Astro Flare - Beta

[DigitalMarsh]

Please check out the video for the game I am currently working on called Astro Flare, a top down space shooter with six different game modes, unlockable ships, upgrades and online leaderboards.

In the game mode shown in the video "Time Bandit" you collect time powerups that will briefly slow time around you and increase your countdown timer.

Astro Flare - Game Mode: Time Bandit

As well as the normal survival game mode other game modes include "Alter Ego" having to battle an AI controlled clone of your ship who will fight you as well as collect powerups and kill enemies for score (Your final score is determined by the difference between your score and the AI) and "Extermination" Battle a fleet of space bugs that break down and split into more enemies when killed. Try not to get overrun and swarmed to death!

I'm going to be putting out a beta test version in the next week and was hoping a few people might like to help out with gametesting and balance feedback.

If you are interested please send an email to digitalmarsh@gmail.com with the subject "Beta Test" and include the windows live ID/email that you use on your phone. The live ID is required to activate the beta for your handset.

Thanks
Astro Flare

 

[DigitalMarsh]

The beta is active now, if you want to download it send an email to digitalmarsh@gmail.com with the subject "Beta Test" and include the windows live ID that you use on your phone. Once I get your email I'll authorize your live ID and send you the marketplace link.

 

[selfcreation]

looks like Geo wars on Xbox live i love that game , haha ..

im down for testing , sent you an e-mail!!

 

[DigitalMarsh]

Definitely inspired by geometry wars, love that game as well It's a similar type of game but with an interesting twist on the powerup system, upgrades and some unique game modes.

Beta activations take a couple of hours but I will send out emails to let people know when they can download.

 

[selfcreation]

Definitely inspired by geometry wars, love that game as well It's a similar type of game but with an interesting twist on the powerup system, upgrades and some unique game modes.

Beta activations take a couple of hours but I will send out emails to let people know when they can download.

hehe awsome , im waiting on your news!

 

[jtn05]

Game looks great man, count me in.

Just sent the email.

 

[jtn05]

Loving this game so far. Love the fact that there are so many upgrades....keeps you coming back for more.

 

[TheArcaneFlame]

I've only had a few minutes to play with it so far, but my initial impressions are good. It's a fun game. Initially I had trouble downloading it on the PC it gave an error when I tried to download it but doing so directly on the phone worked fine. As for the game itself, the controls worked fairly well for me. I liked that you can place your thumbs anywhere and it'll use that point as the center for the virtual sticks. That's pretty slick, though sometimes I obscured substantial portions of the screen depending on where I had them placed. Looking forward to trying the other game modes and watching this game progress. Keep up the good work!

 

[DigitalMarsh]

Controls are definitely the hardest thing to get right on a touchscreen. The way they are set up at the moment they will follow your finger movement and always stay within a certain distance so that when you go to input a different direction you don't lose track of where the thumbstick is as its always relative to where your finger currently is on the screen. After a while it feels very natural.

The game is meant to be pretty challenging but I will be interested to hear feedback if I have made it too difficult or not. Since I have been playing the game a lot myself all through development it's hard for me to tell.

Another thing I am curious about is if the selection menu for the different game modes is obvious enough. I notice a lot of scores in the leaderboard for the first game mode but not the others. Perhaps it's just people getting used the first game mode before trying the others though.

 

[jtn05]

The game is meant to be pretty challenging but I will be interested to hear feedback if I have made it too difficult or not. Since I have been playing the game a lot myself all through development it's hard for me to tell.

Another thing I am curious about is if the selection menu for the different game modes is obvious enough. I notice a lot of scores in the leaderboard for the first game mode but not the others. Perhaps it's just people getting used the first game mode before trying the others though.

After playing the game for a while, i think the difficulty is just right and would even love to see an insane difficulty(for people like me who love really hard games lol).

I do think that you could make the different game modes more obvious. Maybe have a separate page with all the game modes listed.

 

[selfcreation]

hey ,

First impression of the game:

Opening up the game , right away i love it hehe , for the controls , i had a little hard time getting use to the shooting , but after 2-3 games you get it pat down. over all small learning curve

Time bandit:

I liked time bandit , but i find that the Units are all to far apart ( maybe i find the infinite playing ground to big ) i would like to have a limit (borders) in the sense that units cant get to far from you , they bounce off the walls and come back. ( would allow for the game to last longer i think ).

