Ha. But the arrows are lacking precision, don’t you find?
I’d actually prefer to play it with JUST the keyboard. WASD to move, and arrow keys to aim.
Hmmm. You can try playing the game with arrow keys and spacebar.
It’s a lot harder, and i don’t think it adds anything to the gameplay.
I realize that not all have a mouse at hand with all the laptops of today, but i really think this game benefits from mouse control.
So long story short i think i’ve quite satisfied with the controls, even though i might consider your ideas for future games.
Thanks for the suggestions in either case 
- Scarzzurs
Really nice game, thumbs up again to you Scarzzurs , your productivity amaze me!! Nice to see some other indy java game developers from Denmark. Keep up the good work!!
Heh, thanks a lot.
Yeah, i’m also quite happy to find other danish people out there doing the same as me.
There’s a small community dedicated to the danish game scene at http://spiludvikling.dk.
You might want to check that site out aswell…
- Scarzzurs
´
Yep i know it, im checking the forums several times a week
There are Danes all over the place writing games!
It’s a conspiracy.
Cas
Nice! Really cool graphics, did you draw them? 8)
@princec:
I’m just a little worried that the number of jobs doesn’t follow the number of people writing games
@j_jerrik:
Aight.
@Renoria:
Thanks. Yeah, i can’t afford to pay an artist, so i have to make due with what i can cook up myself.
I’m very glad you like it though.
If you find that not all the graphics are of the same quality i’d be happy to hear about it aswell.
I had an old friend of mine playtest some of my games. He noticed that my games aren’t that rewarding. So i’m trying to add that to the game. First thing will be to add small floating text messages showing that you gain points when you kill something. My explosions in the game have become much better recently, but i think they need to look even better aswell.
- Scarzzurs
Hey again.
Game is still in development, in fact i’ve made some major improvements recently.
Game now features eight enemies, eight upgrades, eight stages and two powerups.
Graphics have improved, performance have been optimized.
The game now has a highscore list.
I added lives to the game, but as you are allowed to enter the highscore list, even if you don’t make it through the game, i think i should perhaps remove lives again. I think i’d be better with no retries at all, or infinite retries and a dialog with two buttons and the text:
“You have died.”
“Replay Stage / Submit Highscore”
Any thoughts?
I did a bit of marketing and are now getting around 20 visitors a day to my website, so that’s pretty good.
I’m still interesting in getting a sponsor, but i’m guessing that is ridiculous unless i get atleast 100 visitors a day…
- Scarzzurs
amazing game!!! I was shocked and amazed when I played it. are you only a hobbyist?
Heh, I’ll take that as a compliment.
But yeah, making games is my hobby.
I’d like to make money from my products, but that have failed so far.
I haven’t earned anything, but i haven’t spend that much either, so i guess it’s ok…
Anyways, all comments and suggestions are welcome
- Scarzzurs
you may want to have misiles. but they can only be used every once and a while.
Pretty fun! However, when I press esc it shouldn’t quit the entire game and force me to restart. :-\
@Demonpants:
Thanks. Yeah, you are right, i’ll look into it soon
@h3ckboy:
Hmm yeah. I don’t want to have activated weapons though, so i’d have to be activated periodicly or something similar…
Thanks for the suggestion
- Scarzzurs
Very nice game, I enjoyed playing it - got (barely) to TOP 10 on my first try! 8) I will play it again, for sure. Only problem was that the game was running quite slowly… It worked somewhat smoothly when there was only my ship and no bullets on screen. Whenever there was some action, it got quite choppy, I’d guess below 20 fps or atleast way below 30. It made playing a bit difficult, unfortunately. The screens between stages were the slowest, but since you had some heavy alpha blending going on it’s no wonder… You’re not using OpenGL, right? Perhaps it would be faster on Windows (as the 2d gfx accelerations tend to work better there), I’m currently in Linux.
What does the cache gfx option do in this case? I tried it, but it didn’t seem to make much difference. I noticed some of the explosions were different (and not transclucent).
I would suggest you add more variety to the background, like some nebulae / space dust clouds drifting around. If the game was running in pure OpenGL, that wouldn’t be a problem, but I can see it degrading the performance quite a lot otherwise (I was thinking of alpha blended clouds). I used something like that in my game Funguloids (ok, it was C++ and Ogre3d, but anyway :)) and it looked quite nice in motion, if I may say so myself. 
Anyways, keep up the good work! It’s a nice game.
Hey mh114
Thanks for your feedback. Glad you like it
It’s a shame it doesn’t run better on your machine. However, since you are running linux, i think it might be a good idea to try the OpenGL version of the game. Atleast all the symptoms you mention are often cured when running that version. I’d like to hear if it improves the performance if you test it
The “Cache GFX” option stores tranformed images to try to improve performance. However when using the OpenGL pipeline or something like it, performance actually seems to decrease. So this option will most likely be removed in future versions. And since you don’t experience much of a performance game it is even more likely to happen soon.
The explosions introduced in later versions doesn’t work well with caching, so that’s why they look different in the two versions.
I absolutely agree about the background. I have been planning it for a while, but due to the current story-line it didn’t seem like such a great idea. However now that you remind me of it, i think i’ll rewrite the story and change scenery every once in a while.
I’ll be sure to check out your game, sounds like you have some good ideas
Again, thanks alot for taking the time to provide feedback
- Scarzzurs
Darn, did you just add the OpenGL version or have I managed not to see it before…? Either way, it works much better, only stuttering occasionally. My second play was much better as the game ran smoother, managed to get to the 3rd place… Perhaps you could even make the OpenGL pipelined version the default?
[quote]I absolutely agree about the background. I have been planning it for a while, but due to the current story-line it didn’t seem like such a great idea. However now that you remind me of it, i think i’ll rewrite the story and change scenery every once in a while.
I’ll be sure to check out your game, sounds like you have some good ideas
[/quote]
Another idea which might (or might not) improve your game is wrapping play area. So the area is limitless in a sense, you can fly straight endlessly and the game world keeps repeating around you. It would make the game easier though, as you couldn’t get cornered anymore, so I don’t know.
[quote]Again, thanks alot for taking the time to provide feedback
[/quote]
No problem, it’s a great game.
my friend saw me play and he likes it.
@mh114:
The OpenGL version has been there for longer than i can remember, but perhaps i need to make it more visible…
I’m glad to hear that it works better now.
I can’t make it the default version though, as on certain machines (mine f.x.) the user will get invisible windows and whatnot. Hopefully Sun will make it the default pipeline or come up with something similiar for more systems in the future…
About extending play-area, possible through wrapping, i’ve tried it early in development, and it didn’t seem very good. The problem was, like you said, that you couldn’t get corned. I tried adding a “base” you had to protect, but this didn’t work very well either. Thanks for the suggestion though
@h3ckboy:
Good to hear
- Scarzzurs