WIP: U-Type (working title)

[cosam]

Hi all,

Thought you might like to see a quick preview of my Uzebox debut which I've been working on the last couple of weeks. It's a horizontal shooter which should end up with about four levels, each with their own look and a big boss at the end. There are a few graphics glitches and I need to work on the level design a bit, but you get the idea! I'm afraid the desktop capture software I used added a bit of a jitter to the video and didn't want to produce audio, but you're only missing some basic sound effects as there's no music as yet.

Cheers,

Steve

[Harty123]

Hi Cosam,

this looks awesome! Can't wait to play this game.

Please add a wiki entry for this game under Work-in-progress...

-Harty

[Jeroen]

Nice!
Brings back memories of the game nemesis on the msx. I've played that game so much

[martinsustek]

Very nice!

I have some tips to make it better:
Let player to choose ship at start (there may be 3 different space crafts with different size, speed, weapon)
Each weapon should be upgraded by picking up some item - next level will be more destructive, faster, more bullets
Animate spaceship (fire from motors, tilting during moving up and down)
Add shield to protect ship from enemy bullets for short time (then it should be recharging and not working for some time)
Use different music for each level
To make it more challenging let player play all levels again after he finishes last, with keeping his score and increasing speed of enemies
Save highscore for each spaceship in 1 player mode
Create 2 player modes - cooperative (booth at once) and competitive (one after each other, level by level, to reach higher score)

[D3thAdd3r]

Wow very impressive!

I'd love to know some technical details unless you want to be secretive at this point I imagine projectiles are done with tiles, what kind of level format do you use?

[paul]

Excellent! Uzebox needs a horizontal shooter

[cosam]

Thank you all for your comments!

Please add a wiki entry for this game under Work-in-progress...

Will do!

I have some tips to make it better:

A lot of the things you mentioned are part of the plan already: weapons, power ups, difficulty levels. I'll have to see how this all goes before doing much more as I already have a pretty tight flash budget.

I'd love to know some technical details unless you want to be secretive at this point I imagine projectiles are done with tiles, what kind of level format do you use?

Nah, I like discussing that stuff, although at this stage it's all subject to change The ship and the player's projectiles are sprites right now, but this might change depending on how the weapons work out. Everything else is tiles, so for collision detection I only need to check sprites against tiles, for which I use a map to get down to quarter-tile (i.e. 4x4 pixel) resolution.

The level format is based on a "stream" of columns which is rather crudely compressed by encoding runs of the same tile and occurrences of identical columns. This could be done a lot better, but it's simple and seems to do a good job of the relatively sparse maps I'm using (around 10% compression ratio). It helps that the stars in the background are superimposed randomly over what would otherwise be blank tiles.

[uze6666]

Yes! A shooter...at last! Do you intend to produce original music or convert existing one? apart the obvious NES classics, there's plenty of community made NSF music out there, like rushjet1, from which I used a song for my last video. If you need some help converting some songs, just let me know.

Cheers,

-Uze

[cosam]

Do you intend to produce original music or convert existing one?

I was hoping to compose some myself, but the last time I wielded a tracker in anger was on an Amiga 500 and I'm kind of lost where to start on the Uzebox. If I cop out I may have to recruit community help and take you up on your offer!

[cosam]

Wiki page is up now: http://uzebox.org/wiki/index.php?title= ... g_title%29

Working on power-ups and more levels at the moment and running into RAM issues, although hopefully Uze's good news sounds like a solution!

On the music front: I've got a couple of tunes brewing in Famitracker. Is there some way to convert these to Uzebox format?