Herr Schatten wrote:It looks very interesting. From what you describe it reminds me a bit of the old Amiga game Growth. I used to play that a lot as a kid.
I never had the chance to try the Amiga. So I missed that game. Thanks for trying this early test concept.
halsted wrote:Very interesting concept. The growth pattern reminds me strongly of kobo (
http://olofson.net/kobodl/download.html), a game with which I was briefly obsessed in the early aughts.
One thing that game does very successfully is that it introduces interesting strategic importance to the order in which you kill nodes -- flowers in your game. Each cluster can be destroyed by killing a flashing core in the center and, thus, optimally you can plot out which nodes are the best to kill to expose the core.
I'm not saying you need cores in your game -- it might detract from what you're doing -- but you could have little "pruning spots" that take out multiple stalks at a time, you could have shootable "multiplier buds" that spawn along the inner stalks, or bugs that crawl along the stalks that function like the fruit in Ms. pac man.
As I say, looks like a great concept, looking forward to seeing more.
Thank you. Actually Kobo and Gyruss were the main inspirations behind this game. I don't plan to go with the core idea simply because it would mean a fast level kill while the plant is growing.
kdmiller3 wrote:That's pretty slick, and you definitely captured that early-1980s feel. I'm definitely looking forward to where you take this. The "outside shooting in" mechanism is unusual yet familiar, since I've run across a few games that work that way. I can't for the life of me think of their names, though.
SFXR is sort of the go-to application for creating retro sounds, though it tends to achieve a softer mid-1980s console sound. Square waves and 1-bit noise (using linear-feedback shift registers) were typical of early 1980s hardware, though quite a few games used discrete electronics if my understanding of MAME is accurate. The distinctive sound of early Williams games came from a Motorola 6808 CPU driving an 8-bit DAC with procedurally-generated waveforms. You have a lot of options to try out.
Thanks, I really enjoyed games like Gyruss but wanted to force a square playing border to try something new and give my game a unique feel. I actually did use SFXR to create the sounds.
genecyst wrote:i like a lot the way you work on very simple concepts creating something with his own gameplay, which is one of my favorite things in a game.
Thanks, individuality is very important to me in a game. I've done enough vert shmups and wanted to try something new. I think the tube shooter is an overlooked shmup genre so I wanted to make a game that sort of roots for the underdog.
EDIT:
I just finished the bee sprite. Quite cute for a 3 color 16x16 I think...
Some of the best shmups don't actually end in a vowel.
No, this game is not Space Invaders.
