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[herrerik]

Hi!
Im making a top-down space shooter. The meta-game is travelling on a map like Faster than light or Slay the spire (visit nodes with fight, shops, events etc).

When reaching a fight it goes into realtime, topdown combat. However this isnt very fun at the moment
You accelerate, use sideways thrusters and rotate (aim) towards mouse cursor.
You (and the simple AI i have implemented) end up side-strafing each other (circling a point in between you), trading shots, until one dies.

Any examples of fun topdown space shooting? Im not sure where to go. See screenie below.
Thanks!

[michaelplzno]

You should look at typical SHMUPS that are well recieved and go from there. My favorite SHMUP is "Tumiki Fighters"

http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/tf_e.html

Those systems are constrained deliberately to make the emphasis on dodging bullets, whereas with a top down space sim there is likely an attempt to make the physics more realistic. Not sure how to fuse those two design ideas, but SHMUPS are made totally for the fun of it at the expense of realism.

[herrerik]

Cool! (and thanks) Yeah maybe one way to improve the fun is to add lots of enemies instead of having more realistic 1vs1 "dogfights". Then I can have more variety in mechanics such as certain weapons or abilites work better for area damage etc.

I now have a fairly realistic way of installing into weapon slots, such as eve online has. But this means larger ships just have more firepower as more guns are added.

A system of abilities might be more fun, where I can trigger spectacular weapons and have cooldowns etc. More diablo-esque than a classic spaceshooter like freelancer.

Any thoughts on this?

[michaelplzno]

Cooldowns was never something I enjoyed about Diablo, more of a necessary evil. In the original Diablo you could cast a spell as many times as you had the mana for, and if you chugged potions you could cast spells indefinitely. The problem with this design is that it allowed for players who wanted to game the system to create super OP characters. But I really enjoy doing that personally. The reason they switched the paired down the skill system is that they didn't want people to create off the rails characters b/c the people who were gonna do all kinds of optimizations would be essentially playing a different game than the more vanilla players.

Another reason your Diablo comparison breaks down is that 1 on 1 dog fights are very different than the "take out the trash" mob battles of Diablo. My suggestion was to make it a bit more 1 v mob setup to make it more fun, but the realistic asteroid controls never really grabbed me where you have to manage your thrust and so on and then rotate and adjust, its too unintuitive despite being perhaps a more realistic vision of what space combat would be.

In terms of custom weapon slots there was a game that started that trend, Captain Forever:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Forever which really lets you rebuild your ship based on weapons you pick up. Might want to try it.

[Ramos]

Add destroyable parts, if a projectile hits wings and destroy a weapon you lose the capability to shoot that weapon, destructible things always bring + in fun and polish