Roid Rage

[help computer]

Hi everyone!

I've been learning Lua for the last two weeks or so, and LOVE for the past week, which has made it even easier.

Anyway this is my first game called "Roid Rage", it's about asteroids, not power lifting.

It's a simple shooter where you destroy oncoming asteroids of various flavours with lasers and bombs. I'd like to tweak the game further, maybe setup some kind of mission and upgrade structure, fix up the interface, but I thought it better to try and get feedback first to make sure the thing actually runs well. I'm particularly concerned that I went overboard on the particle systems (I loves me some explosions) and it'll run like a snail through molasses on low-end machines. That's why I've left the FPS check on to make it easy to report, although I realise it does slow things down itself too.

Regardless, any kind of feedback would be great.

Cheers

EDITS:

Beta 3

- Increased speed of table insertions and access a little bit.

Beta 2

- Changed non-power of two images to be compatible with older machines.
- Added an options screen to change explosion size and music on/off.
- Made laser auto-fire and is slower.
- LMB now enables a shield.
- Last high score name is saved while game is running.
- Disabled v-sync by default, for now.
- Interface changes to main play screen.

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.love: https://github.com/downloads/helpcomput ... Beta3.love
Source: https://github.com/helpcomputer/Roid-Rage

[TechnoCat]

Haha, I love the character input menu.

[StoneCrow]

nice game !
cant beat the top score on it though

[JDFight]

Very cool game! I am running an old machine (Powerbook g4 1.6ghz - Debian Squeeze) - yep - the framrate does drop to below 20fps whenever there are explosions on my screen - So, if you are targeting older hardware, you may want to change the explosions a bit - Perhaps add an options screen with an adjustable graphic effects setting... or detect when the framerate drops and adjust the explsoion effects automatically? The game runs fast (60 - 100fps) on my system when there are no explosions on the screen.

Another thing you may want to consider if you are targeting older systems is power of 2 texture sizes. A lot of older graphics cards require power of 2 textures - otherwise, the graphics appear as white rectangles - I had to modify several of your images by padding them with transparent space to get the game to run on my system. I tend to recommend using power of 2 for everything because it ensures a greater range of compatibility.

(I also have an issue with .ogg sound files and openal... so I had to convert your music files to mp3... but I think that is an issue specific to my machine.)

Here's my version with power of 2 textures...

[kikito]

I liked it!

I missed being able to move left/right though.

Also, as it is now, the left mouse button is a bit worthless - there is no reason to stop firing, ever. I would either add a reason to do it (conserve special ammo, weapon overheat, etc) or I would make the ship auto-fire-all-the time. That last option would liberate the left mouse button - maybe you could then have two types of special attack (bombs and missiles or something)

[help computer]

Haha, I love the character input menu.

I stole it from some old game, I just can't remember which one. I guess that's called inspiration!

nice game !
cant beat the top score on it though

There's some luck involved, especially if you just got hit by two gold asteroids flying at full speed.

Very cool game! I am running an old machine (Powerbook g4 1.6ghz - Debian Squeeze) - yep - the framrate does drop to below 20fps whenever there are explosions on my screen - So, if you are targeting older hardware, you may want to change the explosions a bit - Perhaps add an options screen with an adjustable graphic effects setting... or detect when the framerate drops and adjust the explsoion effects automatically? The game runs fast (60 - 100fps) on my system when there are no explosions on the screen.

At this point I'm learning toward an options screen anyway. If you can, could you try it on your system with line 15 of explosion.lua changed to something like 100-400 for the newParticleSystem buffer? 100 doesn't look awful, just small. I'm also wondering if a scaled (or simply bigger) particle image when less particles are used would work, so the explosion still looks big.

Another thing you may want to consider if you are targeting older systems is power of 2 texture sizes. A lot of older graphics cards require power of 2 textures - otherwise, the graphics appear as white rectangles - I had to modify several of your images by padding them with transparent space to get the game to run on my system. I tend to recommend using power of 2 for everything because it ensures a greater range of compatibility.

I'll use them, thanks a lot! Although you may have noticed (only on medium-sized asteroids) that the hitbox is bigger, and the point of rotation is off now, since by default the width and height of an entity is 80% of it's loaded image size, but it shouldn't be hard to fix.

(I also have an issue with .ogg sound files and openal... so I had to convert your music files to mp3... but I think that is an issue specific to my machine.)

Ironically I converted them to .ogg because I was having problems with mp3 (an intermittent clicking sound) This is in Ubuntu, I've yet to try in Windows 7. If you want, you can find the original mp3's on http://www.mattmcfarland.com.

I liked it!

I missed being able to move left/right though.

Also, as it is now, the left mouse button is a bit worthless - there is no reason to stop firing, ever. I would either add a reason to do it (conserve special ammo, weapon overheat, etc) or I would make the ship auto-fire-all-the time. That last option would liberate the left mouse button - maybe you could then have two types of special attack (bombs and missiles or something)

That's a good idea! Shield perhaps another option.

[bartbes]

Awesome, nice game, good music, well designed (ui). I'd prefer it if the name entry stored the last one entered though, because it's not the fastest way of entering text, it gets tedious after.. one time.

[nevon]

That was really cool! I agree with bartbes about the name thing, though. Took me forever to write my name, and it isn't even very long.

[JDFight]

Yep - Changing line 15 of explosion.lua to :

Code: Select all

self.ps = lg.newParticleSystem(IMG, size * 100)

makes the game play much better on my machine - The framerate stays around 30fps when explosions are rendered on screen - (not optimal - but certainly playable - it is basically double the framerate I had before)

[JDFight]

I'll use them, thanks a lot! Although you may have noticed (only on medium-sized asteroids) that the hitbox is bigger, and the point of rotation is off now, since by default the width and height of an entity is 80% of it's loaded image size, but it shouldn't be hard to fix.

Yeah - I figured there might be some sort of shifting/ broken rotations when changing the base size of the texture - The good thing is that it was a very simple tweak to get the game functional on my system - Power of 2 can be a real pain to deal with in certain cases. Although, definitely worthwhile considering system compatibility.