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[sublinimal]

This is only loosely related to One Game a Month - I take it more as a guideline for scheduling anyway, rather than an obligation to push out crap every month. Realistically, this thing is going to take longer than a month if I want to be satisfied with it.

Caves.

The veins of a planet.

And you're the heroin,

addicted to destruction.

So. One thing that inspired me to make games was the Finnish shareware scene of the 90s. Arena cave fliers, in particular, were popular here but barely known elsewhere. It was almost as if every aspiring game developer had to make one of these as a rite of passage. Since the audience was specific, they got what they wanted, and the games felt personal.

The genre has stagnated nowadays. Local multiplayer went out of fashion, and there weren't enough gameplay innovations to keep the flame alive.

This is my attempt to revitalize the genre. It's not just a nostalgy trip; I have some fresh ideas that would bring cave flier fighting into the 2010s.

Current proof of concept in C++ with SFML:

[Brother Android]

Interesting. I've never encountered this cave flyer genre by name, but I looked it up and it seems that some game I recall playing as a child but have never been able to find again must have belonged to this genre or at least been very similar. In any case, I enjoy this style of gameplay and the graphics look nice, so I look forward to seeing how this progresses, and what fresh ideas you're going to introduce.

[sublinimal]

Some of you may not be familiar with cave fliers, so I think I'll namedrop a few of my favorite ones to kick things off: Tappo II (best ever, had tons of variety and good production values), KOPS (artsy, with great

), Rocket Chase, Wings (just played this at a LAN party, still hilarious!), Tunnels of the Underground. Go give them a shot while waiting for Veins of a Planet.

A few inspirational mockups from my post history:









(Damn, looking back at those, I can see a lot of potential improvements.)

And music pieces:
https://soundcloud.com/laglace/grudge
https://soundcloud.com/laglace/horizon (you can tell the samples are ripped from an old tracker file )
https://soundcloud.com/laglace/over

Anyway, there's a specific gritty, desolate aesthetic I want to capture. The graphical style will be rough and mostly hand-crafted, with large plain sections contrasted with detailed ones. The music should be kind of dark and ominous overall, sounding like battle anthems with melancholical melodies (the first piece is spot-on). A small palette of recognizable instruments and a tastefully lo-fi tracker feel.

[sublinimal]

Several factions are featured in the game:

The Knights are a nonhierarchical group of hackers focusing on agile ships and laser weapons. They seem to have no single motive for fighting, although they claim to be reactionary.

The Markov faction is a kind of grassroots police, sworn to maintain peace across inhabited zones. After the resurgence of spaceship combat, they've become more corrupt and less focused on protection. Their ships are heavy and defensive, preferring to secure areas with mines and turrets rather than fight one-on-one.

The Ubi are a religious sect that was thought to have disappeared, but they had actually withdrawn underground to live in a virtual reality. Their ships are baroque and spam intricate bullet patterns that deal elemental damage and heal friendly ships.

Nobody really knows who the so-called Ravens are, despite their prominence in research. All the menus and consoles in the game bear their logo.

[sublinimal]

The game will have heavy tactical elements. Destroying enemies yields minerals and modules, which can be used to build bases. Teamplay is important and fights are focused in strategic areas, giving new depth to the genre.

Modules introduce polymorphism as a kind of "fluctuating tech tree". Each ship can have one module at a time, and each ship spawns with its own default module. New modules can be looted from enemies, registered at your factory so that they can be purchased by your team, and then installed to ships as custom modules.

Weapon modules are self-explanatory; more on weapon types as the project advances. Right now I'll focus on defense modules, which allow a ship to construct a specific structure:

• Ship factory. Each team starts out with one. It allows you to register new modules (that you've looted from enemies or simply spawned with) and purchase them to your ships. Also, you can use the factory to set your team's build queue for new ships - if nothing is set, a respawned player will get a random ship (with default modules), as usual in these kinds of games. Don't leave things up to chance!
• Repair station. Will come in handy: ships are expensive, healing is cheap.
• Various turrets. They inherit their builder's weapon module, so skillful use of custom modules will create the right defense for the right situation.
• Mining plant. You'll want to get one pretty early, it gives you bonus minerals over time. Even after it's depleted, you can use it to quickly transfer minerals to your team's mineral pool.
• Shields. These are only a slight obstacle alone, but efficient when chained. The topmost one protects everything underneath, so enemies will have to take out the shields in reverse build order.
• Acid spawners(!!). Death from above for underground bases, and brutal defense for your own, given that you don't mess up. The acid stream runs out quickly and the rest of it evaporates eventually.
• Stargates for fast escapes and management of multiple bases.
• Various explosives. These are cheap and just as useful in the battlefield and in the core of a base. Destroy the builder's ship to fizzle all its explosives right away.
• And more...?!

[sublinimal]

The groundwork is progressing smoothly, I'm planning to have the first proof-of-concept prototype out in a few days (and an obligatory Screenshot Saturday .gif tomorrow ). Just something with a handful of ship types blowing each other up in a local multiplayer test level, plus basic transactions with the dropped resources. Basically, the first stage where it could have some semblance of fun. After that, I'll start investing more into content - which hopefully won't be a pain since I'm doing my best to design the code structure to be easily expandable, even with my limited C++ experience.

I have a bunch of friends as playtesters, but TIGS' feedback will be appreciated too.

PS. It's funny, I've noticed the nighttime is the most productive time for me, especially the time around sunrise.

[cragwind]

Sounds/looks good so far. I wasn't familiar with the cave flier genre, but it has some similarities to what I'm going for with my own game.

Your game looks like it mixes top-down ships in a side-scrolling environment, which I've seen occasionally (are all cave fliers like that?). Any particular reasons for choosing side-scrolling over top-down? Gravity? The sense of descending into the planet?

I like the handcrafted look of the rock. I wonder if there's a place for procedural generation in levels without losing that aesthetic quality.

[sublinimal]

Side-scrolling is a staple of cave fliers, but it comes naturally in this game anyway. Some functions of the game rely on gravity, like collected minerals weighing your ship down or ships landing on platforms. And from a level design perspective, it's easier to showcase changes in environments.

A bit of a backstage shot:



Making graphics for this is pretty fun: collisions with walls are based on pixel data, so I'm not strictly limited to grids and tiles. It's an improvisational but iterative process, you can see how I like experimenting with different styles and textures. This approach is also important in achieving the hand-crafted look.

Though I should design the level layout better before going into details too much. If it turns out the base is too hard to defend or the caves are too narrow, redrawing things will be a pain. From now on, I'll just playtest with silhouettes and fill in the details later.

[jO]

Ooooh cave flyers!
One of the first games I ever made was of that genre.
Your mockups look really good, and "Star-Gate" sound promising