Can't decide if the lighter lines look better highlighted with dark outlines or not.

Neat, glad you thought it was a good idea!

Just played it some more and got the second place in the top tier :D

So, with the new leaderboards set up, any thoughts on allowing players to actually reduce their point totals in the customisation screen, by clicking on filled boxes? That would allow players who have already played the game a bunch to take on a handicap and try out different combinations of power-ups at the lower levels, kind of like the ever-popular low-level playthroughs in JRPGs. Not sure how much extra work that would be.

You definitely need a mac to develop for iPlatforms, unfortunately, but if you have the option at some point in the future, a short-form game like space parasite could be an excellent fit for the App store.

G'day folks. Considering how much I improved thanks to the Powernoughts thread I started during the VS compo, I figured I'd start one for my current project. I already had some really good pointers, but I know I can definitely use more help.

So here's the current level background I'm working on. It's the entrance to a sewer tunnel on the outskirts of a city:

 

The lighter lines on the water are still very much WIP, and I'm basing them on a tutorial I saw linked a long time ago that I haven't been able to find again. It definitely looks too 'clean' still, to be a sewer, but I don't want to clutter it too much in order to avoid distracting the player from the enemies.

Thoughts?

And I would add that its pretty cool when a logo looks like it was done for the game itself. Without looking like a stock footage. I love when Movies adapt their logo screen to fit the theme of the Movie, like Universal 8-Bit logo in Scott Pilgrim

I really like it when movies and games do this, gives them that much more personality and it's a nice touch.

Some things

Love those, great colors and personality!

[Devlog Day 61]

Devlog Day 61 (version 0.42d)

Made a major change to the way the World Map UI works. It used to be that if you clicked on a map location, if you weren't already on it it would move you to that location, and if you were it would transition the game to that level. This restricted the number of levels to the number of locations on the map, which was ok for most locations, but posed problems if I wanted to have more than one level at a particular location. So I changed it.



Now each location can have up to 12 things you can do there, marked by the icons in the bottom left of the UI panel. Each icon represents either a level, a tutorial, or some other activity or location - for example, the starting city currently houses the tutorial and one level, but I plan to add a shop, the shady magic cram school the protagonist is attending (basically a practice area where the player can try out their powers as they acquire them), some more tutorials, and likely a few more levels.

The new level panel required some icons for levels, so I made some:





Each level icon has two frames. The first is the regular, active frame, which indicates to the player that the level is available to play normally. The second varies depending on the type of level: Tutorial levels display a check mark, indicating that the player has completed that particular tutorial. Regular gameplay levels appear greyed out. This means that the level has been completed recently and is unavailable. I'm planning on turning levels off for a few in-game days after the player completes them, and once the cooldown timer expires they become available again.

Started work on the first level, one of the entrances to the Thessalian sewers. The Thessalians use magical slimes as a first process to break down the city's waste. The slimes take care of most of the solid waste, breaking it down into smaller particles. The city's population being what it is, a lot of magical contaminants get dumped into the sewers. These contaminants are happily absorbed by the slimes, and over the process of a few months large numbers of slimes will mutate and evolve strange magical powers. Since uncontrolled magical creatures are the last thing the City Council want spewing out of the sewers, regular patrols of the sewer entrances and tunnels are carried out, usually by squads of freshmen from the Academy or out-of-town mercenaries looking to make some quick, if smelly, coin.



The water still needs a lot of work, as do the banks.

• Implement UI covering panels to cover unused Level UI elements
• Change World Map interaction so that the player moves between locations by clicking on the maps, but access levels through the level selection panel
• Thessalia sewer entrance level
• Implement mouseover script for level selection panel that shows level info
• Implement system that increases the quality of item drops depending on level tier

Those vines look much better. In the video, it looked like the vines had leaves coming out of them, maybe (circles that were offset to the sides of the main line of circles)? Or was I just imagining it?

Also, the circle from where your shots originate looks like an ancient mask or face bas-relief. I really like the art style you're using. 

I'm also curious to learn what role the sun plays.

Really cool idea, I'm looking forward to playing this. I especially like the mechanic with the rainclouds and the vines. 

Pretty fun, it has a good feeling of tension, and the different arrows are interesting. 

Played it some last night, loving it! 

Played it some just now, and it's really fun! I played it for about 45 minutes non-stop, trying to get to the next level, get more attributes, unlock the next enemy and power-up. It's a great pick-up and play game, and the chaos once you have a few points in some attributes is hecticly glorious. When I started playing I was a little confused as to what I was doing, but once it clicked it was easy to grasp and engaging.

