Release Space Rocks!


sswam said:
B-ZaR said:
Sounds like an idea I've had quite a long time regarding spherical gradient time distortions in synchronous multiplayer games. Never implemented this but it's a nice idea :)
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Sounds interesting, would that allow your local time to slow down and speed up in a certain area, such that when you get out again you would be back in sync with everyone else? Not sure if that corresponds to any real phenomenon in general relativity, I'm guessing not.
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It's more of a "bullet time" system without any actual time bending. Basically all velocities and accelerations would be slowed down by the distortion gradient, along with angular velocities. All actions would be delayed depending on the gradient value. To keep the "bullet time" advantage for one player, his angular velocity would be unconstrained and actions immediate.

More like a gradient slowdown bubble than time distortion, really. No need to have faster time zones as the aim is a game mechanic more than an actual time distortion. In synchronous games time distortions that require players to react in correct way to other players being in another time speed pretty much require the players themselves to experience time differently :D . Here I've simulated a player being in slower time using control latency and constraints.

To make it look nicer one could apply some light distortion and motion blur.

This system could be fun, though. Consider the following scenario: Two players are locked in a duel. One uses the time distortion skill, making them both move slowly. They continue their dance while a third player outside the range of the distortion spots them and carries on to shoot rockets at them from all sides. As the rockets hit the distortion, they slow down so they're all en route at the same time, from all sides. The two duelists notice the ring of incoming missiles just as the distortion bubble is about to collapse. "Oh sh-!" *BOOM*

Another sceenario would be that the rocket launcher toting player sees a camping sniper at a distance. He promptly uses the time distortion without the sniper noticing the distortion bubble behind him. The player moves outside the bubble, leaving it between himself and the sniper. Then he shoots a flurry of rockets at the sniper, but passing through the distortion they slow down to a crawl. As the bubble fills up with rockets flying toward the sniper, the player cancels the distortion. The sniper only sees a brief sight of the front cones of dozens of rockets as they devastate his perch.
 
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ingoreis: I've been toying with an idea of a secondary shot types for each weapon, but I don't want to shake the balance too much. Weapon charging without a downside in a game like this would give the player too much power. Any mechanic that gives the player more power must be counterbalanced by an equal downside or the game becomes an endless explosionfest, which I'm not aiming for.
 
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One reason for keeping the difficulty fairly high (as soon as the asteroids start piling up) is that there's really not much content in this game (by design, it's an arcade-style points game afterall). So if it goes on too long it becomes more tedious than fun to get a high score. Even now it's skirting the line of becoming tedious, but IMHO doesn't yet because of the increase in intensity (made even more intense by the downsides of having high-power, but ultimately low-accuracy weapons and slow turn rate).
 
Do the asteroids speed up as the level number increases? That's something that could be done to shorten the top end game times, although I guess to make it fair you'd have to make it possible for a player to avoid a large meteor descending directly down from the initial layout. Although again, I guess the player could always shoot it.


Hmm, it might be nice actually to have a reverse gear, maybe as a power-up. Would perhaps make the sheild more useful, if you were quick-witted enough to switch from forward thrust to reverse thrust at the right times.
 
Levi: https://github.com/bzar/spacerocks/blob/master/src/gameworld.cpp#L161

Reversing is a surprisingly powerful ability. Strafing control too. Believe it or not, I've considered these powerups before :D . I'm just not quite sure how they should play with the dying mechanism. Should they work like shields where you have N instances of them, losing one every time you die? Maybe like weapons where you get levels for them, increasing their thrust? What buttons should all these use? Where do I find the time to add them? :D
 
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Yes, adding strafing would turn it into something more akin to a twin-stick shooter. It's perfectly possibly to strafe with the current controls, just a bit trickier ;)


I'm just thinking that at present, having more than one shield is pretty pointless at it tends to boing you off at such a rate that you smack straight into another rock which bounces you off even faster. It's quite funny when it happens, but it basically means if you don't stop it after the first bounce you lose all your shields and a life.
 
Much of the skill in the game is predicting where the rocks will go and placing yourself appropriately though. That's why I was thinking more reverse than brake - a brake would be directional, and you could just hold it down if you hit a rock with a shield on - no skill involved.
 
I also want reverse.  How can you have a retro space game, without retro rockets?!   ;)

Not so keen for strafing, 6 different directional controls might be too much.

I still reckon Space Rocks would be even more awesome (for me, anyhow) with faster paced, shorter, more difficult games.

Give us retro rockets, then up the pace!  I think everything in the game could move a good 50% to 100% faster, and rapid fire "lasers" to go with it.

I'd like to play this every day and get good at it, but I can't invest 30 to 40 minutes playing Space Rocks up to level 15 every day.  It feels like a "grind" killing all those hundreds of little rocks in the first dozen levels.  I don't have the stamina for this!

Don't get me wrong, I do really like the game, it's just the pacing of it makes me feel frustrated.

Imagine you had to put the game in a video arcade.  You can't have people playing for 40 minutes on 20c!  Then kind of take an average between what you have now and the arcade version.
 
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Hmm, I take your point.  I've only put in a handful of attempts to beat Cloudef's score since I can either have one game of Space Rocks! of an evening, or do half a dozen other things on my Pandora.  But then I also like that because we don't have to mine kid's pockets for dimes, we can have slower paced games.

