by jim » Sat Sep 26, 2015 10:18 pm
Yea, so it changed to a minimalistic styled zero gravity flight game some 3 weeks ago. Continues with the WinQuake engine (may work with other engines too). The game can be played almost with just the mouse. Keyboard is used for weapon changes.
Player's spacecraft moves automatically forward. Holding down the "Move" button accelerates. Double click + hold activates "Turbo" move. Aiming is fast, but it takes some time for player's movement direction to change to the aiming direction. This allows some sideways strafe and up/down hovering. Colliding into walls or things may cause damage.
Player has 5 Main Weapons and 4 Support Weapons. The main weapons generate heat when they're fired. When they're too hot, they don't fire. Support weapons can be fired any time. Environment and explosions can affect the heat levels too: dive into lava and you get hot.. dive into water and you stay cool longer. Turbo move also increase the heat levels.
The main weapons fire small projectiles or beams. The support weapons fire bigger missiles, mines, combat drones and nukes. All these bigger things can be shot to make them explode sooner, which includes accidently shooting down your own missiles/etc at close proximity...
Anyway, here's a new video showing off Laser Cannons (with a powerup), Plasma Shield powerup, Autocannons, Plasma Cannons, Missiles and 2 Enemy types.
//==
WinQuake seems pretty bad for heavy action. Just have a dozen enemies around firing at player, and boom it's "packet overflow". Well at least it doesn't crash the game, but it's pretty annoying when sounds are no longer played, and everything's kinda lagged. I was able to do some kind of workaround with limiting how many enemies can be in the level at the same time and how many projectiles they can fire.
When player destroys an enemy, then there's room for some more. If it's a large level, then enemies may need to be removed/teleported away when player is no longer there, so the enemies would always be around player. Or maybe use some monster blocking invisible blocks, though this wouldn't work so well on some big areas with long range visibility.
To compensate for the lack of large enemy masses, I increased the hitpoints of the enemies to make them more dangerous even if they're alone. Could probably increase their projectile speeds and damages too. Projectile speed increase would also make the projectiles hit something faster and allow the enemies to fire again sooner. They're quite challenging already.. it took me like 10 tries to complete the level in the video (though I was kinda sleepy when recording it).
The textures came from my earlier minimalistic Doom content pack, so there's some Doom texture replicas, and looks like I'm keeping the Doom texture replicas... But no plans to make more replica textures. Majority of the textures should be fresh/original.
//==
All the item models are complete. Enemies can drop the smaller ones. All have some glowing parts to make them easier to spot even in darkness. There's 6 powerups. Most of them are limited time, and picking up the same powerup again adds to the time.
The powerups are (middle pic, in order of appearance):
Automatic Repair System: repairs player's armor for 30s up to 250 points.
Heat Shield: decrease all heat levels 50% when picked up, weapons cool faster and heat slower. Allow moving in lava and acid without taking any damage. 25% damage protection. Lasts 60s.
Super Shield: protects from all damage 100% (75% in DM). Malfunctions in water (but works in lava and acid). Lasts 30s.
Laser Amplifier: improves the Laser Cannons to fire more realistic kind of laser beams with faster fire rate and damage. Lasts one level.
Plasma Shield: protects from all collisions to walls/enemies, creates no self-damage explosions every 2s or when colliding with something. 50% damage protection. Lasts 30s.
Cargo Module: double/increase max ammo capacity and give some ammo. Permanent upgrade.
zbang!