Release [Rebirth Competition] Schwerkraft

[Ziz]

good morning folk,


Just a few days before the dead line I want to show (and let discuss) my entry for the Rebirth Competition. Until yesterday I was not sure, whether I am able to participate because I had only time until today. Tomorrow I will be without internet (and PC) for 2 at least weeks.


It is a game about gravity (like slingShot), but written in C with sparrow3D (surprise!). Furthermore there will be more feature in the future but as I said I ran out of time and am quite happy to release at least this version you will see below. At the moment you control a ship and want to shoot the opponents ship. But your projectile is redirected by gravity. There are two kinds of objects with gravitiy: normal, solid planets and gas planets. gas planets has fewer mass and gravity and your projectile will not collide.


Later I will release schwerkraft for other handhelds, too. But first I have holidays. ^^


I will read here 'til today night. After that, I hope other people are able to inform about problems with this game. I will not.


My beta tester "holliefant" (thanks to him) made this video of the game. Enjoy it.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/8m67kU2HSdw?feature=oembed

greetings, Ziz

 

[fusion_power]

Cool Name.


I never played these type of games but it looks interesting. Seems like you can kill yourself if your missle hit you back. ^^

 

[Ziz]

Of course you can. As you will read in the ingame how to: gravitation is an asshole. ^^

 

[mattman]

love it cant wait to get home and play it

 

[bzar]

Great to have you aboard, Ziz! From the video I assume there's a computer opponent available?

 

[stoni]

The game has a lot of potential.

 

[Ziz]

Great to have you aboard, Ziz! From the video I assume there's a computer opponent available?

It is. At the moment the computer opponent is sometimes incredible smart and sometimes incredible dumb. I will change the AI after the contest and my holidays. ^^


It is not hard to write a good ai. It is hard to make it winable for a human player. ^^

 

[bzar]

Depends on the game. Try making a decent AI for something like Wars

 

[F_Slim]

The game has a lot of potential.

LOL :lol:

 

[Holliefant]

Ziz mentioned when I was testing that he will include a network pvp mode

 

[gruso]

XBL/TINXL talk moved here on request: http://boards.openpandora.org/index.php?/topic/7713-discussion-an-xbox-live-like-system-for-pandora-split-from-other-topic/


Back on topic, I'm a big fan of Slingshot and this looks like an excellent addition. I love Holliefant's laugh when he thinks the shot is coming back around to get him. Every time that happens in Slingshot I laugh out loud too. Awkward when you're in the work toilet.

 

[bagmouse7]

It looks fantastic, great work. I am looking forward to playing it.

 

[gruso]

As mentioned I'm a big fan of Slingshot and play it regularly. I would love to review this without that pre-existing bias, for want of a better word, but I've played so much Slingshot that I can't help making constant comparisons as I play! Of course I am mindful that Slingshot is a port and this is an original work. There are some areas where I think it would be beneficial to 'borrow' from Slingshot, but I'm definitely not suggesting that you should simply clone its features. You've made your design decisions, and different is good.

• I really like the soundtrack, which depicts the eerie serenity of space nicely. It would be nice if there were also some sound effects in a future release.
  
• Gas planets are a cool idea, and add some depth to the gameplay compared to having all solid planets.
  
• The autozoom function is lovely - I daydreamed about having this feature in Slingshot and it's exactly how I envisioned it.
  
• Upon death, it should go to a new level instead of the menu. This would make it feel less like "game over" and more like "next round".
  
• An option to set timeout would be nice. I like setting Slingshot to maximum timeout, and watching the missile to several elegant orbits of the universe before finding its mark. Schwerkraft offers a pretty good timeout as it is, but options are always nice.
  
• Controls... the d-pad axes are opposite to Slingshot (it uses l/r for direction, and u/d for power). To be honest, this is one point where I don't really trust my own objectivity. Schwerkraft feels backwards and I can't get used to it. That may be because I'm so used to Slingshot, but I've tried to put that aside and reason it out. Based on (god knows how many) years of gaming, one tends to associate l/r on the d-pad with 'steering' or directional control. In Schwerkraft it is logical that up/down controls the angle, and l/r controls power. But my instinct does not follow the logic; it wants to control the angle with l/r and the power with u/d. Is it Slingshot bias, or long burned-in muscle memory? I can't answer that. Which ever it is, I can't seem to get comfortable with the current scheme. An option to swap axes would keep both camps happy.
  
