Serve & Volley with my nephew with a Commodore 64 I just acquired. 

Also, a versus-style 2-4 player deathmatch game from a buddy of mine: Toxic Takedown. Has a nice 90s retro/arcade vibe and an effective scoring mechanic: instead of direct points for kills, you need to catch a bouncing star that is spawned upon a kill. You can mess this up (for instance, jumping after it into acid) and your opponent may well come back and collect both of the stars. Good fun, although you do need a friend (or three) at hand in meatspace in order to play.

--Eino

Linux support? I think I'll make a Steam account just to Greenlight this. Crimsonland rocks, I had the best time playing it back in the day (both the free and commercial version) and it'd rock to play it on my current computer (Linux) again.

--Eino

Another tiny bug I found: the effects volume setting only affects weapon sounds and explosions, but not menu sounds or message/alert/etc sounds in the game. Also, you can still set control for "Backwards", although I guess technically it's still used for going downward in menus.

Thoughts on weapons:

AWS - I think it's too easy to hit the middle part of the big ships, especially if they have no cover. You can sit on their tail without moving, and the missiles home on the middle. Having an even wider firing arc/pattern might make it less accurate and more importantly spread the damage more evenly across the target. Those who want precision should use the weapons you have to aim yourself. The pattern could be slightly randomized too.

Torpedo - suggestion: ability to hold down fire to hold off launching the torpedo after priming. It would be easier to time hit-and-runs.

Multi-rocket - feels like the best weapon more and more. Suggestions: shorter range, so you'd have to get in the range of big ships. A little pause between releasing the trigger and firing the rockets. This would hopefully make it a little less convenient to use spontaneously (for instance, against fighters).

Caveat - these changes would make the torpedo and multi-rocket more similar.

Another idea - there's almost never a reason to not fire your weapons as fast as possible (apart from needing to aim with most of them). How about not recharging your shields while weapons are in use? This would change the balance a lot (needing rebalancing), but also (hopefully) add meaningful micro-decisions.

My comments on some comments in the shmup-dev thread:

kdmiller's idea of pad configuration sounded really good to me: move/strafe instead of move/turn in the left stick, and turning in the right stick. I had trouble pointing the Angry Moth towards the bombers in stage 2 while chasing, when I was playing with a pad. I was even inspired to try similar configuration on the keyboard, and now I play with move/slide on WASD, and turning/weapons on the numpad (right hand). Turning and sliding simultaneously feels more natural this way. On the downside it's now hard to operate the menus.  FR: separate control setup for the menus!

I was impressed that monoRAIL made a video + a demo about the GW-style control scheme suggestion. While I'm sure I'd play the hell out of Angry Moth if it had GW-style controls, the current controls seem much more exciting - I didn't try the monoRAIL's demo, but the current scheme is evocative and something different. I think it works fine too.

I disagree with monoRAIL that dogfighting wasn't happening. For me, it mostly happens when there is a tight concentration of large ships and a fighter cover for them. That's when the barrage of fire is too much to just turtle around the defenses and pick out the large ships. Examples are the first enemy reinforcement group in stage 2, and the carriers. Especially the round, heavy fighters that protect the carriers provide dogfighting opportunities often. Another successful high-action phase is chasing the bombers while avoiding their escorts.

A lot of the action is in the turtling style though. Angry Moth is a superior ship compared to the fighters, and can withstand their attacks while slowly taking on a modest group of larger ships. I don't mind this part of the gameplay at all. Stage 2 has nicely varying gameplay, and to me proves the versatility in that department.. the turtling-high action ratio depends on the level design. (As a side note I think occasionally putting the player in controls of a frailer ship would also vary up the gameplay nicely.) In any case, I thought that monoRAIL's idea of slowing down the action (regarding smaller ships) might be worth checking out, it might make it even better. All the same, I really like what is there right now and would be heartbroken to see the control scheme changed too much!

--Eino

I was able to test co-op with the revised demo today. The guy I played with is a TIE Fighter veteran and recognized the similarities immediately, and found the game enjoyable. Co-op worked very well, apart from a few bugs. It was also hard to locate each other while playing, but this might have been partially because the palette bugs made the radars less clear than I recall they are really.

The bugs:

The palette bugs: the palette was wrong - for instance most text was red instead of the cyanish blue, and the palette also made enemy ships look blurry/garbled. A few times in stage 2 when attacked by bombers, the palette swapped completely into a rather psychedelic colouring. Probably the battle drugs of the pilots kicked in. The machine we played on had 64-bit Win7 (SP1), with Geforce GTS 450.

Only the first player had the new indicator which pointed to the target.

All of the gamepad control setups weren't saved between different runs of the program. We used two XBOX360 pads which worked fine (didn't test the second stick for sliding though). The controls that got resetted were button 10 (pushing down the right stick) and start (I don't know the button number).

Once, the radar of the second player completely broke down when the first player died for the last time. The round radar would not change direction as the player turned the ship.

More weapon comments:

I didn't try the angling cannon yet, but the other player did and it seemed to work very well. I tried the torpedo and while increasing the loading time makes sense, it's way way harder to use effectively. AWS and multi-rocket were much better choices. In coop, where you can pick just one weapon, the multi-rocket was really a no-brainer.

