Be Excellent To Each Other

I made a game!

It was part of a game jam, where games journos and developers swapped places. You can read all about it here:
http://www.develop-online.net/topics/tag/journodevswap

The game I made isn't yet publicly released, will be in a few days, but I've got a beta build you can get your mits on if you'd like to. It's Windows only atm, but there will be a Mac version later.

If you'd like to play it, let me know, and I will send you a message with a download link.

Me. What is it?

It's a shmup!

Well then.. Me please.

Ooh, me too please!

Cheers, Lewie!
First thoughts - fun and frustrating in equal measure. It's tough, and sometimes feels unfair, but it's definitely got that "one more go" quality about it. Took me a while to get to grips with it, but I finally had a good run and got up to third on the high score table.
My main niggle was just with the randomness of the reflector placements. Quite a lot of the time they're completely unusable, and since they're key to staying safe from your own bullets and getting a high score, it's frustrating to have some games hamstrung by reflectors stuck at the bottom of the screen or spawning at an unhelpful angle.

Oh, and this may be a personal thing, but allowing the player to be killed by touching the top or bottom of the screen is a bit of a cheap death IMO. I know they're supposed to be giant reflectors, but I found it quite annoying.

But! It's a lot of fun! Needs a little polish (but it's a beta, after all), but I like it a lot.

Very clever idea - in effect you're your own worst enemy because it's your own bullets that are killing you most of the time. Definitely puts a cerebral spin on your traditional shooter. Good work Lewie!

Give it a try, folks!

The reflectors/barriers being totally random isn't necessarily ideal, I agree. One of the things that we said we would have done if we had more time is to make a series of authored levels with barriers in specific places, with specific strategies in mind for them. (Edit: They aren't required for survival by any means, although clearly some configurations are much more useful than others).

And yeah, I'm not totally happy with the death upon hitting the edge of the screen thing. It was a bit of a duct-tape solution to a bigger problem.

It is beta, but don't expect anything noticeable to change between now and release except for a couple of bugfixes.

Glad you enjoyed it, and thanks for playing!

Also


Just Like Real Life!

Trailer:

Web version. uses Unity Web Player.

Although doesnt seem to save high scores ?

Interesting idea. Is it supposed to auto-fire or not; as my experience with the browser based version was a bit inconsistent. When I first spawn after dying I had to manually click to fire off a bullet, but after that first one went out it would auto-fire at a fixed rate (which I could add further manually triggered bullets to as well).

It's always autofiring. After you die, you turn red and then click once to respawn (when you have got into a position you like). Clicking doesn't do anything else. The idea is that part of the challenge is dodging bullets you have just fired, so they bounce of the walls twice, and because you are always shooting, you have to always be careful. It's sort of explained on the "How to play" screen, but not particularly clearly. We were tired by then. The rate of fire increases with the waves, making you more deadly to the enemies, and potentially yourself.


It does save high scores, but it asks you to enter your name even if you don't set a high score. There is an online leaderboard with the top 50 names here, only the top 10 are displayed in game.

Its the 'top 10 only displayed in game' that threw me

** edit actually its top 11 in game ? **





And no idea if your looking for feedback or not but the quit button doesnt work on the web version , I'd like to add an achivement for staying alive a certain amount of time without scoring a point and one for scoring zero points without crashing into the outer wall

I also think it would be good to have the multibullets you shoot out from the power up as either a different icon or a different colour from your main ones (easier to trace) - and i'd like to see what Multipliers people got up to (i'm currently 4th and 7th on the leaderboards and i think 8x is my best multiplier)

Downloadable version out now:
http://karnbianco.co.uk/blog/2012/10/13 ... real-life/