You have downloaded Version 0.04 of Grand Theft Shmup, a prototype of a (possibly) unqiue Shmup game.

IMPORTANT:AS THIS IS A PRODUCT MADE WITH A KLIK PRODUCT, IT NEEDS THE PACKAGED .DLL FILE IN YOUR WINDOWS/SYSTEM FOLDER!!

The gist of it is that you are the dot, and you have to kill bad guys. You can steal enemy ships by bumping into them, and then use those ships against the enemy!

The controls are:
Arrow Keys - Move
Shift - Dash (while in dot mode) or Shoot (while in Ship mode)
Control - Jump out of ship.

Changes to v0.03 are:
Dashing now creates a shield that defects enemy bullets.
Dashing now make a noise.
You now cannot dash the whole time.
Sub Boss appears sooner, and is harder


Credits:
PenguinSeph - Game Design, Programming (I used MMF1, but it's still kinda programming), "Art"
DrPetter of http://www.cyd.liu.se/~tompe573/hp for making sfxr
Everyone who has commented so far!

Finding it hard to work out what's going on? Enjoying it? Hating it? Whatever you think, I would love to hear from you, so if you want to leave any feedback, either E-mail me at penguinseph@btinternet.com or leave a comment at my Glorious Trainwrecks blog at http://www.glorioustrainwrecks.com/?q=blog/90




As a prototype, it exists to create the outline for a project. The prototype should show that the finished game will fill in all the requirements. As I am mainly making the game as a hobby for myself as well as maybe a talking point for any interviews and stuff, the goals are:

- Game should be at least vaguely in the Shmup genre.
- Game should be enjoyible and complelling from the first go.
- Game should be pick up and play. To be more specific, the player should be able to play the game is short bursts.
- Game should use the ship stealing mechanic to good effect, using it to give the player many options in gameplay.
- Game should be deterministic. If the player enters the same input 5 times, she should get the same result 5 times.
- Game should have a high amount of polish, and should be bug free (note that the prototype will not have this point. It's only like a really small demo to show what the finished product will be like)

As of version 0.02a, I also stole some more goals from Lost Garden (Common Game Prototyping Pitfalls - http://lostgarden.com/2005/08/common-game-prototyping-pitfalls.html ):

- Can the player make meaningful decisions?
- Is the player getting the feedback they require to make good decisions?
- Are the major risk / reward schedules in place?
- What is the pacing of the experience?
- Is there enough meat here to hang the rest of the game on?

Please tell me what you think of it!

The answers for v0.03 for these goals are:

- The player can choose whever or not to risk collision with a bullet to steal an enemy ship. Better ships have a larger risk as there attacks are generally harder to avoid, and some ships tend to hide near the top of the screen, making them really hard to reach. The player can also choose jump out of the ship. This destroys all on screen bullets, giving the player a chance to quickly grab another ship.

- Yes, apart from dashing. I'm not sure that the dash attack mechanic is ever found.

- Yes, you can risk destrution to steal a ship, which rewards you with a shield and a weapon. Now that ships can take more than one hit, owning one becomes the focus of the game.

- The pacing is very quick, with no real long term desicions. This fits in well with the pick up a play goal.

- Yes. You can keep on adding different enemy ships, and you could make the game level based, instead of a never ending hi-score run. You could also add bosses and the like.