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[fractilegames]

A new alpha version 0.0.11 is available!

The single most important addition in this update is online and local high score tables for the survival co-op game mode. I have made a lot of changes that affect survival co-op difficulty progression. If you play the game, please let me know if you think it's too hard or easy.



Here's what's new:

• Added local and online high score tables for survival matches.
• Added new weapon: Teletorpedo.
• Improved jumper boss model.
• Tougher boss ships drop more valuable score items.
• Show number of remaining lives in survival match.
• Fixed gamepad thrust buttons not working simultaneusly with analog stick aiming.
• Missiles no longer detonate on contact with the ship that fired them.
• Mothership laser beams now turn on and off based on time instead of position.
• Added "tail lights" to drones to make them more visible.
• Wrap telefragger target indicator around arena edges.
• Added separate tips shown at co-op survival matchs start.
• Added a boss health indicator in survival matches.
• Fixed a bug that prevented enemies from coming from the right side of the arena.
• Fixed explosions causing less damage to larger objects.
• Made enemy drones a lot weaker.
• Rewrote drone aiming code to make them better hit stationary targets.
• Added camera shake to enemy boss explosions.
• Decreased duration of disruption caused by ship explosions.
• Prevented disruption from ship explosions when telefragging.
• Added respawn delay progress bar to respawn labels.

Download here: http://www.fractilegames.com/products/astronautics/

[fractilegames]

Alpha update 0.0.12 is out!

This is mainly a maintenance update fixing several long-standing compatibility issues and improving gamepad support. For example the fatal "selectPixelFormat failed" error that appeared on some Windows PCs should be gone. I haven't seen the random "X Error: BadDrawable" errors on Linux anymore either.

Here's full list of changes since 0.0.11 alpha:

• Switched to use SDL2 game controller mappings for much better gamepad support.
• Added a notification when new gamepad is connected.
• Reworked OpenGL initialization code to fix some compatiblity issues.
• Fixed some special characters not showing right in high score names.
• Added a --video-fail-safe command line option to temporarily force fail-safe video settings.
• Added V-sync interval setting to system settings menu.
• Added setting to disable mouse control (and prevent mouse capture).
• Added an ominous sound playing just before bosses appear in survival mode.
• Updated all packaged libraries to latest versions.

Downloads: http://www.fractilegames.com/products/astronautics/

[fractilegames]

Another alpha update 0.0.14 is here!



There was a version 0.0.13 too, but that only fixed one bug, so I didn't mention it here. This update brings again a long list of changes:

• Added new weapon: Death ray.
• Adjusted background asteroid color to better blend in to the background.
• Added setting for changing ship HUD size.
• Added left digital trigger as alternative thrust button on gamepads.
• Added shift keys as alternative shoot keys for keyboard controllers.
• Use ship's side thrusters to dampen lateral motion while thrusting (off by default).
• Fine-tuned camera shake to feel better.
• Added a blue light source to teletorpedos.
• Increased scattergun projectile count and lowered individial projectile damage.
• Fixed full-screen mode not always defaulting to primary monitor.
• Increased telefragger kill range at teleport target position.
• Don't spawn telefragger right before boss fights as it can't be used against them.
• Spawn repair bots in survival mode only as boss kill rewards.
• Fixed log error spamming on some buggy AMD drivers in Windows.
• Made player ships attract power ups from much greater distance.
• Added particle trail effects to some of the beam weapons.
• Added smooth fading at both ends of weapon beams.
• Moved controller help from menu to a separate overlay that can be toggled with F1.
• Show match tips in randomized loop while waiting for players to join the match.
• Added a shockwave to teleporting effect.

Downloads are hosted on itch.io as always:
https://fractilegames.itch.io/hyper-ultra-astronautics

For more information, see the game's website:
http://wwww.fractilegames.com/products/astronautics/

I'm especially interested in hearing your thoughts on the best value for "slide prevention" setting in Settings/Controller settings -menu. Many testers have felt that the ship is too hard to control due to the inertia. However, I like the raw turn-and-thrust controls and so do most of the players once they get the hang of it. As a compromise, I have added this option to automatically use ship's side thrusters to dampen the lateral movement while thrusting. This makes maneuvering a bit easier without introducing any magical forces or friction. It is currently disabled by default and I'm not sure what to do with it in the future.

