[Patch changelog]

New Demo/Build is up, download here.

   

   

Patch changelog
Twice as many enemies.
Player ship is faster and more agile.
Major performance optimization.
New weapons: Tactical nuke, spiral nemesis cannon, laser guided shotgun shells.
New engine: Hyperdrive. Flies towards the crosshair at ridiculous speed.
Many projectiles have sparkly trails.
Railguns have a spiral trail.
Some enemies now shoot drill bullets, which penetrate obstacles.
More varied enemy projectile appearance.
Improved appearance for flamethrower and missiles.
Improved some explosions.
Pilots being mauled by bears now fly less smoothly.
Tweaked locking system.
Larger minimap and improved health/fuel/heat bars.
Bombs are now launched slightly further away.
Crosshair now has a heat indicator on it.
Several bosses/enemies now have health indicators.

If you’re interested in winning a free copy of the game, get a top 10 score on any demo map and post a screenshot in this thread before 3/3/2014.

Greenlight is at 85% now, for anyone who was curious.

Added a spiral trail to the railgun.

Yeah, will definitely experiment with one. If it's too annoying in multiplayer it might not end up going in, though.

There's also a shield, a different kind of teleporter(one teleports a short distance in the direction you're moving, the other goes to the crosshair) and one which leaves a trail of radioactive gas while you boost.

The gravity warping bullets thing would be really awkward as the bullets don't actually have colliders or any real physics. Thats part of what lets me have lots of players all firing 120 rounds per second at once.

Finished tweaking the new engine type:


Also improved the gravity flamethrower effect:


Right now I'm working on getting the new object spawning system to work in coop. Unless something goes horribly wrong there should be a new beta build up by Sunday.

I was adjusting how the shield works to make that impact effect on it a bit more efficient, and accidentally broke the part that made it ignore collisions with your ship. So what happened is that the shield orb spawned, pushed your ship out of the way(forward), then jumped back to your ships position next frame and pushed it out of the way again. Repeat every frame for crazy speed.

The current one just sets your velocity rather than messing around with colliders, but the end result is pretty much the same. Still doing a bit of balance tweaking, it's pretty overpowered at the moment.

Now you can shoot crazy bullet patterns (like a boss).


Also added a sound, flash and distortion wave when you block an attack with the shield. This makes it feel a lot more like action game blocking.

Because it's a nuke that you use tactically? Fun doesn't get more simple than that.
But the nuke seems like it needs to be more powerful. Bigger area of effect, more powerful shockwave

Fallout 3's Fatman felt really good to use:

My explosion effect doesn't look that good when I make it much bigger, will have to make a new one for the screen filling apocalyptic blasts. Until then, here's a nuclear missile which shoots laser beams.

New weapon: Tactical Nukes.


Somehow it's even more fun to use than I was expecting, not sure how thats physically possible.

That gameplay test video looked pretty promising, any more footage on the way?

Ah, forgot to mention that. It uses the either the range of the beam or the distance to the object obstructing it to calculate the texture tiling on the beam mesh.

[Laser Tutorial:]

Should have a new build soon, the higher enemy counts are a lot of fun. I also managed to make the controls/movement a little bit more agile and responsive.

Laser Tutorial:

I'll start by showing how to make a good beam texture for a laser. Can explain a bit more on that purple tractor beam later if anyone wanted that specifically. The first thing to do is get a good sparkly brush and draw a line across your texture on its own layer. In photoshop, the star brush with high angle and size jitter works nicely.


Next, use some layer effects to give it both an inner and outer glow. Set the inner glow source to center rather than edges and make it a near white version of your original color. For the outer glow, adjust the contour, spread, range and size until you get it looking nice.


Last thing with the image is to switch the background from black to a dark red and create an alpha channel. This is done by making a copy of the beam layer and rasterizing the layer style then cutting and pasting it into the alpha channel. After that adjust the levels to get the core beam pure white.


For the in game parts, I won't be taking any more pictures or going into too much depth on the unity specifics of how its done unless someone requests it. The beam should be on a shader which uses additive blending and is rendered after particles (done by setting it to overlay queue in the language I was using). This will make it show up through any smoke, flames etc. on screen and look much brighter. I used it as the material on a 2 poly plane mesh. To get the beam to flicker nicely, multiply the shader brightness and horizontal scale by some constant + constant*Sin(Time) + constant*RandomFloat. This will make it flicker almost white some frames, and it'll also pulsate a bit.

The beams texture offset should be changed every frame. If you want a smooth looking beam, make this based on time (this is how the tractor beam has its spiral moving inwards - thats just drawn onto the beam texture and the whole thing moves inwards). For a firey beam or a lightning bolt, set it to random every frame. The shader also has a secondary alpha texture which is a simple white to black gradient. This is only enabled when the beam isn't obstructed, and it is used to make the beam fade out gradually.

Last thing is the muzzle flare/hit effect (they're both the same). It consists of a particle system emitting a bunch of stretched sparks in a forward cone and a circular glow plane flickering the way I described on the beam renderer (that second part wasn't in the tractor beam gif, but you can see it in the impacts from the ball lightning gif).

Anything still need more explanation?

Looks really cool, how far are you from an in game video/gif?

Seems kind of misleading not to have lift when the game is called lift.

Top right looks good. Some sparks where it hits would help the effect.

Nearly finished the optimizations, generally have twice as many enemies at a time now (the extra ones are pretty weak, but it still makes you feel like you're in more danger). Also helps make the tradeoff between single target damage and AoE easier to balance.

Will get started on a beam effect tutorial today., and one about the dash will come after that.

Holy crap, the particle effects are really rockin' . Would love to see more guides on how you made them. Keep up the great work! Really inspiring to see how it evolved from the Kongregate version.

Wow, I actually forgot that existed. Do you think it'd be worth making a new one (cut down a lot so it doesn't have a 30 minute load time) with a demo/greenlight link?

That shield effect is really nice.

Which effect do you want written up first? I'll try to do an effects tutorial every week or two, eventually that should add up to a pretty good resource.

Here's a flamethrower one I wrote a while ago.

Could give the bullets a time limit before exploding if you want to keep the ricochets.

Putting on your robe and wizard hat is an important part of any adventure