Another Lander Clone

[Tabasco]

I started a sort of space melee project, but it's a little bit more ambitious than I wanted for a first game.
Using some resources for that, I just whipped up a simple lander clone.

For some reason on Windows math.random() has some strange behavior.

Controls are arrow keys and R.

Update -- F will now switch to fullscreen.

Latest version:
http://tyranny.ckt.net/land.love

[mike]

Nice demo. Works as expected and the stars were a nice touch. If you want me to nitpick (which I will do no matter how you feel about it) then I have these issues:

• It's not very clear on where you're supposed to land. The green box looked very ...ambiguous the first time I played it. A nice landing pad image would be nice
• Also, why do you sometimes fail to land? Is the velocity too high? There is no clear marker on what is determined as "too much" velocity, just a number.
• I, personally, don't like disappearing off the edge of the screen.
• For the sake of sparing the system from some strain, try to avoid using system.reset() unless you really need to reset everything. Just reset the variables you use.

Don't want to be too bitchy here. It WAS a good game that did everything it set out to do and it looks a lot better than anything I've ever made (evidence). Keep up the good work!

[Tabasco]

Thanks!

I'm always open to constructive criticism.

1. I might work up an animated target circle over the landing pad for clarity.
2. The velocity tolerance is set at |40|. If I broke it down to two lines for vertical and horizontal velocity, I could adjust the text color of the readout (red / green) to indicate acceptable rates.
3. I knew I forgot something!
4. I'm lazy so I used system.reset(), but yeah, there are only a handful of things to reset so it's an easy fix.

5. I need to make an explosion animation for when you crash and maybe add some sounds.

I've been doing proofs of concept in C and openGL for years as a hobby and I write boring business type apps for a living so I mainly did this just to say that I have completed a game and to motivate myself to complete more complex games.
I'll post an update once I get some time to implement these fixes.

Update: I got around to it before I thought I would.
The landing pad animation is pretty cheesy but it gets the job done.

[osgeld]

#5 get sfxr

[farvardin]

I've modified a bit the graphics (see attachment). It's not the best we could imagine, but the stars are less round and the ship is different.

It's a funny game, yet a bit easy after some training.

[Tabasco]

I like the ship and engine particle graphics quite a bit, but I'm not too fond of the new stars. When I made them round I was shooting for more of a halo, but it didn't come through. What I envision is a sort of diamond with an alpha-blended halo around it.

I added some obstacles to increase the difficulty this time.

Still no sounds, but I might get some in there this weekend. Also, my asteroid hit detection could be better, but I was in a hurry.

[mike]

Oh, I like the asteroids! This is turning out to be a fun little game.

[Tabasco]

I really appreciate all the feedback.

The ship's hit model should more accurately reflect the shape now, rather than just being a rectangle, and I've made a simple scoring system based on remaining fuel and how smooth the landing was.
Lastly, there is now sound and music.
I've only included two background tunes, which can be cycled with the M key. This can also turn the music completely off.
I did a google search for free sounds and found some good liberally licensed audio.
http://www.pacdv.com/sounds/index.html
http://freesoundfiles.tintagel.net/Audio/

Since the file is getting larger, I've uploaded it here:
http://tyranny.ckt.net/land.love and I'll keep this copy up to date.

I seem to recall reading that you guys intend to rewrite the audio module. I had trouble getting thruster sounds to work the way I wanted so I just didn't include them.
It would be nice to be able to stop a specific sound instead of having to stop the entire sound system, as well as check to see if a specific sound is still playing. It would also be nice to be able to do something like
love.audio.play(mysound, 20, 200, x), where the prototype is play(sound/music, start milliseconds, end milliseconds, repeat).

I also ran into a problem with love.filesystem on ubuntu 8.04. I can't create the ~/.love directory from within love, and if I create it myself and then try to make a new file, I get a segmentation fault.
If I try newFile without a file mode, I just get a file not found error.

Please let me know if I'm just doing something wrong.
Otherwise, if I can get some time, I'd be glad to work through some of the audio / filesystem issues and submit a patch, but we should all probably be on the same page first.

Thanks!

[zeddy]

This is a fun game
My best score was 569:

[Tabasco]

Thanks, that's a good score.

I've managed ~740 before, but with the meteors it ends up being more about luck than skill. Once I finish the project I'm working on now I might revisit it and add some options to adjust difficulty, save scores, and add a proper rotation reset to the ship object.