Vector Field Shooter

talk design
1

Here’s my super secret beta test for a game that I’m working on. It’s an asteroids/geometry wars style shooter with a twist. All your bullets follow a vector field that you create. I just got the very basic engine done, but I think the idea has a ton of potential.

http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~tetler/swf/SF.html

The controls:
1/Up - change to vector field 1
2/Left - vector field 2
3/Down - vector field 3
3/Right - vector field 4

Mouse - move
Click - fire

e - edit current vector field/return to game
g - generate enemy
k - kill all enemies
p - pause

2

Its pretty fun to play and yea I can see a really fun game coming from it. If you know what your doing one can destroy all the dots in a few seconds.

3

That’s pretty sweet. If you use the spiral field and just hang out in the middle, you can accumulate a crazy circular wall of bullets, and then release them with the “up” arrow you can wipe out pretty much all of the oncoming dots instantly.

4

Thanks for the comments. Be sure to edit the fields with e. The idea is that by combining fields you’ll be able to come up with some pretty unique strategies. Of course in the final game you’ll be constantly bombarded with an onslaught of enemies and you won’t always be able to get into position to do stuff like that. So coming up with fields that have a wide range of attack and that let you attack from many directions will be key. Some other strategies could be shooting in a circle around enemies and then using a vector field that goes in. Or you could shoot a straight line then spin it. And I plan on letting you use more than a 2x2 field in the final game which gives a crazy amount of possibilities.

I need to come up with ideas for different AIs though. The homing swimming enemies won’t be enough, and I need to come up with an AI to decide where the enemies spawn.

5

Firefox. Keys wont work man

6

I love it even in it’s beginning stages xD Alot of fun to figure out the little things… got a circle and then exploded… yeah haha. Enough ranting. But yeah, I like it alot.

7

Really? That’s odd. I only tested it with firefox. Are you sure it was in focus? Can you give me any other details?

8

Yeah man its working. Just not in focus at first.

Its OK. Dont like or get it

9

Hey thats very very cool.

With a bit of work - this could become an extremely addictive game. Hell, you might even spawn a new genre of shooter :smiley:

10

As a test I modified my game to be like asteroids with the vector field functionality. The build is here.
http://ieng9.ucsd.edu/~tetler/swf/SFa.html
It gave me insight on what my engine is lacking, which is a stronger event dispatching system so I can script new code based on what’s happening in the game. This build is a dead end but now I know what needs to be done for the trunk. There’s no collision detection if the ship hits an asteroid so there isn’t any challenge right now.

Controls:
w - move up
a - move left
s - move down
d - more right
space/shift - shoot (the keyboard can’t detect multiple keypresses if you hold down space so I suggest using shift)

1/Up - change to vector field 1
2/Left - vector field 2
3/Down - vector field 3
3/Right - vector field 4

e - edit current vector field/return to game
p - pause

note: The default vector fields go in straight lines, so they’re very booooring. You will have to edit them with “e” and come up with clever fields to implement new
strategies. Try circles, or all lines pointing outwards.

Tell me how performance is. I might have to tone it down to 30fps instead of 60;