Hi All!

I have just released version 0.9 of my game Vektar, an arcade-style shooter.

http://archive.gp2x.de/cgi-bin/cfiles.cgi?0,0,0,0,30,1382

All comments are welcome. This version has a lot of new features compared to the version from the recent coding competion, and I won't be adding more significant features for the '1.0' release, though I'll make a few tweaks here and there.

I'm sure there will also be some bugs that need fixing before I call it version 1.0.

Hope somebody enjoys it!

Thanks very much for this, downloading now.. Excellent game..

Sounds great, I'm testing it out right now!

EDIT: I just tried it out, so far it seems to be a great improvement over the original, thanks!

Why have you put the text for the info page and the link to the download?

Anyway I'll try it out, I loved vektar

EDIT: w00t and such, this is way better than the original, but it has a different feel to it, I might keep the original because I liked that too (unless that's what the harder game is)

Excellent game,looks great as well.Thanks

Nice, I like colorfull games

Thanx for an excellent game, should've gotten 1st in the contest, IMO...but it's too easy...lol

Looks great, thanks for the update. Nice to see that the difficulty ramps up a lot quicker now - It really makes it worth taking it out for a quick blast at breaktimes now.

Would it be possible to make the keys user defineable though? I find it impossible to use the stick for rotating and keep control over thrust/no thrust. I'd like to try using L + R for rotating, the stick button for fire, and the buttons for thrust and brake.

I was also thinking that it might be interesting to have a reverse thrust option to replace the brakes.

There is an old Windows game that I played a lot of (some time back) called Hyperoid, which this reminds me a lot of, for some reason, even though the gameplay is totally different.

It would also be nice if we could customise the music and sound effects, rather than holding everything in the binary, as this is definitely shaping up to be the kind of game that deserves some Yak-style audio!

Also, do you have any plans to release the source for this on the 1.0? I think a lot of people (myself included) could learn from looking at it.

Really nice game, only suggestion is if you could add the option to either hit a or b for fire, and x or y for shield, as i feel more comfortable with the a button.

It feels a little different than your first release, but apart from that, nice improvements.

The shields addition is especially nice, since I like to run it blockade-breaker style: wait for all bad guys to amass, then go through them, thrusters and cannons ablaze (and shields on now!

Thanks for the comments everybody; I'm not going to make any large additions to this version but I'm paying close attention for the future!

I love this game !

You definetly should have won the 4 gig .

the game is lots of fun and a big improvement but still too easy. i think its mainly due to being way too generous with extra lives. i think you are a little too generous with the shields too.

great graphics and tons of fun though. im really looking forward to future developments with this.

This game is fantastic! I just got my GP2X and this was the first game I tried. I never thought it would be so fun. Its great that there is so many variations of enemies.
I have to agree with some of the above mentioned comments though : A different thruster-button would make it a lot easier. Same for the shield. Perhaps you could simply have two control-modes which can be selected after selecting difficulty.
Also, a background which interacts with the action in some way would make it perfect. Not needed, but Ill mention it anyways.

I love this game.

For V1.0 can you make it so that the game remembers your initials so you don't have to enter them all the time? Can you also add an option to the menu to view the high score board?

I'll see what I can do about configuring the controls. Writing a large menu system to let you choose everything is probably more effort than I want to put into it right now, but I might be able to something with a text configuration file.

The 'remember my initials' is such an obvious and simple thing, I should have thought of it.

As to the game being too easy still, I think I agree. It does seem to me that once there are a lot of enemies flying around the odds of getting killed are pretty high so I don't want death to be TOO high-impact.

My current thought is to do the following: Increase the 'free ship' score to every 8,000 points (instead of 6,000), cut the shield replenishment rate somewhat, and allow the player to start on wave 1, 2, 3, or 4 (instead of easy/hard which is just wave 1 / wave 2 anyway). I don't think wave 4 is too easy for anybody. If somebody wants to start at wave 1 and invest the time to build up a bunch of ships for an assault on wave 5, that's fine with me.

I'll release 1.0 in a week or so, I want to see if bug reports (like the freezing issue with the competition version) come out.

Thanks for the feedback everybody!

Hi Dzz,

Just had my first try of this new released, it's feeling more polished than the compo entry version. I would have given that entry 1st palce.

You comments above were along the lines of what I was thinking when playing the game.

Make the player work harder for extra lives, say at the start one at 8,000 then again at every 12,000 points then 16,000 and so on. Make it progressively harder to make up for lost lives later in the game.

One bug/feature I have was that when sound is disabled and the game paused then restarted it starts with music. Some of us are late night gamers.

Thanks for all your hard work.

