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[FrankForce]

Hello, I've been working on Faster Blaster for about 2 years as a side project from my industry job.  I'd like to wrap it up by about this time next year.  At this point it's a fully playable adventure of about 3 hours in length.  What I mainly want to do over the next year is polish the gameplay, improve the tutorial, add more enemies types, music, a tiny bit of story, and more player abilities.

This game was made using my own open source game engine which was written from scratch.  It features a custom dynamic lighting system that I hope gives it a unique enough look.  The world is huge and streams on the fly.  Everything in the game was created by me except the music.  It can be played with WASD+Mouse, Xbox 360 controller or even a SNES gamepad (though that is the most difficult option it's kind of fun).

The art style and gameplay were heavily inspired by the original Metroid and Blaster Master for NES but this is a completely original work.  No art or sounds were directly ripped off or copied.  I hope players aren't too distracted by it's resemblance, but that was one of my goals and I don't plan on doing another art pass.  I will improve some of the art and add new things but the style itself will not change.  With so many projects going on I simply don't have the time to work on art, I want to focus on gameplay!

I will keep posting here occasionally as I make new updates.  Any critiques or suggestions are welcome and appreciated!

Website: http://fasterblaster.3d2k.com
Download: https://www.dropbox.com/s/hb3ichf8svxl5ri/FasterBlaster.zip?dl=0

[Whiteclaws]

Why not metroblaster ?

[ithamore]

It's great you're working more on this. How much has changed since the November update?

I've already started playing it again and look forward to the progress you'll keep making with it.

[FrankForce]

Whiteclaws:  I am totally open to changing the name, it's kind of a work-in-progress name right now.  I hope that as I add a bit of story a better name will fall out of that.  I will add MetroBlaster to the list!

ithamore:  When I first posted on here the lighting wasn't tweaked very well, many players complained it was too dark and they were right.   I think I have the lighting almost exactly where I want now.  I made many tweaks to gameplay to make the player more powerful and increase fun.  For example the onion ring looking enemy used to be indestructible from your normal blasters, they aren't any more and they also take some splash damage from rockets. I've always had rockets temporally disable turrets but the rocket was often hitting the projectiles the turret shoots which was annoying so I made rockets destroy projectiles without themselves exploding.  I also increased how long they disable the turrets for.  The final boss was way too hard I think, I have reduced the difficulty somewhat and hopefully the final battle doesn't drag on.  Lots of little tweaks like that.

[FrankForce]

New build 0.8735 changes...

Red doors require 5 rockets, but are permanently unlocked and are saved when you save your game.  Before it was only 1 rocket and not permanent so I think this is a good change and will eliminate the possibility of getting stuck behind a rocket door.  There are also a few shortcuts, one where you can bypass 2 rocket doors by only using 1 rocket, which wasn't quite as useful before the change, now its a savings of 9 rockets rather then 1.

Added a small tutorial section about how to disable turrets by firing rockets at them.  Created part of the level that is difficult to pass without disabling the turrets.

Added some more help messages, fixed one that got erased somehow. A few other small bug fixes.

Here's a screenshot from the new turret disabling section...

[psyguy]

Looks pretty cool, Frank.  It has a great ambience to it, with the lighting and some of the backdrops.

[FrankForce]

Thanks! 

I thought I'd try making an animated gif.  My game tends to really suck up the bits on gifs with all the gradients unfortunately so I can't do a very long gif and I had to half the frame rate to fit it under 2 meg. Anyway, here's first try at making an animated gif of gameplay...

[FrankForce]

[Linkshot]

Right up my alley. Will download on other gaming rig tomorrow. Runs a little messy on this old laptop.

EDIT: Okay, put it on my Windows 7 gaming rig and the game is convinced that my cursor is in the top left with the button held down no matter what I do.

[FrankForce]

Okay, put it on my Windows 7 gaming rig and the game is convinced that my cursor is in the top left with the button held down no matter what I do.

Thanks to Linkshot for helping me diagnose this! We fixed it by unplugging his gamepad and restarting the game. I'm not sure why it had issues with his Saitek Rumble Force gamepad. I have tested the game with xbox 360 and snes controllers, but I would expect most other gamepads to work fine. I will try to get some more gamepads to test with, but until then at least there's a work around.

[Linkshot]

Alright, I think I got myself stuck. The way out to the right is a one-way door with the switch on the other side, and it's impossible to make the jump to get up the shaft.

[FrankForce]

Thanks for posting about this! You definitely found a bug. I originally set up that alien area so you would only be able to access after getting the jump boost upgrade. For some reason I changed some of it but not all of it and apparently didn't think things through or got distracted. You took the path less traveled so I never ran into this before, most players head all the way down and to the left. The way you took is totally valid though, I wanted people to have 2 ways to get to the next area.

So, I just spent a about an hour tweaking that area to fix the issue. I made it so it's slightly easier to explore that alien section before you get the jump boost by making some of the platforms larger/lower. I also got rid of the one way locking door, you still wont be able to go up in that room until you get the jump boost but at least no one will get stuck. The new version is up now.

[Linkshot]

Thanks! It worked, but now I can't explore the shaft as high as I used to

In order to make up for that lack of sequence breaking, I took this screenshot of stylishly recharging.



And a typo.



Okay, so I accidentally right-clicked the top and made the dropdown come up and now game is stuck on whatever image it had up when I put it back in focus. It is still playing because I can hear it.

I've been livetweeting my experience with the game if you're interested in that kind of feedback, too.

[Amirai]

This looks awesome! I like the name faster blaster - I think it's appropriate and made me think of blaster master even without the explanation of the type of game.

I haven't played it yet, but the one crit I have is the Mario ? blocks seem out of place, and distract from the immersion. I'll comment more after having actually played it.

[FrankForce]

I made some immediate changes based on Linkshot's feedback and put up a new build. Here is the change list...

• Reworked level design for alien area in upper left portion of map.
• Fixed an area where the player could get stuck.
• Laser does not do any damage to enemies anymore.
• Laser does not wake up bats anymore!
• Removed first flying enemy and re-positioned the other 2 before the 1st save.
• Fixed type-o, probably added some more type-o's.

[FrankForce]

I just posted a new clip on youtube in HD...

[FrankForce]

Someone asked what has changed in the past few months.  Here's a video comparison of the same section of gameplay from today and from 6 months ago. As you can see there has been a lot of visual polish. The graphics themselves are the same but the lighting is much better.

http://www.youtubedoubler.com/?video1=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D7EGoY9eWX4U&start1=0&video2=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3Djdi9fE8H4hs&start2=0&authorName=KilledByAPixel

[Linkshot]

I'm expecting some friends over today so I'll check it out when I have a chance. Did you remember to change the tutorial block that mentions how the laser interacts with enemies? Does it retain its ability to open blue doors?

[FrankForce]

Help block is changed. Laser no longer opens blue doors, is that cool?

[Linkshot]

I liked its ability to open blue doors because it allows me to go from room to room at a faster pace than the blaster would. I attribute the Mining Laser to the Grapple Beam in that it has weird functions outside of its intended mechanic but they're all pretty awesome for technical play.