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diff --git a/BulletLabRemix/index.html b/BulletLabRemix/index.html index 408a2fa..fac7a1b 100755 --- a/BulletLabRemix/index.html +++ b/BulletLabRemix/index.html @@ -27,10 +27,19 @@ div.TPartitle <span style="float:right;">Meet the power of open source!</span></td> </tr> <tr> - <td class="TText"><div class="TPartitle">Over view</div><br> + <td class="TText"><div class="TPartitle">Notice</div><br> + All development of Bullet Lab Remix ceased in 2017, and as of August 2023 there's no plan to resume. In fact it's + probably never going to resume unless I literally have a brain tumor. + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="TText"><div class="TPartitle">Overview</div><br> <img src="./scrot/BLRIII_Menu.png" width="480" height="360" alt="BLRIII menu screenshot"><br> Bullet Lab Remix - is an open source game project inspired by Gameboltz's <a href="http://www.funny-games.biz/bullet-lab.html">Bullet Lab</a> <a href="http://www.gameboltz.com/game/337/bulletlab">(Original link, dead)</a> and (somehow) <a href="http://www16.big.or.jp/~zun/">the Touhou Project</a>. However, this is a strange game with its own style.<br> + is an open source game project and an attempt to further develop <a href="https://github.com/styxtwo">styxtwo's</a> + <a href="http://www.funny-games.biz/bullet-lab.html">BulletLAB</a> + <a href="http://www.gameboltz.com/game/337/bulletlab">(Original link, dead)</a>. + Level design is heavily influenced by + <a href="http://www16.big.or.jp/~zun/">the Touhou Project</a>. However, this is a strange game with its own style.<br> (Surprisingly, this game has native Linux support!)</td> </tr> <tr> @@ -40,22 +49,103 @@ div.TPartitle </tr> <tr> <td class="TText"><div class="TPartitle">Development Status</div><br> - [20150912]Bullet Lab Remix III is now in its main development phase.<br> - [20150614]Bullet Lab Remix III first development phase finished... The whole development folder can be found <a href="./public/BLRScriptTestbed">here</a>.<br> - [20150217]Bullet Lab Remix II 1.0.0-0 completed! Get source code <a href="https://github.com/chirs241097/bullet-lab-remix">Here</a>!<br> - [20130828]Bullet Lab Remix I 1.0.3 (stable release) Released! + [20150912] Bullet Lab Remix III is now in its main development phase.<br> + [20150614] Bullet Lab Remix III first development phase finished... <s>The whole development folder can be found <a href="#">here</a>.</s><br> + [20150217] Bullet Lab Remix II 1.0.0-0 completed! Get source code <a href="https://github.com/chirs241097/bullet-lab-remix">Here</a>!<br> + [20130828] Bullet Lab Remix I 1.0.3 (stable release) Released! </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="TText"><div class="TPartitle">Distribution</div><br> - <a href="./public">Click here</a> to visit the download folder, which includes all binaries for different operating systems and, of course, the source code! - <br><br> - <a href="https://github.com/chirs241097/bullet-lab-remix">Project git repository</a> + <a href="https://filestorage.chrisoft.org/blr/">Click here</a> to visit the download folder. All versions -- from BLR I o BLR III Test Bed + are there, including the original modded flash version.<br> + To get the source code, please check out the + <a href="https://cgit.chrisoft.org/bullet-lab-remix.git/">project git repository</a>. I unfortunately no longer + have the sources for the modded flash version, but any decent Flash decompiler should be helpful here. </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="TText"><div class="TPartitle">Screen Shots</div><br> - View Screen Shots <a href="./scrot.html">Here</a>(not maintained and outdated).</td> + View Screen Shots <a href="./scrot.html">Here</a> (not maintained and outdated).</td> + </tr> + <tr> + <td class="TText"><div class="TPartitle">Untold back story of the project</div><br> + <p> + The year was 2012. I was a high school freshman deeply sucked into the Touhou rabbit hole. (yeah, yeah, I know. Weeb and nerd stuff. But calling me + a weeb isn't appropriate since I myself is Asian...) One day when I was randomly roaming on the Internet I noticed the game "BulletLAB". I played + it for a bit, and thanks to my Touhou addiction I cleared the entire game in medium difficulty on the same day. It turns out if you are accustomed + to Touhou-level bullet hell (well, I wasn't even that good back then, only playing the normal difficulty. And it was all down hill from there), + this game is pretty much a walk in the park. + </p> + <p> + "This game needs some desperate help," so I thought. So I busted out my flash decompiler and adobe flash (both pirated, of course). Before long a + modded version came into being. Basically I buffed the sh*t out of certain levels and, cough cough, totally play tested all of them (not the truth + lol). I also removed momentum from player movement completely since that's a completely foreign concept to Touhou players. + </p> + <p> + But soon I found myself strangled by the poor performance of Flash. The game quickly slows down to a crawl when there's too many bullets