Well done on the update, its like playing it for the first time again. Love the new difficulty levels. Im another in the ' would have given you first place in the compo' gang. Thanks.

Thanks for the bug report, I'll look into it and make sure it gets fixed.

Hey NeoStuey, my icon for the game stinks, want to make me a good one?

Regarding the competition: BubbleTrain, Beat2x, Extraterrestres, Vanguard Wars, and others all deserved prizes and applause IMO (not to mention the emulators and utilities!). I'm not competitive so I'm just glad there were good entries for people to enjoy.

Heck, I would have given you first place for your original entry, but this version IS alot more refined and fun.
Any chance for a hardcore setting without any shields? That would be good for some serious pulse pounding, frantic action (and shorter gaming sessions). While I personally enjoy the shields, I can't help but think it might be a bit more 'arcadey' and challenging to have an option to play without them...

Thanks for mentioning my game! At least I have one fan.......(my attempt to generate discussion about my game yielded no responses )

Anyways, great game dzz! Would you be willing to send me the source code & files for vektar? You could e-mail them to me at deadlychicken22[at]gmail.com

I would just like to see how you managed everything in the game as I am new to real programming (previously programmed in VB) and think it would be a good learning experience. Tutorials taught me how things function but not how to apply them to game creation.

Thanks,
-ben

Great improvements since the last version !

I really like the new enemies and their behavior (damn blue spirals ! ).
The shield is also a nice feature and I can't hide no more in the corners. Joy !
But the game is still too easy since wave 4, then it became too hard...
"I is surronded by tons of killer rainbow-pyramids from outer space"

I think this is my favorite game on Gp2X Dzz !

EDIT : A slight thing will be nice, even if it's really useless:
Make the ship in splash screen rotates (90°) with joystick movements. Just for fun !

Any chance of a GP32 version? Looks great and a lot of fun.

Whoops, I missed this post, please don't think I was ignoring you.



Let me know what you think.

I hope you like it.

Hey, that's great, thanks! You're a true pixel artist!

I'll use this in the version 1.0 distribution.

Cool.

I'm glad you liked it, I was having a hard time getting any ideas from my mind into that 32x32 box. I started drawing a plain blue grid and then played with the perspective, overlayed the text I had made on another failed attempt. Added the lense flair and a two layer variable density starfield in the hope it was in keeping with the game. The missing feature was to have your hero ship fly from out of the lense falir and accross the grid above the word vektar.

Too bad we can't use animated gifs.

Animated mock-up


Looking forward to the next release, I've made some more time to play it properly and I'm enjoying it much.

Congrats on the fantastic game Dzz. I agree with the gradient of difficulty. It goes from really easy to really hard really quick lol. Thanks for your work on this one!

Oh and i like virusx's idea, just for coolness it would be nice lol.

Thanks for the comments!

Once you get bettter at the game the current "hard" setting is too easy still at first and it takes up to 15 minutes or more of gameplay to get to a challenging adrenaline-inducing state. So I'll certainly have some way to start at a more difficult level if desired so you can just play for 5 minutes if you want even if you have mad skillz. On the other hand, I think that the game does get "impossible" a little too fast -- I think it would be basically impossible for anybody to finish wave 5, although as soon as I say that I'm sure somebody will report that they've done it. So I'll be tweaking that a little bit.

I also have a configuration-file based control customization scheme designed that will give a fair bit of flexibility for people who hate the current control layout or who just want to tweak it a little bit. It works basically like this:

For each of the 16 joystick directions, and each of 6 buttons (L,R,A,B,X,Y), you can assign any combination of the following functions:
Thrust (with a numeric "strength" value so if you want a weaker or stronger thruster than currently in the game you can have it)
Brake (again with a numeric strength)
Left turn (with numeric speed)
Right turn(with numeric speed)
Fire
Shield

These can be combined so you can do things like have the lower left diagonal both turn and brake if you want.

I'll ship a few pre-made config files, like:
Default (the current scheme, so it's easy to modify in small ways like changing which button is used for fire)
No Shield (default with no shield button, for extra excitement)
Asteroids mode (L,R for turns, A for thrust, B for brake, stick any dir for fire)
Upside down (A,B=turn, X=thrust, Y=brake, stick=fire, play it upside down)


I have a couple small bugs to fix also but not much.

Excellent game and good alternative to Asteroids. This was the best game submitted to the Gp2x competition, by a long chalk.

IDK about the rest of you but I want some more kinds of weapons and maybe a bomb even. I just find it hard to aim with the stick, a nice wider spread weapon would help.

Thanks for the feedback! I'll keep those ideas in mind for future versions!

I like this game! How about online ranking via passwords?

This is an amusing idea for a future version. How would such a thing work?

