Ideas for my shooter...

Hi everyone,

Don't know how many of you are aware but I'm working on my first game, its a space shooter style game...I've been working on it for a while, had to start over because of poor coding, but I've finally caught up to where I was before... I'm just looking for some creative ideas for items/weapons that hopefully aren't too hard to code. Let me first explain the different types of weapons and items I have:

Weapons
3 Standard bullet types of different strength and fire rates
1 Weapon that you shoot and it goes out and make a big explosion killing everything in its explosion radius
1 Heat seeking missile

Items
Scanner - this once you've purchased, displays next to all the enemies their health bar
HyperSpeed - When this item is activated everything except your spaceship slows down
Shield - Still debating over whether it will be a user activated shield, or how it is currently coded it just takes damage first then once depleted moves to normal life

I know none of these are that creative or anything, my aim for this game is to create something reasonably fun but to keep it within my abilities. I am not expecting to really be able to answer the question of "what makes your game so unique." Anyways I was just wondering if you guys had any fun item or weapon ideas. The only weapon as of now I plan on adding is one that fires in multiple directions at the same time, and maybe one that calculates closest enemy and shoots bullets in the proper direction to hit the closest enemy. Anyways, thanks for any help,

ChaseNYC

Well, I'm not that much into space shooters anymore. But I did like them as a kid. Ahhh, I remember my old Commodore64 and Nintendo... I still have them... :)
In my opinion, a boss at the end of every level makes this kind of game much better. That way you have to calculate the use of your powerups and learn where enemies are comming from. It makes a game more addictive plus you have to put some brains into it.
As for weapons... if you ever played or saw Contra Force on Nintendo then you know that there are lots of different bullet behaviours. Some of them spread, some of them go straight and some of them go in circles. Try using something like that for every weapon. So you wouldn't need to come up with some kind of new weapon, but only add different types of bullets.
Also, something like "quad damage" from Quake would be interesting.
Hope this helps a bit.

Regards

quad damage? sorry, I never played quake... I'm going to guess this refers to a power-up that makes your damage four times as strong? Actually a good idea, just not sure how I would explain a space ship power-up that does that. I've been trying to stick to somewhat realistic or explainable phenomenons, can't imagine what would make my weapons 4 times stronger hmmm...

Realistic space shooter?
The best ones are the ones with bullets going everywhere.

the game that actually inspired me was Raptor: Call of the Shadows which I loved when I was younger... By realistic I mean in the same style as this, when you are purchasing new weapons etc there is a description of the weapon and some technical jargon... Just saying not sure what technical jargon would explain a weapon becoming 4times stronger for a set amount of time...

edit: not actually a "space" shooter, just I think thats the name of the genre, even if you aren't in space but flying over land...

Side note: has anyone else played that game?

ideas that would still be interesting?
well theres the always popular blackhole (try not to get yourself sucked in)
hold on as i pull some ideas from other games:
stasis field (traps an enemy player, but makes them unattackable)
override (totally ***** up the other players ship)
particle accelerator (aka, a rail gun, makes use of the advantage of being able to attack through enemies)
i recall once weapon from startrek armada, it bounces off enemies getting stronger each time (like chain lightning), but will stop after a few hits are made
shield/armor system, certain weapons may do more shield damage then armor, and vise versa
cloak, very nice
cloak detector
im sure the list goes on, one concept i thought of and found very intriuging (with similar effects like that of your hyperspeed) which totally makes everything all "time warpish" you go mucho faster, as well as everything else, but the enemy goes slower
that would be called the "panic" meter

as for technical jargon to describe 4x stronger weapons, just use something along the lines of "power surge", which means you may want to have a few cons to it as well

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Originally Posted by ChaseNYC

Just saying not sure what technical jargon would explain a weapon becoming 4times stronger for a set amount of time...

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You can make something realistic up about anything.
Power surge, Overloading, Capacitive discharge, even liquid nitrogen to cool the circuits into super-conductive states could explain it.

As for existing weapons, my favorites are:
Rail gun
Coil gun
Laser
Maser (Invisible)

Mech warriors is also a good source of weapons, they are cool but still plausible.

