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There is no name for the project as of yet, any suggestions welcome. It is a very basic generic shmup. This is my first effort at the genre and I realise there is a lot missing that I now would like to add. These will be implemented when I write a new engine.

All the gameplay mechanics and levels have been implemented. Currently there are very basic graphics (simple shapes and no background) and sounds as placeholders. I haven't found anyone to do the graphics yet.

Download: http://dfs.uh-hosting.co.uk/hatsu/shmup.zip (2.3mb)
Screenshot:


I programmed this on quite a low spec machine so I am expecting the fps (shown in top right) to nearly always be above 60. Can people let me know if this is true.

Instructions:

Z: shoot (hold down to continuously fire) and use menu options.
X: use shield
Cursor keys to move
R: restart from last checkpoint when you have died

Powerups: Collect the green powers with your ship to improve it
S: Increase speed
F: Increase firerate
X: Increase shields
L: Increase lasers
M: Increase missile lasers

You will die if the core (the yellow circle at the centre of your ship) of your ship is hit by a laser or if your whole ship collides with an enemy ship. You have 5 lives. If you die press R to restart from the last checkpoint. (This will be removed for an automatic system as requested in feedback from elsewhere)

The yellow bar at the bottom represents your shield level. When you activate the shield with X the shield level decreases. Once it is zero the shield is deactivated. The shield level decreases with time and bullets absorbed.

While playing if you could comment on the difficulty (currently only normal available) and fps that would be great. Any other feedback is still very much welcomed.

There are a few features I plan on adding before release, but a lot of things I realise later would be good will be missed out until I rewrite the engine for further games such as chain scoring etc.

Planned features to be added:
TATE
Gamepad control
Online high scores
Hard difficulty

I'm currently struggling to find a graphic artist for the project, so if anyone is interest in doing some work it would be very appreciatd.

Thanks

FPS - solid @ 66 (i don't see why anyone would struggle to achieve that with what's at work here).

difficulty - feels "just right".

graphics - if i have time, i'll try to get some graphics together for this since it's a relatively small amount. i appreciate when programmers here leave the graphic files in a folder like you've done vs hiding them. this makes it easy for us to whip something up, temporarily overwrite the place-holder graphics with ours to see how they work in the game. meanwhile, i kinda like how the graphics are right now but i know you want something with a little more polish

suggestions:

1) show us current ship stats. fire rate, speed, etc. maybe just have em fade in/out temporarily when we get power-ups.

2) powerdowns to avoid.

3) scrolling background(s)?

question: what's TATE?

good fun. thanks for sharing

Thanks for taking the time to play and feedback.

1) I'll have a think about this and a nice way of implementing it.

2) What type of powerdowns were you thinking? The opposite of power ups?

3) I would love to have a nice scorlling background, but again I am no artist. At the moment I am just planning on having a simple parallax scrolling starfield with a few features thrown in such as planets etc.

TATE mode is where the whole screen is rotated 90 degrees and zoomed in to show just the play area. The person playing the game can then rotate there monitor to play it as a vertical shmup, but with a larger play area.

A visual example is probably a better explanation and can be seen in this guy's video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOB3SmOZ9mA

If you do have time to play with the graphics that would be amazing. The small ships should be pretty quick to do, but there are the bosses to be aware of which are larger in size. Any efforts though are greatly appreciated as they are likely to be a lot nicer than my efforts.

Thanks again for the feedback.

This is really cool. I know it's placeholders, but I like the aesthetic. Thought there was a bug initially until i realised you have to press R to continue. I reckon it would be better if you automatically continued after a number of seconds, or if it actually said "press R to continue" on the screen.

I've started having a go at my own pixel art for the first time. Here are some screenshots of it so far: