Here are some screenshots

Most of the criticism of the game has been for the harsh difficulty curve and slow progress (I read about one guy taking 8 hours to fly to the next system). But luckily, the developer has released modding tools and updated the game since to address some of these issues.

As noone had done so yet, I thought I would give it a shot and create a balance mod for the game. My main goals were to speed the game up a bit and make it a little more accessible. I also balanced out the mission rewards, to encourage the player to take some of the cooler missions, like photographing planets and finding lost people.

Oh, have I mentioned that the game is free?

You can download the complete game, with updates and the clgMod, ready to go.

And here are the full changelist, the SSC thread with the vanilla game and all related downloads, and the developer’s website. Oh, and please drop an upvote if you’re on Reddit!

The game itself got a small update as well. I fixed some minor glitches that were still bothering me and tweaked the player movement a little. It’s still available right here.

In other news, I am still working on Project Elite. After going through some gameplay prototypes, it is going in more of a free-form direction now, where the player gets to explore on his own. A more substantial update on it’s progress should be forthcoming soon.

There is also a benchmark you can run. It will measure your system’s performance using a very taxing test level and display a score out of 100 when you mouse-over the button next.

I’ve been getting some feedback on the benchmark and it’s been very helpful. It seems most systems run it quite well (70-90 scores), but running multiple applications in the background slows down the game considerably. So I might have to add some sort of note at the start of the game, or offer some graphics options to turn off some of the visual features.

I would appreciate any feedback on the demo levels or on benchmark scores!

I realize I am updating the blog too infrequently to get people to regularly check for news. So if you want an easier way of tracking the game’s progress, you can now use the facebook page instead.

In other news, I’ve been getting some great feedback on the demo and video. Perhaps I will post some info on the tech behind it in the coming days.

So without further ado: Pre-Alpha Battle Demo

I am also currently looking for an artist. Mainly for UI/Menu stuff, but also potentially for in-game assets like ships and backgrounds. So if you are, or you know anyone who might be interested in working on a top-down space shooter, send an email with some links to previous work to crunchyleafgames -at- gmail -dot- com.

Play it here!

You can reach each of the team members’ homepages through the links below the game. The full source is available at GitHub here.

Check it out here: DodoVsDarwin

We were a team of 4 guys and had 48h to make a complete game from scratch. The theme of this year’s Game Jam was “extinction” which quickly led to the awesome Dodo bird. A creature so completely defenseless und evolutionary unprepared for the ouside world that it was quickly made extinct when humans discoved the island they lived on.

You play as the Dodo bird and must stay alive as long as possible while the island keeps getting harder to survive on. Chase the pigs away from your fruit! Bait the rats into a trap! Poop a tree! Attract your Dodo mate and try to survive!

Here’s a short demo of the particle engine I implemented yesterday: Particle Engine Demo

I used the outline presented in this article, adding classes and functionality as needed and then used blitting to render the particles. Even without optimization the performance is satisfactory, but depending on how many particles the game will need I might have to go over the code again and add a little magic dust here and there.

The balance should be better, it’s actually possible to beat wave 7 now! There are some small graphical improvements, but this version is not using CopyPixel yet.

You can try the new version here.

I also set up a super-short survey (less than 10 seconds if you’re quick), if you would like to give some feedback.

The main problem with the flash vector renderer is that it has performance issues when displaying a large number of objects at the same time, a problem that simply doesn’t exist when using blitting (see this awesome example). Another problem is that it has trouble with the 2d free-scrolling background, making it move in jumps at times which gives the impression that the game isn’t running smoothly. Perhaps I will be able to fix this with blitting by applying a slight motion blur effect to the background.

Update wise, I will be upping a new version soon with better balance and couple other smaller changes. I think most people haven’t even seen all the enemy types yet, because waves 5 and 6 are way too hard. I will also set up a survey so people can give me their take on the prototype and make suggestions.

Until then you can still play the original prototype here.