoy!

Requires DLDI Patching (R4/M3 users - do not let the device create the save file...the game will do it)

Download

This game is a final release, but comments/suggestions or any other type of feedback is welcome.

#138426 - Galactic Lord Xenu - Fri Aug 24, 2007 1:44 am

I've played it for only a little bit so far (plan on playing it more in the future), but it's a pretty polished piece of homebrew.

#138430 - Sweater Fish Deluxe - Fri Aug 24, 2007 1:54 am

Hey, I missed the announment of the results from the dev-fr contest, so I didn't know your game won. Cangratulations, sumi! I knew you'd win.

Geo Wars is absolutely my favorite game on the DS, homebrew or otherwise. I can zone on it for hours.

I never had an Xbox or 360, so I've never had a chance to play the original Geometry Wars, but I've always slobbered over it because it looks so cool and is just exactly the type of game I love. I played Extreme Onslaught a lot and loved it, but I knew it could be improved on a lot. So my excitement when I saw GeoWars was pretty high. The fact that it actually turned out to be probably the most polished and complete homebrew release on the DS yet was like a wet dream though. Thanks so much.

I honestly can't think of anything that truly needs to be fixed or improved in GeoWars, which is pretty rare for me since I'm such a nitpicker.


...word is bondage...

#138441 - Markzilla - Fri Aug 24, 2007 4:28 am

Well, it could use a few more levels...
But other than that, all-around excellent homebrew.

#138444 - calcprogrammer1 - Fri Aug 24, 2007 5:38 am

This is really nice! Runs great on my Games n' Music, and the graphics are excellent, the explode effects look great. It looks very professionally designed too, with smooth menu buttons and fade in/out effects.
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#138462 - tepples - Fri Aug 24, 2007 10:40 am

How long until the cease and desist?
Quote:
Although other freeware games similar to Geometry Wars exist, Grid Wars eventually became so popular that Bizarre emailed Incitti and asked him to take the game down, citing that they were "beginning to feel the effects of the Geometry Wars clones on our sales via Microsoft now and are beginning a process to begin to more robustly protect our copyright and intellectual property". The game was pulled from download on 2006-08-08, but many mirrors exist on the web.

Does Bizarre really think it owns all Smash TV clones that use wireframe graphics?
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#138492 - Dood77 - Fri Aug 24, 2007 6:25 pm

I was wondering the same thing, and I think it would've happened if he did any big announcements and kept us up-to-date on the progress well before it was released. But I actually think Bizarre is too confident and excited about there new release, Geometry Wars: Galaxies (whose features are boundless compared to Retro Evolved) to care about more small clones. Plus, Grid Wars was the most accurate clone I ever saw, and it was the most popular, also being on the PC. Granted, I do think the name is a little much.

Oh, and they're not Smash TV clones, they're Robotron: 2084 clones.
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#138509 - tepples - Fri Aug 24, 2007 8:43 pm

Dood77 wrote:
Oh, and they're not Smash TV clones, they're Robotron: 2084 clones.

In Smash TV for arcade (in official Midway PS2 emulator), NES, and Super NES, new baddies respawn into the same room. Was this the case in Robotron? But even that is mildly a Berzerk clone, which is in turn a real-time game based on Robots for old-skool UNIX systems.
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-- Who?
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#138525 - Jakeohagan - Sat Aug 25, 2007 2:13 am

sweetness i downloaded the game and im palying it right now i love this game on pc and i bought the new one for steam but there error or something becuase it keep crashing off topic sorry.
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#138584 - Pikanya - Sun Aug 26, 2007 3:02 am

Truth is, it doesn't work in my M3 SD. I tried every combination of .ds.gba or .nds, and the two DLDI patches available, plus non-patched. I wonder what's wrong.

#138620 - Liquidnumb - Sun Aug 26, 2007 8:30 pm

tepples wrote:
Dood77 wrote:
Oh, and they're not Smash TV clones, they're Robotron: 2084 clones.

In Smash TV for arcade (in official Midway PS2 emulator), NES, and Super NES, new baddies respawn into the same room. Was this the case in Robotron? But even that is mildly a Berzerk clone, which is in turn a real-time game based on Robots for old-skool UNIX systems.


Tepples, I learn so much from you.

#138953 - sumiguchi - Fri Aug 31, 2007 5:27 am

Quote:
How long until the cease and desist?

lol...so far so good :)

Quote:
to care about more small clones.

Well actually this is not a "small clone" - this is a completely different game with similar gameplay.

Quote:
Granted, I do think the name is a little much.

Yeah - should have probably changed up the name, but it wasn't really a priority.... it was a working title that just got left....

Thanks for all the nice comments. Hope to see some more high scores registered...so far 970! :D And some of those scores are freakin awesome!!

I finally got a round to creating my own page for the game and posted up a few more pics.

[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]
[Images not permitted - Click here to view it]

#138958 - sonny_jim - Fri Aug 31, 2007 8:08 am

Excellent! I've been wanting a good Roboclone for a while now. Great work! Oh and btw, Robotron:2084 is much better than Smash TV. So much so I ended up buying a Williams Bubbles cocktail cabinet off Archer Maclean with the view to converting to a Robotron.