I could imagine something like this (not using passwords so not what you had in mind):

Your high score table also contains a "key" that is generated by the software that includes in its generation both an "encryption key" to make it hard to cheat and an encoded version of the score/user name. You take this key and type it into a web site which collects and displays them. A really good hacker could reverse engineer the mechanism but I can think of ways to make it difficult. I can't think of a way to make it impossible to cheat, but there's probably a limit to how many hours hackers are willing to put into cracking the score mechanism for some freeware game on an obscure handheld device.

This looks like an interesting idea. If done right this could be really cool.

Adding to what reallynotnick said about weapons, I think powerups would be really cool. One that comes to mind is the ability for your bullets to reflect of the walls, among other weapon upgrades etc.

Im really likeing this game so far, its an excellent piece of work.

Hi,


It would probably take you longer to implement this than it would for someone to crack it, as with pretty much any kind of encryption where the key is public (i.e. in the code).

I don't think it's worth the diversion from working on the actual game itself. Perhaps the easiest thing to do would be to have future versions keep a full history of high scores in the high scores file. To post a high score publicly, people will need to upload their entire "score sheet", so others can see if they have just suddenly pulled a mysterious mega-score out of nowhere, or if there had been a progression over time.

Obviously, there will be those who would be happy to fake a whole high-scores file, but at the end of day, anyone who is lying will be caught out in the end when it comes to the international playoffs! And who'd want to risk the embarrasment? ;-)

As regards the game itself, I'm still finding it hard going with using the stick, so I'm really looking forward to the next release where I can tweak the controls to find what suits me best. One thing I thought would also be nice to see in the game would be some kind of zoom-out, as the screen gets a bit crowded, and it can be a bit hard to find a safe path through.

I played Vektar for a while last night and really like it. I came here and foundout I was playing the old 0.1 version! I just upgraded to 0.9 and it's very cool too. A couple of suggestions:

1) Make the shield a different color than white. Maybe that rainbow effect?
2) is the shield unlimited? Seemed like it was. I think it would be better if it only lasted for a few second like in Asteroids. That way you can use it to get by a bad guy quickly but you couldn't camp.

Great game! If you have a Paypal address for donations, I'll drop some dough in the pot.

Great looking game! Keep up the good work :-)
I'm finding its one of those games I'll pick up for a quick fix!!

Hey the shield is limited, there is a little bar in the bottom right of the screen that decreases as you have your shield on.

Not sure about that rainbow shield, I kind of like it the way it is, but im not really fussed either way.

Ah. I never noticed. every time I used it and heldit on for a while it worked so i assumed it was unlimited.

Brian

Thanks for the kind words and suggestions.

Regarding donations, I think it's great that you want to support gp2x homebrew but I don't really need the donation personally so how about this: The NEXT gp2x homebrew game you find that you think is cool, pass on the donation to them.

A quick note on version 1.0: I have gotten sidetracked doing a port of the classic "RPG" NetHack, so it will be a little while yet before I get to it. It will just have a few bug fixes, a few game balance tweaks, and configurable controls.

*lol* ...

I think everyone here agrees that you can take as long as you want to release Vektar 1.0 if you are able to make an usable NetHack port!

Thanks for this great original game, and maybe the upcoming port too!

I like your game a lot, but it would be a lot cooler if it was more like gridwars:
http://gridwars.marune.de/

Maybe you could implement two game types:
One asteriods like version like it is right now and one gridwars like version:
Use the stick to move ship (not with thrust or anything, simply stick left -> move ship left) and the four buttons to shoot in the four directions. L and R could be used for a bomb and a shield.

I understand exactly where you're coming from. I was just thinking how much better Vektar would be if it involved a little frog that hopped over roads...

Thanks for the comments guys, I like them a lot, but they would be a lot cooler if they were more like the onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/index

Version 1.0 of Vektar is released. I have submitted it to archive.gp2x.de and I'm sure it will show up there shortly. Until then you can fetch it from here:

http://www.gp2xgamer.com/Vektar.zip

This release fixes the sound/pause bug and adds configurable controls. Here's what the readme.txt has to say:

nice

Just wondering what are the few bug fixes?

I just noticed today when I tried to play vektar .9 on my tv it had no sound. Is that fixed in this version?

another vote for a GP32 version (I know, no mentions of it, but we can wish can't we)

Thanks so much for this final release. The config options can make for some very CRAZY gameplay lol.

Vektar owns! Keep up the amazing work! It would be pretty amusing if the homebrew efforts on gp2x pushed it into the mainstream.... It really is an amazing piece of kit!

I love the Nintendo DS because of the games, hate the PSP because the games suck so much... GP2X deserves to do well, the homebrew stuff so far kicks ass!

Vobbo