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[Squirrelsquid]

Wow, my first topic!
hope that this doesn't count as advertising.

anyway, most of the people around here, should know,that I'm currently  developing a  shoot em up.
though I'm having problems, that won't allow me to add aditional levels to the current Multimedia Fusion code, since the level is too big to copy. so I have to find a skilled coder and recode it from scratch.
currently it run's in a 320x240 resolution. A friend of mine mentioned that it could look great in Highres.
and as the idea was growing on me, I decided to do a mockup and start the ball rolling.

In this topic I'll try to give insights on what happens by increasing the resolution and altering the gameplay
from oldschool to next gen. What changes will be made? Will I find a programmer to build one of the craziest Shoot em ups ever?or will my feet be bitten off by carrots?

to start things off:

]
screenshot of the current version:

and a mockup how it should be. ( still missing bullets)

[ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)]

The graphics style reminds me of a 16-bit version of Guardian Legend, I like it. You wouldn't be interested in collaborating on a game, would you?

[Tr00jg]

I see a sexual theme in the game... 

Anyway, I like the high res version more. Your art is good! I like it.

[Derek]

Wow, do you get to control that big thing at the bottom center?

Great work!  It's been a pleasure to see you work toward this point.

[handCraftedRadio]

The enemies look awesome, very cool looking creatures. Great job, I can't wait for something playable.

[Akhel]

Holy crap. That looks really really awesome, you are very talented

[Michaël Samyn]

Looks like you made an excellent choice.
Love the detail!
Good luck with the coding!

[Squirrelsquid]

Wow, do you get to control that big thing at the bottom center?

Great work!  It's been a pleasure to see you work toward this point.

thank you for the feedback guys!

The big thing is the Leviathan Dropship. and plays a vital role in the new gameplay mechanics,
that the highres version will introduce.
(the player ships are the 1p cerberus (left) and the 2p hydra (right).)

you can't control the Leviathan directly, but you can give it simple orders; that being:
   - Free Roam
   - Attack largest/most dangerous target
   - support (the initiator of the order)

If you fly close to the side of the ship the corresponding hatch will automaticly open,
allowing the Dropship to grab a hold of your ship and pulling you inside the ship.

inside, you are behind thick armor and you can do variouse things,
like refilling your Hypermode energy, repair your ship, select a different weapon,
or let the Leviathan carry out more precise operation, such as targeting enemies by hand.

you are always free to leave the Dropship, and go into heavy dog-fights...
but you can always take a shelter inside the Leviathan, and think about the best tactics for the situation.

The Leviathan has a very large hypermode bar ( a player ship has 10000 units, the BIG ONE has 100000 )
that gets drained by enemy fire,special commands and special actions like repairing your ship or curing an omnivore
infested part of your ship.
( yes it is possible to get infected by the Omnivore organism.)

giving commands while in flight is easily done with 2 buttons.
one for Attack largest target - the other is for support.
free roam is activated  if you press the mode again, that is currently active.

when you'r inside the ship some parts of the corresponding players HUD will change to
easy recognizable icons that can be easily navigated via simple Icon-menus.

well that's all the gamedesign rants for now, hope you liked the read.


EDIT1:oh and since the "when" was asked often,here's a taste of the old and classic gameplay. http://www.megaupload.com/de/?d=MAOKL7IF
keep in mind that the menu is pretty much bolted on... (and you can select illegal setups. a new select menu is on the way...
as well as the boss ( finaly). that's all i will do for the old version.

EDIT2:oh, and I will probably tailor the controls on an Xbox360 controller.

[Squirrelsquid]

time for another update

the party unites!

in the last couple of days I expanded my teammates from me ( art and story)
and a very talented composer and photoshop-artist.
to a 4 man core team.,

a friend of mine )who is an experienced web-programmer will do the
technical side of the website as well the built in online-highscore statistics.

and best of all:
the best friend of my initial team-mate actualy is a very talented programmer,
and is eager to do something big with potential.

so we are set and ready to advance this game into playable state, early next year!

 

[threesided]

That's really amazing news man! I've been watching your work for a solid year or more now, been seeing all this shmup stuff floating around various sites, and I must say it's very exciting to see it come to fruition for you! I hope to one day play your beautiful game, and will prematurely offer up my (albeit lacking) skills (at shmups) to beta test. Of course I realize this to be highly premature, and you may not need such a thing. But yes. Let's see this puppy grow!