Removing reverse is a good decision. Even though you can move away from the situation by sliding sideways, it is much more dangerous and exciting. I just need to unlearn the instinct to reverse..

--Eino

After learning to slide, torpedoes and multi-rocket turned out to be very good. I went through several combos, and as I learned each, I always thought they were a bit too good compared to the last one, but this was just my own skill increasing. I tried out the AWS+rocket combo again eventually, and it felt devastating by that time. In the end the weapons felt like they had a pretty good balance, only the heavy cannon still seemed lacking.

AF missiles were good after reading your advice. AWS missiles are very powerful, being fast, hard-hitting and easy to use. With rocket as the other secondary, I could practically just hold down the three fire buttons, keep myself facing the target and dodge fire and fighters quite effectively.

Rockets go great with either torpedo or AWS, since you can just constantly keep firing them and they work great against any target. This makes them a little less interesting than the other weapons, even if a dumbfire rocket is fun to blast around with. Multi-rocket has more interesting drawbacks though and has the same dumbfire appeal imho - dropping the rocket might make the weapon selection a bit more interesting. I do like your idea of differentiating weapons by varying shield/armour effectivenes (system disabling weapons coming?) - something like that might work for the rocket. OTOH it might still be optimal to be always firing it..

Multi-rocket was great, working well against both big and small targets, packing a punch and having long range as well. The drawbacks - loading time and being unable to fire your other weapons meanwhile - worked well. The weapon was fun to use and suited well for high-speed divebombing tactic, as well as the usual slide-strafing. I picked angling cannon to go with it, since you can't really fire other warheads and don't really need additional versatility. The cannon upgrade was good for finishing off fighters after a salvo.

Finally the torpedo was extremely fun to use, while probably the hardest. It was powerful - small cruiser shields gone in a single hit - but overall not more effective than multi-rocket or AWS. I didn't feel the torpedo really had it's own niche compared to those. Trying to take out the carriers in the 2nd stage, I was wishing for some sort of targeting guide system for dive-bombing off-screen targets. That would make a "natural" torpedo niche I thought, Currently multi-rockets are better for this as there's no post-launch priming.

So, I've been playing quite a bit.. I really like the slight randomization evident in the first stage. It's good to have stuff like this, as when you replay the missions over and over (as you have to do with how difficult they are), you can eventually do cheesy stuff like hang around the spot where the enemy reinforcements are going to appear. Speaking of those, I really like how the second stage can end up in so many ways. In my first wins, the alpha team got wiped out and the enemy carrier group was left untouched, safely launching their bombers. Next time I went after the carriers myself at first opportunity, which was possible to do (I even managed to take out a couple of carriers before they could launch any bombers), but the alpha team still got wiped out. And in the last few rounds, I've been able to defend the alpha team until they themselves turn to chase the carriers. Btw, if you take out all the enemies in the stage 2, the wait until the mission is over feels a bit long.

Looking forwards to the music, and more stages to play! Will the music have the procedurally generated thing like your previous soundtracks? I imagine with the dynamic battlefield it could be really cool. I've liked the soundtracks since Lacewing, so I'm genuinely excited to hear the music.

--Eino

I absolutely loved the demo, I'm playing it quite a bit and I'm really looking forward to the complete game. I realized this is, kind of, just the game I've been looking forward for a long time.. 2D space combat, dynamic fleet-level battles.. right now only similar thing I can recall is an obscure shareware game called Star Hammer that had kind of similar mission-based feel, though I think the scale of the missions was much smaller.

Probably thanks to my Hellspider experience, I was able to beat the demo in 45 minutes.. not that it wasn't challenging! The weapon choice that worked well was combining rockets with anti-warship missiles. You can just constantly fire rockets at anything, and using the anti-warship missiles was easy as well, since the large targets are easy to keep in the firing zone. So, I could down the small vessels (especially bombers) with the main cannon + rockets, and the big vessels with rockets + missiles.

In comparison, the other weapons felt noticeably less powerful/useful. It was very hard to hit anything with torpedoes. The mini-rockets blocked firing other weapons while you were loading and it was still hard to hit stuff with them. Anti-fighter missiles were ok, but harder to use than rockets and anti-warship missiles. Angling cannon was ok, heavy cannon didn't feel like it had the bang for the buck. But picking the angling cannon makes you miss out on more versatile armament.

That said I didn't yet use sliding at all. I got the idea after winning to use sliding to dodge fire from large vessels while keeping myself pointed in the same direction. That tactic should make torpedoes and mini-rockets easier to use against them, but I didn't yet have the time to try it out very much. Anyway, rocket/anti-warship missile combo was easy to get going and powerful enough to win.

I really like the visuals, and the sounds already sounded nice enough, so improvement, plus music, sounds promising. Looking forwards for more!

--Eino

Many thanks for your feedback, tzachs! Glad you found the game fun!

