Robotron

First of all, I've been working on this for a while, its a fairly big project, and its not nearly finished (I know construct is in beta etc etc, but I cant be bothered to wait 10 years for 1.0, and even at this stage (crashes and all) its 1000 times better than any other alternative )

So in this early stage I thought I'd show you guys the game so you can give me your opinions and some constructive criticism.

It's called Robotron, based on the old (and completely awesome) game Robotron: 2084 but set in the same universe as one of my other games (there was already a character called robotron and I couldnt resist ).

The idea is this zone is like the original game but there will be multiple zones expanding the game into new fronteirs, with new enemies, powerups etc.

DOWNLOAD LINK IS HERE: http://www.quotecats.com/op420/RBT.zip

I'm pretty terrible at animating things so you'll probably notice as a substitute I've just piled on 1000 pixel shaders on everything, as such there is a graphics setting in options if its laggy for you.

(also if you don't want annoying music made by me turn it off in options )

The controls are:

WASD - movement

Arrow keys - shoot in that direction (hold down 2 for diagonal)

ESC - menu

Tips:

You get a new life every 20000 points, so score is important

Green things (called xortrons) are vital for the above reason, they give you 1000 for the first one you get, 2000 for the next, etc, up to 5000 where its capped.

If you can, its worth saving some poweurps to the end of each level, so you start the next level (when there are the most enemies) with them, be careful though, if you die all the powerups on the floor dissapear.

The biggest problem I have with this game however is it crashes, when too much stuff is happening at once (for example if you have lots of stacked powerups and are blasting the crap out of 100 enemies at once), and sometimes even when not that much stuff is happening at once, it crashes. I am 99% sure this is construct bugging and not my fault . (if any admins want the cap i'll be happy to send)

Thanks, hope you enjoy

Man... yeah... surely a difficulty setting wouldn't be out of place?

No crashes here, but send over the cap and I'll run it through the debugger a couple of times.

Man... yeah... surely a difficulty setting wouldn't be out of place?

lol I'll probably have to add some sort of practice mode eventually for people who've never played before, as people seem to find it extremely hard. Its also not very consistent, since powerups make the game actually possible, and they're completely random drops so sometimes you can win a level gaining about 5 lives and sometimes you'll lose 15, I'm currently working to improve this.

EDIT: for reference, my personal best is level 20 with 33 lives left (after level 20, the same level repeats (and with enough turrets you can just not die and farm powerups and lives), and I just added that for this upload, so I am not counting my score of level 47 with 75 lives left before it crashed )

Cool... I'll have to give it a try when I get home. I love classic arcade games.

"High Detail" runs perfectly smooth (Athlon XP 2600, 512mb of RAM, Radeon 9800pro).

Don't stand still...

...and don't stop shooting. That seems to be the best strategy.

Christ, that's hard. And yes, I have played the original, and it wasn't nearly this hard because you don't start off by fighting a bazillion robots at once.

Here's a tip: Scale the difficulty up as the levels advance. Make level one have five robots. Make level two have ten. Make level three have five little robots and a big robot. Make level three have slightly faster robots, etc. Your game is starting out on like, level 50.

And yes, for an arcade style game with unique controls like this, you want to make it that easy to begin with. It gives the chance for the player to get a feel for the game and learn things gradually. Don't go throwing them in the middle of a hundred robots on the first level, it's too overwhelming. Introduce new enemies gradually, and ramp the difficulty up over time. Not only will the player feel like they're accomplishing something, but by the time you do throw 100 robots at them they might have a fighting chance.

It looks pretty nice, though.

Thanks for the responses, I guess I completely lost touch with what it was like to be a beginner, having obviously played it 1000x as much as anyone else with testing and whatnot...

It seems I have to tackle the difficulty, I will take your advice deadeye and make it easier to start off with, and I actually think it needs to be harder in the later levels. As I said the consistency of games needs to be improved, because pretty much everything (mainly powerup drops) is based on randomness, so sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you dont.

out of interest what sort of levels can you guys get to?

how should I make it easier, other than lowering the amount of enemies? Like, should I slow them down, make their bullets not travel as far etc...

I got to level 5 and i tried a few times before i did. It was a real fun game! However, i think the powerups should last longer, and i agree about the dificulty.

I got to level 5 and i tried a few times before i did.

Level 5 is my best as well.

You might not even have to tone down the number of enemies so much... just make them start off a bit further away from the main character. You need space to move and its really tough when you are surrounded right from the beginning.

how should I make it easier, other than lowering the amount of enemies? Like, should I slow them down, make their bullets not travel as far etc...

Those are both good ideas. Any way you can gradually ramp the difficulty up is good.

I also seem to recall that the original Robotron had walls in a few of the levels. Not like a full-on Pac Man maze, but just a couple strategically placed ones.

Fake edit:

Nope, I was wrong. I was thinking of Berzerk. Which is kinda like Robotron with walls.

heh do the brains (homing missile jellyfish???) kill you loads on level 5 or something

I was going to add walls at some point, maybe in another zone, I have some pretty outrageous ideas for other zones later on.

Yeah I think the being surrounded at the start needs a little addressing, I think I'm gonna try to lower the amount of enemies and make it harder in other ways, giving you more room to move.

Also, I may end up not making this the first zone, and adding an easier one before it, so by this time you may already be used to the game.

Which powerups do you think need to last longer, just all of them in general? I really don't want to make powerups TOO powerful, they're pretty powerful already, I guess I'll see if this is necessary after I change the way powerups drop.

Goddamn that's hard, but really quite addictive. I'm crap at the Smash TV style controls though, always was. I never played the original, but I played Llamatron which was pretty much the same, but with llamas.

Remember, you gotta get the green things, they give you loads of points, and points = lives = get further.

I have also played llamatron in reasearch of this game the only thing I don't like about it though is the autofire controls that just fire in your last direction, rather than having the other control aswell.