Time Tracer

[casperjeff]

TIME TRACER TRAILER #1

Looking for beta testers to take a spin on the first campaign mission of Time Tracers, a side scrolling space assault/defend game designed for mobile (tablet and phone).

This is not a shmup - it’s more strategic.
The game is loosely based on my fond memories of arcade games Scramble and Missile Command and their modern day brethren - StrikeFleet Omega and Flight Control,

One of the key elements in the game is the ability to draw the path your weapons will take - with an added twist that allows you to ‘stop time’ and plan out a series of weapon deployments. Starting time again will see them played out and the game continues on.

I’m trying to keep the action plentiful, however - there are some pew-pew weapons and things can move along pretty quickly. Running out of ‘time juice’ definitely opens up the stress-meter a bit.

Essentially there are defensive and offensive mission types (a campaign mode plus roll-your-own missions). Sometimes you are protecting ground and air assets - sometimes you are destroying everything in sight.

I am still optimizing, polishing, tweaking, adding weapons/enemies and such - but I have most of the first campaign mission complete. There is plenty done that is NOT shown in the video - I have a space campaign and an enemy planet campaign that includes tunnels/caves, ground forces, minefield, turrets etc, etc

If you have an android device (looking for combination of screen sizes for both phone and tablets) and want to have a little fun, please PM me with your android device model and and I will send you a link to an apk file.

If you are willing, I can/will produce a Windows or OSX build - the game plays pretty similarly on the pc - and ANY feedback I get on gameplay would be appreciated.

Not 100% sure how to get some IOS testers - I CAN provide a (dot)app file - if you are capable of side-loading it I guess……please again send me model/version number of device.

PLEASE - ONLY THOSE COMMITTED TO PROVIDING FEEDBACK!!!

[casperjeff]

Will be sending out links hopefully around midnight…

[casperjeff]

Some pics of interface and basic GUI

[casperjeff]

[casperjeff]

[casperjeff]

(yeah, I know it’s too long and I will eventually have in-game simple tutorials)

First and foremost - the game has undergone very little optimization as yet - I see some stuttering on my galaxys 4 when explosions take place sometimes (but surprisingly none on nexus 7). There are plenty of herky-jerky things that pop up - I will indeed smooth these things out before release.

Movement - Originally, the game was COMPLETELY on rails - no moving the ship - you just concentrated on the weapons. Yikes! That’s since changed and you can move your ship using relative finger/mouse drags on the screen ANYWHERE EXCEPT THE SHIP ITSELF. I have on my list to change the ‘sensitivity’ of the movement. I have temporarily disabled the occasional ‘barn-roll’ rotation that the ship would do (it’s neat but could cause you to inadvertently hit something you didn’t want to) but I may re-add it for when user uses 2 finger swipe/movement only.

Important note until I figure out if I can effectively come up with a solution - do NOT try to use 2 fingers at one time. It will simply cause the ship to jump around. I find that my right index finger is the best tool for moving the ship.

Weapons
You essentially have access to one (eventually 2) ‘pew pew’ direct fire weapons. You ‘tap’ the screen anywhere (except on the ship) and the pew-pew weapon will fire straight out the front of the ship off to the right. It currently has no re-load time, but that might come in the future.
Secondarily (and probably more important), you have the ability to ‘trace’ paths for your ‘missile’ weapons. You simply drag from the ship itself to where you want the weapon to travel. It will follow the path that you ‘trace’.
The unlimited ‘red’ (GIRLY) missile is the default ‘trace’ weapon. It has a smallish orangish explosion.
There is a (limited by count) ‘green’ (GAWD) missile that you can select from the panel in the lower left (just by pressing on it with your finger). It has a much bigger (green) explosive effect (and can take out multiple targets at once).
There WILL be other ‘trace’ weapons and ones specific to certain campaign missions - including:

• MARBLES (Multiple Aerial Release Bomblet - Low Energy System) - Creates multiple bomblets on 3 second timers as it travels. In no-gravity area, they float in place. When gravity, they fall to the ground. Low damage area weapons.
• LASSO - (Large Area Shield System Ordinance) -Draw a shield. Simple as that. Lasts 10 seconds and travels at same speed as ship. Can also use to ‘capture’ enemy units and pick them off at your leisure.
• OMY GAWD - Oversized Mega Yield guided area weapon destructor
• TESLA - Tactical Electrical Synthesized Laser Arc (strike one enemy object and it will arc across multiple enemy objects)
• PATROL Path Activated Traveling Rocket Ordinance (draw a path for it and rocket will loop over path continuously until detonation against target or XX seconds)
• RASTA - Radial Area Spinning Tactical Attack (when detonated, spins and fires in multiple directions)
• LINEBACKER - LINear Energy Barrage AttACKER (fires horizontally and creates parallel beams that stretch up/down to clear enemies on both sides).
• FRIGID - FReeze Inducting Gravity Impeding Doohickey. (fairly big range, freezes - with nice ice texture) all enemy objects within. Airborne ones will drop and ‘shatter’ while ground units will require a single GIRLY hit to die)

