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BATTLE PILOTZ - Arcade Multiplayer Action

Hello,

let me introduce you to my latest hobby game project: "Battle Pilotz" (name may change)!
It's a classic arcade style shoot-em-up game with a focus on multiplayer gameplay. The project is in pre-alpha state and I've put a few weeks of on-and-off spare-time development into it but want to release an early version for testing soon.

Gameplay
The gameplay happens completly in 2D where you fly a classic fighter plane across the sky. Large emphasis has been put on very simple controls where all you need is a single touch or click - that's right, no on-screen controls, no input devices, etc.! You either touch/click or you don't. Hold your touch to pitch the plane up (hold even longer to perform loopings) and do short taps to fire your weapon, that's all. The flying mechanic is heavily inspired by the barrel riding levels of Donkey Country Returns by Retro Studios, which I took as a basis and added to it to allow for competitve gameplay where precise timing is key. Additionally several weapon powerups can be collected to bring interesting changes to the battle, such as flak cannons, machine guns and missile launchers.

Multiplayer
One of the hardest challenges of this project was to get networked multiplayer working, but it's finally playable. You can battle other players on your local network or across the internet no matter what device they are on. This was really hard to accomplish in AppGameKit Tier 1 Basic coding and got kind of messy really quick without the programming comforts of other languages like Java or C++, but rapid prototyping using the broadcasting functionality was the key aspect here. Players can setup their own games, meet in lobbies or hop into running sessions.

Graphics
Although the gameplay is two-dimensional I decided to render all in-game content using full 3D graphics. This allowed me to model my own artwork quickly, utilize shader techniques and implement advanced effects such as a dynamic water simulation and custom particle effects.

DOWNLOAD

Latest Release (0.01 Pre-Alpha):
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mf1jst5o070shor/BattlePilotz_0_01.zip?dl=0

Screenshots

Looking good

Looks really good! I'd love to see a tutorial on fast action real-time multiplayer. I've put off a few projects because I was scared of the multiplayer aspect.

Thanks guys!



Yeah, making such a tutorial would be a cool project, but time consuming! We'll see if I can manage to do something like that. But if you have any questions just ask...
The networking for this game touches on several aspects like session management, event handling or latency compensation, but it is not very advanced yet. I want to release an early version for public testing soon.

Removed accidental double post...
A mod may delete this.

Looks great! I love the look and 'feel' I get from the screenshots. Only thing I can suggest, without having played it yet, is to add some more backdrop pieces, such as the sun, maybe some basic-fast day/night cycle so you can get some dynamic lighting/effects in there. Shooting stars and/or northern style lights in they sky, make the backdrop look alive at night. Also add Luna for the night sky. Lastly, have some Ai vs Ai combat in the backdrop, making it seem like you're in a larger battle and really give it that large scale action set-piece, really grab the attention of potential customers/players. Also give you a reason to add more epic explosions lol.

One last thing! Make sure the sound quality and mixing is top notch! This is something I've been working on and improving on in my current projects, really produce high-quality sound effect samples, bringing them into Audacity and than mixing them with various other sound samples, remix them a few times for multiple variations of the same sound effect, and make variations of 3D sound placement, since I don't think AppGameKit supports this yet as far as I know, so when an explosion happens on the left side of the screen, the sound fx plays from the left speaker and the sounds on the right play from the right side, ect.., ect... This will improve the feel, epicness and immersion of the game 100x over! You'll be amazingly surprised how good sound design.mixing can raise the quality of your game to all new heights!

Good luck! ...and think about me when it comes to testing. My SO and I both want to try the game out and do some multiplayer action, lol. Sooo, email me if you want me to be a tester.

Thanks for the kind words and the valuable advice Moondog!



All your ideas sound really great! The thing is I need to really focus on gameplay and networking so I can get a working demo version out for you guys to test (I can get easily carried away with working on cool looking effects ). But I'll add those to my to-do list for sure!



Yeah I know, that's a lot of work to really get right. Right now I have the most basic sounds in, I guess they will do for now, as they can be easily replaced with improved sound files later in the development cycle.



Yes, it's not implemented in AppGameKit natively, but you can tweak properties such as balance, volume and rate of individual sound instances already. So I created a few basic effects such as positional sounds having lower volume the farther away they are from the listener (camera). Also the rotor sound of the airplanes changes playback speed dynamically based on how fast you're flying.

Ok guys, it's play-time!

RELEASE: 0.01 (Pre-Alpha)

DOWNLOAD: https://www.dropbox.com/s/mf1jst5o070shor/BattlePilotz_0_01.zip?dl=0

* Included are Windows and Android builds (exe/apk).

* Disclaimer: This is a very early test build, use at your own risk! The game may crash often and/or randomly and have many bugs. Also there are plenty of graphics and sounds missing.

* But you can practice a little in singleplayer mode against a very dumb AI (basically just moving targets flying along a certain pattern) or play multiplayer over LAN or Internet (latency may lead to strange behaviour, also make sure to have your port forwarded if you want to host games, default is 48230 but can be changed in the setup menu).

* Controls are simple: Either press or don't (touch / left-mouse / space-bar). Short taps fire your weapon, hold longer to pitch your plane up.

Have fun and please report any bugs here on this forum!