f13.net

So, this is my next project. It's been in development since the beginning of January. Today we finally got a video together to pimp the alpha. We weren't sharing screenshots because screenies really do retro polygon 3d no justice. So, here's a video of Star Fall.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tM4MBpCSiNo

The game will also feature a number of characters, which are presented in an alternative style. We had some internal debate about keeping style consistency, but I feel like the game itself is not retro just to be retro. It's retro because Flash is limiting, and the characters themselves dont need to be limited the way the polygons do. So they're presented in a much cleaner comic style.

EDIT: Removed the art for the characters that were not added to the game.

That looks fantastic.  Is 40fps a set target, or are you still just seeing how it plays best?

It's set to run at 40.

Not sure why he didn't post this yet on his normal media blitz.

But a "Demo" version of what we are working on has been released to kongregate (http://www.kongregate.com/games/damijin/starfall-survivor).

Was going to eventually! So what happened between the original post and now:

Everyone knows projects, especially indie ones, almost never turn out as planned and most die in development (hello FPS mod community!)

Starfall did not. Almost did, but we got some version of it out which is better than nothing! :D

So we worked on this all spring, and then at some point we said "Shit, this is getting too big, we arent going to be able to do this in reasonable time, what should we do?"

Answer: We went back and did the sequel to our first game, Pyro and released that in August.

We then returned to Starfall, now we thought "Okay, how can we strip this down and still make it fun?"

We had some cool ideas for using the 3d. Noteably, I wanted to do a "chase" level where the camera is positioned in front of your ship's nose, facing backward so you can see what's behind you. You'd then be chased by an enemy and you have to dodge left and right to avoid his attacks. I thought it would look cool.

But the more we talked about it, the bigger it got again, and we decided to just cut our losses and work on something else.

Then Kongregate came out with this contest: http://www.kongregate.com/stride_game_contest?src=mr

We thought "Hey! Starfall's alpha is already pretty much an endurance game! Let's clean it up a bit and throw it in that!"

So we did, but unfortunately it will not see a mass release around the web, and will still linger in obscurity for a while. We hope to return to the property down the line with a more deserving game complete with the full content that people would expect. Until then, we have a very barebones high score shooter, but hopefully it makes some money and means our time spent on it wasn't wasted.

Credit to MrBloodworth for the ship graphics!

Took 7th place!

Congrats!

It's like Zaxxon meets Galaga.  Very nice!