Note that in the current incarnation, that time ‘stops’ when you start tracing a missile path. When you complete the path and lift your finger, time will resume. Note that your ‘time juice’ clock will tick off the seconds that you spend tracing.
You can also stop time whenever you want by pressing your finger on the orange “time juice’ clock (orange) in the lower left. You can then draw MULTIPLE weapon paths before resuming time by pressing the clock again. You will eventually be limited in how many weapons you can deploy before restarting time - and this is upgradable. Your time bank ‘size’ will also be upgradable.

Upgrades (not implemented yet)

• Time Stopping Time Bank - you start with 10 seconds of time. Maxes out at 1 minute.
• Number of weapons activatable while in time stop-mode. Starts at 3. max is 10.

Power Ups - Picked up in game by running your ship into the blue power up balls

• TimeBank Refill - automatically refills to whatever your current bank max is
• Weapon Pod Refills - automatically refills current pods to their max level.
• Temporary unlimited weapons for some/all pods. 30 seconds.
• TrippleG. GIRLY and GAWD weapons will get triple missiles following (and straddling) the traced path. For GAWD, each shot only counts as 1 from your pod inventory. 30 seconds.

[casperjeff]

Items left to get done for Campaign 1

.Finish code for enemy orbital ships - that fly in and send bolts of electricity into the buildings/shuttles.
.tweak so we dont have overlapping ground elements (like shuttles overlapping with buildings)
.change overall pacing - speed up left-to-right movement as stage(s) progress
.More asteroids
.less ‘dead’ spaces between stages. Was intended to give player a rest - but seems way too long at the moment.
.add ‘resurrection’ power up to bring civilian casualties back to life (and raise the green meter)
.have powerups ‘spawn’ from destroyed asteroids and rockets.

[casperjeff]

No one to lend a hand?

How about this - a nice web-player version (hardcoded at 1920 x1080 resolution) to get some feedback on overall gameplay and mechanics…again, ANY input is appreciated.
Note that while this ‘functions’ with a mouse, was really designed for tablet/phablet/phone …

https://www.googledrive.com/host/0B42_t04JD1sYcjJfREhwTFVmVzQ/TimeTracerBeta1WebPlayer.html

[TheGraficalOne]

I had to get the hang of it, but when I did I had a pretty good time. It was well polished and it played pretty well on the web for an android game.

[casperjeff]

@TheGraficalOne

I had to get the hang of it, but when I did I had a pretty good time. It was well polished and it played pretty well on the web for an android game.

thanks for giving it a whirl. Yeah…I’ve watched countless people try to drag from the ship to move it - and tap on the ship to fire.
Grumble.
I’ve really got to add some ‘popovers’ in the beginning to give the player some hints.

[casperjeff]

Pics of new Campaign level 1, Enemy Orbital Attack ship…with lightning attack.

[casperjeff]

I put up a new webplayer build -
(nobody seems to be interested in helping out with android - makes me sad).
Contains new ‘stage’ for campaign 1 with the above mentioned enemy attack ships. They are a little easy to pick off at the moment - more balancing to follow.
Lots of bug fixes and polishing.
Almost on to Campaign mission 2…

https://www.googledrive.com/host/0B42_t04JD1sYcjJfREhwTFVmVzQ/TimeTracerBeta1WebPlayer.html

[casperjeff]

Started putting campaign stage 2 together today - the space journey between your (destroyed) home planet and that of your enemy.
There will be asteroids, comets, minefields, enemy ships, space stations, and forcefield barriers (amongst other things).

- YouTube

[casperjeff]

Space mines prototyping

Space Campaign mission - enemy mines prototyping

[casperjeff]

Some new features of the second campaign mission - including comets and “barriers”

Space Mission - still experimenting

[casperjeff]

Hoping to release beta v2 after this weekend - been working heavily on space campaign - plan to finish that, go back and balance first campaign better and tweak resolution/scaling/aspect ratio issues so more people can help me test.
After that - the ‘avenger’ campaign on the enemy home planet is up next…

[ronike]

Sorry I couldn’t respond sooner, my week was crazier than expected.

