Low pH and Loads of Becquerels

This week I have started to implement radioactive acid slime because without it Horizon Blaster just felt empty. In the finished game, the liquid terrain types (lava, ocean, green stuff) will be used in conjunction with other solid terrain or with ground structures like steel girders and platforms.

The other improvement is that level files now contain definitions for placement of buildings. I am using a few simple placement patterns like lines, rectangles, grids and circles. This gets me one step closer to a level editor which in turn brings us closer to real levels.

Low pH and Loads of Becquerels

I also tweaked the homing missiles a bit, they will lock onto a target a moment after launch which makes their handling much more interesting.

Red Magma and Rocket Trails

Lava is now magma red, improving the visibility of blaster shots greatly...

 

The technical improvement for today is that some types of weapons now use dynamically updated meshes for their trails. In the screenshot below, the plasma gun and rockets don't generate disconnected particles anymore...

 

Playing with Lava

The amount of fire, explosions and lava that you can squeeze into a Shmup is remarkable. Today I did just that.

Shots now leave marks of molten rock on the planet's surface as seen in this video:

Here is what the lava terrain looks like after a complete overhaul. This pool of magma wobbles und bubbles, which is extra motivation to keep your ship in the air:

Against the bright terrain shots can be hard to keep track of. This will need some tweaking.

PS: I recorded the 2 videos in 60 fps but I am pretty sure the processed video I see on YouTube is not. Is there a way to enforce higher framerates?

New Landscape and a Short Boss Fight

A new video is up, showing the 2D/3D toggle and another landscape. At the end of the level, the evil space train is dealt with swiftly.

 

After uploading the last video I saw that the energy bars were not updating, which is now fixed.

In the video the first few seconds show a "traditional" bird's eye view of vertical scrolling Shoot'em Ups. The rest of the video uses forward scrolling.

Videos now hosted on Youtube channel

I am continuing my experiments with video recording and hosting. Seems like YouTube's video quality is far superior to their own blogspot-hosted videos!

My next steps are some bugfixing and then to offer a small demo for download.

Another Video and RSS Feeds

I put another video up in the Media section in an attempt to improve the video quality. I will keep experimenting, maybe I will have to upload to YouTube for better quality.

I noticed that the Chrome browser does not come with any feed reader support. To subscribe this page, for most browsers scrolling all the way down to "Submit to Posts" is the way. Chrome users would have to install the RSS feed reader plug-in and will then find an orange feed icon in the navigation bar. *Sigh of relief*

Gameplay video

I was checking out Open Broadcaster Software and created a gameplay video. You can see two players shooting down some bogies over 2 minutes. This is how the campaign or survival modes would work. All current weapon types are shown, but only one enemy type. This video is also without sound, but there will be more to follow. By the way, the game has a friendly fire setting for those who like to get into arguments with whoever they are sitting next to playing.

Head to the video over at Media