[belbeeno]

Oh hey, this game was shown on Highsight's stream; it played well!  My game Factory Hiro ran at the top of the same stream.  Did you end up implementing the stronger score pull proximity suggestion?  That Death Ray is super cool, reminds me of the Raiden 2 (PS) laser weapon, although with much less arcing.

I'll give this game a run tomorrow and let you know my thoughts! 

[fractilegames]

Oh hey, this game was shown on Highsight's stream; it played well!  My game Factory Hiro ran at the top of the same stream.  Did you end up implementing the stronger score pull proximity suggestion?  That Death Ray is super cool, reminds me of the Raiden 2 (PS) laser weapon, although with much less arcing.

Yes, I did increase the pull range on the score items. A couple of other suggestions from that stream also made it to this update. For example, I increased telefragger kill radius to make it easier to use and stopped spawning telefraggers before a boss fight.

Got a lot of good feedback on that stream.

[belbeeno]

Hey!  I played it for a bit, and I have some thoughts!  I do feel like my thoughts aren't very representative of your target audience unfortunately (since I'm just playing single player survival), but here we go anyway.

Overall the game has a simple, cohesive look.  The effects are exciting, and I think you're on the right track to having something great.  I don't think I'm an expert on game art but I think some things I'd like to see are multiple layers of parallax for space (where the furthest layer is not affected by screen shake), more diversity in background elements (maybe distant planets, scrapped ships, maybe just a bunch of AI ships in combat with another group of AI ships?).   I would also consider doing a pass on the UI for each player; I'm rarely ever looking at the ship, but there's so much info on there that is pretty important and it feels very jumbled; I'm still not exactly sure which ring is heat and which is ammo.

Gameplay-wise, I would say more feedback when a player takes damage is a welcome change.  I understand that things like full-screen shaking may not be feasible on per player actions like taking damage, but the problem I'm having is I'm always looking where I'm shooting, not at my ship (like I was mentioned above).  Other than that, in survival (and reiterating what Highsight said) I would like to see more enemy variety, more interesting behaviors (like maybe chains of baddies that follow a path instead of seek the players, enemies that shoot different weapons, etc).  The bosses I've seen so far are distinct and I like the idea of having the difficulty ramp up by having to deal with more than one later in the game, but I'd like to see some more complex behaviors beyond one or alternating between two attacks.

WHEW alright, let's talk about the movement...

I've tried out the game with the slide prevention set to 0 and 1, and I gotta say I prefer setting slide prevention to 1.0.  That being said something still feels off... for me anyway, it feels more like a physics game than what I imagine from a modern top down shooter like Super Stardust HD or Geometry Wars which move away from physics based gameplay towards tighter, more arcade-y gameplay.  The first game that comes to mind with this physics kind of movement is Asteroids. 

This may be your intention!  Maybe this sort of game is fun with many players in DM and I'm completely missing the point.  From what I've played though, many aspects of the game that encourage slow, deliberate movement (the large, difficult to destroy asteroids almost forces you to focus on maneuvering, and even the act of slowing down requires you to do a 180 and counter-thrust which asks the player to ahead a little bit) feel at odds with some of the more modern shoot em ups aspects that your game also exhibits, like enemies that seek you, bosses, powerups and points pickups which encourage moving from end to end.  Because it's somewhere in the middle of this spectrum, I feel like if you had a single hit killing the player (like in other games) in this game it would be near unplayable, BUT with the huge health pool it has now, I don't really feel invested and quickly lose interest. 

BUT this is just for Survival mode!  I do feel like deathmatch could have potential...  Subspace Continuum comes to mind as an example of a game that has looser controls and is mainly deathmatch and it's fun as heck.

There we go!  Hopefully that was helpful and I wasn't a total downer lol.  I think I've said this on the stream but I'll say it again here, if your game is fun when there's lots of players, you're going to get better playtest feedback at game dev meetups or on a couch with friends or in an arcade cabinet at some bar (I hear the Winnitron Network is always looking for games!). 
Good luck out there! 

[fractilegames]

Thanks belbeeno, you brought up a lot of good points there!

The game is intended primarily as a multiplayer game. The survival mode is admittedly a bit of an afterthought. I added it initially as a simple practice mode where you get to fight against AI drones. It got a bit out of hand and now it's the most played game mode Obviously, because most people test the game alone. I will continue improving it, but there will probably never be tens of different enemy and boss types.

