Tropical Dragon Slaughter
Posted on Wednesday, January 20th, 2010 at 10:00 am under: FlashI’ve had a few projects kicking around which haven’t gotten the blogging attention they probably deserve, so I’ll be trying to make an effort to remedy that over the next few days or so.
First up is “Tropical Dragon Slaughter” — the spiritual sequel of sorts to Eruption.
Eruption is strictly a mouse avoider game, and so the player’s ship cannot shoot at the various obstacles that fly around; that was part of the design from the beginning, and I think any allowance for the player destroying the objects in the game would’ve made it into something entirely different. Nonetheless, being able to shoot back was a popular request, and Tropical Dragon Slaughter is an attempt to grant that wish.
You can’t get something for nothing, though, and the price of being able to shoot back is a substantial increase in the number of obstacles flying at you at once. Some screen shots from the prototype of the first of several levels in the game are below:
If some of the graphics look familiar, it’s probably because they’re from the Tyrian sprites released by Dan Cook over at Lost Garden. I’m not sure if they’ll survive into the final version of Tropical Dragon Slaughter or not, but even if they don’t, they’re certainly some snappy placeholders.
Unfortunately the screenshots don’t convey the motion of the white crystal blocks, which are not only rushing towards you, but also move sideways, and occasionally bounce off one another.
In the end, I hope to provide three or four different areas or themes which each require slightly different dodging and shooting strategies, and two or three levels for each area. I should have some new screenshots once another of these areas is in a playable state. In the meantime, here’s a question to mull over: is this next screenshot a quick Photoshop job, or do I actually expect players to survive some of these levels in the dark?
Let me know if you ever want/need a tester. I’m not your core audience for much of these, but I’m always willing to give feedback.
@Corvus: I’ll likely be taking you up on that — I think I’ll be sending the next version of Ruins your way in the not too distant future (though probably not until after the upcoming Ruins-related blog post).
[...] uses a slightly different mechanism to generate and control its various obstacles. The first motif, mentioned in the original TDS blog post, takes a very direct approach and presents obstacles which are primarily flying towards you from [...]