Little game in development, want feedback (updated 19. July)

[ptoing]

A few friends and me (including Helm from this forum, dunno if he has posted yet) started a little game and we would like to have some feedback on it.

It's in it's 3rd day of development atm and coming along quite nice

controls are cursorkeys, up, left and right and space to shoot

F1 - fullscreen
F2 - restart
L - light
P - drop framerate to 15 (debug feature)

You have to scrape the walls to charge up your laser and if you are out of energy you can just shoot with a super wimpy shitlaser. also scraping gives points.

We want the gameplay to be more about the walls than the enemies and this is not a traditional shooter, but I think that some here will like it.
So any comments to balance the gameplay and such are welcome

and here is the link to the current build
http://bicycle-for-slugs.org/ugh31a.zip

[Helm]

Hello, I am Helm. Nice to meet all. This game is currently coded by Fuzzpilz, Ptoing and I are handling graphics, some friends are making music and sound, everybody's co-designing. As it is still pretty open in development, this is the time to give us feedback.

Things we know will change:

grazing will be done with a pixel-perfect mask of the ship

a few more variations of terrain 'traps' will be included



likeso. This started as an urthwurm clone, and these features will be remiscent of it.

[Pixel_Outlaw]

Hehe looks good so far. is currnet ship the final one? It just looks a bit rough. Yay for pixel art and shmups I say. There are too many games with blurred and smudged graphics. I know Helm is good at pixel art so I hope to see the finished product.

[Dale]

Very good concept and is very enjoyable.

[ptoing]

http://bicycle-for-slugs.org/ugh17.zip

Some tweaks and cosmetic changes. If you like it manic hold down B

[EIHoppe]

Plays well, especially for still being early in development (and in wine, no less...a rare moment of non whiny-wine-ness =P).

I totally suck at it, by the way--I find it quite difficult to graze without splatting my ship on the wall--but I'm not used to the game style itself, so it's most likely that inexperience that's causing my troubles.

I would like to see this develop further. Perhaps boss fights could come into play? That'd make for a very difficult experience: dodging boss bullets, fighting the boss, grazing to get extra ammo all while dodging the "usual" (well, to be implemented) terrain traps. And perhaps you could get a bonus based on how fast (distance wise) you kill them, maybe have them appear every kilometer ending in 5, and leave ending in 8 if they aren't killed, and offer bonuses (possibly percentage? Like killing at 5.5km would get you 2.5x the bonus, 6.8km would get you 1.2x, 7.6km would get you only .4x, etc.) that would make putting forth a good effort to kill them worthwhile?

At any rate, I look forward to watching this grow. As a sidenote, wouldn't mind a native Linux port in case your coding gets too "complex" for wine and it starts to complain as usual. But you're the devs, so I can't do much except suggest it. =P

Good work, keep it up.

~EI

[the2bears]

Very interesting idea. Quite difficult to control though, you might consider removing gravity... which is my way of saying I suck at this so far

Bill

[Helm]

Yeah, no way we're losing gravity. Very important to the design. Hopefully it'll be good enough in the end that people feel the urge to get better at it besides being frustrated.

[R_Typist]

Difficult, yet enjoyable. Is the terrain going to be textured evetually (kind of like Worms)?

Could work well as a helicopter!

[Helm]

There will be rocks and cracks and stuff but no tiled textures. We're trying to retain the Out of this World type of aesthetic why the vectory construction. A good middle ground between eye-candy and shooter-clarity will have to be achieved.

[ptoing]

newest version, lots of updates. read the readme

http://www.bicycle-for-slugs.org/thrustburst/ugh31a.zip

[CodeMonkey]

Are you guys still working on this? I thought it was an interesting idea and I want to see where it goes.

[Fuzzpilz]

Yes. There's going to be a new, more public-ish beta pretty soon - probably would have been a few days ago, but the Dwarf Fortress alpha came out and distracted me immensely, which led to no work being done on my part. I am rectifying this.

[CodeMonkey]

I know how that goes. My freetime development is often subject to release dates of other people's games. Thanks for the link, I'm going to have to check that one out too. I have never really branched away from classic NetHack, but that may soon change.