Work in progress: Sidescrolling space shooter

This is my first attempt at making something with Construct since I downloaded it a couple days ago, it's still got a long way to go but it's beginning to resemble a game now. Neither the graphics nor the game itself will win any originality awards, but hey, I like space shooters, I had the graphics already, and I figured it was a good type of game to start with when trying to learn how Construct works, nothing too complicated.

<img src="http://cheesepirate.com/games/shooter_v0.05a.jpg">

Latest version (May 9th, 2010):

http://cheesepirate.com/games/shooter_v0.05a.zip

Cursor keys to move, space or enter (keypad enter for all the left handed people) to shoot. Hold space/enter down for autofire or tap like mad to shoot faster.

The big skull drops weapon powerups when killed. There is no player death yet, just a test shield counter above the player ship. If your shield drops below 0 you lose all your weapon powerups and your shield is reset to 350.

There is tons left to add, and a lot of tweaking to be done:
• I did most of the 16 colour graphics back in the late 1990s so I'll be doing new backgrounds and bits and pieces where needed.
• The music is just a testtune (not by me) and is being replaced.
• The player ship will be animated.
• It's not very playable at the moment, making it fun to play is going to take me a lot of time.
• The skull won't be the first enemy you face in the finished game, but a midlevel guardian type thing.
• There will be lots of other alien ships and monsters, air and ground based.
• I'll be adding different types of powerups: shield refill, extra lives etc., shoot the powerup to make it change colour and type before collecting it.
• There will be a score counter, a graphical shield display, ships left counter etc.
• The text to speech stuff is getting replaced with proper samples.
• There will be a title screen and a highscore table.
• There will be proper levels, hopefully.
• Online multiplayer version? Now that'd be something.

I'll be posting updates here if I make any half decent progress.

great game but sort of difficult to play. The graphics look nice and the laser from the skull's eyes looks really kickass , you should surely continue developing this game and maybe lower the difficulty a bit.

P.S how did you make those sprites, i mean which software??

Thank you for the kind words Abhilash! :)

(...) sort of difficult to play. (...) maybe lower the difficulty a bit.

I completely agree with you on this. I don't exactly have ?ber ninja skills when it comes to playing shoot'em up games myself, so I'm thinking I should add a few different difficulty settings, "easy" for people like me, "medium" for normal casual players and "impossible" for the hardcore shoot'em up fanatics.

One thing is certain, the game will start with easy aliens to kill, not like it is now. The big skull is meant to be a mid-level guardian thing, and by the time you get to that you should have some upgrades to help you. And I think you should be able to keep at least some of the upgrades after dying, I don't want it to be one of those games where you might as well start from the beginning again if you die.

P.S how did you make those sprites, i mean which software??

Most of them were drawn in Deluxe Paint 4 or 5 on an Amiga computer.

The background asteroid and the skull laser were drawn in Pro Motion which is similar to DeluxePaint. That's what I'm using these days, it is an excellent program for drawing and animating pixel graphics. It's a commercial product though, the current version costs $78.

GrafX2 is a free alternative, the old versions were for DOS but the new team working on it has ported it to Windows and other systems, version 2.2 was released on March 22, 2010.

<img src="http://cheesepirate.com/games/asteroids_01c.png">

^ Did some more background asteroids for my space shooter. :)

<img src="http://cheesepirate.com/games/asteroids_01.png">

^ Normal size...and easier to grab individual rocks from, in case anyone wants to borrow some for placeholder graphics.