Hey mike,
I’ll give it a play and a rating later today, okay?
Thanks for giving it a look - it’s a pretty normal retro-shoot-them-up. You shoot the aliens and avoid the rest. Power ups come from shooting the red mother ships and fire and damnation spews forth from the green ones which also need multiple hits to kill.
Hope you enjoy it.
Mike
+1 point if the game installs and uninstalls correctly
+1 point if the game doesn’t crash ever
+1 point if the game is slickly presented
+1 point if the game has “good” graphics that suit the game
+1 point if the game has “good” sound that suit the game
+0 points, although the style was fine it was definitely nothing special
+0 points, there is nothing particularly new offered in this game
+0 points, I was relatively bored by this - another clone, this time with nothing new at all
+0 points, it definitely feels like the game could be significantly more fleshed out in order to be a worthy offering
+1 point if you don’t whine and you demand nothing of the mods (simply saying “can you rate my game please” is fine)
6/10
I think you’ve got a good start here, and the fact that it runs completely smoothly and has no noticeable bugs is great. However, the big hit you took was obviously that this is just a clone with nothing interesting added to it - that docked you points from style, innovation, fun factor, and completeness. If you could just in general add more content and really make this your own then I think it could go from “a pretty normal retro-shoot-them-up” to a really badass and frantic little arcade game.
I’m excited to see where you take this.
Oh well - thanks for reviewing it 
I’m not too keen on making it too wildly different as I quite like this genre of games and the end goal is to put it into an arcade cabinet so everything from the ground up is my own but I’ll try and think of different things to add. Can I ask how far you got (a rough score would be fine) just so I understand where you’re coming from.
I think I beat like 5 waves? I never got hit, I just got bored. 
Obviously do as you wish - being in the featured games section will probably bring you like 2 extra hits a month.
That explains a fair amount - the game adjusts itself to the ability of the user so it progresses quickly when the player clears a screen quickly. As the game progresses you get different aliens and each alien behaves and shoots differently. This allows my kids to play the game and feel that they’ve mastered things while a faster player could get everything thrown at them by screen 3.
Your comment that you were bored indicates I need to progress things more quickly even for slower times. Getting a game to progress in a linear fashion is quite difficult - you want players to reach a level they’re challenged by reasonably quickly but you don’t want to slaughter those who are learning. I guess I need to rework this area.
PS if you want to quickly try the game out at a hard level (and hopefully not get bored) then just start the game by pressing “4”
Okay, I’ll give that a try when I’ve got a bit of time again.
The games been redone (my 43rd attempt - I keep depressing docs on this type of stuff). The aim is to shoot the aliens before your time runs out, try not to overheat your weapon, get power ups etc and not shoot down your own stuff. It plays better, looks prettier etc. Any opinions welcome.
looking much better and starting to get some polish, I especially like all the little touches you’ve added ships in the background and the aliens that popup.
The game still has a slight look of a java applet game from the 1990’s, this can however be remedied.
- Get rid of all the default java colors that you’ve used, especially the yellow and blue.
- Use a different font and not just the default Ariel Bold, there’s plenty of nice free ttf fonts out there that you can use, get a nice one that fits your game theme.
- The particle effects, don’t look that good, use slightly bigger particles (small images if needed), doing this you may even allow you to get away with using less particles in each explosion and it’ll look better then the fine dust looking particles you have atm.
- you can have slightly better looking health bar (again get rid of the default colors), maybe use some sort of texture.
- The yellow laser bullets aren’t that good looking yet think its too much fade and blur on them, needs a bit more tweaking to get better contrast on them. Also consider using different colors for enemy and good unit bullets.
Must say the planets in the background do look great.
Hope that helps.
Edit: Oh and the 90’s looking non seamless webpage background doesn’t help
I’ve added a fair amount of new stuff to this game and wanted to a) check they worked on all machines b) hear any opinions. The idea is the same in that you shoot anything alien as quickly as possible while avoiding anything else. The key to the game is to shoot the red mother ships and then carefully shoot the power up you need (I suggest getting all the weapons first). Changes include:
- It’s now uses the full screen
- It has bio turrets that shoot down from the top
- It’s more aggressive from the start
- There are more power ups available
- Super power ups include nuclear weapons, super cooled guns and automatic shields
I haven’t changed the explosions as yet. I’ve actually tried all sorts of explosion generators but they either didn’t suit the game or used way to much memory. I haven’t changed the fonts much but I’m looking into this. I wouldn’t mind hearing whether :
- the web start works on most machines
- full screen works (it currently doesn’t on Linux boxes)
- the high score system will store your user name?
- and is it any better?
Cheers
Mike
It works, and it is better! More work on the explosions I think.
Cas
Is there an explosion generator tool you guys can recommend?
I tried a couple but each had issues. My favourite was Explogen v2 which created great explosions but I couldn’t :
- get it to produce images with transparent backgrounds (only black) so I had to use paint.net to play with each image produced - this took ages and also affected the explosion quality.
- change file names
- change type of image to pgn
I tried other tools with varying success. At the end of the day the explosions just looked like they were from a different game and added to my game (I guess they were) and storing a sequence of explosion images also badly affects the jar size. Sure I could have just one explosion for all but I felt this would be a retrograde step. Are there any simple to use explosion classes with a smaller set of images?
I haven’t used it, but isn’t that because it expects you to draw them with additive mode, not regular blending?
Because if that’s your only real problem, the other two can be solved with some small scripts quite easily.
I don’t use an explosion generator, just lots and lots of particles.
Cas
39K scores. Option to window size would be nice.
It doesn’t have blending modes or alpha values etc. It is easy to use and produces good looking explosions though. I tried using paint.net to replace the black background with a transparency - this worked but the end effect was no where near as pretty.
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I was using particles - lots of small dots that gradually faded out as they moved out. I quite liked the effect but it was you guys that said I should explosions
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I’m not sure how to resize the window when you have set graphics to display ie the moon base and the aliens etc are all a set size. Did 39k get you on the high score list and did it display your name? I was having issues with no new names displaying even though it worked fine for me.
You need more than just “dots” - particles can be any size!
Cas
No, I think you misunderstand - explosions on a black background are (probably) in a pre-multiplied alpha format or similar (google it). That means that you leave the images with a black background untouched, but at runtime you draw them with additive blending (glBlendFunc(GL_SRC_ALPHA, GL_ONE)).
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Nope, it just showed endless animation until I hit fire.
I only get a black fullscreen window (the thumbnail in the task bar is correct though). What resolution do you use? (Windows 7 64 bit, new Nvidia drivers)
Mike