ZenDuck

[Brett_val]

Features three play modes:

Chase Ducks
Chase the ducks as they fly within an invisible frame. The crosshair will stay in the center of the screen, and you will have to move it to a duck. Clicking the screen (anywhere) will shoot it.
When you have shot all of them, you will advance a level and you will get more ducks to shoot .

If you can't find your ducks, you can press and hold the screen, and it will show lines which point in the direction of the ducks' locations:
The longer the line, the further away the duck is.



Hunt Ducks
Watch the ducks fly by and move the crosshair to them to shoot them (again, by tapping the screen). You will get 10 points for a hit, and -5 for a miss. You have to hit at least 41% of the ducks to advance a level.

QuackTap
Very similar to Hunt Ducks, only now you can tap on the ducks to shoot them.
Thanks to dashiva76 for the name

Thanks to blikbier for the gun sound,
and I also want to thank Diddykong13, because his Falling Balls code helped me to easily load the saved highscore.

Don't shoot ducks for real because they are lovely animals. While searching the internet I found that people still do this as a hobby, which is horrible.
Instead, shoot them on your Zen .

This is my first game, so any suggestions/improvements are more than welcome

Version 2
Two game modes:
1) The game described above is now called "Chase Ducks" because you will only advance a level when you have shot all of them.
2) Second mode "Hunt Ducks" is more like the classic game. The screen is fixed and the crosshair is scrollable, and ducks will fly by at different speeds and angles.

Version 2.1
lag fixed
more efficient redrawing
And due to being requested; now also contains a tap-ducks game.

Version 2.2 --contained unsupported wave file, which crashed the player. Sorry about that, please download v2.3
background added
minor game improvements

Version 2.3
Corrected mistake.

Version 3 -in progress
accelerometer scrolling.

[CrowdAds]

[daddycoco]

im putting it on my ZEN now, once i play it, i'll see if theres any bugs or not, it looks great



EDIT: like it alot, it gets a little frustrating scrolling, i was thinking of the classic game, maybe in stead of scrolling just the ducks flying by (some fast, slow, etc.) but i love it 9/10

[Mr Wunderbar]

havent got my cable with me atm but as soon as i can i'll load it. looks great!

[mustomax]

Great !
With the accelerometer,it would be greater...

[Jenner210]

I vote for an accelerometer version too, but it's still pretty fun

[Mr Wunderbar]

yeah accelerometer scrolling would be beast...

[Brett_val]

Good idea about the accelerometer, I'll implement that. I hope it will be fast enough though. Accelerometer scrolling takes a bit more calculations..

Originally Posted by daddycoco

it gets a little frustrating scrolling, i was thinking of the classic game, maybe in stead of scrolling just the ducks flying by (some fast, slow, etc.)

I realized that this game is indeed not like the classic duckhunt. So I renamed my game to Chase Ducks, and added Hunt Ducks. You can now choose between the two modes.

I wanted to have a background picture in the Hunt Ducks mode, but that caused the game to really slow down, and also the movements of the crosshair were not fluent anymore. I guess drawing a picture instead of screen.fillrect(0,0,400,240) is too heavy for our player . (the picture was also 400x240 by the way)

[daddycoco]

accelerometer would be great! And i am thinking about what you said about the background...thinking hard


EDIT: maybe you could keep the simple background (blue) but add some details? I have no clue about this, im no programmer, so im not sure if its possible, add details such as clouds, smoke, etc. example: a duck is flying by and so is a cloud, the cloud blocks the shot, so it makes it much harder to shoot, im not sure if you could grasp what im saying, but see if you could i also played the two modes, i love em'

[Mr Wunderbar]

i dont like the traditional duck hunt game. the cursor lags behind at makes it annoying to shoot.

id prefer simply tapping the birds to shoot them, it would be better than boink anyway.

[matt_bracken]

I agree with Mr Wunderbar, just tapping and shooting would be good. But the game works great and rolls back the years. Awesome effort!

Did come up with one error when I went from one game to the other, but it restarted fine and didnt go to scan- not exactly the end of the world.

[RobertsAccount]

Great game! It's grown on me after 10 minutes of vigorous duck shooting... Only thing is, the cursor can lag behind when you drag your thumb/finger across the screen slowly. I'm not sure why this is, hopefully you can figure it out Otherwise, nice work!!

[ThievingSix]

Why are you redrawing the entire background every frame instead of just the parts that were changed?

