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Game Development Showcase
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| Blastoids |
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| Developer | Rob Loach |
| Genre | Action |
| Platform | Windows |
| Downloads | 459 |
About:
An enhanced version of the classic game: Asteroids. Control your ship, destroying asteroids, gaining points, getting powerups and progressing through levels.
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Please offer only constructive criticism. The intent of the GD Showcase is to help the developer create the best game they possibly can. Show them you support their efforts when posting.
 |   Rob Loach Staff
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Posted - 6/1/2005 2:33:35 PM | Here it be...
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| Battagline
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Posted - 6/2/2005 12:11:47 PM | Very Cool... fun to do spin outs in space. I like the sound track.
You may want to consider a full screen version. I tried alt-enter, and that didn't work so I assmume there isn't one. I run 1600x1200, so the windowed version was a bit hard to see.
Good job.
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| mike74
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Posted - 6/4/2005 6:50:29 PM | Pretty good. I like the graphics, especially the flames that shoot out of the ship.
It would be nice to resize the window or go into fullscreen mode though.
Mike C.
http://www.coolgroups.com/zoomer/
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 | EnemyBoss GDNet+
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Posted - 6/6/2005 1:37:35 PM | Good Job! The particle effects ( are those particle effects? ) are done nicely. The asteroids graphics are great too, I tried to create my own textured exploding Asteroids a long time ago, but they need more work:
  
I think you should loosen up the friction though, it feels like i'm plowing through space. Its still a very good game. And it looks very finished.
[Edited by - EnemyBoss on June 6, 2005 2:37:17 PM]
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| mike74
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Posted - 6/6/2005 5:23:51 PM | Those are some pretty slick asteroids, EnemyBoss. What tools did you use to make them?
Mike C.
http://www.coolgroups.com/zoomer/
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| Rob Loach Staff
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Posted - 6/7/2005 9:26:35 PM | Quote:Original post by EnemyBoss
I think you should loosen up the friction though, it feels like i'm plowing through space. Its still a very good game. And it looks very finished. |
I love those asteroid graphics. And yes, it's a particle engine that I worked on with toxic1337 I think. As for flying through space, I wanted the game to be fast paced and have a more action feel to it then the original. It gets really rediculous when you pick up 10 thuster powerups  .
Were those asteroids made with 3D Studio?
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| EnemyBoss GDNet+
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Posted - 6/7/2005 10:38:36 PM | Thanks, I used Blender to render the asteroids, and The Gimp to compile them as an animated GIF. The shapes are just 3 blobs arranged differently. I created the asteroid texture based from a photograph and I used Blender's particle simulator to make the explosions.
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| ambiguity
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Posted - 6/8/2005 7:39:38 PM | First of all I'm gonna start by saying that I love the game. I don't really know why I bothered to download an asteroid clone, but I'm really glad I did. The controlling is simple yet fully functional, and the grapichs are sweet. Especially those for the engine burst. Simply beautiful!
So now it's time for the part where I whine about stuff i didn't like. This is just because i liked the game, not because I like to whine. Enought said, time for what i think should be improved:
- It's slow. When there are lots of, especially big, asteroids the game runs painfully slow. About 15 fps on my machine (Athlon 2000+, mobility radeon 9200, 512 ram), with low details. Maybe I can help you out on this one, had the same problem with my last game. Just send me a pm if you are interested.
- A full screen mode would be nice, at least as an option. Should be a piece of cake if you are using SDL. The thing that annoyed me most was that I managed to click just outside the screen all the time, losing focus on the game and quite often dying/yelling in foul language.
- The spawning. It's a real bitch when you spawn in the middle of a big fat asteroid at your last life. One quite classic way to solve that would be to make the ships immortal for a couple of seconds at spawn.
- And the last little thing. It's really hard to see which powerup does what before you pick it up. I guess you want that to be possible since you made them in different color, but the colored part could be a little bigger. That would help.
Aside from this I would like to thank you for a great game. It looks like you've put some effort into it, and it shows. I hope you intend to keep developing it, and if you need some help speeding it up, just let me know.
May the force be with you // ambiguity.
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| Rob Loach Staff
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Posted - 6/10/2005 8:36:29 AM | Wow, thanks ambiguity. I completely agree with it being slow when you have a lot of asteroids flying around. Your computer speed isn't the problem. The problem is the rotation algorithm. For each asteroid, it rotates the image and paints it on the screen. This is what is causing the slow speeds. That's why I put in the lower graphic detail. A better solution would be to use OpenGL to handle and paint the rotated graphics, but I was too lazy at the time of writing this. Maybe in version 2.0 .
A full screen mode and spawning time fix would be great. I would like to put in a help screen before the game starts just to say which powerup does what and the simple controls. That would really help the player. Anyway, thanks a lot for your input. I've put them in my TODO list and once I get the time, I'll implement as much as I can.
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| ambiguity
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Posted - 6/11/2005 7:44:06 PM | I kinda guessed that the rotation was what was making it slow... One way to get around it would be to rotate the images at startup and just save them in an image array. I actually had quite the same problem myself for the bitmasks in my game. Not the most elegant solution perhaps, but wasting memory space seems like a better idea than wasting cpu power.
If you plan to re-write the grapics routines I must recomend you to use a library called hxrender. Its written by a guy here on gamedev, pnpbios. It uses SDL and OGL to draw 2D-graphics, and I found it extremly useful and quite easy to use in my last game, rymdskepp.
Glad that you found it useful, and I hope this can help you. If you decide to re-write the grapics routines, let me know and I can give you some help. Got way to little to do right now =). Not that I think you need to though. At that resolution the speed shouldn't be a problem if you don't have to do the rotating in real time. Have fun developing!
Peace // ambiguity
[Edited by - ambiguity on June 11, 2005 7:44:51 PM]
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