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Hi All!
James here, developer of BetaMax - Wow I didn't know this thread existed or the love out there for BetaMax!
Firstly thanks to all of you who have played and thank you so much for letting me know about the level 21 issue, I have looked into it and fixed it.
I have submitted a build to Ouya which will address the following.
* Level 21 now works, for those interested in what went wrong. Level 21 is essentially handled differently to the other levels as it is has a scripted intro and a fixed screen (for those who will get there will realize) But unfortunately the check I was doing in the code to see if it was the final level was broken, so it meant level 21 was being treated as any other level!
* I have added the ability to turn off the CRT shader by pressing L1 at anytime, then press again to re-enable it.
With regards to a sequel. Well let me give you guys/girls a little run down on the history of BetaMax, go grab some snacks this might take a while........
Back in 2009 I made a game for Blackberry called 2D-MAX, (get it? 2D - To The.. Max, nevermind most people didn't either haha), There doesn't seem to be any trace of it left on the Blackberry Appworld, but it was one of my first tries at making games and getting them played. At the time it was 6 level "demo" and some artwork I got made up over the internet, like all Super Cookie Games it was free. Around that time I ended up switching jobs and the recruiter that helped me put me in touch with an artist, Dan, who he knew and knew he liked to make games. Any way this led to us meeting and talking about 2D-max and he loved it, he was always a big fan for Super Mario World, so he wanted to redo all the art for it. Moving on 6 months and we have a game, written in Java, it is BetaMax. We changed the name as at the time in 2010 every game coming out on the web had a beta tag associated with it. So we thought we would play on that.
In fact whilst writing this, I remembered that there was even a pre-pre-cursor to BetaMax that I made sometime in 2008 using J2ME. I never released it as it uses assets from Super Mario, heres the youtube link to the video I made for it -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CRSQJ5pAInA
So what was BetaMax like back in 2010? Well it was web only, running in a Java applet (I know, I know... don't go there). But it featured 4 worlds, each with a level map so you could pick your own route through to the boss. Which was awesome, and for those that could run it and hadn't had Java blocked in their browser really liked it. There wasn't any cookies to collect, and it was one hit kills with a timer and at one point Max had a hat he could collected that would give him an extra hit!
Here is what Sherbet Plains map looked like.
Moving forward again to 2012 and Dan turns around to me and says "Hey I made this neat game using an awesome tool called libGDX" - libGDX is a brilliant cross platform framework that I write all my games in now - Anyway, that got us thinking we should redo BetaMax so it could be on Android (then when RoboVM turned up iOS too). In an effort to have a quicker turn around we reduced the game to the first world only - Sherbet Plains - and created additional levels up to the 21 that we have now. This version you unlocked the levels by collecting the stars and then you could pick and choose which levels to do, then there were achievements too - These are still available on Play and iTunes.
Roll around to 2015 and I port this to Ouya and modify it a bit to fit on a console and a I find that interesting CRT shader and stick that in - here is blog post on how I did it http://blog.supercookie.co.uk/post/110026488367/shaders
So, with regards to a sequel, I have all the art work, I have an engine I can reuse to do it, I just need to find time to make it and with everything I have learnt over the years the level design will be far better!
Cheers
James
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Originally Posted by Helmut
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