I'd like to get some feedback on my space shooter project. Any suggestions (weapon ideas, ways to spice up the gameplay) are appreciated.

Wow! Looks cool! Reminds me of Starfox 64. You should put crosshairs where the lasers are shot and give an "in cockpit" first person mode. Have enemies similar to you dogfight you. Bombs are also good.

Thanks, tried some crosshairs but it's a bit wierd because I'm currently allowing left/right weapon swapping independently (there's also "main" and "special"), and it's a bit wierd when shooting the missile allong with the laser... I like that the different weapons have really different characteristics, the missile is affected by the players momentum, but as a result it shoots somewhat off-target when you turn (your momentum is taking both you and your missile in another direction). It seemed wierd that it didn't shoot exactly where the reticle was (you'd point at the enemy and miss), and if I made the reticle adjust it was even more strange. Without the reticle you get used to the behavior of the missiles and can target accurately by adjusting for your momentum... Another interesting side-effect is when dual wielding the missiles and lasers you can shoot your own missiles out of the air because lasers shoot independently of your momentum. But I think something is needed, it's unfortunate to not have any targeting aid. Was considering having targeting aids on each enemy ship, like a per-ship targeting overlay that changes color and animates when the ship is in your sights - that way it could adjust for the individual characteristics of different weapons.

What do you guys think about per-enemy targeting aids instead of a reticle?

AI does change when enemies reach a certain distance they break from their flocks somewhat and make passes at you, veering off before they hit you, then they'll retreat and make another pass. You can also chase them and they'll try to evade, and they'll chase you as well - "barrel roll" strafing like what I'm doing in the video helps avoid getting shot if enemies are on your tail. I don't think they were very visible in the video, but there was a couple of small fast enemies on my tail that were shooting the lasers.

I do intend to have a bomb, but haven't yet decided how it'll behave. Weapons have to be powerful enough to be fun, but weak enough to be usable in multiplayer, so I can't just have the bomb kill everything in sight. Some options I'm mulling are a simple radius effect bomb (simple explosion), a bomb that sends shock waves only along some planes (avoidable bombs might enhance gameplay), or a bomb that explodes and throws random shrapnel to avoid, or maybe some combination of those. Another consideration is how it's launched. Is it on a specific timer, do you hold it like a grenade for a shorter launch, or do you charge it to shoot it further before it blows.

Graphically I should probably apply the distortion effect (also used for cloaking in the video) to the explosions and do something better with the model rather than just having it disappear into nowhere (this is especially noticable with bigger ships).

Another thing I'm considering is supporting multiple gameplay modes for singleplayer (think super-mario galaxy) - smooth transitions between 2D sidescroller, 3D free roam, and 3D rails style gameplay might produce a fun variety.

Solid stuff there :-)

I have a long career track record in the space shooter genre, so I always like seeing other people experiment in that realm.


Couple of minor suggestions:

- Tiny visual touches go a long way, especially in a game where most everything is black and empty. Some things you might play with include spicing up the starfield backdrop, adding nebula/supernova/other type graphics to the "sky", and so on; adding some space debris or other tiny stuff that helps give visual cues as to where you are in the vacuum (this might be in there and just hard to see in the video?); and of course making the effects feel a bit "beefier" - e.g. lasers feel really, really deadly with the right graphical effects, and explosions can be downright jaw-dropping with good artwork. You've got a solid beginning but I feel like it could be a truly spectacular experience if you bump up the visual polish a notch or two.

- I didn't get a chance to listen to the audio (if there is any in the video) as I'm sat at work, but one thing that makes space games feel so much better is lots of bass. You seriously can not go wrong with overpowering bass rumbles. Fly by another ship's engines? Rumble. Blow something up? Big rumble. Flying through empty space? Fuck it, rumble some more ;-) Even laser effects can go from "meh" to "DAMN that's cool" just by changing up the standard "pew pew zap" laser effect to something with some meaty roar to it.

- 30 seconds is a bit brief to really get a feel for gameplay, so I'd love a chance to actually kick around in your game for a while and see what it's actually like before commenting much in that arena. If you're going for an action shooter, though, I'd recommend adding some really big-ass space ships with massive guns (remember: big shiny distortion-heavy laser beams and lots of bass!) to add some sphincter-clencher moments to it. Think IWAR type stuff.


Keep at it and definitely keep us posted with demos and whatnot; as I said I love pretty much anything set in space :-)

Thanks for the great advice!

I do have a space dust effect like you suggest (youtube downsampling made it disappear) and the environment is fully procedural, animated wavelet noise on the planets (fully randomized off a single seed). Stars vary in color and parallax slightly perturbed with a bubble so they never seem to fly by. It's an infinite volume of stars, and the parallax can support a cool "hyperspace" effect for traversing long distances quickly. As a bonus the aliasing on the procedural stars makes em twinkle :-). The video really doesn't do the graphics justice.

But overall I agree the space environment is weak - what would you suggest for nebulae and subtleties in the starscape? Billboards?

Have audio, and the weapon sounds are pretty good (and I have lots more to choose from), but I'm not the biggest fan of the current music - a bit boring for a fast paced action game. Haven't tried engine rumble yet - do you put it on your own ship as well as enemies (and doesn't get annoying)? I'd probably vibe the xbox remote too...

Weakest part right now's the visual models & art. It's very programmer-heavy thus far and models aren't normal mapped, still have pretty lousy particle effect textures, just generally need to get some art in it... I'm considering doing a kickstarter.com to get money to invest money in good, detailed, normal-mapped 3D models.

No name for the game yet.

The gameplay looks nice.

Tried adding some stuff to spice up the sky per ApochPiQ's suggestion, used billboards created an easy bang for my buck for really spicing up the graphics. Here's some screens - looks like it helped quite a bit!

[sharedmedia=gallery:images:1969]
[sharedmedia=gallery:images:1970]

Kick ass!

Incidental question - is the texture resolution a limit of the software/hardware pipeline you have going, or could it be boosted? Everything (aside from the nebulas!) looks slightly blurry to me.

can be boosted. I just tried a 3000x3000 texture which helped some to make it crisper.

Only thing that sucks about the billboard is it looks so flat in an otherwise fully procedural world. At some point I think I'll come back and do it procedurally as well...