Hey, a while ago I posted a prototype for a game I'm doing, and literally nobody made a comment, so I'm guessing nobody's that interested. But here's an update anyway.

I'm tits-deep in job work on other stuff, so I only get to work on this sporadically, which is why it's taking so long to get anywhere.

I'll sum up what the game is first.

I like shooters, but I hate bullet-hells. That is to say that I like going fast, I like bursting spaceships, and I like giant space-egyptian heads- but I don't like when all that stuff gets boiled down into a slowly opening spiral of purple dots. So I wanna make a scrolling shooter where you can hit guys hard, like a beat-em-up. I want a load of tactile, really physical feeling things like grabbing enemies, catching missiles in mid-air, stealing a guy's shield out of his hand and throwing it back at him etc. Then I want the enemy behavoirs to live up to that, like enemies that circle around you and punch you and have strange interesting abilities.

Read more about the design philosophy behind the game here.

The final game will hopefully be made in Unity and be a strong, capable, functional package; but I'm prototyping it in Flash first becuase that's what I'm good at.

You can play this prototype if you go back in time a month.

Here's some more enemies I've come up with since:

This is the point I figured out how to do THIS:

Enemies that interact with each other. These little pistol ships (which you can grab, and hold as an outward-facing weapon) will swarm around an electric storm ball if one is onscreen. The storm ball will electrocute you and drain health if you get close, so they do it for protection. Also it makes their shots more concentrated around one spot, which means getting hit will FUCK YOU UP!!

The snake guy is an extension of that idea, as it's actually 30+ enemies that will seek out, and hold onto, each other's butts. The idea for this one's evolved since I made this video, he know splits into seperate snakes with seperate heads that chase you. Don't use an explosive weapon like a mine, cos it'll just unclip ALL PIECES and you'll have 30 heads chasing you, and will probably die.

These enemies hold shields, which means they're invincible unless they're attacking. You can see in the video that you can brute-force through the shield, and also steal it off him to wear for yourself. Or throw. Their AI is coded to stand infront of smaller enemies, protecting them and soaking up bullets.

Gonna keep going...

So far there's 10 enemies and a buttload of weapons, all of which you can check out on my Youtube channel. That's a great number for a web game, but I wanna get this to the point where I can sell it for $5 to $10. This is crappo programmer art, btw, it's not gonna look like this. I can DO THAT, but I've not pitched it to Alex, my producer, yet. I wanna have a SOLID SOLID SOLID outline of what the game is before I dive in head-first, cos otherwise it'll seem thin and messy like my last game. Also I'll have to find someone who can code in C# or C++, because Flash will piss everyone off. Hopefully coding this all myself first will let people feel confident that we're not just some idiot jerks.

I'm doing concept art, and I'll be doing more to just communicate what atmosphere I'm thinking of. I want it to be all wild, colourful, impactful Gainax bullshit (which is why there's so much fucking camera shake). Also I want it to be MAD FUNKY and pink as all fuck. You play as a bear riding a mech by accident, kind of... KIND OF!! It's a goofy plot.

Anyway this post is getting really long and is all disjointed. As usual, my GiantBomb posts are an amalgamation of posts I've made on other sites, because I don't wanna spam these forums every week and I don't think anyone here's really that interested in my games anyway. So if you're super interested in how this is getting made, then hit up this kind of rush or read the post on tinyBuild.com.

The main thing is that I'm in pre-production for a chunky impactful shooter, enemies do cool things, it's all pink and lasery, and that's more or less what's up.