Rampage:

this one is also very fun, the ONLY thing i dint really enjoy was that the units you kill ( the last one ) the units seem to get VERY small and a little hard on the eyes, hard to hit and to avoid, i would maybe upscale them JUST A LITTLE..

Extermination:

this is by far my FAV game mode , i could play this mode for hours!!

Alter ego:

Very thought at first , dint relies he could freaking kill me!! lol ..


Bugs and changes:

1 little bug i noticed, when your flying around , sometime your ships sorta stops moving , and then it move VERY fast in the direction you wanted to go . it feels like its LAG , but its not lag cause the enemy are still moving smoothly. just a little problem i guess with he controls?

the thing i would change is when the ENEMY dies , the pixel explosion is a LITTLE much , i would tone it down just a little , a bit less animation.

Also i would edit your main menu UI a little , maybe make it a little more Interactive ( sorta like geo wars ) where you can see the top 5 scores of your friend per game modes and what not.
and maybe more details of the game mode ( click on it and see a small description ) .

Over all impression:

Over all the game is amazing , very smooth and well done , im diffidently going to buy the full game when it comes out

 

[DigitalMarsh]

Great feedback, thank you.

Just to clarify one issue, when you say the ship stops moving then moves very fast does that happen in all game modes or is it just in Time Bandit when you pick up the time powerups? It's meant to happen in Time Bandit but definitely not in the other modes.

 

[selfcreation]

Great feedback, thank you.

Just to clarify one issue, when you say the ship stops moving then moves very fast does that happen in all game modes or is it just in Time Bandit when you pick up the time powerups? It's meant to happen in Time Bandit but definitely not in the other modes.

OH!! yeah it only happends in time bandit , i dint relise it was a part of the game : a little discription of the game mode would be nice lol

 

[DigitalMarsh]

A couple of the game modes are pretty different to each other so I'm definitely going to add an intro in each mode to explain.

Alter Ego mode is very tough but once you unlock the second ship with the area attack it's a bit easier. You can wait till you get a missile powerup and then activate your special ability and it will fire out 100s of missiles and destroy your alter ego very quickly. Then you have a bit of time to build up some score before he respawns.

A few people have told me their favourite mode is Extermination now which I wasn't expecting. I hope to work on it a bit more and make it even better.

 

[selfcreation]

yeah Extermination remind me of EVOLVED on Geo wars2 with my 50million rec. gona spend alot of time on it hehe

 

[DigitalMarsh]

Still working away on the next beta version. One of the things I've added is a new powerup drop that gives you a stack of 5 laser charges which will automatically shoot down any enemy bullets that come near your ship. In Extermination mode the laser is also able to kill the smallest bug ships. Looking forward to see what people think of it.

Each ship now has a unique passive ability as well as the active abilities they already had.

The score screen shown when you die has been improved a bit to show your top 5 scores as well as enemies killed and coins collected.

An instruction screen has been added along with a practise mode so new players can get used to the controls without worrying about getting killed too quickly.

A bunch of other tweaks and fixes that I'll list when the next version is ready for testing.

Feedback so far has been really helpful, and I really appreciate that people take the time to send it to me.

I still have a small amount of beta spots left so if you know somebody who wants to test the game tell them to send me an email.

If anybody has Mango on their phone I would interested to hear how it's running, that it isn't running at double speed or anything crazy. I haven't updated my phone yet as I didn't want to run into any problems with compiling and running a non Mango version of the game but since Mango is around the corner I'll probably update soon to make sure everything is running ok.

 

[selfcreation]

nice cant wait tot ryt his new vershion ,

so far the game play it self is rpety smoth and polished ( i find ) i think all you need now is does small features you started to add.

maybe make the UI a little more interactive.

 

[DigitalMarsh]

Just submitted new beta version 0.8 to the marketplace. I'll send around an email to beta testers once it goes through, takes about 30 hours.

 

[DigitalMarsh]

The latest trailer, this time for Extermination mode, enjoy:

Astro Flare - Game Mode: Extermination - YouTube

 

[selfcreation]

hey i think there is a problem with leadr bored , my score int coming up , i got 16k in Rampage but it dint apear ont he leader bored.