Pretty much anything can be used. I would especially like a "Tesla coil" type of gun similar to the purple beam in RaidenX but with electricity. If you simply want realistic explanations for weapons, anything can be rationalized.

how about some interesting damage and altering system of the vehicle? like realtime shape deformation (using a drawingAPI beginBitmalFill(...) for the shape texture. And when you bump onto something your ship gets real deformation, slurp :D

On a layer above add sprites for fire, little destruction details and shot details.
Maybe also some smoke trail on the spaceship with differet rotation, alpha, displacement of each sprite element.

This boring game type could so much more improved- why even going for something such cliché like ?


about weapons:
how about something crazy like a big gravity bomb that attracts all metal ships or pushes them away. or some oil or alike to make the enemy blind and out of control.

Thanks for the ideas guys, I think these are helping me get my brain working again...
Has no one heard of Raptor before?!?
More Ideas definitely welcome!

ChaseNYC

have one which is not limited to 1 direction. Kinda like jungle strike on the sega. :)

maybe have a link gun, link up to enemies, when you rotate the enemy ship rotates as well, you can smash them into other enemies.

different heights, ground units, air units maybe even underwater units :D

some missions to do, not just kill the big thing.

ability to get out of your space ship and run around on ground, some missions would require this.

...i'm probably getting carried away here

Call me old fashioned but when it comes to shooters I like them simple.

IMO you don't need heaps of new ideas or add-ons, just one good idea and a fun game that requires good reflexes, rewards skill and has cool explosions and sound effects.

imo. shooters are very booooring,- one of the simplest and most copied genre. Even if you want to aim for needing good reflexes that would require a special or good control mechanic.
Of course everyone has their own goals but I wouldn´t even start on this without unique idea´s.

as for raptor (was it apogee?):
of course I know that one!,- one of the few games that had a co- op support for 2 players . Had lots of great ideas I really loved the shareware back then.

I couldn’t disagree with you more render :) I think shooters are one of the most fun and diverse genres of game around. The problem is that a lot of new programmers choose to make a simple shooter as a first game and as a result you see a lot of plain, ugly, boring shooters. You only have to look at games like the recent eclipse polarity by stimunation, or go to a shooter community such as shmup-dev however, and you will see how good these games can be.

There is a reason that shooters are really the only old school genre that are still quite popular today.

As for the purpose of this topic, just try to be as creative as you can with enemy designs/patterns and make everything look and sound nice. You don’t have to have a million different upgrades (although upgrades are nice) for it to be fun. Fast action, big explosions and even bigger bosses usually work for me.

Ali

Well thank you for the feedback, somehow I had missed trogdor's post earlier. You guys have given me a lot to think about. In regards to alillm's comment about not needing a million upgrades I agree, I just want enough to incorporate the user needing some strategy in saving their money/purchasing weapons/items that they feel most useful to their playing style as well to adapt to the increasingly difficult enemies. I think one area I haven't spent anytime thinking about and need to start to soon is coding of certain graphical elements...

In terms of the debate about shooters being boring, I feel quite ambiguous about it. I do believe my shooter will be boring, I hate to admit it bust as alillm said I will be one of those new programmers making a plain, ugly, boring shooter. As stated earlier I am just using this a tool for learning. I have learned a great deal already and am happy with my choice. I don't really see a problem in my choice and I'm not sure why you feel so strongly about it render... This game may be made available to the public, if I deem it good enough but really its for me to learn. Basically, as my FK forum title says, I pretty much am flash incompetent, I've only made one thing in flash ever (www.hrprivacy.com) which I am not that proud of. Anyways, thanks for the ideas/feedback.

ChaseNYC

p.s. alillm-really loved your neon game, was one of the games that surfaced when I was first starting to make this game and motivated me to continue struggling through this project.

I couldn't agree more with Alillm. Shooters are one of the best video game genres ever. Still are.

meh

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Originally Posted by mr_malee

meh

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Than again, your target market (if you had one) could be this ^.