EDIT: Sorry to nitpick, but there's a spelling mistake on one of the first screens. It says "unkown enemy" rather than "unknown enemy"
EDIT2: And perimeter is spelled wrong.

#143154 - Kiz - Wed Oct 17, 2007 1:39 pm

Pikanya wrote:
Truth is, it doesn't work in my M3 SD. I tried every combination of .ds.gba or .nds, and the two DLDI patches available, plus non-patched. I wonder what's wrong.


Same here (M3 SD), can't get it to work no matter what I do. I just get two black screens. Pity, coz I'd love to give this a shot.

#143222 - Jakeohagan - Thu Oct 18, 2007 1:57 pm

jetboy wrote:
Excuse noobish question, but how do you actualy shoot?
I'm flying around and no button seems to be working as a trigger....


Touch the screen in the direction you desire to fire if i remember correctly.
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#143223 - jetboy - Thu Oct 18, 2007 1:59 pm

Jakeohagan wrote:
Touch the screen in the direction you desire to fire if i remember correctly.


Ya, i'm a noob.
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#143265 - sumiguchi - Thu Oct 18, 2007 10:43 pm

I see a few problems with the M3...

So my suspision is, (aka.. I dunno), that the M3 is creating a save file. Then the game tries to use it and it fails because it is improperly formated. The game needs to create it's own save file. Delete geowars.sav from your card and when you start the program, if given a choice, choose to NOT create the save file. If you aren't given a choice, perhaps, I can upload a blank, but valid save file...that you can use to replace the one created on the card. But I don't know how the m3 works with saves - so please educate me :)

To confirm that the problem is save data related...I've uploaded a NoSave version to my website. This way the M3 users can test it out...but your progress will be lost after a power cycle... sorry :(

NO SAVE VERSION:
http://sumiguchi.googlepages.com/geowars_nosave.zip

#143285 - Kiz - Fri Oct 19, 2007 7:01 am

Sumiguchi - I *THINK* that the way the M3 works is that when a .nds file is loaded, it internally creates a .sav file. Then, next time you boot up the DS it'll backup that .sav to your memory card. For all homebrew apps, when it tries to backup the .sav to the card, it generates a warning saying that it can't backup the .sav file (probably because because homebrew apps don't use the same method of saving stuff as commercial games I'd assume) so nothing is actually written to the card.

I'll test out the suggestions you emailed to me/posted here and let you know the results. If I have some luck with the NoSave version, then perhaps a blank but valid .sav file packaged with it would do the trick as you suggested.

Edit - I tried both Chishm's and agentq's DLDI patch on the regular Geo Wars, no dice. I tried turning off autosave in the M3 options (this makes it so when loading a .nds file, you can choose a .sav file to backup the .sav of the last thing you played. If you hit 'cancel' then it just loads the .nds file you selected, so I'm assuming that it's not trying to use any .sav file, but I dunno what's going on behind the scenes), no dice. I tried the NoSave version, no dice (both with and without the autosave option). Everything resulted in the double black screen.

I tried loading up a different app that I don't have any problems with, perhaps to clear out any garbage .sav file that might've been stored internally, then loaded up the NoSave version. This time instead of the double black screen I had the top screen black, bottom screen white. I don't really know what else to try now, but I'll try out anything you could suggest.

It's a pity I can't seem to get this working, tomorrow afternoon I'm going away for a couple of days, and this like it would've been an awesome time killer.

Edit 2: Success! GeoWars_nosave.nds didn't work, but using dsbuild to make a .ds.gba version did! And there was much rejoicing. Hopefully with a valid blank .sav file, the regular .ds.gba will work for me.

Your game is really cool, and has quite a professional polish to it. It's got me thinking about trying my hand at my own little shooter type DS project now that I've finished classes for the year (haven't done much for the DS other than compile and run some examples). For one of my subjects I needed to make an Asteroids clone, so might try porting that from Qt to VideoGL.

#143325 - sumiguchi - Fri Oct 19, 2007 3:58 pm

Glad you got it working and like the game :)

A valid save file is here: http://sumiguchi.googlepages.com/geowars.sav

#143353 - Kiz - Sat Oct 20, 2007 3:14 am

Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get any of the saving versions working no matter what I did. At least I'll be able to toy around with the game, though it's a pity I won't be able to get saving working. Once I get back from my holiday I'd be happy to try anything else to try and get it working, though I'm not sure what there is left given that you don't have access to an M3 as well.

#143478 - moket - Mon Oct 22, 2007 6:38 am

[EDIT] ok figured it out !!
i've uploaded the file here.
http://get.a.life.free.fr/homebrewNDS/geowarspatched.ds.rar
tell me if I'm doing wrong. I will remove it.

-----
Hi Kiz can you perhaps upload somewhere your patched rom please, I've tried DSBuild but really don't understand, then tried with CMDhere like some guys said but really don't understand at all.
Really want to try this game. Geometry Wars is coming anyway so I won't bang here again. I swear :)