Canon FS20, Canon FS21, Canon FS22, Canon FS200

Posting in the hopes that Google will help others fix this problem:
Ditch the USB cable that comes with the camera. This camera is VERY sensitive to cable length. I swapped it for a two-foot cable from some old device and it worked fine.
If you’ve already got the camera in USB mode and it’s failing to connect with the supplied cable, you’ll have to pull the battery to get it out of USB mode. Try with a shorter cable (connect the power adapter first) and you should be golden.

It’ll mount as a removable drive, and the movies are in SD_VIDEO as PRG001, PRG002, etc. They’re in MOD format, which mplayer/mencoder can handle just fine.

Or if you want to get fancy, you can always use Kino which has no problem importing them.

October Game: Declaring victory

So since I think I’m going to keep working on this and jam it up on the market, I realized I can’t do that and use this as my October Game. So version 2.0 will be released on the market, October Game is 1.0.

And 1.0 is done! OCTOBER: GOOD.

I added a “you win” screen, a cheat code to upgrade your main gun (powerups later), backgrounds (four different backgrounds used across 11 levels), and extended credits which properly attribute the backgrounds (NASA) and the other art (Danc/Lost Garden from “Hard Vacuum”).

October Game: Misc work

A bunch of various minor changes this time, like a neat new animation when you win (complete with trail of fire self-plagiarized from R.E.A.W.).
I’ve also improved the level selector with confirmation (when resetting the levels-beaten counter) and cheat codes! (well, cheat code)

There are finally more levels. I’m up to 10 so far, with some nice lead up before the boss instead of 3 levels going tutorial/regular level/OH GOD END BOSS EVERYONE IS DEAD.

Update: And now I see that the cheats don’t work and can’t be made to work on a real device that lacks a hardware keyboard. Drat.
Double Update: And now it works!

October Game: Minor fixes

No pictures. I fixed some bugs with losing and the game failing to take you back to the level list. I also made the game autopause if you lock the phone while playing.

October Game: Not much to look at

Not a lot to look at this time. I finally got the whole XML system working, so bullets, enemies, firing patterns, and levels are all loaded from XML files. This makes the built in stuff easy to handle, and the possibility of loading custom(user!) levels off the internets.

Now that levels actually exist, there’s an interface to them as you can see above. It shows you the levels you’ve unlocked, and you can click to play one. Beating the latest level unlocks the next, and this is persisted across launches. (This took awhile, as I had to split the program into two Activities, and I hadn’t learned how to do that at the time)

And writing this made me realize there was a bug: It incremented the level-unlock count even when you were replaying an old level. So playing Levels 1, 1, 3 was possible from a fresh save.

October Game Update: NOT MUCH

I finally got around to extending the enemy-shot system so that it was more than a boolean for “seeking”. Now there’s an ENUM! (which’ll go away once the next thing is finished)
You can see this in practice above, as some of the enemies are shooting the semi-new Wave shots. Less damage than a missile, more damage than a plain shot, doesn’t seek but is rather fast, and wide enough to be kinda annoying to dodge.

And I started setting up a template system for different bullet types and different enemy types. At the moment I have enemy-type config files (XML! HURRAY FOR JAVA) being parsed, but that useful information is not put to any use. Eventually you’ll have bullet config files which define shot types which are used by enemy config files which are used by stage configuration files.

October Game: THAT’S NOT HOW MISSILE AIMING WORKS

A silly bug where I swapped a > for a < in the missile aiming function (which still needs work, it looks good when it’s near the player, but crap far away or behind them)

Health bar! It’s shiny, but it needs to either fade away after no changes (a la GoldenEye), or be part of a full status bar (could be a place to stick powerups and a score)

Other than that, uh…. I’ve been working on this for about four hours and I can’t remember what I’ve been doing besides those two things. (Oh yeah, I did add bordering for the player movement, so you can’t hide half-off the screen)

October Game: YOU CAN LOSE!

Enemies can now shoot back at you, which they do semi-randomly. Enough hits, and you splode.

I had some fun bugs implementing this, like first implementing enemy bullets but forgetting to not check them against enemies for collision. So enemies would fire, and promptly damage themselves with their own bullets.
Then I forgot to swap the directional, so the enemies started firing away from the player. Not very useful.

I still need to add multiple shot types (which depends on enemies being of actually different types, instead of just different sprites), so some enemies can fire shots which are faster or higher damage.

AND FINALLY, I added a way to schedule multiple explosions, so the player can have a nifty five-stage explosion, so it’s weightier than an enemy ship going down.

October Game: SPLOSIONS!

I now have collision detection and nice little explosions as you shoot up enemies. The enemy ships then die after a few hits. It’s nice.

The enemies still don’t shoot back, so you can’t lose. And there’s no levels, just randomly generated enemy selections.
Next time I’m going to implement some differences between the ships, like health/fire rate/speed.
Then, stages: On Stage 1 you get some easy enemies, Stage 2 has some easy mixed with a few harder, then Stage 3 is more harder than easy.

Still need backgrounds.

October Game: CONTINUES

So I’ve got improved following, instead of you just appearing where you touch, the ship moves towards to it, so there’s a maximum movement speed.
There are also now BULLETS, which fire whenever you touch and hold.

The enemies have pretty simple AI, they just wander around randomly. Eventually they’ll fire back, and explode when you shoot them enough.

I changed the background to stop frying my eyes so much, but I’m still not sure what to do about it. A pure-black space background makes the sprites look pretty crap, they’re designed to be used on white. So I might make a scrolling background out of some terrain tiles helpfully provided in the sprite pack.

By the way, this screenshot is from the actual device, not an emulator. Hurray for easy deployment!