Alien Space Beetles Mockup

(See below for new mockup)

This is a mockup of my game "Attack of the Alien Space Beetles". You may remember an old version of the game a while back which used tiny low res sprites.

As you can see, the art has been redone, the characters are 50% larger, the backgrounds are more interesting, and the aliens will now emerge from behind a planet before attacking in order to create anticipation.

(There will also be things like scores and ships remaining and the like on the screen, but no fonts have been done for that yet.)

18 enemies have already been created, and the final tally will be around 25-30.

No gameplay has been coded yet, aside from that old demo in BlitzPlus (the game is going to be done in BlitzMax) but a lot of the support code like menu systems, sprite systems, and sound systems and such are already done because I've been writing those for the puzzle game I've been developing for the past several months for someone else.

The game will be played using the mouse. I haven't decided yet if the player's ship will be limited to moving horizontally or if it will be free to roam the entire screen.

Great gfx!!!

Could be cool.

Yeah, awesome graphics. Looks a bit like Chicken Invaders: http://interactionstudios.com/chickeninvaders2.php

Tell Anthony Flack to put the bloody clay down and get back to Cletus.

( That's a compliment ;) )

"Looks a bit like Chicken Invaders"

Except my game has 30 different enemies, and theirs has one. :-)

Oddly enough though there are eggs and drumsticks in mine as well!

Not sure what to think of the 'bird' graphic (may look better animated?) but the space ship itself looks excellent

Here's the bird bug animated. You may notice it is a bit smaller than the one in the mockup above. That's because I screwed up the mockup. :-) I _thought_ the bug took up more space onscreen than it was supposed to!

The ship is too large too cause it's supposed to be the same size as the bug. :-)

Is this 2d?

How d'ya do the animated stuff?

This looks very nice. The planet style reminds me of some of the screenshots I've seen of Spore.

I second xlsior about the bird, though. It doesn't match the quality of the other elements in your mockup, looking rather primitive compared to the rest.

Yes, it's 2D. All the models are 3D Studio Max, except the planets which are created in ZPaint.

Each enemy has one or two 256x256 images with 16 64x64 animation frames. The above sprite is animated at 24fps, but I may bump that up to 30 in the game since it seems a bit slow. Or I might make it vary, so it plays at that rate when sitting still and faster when moving. I haven't decided all the specifics yet of how the aliens will move and attack.

I haven't even decided whether I will have the stars scroll or not actually. I probably will, but the planet will sit still in the middle of the screen for the aliens to come out from behind. And the player will approach the planet as they get through the level. So the planet will be orbiting, and the ship will be dropping towards it. I don't really think anyone will care about the actual mechanics of it though, I just want it to look good, and to do that I need a lot of motion. I considered having the stars fly towards the user, but I'm pretty sure that would just look even weirder and not as good as having them scroll. If I have them scroll the nebula will scroll too and I'll have different bug shaped nebulas that scroll by. The blue background behind the bug nebula will probably be about two screens tall and repeat.

But as for the attacks, I may have them fly in formations, or I may have them fly to points on the screen and sit still and then divebomb attack, or I could end up doing both. I just don't know yet.

Looks neat, nicely done, bit weird also. Have you played the Bugatron Worlds (by Retro 64) demo on Indiegamer yet, could be worth a look.

So you posted a while ago about the costs in another thread, so how much (approx.) did say that ship cost you in dollars, and the animated bird? Thanks

Okay, I went back over the mockup and I fixed the scale of the ship and enemy and added some additional enemies, some powerups, an explosion and a temporary score display.

Maybe this will give you a better idea why the aliens are so much less detailed than the planet. They're only 64 pixels wide!

You'll get best results viewing this fullscreen.



My other excuses for the lack of detail on the aliens are that it is an intentional stylistic choice on my part, (they don't need more detail because they'll be moving around a lot, and I wanted to make the game look "retro") and because of budget constraints. :-) I can't be asking my artist to redo work over and over till he makes them in a style I like, and it's not fair to him either since I'm not paying a ton for the work.

