Asteroids

Hi all,

I'm coding an asteroids-like game, and I would like to know your comments about.

I'm really interested on criticisms and suggestion about how the game performs on your machines in regarding of smooth and speed, as well as bonus pick-up ideas, and generally, if the game brings you fun while playing it, and if not, please tell me where should I put more attention to improve to meet your taste.

You can download the game here: Asteroids



Controls: arrow keys to move/brake/rotate; left control to fire

Picking up bonuses give new weapons. Actually the ship is never destroyed, neither are the robots, but this will change.

Thanks for your attention,
Sergio.

Its not bad that.

The biggest problem for me is that the shadows on the asteroids aren't right when they're rotated but I don't suppose there's much can be done about that... it looks odd though.

I'd also like to see a bit more variety in the explosions, as they're all the same but I guess its easily changed.

Runs 60FPS here (same as monitor refresh)

Correct :-)

Yes this will change soon. But first I would like to find out what could make this game more appealing in regards of gameplay.

I wonder, for example, which kind of difficulties should have the player. Right now, the astroship energy is sinked by asteroids hits, but I want "extend" it also to robots hits.

What do you think ?

Sergio.

It works, but no sound yet?
Controls seemed smooth.
I thought the flashing lights on the robo ships was very cool.
The power ups look good.
I'm not sure if that type of explosion will work on the asteroids, You will end up with big explosions everywhere from shooting asteroids, I had to tone down the explosions on my tank game, too much of good thing is not good, it was difficult to focus on the game.

Get some playable levels going and will test again.

Hi,
a new Asteroid version is available; please download it from here:
http://www.sergiomarcello.com/temp/asteroids.zip

Thanks to your suggestions, I have achieved several goals:

+ an easy but effective "Game Logic" whith increasing difficulty levels
+ Different explosion for each asteroid type
+ Astroship is destroyed when the Energy is empty - no worry, it comes back after a while !
+ when in "Chaos Missile Mode", the shots are limited to prevent FPS dropping
+ Dynamic background with rotating and blinking stars
+ Bug fix for random and nasty explosions under the astroship, which may produce a MAV (Memory Allocatioin Error). This issue has been fixed.
+ Miscellaneous cosmetic re-touch

Now I need some suggestions about the following topics:
? Is the game too easy or too hard to master ?
? Gives the game fun or is it boring ?
? Is the game too fast/too slow ?

For the Robots behaviour, I've thought the following:
1) they should damage the astroship
2) when a robots is destroyed by the player, it should release an Energy Bonus
3) if a robots is not destroyed, and enter in its self-destroying mode, then the robot explosion should damage the Astroship.

What do you think about this concept ?

New "weapons" are also under developing, and will be probably activated in the next version, as well as the suggested "wrapping line" which will also be a container for a new energy bar.

Thanks for your attention,
Sergio.

Hello,
a new version is available:
http://www.sergiomarcello.com/temp/asteroids.zip

Still no sound, but that will change for sure.

The most evident change is that now the robots could seriously damage the player ship.

If a robot is hit 5 times, it gives extra points, and releases an energy bonus sphere. You have to hit the sphere with the ship in order to increase the energy.

If a robot is not destroyed in a certain time, it will explode in a blast ring which damages the ship.

There is still lot to do, and thanks to the nice feedback, I have some exciting ideas that begin to take shape.

At this time, even if the ship lifes are endless, I wanted to release a playable version, in order to better test the gameplay .

Right now, the available bonus are:
E - Energy
M - chaos Missile
B - fire Bow
T- Triple shot

More to come...

Sergio.

That's pretty fun!
I got to level 6 with 10,000 points before posting this

Couple things:
I think the ship speeds up a little to fast (not that important,though)
There is a little bit of a delay between stages where my ship was destroyed by remaining enemies

I like how in the Fire Bow powerup the bullet fade off and dont go on forever.

~.~ first of all..... NO JOYSTICK CONTROLS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

other then that...it's graphics rocked, it's turning was perfect, and its particle effects were amazing.

Great game, keep up the good work.

One little bug, the asteroids have a weird little black outline against the stars that looks like it shouldn't be there.