Xiraya Falling - Beta Demo
Community Forums/Showcase/Xiraya Falling - Beta Demo
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| 'Xiraya Falling' is currently about 80% complete. Fully playable and hopefully highly enjoyable. Please download it here. http://www.johnpitchers.com.au/XirayaFallingBetaDemo.zip Some screenshots...   Lasers are for girls. Gimme lightning bolts!!  The view from the cockpit towards the Spacestation Xiraya.  MISSILE CAM. One of 5 different view cams.  Oh no!! That can't be good.  Increase your weaponry with power-ups. Thanks to all who download. Comments are welcome and please make suggestions as to how this can be improved. Regards John Pitchers |
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| Smashing GFX. Downloading it now... |
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| Well presented but I think a few gameplay tweaks could improve it a lot. Spent a lot of time flying into the darkness chasing things (I think I know how to use that radar), but then it's a few shots and back into the darkness. Suggestions: Perhaps the baddies could hang closer to the space station? Some sort of HUD showing where the enemies are - e.g: a ring around enemy ships. |
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| Press 'U' to identify the nearest enemy or 'I' to identify the enemy in your sights. When the enemy is off screen an arrow will appear indicating it's direction. 'R' changes your radar zoom when things get a bit tight. Hmmm. Should have included a readme.txt with controls in it. Will have to get one together. |
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| Ahh - probably says this on the intro screen - didn't get long enough to read it all. |
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| I can't believe only one person has looked at this after 2 days. Any one else get any feedback, please. |
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| I agree with Falken about the HUD, enemies are a bit too hard to see. It is showing alot of promise, great introduction sequence. The interior of the spacestation doesn't look anywhere near as good as the outside, I know the ship isn't inside there for long but you could polish that up a bit. Need some way of adjusting controls e.g. mouse sensitivity and Y axis invert. I get some Z fighting all over the planet surface. You have obviously spent some time on it and this definitely shows through, all in all it looks great and with a few tweaks should be a fun game. |
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| I downloaded it, and had a play with it last night. I was interest because I am also making a space shootem up in 3D. I was interested to see how it played and it worked well. What will the final scope of the game be? The particle effects were nice. Did you code the routines yourself or use a library like Particle Candy. Cheers, Unc |
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| All in all a nice game... nice graphics... But i've got the same problem like shambler about the planet here... You should look after how your "planet glow" is set up a bit further. Another thing: It's not easy too use all this shortcuts... more interface should do the trick. Adjustable controls would be nice too. The rest is well made and good looking. |
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| Originally, I was going to call this game 'Traffika' as it was going to be an intergalactic trading/combat game. With the player having a choice of being a trader, bountyhunter, miner, etc. But there are plenty of those games out there and the project was getting so big I could see it never getting finished. So, I decided to concentrate on the combat side and make a pure space shooter. Granted, it still needs work. Enemy bosses are the next thing. A few more weapons (Did you play enough to get the Electron Displacer power up? It rocks!), different explosion variations and other tweaks. I've just added auto-identification so it automatically targets and identifies the nearest enemy to you. Yes. I did the particle effecs myself. To create the smoke effect, I gave each particle a timer. When the timer reaches about 50% I fade the colour to dark gray (32,32,32), increase the scale each round and fade it out. I also get problems with the planet glow in 32 bit mode but not in 16 bit mode. I thought it was a problem with my inferior hardware. Now, I know it's not I'll spend some time on that. |
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| Looks very nice, I'll get a few mins later to grab it. (looks like my sort of game!) Gota ask- Can lightning strike with no substance? |
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| No, but never mind that, it's a game =] |
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| John, I agree with most of the other comments. The biggest issue for me was locating the enemy ships. Pressing 'U' to identify and highlight the nearest enemy helps considerably - if this highlighting happened automatically (eg at the start of a mission; shifting the highlight to the next enemy when the current enemy is destoryed, etc) it would make things better, in my opinion. You might want to consider the "Wing Commander" targeting method, whereby enemies in the vicinity are highlighted by 'brackets' and the targeted enemy is highlighted by a 'box'. Like other people, I am experiencing planet 'flickering' in the 32 bit modes. Another thing: Perhaps it's just me, but I found the opening transcript difficult to read because of the moving background. This could possibly be rectified by having a darker coloured box behind each text portion instead of complete transparency - but you would probably lose the effect you were aiming for. Not having the general's comments and the captain's comments both aligned to the same side of the screen also proved difficult for me. I experienced a MAV after leaving the game running (at the opening menu) for a considerable time. Despite these things, the game is shaping up well. You have achieved a lot from your obviously considerable efforts. If I were you I would finish and release this space-combat-oriented version and then, for the next version, add the intergalactic trading components you had originally planned to include. My system - Laptop: Pentium-M 1600, 512MB DDR2 RAM, 128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X700 |
