Martian Assemblers - your opinions?

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

I’ve been working on this for the past couple of months and just wanted some feedback. It’s a basic shoot them up game and is intended for PC’s and for MAME arcade cabinets. In this game the various Martians can assemble together to become a more powerful creature. Whatever characteristics they have will be inherited by the finished assembly. You can blow them apart but they’ll just scramble back together into something different. There are various supply drops for weapon upgrades, health improvements or just points. There is a tutorial and various levels available. You can earn trophies at each level and you need to earn a trophy to start the next level. There are also global high scores (though the current entries are artificial).

Here’s a quick video of the game which hopefully gives a rough idea of things:

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Any feedback welcome!
Mike

#2

Looks generally not bad, interesting artstyle for the genre.
You might want to take a look at the design aspects discussed in for example this video.

#3

That’s a 45 min video! I will watch it at some point over Christmas but perhaps you could just mention briefly what design aspects you were concerned about or you thought needed adding. I’m quite hard skinned so don’t worry about offending me :slight_smile: I started off with the cartoon hills simply because they were easy to draw (I’m not an artist) but then found I quite liked the cartoon style and kept with it. I tried adding extra realism like moving shadows etc but they felt at odds with the “cartoon feel” so I took them out again. I’ll admit my main interest in the game was the internal data structures to handle the varying assemblies that happen - from a coding perspective it’s quite an interesting problem. I’d also never done a 2D side scroller before.

thanks for replying by the way.

[EDIT]I managed to get past the 1st 10 minutes of waffle and then that talk suddenly became much more enlightening. I’ll look into some of the areas he mentioned.