StarDestroyer.Net BBS

I decided to play around in flash and make a game. It took about 3 hours to set up the basic game and then 3 days to put crap around it.

I did it mainly to get some familiarity with flash and to use some maths, then extended it into a mini game. I'd wondered if the reason that bullets move really slowly in flash games is because most flash game programmers are morons. It is. (The game was extremely efficient before I put all the additional crap in which i didnt bother to optimise too much... but it ran ok on a laptop and a macbook so i didnt bother to go over it any more). I also wondered what it would be like to have a gun that was effective. Its not supposed to be a proper serious game, (probably works as a parody of some well known franchise I cant quite put my finger on...)

Anyway, here it is:

http://www.kongregate.com/games/SteelGiant/derelict

A few nitpicks:
The health metre is confusing. You would expect a static health bar to be the measure of your health. Maybe you should try messing around with the special effects or something?
The melee attack was useless, its distance was just too short and simply using your power to get more ammo is more useful.
The greatest chore isn't not getting killed but conserving ammo.
The weapon sound was a bit annoying, especially when firing it rapidly.
The voice, being a computerized voice, was bad. Use subtitles please.

Overall, I don't find it compelling but I guess that's not what you were aiming for.

Not bad, thought not the kind of game that interests me much. I've never been a big fan of shooters, and I lose fast.

One little bug I seem to be running into is that when I try to teleport in more ammo, the screen goes blank. This didn't happen at first, just that last couple times.

Edit: worked fine last time around.

Gets pretty tedious after a while. Could benefit from having more than one enemy with different move characteristics. It looks very reminiscent of Space Hulk. Was that on purpose?

Agree with Zixinus, I'd say it would be most improved by extra enemy types, a clearer health bar, and a more useful secondary fire. Try out Boxhead (more rooms) for lots of weapon ideas...

But as far as a flash programming familiarization exercise, I'd rate it as pretty successful.

It amused me for ten minutes, code it as an Iphone app and make your money. All you need is a few different enemy types a few weapon choices and you have a fun little shooter.

On that note, the flashing heath bar is annoying, the melee attack is pointless, I'd rather have ammo then a punch. And yes to different enemy types, even if they swarm you same standard AI seeing some of the other blog-standard archetypes "Jumpers/Hoppers, sprinters, tank types ect"

That said, the gun is fun, the sound is a touch annoying after awhile. The sound file is to short so the loop points are to obvious.

Thanks for the comments guys. Yeah I'd say as it is its not that great a game in itself, and would benefit from more weapons, enemies, stuff happening and even some game balance. However as this was mainly a code project for me and adding content like characters and doodads was actually massively more time consuming than making the inner workings I thought I'd stick at a the bones of a game for the moment. Maybe once I've got a bit more time I'll go back and enhance it.

Of the issues you've presented, I'd say yep the health meter is a bit crap. Shooting things is indeed more effective than melee (although melee doesnt drain the teleport bar, i'm not sure if people thought that from a couple of the comments) although melee can always kill things before they get a hit in on you so its far from useless and can kill up to 1/4 of the enemies without using any ammo (not that that is any use as ammunition is plentiful at the moment).
The gun being too effective is something I'd change if i was making an actual game, along with having some weapon balance and a more sophisticated ammo system. The gun sound was a bit rubbish and seemed to sound more annoying as I used it more. Thing was I couldnt actually have it just make a bang when it fired each shot as it was actually firing 30 rounds per second and flash would shit its pants at that even if was a very short file, not to mention it wouldnt sound right anyway. I should probably have gone for making the weapon fire in 3+ round bursts (as its basically impossible to fire less anyway) and then i could have used a better sound file. Flash was not cooperative with the sound as it was (asking it to repeatedly stop a sound file seems to make that file progressively slower until you manually restart the player...?) and I couldnt face redoing that bit in the end.

Not sure what caused the issue with the teleport you had, The Romulan Republic, that doesnt use anything that could actually break flash apart from making about a dozen clips at once, its basically the same thing as when the melee goes off. Its manually coded in and doesnt use any functions that can go wrong...

As far as inspirations go, I couldnt comment on Space Hulk in case the copyright gremlins come after me Needless to say this is totally generic and doesnt directly use anyones IP... unless that person could also sue ALIENS and Starcraft (bet they wish they had a gun like that on the amerigo! )

As for the teleport, I have no idea. I don't know, maybe I hit the wrong key by mistake or something.

I'm curious as to weather its actually possible to win, or if the computer will endlessly spam troops until you die.

The Romulan Republic wrote:As for the teleport, I have no idea. I don't know, maybe I hit the wrong key by mistake or something.

I'm curious as to weather its actually possible to win, or if the computer will endlessly spam troops until you die.

It's possible to beat the first scenario it gives you, I know that. I don't know if it's possible to beat free play mode.

Zixinius wrote:Overall, I don't find it compelling but I guess that's not what you were aiming for.

Well, it looked quite good to me. Zixinius' nitpicks are on the spot as well. Especially regarding the firing sound. I'm sure you could google up some nice gunfire sounds (the background voices on this one would probably add a bit to the atmosphere. You could write it in as player's radio chatter). There is also a couple of cool machine gun sounds here.

Nevertheless, we shouldn't forget that...

Steel wrote:I did it mainly to get some familiarity with flash and to use some maths, then extended it into a mini game...<snip> It's not supposed to be a proper serious game, (probably works as a parody of some well known franchise I cant quite put my finger on...)

So let's take for what it is, and be thankful.

Great job, Steel! I've seen many flash games made by "professionals" that aren't half as good as yours. Keep it up!

