XenoRaptor

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You were right about the music levels, here's how it showed up in audacity:



Uploaded a quieter version of the song now.

As for the ship balance, it's definitely possible to build a ship much better than the default, and that's meant to be important in getting good scores etc. Finding the best build is one of the things I really like in games, and if I just gave out the best ships I could come up with right from the start then players wouldn't have the chance to find them.

I'll upload another patch with a few more waves and a proper win screen sometime on the weekend.

BTW Destroid, remind me about this post when I go commercial with it and I'll give you a free copy. You've been very helpful with spotting problems.

New update:

Health regeneration now disabled for 1 second after getting hit. This applies to both the player and enemies with regen.
Survival: Nebula now goes up to wave 15
Minor adjustments to scoring system
Missiles do slightly less damage
Improved graphical effects for sprayer weapons
Better win screen in survival mode
Camera now switches mode instantly
Minor texture improvements

I was thinking the enemies regened health the same way you do. What's the rate exactly? Must be pretty high.

10% per second. It only caused problems on ships/enemies with loads of health.

Health based builds are still pretty good even with the change, though - your multiplier stays at 1 while under 90%, so a tough ship gives you a lot more leeway for glancing hits.

Forgot to mention - got a bug the other day where the regular flamer was producing the same pull/push effect as the singularity sprayer, but it corrected when I changed loadout and I was unable to replicate the bug. I'm pretty sure I had nothing but the flamer fitted to the ship at the time, but I don't remember the rest of the loadout.

Did another update today, it adds the first boss enemy. It'll appear in the later waves of both survival maps, or you can fight it right away in the hangar test map.

That warpthrower bug should be fixed, I'd forgot to reset the 'singularity' flag on sprayer weapons.

Full changelog: http://www.facebook.com/apps/applicatio ... 2394570544

Unless anyone spots some more bugs, I'm going to make a website for it now so the next update will probably take longer.

The boss is very hard to beat, unless you use beats, in which case it is exceedingly simple.

With mines and bombs you are currently able to deploy them extremely fast when using cluster or swarm - it appears that they begin reloading after you fire the first one so you are able to let loose 10-16 of them before you actually have to wait a moment. If you hold down fire you will spew a constant stream of them. Is this intended?

I gave the game 5 for being codexian, but the music sucks and the laser sounds like you're farting.

Yeah, mines/bombs are meant to be pretty spammable. They need it to have a chance at competing with missiles.

As for the boss, I think I'll make it take two hits from the bear teleporter in the next patch. The bears are meant to be for high priority single targets, but one shot is a bit too easy. The other thing is that in the campaign, that boss will show up before you can get the bear teleporter. Also, I'm thinking of making the turret blow up when you get it below 25% health.

By the way, there's a trick to beating it without the bears, but I'm not going to explain it now - I'm interested in seeing whether it needs more signposting.

After a bit more play he's easy enough to beat with the right tactics, about a 60% win rate after 10 minutes fighting him.

Have you used the scatter (shotgun) railgun much? It seems pretty crappy in all it's versions.

Website is still in progress, but I got a bit done on the game over the weekend:

Added minimap
Improved player animation
Added heat bars to crosshair
Buffed efficient barrel
Moved dialogue box to keep it out of the way in chase camera mode
Bears no longer one shot the killdozer
Killdozer will lose its turret when it goes below 30% health
Bears now have a dialogue box when they eat enemies
Scatter railgun ammo now has higher projectile speed
AP and Scatter railgun do slightly more damage
Improved collision detection for projectiles at point blank range.
Shock effect now more visible.

I didn't find the scatter railguns to be particularly weak before, though the slow projectiles made them a bit troublesome to aim.

I should note that when I say they seem crappy - I'm thinking of the weapons in terms of even balance across all of them, where you seem to be developing this for a single player campaign rather than survival game.

Moar?

Sorry about leaving this thread blank for a while, I was fairly busy with some other stuff lately (got a small business course done and a grant from the government to help me get started).

The website is now open, with an in browser demo, trailer and official forums. It's also open for preorders if anyone is interested in getting it cheap.

Changelog: (Well, the parts of it that I can remember, there's also a fair bit I've done and forgotten about)

New login system which lets you save configs to the server.
Desktop version is available to people who preorder.
Fixed some bugs with fullscreen mode in firefox 4.0+ and internet explorer.
Fixed some bugs with calculating splash damage.
Turbocannons and sprayers now have a more continuous stream of dakka.
New barrel type - dual barrel (extra fire rate, weaker individual shots).
Scatter shells now fire 20 projectiles instead of 12, but they're a bit weaker. This makes it much more consistent.
Singularity autocannon now detonates at the crosshair (like flak).
Many some energy weapons/special abilities look a bit nicer.
Border at the edges of the map so you can see when you're running out of space.
Singularity beam/ turbocannon now increases the gravity of things they hit.
Sprayers now have a larger damage hitbox.
Beam weapons slightly buffed.
Some tweaks to enemy spawn rates.
Fixed a bug which made the game misreport the wave you got up to.
Flak cannons have less knockback.
AI crashes into things a bit less.
Added a fair few more tracks to the playlist.

@Destroid: I want the weapons to be pretty similar in power level for the whole game so that you can play coop with friends of different levels. Also, check your PMs for a preorder key.

I'm hoping to do something a bit like space rangers 2 as far as the general structure of the campaign is concerned (open galaxy with antagonists who actually conquer systems if you ignore them), but I'm not going to outright promise it because really ambitious indie projects often die unfinished. Had a look at EV nova and it did seem pretty cool, might use some ideas from it.

Also, I've got a scoreboard up on the website now.

I love how the background "nebula or whatever" looks. It creates a solid sense of space & motion, as opposed to space shooters that just take place in darkness spruced up by a few bitmaps at a distance.

Multiplayer is now functional for FFA deathmatch, I'd be interested in testing it out with some codexers sometime.

Also, I'll be starting work on the main single player mode in a month or so, so it's time to start thinking about how it will work a bit more seriously. For the first build, my current idea is to have a big map with several systems on it. Each turn, a number of enemy fleets spawn and start attacking, arriving at systems and needing a certain number of turns to capture it depending on the strength of the fleet. Each turn you can jump to a system and fight a battle there, and if you defeat all the enemies the system is saved. If not, you get sent back to the campaign map and the system is lost regardless of how many turns it would have taken to capture. This will be pretty crude - not really any resource management or strategy to it, just a basic context for the battles.

The second campaign build will be where it gets a bit interesting. Friendly systems will be able to spawn fleets, which you can send to delay/destroy enemy ones. If you jump to a battle where one is present, it will be there to help you out. However, they won't be able to jump - they'll only be able to move to adjacent systems each turn. This will add a layer of strategy to the game; do you want to send ships everywhere to delay attacking aliens or form big fleets to keep the important systems safe and sacrifice the rest? Later still there will be the ability to build up systems for greater production/defence rather than manufacturing ships.

For the end boss, I'm thinking of a giant mechanical squid named reaper which wants to destroy all life in the galaxy because it is jealous of characters with non retarded motivation.

Coop is in, need some codex bros to help test it out over the internet. Australians would be preferable, otherwise pings might get a bit high.

I can help you out some time this weekend if you'd like?

Sounds good, I guess the easiest thing would be to PM me with msn or facebook and we can arrange things through there.