• AI - another feature I longed for in Slingshot. This seems to be well implemented. Not too brutal, and not too dumb either. (Except one round where it seemed to stick to one trajectory shot after shot, but that seems to have been an isolated occurrence.)
  
• Ship sprites could be more... shippy. And some explosion graphics would be welcome too.
  
• Online multiplayer would be sweet!
  
• I would like to comment further on graphics - I can see some nice work has been done there - but I am suffering from PTOD and every game looks bad.
  

All said, a very nice release. It's great having two games of this type on the Pandora, and it's great that they are different. Nice work.

 

[Ziz]

First of all: Thanks for your great feedback, especially yours, Gruso.


I had a very nice time in my holidays. We went to Scotland and walked 150km in 8 days (West highland way).


But back to topic:

As mentioned I'm a big fan of Slingshot and play it regularly.

Me too. That was the reason, why I HAD to write a clone in C for the open handhelds community. Especially because I still have nice ideas and improvements in mind.

I really like the soundtrack, which depicts the eerie serenity of space nicely. It would be nice if there were also some sound effects in a future release.

Did you ever watched Firefly? Great western-sci-fi-serial with great music. I tried to find something in this style.

The autozoom function is lovely - I daydreamed about having this feature in Slingshot and it's exactly how I envisioned it.

Yes, that was one of the "down-the-line" features. Nice, that you like it (like I do )

Upon death, it should go to a new level instead of the menu. This would make it feel less like "game over" and more like "next round".

k, comes to the toDo.

An option to set timeout would be nice. I like setting Slingshot to maximum timeout, and watching the missile to several elegant orbits of the universe before finding its mark. Schwerkraft offers a pretty good timeout as it is, but options are always nice.

I learned with my puzzletube release, that too many options are counterproductive. As mentioned before I ran out of time, so I decided to have no options yet. Later I will add some settings.

Ship sprites could be more... shippy. And some explosion graphics would be welcome too.

I know. It will change. XD

Online multiplayer would be sweet!

Indeed! I would think about some... Championship, but instead of country vs. country, we could have Caanoo vs. Pandora or similar.

I hope I don't oversee something important.


As said before: Thanks for the great feedback, now I am looking forward for the votings. ^^


greetings,


Ziz

 

[F_Slim]

I finally tried this, and I like it very much! ^_^


I do hope that you will develop this further. Some things I could imagine:


a bigger play-field with multiple enemies instead of just one (choose number of opponents basically, from 1 to 5 or whatever is still reasonable.)


Maybe add some kind of a Tournament-mode, where levels are randomly generated (I assume that is how levels are generated now?), but the field-size and/or number of planets increases to increase the difficulty, and the winner is determined after a fixed number of rounds.


Maybe even something develish like moons orbiting a planet would be cool! Since it might add a bit of randomness to your shots (unless you time it right), this should be rare, but it might give a bit of extra thrill.


Overall I like it as it is already. Perfect to waste just a few minutes, addictiing enough to play for much longer than that

 

[DaMummy]

the documentation file is labeled as README.txt, although when i try an open it, it tells me no such file or directory. please rename documentation to Schwerkraft.txt and have it point to the right file

 

[foxblock]

the documentation file is labeled as README.txt, although when i try an open it, it tells me no such file or directory. please rename documentation to Schwerkraft.txt and have it point to the right file

Yeah the correct file goes without file extension (so just "README"), it does not contain much useful information though. (not that it needed with the good in-game help)

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Can you upload it to the repo plz ?

 

[Ziz]

Of course. ;-)


http://repo.openpandora.org/?page=detail&app=schwerkraft-schwerkraft-12345

 

[Linux-SWAT]

Thx.


So which new feature is planned for the next update ?