Hmm... at the end of the level, you should see your ship do a roll and boost off the screen as a nice touch.

I love this kind of game, and I love this indie spree going on!

iBLAMEGETI

Shame on you Geti for sparking so much creativity. :U

@CrazyMLC: Me too!

@Poor mans sniper:That's a pretty good idea, though i'm not particularly looking forward to animating the ship doing a roll. =P

Also, introducing hexagonal thruster exhaust:



Making it work for the yellow wedges is a royal pain in the ass, but i nearly have it! Once i've got a formula going, it should be easy to make it work for other ships that change their facing. Yes, such ships will occur.

As far as animating the roll goes, I'd suggest whacking together a quick 3D model of the ship.
It's fairly angular, so it should be easy.

Finally got to play this in the short break I'm having from study (good joke short break you're on the internet :V) and it ran nicely (though aiming with a track-pad is haaaaaard) until I hit the interstage menu. Looks like wine doesn't like layered drawing or something, because it lags in spelunky when you get a text overlay down the bottom and in supercratebox when you die). I like the mechanics you've got going, and the little 'splosion animations were nice. The music was jiving and retro as well.

All in all, I like it. A nice take on the genre

Thanks! Also, yeah, those touchpads/trackpads cause a lot of problems with this game, though i think i have a reasonable solution: Auto-aiming. Somewhere in the menu, you should be able to disable the use of mouse, which will make the turret take on a life of its own and shoot the nearest enemy. This might also be good for people who don't handle the multitasking very well, since it allows you to take your mind off where you shoot with the turret. Doing this properly will be hell though.

@Wonkyth: Good idea, though i'm absolutely terrible at 3D modeling. :I

Also, hexagonal thruster emissions are coming along nicely, plus i've started to tweak things more in the player's favor. Right now it's just too hard overall.

Nah, just do a damped rotation towards the angle of the nearest enemy, and only allow it to check for a new enemy once that enemy is dead or half a second has passed (to prevent it from flipping crazily between two equidistant enemies).

Sounds about right. Now to devise a sneaky way of making Gamemaker obey my orders. In the meantime, slight progress.



HUGE BOOLETS. AKA supercharges AKA super shots. This one in particular just plows through 200 damage worth of enemies, and always kills the last one it hits. Except bosses. I still have to implement a proper limitation on it (you can fire three per second right now), though i think this will be done by means of a recharging bar in the GUI. And speaking of GUI, Lizard has not-so-subtly nudged me to make it less boring-as-hell. Because honestly, it is. What he (and shortly after, I) was thinking is to get rid of that silly blackboard entirely, and have the elements just float in place. It's not a bad idea really, plus it would open up more of the screen for the player to use. I'll just have to make the elements able to turn transparent then. Can't have them obscuring the player's view, right?

... And while writing this post, i acquired this screenshot.



Looks pretty good, yes? Now i just need to adapt the game to this, so the player has more room to roam in.