This is my first game ! I participate in the Unity Kongregate contest with this entry. It is a tunnel shooter with a mix of 3d and vector graphics. The gameplay is reflex-based so you should have fast reactions I plan to update it quite often in the following days and I keep the changelog at the bottom of this page.
You can play it here:
Controls: Use Left- Right arrows to move, Z button to shoot. If you press the P button, the game pauses.
Changelog:
22 Mar 2011:
Updated player’s and bullet’s models.
15 Mar 2011:
Added music. Opinions are appreciated (negative ones especially, just document them please).
24 Feb 2011:
Added explosion effect on the enemy spaceships. Pink is the new black…
23 Feb 2011:
Added a wormhole effect in the background. Improved controls.
16 Feb 2011:
Added sound fx. I used some text reader for the voiceovers and cfxr for the other sounds (found in http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr).
Added Mute button (actually sound off button).
Improved the quality of the lines in the web (no more artifacts).
Oh, and if you haven’t, check out Eric’s Vectrosity in the asset store.
The lines and the bullets are all made with this package !
Helps keeping draw calls count really low.
15 Feb 2011:
Added a mini tutorial. At the beginning of the game, a short tutorial instructs the player
how to use the controls and pauses the game until the z key is pressed.
Reasoning: I noticed that some people havehighscores = 0 which I interpret as follows:
They opened the game in a tab and came back later. The game had already started
(since in the previous version it doesn’t pause at the beginning) and they found it running.
Bad user experience… Lesson learned: Pause at the beginning until user gives some input.
14 Feb 2011:
Released in Kongregate for participation in the Kongregate Unity contest
(Thanks to Sophie Houlden for providing the js code for connecting with Kongregate Statistics in pastebin.com)
Update:
Added a mini tutorial. At the beginning of the game, a short tutorial instructs the player
how to use the controls and pauses the game until the z key is pressed.
Reasoning: I noticed that some people havehighscores = 0 which I interpret as follows:
They opened the game in a tab and came back later. The game had already started
(since in the previous version it doesn’t pause at the beginning) and they found it running.
Bad user experience… Lesson learned: Pause at the beginning until user gives some input.
Update:
Added sound fx. I used some text reader for the voiceovers and cfxr for the other sounds (found in http://thirdcog.eu/apps/cfxr).
Added Mute button (actually sound off button).
Improved the quality of the lines in the web (no more artifacts).
Oh, and if you haven’t, check out Eric’s Vectrosity in the asset store.
The lines and the bullets are all made with this package !
Helps keeping draw calls count really low.
Added a wormhole effect in the background. Improved controls.
Feedback helped a lot to improve the controls of the spaceship. It seems that everybody who played thyella so far was left disappointed by the controls. The new controls are far more easy and allow a less steep learning curve.
Wormhole is made from a couple of quads that rotate around camera’s z axis. Nothing fancy there.
Also increased camera’s dampening so it causes less nausea…
CALL for FEEDBACK !!!
Hey everybody, this game is at position 540 from 600. It is not gonna take any prizes in the contest and is not your rival
The limited feedback I had so far helped me a lot. Actually it completely changed the way I perceived the game. Please, give some more feedback. Tell me what you like and what not so I can improve it little by little.
Interesting concept, Ippokratis. I like the camera movement and retro-y graphics. However, the text was a bit annoying to read with the zoom effect and the new version (pictured at the top of your post) didn’t seem to be uploaded.
The version I played seemed to be exclusively a tutorial… I’m not sure if that’s how it was supposed to be. One of the aspects of the game that made it difficult to play was the super sensitive controls; I would tap the arrow key lightly and the ship would move two spaces over. Perhaps you might want to consider fine-tuning the controls a bit more.
I also encountered a glitch where I escaped the enemy ship that had gotten all the way to the top of the wall by moving all the way to the other side and then quickly moving back when the enemy ship was close - might just be luck though
Overall, nice game. I hope you’ll get more feedback soon - the community isn’t always the most responsive to some posts (e.g. one of my posts which I bumped up 8 times ).
Congratulations on finishing your first game!
Here is my criticism:
This would be more interesting, visually and gameplay-wise, if your tunnel actually went 360 degrees around, where is the roof?
Also, i think you could add alot more character to this game with particle effects (for explosions, maybe even backgrounds) but nothing fancy, in keeping with your vector graphics.
i like the text alert system, very nice. This looks like something i would have played on my mac plus in 1991. It needs more variety to keep me playing for more than 1 minute!
Thanks for the feedback.
You are right, I uploaded the new version but I didn’t published it, thanks for bringing it to my attention.
Now it is published. In this version I tweaked the sensibility of the controls, which are now less sensible.
What you describe is a desired part of the gameplay, the player have a small chance to escape the enemy, if he manages to pass below the enemy.
Thanks for the feedback.
Indeed, this is a very nice idea.
I intend to release this title later for the iphone. This lead me to drop many fps killer features like particle effects. A custom particles system could be the solution but I try to focus on making more elementary things at the moment (see below).
Absolutely ! The game variety is poor at this stage. One kind of enemy, one level, no power-up’s, the list goes on. At the moment, what varies is the enemies speed, the enemies bullet speed and the enemies spawning rate. Something *had to vary in order to release it:)
I have a roadmap I try to follow, right now the next thing is game music (which gives me major headaches).
The roadmap is
game music
game menu
improved tutorial (I have to find a way to explain that the key in the controls is to release, not to push the keys)
enemies
weapons
ai drone
level editor (for user generated content integration)
levels (yes, there is some road 'till we get here )
well, what you have so far would obviously run on the iphone, but i also think the unity particle system will work on the iphone, its actually a pretty powerful device. Have you seen any of the full 3D games on it? Many of them were made in Unity, and i have seen particles. But you could also create explosion effects within vectrocity! I think you do need some kind of explosion effect, the enemy ships just disappear
Update:
Added explosion effect, as ScienceFictionado suggested. Now when you hit an enemy, a small pink cloud appears.
By using a particles pool, as well as not emit continuously but at request, no significant fps drop.
Special effects just added in my todo list
Update: Added music.
It is so strange that after a made a music “engine”, created my first music track, wrote my first class and my first component, modified the entire codebase to be #pragma strict all I can say in my upgrade status is that I added music…
Now the whole game (including music) is 324 kb. You think I should stream the levels ?
Also, what is your opinion in the game in its current form ? Any suggestions ?
Update : Upgraded player’s and bullet’s graphics with new models. Huge fps improvement, from 110 fps → 260 fps ! New models are made with Vectrosity.
I 'll focus now on the enemie’s models and special effects. Any suggestions ?
