Early first demo

Cosmologicon on 2009/09/01 03:06 of Universe Factory 9
— edited on 2009/09/01 05:30

Finally got a good idea. Top-down action game. You're a wizard who uses feathers as wands, each one casting a different spell. (Originally, you used the feather as a quill to write the spell on a scroll, but why complicate things?) A hawk spell slashes enemies, a dove spell puts them to sleep, etc.

Spells fly through the air and bounce off walls. I want to make bouncing a big part of the gameplay, where you have to set up complicated shots around corners. I uploaded a playable demo to illustrate the spell-bouncing physics. It's you and another wizard running around a room. I realize that (a) the action is way too fast to set up tricky shots, so I'll need to balance things better, and (b) the AI is going to be hard.

Controls are Arrow keys to move + mouse click to fire. I don't like this scheme: I want the player to be able to use just the mouse or just the keyboard. But, since the direction of shots is so critical, I'm not sure how best to use the keyboard for aiming.

Oh well, plenty more to work on in the meantime!

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Comments

saluk on 2009/09/01 04:44:

Aw, but mouse + keyboard is the combination of the gods.

georgek on 2009/09/01 06:01:

agreed, mouse aiming with keyboard movement is the way to go.

saluk on 2009/09/01 06:03:

Then again, it could be like yoshi's island where part of the game is timing it so it goes the direction you want :)

nitrofurano on 2009/09/01 08:01:

it looks and feels a bit like Reactor (arcade, atari2600)

alia on 2009/09/01 09:06:

Even in this early state - its fun :) Having things to hide behind will help too.

wary on 2009/09/02 16:01:

it is going to be good game, but it is quite buggy: in demo i can get out of the polygon by moving to any corner.

Nannerpuss on 2009/09/02 17:05:

I would suggest W, A ,S, D movement along with, or instead of the arrow keys for movement to make it easier to mouse with the right hand.

Cosmologicon on 2009/09/02 19:12:

wary: thanks for the note. For me, I can only escape the polygon if the framerate is very low, around 10. I'll fix that, but it concerns me if you're getting such a low framerate on this demo. When you quit the game with Esc, it prints out the framerate. Can you tell me what it says for you?

Okay, here's the control scheme I'm planning on. Hopefully it'll please everybody:

Move: Arrow keys or W/A/S/D or ,/A/O/E or right mouse click
Aim/fire: Hold space + movement keys or left mouse click
Choose weapon: number keys
Cycle through weapons: tab or scroll wheel or Q/E or '/.

The ,/A/O/E is for Dvorak users. It's in the same place as W/A/S/D.  Likewise '/. is in the same place as Q/E.