I’ve decided to bite the bullet & put up the simple shmup I did for class (the school owns the IP but I don’t think I’ve done anything original here anyway). I made an offline Web Player build & copied the folder to my google drive but when I tried to run it from within google drive it failed to run (it ran from the original folder on my pc, I tested it first.) If I just provide the link to the folder on google drive is that all that’s needed & you guys can run it or do I need to do something else?
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this was a class assignment. After a couple of weeks of intro to programming we each had to make a small game.
My intention was to make something that reminded me of the arcade games I wasted my pocket money on as a kid in the 70’s & early 80’s. Each game is meant to last around 3 minutes.
To clear stuff up that I haven’t commented in game but witnessed when others played:
you collect the gems by hitting them with your ship. If you shoot them they are destroyed.
energy is depleted at 1/second & 1/bullet
game ends if your shields OR energy reach 0
not all aliens will drop gems
when I tested the web player version hitting escape didn’t actually work (it does on the pc build)
known issues:
there is no variety in enemies & no enemy AI
there are no boss battles
if you don’ take a screenshot then you can say you lasted as long as you like (no high score feature)
As previously stated, I suck at these games but keep playing them. I died completely on the first wave as I didn’t work out what was happening as the screen was hectic & I was busy spamming fire. After I made it to the 2nd wave I worked it out & was slightly better (made it to level 11).
What I liked
for me the difficulty curve was right & the waves didn’t drag on (I would’ve been fine with slightly longer if you wanted to)
you succeeded in bringing back memories of the old console & arcade games but somehow it still looked a bit new & I can’t pinpoint why. I was glad I didn’t have one of those old joysticks though as I probably would have broken it like I used to do.
those green swirly power-ups. Spamming fire gave me a protective barrier that got me to level 11. The other power ups weren’t as effective for me
What I had trouble with
I got the 3 strikes on the first level but it wasn’t until the 2nd level that I was told that 3 meteors hitting the earth killed me. There was so much on screen due to my lack of skill that initially I didn’t know why I died.
it might be me being stupid because old games & old style games make me think of having them but I couldn’t work out my lives . When I died on level 11 it just let me keep restarting. Is it just a score tracker so I can keep playing from where I die but if/when I manage to complete the game I will just have a lower score (I noticed when I died I had a red score that counted back up to 0 then went green)?
based on the point above, should the score reset to 0 when the player resumes play? I was able, thanks to a massive negative score, to restart while the score was still negative. Othertimes I just waited until the score went back up to 0 & restarted. Not a big issue either way, just a question really.
the mini meteors after the explosion. I spent a while trying to shoot them at the start before I realised they did no damage.
Overall
this was lots of fun & brought back good memories. The art, sound & animation worked well together & none of them clashed. I can’t comment on the difficulty as I never made it to the higher tiers (yet). Maybe having the harder options as described above by others could work so little kids can play & have fun & old time gamers can punish themselves on harder levels. It might only need to have each level slightly longer, % increase in speed or spawn rate I’m not sure. People that enjoy those harder games can provide better feedback than me for that.
So crazy, I wondered if this little bits of rubble would be seen as hostile.
I made the game half as long as twice as hard, as a test.
Now I can see that the perfect difficulty and length is a little longer, so maybe I’ll go for 22-23 minutes of play.
The score and all that just isn’t intuitive. I’m deducting score from you for dying and getting hit, like Astro Smash. I think that’s just an odd antiquated idea.
I need to reduce the difficulty by slowing down meteors and powering down specials, as well as increasing standard weapon fire rate by about 12.5-25%. Once that’s flattened out, I can Add a wave to each stage.
The score will no longer deduct for hits.
However, I’m going to introduce lives and you’ll restart on the same wave… but if you run out of lives and have to continue, you’ll restart the whole stage, and lose like 100, 000 score.
So let’s see how that goes, also I’ll switch back the green shot to a fan spread, more even.
I will not do the shooting power up thing… because I know for sure that will be super hated! It sounds like something for hardcore
To get it working, I had to take a new version of the Unity player .html file from my project and change its source to your Unity3D file. I don’t think the old player script works with up to date browsers.
It does seem like an older arcade game, the pacing is consistent with something like Asteroids. Sort of slow and methodical. The ship looked really cool and I loved the explosions.
Honestly, the ship moves way too fast, I think. It’s almost like you tap it, and it goes flying. I know in some older games the ships were really fast, though. LifeForce did that, you got speed upgrades, then each tap of the dpad was like a shot out 10 pixels. The shooting is very slow as well, it almost seems like you can’t shoot. It feels like an input glitch.
I am glad there were no challenging enemies because I know I would have not been able to fight them with the really high sensitivity controls and the 1 shot per second fire rate.
Something intriguing about a shooting gallery in space, though. Like I feel like I could play that game for a while, just collecting stuff. Maybe throw a little upgrade store in.
I wasn’t sure what killed me or why, but I died at about 37 seconds.
