Jul 6, 2010

SHOOT FIRST

Shoot First is an Action Roguelike.

It features 2 player co-op, procedurally generated levels, 5 environments, and online highscores (thanks to Adam Reineke for writing the PHP script and Evan Balster for the DLL).

I started this game in the middle of working on Action Fist. Even though I had a brand new and fiery passion for my rogue project, every now and then I would run into such pitfalls as: "Everything is frozen" and "This map is unbeatable". And it's bad enough to lose inspiration for your main project, let alone one you just birthed. (I'd like to thank Jonatan Söderström for encouraging me to get this thing finished up near it's last legs).

I found it funny: Because the game was procedural, sometimes I would be testing it and would catch myself looking for things that I knew weren't there... So I hope that players feel like this game offers much more to explore than I ever got to experience while making it.

Due to the procedural nature of this game, it can be downright cruel sometimes! Enjoy!

On a side note:

While working on this game, I realized that I make a lot of games with shooting. I mean seriously, look at my games page; there are 7 games that have guns/shooting on their buttons. Seven! (and all of my games have something violent in them)

Now this may not seem like a problem to many gamer types, and frankly, it isn't. Shooting and dodging is a fun and intuitive mechanic, which also acts as an instant conflict; But I feel like it might be an easy way out.

I might have to go fishing in another pond for a while.

13 comments:

  1. Oh no! I would very, very much like to play this, however I can only see the top left bit of the screen. It's tiny, and at the bottom right of my monitor. The rest (I assume) is cropped off. Alt-enter and F4 don't appear to do anything. Please help!

    ReplyDelete
  2. i want an option to turn off the scanlines, i hate them

    ReplyDelete
  3. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ^^^ blogspot screwed up my comment a little, reposting.

    I am having the same issue as Farbs. I would kindly suggest you make it possible to play the game windowed.

    Also, it would really be nice to have a pause function and/or rebind Esc. It's a bit of a surprise that Esc will suddenly end your game and bring you back to the title screen.

    Anyhow, the game itself is great! Such a simple idea (Robotron + Roguelike) that I wonder why no one else has made it before!

    ReplyDelete
  5. This comment has been removed by the author.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Awesome game! I love the idea and execution of a smoothly scrolling rogue-like with arena-shooter gameplay! Cool pixel art, too! I actually love the scanlines. Really like the art and gameplay in most all your games!

    Especially Uberleben is very stylish too! Grammar in title slightly wrong (on purpose?): "Überleben des grossen Sprungs" would be correct... haha I am such a German :)

    ReplyDelete
  7. second to be able to turn off post effects, slows me down too. Excellent game, great fun, congratulations! reminds me of dungeon master on the msx, a type of game I long wanted to see updated, congratulations!

    ReplyDelete
  8. Great game! Finding princesses is pretty rewarding but having the other adventurer die made me super bummed out. :V

    ReplyDelete
  9. I just wanted to point out that (for me at least) the princesses seem to insist on spawning on top of spikes. This makes them somewhat impossible to rescue, because they die as soon as you touch them.

    Maybe you should keep this misfeature, but have them spawn pre-dead on the spikes with some sort of "aw shucks, too late" comment from the PC?

    Other than that, this is a brilliant game.

    ReplyDelete
  10. Second vote for windowed mode or something.

    I can't play at all, both versions of the game just open up to a completely black screen. Hitting enter causes the music to change so I know it's just a video issue. It's weird since I play a lot of full screen low res games (including Action Fist!) and never had this problem before. WinXP/GeForce 7900GS.

    ReplyDelete
  11. Hopefully helpful suggestions for next version:
    1. add windowed mode; really handy since it doesn't mess up the size of existing windows like a resolution change does.
    2. fix fullscreen to request 640x480 resolution from OS, and scale all gfx by 2; requesting 320x240 res is a bad idea, not all video cards support it (ATI stuff doesn't, intel stuff it works erratically, dunno about nvidia)
    3. add optional disable for the scanline shader, which is DOG SLOW on all intel video cards and core i5/i7 video
    4. new joystick mode (1 stick): add an optional 'one stick' mode which allows keyboard type control with one joystick (aim locks to direction you walk in unless you press strafe, in which case aim locks at direction aimed in until strafe is released)
    5. suggestion for dual stick mode: optionally make moving the 'aim' stick automatically fire (once, or maybe autofire at some non-gamebreaking rate) in the direction aimed at, rather than having to move with one thumb, aim with the other and rapidly mash a trigger with an index finger to fire, which in my experience wears out my hand REALLY quickly.

    Otherwise, this is a great game! I like the sin-tri-noise music, and am hoping we get some more!

    LN

    ReplyDelete
  12. Well, I couldn't get scaling to work right since I have surface code and built in views that muck up the process (problems with working on games for a long time, old code comes back to haunt you) But I uploaded a scalable Game-Maker-Blurry-Type windowed mode of the game for those who can't play the original. Hope this helps for now.

    ReplyDelete
  13. How about a game where you go fishing in a pond for a while?

    ReplyDelete