Very, very cool game, I love the concept. I was frustrated at first because there are no instructions
First of all, thanks a ton! I'm amazed people have had so much fun with it.
Second of all, the instructions are in a file called "sbc-409a_manual", but it seems to be missing from the latest build. I blame the fact that I made the build at work so I probably just overlooked that. There are very simple ways to automatically include those files as part of the build process, and after all these mishaps I'm actually going to go ahead and add the necessary commands to the build script.
You can get the manual here:
You can switch modes with the middle mouse button. The fact that there are three active buttons on the mouse is because I sort of wanted the game to be mouse-only, but I kept the WASD controls because piloting with the mouse is currently a hassle, even more than manual rotation is.
Still, that real challenge underneath the frustration made me come back and read through the thread and keep trying. Once you know how to play, it's an awesome juggling act of keeping track of target distances, which targets you've fired on yet, and switching between offense and defense. If it weren't for the game-end bugs I'd be playing this non-stop. Unfortunately as of the latest (1.2), it still crashes after trying to start a second game from the main menu. There's also a minor bug where pressing escape at the game over screen closes the program; I assume this is because the key press gets repeated at the main menu if I don't tap the key too slowly. Not that I can start a new game anyway, but if you fix the one it would be nice to fix the other. Hand Thumbs Up Left
I didn't know anyone would actually like the juggling act it turned out to be! It ends up being sort of pointless to turn, I think in a future version I'll try to put in code that will force you to point at the target to achieve a missile lock.
The bug has to do with the engine not being able to properly clean up after itself when ending the game scene. I thought my "engine improvements" would solve this, because in my other game using the same engine it seems to work pretty well, but there's something else afoot, and it will be hard to figure out because I just get a crash and no error message.