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[X-0ut]

Hi my name is X-0ut and I have a long standing fascination/addiction to shmups.
I'm not so keen on the current trend of bullet hell, and it is my intention to show the existing shmup user base that the old school horizontal shooters still have life.
As such, I'm going to keep a work log here on tig for general feedback.
The project has been in development for around 6 months now, progress has been slow as I have bitten off quite a bit of work for a solo developer. The planned release date is sometime in 2011, its a little sketchy since I will not be happy to release a game I would not want to play myself.
I'm giving you the tig source readers a chance to steer the direction of the this games development. I shall be following feedback and critiscim closely, and hopefully applying what I learn to the game.

And now for some obligatory screen shots of the game and its status over development so far.





Well, thats it for the first development post, hope to hear some feedback.

*EDIT* Now has a name "Giga War", sorry for the confusion this may create from the previous title MkIII.

[shig]

Whoa, this looks great!

But, yeah, when I first read the topic title I thought it was a shmup based on Mortal Kombat III and I was like what.

[X-0ut]

Hah! Yes I see the connection.
I guess its about time I gave the game an official name.

[Onza40]

Looks good, and I'm with you, these hell of bullet games can be totally ridiculous.

[dumbmanex]

Ohh, very cool.  I was never able to get into the b.h. shooters, so seeing this will be nice.   

So is the mech a boss or what?

[deathtotheweird]

I saw that screenshot and immediately thought of Einhander. This looks awesome and I can't wait to see more shots, and especially footage.

[The Monster King]

yeah this is like R-Type + Einhander with more giant robots? I'm sold!

[davidp]

this is looking mega sweet!

moar please. video or something of that in action would be nice.

[Retroman]

Good luck with your project, it already looks quite promising!

Nice username BTW, I loved X-Out on the good old C64!

[X-0ut]

I have some old videos that can be viewed, but please note these are not up to date and do not correspond to the current status. They should give you an idea of where its going though:








@The Monster King: You nailed it spot on, that is what I'm going for.
@Retroman: Yay another oldschooler to appreciate shmups. Loved the X-0ut intro

[tapir]

that thing reminds me of Shogo: Mobile Armor Division

[X-0ut]

A new video of the game can be found

.
Theres no enemies in yet, its just a fly through of the first stage, route/path A.
Includes a sound track I have been working on.
Collision handling and response is also working between the world and entity spaces.
Such a mammoth project for one person, but it is progressing steadily.

[george]

that cityscape is ridiculous, keep it up man 

[maxwell]

This looks great! It looks like you get multiple independent weapons, how do you control them?

[X-0ut]

Depends on the ship you choose, for this ship its 1 button to configure, another to use (per weapon).
So thats a total of 4 buttons for this ship, works fine on controller with should buttons for configure. I dont think it will be too many.

[I_smell]

I think this belongs in Devlogs.

I think Giga War is a really awful name. There's about 500,000 other games with "war" in the title and "Giga" doesn't even really mean anything, it just sounds roboty.
I think the lightsaber waggling about ontop of the ship looks daft. Can you swap out weapons in this game, change em around or anything? When I saw the ship I thought of

, where you could buy new weapons and afix em to the top or bottom. So there's an idea.
Actually the ship doesn't look like it's flying at all. It literally looks like the background is a slowly-moving camera. It seems like you've built a spaceship with a top speed of about 60mph.
The boss fight seems pretty good.

[BlueSweatshirt]

Great job so far, X-Out.

The city and the way the camera pans throughout it is breathtakingly beautiful for just the work of one person. Again, great job so far!

[X-0ut]

@Everyone: thanks for the feedback so far.

@I_smell: Hmm you are right this probably belongs in devlogs, maybe a mod can get it moved?
You put some valid points. I've allways been terrible at names. The 'story' behind it is a futuristic war between the Titans and Gigans, hence GigaWar. But I agree, its not particularly catchy.
Weapons can be swapped about, indeed that is one of the primary game-mechanics.
I see what you mean about the ship not looking like its moving, and some other people have mentioned this also. What do you propose to remedy this? I can pan the camera so you get different angles on the ship during sharp turns etc.
If you have ideas, I'd like to hear them.

[I_smell]

Ok I'll try n think of a couple things that don't involve the camera just moving faster;
Sometimes the camera's speed or direction make an abrupt change. It suddenly goes faster at 00:40 in the last video, for example, so maybe you should start by smoothing those points out animation-wise.
At about 1 minute in the video, you flick the rail gun backwards and shoot behind. At that point it kind of looks like the ship has some velocity, so maybe what you need is some kind of particle effect or exhaust or after-image flying out the back.
I think the way the ship rolls up n down as you move is really good.
Sometimes the camera move FORWARDS while the ship's allways facing RIGHT; I think that might be what's really stopping it from looking right.
Putting more small things in the foreground like street lights, satelites, antennas, fences etc might help make the whole thing look faster, because stuff like that naturally goes by faster anyway.

So there's a few tricks I just thought of that'd help give the ship some velocity instead of being a static image infront of a slowly moving background.