Rocket Run
Some of us older guys remember Thrust and Thrust II from the 8-bit era. The player’s aim was to manoeuvre a spaceship by rotating and thrusting, as it flies over a two-dimensional landscape and through caverns. It’s roots can be traced back to Atari’s Gravitar and Asteroids.
Rocket Run is a new take on the concept of piloting a little ship around an environment shooting enemies and collecting items. The core of the game is learning to control the ship accurately through increasingly narrow tunnels.
Having tried various graphical styles, I’ve opted for limited palette pixel art graphics. 8-bit games Starquake, Underwurlde and the more recent Axiom Verge have been my main influence. I’m not really an artist so need plenty of good source material to draw inspiration from.
For the first time in a Defold game I’m implementing parallax scrolling. There’s a simple repeating background that scrolls more slowly than the foreground to create the illusion of depth. Right now, it’s not possible to place game objects between tilemap layers so the background is just a repeating sprite. Hopefully in future releases of Defold, it will be possible to have a foreground and background implemented within a tilemap.
As of this evening, the game has a single map and the player can fly around, bump into the scenery and shoot.
On the to-do next list is:
- Static enemies that shoot
- Fuel cans and other items to collect
- Add tractor beam to ship
That’s all for now. Thanks for reading!
