Starfire Lords: Genesis
Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2014 7:13 am
Starfire Lords: Genesis
Screenshots
Gameplay
SL:G is a top-down 2d space shooter with semi-cooperative play. Each level has a small handful of objectives, a lot of enemies to kill, and one double-agent on the players' team. This spy could be one of your friends, or it could be an AI, and his job is to sabotage the player's goal without getting killed.
Development History
I've been working on this game for the last couple of years, off and on. Last year I brought another dev named Wes Paugh on to help with AI and some other stuff. Resolved to finally finish the damn thing, he and I are making a big push to get a playable game to a shippable state!
The game is written in Löve 0.9.1 , which we've been upgrading from 0.8.0 to make it easier to port to Android (Ouya!). So in the past week, I've been able to get the game from scratch to a solid first level. The Spy idea is a recent pivot for the GDD; previously, the game featured either a co-op mode against waves of enemies and a deathmatch mode that was a free-for-all. Unfortunately, both of these modes had some design problems that would have required a lot of new art to get around, but the "Spy" idea provides a promising alternative solution.
Next Steps
We're doing weekly user testing with players. So far it's just been our friends, but we're interested in distributing to bored webtrollers in the coming weeks and will be taking the game to the Too Many Games con in Philadelphia next week to find more interested testers. Please PM me or leave a response here if you're interested!
Our first goal is to make sure the semi-coop actually works and is fun. Part of that is going to mean fleshing out the AI. We've got a basic state machine with 'wandering' behaviour, which can now be extended into seek/pursue/flee/retreat/etc. We've got a basic 'kill all' objective, and plan to add timers, boss ships, and possibly convoys to destroy or motherships to protect as additional mission objectives.
It's also going to be important to continue making the game as pretty as possible. We've got parallaxing working, and can add planets and other spacey stuff into our backgrounds fairly easily, and made some performance improvements that will allow us to add more shinies and pretties.
For anyone interested in testing, please join our mailing list! http://eepurl.com/XyBr5
Screenshots
Gameplay
SL:G is a top-down 2d space shooter with semi-cooperative play. Each level has a small handful of objectives, a lot of enemies to kill, and one double-agent on the players' team. This spy could be one of your friends, or it could be an AI, and his job is to sabotage the player's goal without getting killed.
Development History
I've been working on this game for the last couple of years, off and on. Last year I brought another dev named Wes Paugh on to help with AI and some other stuff. Resolved to finally finish the damn thing, he and I are making a big push to get a playable game to a shippable state!
The game is written in Löve 0.9.1 , which we've been upgrading from 0.8.0 to make it easier to port to Android (Ouya!). So in the past week, I've been able to get the game from scratch to a solid first level. The Spy idea is a recent pivot for the GDD; previously, the game featured either a co-op mode against waves of enemies and a deathmatch mode that was a free-for-all. Unfortunately, both of these modes had some design problems that would have required a lot of new art to get around, but the "Spy" idea provides a promising alternative solution.
Next Steps
We're doing weekly user testing with players. So far it's just been our friends, but we're interested in distributing to bored webtrollers in the coming weeks and will be taking the game to the Too Many Games con in Philadelphia next week to find more interested testers. Please PM me or leave a response here if you're interested!
Our first goal is to make sure the semi-coop actually works and is fun. Part of that is going to mean fleshing out the AI. We've got a basic state machine with 'wandering' behaviour, which can now be extended into seek/pursue/flee/retreat/etc. We've got a basic 'kill all' objective, and plan to add timers, boss ships, and possibly convoys to destroy or motherships to protect as additional mission objectives.
It's also going to be important to continue making the game as pretty as possible. We've got parallaxing working, and can add planets and other spacey stuff into our backgrounds fairly easily, and made some performance improvements that will allow us to add more shinies and pretties.
For anyone interested in testing, please join our mailing list! http://eepurl.com/XyBr5
