Alien Raeign

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

Hello JGOnauts,

some of you might have already seen me post one or two things on here, allthough I haven’t been very active lately.
Anyhow, I’ve decided to show you my game Alien Raeign (Rain + Reign, yes I know… very clever) even though it’s in
a very early stage. Reason being that motivation is starting to fade again and I’m starting to be unhappy with things.
I thought showing it to the public might reignite the passion a bit :slight_smile:

But of course, the main reason for showing it is that I’d like to get some feedback from you.

http://imageshack.us/a/img837/334/8cda.png

Here’s the rough idea:
You are stranded on an alien planet with only a link to your home-planet but no means to return there. Your goal will
either be to find a way to get back to your home-planet OR plain and simple to survive as long as possible.
You wake up next to your wreck of a spaceship, it’s raining, everything seems fine and dandy (given the circumstances…)
and you start to build a shelter and plant the last seeds you managed to rescue from the spaceship.
But as it stopped raining for a while and starts to rain again you notice that the rain looks different now… you are left to
mourn as your plants burst into flames, leaving you without any food and you starve to death.

But hey… now you know, time to try again :smiley:
The attributes and colour of the rain will be randomly generated (nutritious, acidic, poisonous, etc…) and is pretty much the
key gameplay feature. It effects the plants, machinery, natural resources, everything.
You will be able to build cover for your precious food that you can active/deactivate considering if the current rain is good or
bad for them, machinery to analyze the rain, predict the weather, alter it’s attributes, whatever is fun.
As mentiond there will be hunger, also perma-death, fatal decisions (you send an alien resource to your home-planet without
analyzing it properly, oh crap, the resource was host to an alien virus, the human race dies, link to homeplanet gone for the
rest of the game … or at least delayed till they manage to get rid of the virus)

Enough blabbing… I’d really appreciate some feedback from you. Especially to what I already have done,
is the pokemon’ish grid based movement annoying? Is it at least somewhat visually appealing? Does the rain look
decent? Etc.

Controls:
-WASD to move
-J to take, put down objects
-K to plant seeds (they grow)
-SHIFT (hold) to turn on the spot

And the JAR of course.

#2

Nice start, I really like the rain on the ground.

Just a few things I notice whilst messing around.

  • Would be nice to have some indicator that I am carrying anything or not, kept trying to pick stuff up without having dropped what I had already.
  • It may just be a personal thing but the controls seem a little weird, maybe some diagonal movement might help with that.
  • Couldn’t resist making some shapes out of the blocks.

Good start, keep going.

#3

Oh that was quick, thank you for the feedback Bearded Cow!

Yeah I originally wanted to implement free movement, as in move where you want, no grid.
But I had a little trouble implementing the collision avoidance last time so I decided to go the
easy route and implemented grid based movement :confused:
We’ll see, might tackle it again.

And yes, an indicator is planned. I actually wanted to dive into shaders for that but couldn’t
really find any good sources to learn it (I’m using libGdx). Would be great if someone could
point me to some.

Oh and another thing… I noticed that the colours get darker when the camera is moving,
does anyone have an idea why that could be? Very odd.

#4

The grid based movement was somewhat annoying at first, but after a short while, I got used to it. I don’t think that would be a problem. The game was quite visually appealing. In particular, I loved the effect as the rain splashed onto the ground.

Just wondering, what are those things on the ground supposed to be?

#5

Cool. I’m waiting for more progress, can’t wait to see how this turns out. Perhaps show the item I’m picking up somewhere on the screen? I can’t really tell sometimes if I picked something up or not. Keep working hard, the animations look very polished, well done :slight_smile:

#6

Thank you for the feedback!

Alien resources, but they are pretty much just a placeholder, I dont think they will find their way in the final game.

#7

Looks good. I don’t find the movement annoying at all. The rain effect is indeed pretty cool.

#8

Nice story/idea and animations, it looks very good!
What you should implement is some GUI, the diagonal movement (should be easy to do) and maybe a little (maybe text-based) intro in the game.
Oh, and the wreck ^^

#9

Looks nice and I like the idea very much :smiley:
Just one thing I noticed, if you move the player to the bounds of the world, the rain doesn’t fill the screen anymore. I guess you position the rain over the player, instead you could position it according to the camera.

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#10

haha wow :smiley:

and yes that is correct, forgot to fix that. Thank you!

#11

This is looking really cool man. The rain effect looks really awesome. I can’t wait to see what kind of game this is going to turn out to be :smiley: