Orbus: A team-based multiplayer. Collect orbs and sabotage the enemy to win!

WIP games, tools & toy projects
#1

Hi!

I spent a month or so making this in my spare time. As the title says, it’s a team-based multiplayer, although you can play with bots offline as well.

What is the goal?

Simple: be the first team to reach the maximum number of points. To do so, find and collect the many orbs scattered around the map, and bring them back to your home base. The more orbs you have, the more points you earn per second.

How do I play?

Other teams will be working towards the same goal, of course, so sometimes it becomes necessary to sabotage them for your own gain. You and your team can collect various power-ups scattered around to provide an advantage.

There are 6 types of power-ups: turrets, force fields, energy bombs, gravity bombs, and teleports. Most of those are pretty obvious, but the energy and gravity bombs will attract energy and orbs, respectively. They’ll even siphon it from nearby enemy units, too, making them quite useful.

You also have energy levels which determine your speed and survival. You can replenish energy by collecting the energy orbs, or by nearing your home base.

That’s essentially it. Multiplayer is probably buggy right now, so if it isn’t working for you, tell me if there’s any tweaks I need to make, to make it feel smoother and whatnot! I always appreciate feedback.

Download link?

Currently the game is hosted on itch.io in the form of an exe file. Here’s the link! Hope you like it.

itch.io page

#2

Works fine and runs well!

A minimap or/and a different viewport zoom would be useful, you get next to no sense of where you are and what is happening.
The powerups effect range is also sometimes almost bigger than the viewport, it all contributes to the confusion.
Changing the windows size changes how much you can see, that’s giving players with higher res screens an advantage…

The powerups themselves seem wisely choosen, not too many and each one has a rather clear function.

#3

Thank you! That means quite a lot. the powerups were a large topic of debate when originally deciding on the gameplay. As for the window size issue, it does give some players an advantage. Perhaps the game could automatically scale when more objects are in the same area?

Either way, I’ll have to standardize the view port somehow anyway.

Thanks for the feedback!

#4

By looking at the game screen shots I assumed this to be an .io game! X) nice looking game. Should of released not during the summer because kids play these games together in school. I have experience to say. Slither.io and Agar.io were played in every class.

#5

I’ll be sure to do some promoting in a few months. By then, it will be less buggy, I hope! ::slight_smile:

For the next couple days I am going to be fixing a lot of multiplayer bugs, I’ve got a LAN party coming up that I want to be ready for.

#6

I love the art style and the gameplay is very similar to agaro. What libraries are you using?

#7

Thanks! I’m using LWJGL+Slick2D. :persecutioncomplex: However, I might need to convert it to LibGDX or some other library if I am going to make an Android version, which is something I’ve been thinking about the past couple days. I think a simple game like this would do well on a more casual platform. ;D

#8

Let me help you migrate from Slick2D.

#9

I’d love that. Slick2D is super buggy, but it’s all I know. Do you want my source code?

#10

I’d highly recommend learning how to do it yourself. You’re better off in the long run, as if you plan on using LibGDX in the future you’ll need to know how it all works anyway. Besides, more hands in the code can just cause messy code if your help doesn’t know what they’re doing. [sub](hint hint)[/sub] :slight_smile:

Having said that though, your game is visually-simple enough unless you really want to push into the android market Slick2D will be fine for you. (and hell, you can use Slick on android anyway, just takes more work) Slick2D is deceptively powerful if you know how to use it, I’d argue people who claim LibGDX is “10 times faster” are simply using Slick incorrectly. If you’re still learning, Slick is a pretty straightforward library, perfect for learning the fundamentals of gamedev itself before pushing into the more complicated features LibGDX provides.

Slick2D also really isn’t that buggy from what I can tell, although there are some classes that can be improved/optimized. If you’re encountering several bugs, chances are you’re using the library wrong. About the only straight-up blatant bug I’ve found is a memory leak in Image.getColor(x, y); but that can quickly be resolved by running Image.flushPixelData(). :stuck_out_tongue:

But anywho, I guess the tl;dr of it is there’s no reason to change to LibGDX right now anyway, unless you’re really keen on pushing in the mobile market. If you do want to switch, do it yourself. :slight_smile:

#11

Lol are you trying to say I don’t know what I am doing?

Anyways, it’s not that Slick2D is buggy, but there is a lot of room to learn, as you stated, about the core of LibGDX (and opengl for that fact). I just want to make sure he goes on the right path too :point:

I found that Slick2D was completely replaced by de.matthiasmann.twl.PNGDecoder class.

#12

I seriously doubt Ray is trying to say you don’t know what you’re doing. It’s just far more useful to learn how to do something yourself than have someone else do a lot of it for you. It’s good to have people around to ask questions (what this forum is supposed to be used for), but you’ll learn a lot if you just attack it on your own.

Also, you should really contemplate if you want to mess around with the underlying technology or just make games. OP, if Slick provides you with everything you need to render your game, then stick with it until you figure out it’s limitations. Moving to LibGDX might very well be beneficial, but why take the time to learn an entire new library when you already know one that functions perfectly fine?

If you’re more interested in “pushing” technology to it’s limits, consider learning raw OpenGL. Just know that you probably won’t be making a game with any framework you create for a long time because OpenGL is a decently difficult technology to actually get good with.

But if you’re more interested in just making games, stick with Slick until you are stopped by the library’s limitations (if you ever find any).

#13

I’m saying most people on the internet are probably going to do more harm than good in a situation like this. Helping completely convert a game from one library to another can get sticky, and requires good coding practices. Problem is, the OP won’t be able to judge your’s/whomever’s coding practices due to lack of knowledge, so it’s just generally a bad idea to go forward.

That’s why I opt for learning how to do it yourself. You’ll understand your own (new/revised) code better, and learn something along the way. :wink:

I fail to see how an entire game library can be replaced by a single PNGdecoder, unless you mean all of Slick’s functionality you used was replaced by TWL’s PNGDecoder?

#14

Yeah, you don’t need anything else from slick but that.

#15

Yes, because the other tens of thousands of lines of code is just filler. ::slight_smile:

#16

I swear it’s like vulkan. :point:

#17

In general, what do you guys think I can do to make this game more fun? I’ve been showing it to my friends but it seems to be missing that ‘spark’.

#18

distill features, tweak values, polish art, repeat…

You want only the features that add actual meaningful choices to the game,
every one of them needs to be balanced, how many points for a win, what does this mean for the round-time etc etc
Take your turrets for example, their range is huge so their exact placement doesn’t matter that much and they are op as hell.

What is far worse is that the game mechanics do not reward competitive play, as the best strategy is to place turrets and force fields near your base and sit and wait in your half for the points to come, that’s boring why even play if it’s just a waiting game.

You need to implement mechanics that make it rewarding and necessary to leave the base and fight, the goal is to get all the points but you flood the arena with points, so why leave your half to get points if power-ups are far more powerful?

The slow point draining doesn’t help, you spend a minute submitting your points and waiting.

The art is a bit too bland and inexpressive…

#19

Thanks, that was very helpful, actually. I have some ideas already to make things more interesting.

Not sure what to do about the art style, though.