Hello,

At first I want to introduce our game RohXel. Basically it is just a shooter in 2D, but it is based on a physics engine I wrote so everything ingame is based on physics. This makes it more interesting to play since sometimes unpredictable things can happen.

The basic concept of the game is nothing new, its just a shooter, you walk around in sideview, controlling a ragdoll with a weapon or something else in its hand, shooting at other ragdolls. Great!

To enhance this whole thing a bit we tried to introduce some weapons and features that don't exist in every second shooter:

For example we just implemented a rope-thrower (remember worms ? ;)). You can swing around and make acrobatic moves with your figure, always trying to land back on your feet so you don't die. Since we have a nearly completely dynamic environment, you can also use this rope to pull a crate or some other obstacle to you, making your way free. You could also use it to pull the other player into the abyss, but you'd have to watch you don't suffer the same fate.

This can be seen here:

"> Youtube Rope Video

The player also has a weapon that shoots little bullets "black holes" that pull everything to them (ok, this isn't really anything special, i think this times it actually exists in every second game) and after a short period they explode and push everything away. These little bullets are attracted by your mouse so you can shoot them and then guide them directly to your opponent who will then have some of the objects around crush him. Although it may not be that creative, it is still really funny to do.

Our problem at the moment is that we are a bit in a lack of ideas. With our graphics and physics engine we are able to make a lot more than what we do at the moment. We don't really use the potential of the engine and we think that our game could be quite fun to play if we had some more game ideas.

We thought about creating a game mode, where one of the teams sat on a hill or in a house or something and had to defend it for a definite amount of time while the other team has to attack it.
Of course this is not something really special, but considering the possibilities of a physics engine you could for example take objects lying around and build yourself a bunker to make it harder for the other team to get in. I can imagine that to be pretty fun and we will definitely give it a try as soon as we have our network code running (I don't think we can make an AI so clever that it would be fun to play this game mode against it)

We also considered to do something completely different from a shooter. (additionally to the normal game mode)
We had the idea of some kind of a module-based vehicle. It would have a brain from which you could control it. Attached to the brain would be other modules, like engines, shields, energy providers, different turrets etc.
Each player could then build its own vehicle before the game and then fight other players with it.

But we have temporarily discarded this idea since we want to concentrate more on the original game "idea".

To cut a long story short:
If anyone here has any idea on what we could try to implement to make the game funnier, we would be really pleased if you'd share it with us :)

Just for a quick look on how the game looks:

"> Example video (ok this is a bit exaggerated, it doesn't always look like that :) )

If anyone is interested in playing it (or maybe even looking at the source code, it is open source):

You can download it from
RohXels Google Code page

RohXels Blog (in german):
RohXels gameblog

Thanks in advance, (and excuse my English, I'm German)

Tehforsch

[Edited by - Tehforsch on June 22, 2010 4:41:29 PM]

Have you looked at Liero and/or some of it's clones/remakes? For example, Gusanos may give some inspiration.

I actually remember having played Gusanos before, but that was long ago. I'm gonna have a look at it, thank you :)

Tehforsch

Something I always missed in the original Liero was cooperative mission-style gameplay.

Another Liero clone you should look at is Liero-AI (aka LieroSDL). That project got WAY to little attention by the way. One of the most interesting features of that project is water/liquids. Probably a bitch to implement, but could offer some seriously cool gameplay if you can pull it off.