Regarding additional features.. a simple game like this inspires many ideas easily, but when the game feels good with a small feature set, you must be careful when introducing new stuff. Jarkko in particular feels that this version is finished as it is, and a sequel will be sort of its own game.. anyway, I'm thinking that workable new features would include different playing fields (other shapes, perhaps obstacles, even moving ones); and three or four teams (with three/four goals) and appropriate field shapes for them.

cheers!
--Eino

Great to see an update since I last checked; looking forward to the demo!

--Eino

<div style="padding: 5px; padding-bottom: 0; float: left"><img src="http://www.student.oulu.fi/~einokesk/slug/slug_300_200.png" width="300" height="200" /><p style="margin-top: 0"><a href="http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=18112.0">Slug League</a>, by Jarkko Matilainen and Eino Keskitalo</p>
</div>



Slug League by Jarkko Matilainen and Eino Keskitalo

A game of reflexes and tactics - zip here - tested in Windows XP and Vista. Also tested in Wine, where it sort of works - there was a strange delay in the menus, and the gameplay was a bit ...sluggy. But playableish.


Credits:

• Jarkko Matilainen - everything except..
• Eino Keskitalo - ..English translation + international PR
  

Have fun!

--Eino

Sounds.. and looks great! I'm very happy that you're doing a new game. I enjoyed Transdimensional Hellspider a lot, it was somewhat hard to get into, but I did play it until I won. Albeit the dive-bombing weapon turned out to be more effective than I thought it was supposed to. Anyway, I love the idea and scope of this, and am looking forward to play it!

--Eino

Is it ok to use an existing game as the basis of your new game?

My idea would use Dungeon Crawl's arena mode, where you can pit two monster teams against each other. I would make that a two-player game where two players pick their monster teams based on some rules, I was thinking of a drafting mechanic. You can run the Crawl arena via command-line, so I would probably use that and code the drafting stuff as an external program (or get someone else to do it - for instance, an irc bot would be cool but I don't see myself coding that).

I have a bunch of other ideas too - I love the head-to-head on the same screen/keyboard thing.

--Eino

Yess! This is excellent news.

--Eino

I liked it too. I liked the combination of the backgrounds and the simple sprites, but I especially liked the audio. Very, very atmospheric.

--Eino

Looks fun, I look forwards to trying it out with a friend.

--Eino

I love the concept, and I love the name too. I had fun playing it a couple of times, I even managed to win it. (Two ships in the end, 77000 score.) Making a navigation error and having half of the fleet wiped out in a single beam made me laugh.

Two things came to mind:

* Experienced players may want to crash/quit after losing a portion of the fleet early on - they've basically failed, but they have to end it themselves to get a new game. Don't know if it's really a concern, or what alternatives there are, but it sort of stuck out to me. (This would be sort of worse if the game was infinite - the player would still have a chance to beat any  high score with just one ship, it would just take ridiculously long.)

* Risk/reward system sort of inverses when you have only a few ships left - then it's less risky to expand your fleet, especially vertically. If you pack them close together, you're more likely to get them wiped out in a single beam. (Naturally, if you have few ships you've "lost" in the high-scoring sense anyway, so this might not be much of a concern either).

cheers!
--Eino

I really, really enjoyed this as well. I loved the bright, cartoony graphics. The story seemed surprisingly dark. I thought the wrenching was ok as it was (keyboard here), and the puzzles and variations were good. I got a little kick out of sliding under one of those closing gates. Jumping did feel a little floaty. The second boss was indeed very enjoyable, rather terrific actually. Definitely would love to see this one finished.

--Eino

Daniel Remar (Iji):

http://www.planetfreeplay.com/interview/24/
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/microsoft/windows/2008/10/iji-freeware-2d-action-platformer.html
http://www.bytejacker.com/blog/interview-daniel-remar-iji
http://www.devmag.org.za/articles/13-DANIEL-REMAR-INTERVIEW--IJI/1/
http://www.charge-shot.com/2009/03/swedish-savant-talk-with-daniel-remar.html

--Eino

I played the game through, it was a good experience. What I said about size held, it was a nice bite-size game. Yeah, the boot thing was funny, too bad I was a bit spoiled by reading this thread.

I had a bit of "where to go" confusion in the end. I had taken care of all the underground alien pods. I checked objectives with space, which showed two pods. I then went to the tunnel that goes to the final boss - there was one "vine" or wall blocking my way. I then went to take care of the pod that's above ground, and then started looking around where that final pod would be. After I couldn't find one anywhere, I checked the tunnel and could go through. I'm guessing the last boss counts as a pod in the space screen, and there's a wall-vine for each earlier pod in the tunnel. Anyway, I wandered around a bit, not knowing I could proceed.

--Eino

Played this a bit. I definitely appreciate the style. I'm reminded of Captain Comic (which I haven't played, only seen) and Commander Keen (which I've played, a lot). I also appreciate it will be short.. I like this kind of a game and welcome them in all sizes! It's nice knowing it's not going to take a huge "investment" to play through the whole game.

The screen wobble, while a cool effect, feels a bit nasty for my eyes. I often get motion sickness from 3D games with a low/unstable frame rate, and it's the same kind of discomfort. Any hopes for it to be toggleable?

--Eino