Increasing the enemy count makes area of effect weapons really good.

This is unity right? I'm curious to hear more about your optimizations.

Nice looking game by the way. I haven't tried it yet because I'm burnt out on top down shooters, but a few more of those gifs will probably win me over

Instead of instantiating/destroying various things that spawn/explode often, I made a cache of them and activate/deactivate them as necessary. Working on doing it for enemies and a few particle effects now.

Finally got round to having a hands-on with this, looks stunning but couldn't find a decent setup to work with a laptop trackpad which seriously hindered my abilities, the best I could do was to use the alternative camera and fudge the weapon mappings, was still nigh-on impossible in what I could see was a simple scenario for a mouse...

GG

Yeah, I don't really expect it to work with a trackpad.

[everywhere]

Au contraire mon ami; on the way in the enemies are "the locals" in predefined locations, hidden around corners etc. as you get the artefact the Timesplitters (time-travelling aliens) start spawning everywhere in random places, if you stay still you will lose as they just keep spawning, if you leg-it, you have to be VERY skilled to survive the harder levels (where you have to travel further to get back home) so it becomes about balancing the pace at which you progress and the rate you dispatch the enemies...



you can see the artefact at 4:40, the timesplitters start beaming in as he approaches it... FPS yes, but I enjoyed the mechanic a LOT (as have countless others)

If I recall, they have low health but powerful weapons... Not sure TBH

Ah, yeah that's definitely going to be worth testing, plus it shouldn't be too hard to implement.

Also, optimizations are going nicely. I've made spawning things more efficient, did it with projectiles first and it let me have 4x as many bullets and still get better performance. The enemy count will soon be getting serious.

Looks really tight!

For an additional game-mode you could try something akin to Timesplitters - head deep into enemy territory, grab the artefact and return. The think I like about these is that on harder modes you simply have to travel further! For the return journey you have choices; dispatch of the enemies tactically or leg-it.

So get to the first objective, after that enemies stop spawning and you have a choice to finish them off or just run for it? That sounds fun, I'll try it out sometime soon.

This sounds really promising.

Did some experimentation with higher enemy counts, it's more fun and doesn't actually make the game stupidly difficult (they kill each other even more this way). Will need to do a bit of optimization before releasing this change, though.

Also made some progress on the objectives stuff, but nothing that makes for a nice gif.

Adding electricity effect and a new AI for the blaster. The electricity effect is not done yet but the AI is: it works by just moving around left/right and generally staying around an initial y position. The generally staying around part means that the Blaster will always converge to that initial y position and when he gets there he'll float up and down a little. If he gets hit and something pushes him up then he slowly goes back to it... Every frame a ray is cast below the Blaster, which checks for collisions of the line against the player, and if it does then it starts attacking.

The electricity effect was based on this tutorial (http://drilian.com/2009/02/25/lightning-bolts/) and I'm not done with it yet. I also don't know if it fits the visual style of the game properly, but I think for visual effects there's usually some lee-way in terms of how they fit everything else (at least I hope!).

I'm using a looping lighting bolt texture I drew in photoshop with randomized offsets to make each bolt look different, maybe doing something like that might let you create something that matches the other art more easily?

Either way thanks for linking that tutorial, I found it really interesting.

Just checked out the demo, and damn is this thing satisfying! Observing flight patterns in order to sabotage enemies is such a simple mechanic, but it is so much fun to do. I made it to boss on Earth, and proceeded to get beat-down, but I enjoyed this, and will definitely be following it's progress.

Yeah, plus (I'm not sure if players actually notice this) I find it helps give the enemies a bit more personality. Some types are pretty careful about friendly fire, others happily run over half their team to get you. Bulldozers in particular have no FF checking or pathfinding, they just smash through everything.

a weapon which teleports attack bears into the cockpit of enemy ships

That's all I needed to hear

Lol!

Dev's always find a composer right before I find their stuff.

I think it looks great though, lots of visual depth and intensity! Up-Voted

The music on your site is pretty cool, listening to it while I dev atm.

What are the cubes made of?

They are made of space substances and typical intelligent life form stuff like brain and digestive system related stuff.

They eat stuff and then the digestive system processes it into a crumpled paper. That's how the crumple papers appear in player's room.

They have a life crystal in their body. This is the source of their power and the more they suffer emotional/physical pain, it shines brighter. When the life crystal is extracted from their body, Cubes die.

I meant more along the lines of are they meant to be squishy jelly cubes or bouncy bricks?

What are the cubes made of?

Armors: 1, 3, 11, 12, 13. The helmets look a bit too small at the moment.

Swords: 3(favorite), 11, 15, 16. I like the idea behind 9 as well, but it needs a bit of tweaking.

Having mouse control combined with a ship that keeps up with your cursor was fun.

Suggestions:
-Hide the cursor when it's on screen
-Make enemies flash/shake/knockback a little when hit
-Maybe a tiny bit of screenshake when an enemy is destroyed or you get hit
-It might be worth making sure everything is loaded before you start playing, although it was interesting having a bunch of squares flying around then turning into spaceships after a few seconds.

I love gifs.

I was thinking of timed collect all X (and they'd spawn one at a time), so it'd play a lot like the gauntlet suggestion except that the checkpoints would be items you collect.

Escort would be pretty easy once base defence is done, just make a second base type that moves. And yeah, both the base and any ship you'd escort would have chaingun turrets because  gatling guns make everything better. You'd be able to repair them seperately from the core ship/base (mind control beam currently doubles as a repair gun).

Looks fun.

Currently working on adding objective based levels and waves. This is mostly to provide a reason for players to stay together in coop, but it should help add a bit more variety to single player as well. The basic destroy everything mode will still be there, of course.

Current ideas for objectives:
Defend a base
Collect all the sparkly wotsits
Push the important physics object to the important place
Destroy a miniboss while regular enemies are still spawning
Stay in the glowy circle for a while

Would be interested in hearing any other objectives you think would be fun.

Edit: Also, I'm seriously considering making 'collect all the sparkly wotsits' the actual objective name.

I've heard the word juice used for it a lot. Adding a tiny bit of shake to all the atoms (maybe with falloff based on how far they are from the one you made) might give it a bit more impact too, but it's looking a lot better already.

That does look a fair bit better, plus that angle shouldn't make walls get in the way much.

The more prominent text when you collect a pick up works well

Update on the controls: the keybindings save now, except for mouse wheel for special weapon. Instead staying as mouse wheel, exiting and playing again has special weapon as none and I have set it as mouse wheel again.

I don't think the targeting laser turning white is that effective because the bullets you fire obscure the laser. Well, that's probably more of an issue with rapid fire weapons like the chaingun. Maybe the actual reticle could shift color as well so the change would be more noticeable

Some more map ideas:
- Area near a black hole, with gravity wells or something similar, that alter gravity, affect your aiming and movement
- Area around dying sun, with random solar flares to avoid
- Some kind of ship graveyard

Changed the crosshair heat indicator to make it more obvious:


I'll look into the mousewheel thing now, should have it fixed in the next build. Again, thanks for the stage suggestions, a fair few of them will probably end up in game.

GOTY.