Perihelion early WIP demo

[Nemesis]

** Brought over from Dexterity Forums **

Hi,

I wish to share with you guys (and gals) an early WIP demo of the game. Don't expect fancy title screens etc. yet. This is just to give you an idea of how the game will play.

A brief summary of the controls:
Cursor keys / joystick / mouse: ship movement
Z,X,C keys / Left, Right, Middle Mouse Btn / Joy Btn 1, 2, 3: fire primary, secondary, tertiary weapons (subject to being installed)

~ key: brings down command console
help: lists of available commands (try them out at your convenience)
quit: exits the game (to quit witohut a console hit ALT-F4 or close icon if running in windowed mode)

You'll probably find the short test level quite hard.. well.. we've been practising for more than a year now :)

For screenshots, check my signature link.

The demo download is available here (http://colinvella.no-ip.com/perihelion/PerihelionSetup.msi).

Enjoy.. and feedback welcome!

dreese
Nice! A crosshair would be good, since the camera isn't always behind the the plane.
And a shadow or something which tells me how far from the ground I am (so I know when I'm about to get damaged when hitting it).
__________________
http://dreeze.ath.cx (http://dreeze.ath.cx/)

JackNathan
Shows potential. The viewpoint / controls seem a bit awkard. Reminded me of the first Rebel Assault actually.

Jack

Nemesis
Yeah the perspective makes it harder to line your shots with the target. I'm considering adding a "fixed" target that lies ahead of the player just to help him / her get a feel of the perspective.

Please bear in mind that the test level is bloody hard to play!

The ship will eventually have a shadow to give the player a better depth que.

As you can see, it's far from being a complete game but we're finally gearing up.

Nemesis
Hi,

Just wanted to share some recent screenshots of Perihelion. One example is here (http://colinvella.no-ip.com/perihelion/055.jpg).

The page in my signature link below is a gallery. I have just posted the last 3 rows and you may notice a substantial improvement in looks.

A demo download is available, together with instructions (see first post in thread).

Feedback welcome! :)

Phantom1029
Looks really cool, just get the controls tighter and camera straightened out. If you do that this game could be really fun :)

**edit** Replaced old smiley links - they were still pointing to Dex's!

[Reactor]

That's shaping up to be a really nice game! But (you knew that was coming) the mouse sensitivity is far too high, and the up-down controls need to be swapped, in my opinion. Or at least, controls for that would be good in the final game. I also tend to agree with the other comments above. The missile effects were excellent, btw- I really enjoyed dodging them :)

[Nemesis]

Thanks Reactor.

Those missiles can be nasty especially if the SAM launchers are set to infinite ammo and a small firing interval! Besides the mech-style walker, the launcher is my favourite enemy entity so far!

Regarding controls, everything is planned to be configurable including mouse sensitivity, keys etc. etc. including an option to invert vertical mouse control.
The demo level requires the reflexes of a Jedi to play through and power up without loosing lives! For the sake of testing, I've added a cheat in the form of hitting 'V' to raise the health to 100%. I don't think it's in the downloadable build yet.

At the moment I'me focusing my attention on the level editor to add some terrain manipulation functionality.. at present it's not as designer-friendly as I'd like it to be!

I'm glad you enjoyed the WIP demo :)

[Reactor]

I forgot to add- fullscreen mode really needs an exit key... or something (like escape).

[Nemesis]

Of course... an in-game menu is planned on hitting Esc with options to resume, quit the current session or exit the game application completely.

For now, your options for quitting when full-screen are:

1) Hit ALT-F4

2) Hit tilde (~) to get the command console and enter 'quit'

[Reactor]

Heh, yeah... ALT-F4 did come in handy :)

[Glennyboy]

Very nice. I'd agree with the control issues mentioned above. In addition, I felt like I didn't have any room. Maybe have the camera a little further out? Also, the camera shake was a bit off-putting.

But, on the positive side, it's looking pretty nifty. I like the enemies, I like the action. With more work on the controls, this should be pretty damn fine.

[Nemesis]

Thanks for the feedback!

In what sense did you feel like you didn't have enough room?
Also, how did you find the difficulty level?

[Glennyboy]

The "room" thing. I sorta felt like if I dodged I couldn't quite see what I was dodging into until I did it. Maybe it's more of a question of the camera angle, hard to define this one. I guess if I'm the only person to bring it up, it's probably just me.

Difficulty-wise, not too bad. I think I felt the controls were the biggest factor in me getting shot down, rather than the actual difficulty of the baddies.

[Reactor]

It's not just you, but the lack of room didn't really bug me. I do think though that allowing people to see more would help the game feel less cramped. Generally speaking, people don't like the feeling of being boxed in, and with games that have you flying down a 'tunnel' for long periods of time, it's good to do something to help people feel like they have more freedom, even if they really don't.

Anyway, good luck on finding that special something! :)

[Nemesis]

Well.. to be honest we did widen the play "corridor" slighlty and should probably widen it further, at least horizontally. The tradeoff is that we have to render more terrain and it becomes more obvious that the level has edges on either side of the player. It's actually quite a hard balance to achieve. But thanks for the feedback. We're actually using a custom LOD algorithm on the terrain geometry so it's not so bad, but it does take its toll on the hardware anyway.


For the techies, you can see the LOD algorithm in action by bringing down the console with the tilde (~) key and entering "setloddebug on". An example is available in the screenshot:
http://colinvella.no-ip.com/perihelion/003.jpg


I have to admit that the perspective takes a while to get used to, but we'll be adding depth cues like a shadow for the player and perhaps a frontal target to help the player line up with the targets better.

[Nemesis]

I'm posting another update for Perihelion:

Since the last post a proper menu system was put in place and the game now automatically cycles through the levels and cut-scenes. There are only two "levels" so far, with the first being mostly a test level while the second being a copy with some messed up settings to make it look different.

The console screen is now available from the menu as well with commands to load a specific level or quit. Typing "help" will yield a different set of commands depending on whether the console is open in menu mode or while playing.

There is also a hi-score system in place and a scrolling credits screen.

The menu features a rotating galaxy skybox and an animated star emanating flares with a lens flare representing a nearby star. The menu system includes a working video and control options sub-menu.

Less visible features include a path language for enemies and some internal polishing.

Screenshots may be found here:
http://colinvella.no-ip.com/perihelion/

A current copy of the setup file for the game in progress can be downloaded from here (18mb):
http://colinvella.no-ip.com/perihelion/PerihelionSetup.msi