Assault Android Cactus - twin stick shoot-em-up (PC)

Community Showcases
1

Hi everyone! I’m part of a three person indie team working on a twin stick shooter, the other week we finally announced the game and I figured I should start a thread about it here!

1220024--50234--$cactus_01.jpg
1220024--50234--$cactus_01.jpg800×450 89.1 KB

So this is the main character, Cactus, she’s responds to a ship’s distress call only to find everything has gone horribly wrong, yadda yadda yadda killer robots!

1220024--50232--$cactus_02.jpg
1220024--50232--$cactus_02.jpg800×450 85.4 KB

The game has different playable characters that all have unique weapons, so it’s a bit like a scrolling shoot-em-up where the character you pick gives you a different play style.

1220024--50231--$cactus_03.jpg
1220024--50231--$cactus_03.jpg800×450 104 KB

The levels are arena based, so you’re in one area dealing with waves of incoming enemies, but we’re trying to mix that up as much as we can, this level reconfigures itself as you play.

1220024--50230--$cactus_04.jpg
1220024--50230--$cactus_04.jpg800×450 100 KB

We’re supporting keyboard and mouse as well as xbox pads at the moment, one to four players, local co-op only.

Anyway, here’s our announcement trailer if you want to see it in motion :

The gameplay is in a pretty good place, but we still have plenty of content to build. I’ll try to keep this thread updated with our progress and I’d love to hear what everyone thinks!

2

Very nice work so far. This looks good. I like the name of it and the characters name. Cactus. haha.
Keep up the good work.

3

Game of the year!

4

snowconesolid - thankyou! :slight_smile: I’m quite fond of the characters!

pixellegolas - haha that would be nice :slight_smile:

It’s been a few days now, figured I should talk about what I’ve been up to! Assault Android Cactus is set aboard a very large spaceship, although most of what has been shown is from zone 1, that rusty brown loading bay style environment.

1224170--50856--$tileset.jpg
1224170--50856--$tileset.jpg800×772 66.4 KB

I’m more of an animator than an environment modeller, but my approach has been to build a tileset as I go while modelling custom parts as I need them. Above is zone 1’s tileset, and below is where I’m at with zone 2’s.

1224170--50854--$hive_whitebox.jpg
1224170--50854--$hive_whitebox.jpg1024×512 102 KB

This is the whitebox version of the first level of zone 2, Hive, built by the designer out of Unity primitives.

1224170--50851--$hive_dressed.jpg
1224170--50851--$hive_dressed.jpg1024×512 148 KB

Here it is with the components fitted! Still needs some polish, but a good chunk of the way there!

1224170--50852--$hive_sshot01.jpg
1224170--50852--$hive_sshot01.jpg800×450 97.2 KB

Now it’s in game, wheeeeee!

1224170--50853--$hive_sshot02.jpg
1224170--50853--$hive_sshot02.jpg800×450 106 KB

A few plants around the workplace livens things up!

5

It’s just amazing this game!!! I can’t wait to play it!!! Fluid, cool, nice avatars, and the style of the weapons!! I loved the boss’s part tooo!! AHHH SO GOOD :smile:

6

How is this not in Showcase Forum? Amazing work, guys!

7

HelziX - thank you! :slight_smile: That was uplifting to hear! I tried hard to get the game to flow and to balance all the weapon sets so they feel different but remain on par, power wise.

Thanks! Hmm, should this be in the showcase forum?? I figured it belonged here because we’re still in the middle of making it…

8

Looks good.

9

How did you do the changing level floor in the trailer?

10

1226158--51141--$blocks.gif
With lots and lots of prefabs! We started with a 1x1x1 cube that could move up and down to become a wall, floor or a hole to test the gameplay out.

Once we were happy with that, I realised there’s only so many permutations (floor to hole, wall to floor etc) so I made an animated object that could switch between each state.

1226158--51140--$block_grid.jpg

The block became a prefab with it’s own script, then we laid them out in a 15x11 grid to make the level. Each block has a single skinned mesh with 1 bone weighting.

1226158--51138--$blocks_script.gif

The designer wrote a script to control the position of each block based on a texture lookup. (those little icons are the level layouts, they’re only 15x11 pixels :slight_smile: ) and as the player reaches set points in the spawn waves, we trigger a level change. The final touch is to start the level change from the players feet and let it ripple outwards. (also there’s a bunch of code to prevent blocks under the players feet from collapsing - it’s not the sort of game where you are thrown to your doom)

1226158--51136--$block_running.jpg

Here’s one of the texture loopups enlarged, and the level it creates! In case anyone is curious, the colour scheme is green is floor, red is wall, black is a hole and yellow for a pathfinding node.

Hope that all makes sense!