Scale on objects seems a bit… weird to me. I know you said you were going for a more Missile Command feel, but the player seems massive to me. I know this is in part to help with the controls, but it’d feel more natural to me if the ship was like… 70% the size it is now?

On the control end of things, I’d be interested to at least see an option with the controls being the opposite way. You drag on the ship, and if you click/touch off the ship, it creates a starting waypoint for the missiles, which the player can drag to path from there. I’d also like to see the missiles move at a uniform speed, rather than the speed at which it is dragged. It also feels a bit odd that the path is relative to the ship rather than space (i.e a missile that I path up and around, then into an asteroid will go past it), though I recognize that that is likely by design, as it feels similar to Missile Command.

Another thing is the clock stop thing. I would rather see it be a very small timer (like 1 second), which recharges, which would immediately fire the missile with the path there currently if it were to run out. At least, with the way it is setup at the moment, with 1 missile at a time. Perhaps the continuous stop could be a separate system?

Levels also feel way long for a mobile game. I’d probably split the levels into the phases, and make the requirements for not getting hit way stricter.

Iunno, those are my gut notes. Looks promising, I’ll keep checking in.

[casperjeff]

@ronike

those are my gut notes. Looks promising, I’ll keep checking in.

Awesome feedback - exactly what I was looking for!!

Yup…overall scale is something I am working on - trying to decide player ship size as percent of screen height - looking to land on a value that ‘feels’ right. It’s definitely not right now.

As far as ‘swapping’ the controls -
I like relative movement controls in mobile games - so swiping ‘off’ the ship somewhere to move seems more natural to me. To be honest - movement in the game is relatively new - originally it was COMPLETELY on rails - you simply manned the weapons. I’m not 100% sure I’m going to keep the manual ship maneuvering - input is appreciated.

As far as the missile paths - I was afraid if I let the player ‘start’ somewhere else on the scree (and that is the first ‘waypoint’ ) that they would simply choose a point ‘past’ their target - and be able to hit enemies/objectives without having to do any real path drawing. I guess I could require the first ‘touch’ to be in certain radius of ship…

The missile speed ‘thing’ is actually a side result of the bezier curve/path logic/technique I am using - when you draw slowly, there are more points on the curve to iterate through and it ‘slows’ things down. I can adjust fix that - but I almost liked the effect - but I am not married to it.

yeah - the path being relative to the ship vs space thing is one I have been experimenting with - originally you could draw paths without stopping time and the effect was much different.

You might not have noticed (there is no tutorial yet) that you CAN stop the clock manually (by pressing on the orange dial) and draw multiple weapon paths - that all initiate when you restart time.
If you ‘run out’ of time, it will auto-fire based on the paths you have already completely/partially drawn -

I almost like the idea of micro-time stop and it fires when it runs out - but I don’t want people panicking and just dashing off straight lines to ‘beat the clock’ - I want them to leisurely and strategically plan their attack

I have lots of balancing to do on the campaign/level size - I actually that it was too short - there will really be 3 long ‘campaigns’ with the sub-sections within. Once I get all the assets/enemies/features done, I will have a better idea how to balance the size/length of the levels.

thanks SOOO much for the input - beta-2 hopefully next week!!

[casperjeff]

Started tonight dealing with scaling and sizing issues for different resolutions and aspect ratios.
Friend was nice enough to try on his device (RAZR) which has an abysmally low resolution -
adjusted the terrain height and limits to scale based on resolution now…looking good. I REALLY like Unity’s ability to change the game window to any resolution/aspect ratio you want for testing. Makes this 1000% times easier.
I’m luck to also have an IPad 2 (4:3 aspect ratio) and Android Galaxy S4 (16:9 ) to play with.
Now to tackle the prefab sizes and other nuances of distance that I ‘hardcoded’ earlier.

Prototyping is a good quick way to get a project started and get motivated - but it makes for a LOT of cleanup later.

[casperjeff]

Closing in on another beta.
Lots of scaling work for different resolutions.
Added a whole ‘salvage’ system where each destroyed objects yields some (gold colored) salvage that you can pick up. That will be in the currency in the game that you use to buy upgrades in the “armory”.
Added fire/smoke damage to the terrain when your missile or enemy rockets/asteroids hit
Added smoke damage to enemy ships
etc
etc
A couple of critical things left before next beta - but closing in on completion every day!!!