Spacegeddon - multiplayer space shooter

[xsw]

Screen Shot 2017-09-03 at 23.01.54.png (743.64 KiB) Viewed 5354 times

Hi,

In the beginning of the year I stumbled upon this framework, and fell in löve :-). I've been working some months now, on and off, on a multiplayer space shooter. I call it Spacegeddon.

The networking code is implemented, but for now no server is up, but you can play locally against bots. Try to beat them :-).

Choose a ship, pickup weapons, missiles, ammo, shields, and shoot down as many ships as you can.

First to 10 kills is the winner. Currently there are 3 different levels.

Controls:

* Move the ship with WASD.
* Aim and shoot with the mouse. left button primary weapon, right button fire missile.
* Or aim with right/left keys and fire primary/missile with up/down.
* Switch weapon with mouse wheel or with 'f' / 'q'
* Switch missile with mouse wheel + ctrl or with 'e'/'r'
* CMD[WIN] + Enter - Enter full screen
* F2 toggle sound on/off
* F1 show score
* Space - toggle camera lock. (without camera lock, drag mouse to screen end to scroll the world)
* +/- Zoom in/out
* Esc - quit

Plans ahead:

* More game modes: Team death match, base attack etc.
* More levels
* I'll explore whether to make all ships unique, with unique weapons and special abilities.

Any feedback is welcome.

[Germanunkol]

Very cool, the game mechanics are solid, movement feels very nice! Well done.

I really look forward to seeing this as a multiplayer game.

• Movement was a little weird at first - I expected W to move "forward" instead of "up", but you get used to it quickly. The reason I find it a little confusing was that the engine exhaust is always coming out of the back of the ship, no matter which way you're moving.
  With the current movement (WASD + Mouse for aiming) I think you should engines in all directions and make them "light up" when you're moving in a certain direction (For example: when moving up the engine which is facing down will light up, no matter which way the ship is moving). You could also experiment with different engine strengths (the backward-facing engine is the strongest, the others are less strong) which would could add some really interesting movement to the game (but it might also be too difficult for an action game - I'd still love to try it, though )
• Do the asteroids do anything besides looking nice? Their movement is cool, but if they don't do anything I'd remove their health bars. That way they are easier to distinguish from the enemy ships.
• You really need to make the border of the map visible somehow.
• Swapping of the missiles (using CTRL+Mouse wheel) feels sluggish.
• I find it hard to tell what objects I pick up. First, I would make them entirely invisible when picking them up from the map (or replace them with some other image). Right now it's hard to tell in the heat of battle what I can pick up and what's already been picked up. Maybe put a small glowing ring as the "spawn point" instead? Secondly, whatever I picked up could blink on my User-Interface.
• Instead of a "next weapon" and "previous weapon", I would use keys for specific weapons, like most shooters do (1 is primary, 2 is secondary ...). Otherwise it's very hard to quickly switch to a specific weapon.
• The range of the weapons feels a little too short...
• The standard missile often explodes right in front of me, so I kill myself (maybe because I fire too many rockets too quickly?).

Cool game, looking forward to seeing more!

[xsw]

Thank you for your extensive feedback Germanunkol! I'm glad you liked the game :-)

* Movement - In the beginning I only had keyboard controls, with 'W' going forward etc. But when the ship was facing down, it was often confusing with turning / strafing. With mouse aim I think it's more natural with going in the screen direction. Interesting idea with engines in all direction, it does restrict the design of ships a bit though - then maybe it should just be a turning turret on top? I'll think about this.

* Asteroids - they blow up . But I agree, I will remove the health bars. Or maybe just show them briefly when the asteroids take damage, and then hide it again.

* borders of map - I agree.

* Swapping missiles with ctrl+mouse wheel. I agree, personally I use the 'e' key. Maybe I should remove mousewheel swapping for missiles completely...

* Pickups/spawn points - good points!

* Specific weapon keys - I will add this, on number keys. Eventually I will make keys configurable.

* Missiles - only the small missile can be fired multiple times. The other missiles are triggered on a second click. So you can trigger them when they are close to the target, to hit them with the explosion even if the missile would miss. It takes some getting used to, but when you get the hang of missiles they can be very good.