The slow (and a bit awkward) physics based controls were definitely intentional. Inspired by Asteroids (obviously) and many old cave flier games. And even by those dogfight scenes in the new BattleStar Galactica series.

One problem with this, like you said, is that people expect the instant controls they are used to in usual twin-stick shooters and easily dismiss the game due to "horribly laggy" controls. The other is that as a party/couch game new players should be able to just pick up a controller and immediately have fun with the game. Now it takes some time to learn to control the ship efficiently.

I would also consider doing a pass on the UI for each player; I'm rarely ever looking at the ship, but there's so much info on there that is pretty important and it feels very jumbled; I'm still not exactly sure which ring is heat and which is ammo.

The rings are actually health and heat Do you have any tips on how to make them better? Ideally player should see the ship's important stats with a quick glance without actually focusing on the ship.

with the huge health pool it has now, I don't really feel invested and quickly lose interest. 

I agree. Perhaps I should make the enemy projectiles make a lot more damage. I will definitely do something to improve the "feel" of taking damage.

[belbeeno]

The rings are actually health and heat Do you have any tips on how to make them better? Ideally player should see the ship's important stats with a quick glance without actually focusing on the ship.

It's a bit of a tough problem, considering you use color coding already to identify players (red to green gradient would have been nice to use here), but as I mentioned most of my time is spent focused on where I'm aiming.  It's not a solution that would work for all the weapons, but one thing that comes to mind is moving the cooldown gauge to the aim assist somehow.  A great example would be the telefragger: the circle that previews where you'll teleport to could show the weapon cooldown (you may do this already, I can't rightly remember now). 

More generally, I would recommend looking into other ways to convey information without using a bar or text around the player.  Clearly you don't have the luxuries of single player and can't just slap the info into the corners of the screen, but you might want to consider things like applying a high contrast effects on the ship that trigger on events (I do notice you have the ship smoking on overheat, but this could also be confused for a low health effect plus it's very dark and doesn't really pop out), maybe even changing the color of the ship entirely to represent a state like a red flickering ship means getting hot... I dunno!  You'll have to try stuff out and see what works.

One thing that I forgot to mention in the previous post is the weapons pickup is a bit confusing to me... like, some weapons change my primary weapon, whereas others are limited use I think?  Is there some way to differentiate the two, other than the main weapon powerups use (as far as I can tell) bullets?  Do the main-weapon pickups need to be the same color as the limited use pickups?  This was kind of confusing to me, but admittedly I could ignore it because I'd just roll with whatever I had as, in most cases, the aim assist would let me know generally how I should be aiming (I should mention it IS exciting to get a new weapon and seeing approximately how it fires but not knowing exactly how it works, particularly for big beam weapons).

In my opinion, I would have the pickups just be limited use powerups, but have the main weapon types be something fixed to a ship, and having multiple ships for players to select.  Having a ship selection also gives you the opportunity to solve that problem you're having with some people liking one movement type and other people preferring another type by just having both, and potentially move away from color-coding the text of a player so color could be used for other things.  I also suspect it may be non-trivial to hack this into a game that assumes one player ship type, plus it's almost certainly non-trivial trying to balance ships that move differently, but it's an option.

[fractilegames]

A new alpha version 0.0.15 is out!



Many of the changes are based on feedback I have received here. Here's the change log:

• Added a new enemy boss in survival mode.
• Added a new enemy drone type in survival mode.
• Added menu control from first connected gamepad.
• Fixed remote (mobile app) controllers not requiring shoot button release after respawn.
• Added a new enemy spawn pattern where drones teleport in at random positions.
• Made survival mode enemy weapons a lot stronger.
• Firing death ray disrupts own ship controls for a while.
• Use "smoke" effect on ships only when badly damaged, not to indicate overheat.
• Added one more projectile per burst to plasma burst to make it more effective weapon.
• Blink ship label when the ship takes damage.
• Fixed a bug causing too weak angular damping on all enemy ships.
• Fixed potential random crashes when using beam weapons.
• Made enemy drones randomly look around when they don't have a target.
• Added contact and explosion sounds to explosion fragments.
• Set boss explosion fragments to explode after a random delay.
• Prevented collision response from small fragments to prevent them from altering player's heading.
• Added white flash effect on all ships when taking damage.
• Made all enemy bosses teleport back to arena if pushed out.
• Fixed background sound loop unnecessarily restarting when closinvg controller help.
• Updated GLFW to fix inversed Y-axis on all XInput gamepads.
• Prevented bosses from teleporting too close to players.
• Prevented players from respawning too close to enemy bosses.
• Fixed a bug that made projectiles launched by already destroyed ship damage friendly players.
• Updated SDL game controller database to latest version.
• Implemented a workaround to a GLFW bug that caused missed keypresses on USB keyboards in Linux.
• Fixed occasional decimal value formatting problems in the menu.
• Marked transient power-ups with "+" sign in the title.

