Edit: Wow, mispelled the title of my own game. That’s embarassing. It’s Cashtronauts, as in cash + astronauts.
Hello everyone! I’ve gotten so much help from this forum and from Unity Answers that I feel like I’m stepping in a hallowed place…
Cashtronauts
Cashtronauts is a 1-4 player space/combat trading party game. Players have a few minutes to explore a randomly-generated solar system and get as rich as possible. This can be done by mining, scavenging, hunting pirates, fighting police or attacking the other players. The only rule is that when the timer runs out, the richest pilot wins.
I’ve been working on this project for an embarassingly long time. It started out in (badly written) Javascript several years ago, and has gradually morphed and evolved and switched to C# and been facelifted and restarted a few times over. I’m glad to finally be in the last stretch; the design is pretty nailed down and we hope to release something playable in early 2014. It’s coming out for PC, Mac, Linux and OUYA.
Looks good. But don’t you think that it is reasonable to force players fight each other at least in the end of the match? Otherwise it somewhat kills the point of split screen, and could as well be a single player game with high scores online.
Make sure, if it is a party game, you treat it like a party game and not make each player’s turn run for too long. It looks pretty cool. Great work. Looks awesome. Make some of the lighting e.g. 0:15 of the video more brighter and shaper. If it isn’t there yet and you have Unity Pro, add in a bloom image effect as it would work REALLY well on this.
The framerate is really good, looks so fluid. That graphic are provisional? Anyway, looks good, the respawn point are a little weird but the rest looks good. With 4 players will be such a fun game, ha, by the way, it the split screen for 4 players on the same computer too?
Thanks for the feedback! Currently, players can attack each other but that’ll only stun the victim and make them drop their inventory, letting the attacker swoop in and steal it… but that draw the cops. The idea was to get players to interact and compete economically, not just through combat. You can kill other players, but you might need to buy a powerup or hire an NPC merc.
I probably shouldn’t have used the word “party game”… it’s not Raving Rabbids or Mario Party, where players take turns playing minigames. It’s more like Mario Kart with players playing in the same space, at the same time in splitscreen
Lots of the graphics are provisional, especially the particle effects. The stations are going to change, and probably the red and brown pirate enemies too. And yes, splitscreen will be on PC too!
In fact, visually the game’s being kept pretty bare bones right so that it runs on the OUYA, which is a not-that-fast Android device at its heart. It’ll be playable on PC pretty early, probably as a free beta or something… but the final, polished PC/Mac/Linux version will have all those fancy effects. Just last night I was playing with bloom and depth of field and was getting pretty excited, actually!
Update: Gameplay footage! Just me running around a bit in single-player, but gives you an idea of how the game goes.
Players can pick up minerals of any colour and sell them at their respective stations, but if you’re playing multiplayer then the station’s owner will get a cut of what you sell… so it’s best to see who is in the lead and start discussing embargoes with your couch mates!
Since our visuals are pretty low-fi and low-poly, we thought we’d do the opposite with the audio to get a fun contrast: really loud, realistic booms and bangs.
Oh, you’ll also see new VFX for explosions, and some added camera shakes.
