Eon Skies

[Loswaith]

Eon Skies (idea)

  The concept for Eon Skies is a top down scrolling shooter that runs through a gamut of various air creatures and vessels from the mythical to high end science fiction.
  The idea is that the player needs to collect these various ships to battle through regions to conquer various Ages (for what ultimate purpose I'm not sure as yet).

  The player/s will only initially have a few ships to choose from but as they defeat enemies they can gain the enemy creature or vessel as a new 'ship', thus increasing the number of ships a player is able to take into each mission.

  Each 'ship' will have its own style of primary and secondary weapons and its own defences based around some basic attributes that all ships will have.

[Chimera]

Sounds good - do you gain the new ship after a boss fight?
Can you get upgraded weapons mid mission?
Weapon choices?

I like scrolling shooters 

[Loswaith]

Feel free to add, that's the basic concept I have to date, usually things develop further as i Progress in The creation of it.

I'm thinking in most cases a ship will become available to use after you destroy one, though I am thinking of adding that you actually have to capture the ship, via some ability all ships can call or have.

Unlikely to be able to change weapons mid mission, though given its a fairly staple thing of these games there will be power ups during missions.

I'm thinking each ship will have it's own weapon system based on the ship itself.  Whether I will enable tweaking or changing weapons for that only time will tell, though unlikely to happen as that's more 'icing' than cake gameplay.

[Loswaith]

I haven't done much on this in a while, playing around more with RPG stuff, but finally got back into it.

At this stage I have got an 'engine' together to handle most of the gameplay functionality.
A few more things are left to be done such as making a pretty UI, and a few more weapon and power-up functionality that I'd like to be core for the game itself.

Then onto the game proper and level design.
Either way I wont be able to deploy this on Xbox 360 for us to have a play on .
Even just to test on the platform Microsoft requires a membership and at $100 a year , I cant justify the expense simply to be able to test a game, and at this stage I cant see me not just giving it away once its done anyway.

Not that overall it matters since you cant release games for sale on the Xbox in Australia anyway.

[Loswaith]

Playing around with the core of the shooter at this stage, and have some weapons to show off.

Most of the artwork isnt mine however but obsconded with from a tutorial I was initially playing around with to learn about per-pixel collisions.


From left to right, Burst fire with exploding enemy, One sidearm and both sidearms, A wave fire effect (coved in the tutorial), and a splashfire effect I liked (that started as an error made during the wave fire) and a laser (zoting some asteroids).


A shield type that forms a barrier around the player, that spins up through the stages shown


The shield when  a few parts have been "killed" off.

[Loswaith]

A bit more of a conventional weapon today.
The way I designed this I inadvertently gavemyself much more flexability with this weapon than I originally intended.  This was due to I wanted the weapon to fire wider as it gained more bullets.  If it gains enough it will go all the way around.  However being free to set the angle between shots you can make it fire in just about any direction you like even up-to 360 degrees.


The Basic 5 shots, 5 shots wth a wider arc, 8 shots with that wider arc (showing up the 360 fire nicely).

Add enough bullets and you can get completely Insane

[Chimera]

LOTS OF BULLETS!
 
 
<insert exploding head smilly>
<edit note - if you stare at the sphere of bullets long enough it forms a spiral pattern>

Quick thought popped into head while viewing- in some shooters - if you can move up the screen - I sometimes wish I had backward firing weapons so I can clear below me and move back down.

Oh oh .. What about a phase wher you need to play at the top of the screen and waves come from below you ... I can't recall seeing that in a shooter...

Also also - what is required to generate graphics you can use? I would be willing to spend some time on it if I had a focus.

[Loswaith]

  For making graphics any program than can make png files with alpha (transparency) information will do it.

The most commonly used ones are
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Photoshop
Gimp (Open Source program similar in nature to photoshop)

[Loswaith]

Here is a prototype that can be downloaded and played and that hopefully works.

Eon Skies Engine Prototype v0.11, it's less than a megabyte.
  It doesnt need to be installed, just unzip it into a folder and run the SpaceFighter.exe, it will start straight away.

You may need the XNA 3.1 runtime and/ or updated versions of the .net 3.5 runtime or some later version installed too.

Controls:
z Key = fire - it auto fires so you can hold it down or tap it as you wish
x Key = Alt fire - this currently is for the laser, it has a delay on it after firing before it can be fired again
Directional Keys = movement - you can alternativly use the numpad directinal arrows if num-lock is turned off
keypad minus key = quit - this wil exit the game as will closing the window.
enter  = respawn - creates a whole new ship for you to play with, there is no limit on the number of respawns and also no immunity once you have spawned implemented yet either.

After the count down a few set waves have been put in place with a few of the power-ups too, when you get the Random! message it will just randomly spawn power-ups or enemies that are currently in the game.