Synposis of game, as well as general direction, assorted, unorganized notes:
Space Dungeon is a fast-paced, arcade-ish action game. In some ways, you could think of it as a fast-paced, linear Legend of Zelda. Or, perhaps, a game like Berzerk ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berzerk ), but with more variety of weapons and enemies. Speaking of which, the basic idea weapons is: you will start out with a basic melee weapon (a "sword" of sorts), and as you progress farther into the game you will pick up different weapons like pistols, machine guns, and the like. All the weapons, with the exception of the sword and pistol, will have limited ammo. There won't be weapon selection; instead there will be three slots - melee, "blaster", explosives. Like in a lot of shmups, picking up a weapon in one slot/category will replace whatever was there until ammo runs out. The explosives slot will have shared ammo.
To encourage the "twitch factor" of the gameplay, as well as the ruthlessness, the game will feature a "one hit kill" life system, as opposed to a health system like LOZ. That being said, I will try my hardest to avoid making the game frustrating. Hard shouldn't mean frustrating!
As far as visuals: originally I was going for a look much closer to games like Berzerk. Basically, what you could call the "Atari 2600" look. After drawing several sprites in that style and implementing them into my engine, I didn't think that it was really all that appealing. Instead of looking "retro," it just looked bad. After a lot of experimenting, I went towards the current "pseduo-vector" style, which I'm really happy with. I think it, combined with a few effects I have in place, give the game a nice atmosphere. I plan on creating a Moroder-esque driving soundtrack, which should add to that atmosphere quite a bit.
Oh, and as far as enemies: right now I just have a stupid, wandering enemy. I plan on adding enemies that wander/patrol but then chase the enemy when they see him, and enemies that do the same but stand guard instead of patrol. There will also be shooting enemies that aim at the player, and possibly stationary "turrets" which shoot in one particular direction at a fixed rate (e.g., one shot every 2 seconds).
Another thing I want to add is joystick/gamepad support, and possibly custom key configuration support.
What I have so far:
I have much of the framework in place already. Aside from more general things like a class system (courtesy of MiddleClass) and collision (courtesy of bump.lua), a few other things that are in place are: a smooth LOZ-style "mini grid" player movement (to almost ensure that the player will never get stuck on walls or have trouble walking through doorways or turning corners), player melee and basic blaster attacks, level loading & level exits, a custom level editor with level loading and saving, the visuals (which I'm pretty happy with, I think), and basic "mindless" enemies which can be killed.
Why am I sharing this?:
While the game is very playable at this point, in some ways this might be a little early to share. Nevertheless, I'm sharing this now for a very specific reason: a game like this needs to be very "tight," and needs to run well. I don't ever want a player to feel like they were cheated - if they die, I want it to be because they screwed up, not because of poor control or something.
So, I'd love for you guys to check out what I have and tell me what you think of how it plays. Please feel free to make any gameplay change suggestions, and also to point out any bugs that you see. I'd also love to hear what framerate you're getting (I'm getting a consistent 260 to 280 FPS), and your computer specs. I'm really curious about the framerate actually, since I've spent a fair amount of time optimizing the code (nothing too crazy though).
Get it:
You can find the LOVE file attached to this post. [NOTE: the demo "blue screens" at the end of the third level, since it tries to change to level 4, which does not exist.]
Here are the controls:
Movement: Arrow keys
Run: Left shift key (hold)
Melee attack: Z key
Blaster attack: X key
Thanks everybody!
EDIT:
(2013-07-01) Changed player movement code so that it doesn't look so jumpy when at lower framerates.
