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[KPas]

Rogue-like top-down shooter with pixel-art, physics and hard survival.
Spiritual successor to Teleglitch.




Gameplay trailer

Store page on Steam

Twitter

Features

• top down pixel-art
• dynamic field of view
• 10 levels, handmade regions, procedurally combined
• crafting weapons, devices and usables - all makeshifts
• inertia + collision, based on pixel shapes
• sound with striking Doppler shift
• hard + permadeath+ fair

Regarding pixel-art: there's a graphic artist working behind the scenes, WebGeist. He's a pencil warrior on DeviantArt.

Glad to be here. See you!

[KPas]

This gives you a first fullscreen impression. The field of view is switched off after a while.

[KPas]

The pixel shape of sprites is fundamental to some features.
This is about scanning the shape, using the example of the player ship.


Step 1: pre-calculated data

player ship	image is subdivided into binary tree
border quads are identified and linked as chain	assigning normals

Step 2: some possible features (will be shown)

• detecting collision between ships/asteroids and seperating them including direction and spin
• detecting bullet impacts and assigning direction to splinters
• shaping the field of view along the borders of asteroids
• shaping light along the borders of asteroids

[KPas]

The player moves in a huge asteroid field. The parallax background creates this atmosphere mainly.
The small asteroids can be pushed. The field of view ignores the small ones.

[KPas]

The player ship now looks like this ...

Zoom

In motion

[joey4track]

Awesome, kinda giving me a Solar Jetman vibe

[KPas]

Awesome, kinda giving me a Solar Jetman vibe

Thanks! Nice to hear that it spread vibes.


The shooting will look like this. The example shows a strong weapon, or three of them.

[TinyAngryCrab]

Looks really cool! You need to have a weapon made from a huge barrel of pork that you ate and a bunch of nails though or it isn't the true teleglitch dream..

[joey4track]

Are you gonna add a little chromatic aberration? Like maybe for when your ship gets all jacked up and junk.

[KPas]

Looks really cool! You need to have a weapon made from a huge barrel of pork that you ate and a bunch of nails though or it isn't the true teleglitch dream..

Pork in space. Isn't that from the Muppet Show?
But you are right. I would hate to give up the cangun. Perhaps there is some kind of glue (resin?) in those cans. It wouldn't heal you but repair your ship.
Thanks for the hint!

Are you gonna add a little chromatic aberration? Like maybe for when your ship gets all jacked up and junk.

Maybe. This would be part of the finishing touch.
But to be honest I'm not quite sure how close to the original I should stick in some points.

[joey4track]

Cryptark has some really awesome chromatic aberration too, if you haven't tried that game it's pretty amazing.

[KPas]

Some first enemies ...

The Termite The Welder

These two vessels look significantly different than the player ship. Both were part of the so-called drones swarm against which humans have been at war.
But more of that later.

[KPas]

Here's a first look at a boss: the Volcano.
He shoots 3 granades at once.
Perhaps the player must face two or three of them. In later levels they may occur regulary.

[KPas]

About level generation.

I go the teleglitch-way: hand-built modules are combined together by chance.

Each module is rectangular and has 1-4 defined connection sides. They can be turned (90° steps).
When a level is being assembled, the sequence of modules is always the same, so some modules show up early and others late. After a while the player can recognize the places. Usually he does not know, which comes next, but he gets used to the earlier modules.

Here is some debug output for a simple test level. 5 modules are placed in this order: F, B, E, C, D. The fences "#" stand for blocking parts or sides.




This is the resulting level in overview.
All modules are placeholders of course. You see some additional asteroids and enemies too.

[KPas]

A fleet of automated freighters was sent.
Here's an example:



In hyperspace, a disturbance occurred. The freighters landed somehow in an asteroid field and merged with the stones.
Again an example:



According to this example I build more modules for the levels.

[KPas]

About bounds of levels.

Each level consists of asteroids and parts of freighters. There are no walls to prevent the player from leaving the level. So I took a certain phenomenon from teleglitch, the void, and gave it the form of a surrounding field. And this surrounding void is nothing but the hyperspace, which appears in our space after the accident.

The following image shows a debug overview of a small testlevel.



Here you see an asteroid, which is swallowed by the void ...

[KPas]

About the structure of the game.

The player gets into the area where the incident happened. There are stable islands of normal space between which you can jump to get out of the area. Each island is a level, surrounded by the void. Each level is as follows:

The player's carrier reaches the next island. The player ship leaves the carrier. The carrier switches off to avoid detection.

The player has to fly to three nav points in order to determine the position. Only then the jump to the next island is possible.



The nav points and the carrier can be seen on the map.



Once all the nav points have been visited, the player can return to the carrier. The carrier starts up, and the player can land. Then the carrier jumps to the next island/level.

[Bombini]

Very interesting!

[KPas]

Very interesting!

First of all, Thanks for your interest!

And now: the inventory.

As in Teleglitch the inventory is listed as plain text.
The operation is the same:
- the mouse wheel moves the cursor up and down
- by holding E, the selected item is moved up and down instead
- Q drops the item
- SPACE picks up all items in a certain range
- LMB uses the selected item (fires a weapon, consumes an item etc.)
- C turns on/off the crafting mode



Unlike Teleglitch the objects are not fixed but are drifting around like all the asteroids. They even can be pushed into the void.



The crafting mode works as in Teleglitch: all craftable items are listed to the right, and you choose one by mouse wheel and LMB. Each recipe consumes some ingredients from the inventory, which are marked with lines and boxes.

[filbs111]

This looks good. I like rotate and thrust spaceship stuff. This reminds me a little of Transplant for the Amiga.

For the field of view effect, it seems like you're currently dynamically raycasting, leading to it flickering. A better solution IMO is to render in perspective, prisms extruded upwards (eg a cylindrical pillar for a circular object). To reproduce your effect (without flicker), the height of the base of the pillar should be inversely proportional to the distance from the player.
You can then improve this by fading the shading on the pillar from transparent (at the bottom) to dark.
Another improvement would be to taper the pillar, simulating the effect of the player having "eyes" for a circle of some radius (eg cameras across the surface of the ship).