on screen. + I had to move on to something other than flash. + </p> + <p> + Coincidentally I was playing another shooter game called "Beat Hazard" at the time. I learned about the 2D game engine + <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20120918044348/http://hge.relishgames.com/">"HGE"</a> by going through its game files. + Soon enough I started rewriting the entire game using HGE and C++. + </p> + <p> + By the following year (early 2013), the first iteration of Bullet Lab Remix entered maturity. Thanks to the hardware accelerated nature of HGE, + it ran at a solid 1000 FPS on my crappy laptop. And no - the code does not look good, thanks to my competitive programming entrenched ass. + </p> + <p> + At around the same time, I started daily driving Linux, which gave me the motivation to port the game to Linux. I found out + <a href="https://icculus.org/hge-unix/">hge-unix</a>, a port to hge to any platform supported by SDL. Without much trouble, a Linux port was soon + released. Unfortunately I didn't learn how to write a makefile until years later, so for quite a long time these games are built with a shell + script. + </p> + <p> + Soon after I started the development of Bullet Lab Remix II, this time almost exclusively done on Linux. I took a much more liberal approach + designing the levels, that is, completely unhinged from the original game and taking direct inspiration from Touhou. Some levels are even just + blatant rip-off of Touhou spell cards. The game took shape fairly quickly and entered finalizing phase in 2014, at which point however I got + stuck in trying to come up with in-game music for it. Untalented and unfamiliar with music production tool, it wasn't an easy task for me back + then. + </p> + <p> + While I was busy worrying about the music, I also ported HGE to DirectX 9 on Windows, which turned out to be a trivial task as DirectX 9 kept + almost everything from DirectX 8 and is more or less a find-and-replace job. I also started experimenting with extending the feature set of HGE, + giving it basic support for rendering 3D-transformed sprites and 3D objects, as well as truetype font rendering. With these new features I started + working on a new secret project called BLRScriptTestBed in which I tested all these new library features and laid down the foundation + of what was supposed to be the level scripting engine used in BLR III. + </p> + <p> + But time was merciless. Before I could come up with a single track of my own, my free time is almost up -- it was the final year of high school + and I'm soon facing the National College Entrance Examination (more notoriously known as "Gaokao"). I had no choice but to give BLR II a rushed + finish. I pulled a few (2, to be precise) tracks from modarchive.org, chopped them up as the tracks, and called it done. + </p> + <p> + In the final year of my high school, during which I had to actually attend classes instead of doing my competitive programming nonsense, I was + planning for the third game non-stop. I had an entire notebook that contains nothing but level design, code design and supposed story line for + BLR III. All that effort turned out to be in vain though, because the third game, as you already know, is never finished. + </p> + <p> + When I started college in 2015, development of BLR III briefly resumed for a bit. Curiously the first thing I decided to do is to fork HGE, perhaps + because I decided that I've outgrown this purely 2D-oriented engine. The original fork wasn't too much of a divergence from the original at all. + I just unified the original HGE code base and hge-unix's code base, merged my added 3D and truetype functionalities, and called it my fork. + Later the fork was given a major API overhaul, migrated to GLFW instead of SDL and rewritten in OpenGL 3.2, at which point I gave it the name + "SMELT". + </p> + <p> + Development continued fairly smoothly until late December 2015, when I decided I need to start a new project (now known as QMidiPlayer). I was super + passionate about this new project, so passionate that I already have a prototype with 3D MIDI visualization by mid January 2016 (which is also + implemented using SMELT). This new project quickly took precedence over everything about BLR III. With that and my decreasing interest in danmaku + (or bullet hell) type games in general, unsurprisingly, BLR was neglected to its final demise. + </p> + <p> + If you ask me if I've ever got anything out of this project, I'd answer that with a definite yes, despite that there are few people outside of my + tiny circle that know the existence of this game. Besides the priceless experience dealing with accelerated graphics and a few other programming + tricks, the most significant self-discovery from the project is that ... I should probably never work on a game on my own again. + </p> + <p> + Ah yes I forgot to apologize for the terrible l33t haxxor style of the page. Average 16yo behavior. + </p> </tr> <tr> <td colspan="4" class="TText"><div align="center">Copyright Chrisoft 2015 <a href="../about.html">About</a> Site Map</div></td> |