Downloads are hosted on itch.io as always:
https://fractilegames.itch.io/hyper-ultra-astronautics

For more information, see the game's website:
http://wwww.fractilegames.com/products/astronautics/

[fractilegames]

A new alpha version 0.0.16 is out! This is mostly a maintenance release with following changes:

• Added better Rammer boss weapon effects.
• Improved Rammer boss difficulty progression.
• Fixed Rammer boss occasionally sitting idle for a very long time.
• Implemented movable cursor and home/end/del key support in menu text inputs.
• Changed to a more legible in-game font.
• Added an in-game feedback form.
• Added proper license information for used 3rd party libraries.

For more information, see the game's website:
http://wwww.fractilegames.com/products/astronautics/

Direct link to downloads on itch.io:
https://fractilegames.itch.io/hyper-ultra-astronautics

[rasterzone]

I tried it out on Ubuntu Linux 12.04 with an old GTX 430. Runs good so far. I'm liking the laser and explosion graphics.

If you're looking to improve the asteroid graphics, here's a Blender 3D tutorial to try:




The guy makes really good 3D tutorials. I walked through this a while back myself. It might give you some ideas!

[fractilegames]

Almost forgot to post here, but Hyper Ultra Astronautics has finally gone beta! New version 0.1.0 is available on the game page as usual:

http://www.fractilegames.com/astronautics/

There is a new gameplay trailer too:

[fractilegames]

After embarrassingly long silence, a new beta version 0.1.3 is now available!

Here's what has changed:

• Recreated game icon with better quality.
• Changed the in-game font again because the last one lacked many accented characters.
• Re-show IP addresses listening for remote controllers with F5.
• Fixed text messages at top and bottom of screen sometimes unintentionally fading out.
• Properly reset camera state when exiting paused mode.
• Added command line options for directly starting a match at startup.
• Added menu toggling by ESC (again).
• Use view with slowly rotating camera behind menus.
• Updated to latest SDL game controller database.
• Don't remember entered high-score name in demo mode.
• Added support for event (damage, respawn, etc.) based actions in controller apps.
• Bundled dependencies updated to latest versions (Ogre3D, OpenAL, GLFW, etc).

This time the mobile controller application (Android) has been updated as well:

• Added sound effects (missile lock, respawn beep).
• Added disruption effect when the player is hit by EMP.
• Fine-tuning to background image and damage effect.
• Changed application font.

You can find the game in the usual place: https://www.fractilegames.com/astronautics/

[jbarrios]

Hey FractileGames,


I played your game.  I recorded my game and my thoughts:

[fractilegames]

Hey FractileGames,


I played your game.  I recorded my game and my thoughts:

Thank you! This was really helpful!

Video is a perfect format for feedback like this because it lets me see what you were doing and what you struggled with. There are many things that are way too obvious to me after working on the game for years. I added a couple of things to my to-do list after watching your video.

I need reconsider automatically showing the controller guide when player starts a match for the first time. Currently you need to press F1 to show it, which is only mentioned in tips at the bottom of screen. This should clear up confusion about the keys and also lets player know about the different controller options (including the mobile apps).

I'm glad to hear you liked the game! By the way, there is no online multiplayer, the competitive mode is also local multiplayer only.

[fractilegames]

Hyper Ultra Astronautics is finally out of beta!
Version 1.0.0 is available for Windows and Linux on Itch.io: https://fractilegames.itch.io/hyper-ultra-astronautics

Release announcement can be found on the website: https://www.fractilegames.com/posts/20190918-hyper-ultra-astronautics-1.0.0-released/

The official game page: https://www.fractilegames.com/astronautics/

Thanks again to everyone for the valuable feedback in this thread over the years!