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[Amon26]

Working on something new.  Sci-Fi.  Shmup with additional stuff.

Here's a very, very, VERY early prototype.  you can fly, you can kill, you can die.  Just putting this out there for people to play with.  Unlike Au Sable/AOOFAD, all the code in this is original. So forgive me if it's clonky. 

Downloady-Downloadington
http://willhostforfood.com/?Action=download&fileid=93846

Who knows where this will go? but right now it's yours to play with.

current ideas for game-play

Rescue missions:  Survive to the target, dock, play a short top-down shooter segment to rescue a hostage

Credit collect:  Shoot down specified ships to collect credits, avoid the rest.

Prisoner grab:  Enemy ships when downed will eject their pilots.  Avoid killing them, collect with your ship.

Story ideas:  Something cool and simple.  Plans to personify the pilot of the ship through voice maybe.

[Quicksand-T]

Promising prototype.

I know this isn't a horror game or follow-up to your other games, but it would be interesting if you used some of the storytelling elements from Au Sable in this. For example, the words hanging in the air or the jarring cutaways to creepy sequences. I've never seen anything like that in a scrolling shooter.

[Amon26]

hrm, well what I could do is try telling a story in garbled, glitchy terminal transmissions between stages?  I'm really liking the idea of splitting the gameplay into both shmup-missions and then on-foot segments where you proceed through a map killing soldiers, similar to Ikari warriors.

[Amon26]

ah or even better yet, have the terminal transmissions be in journals scattered in stages, both in space and on foot?  hows that?

[moi]

Very basic, but I like it so far, good dynamic.
the fire sound is a beat deafening though. Also, the ground texture is very nice but it's not very visible until the scrolling stops.

[Amon26]

the sound effects are placeholder at the moment and I'm still trying to come up with a nice backdrop.  The player's ship could be for space or terrestrial, im not sure which yet.  But I threw the cityscape in just to give the demo a subtle backdrop

[Gainsworthy]

Nice ground layer, Amon. Also cool to see a non-horror game from you. I love* diversity. BUT! A peculiar problem:

It is currently more satisfying to be shot down than to shoot down a foe. When the Player ship is hit, it seems to react physically to the bullet, and spin out of control whilst in-view. When an Enemy is shot down, they spiral straight and downwards. It just doesn't have the same punch as the Player Death does. Makes the victory seem trivial.

That's about it, for now. Understand it's a proto. 



*I also love your particular brand of horror, but I digress.

[ChevyRay]

A couple things.

First, the purple bullets are quite hard for me to see against that particular background. Either make them flicker, or change the colour, and they'll show up a lot better.

For the automatic gunfire, I suggest adding a very slight random horizontal speed variant to each shot, so that they're not just a straight orange line of perfect shots, but rather a flurry of individual shots, each just very slightly off the intended target, giving a more effective machine gun effect.

Good job so far.

[Amon26]

thanks for the feedback guys   The shmup mechanics are looking/feeling a bit better now.  I've also added a topdown ikari-warriors style segment for the game.  The player will descend to specific locales and have to walk around on foot to find an objective.  That element's in place too, but its far too rough for me to really show yet.  I'll have an updated tech demo out the week after next

I might also play around with voice-acting for the story a little.  Kinda like a radio-play or MGS1 codec conversations.  I duno, would those be good or just annoying to go through?

[Fuzz]

voice acting for the story worked well for jazzuo, so i'm sure it will for you!

[Curseman]

It really depends on what level of quality voice acting you think you can get.  Bad voice acting is worse than no voice acting.

Good voice acting is nice, but even then it still comes with a few downsides.  For example, it's much harder to make changes or additions to your script when it means calling up your actor to re-record lines as opposed to just modifying some text inside the game.

[Fuzz]

regardless of whether the voice acting is decent or not, amon's pretty brilliant in the field of sound design so i'm sure it would sound great regardless of the quality of the actor in question.

[undertech]

Has a nice unique feel to it, although the bouncing off of the sides is kind of weird. Are there supposed to be some sort of walls/fields on the edges?

[Amon26]

Has a nice unique feel to it, although the bouncing off of the sides is kind of weird. Are there supposed to be some sort of walls/fields on the edges?

I wanted something other than just a stopper for the jet, Also, it's the only way I can make certain effects behave right at the moment  

[Amon26]

Hey, its been a while but I'm ripping my hair out trying to make the "on-foot" section of the game actually fun.  i've scrapped and rebuilt it.  I'm re-spriting the hero too, and made some progress with one of the enemies too.  I'll let you have a peek



Theyre like madmax-style squatters who arrive at wreck sites to scavange up goods, or something such as that.

Thinking the whole game will be written in an imaginary language, an attempt to recapture the feeling of playing games like we did when we were too young to read, or when you play a rather fun game from a foreign land.  We'll see how that pans out.

ill have more soon, stay tuned! 

-Amon26

[Melly]

Will Host For Food is gone. I wanted to try it out, but I'll have to wait until you reupload it.

[Amon26]

new tech demo!

showcases a slightly more robust shmup section and the basis for the on-foot game mechanics.  Enemies cant harm you at the moment so just feel free to take your time.  SFX still need to be added too, but in the meantime i got a sexy little track playing over everything.

here ya go
http://www.mediafire.com/?yjtie2yj2h1

[Eraser]

new tech demo!

showcases a slightly more robust shmup section and the basis for the on-foot game mechanics.  Enemies cant harm you at the moment so just feel free to take your time.  SFX still need to be added too, but in the meantime i got a sexy little track playing over everything.

here ya go
http://www.mediafire.com/?yjtie2yj2h1

Eh? The game appears to have SFX...

Well, I'll assume that this is too early in dev to really bother you about the following slight oddities that you probably already know about:
- Very few enemies actually spawn... seems like I'm just flying through space most of the time -- but  hey, maybe that's the feel you wanted.
- The enemies that fly from the bottom in appear WAY to close to the player
- Sometimes enemies will spawn too far to the left (They can still barely be destroyed though)
- When on foot, I can turn around and walk out of view because you didn't block off that area

[Amon26]

ah, id been wondering if the enemy ships' emergence was still too abrupt, and youre right about them appearing too close to the edges to be shot at.  I couldve fixed that but I was just too lazy to.  The plan is to have a series of different objectives.  Ill tell more later :D thanks for the feedback so far

[Amon26]

i got myself spread pretty thin at the moment, but here's a video giving a quick peek into how i go about doing sprites, also lets you have a brief peek of the gameplay. 

It's still hot on the stove, dont worry