Asteroids Again :/

This is something thats been sitting in by code bin for years and I can never seem to finish it off, I have no idea why but this week I just picked it up and started working on it again.

Here is where its at. Let me know what you think.

http://www.coreillusions.co.uk/games/pds/pds.rar - 19meg

Screen Shots.
Well, an old video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JteXMpZ-Xf0

Here are some game details just to make your play a little better and to try and reduce your learning curve.

Left Mouse : Fire
Right Mouse : Thrust

There are 3 fire types at the moment, with missiles planned before its main release.

currently there 5 safe power ups, 1 for each gun type, 1 shield and 1 power cell. the power cells recharge your gun power, the more you have the less chance your guns energy bar will run out.

There are mines, that drop from time to time, they have a 5 second timer on them, get close and it starts, stay close and your dead, the timer will reduce as you progress through the levels.

The levels come in stages, each stage has 5 sets of asteroids to clear.

At the start of some stages comets will fly by, these things will aim for your ship, so if you plan to just pick a corner and sit there blasting its not going to work.

At the end of each stage, or each set of 5 levels, all of the blasting you have done has created a field of debris this is a level with around 20+ mini asteroids all fast moving, and all deadly with your guns or shield are not up to the job, there are also 3 comets, to make sure your not planning on just sitting still and twirling the mouse o.O.

The levels are basic at the moment, only the first 10 are really accurate, the other 40 are just copies of the first 10 with the type of asteroids changed, thats something I am still working on, fine tunning each of them to challenge the player.

As for the controls. I know some of you would expect a w,a,s,d and mouse to shoot setup, I did have this but found that the game was way to easy, something i might look at again in the future tho.

Anyway. thanks in advance for looking at this. its one of those life long projects you can never seem to finish so would be good to finally get the book closed on it.

oh and pls don't post about the file size. ;)

::edit::

could use some feedback guys...

Cool. I love it. The best asteroids game i´ve ever played. but i dont really understand the HUD. the indicates right and left beside the fire-energie indicate. Maybe he shield should be better, because the game ends so fast...
Thanks for that nice game.

Hi Yavin,
I've really enjoyed the video.

The game seems smooth and quite polished. Some work is required in the gfx, in particular in background. I would like to see some spinning planet, stars, and nebulae for example. I really liked the glove effect you apply to the firing bullets.

Quite frankly, I'm not a fan of the mouse-driven control; but that's my personal opinion, and perhaps I just have to be accustomized to it. I guess that you can control the ship to move or to fire at the mouse position.

Note that I'm speaking only about the video here, because the download size has quite scared me :-/

Which software did you use for videocapture ?

Regards,
Sergio.

P.S.
If you fancy, take a look at my asteroids WIP. Would be nice to have some feedback too:
www.sergiomarcello.com/wip/asteroids.zip
(sorry for hijacking the thread)

@Starwar : thanks m8, yeah the shield has only 3 levels so after your shield drops your fair game for any rogue asteroid or comet. There will be 1up's floating around but yeah you will start with only 1 ship. any more will be gained through a score bonus or one of the mentioned 1up's that you can find.

As for the hud, I still need to do some help screens but it should be prety self explanatory, your ship bottom left, shows 3 rings around it, these are your sheilds.

The 3 main powerbars next to your shield are your left,mid and right gun cells, when you start only your middle gun cell will drop in power as you fire. as you power up to shooting two bullets, your left and right cells will degrade and then when your on full gun power shooting 3 bullets all 3 cells will degrade.

Your power cells can be recharged faster by collecting more batteries, which you will see floating around.

Quick Tip, any drop with a green indicator is safe. anything with a red one is deadly. an orange one shows items that could help or hinder your progress.

@Semar : yeah the video is a bit old now, and I agree the one thing I hate the most at the moment are the back grounds, having said that the backgrounds in the demo are better than those in the video, but even saying that they are still not exactly what I want.

Yeah checked yours out , really cool I love the 2D feel to it. really nice particle and bullet types as well.

Don't let the download size scare you, its that large because while I am working on a project all media is exposed and in its raw formats, I will compress everything down once Its finished.


Thanks for all your feedback. need more tho.. I will upload some screen shots later I know people avoid downloading stuff unless they can actually see what it is they are downloading.