LÖVE

An experiment of mine - make a side scrolling shooter where all images, sounds and effects and generated by the computer. No artwork made by someone, only code to tell the computer how to make stuff that looks like a space ship (or some alien space thing), an explosion, a tunnel, and how to shape a wave to roughly sound like an explosion boom (needs more work).

Press control to shoot, steer the ship with the cursor (arrow) keys.


Youtube (player ship protected by globe of invulnerability for this demo):
https://youtu.be/0TvGRZH9ru4

Source Code:
https://github.com/Varkalandar/procedural_shooter

The idea is perfection.
And these are the prettiest explosions i have ever seen in any game.
People should learn from that, nice assets with zero size.

The game itself however, no diagonal movement is a bit of a bummer.
But nice start.

Thanks! I'll try to make it a real game soon. And yep. 12KB code package. I love the contrast to the megabyte heavy game downloads of today.

I agree with Brot - beautiful explosions! And the ships all look really cool. Well done!!

Thanks!

Meanwhile, I've been working on some improvements:

- Ship creation is now done in three steps. This helps to reduce the little stalls on slower computers, that happened when ship and explosion graphics were created. This change also allowed to spend a little more computation time to make the explosions visually denser.
- A basic scoring system has been added. Player score raises as enemy ships are destroyed. The score drops if the player ship is hit, or even worse, collides with an enemy ship. The current score is displayed as "Power" in the upper right window corner. Running out of power is no problem yet, later it will mean game over.
- Diagonal movement is now possible.
- There is a flash and sound effect to indicate if an enemy is hit.
- The player ship has a very minimal drive effect now.

Almost a game now. Added a title screen and a game over screen. Zero power is game over. The reached depth (how far one got into the tunnel) can count as score.


Shoot with control, steer with the cursor (arrow keys)

Youtube video of this version,
https://youtu.be/xFqLnzAfgRs

Maybe you should cap the power, you can raise that far quicker than you lose it and with 1500 power there is no dangerious situations anymore.

You should also hide the mouse.

Power cap is one option. Maybe have upgrades later to raise the cap? And slowly make the enemies more dangerous, give them stronger weapons ... but yes. When recording the new video, to show the game over screen, I had to intentionally ram some groups of enemies to take enough damage to actually die.

Maybe:
Raise your own states by shooting enemies.
Raise the enemy states for enemies spawned.
That way each time you miss killing one the game gets harder encouraging to shoot as good as possible.

There is a power cap now. You start with 100 power and a cap of 200. There is a small chance that a killed enemy will leave a bonus sphere. The blue spheres add +50 to the max power, the others give your ship additional cannons.

Over time enemies get harder now and also hit harder. From about 5,000 meters into the tunnel this gets pretty notable. Seems I must add some more addons to keep a balance from that point. Better cannons.


Shoot with control, steer with the cursor (arrow keys). F8 takes a screenshot.