Anyway, the fire rate is low and the movement could inherit from the input axis itself, providing a nice momentum to the motion of the ship. Spice up the enemy patterns and then it would be a whole different ball game.
I have gained a sixth sense for things people will notice, by now. At first, I had these nagging little thoughts… that’s too slow… that’s too fast… that’s weird…that’s confusing… but now I’m realizing, those nagging little thoughts are what other people end up saying! It’s like the first thing they notice!
I spent a lot of time trying to get it right & know I still had trouble. It seemed that the slightest adjustment went from too slow to too fast but I will tweak it down a bit when I finish my next assignment.
I noticed this as well. It seems like some hits of the spacebar weren’t registering but debug log shows each hit. I’ll add that to the list, maybe comment out the delay or reduce it to see if it still happens.
Good idea. Maybe I could have levels & let the player choose another powerup that could be dropped. I think I have 2 types of enemy that don’t drop anything when shot so they could be used to randomise the other powerups as they get selected.
This is odd because you can only die from getting down to 0 energy or 0 shields & the end text blurb should say why. I will keep testing to see if it fails sometimes.
Not sure what you mean by inheriting from the input axis but I will certainly keep tweaking the movement/speed & testing the shooting.
Again, thanks for the feedback, I appreciate it & the effort you took. After testing it as I added each item I was starting to not pay as much attention to how it all fitted & was just looking at the bits I had added. I will look at what you’ve raised & by the time I get back to it I may be able to look with fresh eyes myself when I play test it.
Inheriting from the input axis…
Well, what I like to do is take the Input.GetAxis(“Horizontal”) and this will be a value from -1 to 1, and I like to multiply this by a floating point value that represents the character’s movement speed. If you have your input set up as default, what this will do is create a really smooth start up and stop for your character, resulting in motion that just feels natural.
That’s why it’s either too fast or slow, there’s no in-between happening. Your eye expects inertia and momentum, and your brain is wired that way, and when you just start and stop it confuses your eyes and your brain (and your fingers). Old games did this and we coped by tapping the input device to simulate our own sort of inertia/momentum. These days we’re very used to things behaving “like they’re supposed to” and so we take those little details for granted.
That’s what I mean by the input axis. I used to program it myself where the character’s had a max speed, a current speed and an acceleration rate on each axis, but Input.GetAxis(“Horizontal”) * MovementSpeed * (time independent value) is so much better!
Okay thats really hard. Slow fire rate, powerups die when you hit them. Cant cross the middle because theres a ship that goes there. Your running low on energy and have to get the energy.
Thanks for testing. Yeah, I will re look at the fire rate & also try to find why it doesn’t seem to register when you hit the space bar sometimes.
There is a pattern/timer to the ships but I did put those ones up the middle to make players move, they’re also the only ships that shoot back at you.
Destroying the power ups was done to add risk to just spamming fire (as well as using energy to fire) & to timing the move to get them as I didn’t want the average game lasting more than 2-3 minutes (design decision as a 20minute game would be to long to show for marking in class). I may revisit it though when I get the movement/firing balanced & working properly, it will probably depend on a) what power ups I might add for shooting etc (refer previous review) & b)whether I can actually code some variation to the enemy movement or create a simple AI for them.
I thought since we seem to have a theme going on with shmups I’d at least give an update on mine.
Truthfully, due to being distracted with another project the last week or so, I haven’t worked on it much since the last demo and I have no updated demo to play at this time. But hey I have added two new enemies and started on the mini boss!
I bought a new video recording software today so captured a vid of me playing the game. I was doing good until I was pulled out of my “game zone” by someone asking me a question.
You can see the 2 new standard enemies, the asteroid/meteor zone (in case you never made it to it) and also the mini boss make its entrance at the end of the video.
Video recording stuff? Now that’s awesome. What’s next, the Gar YouTube channel?
I don’t know what’s weirder, fruits and vegetables or the fact that it looks like a really sound shooter game. Honestly, if that game was finished, I could see it being pretty popular (for an online indie retro shooter). What’s next man? Stage 2?
Well I like making videos and digital photography too. Sometimes I just take a random road trip and photograph whatever. Video an intense storm. I have most of videos and photos on my FB page. I only have family and close friends on there. Think 75 people total or something like that. lol I’ve thought about making a game or game dev channel for a long time. It’d just be one more thing to do though, you know? Maybe in about 7 years when I go into semi-retirement (my plan is either work Tue through Thur so I get a 4-day weekend every week or work 3 weeks take 1 week off) and finally have time… precious time… to do more of what I like.
That’s a good point! I was actually thinking about making the first stage twice as long as it is now and the mini-boss comes out halfway through. I think you’re right I could just wrap this stage up making the mini boss be the actual end of stage boss and start on stage two. That’d be about a 9 to 10 minute playtime for stage one. That’s pretty good.
People crave that level change I think. New scenery. Even if it is coded almost the same, as long as it looks new. I think it has something to do with the way media is presented and the average person’s attention span.
