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[Ciardhubh]

I've finished a game that I wrote to improve my OpenGL skills and to learn GLSL. Space Folds is a take on the classic asteroid-shooter. It uses several shaders for bloom, normal/specular mapping and distortion effects. I am really interested to know how it runs on various systems.

I've developed it on a computer with an Nvidia graphics card, only to realise later that the shaders didn't work on an ATI card. After some shader-rewriting it now works on both computers. Still, I'd love to know how it runs on other systems (OS and graphics card mainly).

Please give it a try it and tell me whether you ran into any problems or not.

Play now (via Java Web Start)

Screenshots







Menu controls

F: toggle fullscreen
left, right: select level

In-game controls

The ship is controlled by a series of thrusters. You have to control thrusters individually. Firing a thruster will push your ship in the opposite direction.



Thrusters: num-pad keys
Fire missile: Space

Do not forget to enable num-lock or else the keys will not work. The game tries to enable it automatically but this is not supported by all systems.

Easier, alternative control scheme:

Thrusters: Arrow keys
Halt: H
Fire missile: Space

System requirements
- Java 5.0 or greater (Web Start version only)
- Windows, Mac OS X, Linux or Solaris
- An OpenGL 2.0-capable graphics card (requires shader support)

Play via Java Web Start
- no download
- runs from browser
- requires Java 5 or higher to be installed
- works on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and Solaris

Display Configurator for Web Start Version
- if you want to change display settings after the first start

Download Windows Executable (~27 MB)
- Windows-only but does not require Java to be installed

[Alex May]

No time to play right now, but is the extra 'O' in the death screenshot deliberate?

[Ciardhubh]

No time to play right now, but is the extra 'O' in the death screenshot deliberate?

Yes of course! 2.9 million Google hits for "You loose!" cannot be wrong! ... *cough* ... Thanks

[Alex May]

Hi Ciardubh

I tried this just now. I'm sorry to report that I found the controls to be unintuitive and almost impossible to control. At the very least, the keys map to the thrusters opposite to those to which I was expecting. On top of that, you have a confusing four keys related to turning. I think that the reason that this was so frustrating for me is that I've already played this game (Asteroids) with far easier controls. You've taken a game that was easy to play and inserted a really difficult set of controls where some easy ones once were, without inserting any gameplay that is relevant to the new controls.

I would suggest that since Lunar Lander is more about finesse in piloting the craft, using this kind of game mechanic would be to your advantage; Asteroids is about pointing and shooting - the avoiding is a part of it but the core game is orienting your ship and shooting at things, that's the main thing you're doing - and the easier that is for the player the better. The core game mechanic of Lunar Lander is piloting, avoiding terrain and controlling your velocity, so think of some ways to make that a part of your gameplay here, or make your controls map to some more intuitive keys. Like, a large amount of controlling the ship will be rotating, so why not make two keys that fire the correct thrusters to rotate the ship in either direction instead of rotating it and moving it at the same time? It would be a start.

[Ciardhubh]

I tried this just now. I'm sorry to report that I found the controls to be unintuitive and almost impossible to control. [...] You've taken a game that was easy to play and inserted a really difficult set of controls where some easy ones once were, without inserting any gameplay that is relevant to the new controls.

[...]

Thanks for playing.

I agree that the controls are hard to learn, maybe too hard for such a small game. You have to think of it as controlling the thrusters, not the ship's movement. You don't use four keys to turn, you use them to control four thrusters that add to the ship's movement. Imagine sitting in the ship's cockpit and firing thrusters relative to the ship's orientation. The ship's movement consist of the X and Y directions and rotation. Depending on the thrusters current orientation it adds to one of the three. Maybe that's too abstract to get into before the game gets too annoying.

To me the most fun gameplay aspect is the control scheme. I had fun circling around asteroids and all, but then again I'm totally not objective :D. It is best to only press buttons for a very short, controlled time and use auto-break liberally in the beginning. The more buttons a game uses the better in my opinion . Having played so many games that try to minimise the effort needed to control your character/vessel, I got a bit bored.

I have to see if I can come up with something that would make it more interesting to play. Maybe a limited fuel supply after which the ship explodes? Then again that would make it even more difficult 

[Ciardhubh]

When I first released Space Folds several months ago it was ugly and hard to play. Now it comes with added shiny effects and slightly less uncontrollable controls . Admittedly it's not exactly innovative gameplay-wise but my intention was to learn more about OpenGL and GLSL. Still I think it's fun to waste a few minutes

Edit: added an easier control scheme. You can now also use arrow keys to turn and move forward/backwards and H to break.