Oh snap, aliens!

[nevon]

This is a game I started working on two days ago. It's still very much alpha, but the base game elements are in and I suppose you could call it playable. There are plenty of bugs, which I was hoping you could maybe help me figure out why they occur.

Unlike other space shooters, this one has a limited ammo supply, which is refilled by picking up ammo crates left behind after you kill an enemy. Every enemy has different amounts of health (the health bars are not meant to be there, I just haven't gotten around to hiding it yet), so you actually kind of need to think about conserving ammo - though the amount of ammo you get hasn't really been balanced out yet. Furthermore, you don't just shoot straight ahead like in most space shooters. Here you aim using your mouse. If you think it's a good idea, I might add a bit more difficulty to aiming, kinda like they do in a lot of sniper type games.

The screenshots look a little funky, but hopefully they give you an idea of what to expect.




The game is meant to be run with Löve 0.6.2, and it can be downloaded from Github.
Unzip that and run: love Nevon*
Or you could unzip it, go into the folder created, make a zip out of the contents and rename that ohsnap.love, but that's kind of redundant.

If you have any suggestions of things to add (that aren't already on my to do list), things that should be changed, ways to increase performance, or other suggestions, please let me know.

TODO:

• Add proper stage and wave system
• Fix up the game over screen FIXED, kinda
• Add more enemies
• Add more varied enemy movements
• Add enemy attack patterns
• Fix the damn collision system FIXED
• Add powerups
• Add asteroids FIXED, kinda
• Add fancy particle effects to projectiles and ship thrusters FIXED

My code is available under the GPL3. All of the artwork is also available under various free licenses, although I haven't gotten around to compiling a list of exactly what license applies for what graphic. Most of them are either GPL, LGPL or CC. The music is available under CC-BY.

[kalle2990]

I couldn't run the code for several reasons

• Wrong packaged
• Error in code

[nevon]

I couldn't run the code for several reasons

• Wrong packaged
• Error in code

You're right. I thought github would put the stuff directly in the zip, rather than in its own folder. You'll have to unzip the folder and run: love foldername

I also fixed that error you got. I forgot to add a comma in my last push.

[kalle2990]

Okay, it works for me now
I like the game, that the aliens grows bigger the closer they are and such. One thing could be that you can't hold mouse to fire, maybe in an upcoming version?

[nevon]

One thing could be that you can't hold mouse to fire, maybe in an upcoming version?

I could fix that very easily, but I'm not sure I want to. The point is to conserve ammo. If you use more than two shots per enemy (at least for the current enemy type), you'll end up with none. Auto fire doesn't really fit for that.

But sure, if it's something that people want, I could very easily add it.

[bartbes]

Github errors for me (when packaging), looks like I'm going to have to clone the repo

EDIT: Cloned it, and now I can say: Great job! (not my kind of game though)

[nevon]

Github errors for me (when packaging), looks like I'm going to have to clone the repo

That's odd... Works just fine for me. Anyway, once I get a (really) playable version done, I'll add some static downloads.

If anyone else has any problems with downloading from Github, let me know and I'll throw up a snapshot of the current dev version on my webhost or something.

[nevon]

Fixed some bugs dealing with explosions and their coordinates, along with some other small things. The ship now cannot shoot backwards, and I have now added a ranking system.

I'm getting kind of concerned with performance. It runs at around 60fps currently, but the longer you progress (and consequently, the more enemies are spawned), the worse the performance. I still have a lot of stuff I want to add, so I really need to start thinking about making the game more efficient. If anyone has any pointers on how to do things like collision detection, or anything else for that matter, more efficiently, please let me know.

[bartbes]

Well, it sounds like an enemy uses a lot of resources (and maybe they aren't released properly?), try sharing resources.

[nevon]

This is... Odd. Yesterday I ran the game on my desktop, which has an Intel Core 2 Duo ~1.8gHz processor and an ATi HD4850 graphics card, and the game ran like crap after a while. Now I ran it on my laptop, which has a similar processor but a piss poor integrated intel graphics chip, and the game ran perfectly regardless of how long I was playing it. This just confirms my suspicions that the ATi Linux drivers are horribly bad.

Well, it sounds like an enemy uses a lot of resources (and maybe they aren't released properly?), try sharing resources.

What do you mean by "sharing resources, more specifically? Do you mean things like using the same image for all the enemies, rather than creating a whole new "instance" of the image for each enemy? If so, I'm already doing that.

Last night I also realized that I was doing a buttload of unneccessary calculations (I had put some collision detection, that had nothing to do with the player's shots, in a loop of every shot on the screen), so I fixed that.

I've also been toying with the idea of putting in a health meter for earth, that decreases with every enemy that gets past you. After all, you are defending earth, and it would make the game more challenging. What do you think?