Perhaps the game could have two or more modes, with the current one being 'survival'.  Other modes could have outlandish ideas like strafing and bouncy powerups and what have you.
 
sswam: I get what you're getting at. It was something Cloudef suggested back when I was just getting the gameplay tuned. Basically it's a different set of aesthetics (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDA_framework).

The current gameplay is tuned to evoke certain responses in the player from subtle changes in the dynamics of the game as the player progresses. Your approach to the game and its elements changes subtly but in the end significantly because of the dynamics. You can always see things coming (if you look) and design your approach to fit. The gameplay becomes more and more chaotic (but still predictable in small scale), so you concentrate on smaller and smaller portion of the screen to manouver around the asteroids. The only truly random element is the UFO, which represents the antithesis of the player ship. It can fly through asteroids, move in any direction, shoot anywhere, not flip from one side to another. No matter how crowded the area and how small your world becomes trying to dodge them all, the UFO just swoops in to break your game. In the early game you wish and wait for them. They're not much of a threat and give you all these nice powerups. As the asteroids pile up you grow to avoid them because they become more and more dangerous and the probability of getting the powerup and it being even useful drops. Have you ever noticed how dropping from L8 to L6 feels unbearable in level 15, but going from L1 to L3 feels like top of the world in level 3?

A different set of aesthetics with more "flat" gameplay could be faster, more intense, more reflex-based (which the retro rockets support as well) from the start. Because of the radically different aesthetics the dynamics need to be completely revised, even if the underlying mechanics stay the same. It's a different game altogether. It could be implemented as a separate mode, but I'd rather not sacrifice this game to turn it into another.

It can't be just "made faster", because all the elements are interconnected. They wouldn't work as well with faster gameplay. For instance, the tiny asteroids would be far too frustrating to hit, so they'd need to be made bigger or eliminated altogether. That in turn would turn the weapon balance upside down, and laser would probably end up being vastly overpowered compared to the rest. That would invalidate about 3/4 approaches to getting a high score, resulting in resetting the game until you get lots of laser upgrades in the start, since all others would be a lot less useful.

You could say there are difficulty levels in this game. Try starting at level 21, at which point the number of asteroids drops, the number of fragments per asteroid increases and UFOs are more lethal. You can rack up points quite more quickly from levels 21-40 than 1-20. For a real challenge try 41-60. Level 60 is something I've considered for game design purposes to be "impossible" with realistic number of lives even with full weapons. It's probably possible if you're completely awesome, but that's beyond the design scope of the game.

On another note, I could probably make the shield bounce a bit less pronounced without overpowering having many shields. I've managed to survive a three-bounce combo once, though :p

I'll end with the description of the game: "The game is about ambience, patience, risk vs. reward and delaying the inevitable."
 
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B-ZaR said:
The only truly random element is the UFO, which represents the antithesis of the player ship. It can fly through asteroids, move in any direction, shoot anywhere, not flip from one side to another. No matter how crowded the area and how small your world becomes trying to dodge them all, the UFO just swoops in to break your game. In the early game you wish and wait for them. They're not much of a threat and give you all these nice powerups. As the asteroids pile up you grow to avoid them because they become more and more dangerous and the probability of getting the powerup and it being even useful drops.
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I find that if the screen is too cluttered, I can pretty much ignore the UFOs. They're extremely unlikely to have line-of-sight to me at the exact moment they fire.

Normally, the UFO's only shoot me the first time I see them. For some reason they seem unreasonably accurate then, and about 40% of the time shoot me on their first shot, assuming I haven't shot them first.


To be honest, most of my lives are usually sacrificed to chasing the powerups. I tend to leave them if it's crowded and they're not going to wrap round to my neighbourhood, but there's a certain number of rocks on screen where I seem to get overconfident that I can make it - fewer and I genuinely can, generally, more and I won't even try.

On another note, I could probably make the shield bounce a bit less pronounced without overpowering having many shields. I've managed to survive a three-bounce combo once, though :p
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That might be neat :) As is I kind of regard shield powerups as only being slightly more useful than plasma (which I've not found any use for yet).
 
I've put a new version of space rocks here. It contains the ufo occurrance bug fix, 12 asteroid and background (quickies I made, nothing too fancy) themes, boosted plasma and beam, decreased shield bounce, disabled dpad thrust a couple of performance tuneups and stuff. If some of you could try it out before I put it to repo it'd be swell :)
 
Yep, running well here.  The new backgrounds are swell, though level 6 background has a star just south-west of the center which looks remarkably like a small rock.

I think level 3 had a high-contrast white nebula and grey rocks, which were a bit harder to spot in the blackness.  But I survived, so it's not impossible.

The reduced shield bounce is cool though, and no more up=boost is an excellent change, thanks!
 
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The background/asteroid themes are random for each level. Some combinations work less well though, especially with the darkest asteroid theme.
 
The background with the suspicious star is background-1.png, and the high contrast one was background-9.png.

Although you can see from the high score I submitted, they didn't cause me too much trouble.
 
Apparently not :D

Would you attribute the high score to any of the changes in this version? Or was it just a good run?
 
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