(WIP) Simple Space Shooter

Here's something I threw together today :)

It's my first real project with Construct and I'm very happy with how it's turned out so far.

My goal is to have a long, single level that gets progressively harder and requires powerups you can buy with the coins you earn in-game.

Use the arrow keys to move and the stars will power up your weapon's speed.

http://ramzsoft.com/games/spaceShooter

Currently there are about 5 power up stars (any more and the weapon goes nuts) and 3 levels of increasing enemy spawning.

Id love to get your honest critiques about what I've got so far.

The first thing I noticed is that I and the enemy are constantly shooting. It's weird because if you wait just enough for the bullet trail to hit the bottom of the map it's impossible to hit an enemy without running into the trail of bullets first. .. Is that intentional? Seems as if later down the level chain it would be almost impossible to survive with that.

The explosions are awkwardly slow. I like the graphic that occurs during the explosion (money-burst and all)- but the orange cloud disappears too slowly and gives an illusion of lag.

No respawning on death? Could just put a gameover with a button that restarts the layout for now.

The upgrading is insane. The first star makes me feel ultra powerful and anything past that is too much. An idea could be turning off the player's ship's auto-shooting. Then maybe put a cooldown and allow upgrades to lower the cooldown, higher the damage and even increase the amount of bullets at a point.

Thanks for checking it out and leaving your thoughts!

The auto-shooting was really just something to make the events easier while I learn the Construct system better. Had a few people mention they'd prefer manual shooting, so that's definitely happening.

The bullet chain is something I'll need to play with for sure. I'm going to look through other shooters similar to this and see how they handle enemy bullets. During my own playthroughs I noticed it could get pretty difficult pretty quickly (although my wife kicked my butt wih ease :) )

I completely agree about the explosions. All graphics so far were included with Construct 2, so I haven't really ventured into tweaking them yet. I'd like to get the gameplay done before I start work on all the assets on my own (will probably need to hire that part out, as graphics aren't really in my skill set)

I really like the cooldown idea. I built one for speed boosting in a little experiment I was doing, the same events will basically work with this too. Thanks for the idea.

I've got a number of upgrades planned. When I get the upgrade store done, the player will essentially start out by dying quite a few times very quickly, and eventually get super powerful and can basically crush everything that comes at them.

I'll update this thread more when I've got new features to check out.