> :rolleyes:

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some missions to do, not just kill the big thing.

ability to get out of your space ship and run around on ground, some missions would require this.

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Well, sure, but a lot of people scream sacrelege, and you are talking about 3 games in one. We only showed a simpler demo, but our shooter has one level where you run on the ground, and a couple of 3d levels which have missions of destroying targets ala Star Wars ( shoot a missile into that opening to destroy the deathstar, for example ).

Whether this will ever be released as such, who knows. Getting out of ship and running around has already been used to develop a resident evil type of game.

Most people want their flash games to be quickies, as it is this is a huge game.

A shoot'em up doesn't even need to have power-ups to make it good ( *cough* http://www.wedonicethings.com/heartattack/index.html ), it's just got to handle well, and you've got to make the player feel like when they die it's down to their lack of skill, and not the game just bumping the difficulty.

Personally what I'd like to see in a shooter is just bullet hell. Got close to it in places in polarity, but it had to be toned down ( A lot ). I just want to see a 100 sprites on screen, and I'll be content :)

Squize.

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Originally Posted by Squize

Personally what I'd like to see in a shooter is just bullet hell. Got close to it in places in polarity, but it had to be toned down ( A lot ). I just want to see a 100 sprites on screen, and I'll be content :)

Squize.

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You mean something like this?

:yikes:

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Originally Posted by MikeMD

Well, sure, but a lot of people scream sacrelege, and you are talking about 3 games in one. We only showed a simpler demo, but our shooter has one level where you run on the ground, and a couple of 3d levels which have missions of destroying targets ala Star Wars ( shoot a missile into that opening to destroy the deathstar, for example ).

Whether this will ever be released as such, who knows. Getting out of ship and running around has already been used to develop a resident evil type of game.

Most people want their flash games to be quickies, as it is this is a huge game.

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not really, i don't see it being any harder to implement, the same rules of collision, movement and detection would be the same, you'd just swap control over to different things. But yes, if you are just starting out and have done much in AS then i wouldn't recommend making it bigger.

I don't consider it to be three games in one, merely three different modes. Take sonic for example, it has the main game, and two bonus level modes, each very different but its still one game.

I didn't say it would be difficult to implement ( already have a game like that, sitting on it for 2 years ), but that's too much for most people playing on-line games. They freak out when you give them a little more realistic physics. You can't expect them to have enough attention span for something like that.

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Originally Posted by mr_malee

have one which is not limited to 1 direction. Kinda like jungle strike on the sega. :)

maybe have a link gun, link up to enemies, when you rotate the enemy ship rotates as well, you can smash them into other enemies.

different heights, ground units, air units maybe even underwater units :D

some missions to do, not just kill the big thing.

ability to get out of your space ship and run around on ground, some missions would require this.

...i'm probably getting carried away here

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I've always wanted to see something in action as far as a scroller involving use of the PSX game Wild 9 (Pretty much used only a link gun style with the ability to pick up objects and hurl them at enemies, hell you can even pick up the enemies to throw at other enemies :p ). On top the link gun, I want someone to implement the ball-and-chain style effects that are so mouth watering.

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Originally Posted by DancingOctopus

You mean something like this?

:yikes:

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Too bad for low quality. It's just ****** up because at the point it becomes impossible to dodge pretty much ANYTHING (aka chaotic gameplay), and it wouldn't be convenient for 1 hit death style shooters. Either way, that video pwned.

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Originally Posted by Squize

Personally what I'd like to see in a shooter is just bullet hell. Got close to it in places in polarity, but it had to be toned down ( A lot ). I just want to see a 100 sprites on screen, and I'll be content :)

Squize.

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Don't worry mate, you will get your bullet hell if bullet theory ever gets released :). It doesn’t just have that name because I liked it ;). I'm thinking of re-doing the graphics on it to make the sprites stand out more but I'm really short for time at the moment. I have too many projects that need attention. Still, I’m determined to finish it, even if it takes me another 2 years!

Ali

Oh, and I'm glad Neon inspired you chase :) Always nice to hear.

Ali