That's the idea, it's supposed to be weird, that is what will set it apart from other shooters. Did I mention none of the powerups will be like the traditional powerups you're used to?

Here's some info on the powerups:




If you look carefully you'll notice that if you collect certain combinations of powerups you can cancel out the "bad" effects, while keeping the good effects. Or vice versa!




I work for Retro 64. Of course I have. :-) That's who I am coding the puzzle game that I've been working on for. The space background is based on the one in Bugatron worlds to some extent actually, since that was the nicest one I could find. Of course, I improved upon it!



Well I'm not paying per asset, but let's see... Given the number of assets done so far, and the actual cash I have paid out so far, (not including royalties which would increase this value by 3.5x) I'd say I've paid about $8 each for those two assets. If you then take royalties into account, ($1000 up front, plus $2500 in royalties) that's about $28 each for those assets.

yeah I remember the weirdass power ups from before.

lol, OK then. A puzzle game for Retro64, curious...hmm... How can I get a job with Mike?

Thanks for the asset info, appreciated, so basically peanuts, nice one! But hang on you're gonna have 125 assets! That's a lot of aliens and powerups, but I guess you mean other things too right? My current game has 115 graphics (many are anim strips), 33 sounds, 55 menu items but it's not finished yet.

30 aliens, some with two animations, maybe 10 powerups, 10 planets plus a sun, a special boss, menus, different weapon fire for player and aliens, explosions and smoke effects, etc.


"A puzzle game for Retro64, curious...hmm... How can I get a job with Mike?"

Find a way for me to meet with an untimely demise? :-)

OK where do you live...Seriously though, what I'd really like is paid work making an ACTION game not a puzzle game as my heart is really in action games, and by that I mean platformer or Shoot 'em Up (or something else retro) and this is kinda what retro 64 does (mainly)! I did puzzle games so I could make something simple (haha they weren't) to get experience and because I saw it as commercially viable (they were OK). See the blog in my sig for a proper explanation...

Puzzle games are commercially viable, but you have to know how to design a game which is fun, has graphics and an interface that feels like a professional game, and most importantly, how to market it. Note this is not a comment on your puzzle games as I haven't played them. Anyway for marketing, sticking it on your website isn't gonna cut it. You have to buy PromoSoft and submit it to hundreds of websites, and better yet, you have to get it on Realarcade and/or one of the other major gaming portals.

But to do that you'll have to design your game with those portals in mind, because they'll want the game to have a certain type of interface as far as saving games goes, and you need to display their logos when the game starts, and they have to consider the game to be worth marketing in the first place. Also their software doesn't work like traditional shareware where a user gets part of a game and then they buy the rest. The user gets the whole game, but the demo is time limited to 60 minutes. So you have to make sure the user has so much fun with your game that they want more after that time period is up, and that means shooters for example have to have enough levels and enough variation that they don't get to see everything before their time is up.

Anyway I did go to your website and look around, and I was wondering who made that space shooter on your page, "Absolute Blue". The page make it seem like some of those games are made by different people so I can't tell for sure, but you said you want to make an action game so I'm guessing it's not yours.

yep I know this, and my games were on portals (BFG/Reflexive) don't forget and my new one will be on more due to the updated graphics etc. I've studied the interfaces of portal games very carefully and made sure that my framework has all this in it...

yep made sure my framework does all this i.e. full profile management and customiseable splash screens etc.

I told you that the other day ;-)

Yeah so what I was saying was I'm sure I can continue with puzzle games and make them more and more commericially vaible, BUT I'd prefer to be making action games and Retro64 was of interest because they already make and sell that sort of game (to a certain extent.

Just that a while ago the authors of Absolute Blue posted on a forum about wanting affilates so I put it on my site to see if I could make any money. All the other games are mine. I'm note really at this stage expecting that site to make money as I've done no marketing etc, my sales were via portals but I wanted a nice site to put all my stuff on so it was in one place, then I can expand the site to have a shop etc in the future and market it properly.