shmup-dev forums and game development ideas
shmup-dev is a low traffic forum dedicated to shootemup game development. There’s an amazing wealth of information there.
Over the years the forum has run a number of game development challenges, each with a specific theme. The themes are a great way to limit the scope of development, as the challenges are often only a few weeks long. The emphasis is about trying new ideas rather than making a large complex game.
I’ve been slacking off on game development lately and trying to think of ways to get back into it, I think these themes are the key. I’m going to go back over the themes of the challenges and try them myself. Even though the challenges are long finished, I can still use the idea for each theme as a grounding point to get started.
Some of the themes/challenges that have been done:
- Horizontal scroller with a boss battle
- Options (ship options)
- Unconventional weaponry
- Supercharge weapons
- Player is not allowed to fire own projectiles
- Laser Mayhem
- Chain reaction
- Use you foes
- Air and land
- Multi-directional shooting
- Friendly units
- Evolution
- Tentacles
- Time
- Bullet cancelling
Some great ideas there, I can’t wait to get into it.
Theta in action
Here is a video of the first few levels of theta.
weekend theta updates
This weekend I’ve made some updates to theta:
- Tweaked enemy explosions
- Fixed the aliasing in the player graphic
- Played around with enemy shot patterns, making boss enemies harder but normal enemies a bit easier
Screenshots, click to enlarge:
As always, you can launch the game via webstart.
theta updates
A couple of small updates to theta today. This game originated from a vertical shmup challenge so had a few restrictions and was fairly light on content. I like the game, so I plan to expand on it more over the coming months.
- Allowed the player to shoot in all directions.
- Tweaked the enemies straight shot.
As always, you can launch the game via webstart here.
In the future I plan to add much content to the game:
- More levels
- More enemies and more variety between them
- Some player powerups
- More music
- Some visually interesting backgrounds
theta – My entry into the 8th shmup-dev rapid prototype sessions
For the last two weeks the 8th Rapid Prototype Session has been running.
My entry for this session is called “theta”. I tried a few new things for this session:
- Use a restricted color palette from the start
- Design a mockup of how the game looks before coding
This differs from how I usually work. I usually jump straight into the code and start moving things around. I’ll create a new graphic and use it as I need to. As a result, most of my small shmup projects tend to be disjointed and don’t really have a consistent theme.
Screenshot:
Launch the game via java webstart.
Controls:
- WASD to move your ship around
- Mouse 1 to fire
- Mouse to aim
The number in the bottom right of the screen is your health. 5 hits and it’s game over.
I’m very pleased with how this one turned out. The graphics are still plain, but they are consistent so that adds something. The music was created in Reason 4.
There are 10 levels. Action really heats up around level 7 and I’m not sure level 10 is possible to beat!
bcatch – catch bullets and throw them back
In the last week, I’ve been working on a little prototype called bcatch. In this game, you don’t get your own gun, you have to absorb the enemies bullets and throw them back.
Controls:
e-s-d-f to move around. Hold mouse1 to absorb bullets, release mouse1 to start shooting them. They head towards your mouse pointer.
You get points for destroying a blue dot, the amount of points is larger depending on how long you shoot for.
The theme for this game comes from the first shmup-dev rapid prototype session. I didn’t participate at the time, but I’m going back to the old themes as they are a great creative and learning exercise.
a work in progress shmup
I’ve been building a small 2d game engine for a while now. It grew organically out of my first fumbling attempts to learn OpenGL. Over time I’ve added new features like sound and animation as I learnt new things. I’ll probably never finish the “engine” as such, just keep using it as a way to learn new things along the way. This engine will probably be the base for most of the games you see posted on this blog.
The current test application for the engine is an endless shmup. Waves of ships come at you, you shoot them down while dodging bullets. It’s mindless simple fun!
Click here to play via webstart.
The 194x like ship graphics are from a GPL graphics pack long forgotten. Most of the other graphics are from the awesome and amazing classic Tyrian.
invasion – a slightly gory space invaders like game
My third and last entry into the previously mentioned game development challenge is invasion.
Click to launch invasion via webstart.
This game is the most unfinished of the bunch; It doesn’t feature sound/music or a numerical score.
In the game, the invaders don’t shoot, however once you shoot them a little helpless spaceman pops out and gravity takes over. The falling spacemen slowly chip away at your bases and it’s also game over if one clips your ship. It’s fairly comical to see the little spacemen splat for some reason, so this game is fun to play for a few minutes.
planetesimal – an asteroids clone
My second entry in the video game development challenge I mentioned in the last post is a clone of Asteroids.
Launch planetesimal via Java web start.
I like how this one turned out for a number of reasons:
- It’s reasonably “complete” with music, high scores and a start/end
- It’s fun to play for a couple of minutes at least
Success!
warpball
I participated in a video game development challenge mid this year. The end goal was to create 8 small games in 16 weeks. Two weeks for each game is a fairly short timeframe (especially for those working jobs) so the guidelines encouraged you to “remake” old classic games, like Pong, Asteroids etc. The short release times also shifted focus from “creating the biggest best game ever” to just practicing the skill of releasing something. A very important skill.
My entry for the first game is warpball (A remake of Pong). It’s written in Java and uses the lwjgl for OpenGL bindings.
Click to launch warpball via webstart.
Given that it’s constructed using Java, this should work on OSX, Windows and Linux.