[Squirrelsquid]

thank you!!  now you'll see some creatures you haven't seen

on to some more details, on how I designed the omnivore:

The Alien Menace evolves

at first, the omnivore, where not even called omnivore, but carnivore.
back then I was developing the graphics and gamedesign for a swedish
mobile phone company. it only featured 4 bosses and a hand full of enemies.
but the meaty metal creatures where already there... although most featured
real human eyes, like this one:



you'll probably right away notice differences with the X-static bellow:



the new enemys all got more metal shades as well as the Eye of sauron thing.
there's not a single one without it, even the smallest has it, to get an even look for
the alien race. at a certain point during the graphic production, I expanded the
material-collection with a bone-material, that you can see in the mockup.

I'll introduce more materials to the creatures if there is new materia they can fuse
themself with. if there are asteroids, they will fuse with asteroids and fly towards
you,if they infect a plant, the plant will mutate and shoot at you.

the omnivore are driven soley by the desire to fuse, reproduce and destruction.
They have a collective mind, but only small creatures rely on that heavily, making
them rather predictable. They can shift dimensions and actualy attack with small
dimensional worm-holes. It is uncertain from wich dimension the Omnivore
originated.

it is clear however, that they invaded our world through a dimension
classified as "Lazarus Dimension", where they aquired lots of DNA and abilities
from a highly technical race known as the "insert fancy name here".

Eventualy the omnivore devoured all materia in this universe, so they searched
out  for new dimension to feed from.

At some point the Colonization ship Fenrir reached planet Cronos, and received
the construction-plans for space-folding technology via EXO-link. -

EXO-link was an early spacefolding technology, that got discovered by the famous
physics Scientist and engineer "Dr. Pavel Pipovich", who is also on board the
Leviathan.
He will analyze emies along the way, and will create new equipment
and tools while in flight.

The mentioned space-folding technology was a horrible failure since the scientist
crew did not calculate the variouse coordinates correctly, opening a worm-hole
from our world to the Lazarus Dimension.

you guys can imagine what happens next I guess.


now, the new version demands even bigger creatures ( I'll die when there's the
milestone with the first boss) so the small ones become tiny, and the otherwise big
enemies become medium enemies, and the bosses will be some of the biggest
pixel-creatures known to man, so I thought it would be wise to draw ideas for
enemies in my "survival book" first, along with a short written description.
only if I like the selout and the shapes, I will scan it in, and do a quick coloring in
photoshop, that looks like this one:



the "restless soul" is very hard to destroy, since it automaticly goes into standby
mode when it low on health, recharging itself once shut down. if the player doesn't
destroy it, it will reactivate with full health, and will start attacking again.
you can use this to your advamtage too though, since you always rais your chain
and get the score of the enemy, when it goes into standby.

that's all rants for now, hope you had an interesting read.


(new mockup with infected cerberus, using a dimensional shield)

[Zaphos]

Mm ... looks like arched feet, feminine legs leading up to OH    :D

that's all rants for now, hope you had an interesting read.

Yep -- great fun to see your process on this


This looks like it's going to be completely crazy to play -- what an overwhelming amount of enemies!  And the meshing of shooter with sort-of-RTS elements that seems to be going on looks like it could be really great -- it seems like the player may have to think strategically about the combination of enemies, much more so than the typical shmup ... exciting stuff!

[Squirrelsquid]

Thank you for the feedback. Yes the added room gives loads of space to do some crazy things!

Where's my 360 Pad !? or how's thing move?

I mentioned above, that I will tailor the controls to the Xbox 360 controller.
I think  it is the best classic controller and is world wide aviable, too.
and because of the 4 shoulder buttons  I can easily put less vital
controls on these. also, it would make it easier to translate this game to the Xbox 360 as an live arcade title at some point, if this option opens up.

here's the current button layout, though that might change in the future:


you cotroll your ship via D-Pad, and shoot with the A button. The games tradmark Hyper-mode is activated on B.
with it you are invulnerable and more powerfull than ever.

The Gravtron Overdrive (y) is something I won't talk about much since it's
still a bit secret... but it will be very powerfull, I can asure you that.

with the shoulderbuttons (lb and rb)  you will be able to give commands to the dropship like I mentioned above. the left and right triggers on the other
hand, will let your ship make a dashing boost into the left or right direction, allowing you to quickly change your position on the Battlefield.

