An asteroids-like game for PICO 8.
Controls:
UP: thrust
LEFT/RIGHT: rotate
Z: shoot
X: blast (area attack radiating from ship; uses energy)
Don't get hit by the asteroids; shoot the asteroids for points. Big ones split into medium, medium ones sometimes split, small ones never do.
Each player starts with 3 lives, and also has a "power" gauge. The longer you stay alive, the higher the gauge goes. When it passes certain points, you automatically upgrade (upgrades: more bullets, longer distance bullets, multi-shot). When you die, it resets. The secondary attack ("blast") uses up 1 "tick" of energy (3 ticks per upgrade), so you can choose to use it to save yourself and rack up points, but it will slow down your upgrade path.
At this point, probably all that I'm going to polish on this is sfx and maybe some graphical tweaks.
Original Post
So, I'd been thinking of making an asteroids-like game (probably Asteroids, but with some interesting weapons or abilities added in). I was a bit hesitant to go full vector drawing, plus I kinda wanted to mess with sprites. But, you can't rotate sprites (though amusingly, grobstein just posted a thread about just that).
My solution: a two-sprite ship, with both sprites circular. This allows for an arrow-like shape, (via rotating one sprite's coordinates around the other).
I ... kinda like it so far? Right now it's got movement and physics and such. No collisions yet, very boring asteroids. But, a start.
Controls:
UP: Thrust
Right/Left: rotate
actually, because the asteroids ship was just three lines, you could use the line() function to draw it. use some vector normals of the current direction!
Updated (see above, 0.2). Fun new things:
- Shooting!
- Asteroid destroying!
- Score keeping!
- Improved ship rotation (real rotation instead of 1 part circling the other)
- Has a better name (now named after 1036 Ganymed, the largest near-Earth asteroid)
Still no player/asteroid collisions, so mostly this is a flight sim plus shooting stuff game at the moment. Lots more to do, but pretty happy with how it is shaping up.
EDIT:
I am noticing, sadly, that this runs pretty badly in the web player now. It runs fine locally though. I'm guessing some of the list manipulation and comprehensive bullet collision detection stuff may be a bit much. Oh well.
Did another quick update, just to hopefully improve performance. Seems slightly better, not perfect, but not as bad.
Added player collision detection, though the ship doesn't get destroyed as of yet. Mostly uploaded so I could see how performance in the web player was. Answer: not great. I'll need to look over the player collision detection a bit and see if I can improve it.
Feels nice. The ship feels like it has a big, agile spider abdomen. It might be fun if only that part counted for collisions.
New version. Changelog:
- Added in logo intro
- Added in primitive menu
- Player death is a thing (no animation for it yet, though)
- 2 player mode works
So this is the first version that's a relatively real game. Still lots to do (I have plans for some interesting upgrades and weapons, and gameplay tweaks). But, it's coming along at least.
OK, so there's a relatively close-to-done version now. Title graphics are courtesy of Josh / cortex -- much thanks. The game now features a full game loop (including death animations, etc), multiple lives per player, ship upgrades, etc.
I still have a few upgrades I'd like to put in, and in particular the sfx needs work (very basic right now).
very nice! going to make big asteroids split when you hit them?
Yep. Current plan for the asteroids is to add in a new, larger category (the "big" ones now are medium-sized, the real big ones will composite a few of those sprites together). Then, make big ones split to medium, and medium to small.
The only other major gameplay stuff I have in mind right now is to add a "phasing" button ("x") that uses up power from your power gauge (thus taking away upgrades) to make you incorporeal for a short time. That, and tweaking the difficulty ramp-up; right now, it's relatively simple ramp-up over time.
There's now large asteroids. Also, an area attack (radiating from the ship). I chose to not do the phasing, I think the AoE attack actually functions better in the game.
Given how close this is to the charcount / token count, probably won't be doing much more with this other than sfx and minor tweaks. Feedback appreciated, though, as are high scores :)
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