XenoRaptor

[The_Pope]

<Official Site> | <Facebook> | <Kongregate>

I've been working on this for a while, and it seems like now is the time for the codex to whine about it. It's an isometric shooter, so not really codex material, but since most of you are closet consoletards you'll probably have fun.

Eventually it will have some more codex worthy features, but I wanted to get the core combat mechanics working smoothly before worrying about putting in choices & consequences or character development. One thing I plan on doing for the story is a sidequest counter, and if it gets too high before you do certain main story missions, you'll be too late and the mission will be changed. For example, if you get too many cats out of trees before stopping zombie space hitlers fleet from destroying earth, there won't be an earth. There will also be a vaguely X-com like system for unlocking new equipment - many parts of the tech tree will require you to collect alien artifacts to research.

 

[curry]

Too bad the game isn't too good.

 

[Zed]

Not a huge fan of the controls and how the pewpewlazorz work. Besides that it was a pretty good Asteroids clone.

 

[Piety]

This is pretty fucking cool. I'm duly impressed.

 

[villain of the story]

Interesting.

Info box at ship equipment scene can exceed screen boundaries, making it impossible to read what's in the box.

When you first on a ship slot, there is no cancel/back button, you have to select something and it can get confusing when a few of them have subcategories.

Information in those boxes is not enough. It's a lot of guess work and trial to figure out what many of the subcategories actually do.

Controls are a hit and miss.

Nonetheless, it's an amazing little accomplishment!

 

[Destroid]

Why does your game require some lame plugin?

Pretty fun, but really it needs fullscreen or at least to be bigger, all the stuff is really small and especially the tutorial text is almost impossible to catch, it needs to be more central.

 

[villain of the story]

Why are you using some lame browser that don't come with built-in Unity support? Chrome does.

And there was a full screen button on top-right corner.

By the way, like flash, you can enlarge or shrink the game screen in browser mode. CTRL + mouse wheel.

 

[The_Pope]

I did an update which adds the option to toggle between the current fixed camera and a chase camera which follows your ship around. Also, there was a stealth update which made the controls a fair bit more responsive (Actually an increase to acceleration in the players ship, but it feels like more responsive controls) yesterday.

Zed: You can get a few different kinds of lazors in the hangar. The one on the default ship is a heavy laser, there's also a gatling laser and a constant beam one.

Destroid: Kongregate doesn't allow fullscreen apps, the other versions are better. The game is eventually meant to be a standalone non browser release, only using the browser stuff for demo + testing. Thanks for letting me know about the tutorial text as well.

Villain: Thanks for the tips about the hangar menu, it's sometimes hard to spot problems when you already know what everything does.

 

[Destroid]

I'm using chrome!

EDIT: Forgot to mention the graphics are pretty good.

 

[Elzair]

An isometric SHOOTER?!?!







The fuck?!?!

 

[Destroid]

It seems you can collide with the edge of the map? Might want to make it wrap.

 

[Excidium]

Fucking flying chainsaws. Is the energy powerup a random drop from any ship? What does each powerup do exactly?

The new movement mode is great, the other doesn't go too well with the mouse control.

This is pretty fucking cool. I'm duly impressed.

 

[Destroid]

I think the best weapon to beat chainsaws (and general survival) is the high power plasma sprayer, as it stuns them.

Mines seem pretty useless at the moment as half the time when you drop them the enemies shoot them damaging you and the other half the enemy ships seem to fly around them.

 

[The_Pope]

I'll give the mines a health buff, they are a bit too flimsy at the moment. I'm planning on having some missions in the campaign where you defend a base from enemies, the mines (and later deployable turrets) are intended more for that, but I put them in now as it was pretty easy to do.

Destroid got it right about dealing with the chainsaws, though all the sprayers work pretty well against them. Large Scatter Railgun and any type of Flak Autocannon also work quite nicely. The Irradiator and Shockwave Core (Spacebar) also are pretty good as a panic button when you're surrounded.

