The Harmonic Shooter - Procedural Content Generation

[Varkas]

Small update.

- Touching the tunnel walls with the ship now damages the ship.
- A new bonus has been added to give the ships cannon more power.
- A sound has been added for the player ship being hit by a bullet.
- Collecting a bonus sphere also plays a sound now.
- The "power" stat has been renamed to "shield", but kept the same functionality.

Shoot with control, steer with the cursor (arrow keys). F8 takes a screenshot.

[Varkas]

And one more update:

- Parallax scrolling for the star background
- Fixed an occasional glitch in the tunnel display

New video for this version:
https://youtu.be/vTjyV72_kYU

Shoot with control, steer with the cursor (arrow keys). F8 takes a screenshot.

[Varkas]

Update!

- Added randomly generated "8 bit" style background music
- A kill score has been added in addition to the depth meter
- The shield power is now shown as a bar (with numeric max)
- Sounds and colors got some fine tuning

screenshot.png (68.18 KiB) Viewed 4803 times

Shoot with control, steer with cursor (arrow) keys
m toggles the music
F8 takes a screenshot

[Varkas]

Working on level 2. Tech structures. Will be a while though till there is a real level transition in the game. Also need a sort of boss fight for that.

screenshot.png (169.76 KiB) Viewed 4768 times

[glitchapp]

I see a lot of potential in this game. The concept is really cool and it is very smooth and fluent. What I would add is some depth to the gameplay, something more than just shoot and avoid bullets, you can get ideas from r-type, terra cresta and sol cresta for example and add charging fire, auxiliar ships or anything that add depth and force you to have a strategy to progress.

[Varkas]

Thank you. I'll do some research and collect ideas.

[Varkas]

The new level generator is now included. I couldn't decide on a color scheme, so I used the code alrready used for the tunnel to slowly shift the platform color over time. So, here it is, alpha version 008:

- New level background "space platform" included
- Start screen has a choice to play tunnel or space platform level
- Player bullets now inherit player ship speed
- Bonuses spawn more regularly now

Shoot with control, steer with cursor (arrow) keys
m toggles the music
F8 takes a screenshot

[knorke]

The second level instantly closes the game as soon as I press "2".
console output:

love harmonic_shooter-v008.love
Initializing space platform level background
Initializing tunnel level background
ship time=0.002125970000634
Initializing space platform level background
ship time=0.0016420379997726
Aborted (core dumped)

I agree with glitchapp that more gamplay depth would be good.
For start, have some enemies shot diagonally instead of just horizontal. More interesting and unique enemy movement. Also currently there is no point to ever take the finger of the fire button, which looks a bit silly. Maybe have some "battery" that drains when firing and reloads when idle. Some mechanic to make it a bit more strategic.

The generated graphics are nice and interesting feature. It would be cool if the look of the enemies decided their parameters (health, weapons, movement). Maybe even somehow "evolve" based on the player's playstyle.

[Varkas]

I'll look into the crash. Doesn't happen on my computer, but I guess I do something bad with the memory there. I hope I can track it down.

Some parameters depend on the size of the generated ship graphics. Bigger ships tend to have more hitpoints and move slower. I agree that more movement patterns and different weapons (missiles, mines ..) will be interesting.

I think my code is too random to allow evolution of the ships, but I'll think about this some.

Thanks for testing and the feedback!

[Ulexes]

This is a minimalist masterpiece, and a terrific primer on procedural generation. Thank you for putting it in the world.