Game Proposal: Tempest

[pserwylo]

Name

Tempest

Description

Tempest Wikipedia article

The player is looking down a 3D "pipe" (for lack of a better word) of various shapes and sizes. They cling to the edge of the pipe and traverse around the circumference, as monsters climb from the end to the front of this "pipe". From any position, the player can shoot at monsters in front of them. When monsters get to the end of the pipe, they walk around the circumference for a brief period (and hence the player risks running into them) for a brief period.

Links to screenshots / videos / descriptions

Gameplay video - Youtube

Multiplayer Handicap

• More creatures spawn at the start of the tunnel each time other players score.

[pserwylo]

Great, this has the most votes, and soon I'll be looking at adding another game, so Tempest it is!!! Thanks for voting everyone.

For those interested, I'm just working on an internet game server to let people around the world play (rather than just via the local network). See #7 for more details.

When I get around to working on Tempest, would anybody be interested in a blog of how the progress goes? I'm hoping that doing so would be useful to others embarking on either: Game development, learning Kotlin, learning libgdx, etc.

[Offliner33]

Will the server software be available for anyone to use?

Also, yes, I would love to see such a blog.

[pserwylo]

Absolutely @Offliner33, that is a key pillar of my thinking. Here are my thoughts on it: https://peter.serwylo.com/2021/07/03/sustainable-server-infra-for-open-source-games

[pserwylo]

Okay, here we go. This game is underway now, but will be a little slower than planned because I'm quite enjoying writing English at the same time I write code :)

https://peter.serwylo.com/2021/08/01/let-the-community-decide-the-next-retro-game
https://peter.serwylo.com/2021/08/01/tempest-initial-skeleton#displaying-a-message-at-the-start-of-the-game

[pserwylo]

First three levels, no 3rd dimension, no enemies, no shooting, no scoring. But progress nontheless :)

https://peter.serwylo.com/2021/08/02/tempest-basic-progress

tempest-initial-rotation.mp4

[pserwylo]

And now a 3rd dimension...

https://peter.serwylo.com/2021/08/03/tempest-basic-3d

tempest-initial-3d.mp4

[pserwylo]

Confession time: I have too many things going on to continue writing blog posts about this :(

But good news! A beta version of Tempest will be in version 0.13.0 - to be built by F-Droid in the coming days with a beta version of this!

Only three levels, only one enemy type, and no multiplayer support. But hopefully has enough to at least try and get a feel for whether we are on the right track.

Next steps:

• Add more levels (easy)
• Add other enemy types (harder - each has a full set of custom rules to govern how it interacts with the level and the player)
• Tweak the scoring to make it suitable for multiplayer after introducing new enemy types.

I think that adding just one or two more enemy types will make a huge improvement to the game play, but lets see.

2021-10-28.21-03-05.mp4

[pserwylo]

[v0.13.2 released]. Tempest now supports:

• Flippers + flipper tanker enemies (the tankers split into two flippers when hit).
• All 16 level shapes from the original game.
• Enemies fire at you similar to the original (but they only fire once, in the original they fire more than once).

2021-11-16.08-01-44.mp4

I don't think I'll implement every single enemy type right away, but before wrapping this up I think it will be important to at least get spikes implemented. After watching many videos of the original, they seem like a core mechanic.

One thing that does seem to make the game less intense and less frantic (in a bad way) compared to the original is the slowness of moving around the levels one tap at a time. Compared to the analog input the original has, where players can quickly fly from one side of the level to the other, this feels slow and clunky. Might be worth investing in an additional onscreen controller layout for analog input. This also impacts the ability to fire bullets really fast like the original.

[pserwylo]

[v0.13.3 released]. Tempest now supports:

• Spikes and corresponding "spike builder" enemies (starting at level 3)
• Careful to avoid spikes when transitioning from the end of one level until the start of the next.

2021-11-21.15-41-13.mp4

Next on my list of things to do is to support rapid firing by holding down fire (but limiting the number of bullets on screen to 8 as per the original). This should help with the RSI that I seem to be getting from play testing this :)

[pserwylo]

Rapid firing now supported in v0.13.4. From my personal perspective, this makes the game so much more fun. It is far less about smashing buttons as fast as possible, and much more about navigating the level strategically to avoid getting over awed by enemies.

[pserwylo]

Okay, safe to say that this is now live and able to be played by all F-Droid and Google Play users with v0.14.0 of retrowars. Thanks for following along (and apologies for letting the blog slide). Feel free to report any feedback here - is it balanced enough? Too easy? Too hard? Especially interested in if you think it is unfairly easy/hard compared to other multiplayer games.