[Brett_val]

Originally Posted by matt_bracken

I agree with Mr Wunderbar, just tapping and shooting would be good. But the game works great and rolls back the years. Awesome effort!

Did come up with one error when I went from one game to the other, but it restarted fine and didnt go to scan- not exactly the end of the world.

Okay, if you like tapping, I'll might take out the crosshair and change it to tap-shooting.

I'll try to recreate the error.. if I can find it I will fix it.
Which game was it that you were playing, and how long (how many levels) was it before you switched to the other one?

Originally Posted by RobertsAccount

Great game! It's grown on me after 10 minutes of vigorous duck shooting... Only thing is, the cursor can lag behind when you drag your thumb/finger across the screen slowly. I'm not sure why this is, hopefully you can figure it out Otherwise, nice work!!

Yeah it's addicting isn't it, while testing I also couldn't stop

About the lag, (I didn't notice it myself actually, I think I always drag too fast) I suspect that it has something to do with the os.sleep(), but I already put that outside of the else statement, so that it now sleeps everytime in the loop.. (which is also in v2) but maybe that's still the culprit?

At this moment I don't have a clue why there is lag when scrolling slowly.. I'll think about it, and if any of you have any ideas about this, I'll be glad to hear them.

Originally Posted by ThievingSix

Why are you redrawing the entire background every frame instead of just the parts that were changed?

Thank you ThievingSix. You've really opened my eyes. A formula to only redraw the parts that were changed would be quite easy to create, and it will certainly make everything faster. I'll test it and (probably) add it to the next update.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[RobertsAccount]

Originally Posted by Brett_val

At this moment I don't have a clue why there is lag when scrolling slowly.. I'll think about it, and if any of you have any ideas about this, I'll be glad to hear them.

Well I think xConStruct had the same problem with his 3D Wireframe Test app... Maybe you could approach him and ask how he fixed it?

[Brett_val]

Originally Posted by RobertsAccount

Well I think xConStruct had the same problem with his 3D Wireframe Test app... Maybe you could approach him and ask how he fixed it?

While reading that thread again, I found what Cilmaviel used to speed up his Paint app. It also fixed the lag in Hunt .
But I'm still not sure what you mean by "lag when moving slowly".
If it's still there, can you please explain?

So I think I fixed the lag. But I already said I'd make it into a Boink game, so I added Boink Ducks. I really didn't know what to call it, "Tap Ducks" was really lame, so "Boink Ducks" it is... Anyone have a better name?

It's also now only redrawing parts that have changed. When drawing new ducks, it first draws over the old duck with backgroundcolor.
I'm not sure if this is better, or easier for the player, but it works

One thing I still need to change: what can I do to "pause" the game when you go to a new level? It now shows the "new level" screen, but if you accidentally tap it, the new level starts. os.wait() and os.sleep() are not helping, because it seems that the tap is still registered and executed as soon as the sleep or wait is over...
Is there a way to clear the control.read() queue?

[dashiva76]

QuackTap? Too stupid? :P

[Habhome]

Better than Boink Duck I'd say. That just makes me think about the expression "to boink beaver"... Which is definitely not the same thing.

[Brett_val]

Haha I realize now that Boink Ducks is gross and stupid Since Habhome said that I cannot get it out of my mind

QuackTap would be nice.. at least there are no wrong associations with it.. I'll change it on the next update.

[Gruffler]

you quacktap is very nice i like it
an improvement would be if you would add transparency in duck images because it looks a bit weird if 2 ducks are flying across to each other...

[Brett_val]

QuackTap it is

I finally placed a background picture on it, because with the use of ThievingSix's tip there is no slow down. I also made it a little harder to advance a level in Hunt and Tap mode. And I added a sound of ducks quaking. Thought that would be funny. Didn't put it everywhere, because that would be annoying. Only when you start a new level.

So I think I've pretty much completed version 2, but if there are any bugs I'll fix them ofcourse. (I couldn't recreate the error with the changing of playmodes, but I did change some stuff when it changes playmodes, so I hope that bug is done for.)

For version 3 I think I'll add clouds and maybe other objects that block your shot as daddycoco suggested. That sounds like a nice idea.
And for the accelerometer scrolling, I haven't got time try that yet, and I also believe that it will be almost impossible to hit any ducks with that..
But I'll try it anyway

I'm not sure when version 3 will be ready, because I also have to work a little more on Notepad.

Anyway, first post is updated