Sky Defender early early alpha
by Tom Ogburn · in Torque Game Builder · 02/24/2006 (6:03 am) · 5 replies
To celebrate my filing of my DBA yesterday and becoming an official company, I am releasing an early alpha of Sky Defender. There is no polish on it yet, this is just for fun factor testing. I enjoy it, sometimes too much when I should be working on it :), and just want to make sure others do to. The graphics and audio are all currently stock TGB. I will be hiring an artist and musician soon to create some original work. I will be adding level transition screens, online high scores, instructions, and a final score screen when the player runs out of lives.
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If Space Invaders and the TGB Shooter Demo had a kid, this would be it. Defend Earths airspace from the invading aliens using the left and right arrow keys to move and the space bar to fire. Gather powerups while you can, they become very rare in the higher levels, just when the difficulty seems to be at it's highest.
PC: Sky Defender alpha 1 (5mb)
--Tom Ogburn
StarLit Sky Games
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If Space Invaders and the TGB Shooter Demo had a kid, this would be it. Defend Earths airspace from the invading aliens using the left and right arrow keys to move and the space bar to fire. Gather powerups while you can, they become very rare in the higher levels, just when the difficulty seems to be at it's highest.
PC: Sky Defender alpha 1 (5mb)
--Tom Ogburn
StarLit Sky Games
About the author
Owner of Starlit Sky Games, Senior Developer / Architect at Migration.Mobi
#3
The IGC-TGE boot camp was great, but it covered a lot of stuff that isn't in TGB yet and at that point I had already pretty much made the decision that I wanted to stay 2D. At-least until my clones are selling well enough that I can spend the time making a 3D game. ;) It's good that you are now offering a TGB specific one. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the first TGB boot camp in March, but I do hope to attend the next one. By then I should be far enough along that I'll have some more to show and have advanced questions.
@Jesse,
There is no highest level, it goes for infinite. It does implement a curve that increases the number of enemies and their rate of fire and decreases the number of powerups over time so it gets harder to get the next level, but I have been to level 37. Since the end game code isn't completed yet, you can keep going even after all your lives are gone.
02/24/2006 (11:04 am)
Thanks Stephen. My daughter is just now getting old enough (6 months) that she can amuse herself so I'm finally able to start making progress. TGB is getting to be such a powerful and easy to use platform that I do plan to stick with it. The IGC-TGE boot camp was great, but it covered a lot of stuff that isn't in TGB yet and at that point I had already pretty much made the decision that I wanted to stay 2D. At-least until my clones are selling well enough that I can spend the time making a 3D game. ;) It's good that you are now offering a TGB specific one. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to attend the first TGB boot camp in March, but I do hope to attend the next one. By then I should be far enough along that I'll have some more to show and have advanced questions.
@Jesse,
There is no highest level, it goes for infinite. It does implement a curve that increases the number of enemies and their rate of fire and decreases the number of powerups over time so it gets harder to get the next level, but I have been to level 37. Since the end game code isn't completed yet, you can keep going even after all your lives are gone.
#4
02/24/2006 (12:00 pm)
It never went higher than level 16 for me as well. By 40,000 points, it was still level 16 and all I had to do was sit and mash the space bar as fast as I could and no one could touch me. Good start though, I love retro shooters like this, can't wait to see more progress!
#5
Thanks for finding that bug. I had changed my function that determines the next level and had put a curly brace in the wrong place. After I changed it I tested a few levels and they worked fine, but didn't try to retest the upper limit. It's always the smallest things... It will be fixed in the next release. I am also going to remove 1 level of weaponry so it's not quite so easy to get that far.
02/24/2006 (2:32 pm)
@Jesse, Kevin,Thanks for finding that bug. I had changed my function that determines the next level and had put a curly brace in the wrong place. After I changed it I tested a few levels and they worked fine, but didn't try to retest the upper limit. It's always the smallest things... It will be fixed in the next release. I am also going to remove 1 level of weaponry so it's not quite so easy to get that far.
Torque 3D Owner Stephen Zepp