As for making an isometric shooter, I figure if it becomes popular iso will be the new shit and first person popamole will be for fags stuck in the 90s. Then we'll get modern isometric reboots of lame first person RPGs like fallout.

 

[Excidium]

I was always defending the same spot (didn't even know you could collide with the map edge) so deployable turrets sounds like a good addition.

As for making an isometric shooter, I figure if it becomes popular iso will be the new shit and first person popamole will be for fags stuck in the 90s. Then we'll get modern isometric reboots of lame first person RPGs like fallout.

 

[Destroid]

I'm finding the explosive railguns that explode where you target them most effective for primary weapons. The machineguns are low velocity so you miss a lot, they could probably use a buff.

EDIT: Also the hitbox on pickups, it's quite easy to miss them as it seems you need to hit them with a specific part of the ship?

 

[The_Pope]

Yeah, the ship hitbox is currently a sphere which is a bit smaller than the full size of the ship. I used to have a series of boxes which was much more accurate, but the chainsaws kept getting stuck on it and killing you. I'll add a larger trigger for pickups as well as the current hitbox, which will only be used for collisions with asteroids etc.

By the way, if anyone sees anything in the game they'd like to use for a more codex worthy project, I wouldn't mind sharing some code or tips.

 

[Pegultagol]

I tried the game, and it is pretty fun. I wish the movement controls are not absolutely oriented to the camera view but relative to the direction the ship is facing at the moment.

 

[The_Pope]

Another small update just went up, here's what it does:

Chase camera is now the default.
Prevented tooltips etc. from going off the screen in the hangar.
Added stat window to hangar.
Added a bit of scatter to dumbfire missiles.
Increased muzzle velocity of auto and turbo cannons.
Player dropped mines now have more health.
Improved a few item descriptions.

 

[Destroid]

Surprisingly, it is a little easier to survive from the chase cam. I think it makes dodging a bit easier, but aiming a little harder.

 

[The_Pope]

New update, here's the changelog:

Added a soundtrack thanks to The Machinist: http://www.last.fm/music/Theachinist
Gatling deathray now 17% more awesome.
Camera modes can be switched by pressing middle mouse or ~.
Pickups now a little less fiddly to collect and have a graphical effect when collected.
New sound effect for collecting ammo.
Fixed a bug where the tooltip was blocking buttons in menus.

 

[Destroid]

I was gonna say the Gatling lasers seemed pretty terrible compared to the regular one. I'll give them another try.

 

[villain of the story]

How do you find working with Unity? What was the learning curve like to get to this point?

 

[The_Pope]

For the gatling laser, I originally put in a 35% reduction to both damage and heat, figuring that it would do the same damage for the same amount of heat. It ended up just not doing enough damage in practice, so now it's 25% damage reduction and 45% heat reduction. The scatter is also increased, but thats a cosmetic change except at very long ranges. Balancing things is very much a matter of playtesting rather than getting it right straight from your head.

Unity is pretty powerful and easy to learn for everything I did except netcode and the GUI system. You do need to know how to program, though. There were a few features in UDK that I wish Unity had as well, particularly regarding writing custom shaders and making particle effects. There is a free plugin which is kind of like the UDK shader editor, but it needs the pro version for a few important features. It also comes with some nice AI, which Unity lacks.

I'm currently using the free version of Unity, so if you go for the pro one you could get even better graphics than I managed.

 

[Destroid]

I'm finding speed is the key to survival. Dropping the secondary weapons (they aren't that useful anyway, because of low ammo supply) taking the light hull and rocket engines makes you pretty fast, which lets you stay alive a lot easier.

Ok, I just cleared the Nebula survival mode with ~12.5k score, using a Light hull, heavy dumbfire plasma missile, heavy plasma sprayer and standard plasma railgun, with rocket engines and invulnerability special. Also you might want to balance the levels on the background music, it's nice music but one of the tracks is way louder than the others and drowns out the game SFX.

And did it again with the slowest, toughest ship I could make, teleport engines, heavy flamer, large flak autocannon, shield, rest of the ship full of HP. I think it was easier with this ship actually.