Space Steroids, a space adventure

Hello there,

I’m a young student from Germany, Dresden. After my first game written in Java, I decided to do another game! I was looking on different game engines and i bumped into Defold. So I started with the engine and I love it! I also invited a collegue, who studies on the same university. But let’s get to the game.

It’s a simple get as far as you can game in space. The working title was Space Steroids and it will probably stay this way :slight_smile: It’s done it in pixel art style, so far it was quite a challenge to build a united universe. So far you can play the actual game, but gameplay is still poor. We intend to ship it on Android in the new year.

Enough text. Here is a screenshot.

Devs:
Me, Vojta - Design, Programming
2nd Dev Tom - Programming, Project managment

Challenges:
So far, it was a challenge for me to create all graphic assets which works well together.
Also, I have a lot of experience from Java, but Lua was quite different and I needed quite some time to get used to it.
Last thing was getting well on with collection proxies and it’s lifecycle.

Next:

  • Optimize Gameplay
  • Finish all the menu
  • Save highscores
  • Adjust to different densities
  • Parallax background
  • Sounds

It’s still quite a lot to do, but it’s slowly coming together.

I want to thank to Defold community, which helps a lot!

7 Likes

Looking forward to playing the finished game!

1 Like

What Britzl said – keep it up! :fist:

1 Like

Sunday evening and… Update!

We’ve been quite busy with other things, but yet progress has been made.

What’s new:

  • New graphic assets
  • Fixed few bugs
  • Countdown in pause menu
  • New gas particles

Teaser:

4 Likes

Update!

It’s already 2 months since I posted last update, but I still continue to work on the game and slowly, it is coming together :slight_smile:

What’s new:

  • Fixed quite a lot of bugs, visual and logical
  • There is new spawning mechanism for asteroids
  • Buttons and menus!
  • Game keeps aspect ratio on different screen sizes
  • Placeholder sounds
  • Full HD resolution
  • Explosion animation
  • and other things I forgot

Start:

Game:
(you control the ship and dodge the incoming asteroids)

Game Over:

What is left to be done:
There are few things, like polish the gameplay, do some menu, optimize code. It should come out soon :smile:

Size bundle
As I wanted to show the game to collegues, I bundled the apk and I was amazed by the size. In release mode it was just 7,4 MB. I inspected the build report and found out, that half of the size is made by sounds. Without sounds, size would be around 4MB. :slight_smile:

How is this achieved?
Since I have pixelart, i can set default_texture_min_filter: linear in game.project, import my images in really small size and let the engine scale them. This is a huge resource saver.

Lets have a look at one example:
Bg image asset large: 1080x3840, 296kB
Bg image asset small: 90x320, 36kB
Bg image asset small PNG-8: 90x320, 18,9kB

% saved: 100 - (18,9/296)*100 = 93,7% saved
Nice thing about this approach is low memory footprint.

One last thing, thanks a lot to community for help they provide. Also special thanks to @britzl, who made a lot of different demos available public.

Howgh!

4 Likes

Nice work, love the new noisified background.

Btw. how did you manage to lock the aspect ratio? Did you change the render script in any way?

Hodně štěstí / good luck!

1 Like

Thanks! :slight_smile:

I’m already using custom render script for rendering materials. I just went ahead and used example from @britzl to lock the aspect ratio. I modified it for my own needs. Just search for ‘aspect ratio’ on the forum, there few topics about that. :wink:

3 Likes

I didn’t have much time in the past 2 weeks, but I managed to fix last few bugs, and most important, implement new spawning algorithm for the steroids. Sometimes it was quite funny, :smiley: when its just full of asteroids and you can’t do nothing about it.

Here, have a screenshot!

What is left to do:

  • optimize the code
  • replace sounds
  • test it!

I will keep you updated and let you know, when it’s finished :slight_smile:

5 Likes

Looks great!

2 Likes