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[oodavid]

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.

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

[DarthBenedict]

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.

[forsy]

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.

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

[Christian]

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.

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

Got a lot of the Tumblr GIFs collected here:
http://neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=763478

Playing this and Assault Android Cactus back to back is insane. I tried to play some of the older dual sticks like Crimsonland, but after hyperactive gameplay and chaos in these games, I don't find those older games as exciting

[oodavid]

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

[Gregg Williams]

Yeah trackpads are basically useless, especially if you need keyboard at same time. I avoided almost all mouse + key designed games for years, when I was only using my MacBook Pro.

[DarthBenedict]

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.

[Gregg Williams]

Start that book on the effects yet? :D I'd serious contribute some funds towards you writing some detailed posts or blog posts covering how a lot of these weapon effects are done, and if they're combined later on with screen space shaders, etc.

Its an area that interests me quite a lot, seems to have little written about, and I guess I've not touched much since they don't apply to pixel art.

[DarthBenedict]

Which effect do you want written up first? I'll try to do an effects tutorial every week or two, eventually that should add up to a pretty good resource.

Here's a flamethrower one I wrote a while ago.

[Gregg Williams]

Which effect do you want written up first? I'll try to do an effects tutorial every week or two, eventually that should add up to a pretty good resource.

Here's a flamethrower one I wrote a while ago.

That would be very cool.

How about this thing?



Read through the flamethrower one, its pretty interesting having never used Unity. Especially with the using different blend mode shaders to bring the flames out. Are Unity particle emitters able to then also be freely rotated (I'm assuming yes) and thus easily project this flame thrower in any direction?

Having recently just moved into 2D particle emitters and effects, that seems like an extremely useful bit of ability that the stuff I'm using at the moment doesn't have.

[Nezabyte]

Holy crap, the particle effects are really rockin' . Would love to see more guides on how you made them. Keep up the great work! Really inspiring to see how it evolved from the Kongregate version.

[Fervir]

My favorite thing ever is that dash.
It looks awesome.

[DarthBenedict]

Nearly finished the optimizations, generally have twice as many enemies at a time now (the extra ones are pretty weak, but it still makes you feel like you're in more danger). Also helps make the tradeoff between single target damage and AoE easier to balance.

Will get started on a beam effect tutorial today., and one about the dash will come after that.

Holy crap, the particle effects are really rockin' . Would love to see more guides on how you made them. Keep up the great work! Really inspiring to see how it evolved from the Kongregate version.

Wow, I actually forgot that existed. Do you think it'd be worth making a new one (cut down a lot so it doesn't have a 30 minute load time) with a demo/greenlight link?

[Christian]

http://www.kongregate.com/games/darthbenedict/xenoraptor
2011? You've been working on this project for three years?
Playing the flash version and then going back to the latest version, the game has come a long long way.

[SolarLune]

Game looks sick! Posting to follow! :O

[Nezabyte]

Holy crap, the particle effects are really rockin' . Would love to see more guides on how you made them. Keep up the great work! Really inspiring to see how it evolved from the Kongregate version.

Wow, I actually forgot that existed. Do you think it'd be worth making a new one (cut down a lot so it doesn't have a 30 minute load time) with a demo/greenlight link?

I think it'd be enough to show a before/after screenshot or gif with the demo/greenlight link. Something along the lines of "if you liked the gameplay of this..well look at this new and improved version "

[adnzzzzZ]

This is cool as fuck

These look extremely well done too. How exactly are you doing them (the lasers)?

[DarthBenedict]

Should have a new build soon, the higher enemy counts are a lot of fun. I also managed to make the controls/movement a little bit more agile and responsive.

Laser Tutorial:

I'll start by showing how to make a good beam texture for a laser. Can explain a bit more on that purple tractor beam later if anyone wanted that specifically. The first thing to do is get a good sparkly brush and draw a line across your texture on its own layer. In photoshop, the star brush with high angle and size jitter works nicely.


Next, use some layer effects to give it both an inner and outer glow. Set the inner glow source to center rather than edges and make it a near white version of your original color. For the outer glow, adjust the contour, spread, range and size until you get it looking nice.


Last thing with the image is to switch the background from black to a dark red and create an alpha channel. This is done by making a copy of the beam layer and rasterizing the layer style then cutting and pasting it into the alpha channel. After that adjust the levels to get the core beam pure white.


For the in game parts, I won't be taking any more pictures or going into too much depth on the unity specifics of how its done unless someone requests it. The beam should be on a shader which uses additive blending and is rendered after particles (done by setting it to overlay queue in the language I was using). This will make it show up through any smoke, flames etc. on screen and look much brighter. I used it as the material on a 2 poly plane mesh. To get the beam to flicker nicely, multiply the shader brightness and horizontal scale by some constant + constant*Sin(Time) + constant*RandomFloat. This will make it flicker almost white some frames, and it'll also pulsate a bit.

The beams texture offset should be changed every frame. If you want a smooth looking beam, make this based on time (this is how the tractor beam has its spiral moving inwards - thats just drawn onto the beam texture and the whole thing moves inwards). For a firey beam or a lightning bolt, set it to random every frame. The shader also has a secondary alpha texture which is a simple white to black gradient. This is only enabled when the beam isn't obstructed, and it is used to make the beam fade out gradually.

Last thing is the muzzle flare/hit effect (they're both the same). It consists of a particle system emitting a bunch of stretched sparks in a forward cone and a circular glow plane flickering the way I described on the beam renderer (that second part wasn't in the tractor beam gif, but you can see it in the impacts from the ball lightning gif).

Anything still need more explanation?

[Gregg Williams]

So you just stretch these to length needed, vs working with them being tiled and having specific start/end caps than?

[DarthBenedict]

Ah, forgot to mention that. It uses the either the range of the beam or the distance to the object obstructing it to calculate the texture tiling on the beam mesh.