You took basically all of the fun things about asteroids and got rid of it, and the result is honestly just a crappy knock off. For starters, the controls are absolutely atrocious, why would you make 8 directional movement for an asteroids game is beyond me. I'm not sure if you're just new to game dev or what, but you want to use floating point numbers for the movement for smooth turning. There is also no juice whatsoever in the game, no sounds, no tweening, no animations, menus, any sort of visual or audible feedback not even a point system. These are the things that make playing games fun and rewarding for the player, I would look into the basics of game design philosophy it will really improve your skills.
Author Comments
This is an HTML5 asteroids game. It is probably one of the hardest asteroid games ever made.
No, really. I haven't even beat it, and I'm the guy who made this!
I also put a "greed system" in the game, where you get unlimited rapid-fire, but if you "get greedy" by spamming it too much, you'll get fucked over faster than you can say "Damn it!".
Controls:
Left/Right (or A/D): Rotate left/right
Up (or W): Accelerate
Space (or L): Shoot
If you haven't already figured it out, click inside the game to unpause it.
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UPDATE April 12, 2014: HTML5 API IS OUT.
So I've added medals to the game. So reward! Wow! Tired Memes! Much old!
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Older updates:
Thanks to the suggestion of one of the reviewers, I've made two changes:
1) Made the smallest asteroids easier to hit by doubling the size of their hitboxes for bullets
2) Added a graphic for when you beat the game. An unmistakable "YOU WIN".
Screenshot submission thing no longer applies as it was made to be a filler for the mean time. HTML5 API makes it redundant.
Well I think that it's an interesting idea, but it doesn't really apport something to the game, Is like asteroids but with smaller rocks, so it's just like the same, besides this like some users said the controls are difficult and it's very very fdifficult to point at the smaller rocks, you can make a game as difficult as you like but you have to make the main character just as skilled. In brief I would reccomend three improvements, first improve the controls, make it more accurate more easy to point at the smaller rocks, I would use the mouse for aiming, second add something new to the game, I mean people like classics but that doesn't mean that you cannot add something else, and third, I didn't have problems with the size of the ship but some players may think that the ship is too small.
B1KMusic responds:
1: As I've already, said, I've sorta pigeon-holed myself in the controls. I made the turning specifically 8-directional. Adding more directions would require an overhaul of the entire Ship and Bullet classes. And at that point, I might as well make a whole new game. As for using the mouse, I explicitly wanted to make this game with keyboard controls.
2: Couldn't think of anything. This game *was* an experiment, after all. I challenged myself to see if I could make an asteroids game with graphics that aren't squares.
3: If I made the ship bigger, the game would become even harder than it already is, if not impossible. Plus, it's 10x10 pixel art; that doesn't scale well :/
You have to hold down the space bar or L key to fire. Simply pressing it won't do a thing. But if you hold it too long you'll fire two or more. A single press should fire a single shot, so I consider this broken.
Also may as well not even have the screenshots thing if you're just going to discriminate like that. You do know it's easy enough to hide things on Windows too right? Or to make a mock-up screenshot on any operating system using pretty much any paint type program? I mean pretty much any online achievements are going to be highly dependent on the honor system anyway because everyone's machines are going to be different and there's no real way to verify anything for 100% certain. All this does is show and prove that you have personal biases because you personally use Windows. It's the online equivalent of a "Now Hiring" sign with "Irish need not apply" underneath.
B1KMusic responds:
It's not broken. The reason for the delay is to stop you from spamming the shot too much when you don't want to. I let it tick 3 frames (which at 24 fps is about 0.83 seconds) before it allows a shot. Otherwise holding down the shoot key would generate 24 bullets per second. I guess that's the price I pay for wanting rapid fire.
I suppose I might have to set a flag for when the space/L key is down/up and allow only one bullet per pushdown.
"Also may as well not even have the screenshots thing if you're just going to discriminate like that. You do know it's easy enough to hide things on Windows too right? Or to make a mock-up screenshot on any operating system using pretty much any paint type program?"
Good point. I put a digital watermark in the game to rectify that. It's a bit complicated and involves checking all the data for every frame and encoding it into a binary string, which is translated to a hexadecimal string, then drawing some small pixels in the colors that are derived from the string. Looking at a screenshot, it's extremely difficult to see, but using od (octal dump) to look at the data of a screenshot, I can then use an algorithm to decode it back into the frames, "play back" the gameplay, and immediately notice if a bunch of asteroids suddenly go missing.
"All this does is show and prove that you have personal biases because you personally use Windows"
Actually, I use Linux. The game itself was made using vim and gimp. That's also how I know how easy it is to hide things.
For example, press Ctrl+Alt+F1 and you're in TTY1, a terminal screen that can't be seen by a screenshot tool that's limited to the scope of X11 which typically runs on TTY7. From there, you could just run scanmem and with enough meddling, erase all the instances of Asteroid()
Controls a little sloppy, though a fun still a fun game.
Physics are a bit finicky, otherwise a decent, solid game.