Then when I unlocked the poweru-ups and starting seeing the screen do trippy things I was like 'whu? why did that happen, is it because of the chain bonus multiplier?'. It took me a couple of power-ups to realise what was going on. In the later levels, with all the gems and explosions and stuff it got a little hard to follow where I was, but as I kept playing it reached the point where I wasn't trying to follow my position and instead I was going almost on instinct, which felt like it tied in well with the premise that I was some mindless space parasite blindly infecting and destroying hosts in a rampage of primal urges.

It's also really neat that each of the hosts you infect has it's own particular 'abilities', and the sprites are really distinctive and eye-catching. The UI elements are also really elegant (I love the chain and the way it breaks when you run the timer out on it).

Have you thought about making an iPhone port? It also feels like the game would lend itself really well to power-limited leaderboards - you could have a leaderboard for people who play with only 5 attribute points, 10 attribute points, etc. That might give it a fair amount of replay value through customisation, but of course would require additional work.

Nice work!

MMOs fascinate me as one genre that should allow for some absolutely brilliant game design, and yet, it seems like MMO publishers keep falling into the same pits of repetition driven content.

Yeah, I find that frustrating as well. There are huge amounts of potential in the basic concept of a multiplayer persistent world game but no one ever seems to really tap into that potential. There are basically two genres, the grind-based MMORPG and the time-based MMORTS (stuff like Ogame and Travian whose mechanics were later adopted by "social" Facebook games).

I guess it's because running a large-scale MMO comes with a high financial risk so developers choose to play it safe.

More accurately, WoW's success has been misinterpreted, time and again, as 'Players want quest-driven level grinds', and that's the current paradigm. WoW is the game to beat, so developers are trying to out-WoW Wow... which is a crazy notion.

Personally, I would love to see a modern, 3D version of Ultima Online, something more sandboxy and less rollercoastery. Who knows, maybe the time will be right someday soon.

Looks pretty neat so far

Yes, it definitely sounds easier to just take the sprites and greyscale them and store them as either separate sprites or frames of the originals. Thanks for the info!

I totally wouldn't mind an invite.

So Gamasutra has a piece with, among others, TIGF regular supershigi. Gogo!

[Devlog Day 55]

Devlog Day 55 (version 0.41a)

Got a few good hours of work. The game date now only advances when the player plays through a level, rather than when they move to a new location on the map. Since the player has to make payments to the loan shark at set intervals of game time (I'm currently thinking every two weeks), it gives the player more wiggle room to explore the map if the date only advances when they player a level. This will all be subject to tweaking once the game has seen some playtesting.

Also decided that each location on the world map would likely need to have a number of levels (especially the capital city, where the player has to return to learn new abilities, each of which will be accompanied by a tutorial level).

Another possibility I'm considering is giving levels a cooldown period after they are completed. This is to prevent the player from simply grinding the same level over and over for money, which would likely be the easiest and most boring way to accumulate money to meet loan payments. I'm thinking a good way to illustrate this would be to have the level's world icon display in greyscale, which will probably require some more graphics work.

The World Map UI is about 40% complete, with a bar that shows the player's current location, and buttons for the current date and the player's money total. Right now none of these do anything except display information, but I'm considering implementing some functionality for each: the location bar can be clicked to open a small window with a short blurb about the location, the money button can be pressed to make an advance payment to the loan shark at any time, and the date button might be clicked to show a calendar showing when the next payment is due.



On the gameplay side of things, I'm considering implementing some kind of mechanic that rewards the player for firing accurately without missing, perhaps some form of Overdrive bar that fills up as the player hits things without missing, and when it fills up it gives the player a few seconds where they can shoot without using up mana or something. I'll have to experiment with it.

• Rename and organise fonts
• Implement UI covering panels to cover unused Level UI elements
• Change the font of the location bar, or change the name of the capital to something shorter
• Change Date tracker to only increase when the user completes a level
• Change World Map interaction so that the player moves between locations by clicking on the maps, but access levels through the level selection panel
• Implement mouseover script for level selection panel that shows level info
• Implement end of level script that awards Level Clear bonus money (iteration: depending on performance (Level Reward x % objective completion = money awarded))
• Change loot so that gold coins are rarer and copper coins are more common
• Implement system that increases the quality of item drops depending on level tier

Does GM have a way to take a sprite and draw it using greyscale, without having to create a new sprite?

Very promising, looking forward to this going live. 

 

Green, if I was rich I throw cash moneys at you until you never had to do anything other than make sprites for the rest of your life.