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[ithamore]

Versions:

Final Contest Version
Mirrors:
WHFF Part 1 Part 2
YoYo Games

Psi1 (Doubled) Demo

"Omega" Demo

Alpha Demo

About the game:

The enemies change movement, fire, and regenerate randomly within short ranges of time. Destroy them by ramming into them or shooting them (ramming them scores 10x more points than shooting). Dodge or shoot the enemy fire (for 1X points), and try to make it to the end of the song while reaching for a highscore. Tip: the score multiplier is increased by 1 every time the screen is cleared of enemies, which is indicated with a rising tone.


This was planned to be RND SHMUP, but the shooting has become a nearly unnecessary auxiliary attack, since it's more fun and effective to simply bash into the enemies. The only thing you have to dodge for now is enemy fire.

Randomness is the theme, and the the game ends when the music is over. If you die early on, everything will continue its random course until the end or until you press Esc (for now).

This is just a self post-testing release of prototype1, so it's goalless. And the music was derived from a fluke experience with AnlogX's SayIt; it isn't pretty and it's temporary.

Download the Alpha Demo here.

The controls are the arrow keys (for movement) and WADS (for firing).

The animated gif images used for the enemies are from Flikr's computer animation set, which you should check out to see how much better they look in their original sizes.

The screenshot provides only a margin of insight, but it's here for those who might want it.


I'll provide more info after I've slept.

Update:
After waking up, spending my time at work, in Hualien, and in Taroko National Park, I finally have some time to update this post.

I'm thinking about using the player's clearing of the screen of enemies as a score multiplier or as a final goal.

When available, I will include new downloads in new posts and at the top of the original post.

Flikr (aka Kelvin), whose gif images I shrunk to use in the game, used his Agony software to create them. If you want to see them fully animated at their original size (around 10x of their sizes in the game), you have to click on the "All Sizes" tab above the images in the link I provided above this update. It should take a while to load since the animations tend to be near Flickr's 10 MB limit and usually have over 100 frames.

Here is a full-size example of one of the animations (this image didn't make it into the contest version of the game). The animation seems to load faster for me from the host I'm using than viewing it on Flickr, but one should still expect it to take a while for it to load.

[Melly]

Whoa that looks pretty. Though you should probably make the in-game sprites a bit bigger. Still I love that aesthetic. You working on this still?

[ithamore]

I've been working on the game a little each evening, and I had finished what was going to be the "omega demo" (download the "omega demo" from here). However, your mentioning about the size of the sprites has helped me to re-think some issues I had with the game.

I've decided to designed the game toward a classical, high-score goal with clearing the screen of enemies increasing the score's multiplier. It had felt like getting the multiplier from the default 1x to 2x (and beyond) was a little too challenging. At the same time, dodging enemy fire was too easy.

Increasing the size of the enemy sprites while adding more firing enemies might improve the balance between the reward and challenge of the game.

Here is the doubled version of the current game with larger enemy sprites. I think it makes the enemies a bit too large, but it might be a step in the right direction.

The song is the netaudio version of Velum by William Fields from his branches album.

[Noyb]

You might want to cap the speed the player can move in any one direction, since there don't seem to be any limits at the moment.

[ithamore]

You might want to cap the speed the player can move in any one direction, since there don't seem to be any limits at the moment.

Thank you for the suggestion, but the best I can do for now is let the player's use of self control limit the velocity, since I've been too busy trying to get Game Maker to allow the player to replace the music with an mp3 of the player's choice with no avail.

I certainly could have made many more changes and improvements to the game. However, since it's complete enough as it is, I will release the current version as my entry. An extra firing enemy has been added, and one of the passive enemies has been giving the ability to fire.

Also, links to the various versions of the game are now at the top of the first post.

[moi]

Could you upload it somewhere else? I can't download it from Rapidshare AT ALL.

[ithamore]

I've had similar problems with Megaupload and registering with WillHostForFood, so I'll gladly add some mirrors.

WHFF:
Part 1
Part 2

YoYo Games:
the download link is toward the bottom of the page.

[moi]

Very nice effects. The game itself is a little too frantic for me, I can't see where my ship is most of the time. More could have been done with the PG content creation (backgrounds, etc...) It's a pity the anims aren't Procedurally generated.

[ithamore]

It's a pity the anims aren't Procedurally generated.

I felt like I had picked some animations that at least fitted into the procedural theme: the images were created from the calculations of values that were entered into a program They were originally created procedurally, even though I used them as pre-rendered graphics. Also, they have a somewhat random look to complement my use of randoms in the game.

As for the franticness, I might release a readjusted ship movement version of the game that caps the velocity after the voting is over to help with the ship moving too fast.

I've also been thinking of releasing non-QWERTY versions for now to the benefit of those with non-QWERTY keyboards as a compatibility fix for the current version (if that is acceptable for the competition).

[Yuka]

Lol, here's something you migth wanna try because i got the best bug ever when doing it

Accelerate to the right(move a little upwards at the same time) as much as you can and just keep going. Chances are good that enemy bullets won't hit you when you move at 1000mp/h. But the best part was when my ship slowed down (even though I tried to accelerate) and just when off-screen and stayed there.

So now I can shoot my enemies without being on screen, and they can't hit me

[zradick]

I loved the swirly colored enemy cloud things, but the game-play was a little on the challenging side (frustrating for me).  I kept losing track of my ship because it was so small and my bullets felt too slow (I was often outpacing them).  Still, the style, sound, and music all fit nicely together.
Cheers!
--Zack