One of my favourite 8-bit budget games was Operation Gunship. This is a tribute, of sorts, to that game from 1989.
It’s pretty simple - you fly a helicopter through enemy territory blowing up stuff, picking up hostages and returning them safely to base. And staying alive while doing all that, obviously.
Once again, Defold has made the development process way easier than I’d imagined, some modules and game mechanics being done in minutes.
Not much more to say right now so here’s some gameplay footage.
Hell yeah, those game were awesome. There was also a similar one (a bit more arcadish) where you sometimes drove a tank instead of playing a copter. All I remember is the word “OVERKILL!” across the screen when you really got into the destruction.
A bit of advice - one way to make a game like this awesome is to make everything destructible. Bridges, roads, people, vegetation. Have trees explode in a tiny mushroom cloud. Have soldiers explode in blood. Let the player leave craters everywhere and make everything explode. At least that has been my experience.
Games like this, each and every background detail you can’t blow up leaves a touch of sadness on my soul whenever I come across it.
One week of development on Heli-Rescue has elapsed and I’m very happy with the amount of progress so far.
Most of the core game mechanics are in and working well. One tileset is nearly complete as are most of the sound effects.
I’m posting up a demo on the commity page (link below) so anyone can have a go. The aim of the game is search and rescue. A number of hostages are located throughout each island, either out in the open or within buildings. Once said buildings have been destroyed the hostage can then be picked. The rescued hostages will then need returning to base - the little red arrow around your helicopter always points back to base. You may also need to return to base during a mission to refuel and rearm. Note that your armour is only replenished between levels.
Further plans for this game include.
New environment tileset
Different helicopters
Ability to choose armourments
Enemy soliders on the ground
No plans for multi-player - sorry! It’s a bit late in the day to be trying to implement that.
Played the demo, and as I played it, a word rang and rang in my mind, a word called, AWESOME. Just like the classic 90s games, prefectly retro. It also reminded me of a failed game that I tried to make months ago, and failed miserably (),. Anyways, nice concept, nice gameplay, nice balance (I just died in the first level man!!). Best of luck for future development.
BTW if you ever need some quick assets for this kind and/or some other prototype, check him out . Man he has tons of sprites of everything required in a shmup, and 100% destructible.
Played it a bit. Happy to report that the destructibility of the environment is acceptable and pretty satisfying when it come to the larger warehouses.
I’ll give you more in-depth feedback later, but I’ll be definitely following this closely. This looks like it’s going to be a lot of fun.
Looks good! It would be cool to have the chopper tilt a bit when you turn it Have you thought about side-by-side strafing instead of the current rotation? Somehow I instinctively feel that a helicopter strafes but I might be wrong! Good job either way
Thanks @jhonny.goransson ! You can strafe already using the Q and E buttons. It takes a little while to get the hang of it but it can be quite useful for avoiding enemy fire.
Development on Heli-Rescue draws to a close. The first ‘final’ release is available on itch.io here. These native builds provide the best player experience - lag free and fullscreen.
Also, the HTML5 build has been updated on the Community Page if you just want a quick blast.
Barring any serious bugs that pop up, I’m drawing a line under this project today. It’s been good fun to develop this game and it turned out better than I’d initially imagined.
Thanks again to everyone who played the pre-release demos and offered suggestions.
See you in the next devlog thread, whatever that may be!
),. Anyways, nice concept, nice gameplay, nice balance (I just died in the first level man!!). Best of luck for future development.