A little question about the melee attack: does it automatically engage if an enemy gets close and you're out of ammo, or is their a key I have to press to activate it? I ask because I didn't see anything about how to use melee attack, but I don't think I've ever killed even one enemy in melee. Is it really that weak, or have I been doing something wrong? Sorry if this is a really obvious question.

The Romulan Republic wrote:A little question about the melee attack: does it automatically engage if an enemy gets close and you're out of ammo, or is their a key I have to press to activate it? I ask because I didn't see anything about how to use melee attack, but I don't think I've ever killed even one enemy in melee. Is it really that weak, or have I been doing something wrong? Sorry if this is a really obvious question.

Space bar. It's in the instructions. It will instantly kill an opponent if you do it right.

Raxmei wrote:

The Romulan Republic wrote:A little question about the melee attack: does it automatically engage if an enemy gets close and you're out of ammo, or is their a key I have to press to activate it? I ask because I didn't see anything about how to use melee attack, but I don't think I've ever killed even one enemy in melee. Is it really that weak, or have I been doing something wrong? Sorry if this is a really obvious question.

Space bar. It's in the instructions. It will instantly kill an opponent if you do it right.

Ah yes, I see I didnt mention space in the mini instructions bit, but it is on the instructions page ingame. The melee attack does shedloads of damage, so is sufficient to always kill any enemy currently in the game. It actually covers quite a large area (it used to kill everything in it, but I changed that to just the closest) although it is centered in front of the left hand, so it doesnt extend quite as far to your right side. I havent managed to not kill something in front of me with it, so its working as intended I say!

The Romulan Republic wrote:I'm curious as to weather its actually possible to win, or if the computer will endlessly spam troops until you die.

In the first scenario you play you should hear updates about the status of the rest of the team- did you have your sound on? The mission is slightly randomised, so different numbers of people will survive each time and the various stages of the mission will take different lengths of time, as well as it taking more or less time to get a lock at the end. The voice is a bit crap, and I should have put in some subtitles too, i suppose. Ironically the voice sounded more natural but then I actually passed it through some filters to make it sound more computerised. The 'free play' is designed to have no end.

How did it run for most people? I used a totally different technique to make all the body parts, so theoretically they should take no more processing power than just rendering the floor thats already there, instead of the standard technique of making each one an individual movieclip and then having to either erase some or melt the computer. One of the things i wanted to try and do was to see if i could find a way to have arbitrarily many bits on the floor, and thats sort of worked out. I think somethings not quite right though, as there may be a drop in performance as the mission goes on.

I felt the movement was a little too slow, especially for when your drop-off point is right next to the enemy spawn area.

Steel wrote:Ah yes, I see I didnt mention space in the mini instructions bit, but it is on the instructions page ingame. The melee attack does shedloads of damage, so is sufficient to always kill any enemy currently in the game. It actually covers quite a large area (it used to kill everything in it, but I changed that to just the closest) although it is centered in front of the left hand, so it doesnt extend quite as far to your right side. I havent managed to not kill something in front of me with it, so its working as intended I say!

Ok, got it now.

In the first scenario you play you should hear updates about the status of the rest of the team- did you have your sound on? The mission is slightly randomised, so different numbers of people will survive each time and the various stages of the mission will take different lengths of time, as well as it taking more or less time to get a lock at the end. The voice is a bit crap, and I should have put in some subtitles too, i suppose. Ironically the voice sounded more natural but then I actually passed it through some filters to make it sound more computerised. The 'free play' is designed to have no end.

Sound was off I think. As for survivors, I usually seem to hav 4 (out of 5?), which means I'm the first to day.

How did it run for most people? I used a totally different technique to make all the body parts, so theoretically they should take no more processing power than just rendering the floor thats already there, instead of the standard technique of making each one an individual movieclip and then having to either erase some or melt the computer. One of the things i wanted to try and do was to see if i could find a way to have arbitrarily many bits on the floor, and thats sort of worked out. I think somethings not quite right though, as there may be a drop in performance as the mission goes on.

Ran fine for me, except for the afforementioned teleportation issue.

Everything everyone said above, and

One problem is I was too busy listening to the sweet sweet sound of BRRR BRRR BRRR from the chaingun to actually hear Control Lady. I'm sure she had important stuff to say but I didn't really notice so I just kept shooting stuff until a timer appeared and it ended.

Ammo discipline is a bit too easy- 1 bullet kills a genestealer, so you can just fire single taps or short bursts far too easily. Perhaps add some spinup time (tis a chaingun after all), or variability (randomness) in how many bullets it takes? If you do that, you might want to give more ammo though since it'd be easier to run out. An overheating/cooldown thing would help people not blow through their ammo all at once.

A good test run for what could be a good game.

Duckie wrote:Everything everyone said above, and

One problem is I was too busy listening to the sweet sweet sound of BRRR BRRR BRRR from the chaingun to actually hear Control Lady. I'm sure she had important stuff to say but I didn't really notice so I just kept shooting stuff until a timer appeared and it ended.

Ammo discipline is a bit too easy- 1 bullet kills a genestealer, so you can just fire single taps or short bursts far too easily. Perhaps add some spinup time (tis a chaingun after all), or variability (randomness) in how many bullets it takes? If you do that, you might want to give more ammo though since it'd be easier to run out. An overheating/cooldown thing would help people not blow through their ammo all at once.

A good test run for what could be a good game.

Actually it takes at least 3 bullets to kill genestealer. However that is almost impossible to tell as the gun fires so fast, the only way to reliably tell is to see how many casings it just spat out as the bullets move too fast to reliably track by eye.

I'll put some better sounds and subtitles in the next one. Along with some detailing on the weapons.

I counted about four, when I started using Single-taps to conserve ammo.