Beam Gleam

[Sentmoraap]

Hi. Let me introduce Beam Gleam, a shmup in which you can't shoot.
You have a mirror, and you can reflect enemies's lasers with it.
It was an ENJMIN studient project made by a team of 7 people, now we are edited by Neko Entertainment to release it on Steam. The game changed a lot since the student version.

We are on facebook and twitter.


Previous version :

Spoiler

Hi. Let me introduce an ENJMIN studient project made by a team of 7 people.


In this game you can't shoot. You have two joysticks, one to move your ship and one to move your mirror. With this mirror, you can reflect the ennemies's lasers to destroy other ennemies. You have also a button which activate a shield, kinda like a smart bomb which does not damage the ennemies.

Here is a screenshot of the game, still in early stage:


We stream our work sometimes. Here is the twitch of one of the game designers/level designers.

[Kaleb Parham]

dope concept, but couldn't see how it would be hard when you have enemies coming only from the top. I'd make enemies come from all 360 directions, but that's just my opinion

[Sentmoraap]

The enemies can go from every direction, and can fire in every direction. They can also aim the player. This is a screenshot of the first level, it's intentionally easy. The game will have different difficulty modes, the game must be playable by everyone (even people who never played a shmup), but we also want to offer a challenge hard enough for skilled players.

[Sentmoraap]

Here is a video showing the current state of the game.

[buko-studios]

Nice concept! Could look great when the beam fx are in.
The spawning patterns look to be coming on well too.

Everything in the video seems to sorta go about its thing at the same pace. Maybe its because it is a level 1 prototype.
Would be interested to see some more snappy tight fixes ending in some big explosions.

We are avid supporters of indie shmup development on our deviant art group Shmuproom there might be some stuff of interest on there.

Keep Rockin!

[BPzeBanshee]

Might I suggest actual bullets you can reflect as well as lasers? With non-instant speeds this should help any issue of things being too easy from just having the lasers alone.

[Sentmoraap]

Everyone who tests it finds it too hard, so the final game will be even easier. In our defense the game will be tested by someone who probably never play shmups, can can also be a noob in other genres. We want to avoid being bashed by him/her because (s)he can't survive more than 10 seconds. This already happened to some people in the previous years.
We plan to make different difficulty modes to offer some challenge to more skilled players.

There will be explosions using particles, they are not programmed yet.

[buko-studios]

Fair enough! I think you guys are doing a great job! Looking forward to seeing more.

[Sentmoraap]

You can now dowload the game here.
Controls :
5 : insert coin
1 : start
ZQSD : move ship
IJKL : move mirror
N : use shield

You can only select beginner mode.
The game does not seem to work on all machines. Tell me if there is something wrong.

[Lord Satori]

ZQSD : move ship

What?

[BPzeBanshee]

Not working here.

Code: Select all

ERROR : Can't open dll/so file
ERROR : Can't find symbol setPointers

Last time I ran anything with SMFL it was Aero Chimera which made it perform strange as fuck (wonky framerates), but it never crashed.

Some other pointers:
- why is this 100 MB? Something in the assets/sfx folder, the file in question I'm guessing is for music, but unless you got an entire soundtrack in there I don't see why compressed audio needs to be that large.
- explosions with particles sound like a bad excuse to add performance cost for aesthetics. I find that making a sprite-based explosion first then adding particles/effects to it will look better, and add an option to switch off the particle system part of it, that way it will please the graphics whores and the ones who just want to play the game.
- the input system clearly needs simplification. ZQSD makes no sense, and from the video I saw a while back I don't see the need to have four buttons for the mirror: that could be reduced to two at least.

[Sentmoraap]

- why is this 100 MB?

The audio is uncompressed. We didn't have disk space issues, so that was not a problem. The audio will be compressed in a future version.

- explosions with particles sound like a bad excuse to add performance cost for aesthetics. I find that making a sprite-based explosion first then adding particles/effects to it will look better, and add an option to switch off the particle system part of it, that way it will please the graphics whores and the ones who just want to play the game.

My 4 years old laptop is powerful enough to run this game at 120Hz.

- the input system clearly needs simplification. ZQSD makes no sense, and from the video I saw a while back I don't see the need to have four buttons for the mirror: that could be reduced to two at least.

The game was designed to run on a cab with two joysticks, the keyboard inputs were here to test the game on a PC with an AZERTY keyboard. I will add the possibility to change controls later.
For the mirror, you can go instantly from any direction to any direction, and if you center the joystick the mirror will just block the lasers without reflecting them. The ship is also faster when the mirror is disactivated.

A common answer for all questions :
the game was designed to run on one computer and to be played on one specific cab. Initially it ran on linux, I have made a crappy Windows port later so people can play this game on their computers. There are a lot of improvements to be made, we will fix that when we have time.

[Lord Satori]

Always design a game with a QWERTY keyboard in mind. Very few people use/own an AZERTY keyboard.

[Sentmoraap]

In the lastest version, you can now reconfigure inputs with Tab (or shift+tab if you want button combinaisons).
The game should work on most computers.

[Sentmoraap]

It's been a long time since we didn't posted anything in this forums.

We are now edited by Neko Entertainment, the game will be released on steam in early 2016.
The game changed a lot : different level design, different graphics, modified gameplay...
We showed the game in some events around Paris, player's feedbacks are precious to us.
We are trying to make the game playable by everyone, a lot of people likes the concept but also have a hard time killing enemies even without bullets to avoid.

You can follow us on twitter and facebook

[BPzeBanshee]

Hi Sentmoraap! Long time no see.

I had a look at the video footage on your Facebook page for the game and it definitely looks much improved from the initial builds posted here. The use of alternate branches in a similar fashion to Radio Zonde look like good ideas as well. Definitely make a post about this in the main subforum when the game launches, hopefully it goes well for you.

[Sentmoraap]

Hi.

We will be at the Stunfest, so if you will be there you can come test the lastest version of Beam Gleam and talk with us about what do you think of the game.