Dastardly Shapes

by philh
Overall★★★★★★★★★★2.67
Fun★★★★★★★★★★3.38
Innovation★★★★★★★★★★2.15
Theme★★★★★★★★★★2.46
Graphics★★★★★★★★★★2.23
Audio★★★★★★★★★★2.23
Humor★★★★★★★★★★1.33
Community★★★★★★★★★★1.63
Arrow keys to move, click to shoot. You have only limited ammo, but you can replenish it by collecting the carcasses of enemy ships.

Made with C++ and SFML.

Windows versions provided by Monk. (Thanks, Monk!)

The current version has minor changes to the original submitted version. It no longer segfaults at wave 7, the time resets when you die, rendering is faster (probably not noticeable for anyone else, but it is for me), and ammo count is not printed to stdout (I forgot to remove that originally).

There's a bug which causes sounds to stop playing after a while, and not return until you quit. There's another which causes bullets to only show up intermittently after a while, which can be "fixed" by dying and restarting.

screenshot

Comments15

Covenant23 Aug 2010, 07:57
Couldn't play it, only have Windows available... :(
JamesGecko
JamesGecko23 Aug 2010, 10:51
I'm sympathetic to a fellow Linux fan, but you should really at least say that you're using SFML in the readme. :-)
philhauthor23 Aug 2010, 16:21
Good point. I've updated the notes.
Draknek
Draknek24 Aug 2010, 11:09
Had to compile it myself since you linked with SFML 1.6 and the version in Ubuntu is 1.5, but that's not your fault.

Enemies should probably stay within the gameplay area. Possibly dead enemies should too.

Time doesn't reset when you die.

Supporting WASD as well as arrows would be nice. Collision could stand to be a little more forgiving, both on enemies against the player and on bullets against the enemies.

A life system would make it less frustrating. One small screwup will send me all the way back to round 1 so I've only got as far as round 3 with the different yellow enemies.
alistair aitcheson
alistair aitcheson24 Aug 2010, 14:00
Would love to rate this, but cannot for reasons I am sure you are aware of. Would you accept a hug instead? :P
philhauthor24 Aug 2010, 16:40
Covenant - you also should be able to play now. :)
philhauthor24 Aug 2010, 16:40
Draknek - Thanks for the time thing; I've fixed that. The rest are good points that I would have liked to implement given more time.

Ali - you should be able to play now, but hugs are always welcome.

Monk - much appreciated.
Surrealix25 Aug 2010, 04:29
Error creating D3D Device.

I assume it's because I have an older graphics card (Intel 915GM) that doesn't support shaders. Looks lovely, a pity I can't play it.
Surrealix25 Aug 2010, 04:41
Argh. Disregard my previous comment, it was for a different game.

Yours ran fine (in fact, it ran very smoothly). The gameplay is fun, but some indicator of the number of bullets remaining would be a great help. (why did you remove it!)

Also, it seemed that my ship would usually fire white balls, but occasionally clicking on an enemy didn't appear to fire, but did kill it. If this was part of the mechanic, it wasn't particularly obvious why.

The game is pretty unforgiving, I only made it to wave 4 before giving up. Well done for getting a completely, playable, and fun game though.
philhauthor25 Aug 2010, 13:26
The pitch of the firing sound actually goes up as you run out of bullets. You're right that a visual indicator would be helpful; possibly I should have left the count on stdout until I added that.

> Also, it seemed that my ship would usually fire white balls, but occasionally clicking on an enemy didn't appear to fire, but did kill it.

That's a bug, unfortunately.
Spunkmeyer26 Aug 2010, 10:07
Game run very smoothly and you have some clean graphics. I like that. But than there were the bugs, no music and I dont get the connection to the theme.
moop
moop30 Aug 2010, 10:46
Gameplay was quite fun and nice and fast but I didn't really see the theme except for gathering dead enemies for ammo.
Could have done with ammunition indicators and lives.
stqn3 Sep 2010, 09:24
Works fine, good playability, nice particles, interesting idea to keep the enemies moving once they're "dead"... But it seems quite far from the theme, and instant death is annoying. Needs some scoring and ammo count too, or something.

Glad to see another game for Linux!
Sparky
Sparky4 Sep 2010, 19:19
This is a pretty decent idea. Personally, I didn't care for the slidey player movement- I would have preferred tighter control. This is a sound idea, and a pretty direct take on the theme (I disagree with those who have said that it doesn't fit).

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