11

@FlaxSycle, awesome. I’m amaze with the tech. when will this game come out. Will it be on console as well?

12

Thanks! Right now we’re hoping to have the game wrapped up by the later part of this year.

Right now the focus is on making it a PC game (we’ve got a Steam Greenlight page if anyone wants to show some love! We could definitely use it!) but it’s been really cool to hear how Nintendo and Sony are working so closely with Unity. If the opportunity arises, I’d love to work on a downloadable console version too.

13

No, of course, by all means lol. It just looks soo awesome, really seems like a completed project minutes away from getting published!

Will there be a level editor of some kind so people could make some twisted stuff?

14

This is absolutely awesome!
The overall style is polished and has a lovely japanese look (even if you are australian! ) :wink:
I’m impressed by the overall quality of the project, and the changing-level is amazing.
I don’t know if you ever played it, but this game reminds me in some way of Chaos Engine (a veeeery old game for Amiga).

15

Looks great!

16

I am disappointed. I expected a cyborg cactus shooting needles… :frowning:

Anyway, looks awesome!

17

Thanks everyone!

SuperSlonik - at the moment each level is a custom endeavour, it’s not the kind of thing I could wrap up in an in game level editor. I’ll have to give it some thought!

sea5ide - haha yeah I used to love that game, although I mostly played the Megadrive version!

Asvarduil - as long as you’re not disappointed that it doesn’t run on android devices! That one’s been confusing people a lot! Hmmm… Cyborg cactus shooting needles… there’s potential there…

I wanted to make another update, so I thought I’d talk about everyone’s favourite part of making games, the tutorial. AKA The annoying bit nobody wants to do but will absolutely define the experience for everyone who plays it.

We’ve redesigned the tutorial three times now, it’s tricky to get the right balance between informative, fun and, uh… brief :slight_smile: The game’s storyline is Cactus investigates a runaway super freighter and ends up crash-landing in their hanger bay, encountering the other characters from the trailer. The tutorial picks up there, which gives us the setting!

1230902--51762--$tutorial_beforeafter.jpg
1230902--51762--$tutorial_beforeafter.jpg800×710 115 KB

I’d started blocking it in a while ago, but yesterday I did a material pass on it. Cactus’s mini-spaceship is still untextured and I really want to dirty the place up a bit, dent the wall where the ship has hit and strew some wreckage around, but the gameplay space itself is feeling about right.

1230902--51759--$tutorial_01.jpg
1230902--51759--$tutorial_01.jpg800×450 75.9 KB

As you go through the tutorial, objectives are tracked on the right hand side.

1230902--51760--$tutorial_02.jpg
1230902--51760--$tutorial_02.jpg800×450 62.1 KB

I did a talking portrait system for moments like this. It uses an extra camera looking at the ingame character set to depth only. The dialogue system is clunky and needs a re-factor but it’s getting the job done.

1230902--51761--$tutorial_03.jpg
1230902--51761--$tutorial_03.jpg800×450 69.8 KB

Then I pause the game to display an info screen. These really help, an earlier version tried to present this stuff during gameplay, but everyone was too distracted by the attacking robots. We were playing Castlevania Lords of Shadows when it finally clicked that if we froze the game it gave us a lot more control.

Those tutorial boxes are placeholder, but since they are gameObjects being enabled/disabled, they should be easy to improve when I get the time. I’ve got a script that switches text to display the controller specific term (eg. “left mouse button” on mouse/keyboard, or “right trigger” for xbox pad) although I’ll probably use graphics in the final version.

And the tutorial now plays from start to finish! Woo!

18

First of all say that your game looks amazing! I’ve just voted the project in GreenLight :wink:

Really? I was thinking in buy StageBuild or ProBuilder for some of my projects, but after read that… wow, can you tell me how did you do that?

Cheers!

19

Thankyou!

Haha, well when I say primitives, really I mean cubes, and the key is a lot of overlap…

1231896--51924--$hive_primative_01.jpg
Here’s the level with wireframe turned on, it’s a big mass of scaled cubes. The ones that characters can touch have box colliders, but the bigger ones on the outside don’t as they’re only there to block off vision. The final touch is to give them a material with a world space shader so the grid is clean.

1231896--51925--$hive_primative_02.jpg
The circular pillars are a bunch of cubes, the designer made them a prefab so he could drop them in and scale them as needed.

This approach is good for us because the goal is to work fast and replace the level with clean geometry later. (I used that ObjExporter on the wiki to pull the scene into MAX) There would be z-fighting issues in forward rendering, and obviously texturing it with anything other than world space materials would look terrible.

20

Thanks for highlighting ObjExporter - I’ve been whiteboxing levels in a similar way, and that will save me a lot of time in moving things over to the editor :slight_smile: