Mid 80's Side Scrolling Shooter

I'm trying to get my feet wet with Unity development, so as a test project I'm making a simple retro side scrolling shooter.

The goal was to look like a Konami shooter from the mid 80's, like Nemesis for the MSX, but with decent scrolling and multi colored sprites, which the MSX 1 could only dream of. That was my first computer, so I have very nostalgic memories of it!

The Work in progress is here:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/446189/outranger/index.html

For now, there's only one endlessly repeating level. I'd like feedback on the difficulty (too fast? too many bullets?). It gets a little like "bullet hell" during the boss battle, but it doesn't seem that hard to me!

There's no sound yet, and I'm curious to see how it runs on other machines. On mine, it runs perfectly smooth (scrolling exactly 1 pixel per frame, as it should) when I make a standalone app, but kinda choppy on the web player (on both Safari and Chrome).

Cheers!
Leo.

 

Looks really cool ^_^ The webplayer runs perfectly on my PC (CPU: i7 3.4Ghz, GPU: Nvidia GTX570, RAM: 8GB Browser: Chrome) Keep up the good work ^_^

 

I like the style of the game !

 

I am awful at playing with the arrow keys (or the keyboard in general) for this type of game, because I grew up playing these kinds of games on the NES/SNES... so it's hard for me to comment on the difficulty. I think having more shields from the start would be good, or making the player a bit smaller. If I played it a bit more, I don't think it would be too hard. It has the kind of difficulty you want from a game like this. And once I realized you could bump the walls without exploding, it got a lot easier

Is there a way to dodge the bug-like enemies? If you miss out on shooting them, they hop up at you and I can't find a way to stop them from hitting me.

Is the player supposed to move faster going right than any other direction? I realize it makes more physical sense, but it seems a bit disorienting to me from a gameplay sense. Or maybe I'm just too used to Aegis Wing anymore lolol.

Anyway, plays great for me and looking forward to updates.

 

Wow, this takes me back - you really have capture the look of 80's shoot 'em ups. Great work!

 

Thanks guys! I got swamped with work at my day job and had to pause this. Hope to come back to it soon.

Nope, you have to kill them before they jump. But I intend to add several different weapons, so you'd be able to choose, for instance, a secondary gun that fires vertically instead of the missiles, so choosing the right weapon for each level will be essential. In this case, the vertical gun would take care of the jumping dudes, and I could even make them more resilient to force the player to choose the weapon based on that!

With the current weapon set, I'd advise to make sure your missiles are hitting the jumping dudes while your plasma gun hits the other targets! (memorizing their placement also helps! ;-)

Hmmm, it moves with the same speed in any direction. I think what's happening is that when you go left, it seems to move with the BG, while going right feels like it goes faster. Not sure what to do about it, I guess I'll go play some Gradius to figure it out

 

Just to show a little update, here's the explosion that will follow dropping a bomb, which will be one of the alternate weapons. The "ore" you can collect will be used to manufacture upgrades like weapons, spinning satellites around your ship, etc. You'll be able to swap your equipment any time.



While I wanted to do something more like Metal Slug, where it starts very bright and then fades into a smoky color, I chose to be limited to the MSX palette here, and it's really hard to create some of those effects with the original MSX 15 colors, which lack brown or even a dark grey.

 

Haha really nice effect! I liked the game, maybe a little idle animation for the character (a propulsor fire below or something like that) would make it feel less 'frized'

 

I really love that explosion!!

 

I really like it, and this kind of games in general (i'm working on a similar project).
I love the graphics and colors, and i'm jealous of your tile map
The web player is running well (also tried it with onboard intel HD 4000), but sometime i can see seams between tiles.
I'm wondering if you have texture compression on your sprites causing this ?
And please could you add joystick support for my FC 30 NES gamepad

 

Small updates! Some bug fixes and now sound effects! Since this is an educational project only, I'm using actual Konami sound effects from the time period I'm referencing, so don't be surprised if it sounds very authentic! ;-)

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/446189/outranger/index.html

Thanks! I'm using 2D Toolkit for it. Not a big fan, actually, I wish they fully adopted the new Unity's 2D workflow, which is far more intuitive in my opinion.

That's odd, I'm not using compression and only see seams when the resolution isn't correct (when I scale the window up or down, for instance)

Oh, I thought that just by using Input.GetAxis joysticks would work! I guess not... I will look into it.
Thanks!!!

 

Wow! I thought I was the only one who ever owned an MSX. .. takes me back. Used to develop in assembly language on it... basic was never fast enough and never, never had enough memory to do what I wanted. Actually that was my second computer. Had a Texas Instruments TI 99/4a before that. Gee - showing my age. Would have killed to have had something like Unity when I was a teenager learning to program. Anyway - I first played with Unity earlier this year and I really like your graphics and concept - fantastic first effort.

 

Slowly inching forward... added weapons system now. Press X to bring the menu up, and then select up to two weapons. It's a bit confusing, since you have to un-equip the equipped weapon before adding a new one, I hope to be able to improve the UI a little. Here's a screenshot:



I believe the only big feature missing is a way to spend the collected ore to manufacture upgrades. You'd start with only the basic weapon and would be able to use the ore to manufacture new tech or restore your shields. Once that's in, all that's left to do is to use the existing classes to add more enemies and levels! At the current pace, should take me another 20 years!

Cheers.

 

Runs smoothly on my pc, Really like the retro style. You should publish it on mobile platforms when you are finished. Looking forward to see what the other levels will look like.
-Quick note though the controls for the Xbox controller that i am using are all messed up, the left joystick is completely inverted. keyboard works fine though.

 

Runs really smooth. Had a ton of fun playing, the style is great.

 

Thanks!
I have a couple updates:

- Added basic joystick support. Button 0 fires, button 1 is the weapon menu. Vertical axis works properly now. Keyboard works the same way.

- Switched to "auto fire" style (just press and hold the fire button), and re-balanced the weapons. Differences in rate of fire are more obvious now. Eventually, this could make boring weapons like the 2-way plasma more useful, if I design levels that are easier with certain weapons.

Cheers!

 

Awesome stuff! Great work, enjoying playing this. Any plans to write up a dev diary about how you have achieved the development goals?

 

This is a very impressive Gradius/Life Force type demo, I think you should seriously think about releasing this on the asset store or making it open source so people can learn from it.

 

Amazing work, remember R-Type.
I really love the style, my only point is that you need to put a control of volume for sound.

 

This is awesome. Glad people commented on this thread because I never noticed it until now.

This definitely reminds me of old school shooters.

It runs very smooth with no slowdown on my nearly 7 year old laptop: CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26Ghz, GPU: Nvidia GeForce 9600M GT, RAM: 4GB Browser: Firefox)

The size of the objects is perfect as is the movement and just overall coolness. The boss shooting the rings out is excellent. It is odd we don't often see this kind of creativity any more.

Back then we never knew what we would be facing because we battled anything from giant birds to fiery planets to rock heads to fish and so forth... all in the same level in outer space. I once played a shootemup on my C64 that had me battling "my january phone bill", "lawyers" and so forth. About a hundred or so waves of random "stuff". lol

 

HELL. YES.

 

Aw, thanks!

As for releasing it, whenever I can find some spare time I'm converting all my old Unity Script code to C#, and doing a lot of attempts at cleaning up all my embarrassing amateurish code... once I'm done I'll think about it, maybe I'll just post the project somewhere where I can't get heartbreaking 1 star reviews! I'm sure there's stuff in there that can be useful to someone, like a minimalist tile editor with auto-tiling. But like I said, pros would really be horrified at my newbie code.