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The Game
The objective is to get as many points as you can by shooting creatures. If a creature touches you, you'll lose both health and points. Unlike most arcade-type games, you only have one life. However, you start with enough health to take several hits, and your health regenerates very slowly over time. Points are required to unlock your special abilities.
In true Jason Brooks style, you can shoot THROUGH creatures and hit more than one enemy with a bullet. But, just like in reality, bullets lose velocity and damage potential the further they travel... and they lose even more if they have to travel through a creature. This means that in some cases your shot will wound an enemy rather than just kill him. But wounding is good, because a wounded demon does less damage to you if it touches you.
Special Abilities
Jason has three special abilities:
- The Arc Shot fires four normal bullets targeted at the four closest creatures. Best used when enemies are scattered in across a wide area.
- The Superbullet fires one shot at the closest enemy. If it hits, it richochets toward the next closest enemy, and the process repeats until the bullet runs out of energy or it misses. Best used when enemies are clustered together (to reduce the chance of missing).
- Focus speeds Jason's reflexes and perceptions, making everything around him appear to move slower. Use when Jason is overwhelmed to give YOUR reflexes a break.
Created With:Macromedia Flash and Poser. Very little of the artwork was created directly in Flash. The vast majority of it was rendered in Poser and exported as TIFF graphics files, which were then converted to PNG for import into Flash. This leads to a large file size in Flash, but since I have zero artistic ability its either that or nothing.
The code is pretty straightforward Actionscript. I originally coded it in Actionscrip 2 with external class files (OOP, anyone?) but a game of this simplicity doesn't need to be complicated with extra files. All the code fits very neatly inside movie clips where it belongs. Plus, a reliance on external files impedes the mobility of the game. Whether that is good or bad, I have yet to decide. As of verion 0.7b, none of the code is optimized. Yet the game still chugs along at a decent framerate, and will even keep up (on my computer anyway) with an over-inflated fps of 30. Normal framerate is 24fps. In a browser it runs at around 20, but that's due to Flash and the browser itself, not my code. Fully optimizing this simple game may make it a tad faster, but I doubt it will be noticeable unless you're playing it on a 486 or something. If you ARE playing it on something slower than a Pentium 3, I'd appreciate your feedback on how well it plays (or doesn't) on your machine. This brings us to...
Feedback requested:
This is a beta version, but (hopefully) its very close to what the full version will be. I need feedback on game play... on things that don't work, things you like and things that annoy the hell out of you. I want to know how hard you think the game is and what's the highest score you could manage to get. Does the game get too hard too quickly or is it so easy that its boring? (and yes, I know it starts off very slow. That's intentional). What I don't need is a list of features you'd like to see added to the game. The feature-list for the project is already set. In stone. I'm already working on getting the last few features working, but anything else (like more/different abilities, etc.) will have to wait for the next project. Sorry. As of now, my work on this project involves fixing things that are broken, improving the look and feel of the UI, designing a better web page, and implementing features that I already have planned.
Feedback goes here ---> darkicon (at) darkicon (dot) com.
or here.
The Next Project!?
...maybe. Maybe not.
The current project was mostly an experiment and a learning experience. I wanted to see just how easy it was to create a game in Flash. I got my answer (extremely) and when I'm done here I'll consider doing another, more complicated game. But I'm not gonna crank out Flash games for a living, so future projects will be on a "When Inspiration and Free Time Coincide" basis. Unless you want to pay me. Money is always a great motivator.
When THIS game is finished, I'll leave it here for people to play. For free. It, like everything else I've done to date, will be advertiser supported. And even though this is a beta, I think it is a very playable beta, so feel free to tell people about it.
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