CEPHEI - HOSTILE PLANET

[fruitmaze]

This is a shoot 'em up game that I have been working on for a while. It is implemented using the standard libraries in Java.

Short story:
"Gamma Cephei is a binary star system, approximately 45 light-years away from our own solar system. Recently a new planet has been discovered that might contain life. You have been sent away to Gamma Cephei in order to find out more about this planet. But it turns out that the planet is populated by evil robots..."

The object of the game is mainly to get as high score as possible. You can get really high score if you manage to get a high multiplier for the ship, which is increased by 1 for each enemy you destroy.









Controls:
Move - Arrow keys
Fire - X
Super bomb - SPACE
Paus - P
Exit - CTRL+Q

Play game! (runs as an applet)

Any comments and feedback are welcomed!

[Tunedbeats]

Nicely done.

Maybe not the most original concept, but the graphics are very nice and the gameplay is smooth
I'm not entirely sure what the pick ups do (labeled with squares, stars, 1 and 2) but i guess it's just for points. Maybe you can make some distinctive graphics for that?

Thumbs up!

[fruitmaze]

Thanks!

I do have a menu option INFO in the game where it says what the pick ups do, but anyway it might not be clear enough. The pick ups 1 and 2 I agree are a bit confusing what they do. I might try and make a better symbol for those. And yes they are for more points, 1 = 50 and 2 = 4000. They also increase the multiplier (so if the multiplier is 10 you will get 4000*10 points for a "2"-pickup).

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[BoBear2681]

Looks great!  Although I'm sure you're aware, it could really use some sound effects, explosions and such would really add to the feel of the game.  It also seemed to take a few seconds for the pick ups to disappear after I flew over them, which was strange - at first I didn't know if it was registering that I picked them up or not.  Still, awesome so far.  I like to see stuff made in plain ol' Java 2D   

[fruitmaze]

Thank you BoBear2681!

Good point, the pick ups might need some other kind of animation when picked up to make it more obvious.

Yes that is true, sound effects and music would be very nice. Maybe I will have a look at that.

[kappa]

ah thats brilliant, IMO very nicely done.

only thinking lacking to make this already good game great is sound.

I'd recommend the SFXR tool if you need some quick sfx.

[CommanderKeith]

The screenshots look excellent but I couldn't get it to work. The first time it loaded up to here on the console:

1   2

Loaded image: http://jalex.se/Cephei/images/item7_hit_0.png Loaded image: http://jalex.se/Cephei/images/item7_hit_1.png

Then just a white screen, no errors or exceptions. Then I refreshed and got a black screen.

How are you downloading your images?

ah thats brilliant, IMO very nicely done.

only thinking lacking to make this already good game great is sound.

I'd recommend the SFXR tool if you need some quick sfx.

There's also bleb's awesome pew pew pew! generator here:
http://www.java-gaming.org/topics/pew-pew-pew-sound-synthesis/18087/view.html

[kappa]

@CommanderKeith - I've tested on 3 different computers, it seemed to work fine on all of them (vista, xp, linux64), maybe you somehow corrupted your java cache? (you could try clearing cache from java control panel and trying again, might work if its a cache problem) btw which jre version are you on?

@fruitmaze as pointed out by BoBear2681 I also found it slightly odd that when you collect power ups (square things) they take a while to disappear, if this was faster, it might look/feel better for the player.

[CommanderKeith]

Ah now it worked, after a had some breakfast and came back I saw a menu screen, but that took a while! I clicked start and it froze for about 30 seconds before anything happened. This must all be due to my super-slow mobile-phone-connected internet on my laptop. IO shouldn't be done on the graphics thread otherwise it looks laggy and unresponsive. A loading screen would fix it.

The graphics look very nice, beautiful gradients and it all fits together nicely. 

WASD would be good in addition to the arrow keys, and ctrl or space to fire would be more intuitive than X.

Nice job so far!

[fruitmaze]

Thanks for all the feedback!

I will change the pick ups animation during the weekend.

Sound will hopefully be added soon.

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[teletubo]

I dint reach far, but it's indeed a very nice game.
The only thing I missed about the controls is an "automatic shot" mode .  It bugs me a little to keep hitting X like a madman.

And I disagree changing the shot key to spacebar . Spacebar in most of keyboards is a noisy and awkward key to be pressed repeatedly.

[princec]

Works in Opera shock! 

Could do with mouse control and 60fps update speed!

Cas

[fruitmaze]

*** GAME UPDATED ***

- Sound added! Music might be added later on.
- Pick ups disappearing-animation changed
- Some small changes on the levels

I now added sound to the game, simply using the AudioClip class. I have only tested it on Windows XP (Java 1.6) so far, and my fear is that the sound might not play properly in earlier Java versions. Please let me know if there are any problems.

CommanderKeith, kapta
Thanks for the links to the auto generating sound tools. They really helped me alot.

Play game

[max1238]

Cool! It looks like SALAMANDER .

[fruitmaze]

max1238 - Yes, Salamander was one of the games that inspired me.

[kappa]

The game is turning out great, think it might be time to give it a quick review

Firstly the game is very nicely done, the artwork is especially nice.