Now, the original version also had a smart-bomb. that will not be present anymore in the new version, because clearing the huge screen with one smartbomb would not translate very well in my opinion. And also, you still have the huge ass dropship, so there's no real need for that.

The original also had 2 special attacks that get activated when a small bar is full. if you pressed the fire-button once the bar was full, you would activate a Charge Lance. this was an attack with limited range, but it was very powerfull. Then there's the Charge Burst that's activated when the bar is full and  the Hyper-mode butten is pressed. An attack even more powerfull than the charge lance, it would swoop the screen in a giant wave damaging anything that it collides with.

I will include this attack in the new HZ as well, though you'll be able to choose between 3 variants of the Charge Lance and Charge burst, at the beginning of the game.

[Chris Whitman]

Not that those controls look complex, but for some reason the labelled picture of the controller reminded me of this:

[Melly]

Games where figuring out how to actually play is a challenge into itself are probably only good if that was the point to begin with (can't be sure that's ever been made, though it certainly seem the case with hardcore roguelike devs). Otherwise I hate them.

And this pixel art looks pretty sweet, though I'd like to see some crazier ideas for aliens that don't look like organic spaceships simply.

[Squirrelsquid]

@ I Like Cake:
now that's a complex control-setup... I would never do something that complex for 2 reasons.
One, I wouldn't quite like the fact, that I'd alaways had to think about what one button does.
And second: it's simply not needed at all. It's not a 3D game,and giving the player too many buttons, leaving them with riddled faces wouldn't help...

Melly:
3 stages are in space, so you'll see lots of "spaceships". But eventually you'll come to areas where theres a different gravity and there you'll see creatures that have evolved to be effective there, leading to legs, arms, and other means of land-movement.

[Zaphos]

@ I Like Cake:
now that's a complex control-setup... I would never do something that complex for 2 reasons.
One, I wouldn't quite like the fact, that I'd alaways had to think about what one button does.
And second: it's simply not needed at all. It's not a 3D game,and giving the player too many buttons, leaving them with riddled faces wouldn't help...

Not sure how clear this is just from Mr. Cake's post so: that complex control setup is a joke -- it's a Penny Arcade comic making fun of the 'control scheme loading screen' you get in some games.

I do agree with the comic's gist -- showing control schemes in game like that just intimidates the player, and is no substitute for gradually teaching the player through gameplay.  But in a thread like this I think a controller diagram is perfectly okay ...

Anyway, the controls look fine to me, although it's hard to really say much without trying them out -- controls definitely seems like something you should tweak as you start getting playable builds, and not worry about too terribly much before then.

[Squirrelsquid]

Not sure how clear this is just from Mr. Cake's post so: that complex control setup is a joke -- it's a Penny Arcade comic making fun of the 'control scheme loading screen' you get in some games.

aaah, I didn't know that... it is kinda funny

I do agree with the comic's gist -- showing control schemes in game like that just intimidates the player, and is no substitute for gradually teaching the player through gameplay.  But in a thread like this I think a controller diagram is perfectly okay ...

yes, this isn't meant to be an ingame artwork anyway. it's just there to organize my ideas.
I'm not sure if there will be an aditional short training level, or if you'll get instructions
at the beginning of the first level, but you will be taught the things you can do in some way or the other.

Anyway, the controls look fine to me, although it's hard to really say much without trying them out -- controls definitely seems like something you should tweak as you start getting playable builds, and not worry about too terribly much before then.

so true. But still some of the buttons and controls can be easily taken from the old MMF version. This setup is just the way, I think it would work well.

[Squirrelsquid]

my, it has been some time since the last article.
albeit short, I present you:

where the heck is my ship!?

looking at the current mockup, my team and me got the feeling that the current shipsprite might be to small, for it to actualy work well, because a smaller ship is more easily lost in the heat of battle than a chunky sprite.

so, i redid the current cerberus sprite in a slightly larger scale:


the new one is the ship right next to the old cerberus (bottom left)
the actual hitbox will stay the same 2x2 pixels, but this bigger scale makes it a lot easier to see.
it also allows more elaborated animations.
The dropship is out of scale now, but since I have a new concept design for that in the works anyway, it's realy ok for now.

the new ship will actualy be composed of individual, animated parts, ingame...
why? that will be a mystery till a later article 

[Michaël Samyn]

  Insane! Looks great.