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| I am not sure if it was my graphics card but the planet was giving me a headache. not sure about the lingo but the vertexs I guess were blinking between a mesh and black Also if I was not shooting or pressing something the scrren would go black. Look like it could be a cool game but there were a lot of quirky things happening and was hard to know where I was etc. |
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| Hi all, Thanks for the comments. Not as positive as I was expecting. But, that's a good thing. It's highlighted issues which definately need addressing. I have now added auto identify (not in the current download) which automatically highlights the closest enemy when they spawn and when the current enemy is destroyed and I have to admit it makes the game play faster and more continuous. I have started on an interface to allow players to change options mid game (inverting the mouse has been in the back of my mind for some time). About the transcript being hard to read. You are so right. Every time I play it I think to myself, "Oh, I gotta do something about that," but then something more important crops up. So, thanks for the comment on that. On to the problem with the planet. I am having real probs with this. The planet is a 512x512 sprite. I didn't want to use a mesh because it seemed like wasted polys. The planet glow is the same size sprite scaled x 1.12 and positioned behind the planet. I have tried playing around with entity order and different flags but no luck. If I mask the planet glow (flag 4) it doesn't flicker but I loose the smooth fading at the edges. Can anyone offer suggestions on this? Thanks for the comments. I hope more people have opinions to offer. This game will get finished. I guess to sell a game you need to give people what they want. So, all and any comments and critisism will be taken on board and acted upon. Regards John Pitchers |
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| On to the problem with the planet. I am having real probs with this. The planet is a 512x512 sprite. I didn't want to use a mesh because it seemed like wasted polys. The planet glow is the same size sprite scaled x 1.12 and positioned behind the planet. I have tried playing around with entity order and different flags but no luck. If I mask the planet glow (flag 4) it doesn't flicker but I loose the smooth fading at the edges. Can anyone offer suggestions on this? For the game I am working on I use a sprite which was textured with a transparent png file. The image include the a glow which gradually faded out. This was the easiest way for me. You can see the results in one of the screen shots on my site (its under WIP -> then scroll to the bottom and click old wip section). About the transcript being hard to read. You are so right. Every time I play it I think to myself, "Oh, I gotta do something about that," but then something more important crops up. So, thanks for the comment on that. Perhaps you could use something like SpriteCandy or TotalFont. Both give good results. I opted for SpriteCandy because it gave me a total solution for my HUD. I guess to sell a game you need to give people what they want. What sort of price did you have in mind... I wouldnt want you to be disappointed as there are a lot of very very good shootem ups available as freeware. So really you would need to offer something above and beyond in your game to attract the punters. Cheers, unc |
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| The planet glow is the same size sprite scaled x 1.12 and positioned behind the planet. Positioning the glow further away from the planet should sort this, you might need to scale the glow a bit more since it will appear smaller. |
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| another thing.... don't color the sun that gaudy... it would be better if it is more bright. And a nice effect for the sun: make another sunglow sprite with high alpha rendered in front of everything (except HUD and that kind of stuff)... let it get bigger the more the sun moves into center of viewpoint and almost fill the screen when the camera points directly into the the sun... hide it when the sun is out of view |
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| I just had a look and there is only two things i think need improvement. IMHO you need to make the mouse more sensitive. It got really frustrating having to pull the mouse from one side of my desk to the other just to turn the ship around 180 degrees. I gave up and used the keys. The other is it should lock onto the enemy automaticly, rather than the player having to press the "u" key. If you take for instance Freelancer, they just auto lockon to the enemys. In fact they show directions to multipul enemys but the one closest has the biggest arrow. Thoes are the changes that i think need to happen. Other than that it is a very cool game. |
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