Thanks dudes!

As usual I just discovered some painful last minute bugs:
- draw order on enemy wheels is wrong (Z has been my least favourite letter for at least a week now)
- there is a weird bug that means sometimes screens are very underpopulated. I suppose playing Hard mode should counteract this a bit

Also the fun-ness of the game is quite variable - sometimes you get some interesting battles, sometimes not. Ho hum. I think fixes/tweaks will have to wait til version 2...

I get the white screen when trying to run DX, but GL kinda works - I get the pixellated yellow title screen, and then the game, but my ship and all the enemies are black! 

gfx card is a Radeon X850, which I thought would be good enough. I have latest DX9c too... Maybe I need new drivers...

Hey, after some DirectX-not-installed-foolishness, I managed to have a decent play on this last night. I really like the look and the missile mechanics.

My one complaint is that I felt a bit sick after playing for a while, but that might have been mainly due to the fumes from the noxious chemicals being applied to our kitchen floor  (or maybe it would benefit from a mouse-look deadzone? i'm not sure...)

I'd really love to play a post-compo version with all the trading and upgrading stuff in it. Don't be discouraged!

I'd be interested to play a version with the collision on separate depth layers.

Personally, I feel that'd make things too confusing on the heat of the action.

Trust me, it'd be confusing as hell. I've tried it. At first it doesn't seem problematic if you only envision walking on different layers. However transition/jumping between layers in critical situations is feeling really awkward. There's a problem defining *when* actually the switch happens during the jump.

Let's say that layer is switched as soon as player hits the ground. Now, if you for instance jump down directly at the enemy, you'd go all the way through him and die because of the collision only after you've reached the ground. Pretty un-intuitive.

Yep, you're right of course. Also once you're used to it, it's really not hard to deal with.

Great! I also liked the stars acting as shields, and the enemies are really hot. The first few times I played I actually thought they were different each time, but that was purely because I died before I saw the big thing with the shield

Lovely stuff!! Level generation is fantastic, and the Sentinel/River Raid vibe really shows IMO

This really lived up to my high expectations from the early descriptions and preview screens! (except the difficulty... that surpassed my expectations    I really wish there was an easy mode)

I'd be interested to play a version with the collision on separate depth layers.

This gives me happy feelings in my insides - seeing the swarms flowing about is lovely. Although I don't like it when a big purple swarm is beautifully flowing about within my borders! 

The "empire building" as you plant your trees feels great too. The asteroid/unit attributes is a really flipping neat version of the usual RTS unit type business.

I'd maybe like to see options for asteroid belt size and irregularity in the next version. THanks!

btw - this strongly reminds me of playing Deuteros on the Amiga, while listening to Outer Space by the Prodigy (and the rest of that album). Great days.

I liked this! Minus is supercute and the gameplay feels really nice... "understated" in a good way.

I'm wondering about whether a good way to extend this sort of game, and encourage players to explore the various hectic/calm results of the PG is to link levels in a chain rather than one-offs. Pretty much like Rogue does (even if there's no levelling up), or maybe Outrun is a better model. Outrun is nice because the player makes a choice and then has to deal with it....

We need a PG idle design thoughts thread

Wahh, that's a shame. I was just looking forward to playing the only roguelike in the competition!

Finished! Download link and other info in first post.

Help no longer needed... there was some trans-atlantic miscommunication!

Looking sweet! Love the little seedling graphics

(now that I can actually see them )

This looks like if Vib Ribbon had been written in the 70s. Very pleasing :D

It should at least be clearing the screen, unless your OpenGL support doesn't even extend to glClear. Sounds like something fishy's going on. I'll have a think

I don't think it's anything so mysterious - it just throws an exception in the rendering code when vertex arrays aren't available. Talk to you on MSN...

"Need to use this to use Z level drawing" is in the titlebar after hitting Z.
The laptop I'm on has a pretty crap graphics card (Intel GMA 950, to be precise) so I wouldn't be surprised if that was it .

Ah yes. Sorry about that
I'll investigate a fix after a bit more gameplay has gone in.

Nada. Though I think it just freezes up on the loading, because if I hit z and then change windows back and forth it's got the other window frozen on it.

Hi Inane - how old is your graphics card? Unfortunately when fixing some draw-order issues I broke support for cards that don't do OpenGL vertex arrays. I will try to fix this...
Alternatively, it may have crashed on world generation, although I haven't seen this happen. Is there an error message in the window title bar?

Thanks for the encouraging words, those that could run it...!

Thanks - that's nice to hear about the map!

Also, I found your animation editor

Oh yeah 
Hehe - and that editor isn't even used on this project. (Not that there's anything procedural going on with the anims, I just wrote something to import from gridded images instead.)

Apple pumping!!



/does secret "animals in space" handshake

Here's a demo then. You can't complete the game as the spaceship parts aren't placed yet. You can just fly/run around shooting things.

z = jetpack
x = fire
left/right cursors to move

(I just thought - people with non-qwerty keyboards might hate z and x... shout if so and I'll do an update with some alternate buttons)

- NPCs are stupid at the moment and all have about the same behaviour. Soon (?) they should have various tendencies to jump/attack/etc.
- There's a bug where sometimes you get stuck in the scenery when flipping screens
- Player has no animations yet
- Lots of placeholder graphics...
- Health is very high
- NPC bullets are a bit nuts. Planning to re-work this system.
- ... oh, and NPC placement is pretty meaningless right now...

Hence my disclaimer

Are these of any interest...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_net
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WordNet

(I was thinking of making a kind of semantic net for a kind of rogue-like open world game thing, so that the game would know that oaks grew from acorns, oaks were symbolic of strength, etc, so that characters and the overall culture of the world had a kind of common sense to it. I never actually implemented it though. Maybe one day...)

Anyway, the poem-seed idea has loads of potential, looking forward to seeing what happens with it. Now I see what you were talking about in some other thread about a proc-gen game without use of a random function!