Additionally I added a struggle meter at the top. They still aren't 1:1 but I will sort that out in the beta build. I also change the second player cam to more closely reflect the first player camera on the left. It used to be diagonal but it was weird for one player to have a different view space than the other. I change the orientation of the split screen margin. I'll post more of the overall game concept in my eventual devblog. These enemies just want to get in close and explode near you to deal damage. So if 10 are alive then the spawner will wait until one dies before spawning another. At some point in a level the player will be bombarded by this enemy type and need to hold them off until their objective is complete. The flood spawner is just something I recently added as an enemy type that will continuously spawn an enemy every nth second up to a cap of how many can be alive from that spawner at any given time pulling from a max amount to be allowed by the spawner. So the player has to switch to the opposite color from their weapons. Again I don't have the art fleshed out yet so right now purple enemies are negative and orange enemies are positive. The only way to destroy an enemy is to hit them with the opposite polarity. The player can slot two weapons at a time and switch between them whenever they want. An enemy of a positive polarity cannot be hit by a matching polarity weapon from the player. The weapon polarity mechanic is inspired heavily by Ikaruga. Right now I just want to demonstrate a new weapon polarity mechanic and the flood spawner.
I will create a more in depth post on that later though. I made some prototypes and tested it with friends and have found some new inspiration for the gameplay and how I want it to go. I wanted to start a quick post that will hopefully roll out to be my devblog for the game.
I don't have the full look fleshed out right now so enemies are just primitives with some shader stuff going on and you won't see much of an environment yet.
So neon grids and wire frame tessellated mountains with a space themed backdrop. It's look is inspired by that of 80's album art. It's a fast paced twin stick shooter game inspired by the likes of Contra, Ikaruga, Geometry Wars, and a few others. I have been working for a few months in the very brief moments I can on a game called Mainframe. The video also shows the weapon polarity mechanic in action. In the meantime here are some things going on right now to have a look at. I'll be trying to keep the updates coming regularly. Purple is negative and orange is positive. I'm currently signaling this to the player by a color. So they'll have to swap their weapon to the opposite charge to kill the enemy. If the player shoots an enemy with a positive charge and their weapon is set to positive then they won't hit the enemy. The player will also be able to swap the charge of their weapon. In this game the player will eventually encounter enemies that have a positive or negative charge. She's been able to help design new and cooler ideas for the games world and really start to flesh out how these characters will move around what the environments will look like.Īnother cool thing is the weapon polarity mechanic I was inspired by in Ikaruga. This has taken the ideas to the next level. I recently got help from Janice Chu doing concepts for the game. The player is a bipedal character while the enemies are floating entities similar to robots so I can cut down on the animation required to support all the different types and really focus on their behavior. I'm trying to be realistic with my scope and what I know I can do.