Man, this takes me back...

This looks promising; my main crit at the moment would be that there doesn't seem to be any advantage to doing anything 'tactical' rather than just keeping all your guys together and concentrating their fire.  Sure, you can force the player to split them up using pressure plates etc. but that seems a little artificial.  I think the ideal solution is to create enemies that require more advanced tactics to defeat.  Say, ones that try to sneak around behind you so you need a rear-guard, ones with area-of-effect weaponry that you need to spread out to avoid, ones that carry shields that make them take very little damage from the front, but that are vulnerable to one of your guys sneaking round the back... maybe some kind of cover system that lets you pin enemies down while sending some of your guys flanking...

I suppose the downside to that would be that the more complicated the tactic the longer it would take to set up and the game would lose its current fast pace.

Looks cool, I like the graphics.  So I take it the flash mock-up no longer represents what this will be like?  Shame, it was kind of fun - it would be nice to see a combination of that playstyle but with a little more depth to it.

Like the concept, and love the name.

Wow, that looks amazing, can't wait to see what you do with this.  Although, one pedantic point: shouldn't those galaxies really be spinning the other way?

Ladies and Gentlemen, I should like to formally (I'm very nearly wearing a tie) announce the release of:

A free, 3D action/puzzle game, where you must pilot a hovercraft against the regime of an evil kitten-hating madman, clearing out his heavily defended bases one by one in the name of UCAS (The United Coalition of Allied Societies).

The catch?  You forgot to bring any guns.

You do have a super-powerful air cannon at your disposal though.  It won't do any damage, but perhaps, using that, you can work out a way to destroy the enemy legions by using their own weaponry against them...

- Blast obstacles out of the way!
- Deflect missiles!
- Push the enemy into their own traps!
- Over 20 challenging levels!
- Special modes to unlock!
- A totally realistic simulation of modern warfare!  Probably!

More details and a shiny shiny download button can be found here:
http://www.vitruality.com/?p=369

Aaaand it's done:  http://www.vitruality.com/?p=369

Many thanks to everybody that offered advice on this thread!

I played this game when it first came out and loved it.  My girlfriend and I are still making Octodad jokes several months later.  More please.

Pretty cool, although I found it a little hard to control, probably as an inevitable consequence of having no fixed reference points so you can't tell exactly how you're moving.  I ended up getting stuck in a small sun, which is probably a bit of a space navigation faux pas.

i streamlined *the code* to use it in a tutorial -- that's why collision detection & shadows are 'broken' (hardly noticable)

Well, I noticed!  I would say for the sake of a tutorial if you're simplifying something to the extent that it no longer works properly you should probably just leave it out altogether (the shadows etc.).

Um, I'm not entirely sure I see what you were trying to achieve with this.  You seem to have just taken Michal's game and kind of messed it up.  Supposedly static objects like trees and rocks move down the screen at different speeds, collisions don't seem to work properly, things overlap other things in ways that look weird, trees and bushes turn up in caves etc... Also considering how simple the original game is I don't see any benefit in having a 'streamlined' version.  If anything you should be trying to add things, not just take them away.

On the positive side, I do like the blood-splats on the screen.

http://www.vitruality.com/SHB/SHBv0.9.1.zip

New version here - I've:

- Decreased 'disabled' time
- Increased general movement speed
- Sorted out the mouse-aiming (hopefully)
- It will now release the mouse when it loses focus
- Some general tweaks

New law of sidescrolling indie games: The foreground must be solid black outlines with occasional colour highlights. The great god Ig hath spoken.

Originality aside, the graphics are cool and fit the theme well, however there can be occasions where it can make it hard to see what's going on.  I kept overturning and getting stuck at the start of the second level for no apparent reason.  I eventually figured out it was because there was an explosive barrel there.  The customisation is a nice feature, although it's a little unbalanced - the multi-wheel chassis make everything a lot easier, while a lot of the other upgrades seem to not be too beneficial at all.  It might be nice if the earlier chassis had some kind of SRIMECH so this wasn't such a handicap early on.  On the whole though it's a fun and slightly addictive game and I love the sense of humour.

Thanks guys!

Accidental Rebel: I'm relieved to hear you say that about the graphics, since I was a bit worried about whether people were going to like the style.  After a year of staring at it I'd honestly lost all concept of whether it looked like poop or not!

Re: mouse control:  I've had a look at this and realised that the reason the mouse control sucks is that I neglected to make it independant of framerate.  Stupid, stupid, stupid... 

Have corrected that now; will just make a couple more small fixes and then I'll upload an updated version...

Nice game.

Generally very professionally done - but for me it doesn't seem to fit in it's frame properly - it trims off a little bit of the bottom and left hand side of the play area.  Not sure why - I've never seen it with any other flash games.

I'm using Ogre at the moment and it's pretty cool.  Another one I've used previously is Irrlicht: http://irrlicht.sourceforge.net/ - it's not as full-featured as Ogre but it is a little bit simpler to work with.  It doesn't have as big a community as Ogre but the tutorials that come with it tell you pretty much everything you need to know.

I think this is actually the best game made by somebody that's dead I've ever played.  Well, maybe second best.

Had a play around with the benchmark - very pretty!

Thanks for all the comments, guys!

I will definitely reduce the 'fizzing' time to about half of what it is now; also I'll increase the movement speed of both your own hovercraft and the enemies.  This should hopefully make it a little more fast-paced and will mean that when there are enemy hovercraft around and you get injured they will be more capable of actually chasing you down.

Powerups etc:  If I were going to make the game substantially longer then I would definitely add some more powerups, but as it is I want to keep the scope fairly small - something like Portal where you have only a few basic mechanics and then see how far you can take them.  Originally I was planning a couple of different puzzle-centric powerups (like a tank of oil that turned your gun into a flamethrower that you could use to set things on fire and a tank of water that turned it into a watergun that could put them out again) but I cut them out to avoid unsustainable feature creep (the death of hobby coding projects!).  In a way, since the point of the game is to use the enemies' weapons against them, you could look at each new enemy type as being a different powerup... 

Charging: I did have charging in the game originally, but didn't really like it and took it out.  The problem was that in order to make charging worthwhile I had to nerf the 'base' strength of it, which made defending yourself against missiles etc. much much harder.

Music: I set myself a target maximum download size of 50 Meg, which means I was limited in the number of different tracks I could include (and since I have the musical talent of a doughnut, I have to take what I can find!).

@Melly: Would you mind doing me a favour and try running it under OpenGL, just to see if the same problem occurs?  I might actually cut out the option for different drivers and enforce OGL since it seems to look a lot better with that anyway.

Looks good, might finally give me something to use the AR goggles we've had floating around at work for ages!

The main problem with AR for games is finding a good way to interact with it - did you have any thoughts on this?  I guess the best thing would be something like the Kinect that would let you 'touch' it, oooh, that would be cool...