Asteroids game with selectable ships

[Mutos]

Hi xNick1,


Thanks for your appreciation ^-^ It's just a re-creation of the classical Asteroids... And, I died out-of-screen a few times. There is a zone where asteroids keep living.

Read previous posts for the features I plan to add, basically camera follows ship, ship can mine asteroids or fire at them, different ships have different strengths, and between levels, player can change or upgrade ship. More details on the other posts ^-^

[xNick1]

Great, I'm looking forward to play it.
And nice selection menu, I like the 3d effect on ships.

[Mutos]

Hi xNick1,


The 3D effect is just sprites rendered in DoGA L3 ^-^ and all ship graphics are extracted from the Stars of Call game made as a NAEV TC, which is downloadable on the Hoshikaze 2250 site.

I've already made a number of protos under many engines, my main issue being having a seamless environment for dev on both my Linux personal machine at home and my W7 office laptop while commuting. That's why I progress so slowly and why I need a scripting language, because the dev env must be portable on Windows, no installer and no admin rights possible...

As of today, I've nearly completed the refactoring, but with the exact same features as last version, only the guts change. I'll upload it this week-end and begin to add the extra features next week...

[Mutos]

Hi all,


For now I've got internet connection issues, so I can't upload anything, just writing this text takes quite a time on the backup 3G connection my provider gently gave me...

My 015 release has - at last - crude laser and mining features. I mean, you can fire laser pulses that destroy asteroids, and you can mine asteroids when you're near enough. Another nice feature is, that the player can only exit the game in two ways : either failure, hit by an asteroid, or success, exit the screen alive...

I'll upload it as soon as I get my regular internet back online.

In next releases, I intend to add a nice effect for mining, as for now it's only marked by the asteroid turning blue, and a global scoring using time, ore mined and asteroids hits.

The scoring concept is to base scoring on the mined ore, add a bonus for survival time and subtract asteroids destroyed by laser hits, as it's wasted resource ^-^ So the player has to dodge incoming asteroids while keeping close enough to large ones to mine as much ore as possible and learn to fire the laser only as a last-ditch measure !

Once this will be released, I'll get to the hard part : giving each ship a unique capabilities profile, with forwards and backwards acceleration, shield endurance and reload speed, laser damage, mining radius and hold capacity. This way, game will be more diverse as the player will have the opportunity to fly very different ships...

Another further step could be, to have the player get a startup sum to buy a ship and some enhancements, then launch into the mining field and, between mining run, unlock further ships and enhancements. But that's not for now ^-^

[Mutos]

Hi all,


A few good news, but I still haven't got internet back, so I just can't upload the .love file, it keeps failing... Once I'll have my line repaired, I'll upload it so you can see the progress ^-^

The game is progressing well. It now has a score per run, you end a run by either being hit by an asteroid or flying outside the screen, if run is successful, you accumulate score. I've made various improvements here and there.

Now I'm adding stats to the ships. Acceleration, deceleration and turn rate, mining range and cargo hold capacity, shield and laser ratings. The goal is to make each ship specific and to give the player a true, meaningful choice.

Then I may address two other issues with game replayability : having the game keep track of the best score to date, and allowing the player to progressively unlock ships, based on their scoring. Managing failure during a run will also need a gameplay decision : will I implement permadeath or bailout-and-back-to-smallest-ship ? What do you think about that ?

[Mutos]

That's it, at last my internet connection is back on line ! So I've uploaded r022, with a few ship stats : acceleration, deceleration and turn rate are now actually implemented, the other stats are already displayed in the GUI, but not functional. So what do you think of the way the game evolves ?

As for the code, I've remarked, that I tend to do more than I should in the main game object's update() function, which then tends to grow out of control. Before implementing other things, maybe I should refactor that by redistributing some code in the game objects and calling that code from the game update().

Also, you may remark, that there are now only 5 ships in the game. I made example ships to be able to calibrate stats correctly for ease of play. So as of now, the game is quite unbalanced, smaller ships being also better at dodging asteroids. Introducing shield and laser will balance that as larger ships will be able to sustain more beating and destroy asteroids more easily. Then, adding mining range and cargo hold will complete the balance job. After that, with all stats in place and calibrated, I'll reinject all the ships, each with stats according to its personality.