25.08.08

DS3

Posted in OSGi, everything, games, rapid prototyping, shmups at 9:43 pm by the2bears

DS3 is a game I finished in 2 weeks for the most recent Rapid Prototype Session at Shmup-Dev. It’s a gallery shooter, and my tribute to Galaga.

The arrow keys move you left and right, while the ‘Z‘ key is for firing. I guess while I talk about controls: ‘P‘ for pause, and ‘Esc‘ is your friend, takes you back to the main menu and from there it also quits. You can button mash ‘Z‘, or hold it down for auto-fire but it’s slower.

Each enemy takes 2 hits to destroy, and enemies that are hit once (call this “damaged”) will be indicated by a slight change in colours. I’m not too satisfied with this look, it’s not really obvious and could certainly use improvement. The same goes for the “converted” enemies, which I use gray-scale to convey.

All enemies that escape off the screen float back into position from the top. Damaged enemies that return, come back converted, and it’s in your best scoring interest to allow enemies to be converted. Converted enemies split into 8 clones when attacking, and they explode more violently. Their blue explosions chain to other enemies caught in the blast, running up a score multiplier quickly if multiple chains are splining their way down.

Once again I make use of Dave Bollinger’s Pixel Spaceship ideas. I owe thanks to DrPetter as well, for SFXR. I’ll talk a little more about the game in an upcoming post mortem.

Download DS3 here. No Java WebStart yet, until I figure out how to get that working with my OSGi framework.

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