Your distribution method could be improved. At the moment all your resources are loaded directly (outside jars). This can take a long time to initially start the applet (white screen) once the resources are cached however the applet starts quickly. Another issue is when you play sound effects for the first time they again lag the game as they are not downloaded/loaded. Optimally you should put all your resources in a jar(s) and just get the applet to download the whole thing at the start. This way the game will run smoothly once it starts and not lag ingame.

You should also use the following parameter once you put all your resources in jars for even faster applet startup time.

1	<param name="codebase_lookup" value="false">

Mouse input is a must for the GUI (buttons) as this is pretty much expected of all flash/java games nowadays. Optionally you might also want to consider supporting mouse controls for the ship but again not as important as mouse support for the gui.

Pause is spelt incorrectly (when you press the P key ingame)

Your graphics are well done and animation is nice, however the main player ship could do with more animations/detail as this is the ship you'll be looking at during most of the game. You could for example have something like animation to tilt the ship as it moves up and down or some other cool animation on it. The moving tail on some of the enemies is nice.


+1 point if the game installs and uninstalls correctly
+1 point if the game doesn't crash ever
+1 point if the game is slickly presented
+1 point if the game has "good" graphics that suit the game
+0 point if the game has "good" sound that suit the game (sounds effects are nice but could do with some more)
+1 point if the game's overall style is "good"
+0 point if the game is original or brings a great new original twist (standard text book shmup)
+1 point if your judge enjoyed playing the game
+0 point if the game is complete enough that doesn't feel anything is missing (could do with more polish, the little touches that make game games great ones).
+1 point if you don't whine and you demand nothing of the mods (simply saying "can you rate my game please" is fine)

7/10

FEATURED.

[fruitmaze]

Thanks alot, kapta!

I will definitely have a look at loading the resources from a jar instead. Sounds like a good idea.

Yeah I agree, mouse for the GUI is something I should add.

Added now some atmospheric title music (composed by a friend of mine).

[fruitmaze]

*** GAME UPDATED ***

I have changed so that all classes, images and sounds are loaded from a jar-file. So now the applet loads much faster, and I haven't noticed any lagging at the start of the game.

I also added mouse control to the GUI.

Check it out!

[Momoko_Fan]

Cool game. It felt a bit hard for me, I thought the number powerups were shield or something.
Two things I noticed, that bothered me was that it was too easy to hit the walls/sides and die instantly, and another was that the input lagged.

[Nate]

Cool game! I found that I died with the blue laser weapon, game over, start again, and I still had the weapon.

[fruitmaze]

@Momoko_Fan
Yeah the number powerups might be confusing. I've had troubles finding another symbol for them. And I don't want only the colour to seperate them. If anyone got any idea of a symbol you can let me know.

@Nate
That's strange... I tried myself to get game over in different ways but couldn't reproduce the problem.

[appel]

Way too difficult at start. Maybe tune it down a bit so I can continue for more than 10 seconds? 

[kappa]

Way too difficult at start. Maybe tune it down a bit so I can continue for more than 10 seconds? 

your shmups skills sound weak

however agreed that it does get hard pretty fast difficulty should increase gradually.

[Hansdampf]

fun game, reminds me a of R-TypeII (which also had low fps )
The scoring is interesting, some simple enemies give you 10000 (100000?) points, others 150.
The second boss was too hard for me. You should paint the bullets on top of  the boni, sometimes the boni hide the bullets.
Give me extra weapons! (or did I miss something?)
Maybe level codes could motivate me to play again. It seems to be hard work to get to the 2nd boss and then get killed by 5 oversized bullets you can not dodge.

[teletubo]

fun game, reminds me a of R-TypeII (which also had low fps )
The scoring is interesting, some simple enemies give you 10000 (100000?) points, others 150.
The second boss was too hard for me. You should paint the bullets on top of  the boni, sometimes the boni hide the bullets.
Give me extra weapons! (or did I miss something?)
Maybe level codes could motivate me to play again. It seems to be hard work to get to the 2nd boss and then get killed by 5 oversized bullets you can not dodge.

I couldn't also beat the 2nd boss . Maybe a "Continue" option ? like restart the level with 3 lives ...

but anyway, this game is really cool, congrats !
Maybe post it on Game Jolt for more exposure  ?

[fruitmaze]

Thanks for the comments!

Changed the first level a bit so it should be easier now.

@Hansdampf
Not sure if this was clear. The scoring can differ alot between enemies depending on how high your multiplier is (right above the ship). For every enemy you destroy (and bonuses) the multiplier is increased by one (and it is set to zero if you get hit or if you don't increase the multiplier within a few seconds). The "base points" for an enemy is then multiplied with the multiplier (for example 150 * 10, if multiplier is 10). Good idea with the bullets on 2nd boss btw. There are only 3 types of weapons in the game so far (super bomb on SPACE).

Yeah the 2nd boss might be hard, but a reason for that is because the game only has 2 levels so far. When I make a 3rd level I will probably make the 2nd boss a bit easier.

[m77]

Looks just amazing for me.
Too long loading. It's definitely a bed idea to load all resources from the start.

[fruitmaze]

Thanks m77. Hmm, for me it loads really fast.

I played the game on another computer then my own now, and noticed a critical bug. Quite often the game doesn't seem to register keyboard input, which means the ship won't always start to move or it will sometimes continue moving after realising the arrow key!? On the other hand at my home computer it works fine. Has anyone else noticed this problem?