Zap 2! - Reloaded

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#1

Hey everybody,

after finishing the Block Breaker section and watching the first few videos of Laser Defender I aborted for the moment and I began creating my “Zap 2! - Reloaded” from scratch without watching any tutorials or courses.
The original game “Zap!” I created like 10 years ago with a beautiful language called Blitzbasic, although the game was very, very basic and most of it was probably kinda copied from tutorials. :laughing: The last part is the main reason I don’t wanna use courses/tutorials to create this game. I want it to be made by myself completely.
I didn’t know anything about coding the last time, but fortunately I know at least a little bit more about that now and those udemy-courses are really helping to get into the engine.

Talked a lot without saying much - so this is what I have so far in about 600 lines of code (actually… it’s not very much if I look at it this way as I barely started and there’s sooo much more to do, but still, here are the currently functional features…):

  • Parallax scrolling background (speed/sprite easy to customize for each level)
  • Working and fully customizable HUD with -for the moment- very basic shield- and lifebars
  • Working shield-system including regeneration and shield being offline with variable time it needs to rebuild and come online again. Also the shields opactiy reduces according to the shield-energy.
  • Fully working damage-system respecting the collisions of projectiles with shield OR hull, depending on shield-energy being left or not.
  • Collisions between shields/ships // shields/shields // ships/ships
  • Ship movement with physics forces and variable-drag (friction - yes I know, this is a SPACE game, but I think it’s more fun this way :slight_smile:) rather than moving with a fixed value without any actual acceleration
  • Every script is built upon reusable base-classes like SpaceShip, which is built upon SpaceShip etc. etc… A lot of inheritance already for this kind of game, but I hope it will be worth it in the end
  • Duplicating or even creating prefabs from scratch for ships (both enemy and player), shield-types and projectile-types is a matter of very few seconds within the unity editor.

Meaning I can create for example 10 different types of projectile-prefabs with different looks, speeds and damage-values within a few seconds. After than I could create a new shield-prefab and then add all of that the a fully customizable ship, which can have an individual number of different weapons with different firing-offsets, different rates of firing etc. etc.
All of the last mentioned work is actually pure designing, which can be done completely in the inspector, so this has to be good for something. :smile:

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The last two images show some of the customization-possibilities for a ship.
Unwanted functionalities like shields for example can also be turned off completely for each ship separetely.

Hope you like it up to this point :slight_smile: although I know I don’t have a lot to show yet, but I’d like to use this discussion-thread as a kind of process-blog if you people don’t mind. That way I can really SEE the process I am making.

Thanks for any feedback up front! :slight_smile:

See you on discord,
Caesium

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#2

Added a very short video to show some mechanics. Replaced the above seen assets with my own and added a bloom-effect for lowing. I really like this abstract art style and I guess I’ll use this kind of art for the whole game.
Also the projectiles can now optionally rotate at a desired speed.

I apologize for the really miserable video quality. The glow doesn’t come out very well because of it tbh and the video is kinda slow and not smooth like the actual demo.

Anyway, here it is:
https://youtu.be/pn_TIZFc0hc

1 Like
#3

With now over 1000 lines of pure C# code - most of which were written to provide the most possible flexibility and easy prototyping of new enemies, weapons etc. - I have uploaded a very first little glimpse of Zap on gamebucket.
There’s no dying/winning/loosing yet, as I have implemented other stuff first. I’m currently working on the enemy-formation/spawn system. The very first version of it can be seen in the uploaded version on gamebucket.

(Note: I added four simple enemy-waves for testing)

http://gamebucket.io/game/b4af7cfd-0a0d-4ef1-9ab8-ded27e89482d

#4

Just added some self-made explosions and fixed some glitches:
https://youtu.be/ntUqjFWx9hI

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#5

Update:

I decided to polish some of the things I had up to this point and then finish the game - contrary to my original intention - without adding more gameplay-features. Maybe I will do so at some later point in time.
For now I want to finish it and move on as this originally wasn’t supposed to “get out of hand” like this. :smiley:

What I can show now is a WebGL build of the game (it was originally designed for android). The gamescreen size in the WebGL build had to be adjusted to fit the aspect ratio of the phones, so no don’t be surprised. I’ll upload the APK to the play store later, but not today.

Everything was created “from scratch” with unity (as of now about 3000 lines of C# code).
Aside from some very minor glitches the core game seems to work absolutely fine and is almost finished for what I want it to be. What’s NOT finished… is the levels. :frowning:
For presentation purposes I created several weapons/projectiles, ships and three testing levels. All systems are included but don’t comment on the difficulty or the level design please, as I’ll delete these levels completely and create real ones soon (although this is the part I hate) :smile:

I hope you like what I was able to create in my short time with the game engine I recently fell in love with. :smiley:

I’d appreciate any feedback or comments that could help me improve the game. :slight_smile:
Thank you in advance for any feedback and thanks to Ben & Sam & their colleagues for those awesome courses.

Zap 2! - Reloaded BETA (Gamebucket.io)

(First image was made on my Samsung S7)

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#6

Created a - as of now very hard - first level. I also uploaded the game to the Google Play store (for free ofc).
Here’s the link if anybody is interested: Zap 2! Reloaded on Google Play Store

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#7

Hi Caesium ! I really like what you have done with this. As I were going through the Laser Defender section in the course I regularly stopped and thought of what could be added to the game. Alot of your features such as shields and different projectiles I also wanted in my version! So really good job making it all on your own , though if I would have to remark on something it would be that it gets pretty busy at times on the screen.

Sorry for some mediocre english, not my first language :slight_smile:

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#8

Thanks a lot for your feedback. Well yea, I realize there’s a lot going on. Maybe I should ease the player more into the game at first. The controls of the touch-circle also feel way too responsive. You almost can’t control the player, so you better only tap the circle in the direction you wanna go. Those are things I definitely need to improve. I’ll also create some more and easier levels in the next few days.
I already have nine different enemies ready to be used.

:slight_smile:

About your english: I haven’t even realized it’s not your first language as it isn’t mine either. So no worries. :smiley:

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