Under Fire

by

WASD - Move

Mouse - Aim

Shift - Sprint

Kill all the monsters to beat the level.

Inspired by this game: Bullet Fire - https://lagged.com/play/1807/

I was browsing the internet when I found this GEM: Bullet Fire. I quickly realized... "I can whip up some trash like this" So I did. In three days I made this game. It was a good quick start, and I'm planning on making Under Fire 2 with better looking assets, and some simple upgrades, like adding a choice of different crosshairs, improving enemy AI, adding simple achievements, etc.


Basically I was going for that feeling you get when you play one of those shitty games off those 1000 Games! disc. I used to play those really REALLY bad games with an indescribable feeling of cheesy entertainment. I guess I just always looked at those games and was like, dude, I could totally do that. But this time I actually did.


If you'd like to support further development, you can download the Windows version on itch.io for a measly $2. I'd love to devote much more time to creating my own gems that inspire others one day to do the same.


https://invadetech.itch.io/under-fire


I'll be making other types of games for you guys soon. Actual feedback on what parts were fun and what things you would change or like to see included in later releases would really help and be appreciated.

Roasts

MagicMilkman 4 years ago

UI Graphics Controls
Hey, nice game here!

So I want to say what needed improved first and then finish by saying what was done well.

- The first part I struggled with was the mouse controls. Sometimes when I moved the camera the view would start spazzing out of control and I would end up looking in the opposite direction. I also thought the mouse controls were too sensitive (and my mouse's sensitivity is turned down low).

- Another issue I had when playing the game was that I didn't clearly understand the objective. I did see what I thought was a counter for the amount of enemies left but I was unable to locate the last one. Maybe at the beginning have a text saying "KILL THEM ALL" in red with the font you are using to show that you need to kill all of the enemies in the map.

- The next issue I had with the game was that sometimes when I ran, I started flying off the ground, especially when I ran into a barrel. I can see this being used to get up on top of the walls to cheat around the map.

- The last major issue I noticed was that the gun can be shot as fast as you can click. What makes this a problem is I have a triple click button on my mouse and I can now essentially one-hit any enemy I see. This makes the game pretty easy to navigate through and does not add any challenge from the enemies.

Overall, I liked the game! The graphics were nostalgic, the music was a nice touch, and I enjoyed the secrets behind the building (I thought it was a bug at first). Keep up the good work!
Reply

InvadeTech 4 years ago

Thanks for the Roast! :D

I'm going to have to look into the mouse controls. I haven't had spazzing issues, but I have a mouse that has different DPI settings and I'm super used to it being at the highest setting. I had a friend test it out and she also said it was too fast for her even when I dropped the mouse DPI down.

The objective thing... yeah. Haha this game was a proof of concept for myself. I'm kinda tired of all my half finished projects and I found this game: https://lagged.com/en/g/bullet-fire. Then I saw that people are actually playing this game: https://lagged.com/watch/311. And I'm sitting at my computer screen like, WTF, I can make that. This project also allowed me to work on the fact that I'm a dreamer mixed with perfectionist, and that means that when I get grand schemes of games and projects that I want to do, I assign too many upgraded "cool" features and tweaks to make the best game I can. But then it just ends up in me piling on too much work for myself and I never finish because I'm not proud of my work. That being said, I had to cut out certain aspects that I wanted to fix, and attempt to just make a simple clone of the Bullet Fire game. Because in the end I knew that at the very least, I can always use it as a base for making newer better sequels.

The flying off the ground issue was one of those things that I was like, yeahhhh whatever, I gotta get this done. I'm not a big fan of using forces to move objects like a player around the level for that reason. But hearing it lets me know that it's more of a noticeable problem than I convinced myself of.

The gun shots also bothered me as well and I wanted to add bullet holes. In fact I wanted clip sizes, firing speed, and reloading. But those I had to cut out because now I'm piling on three new tasks. In fact I started the project with 5 different crosshairs and set them up to have their color change at run time and was planning on building some cash reward system into the game to unlock the crosshairs and their paint jobs. But I had to force myself to stop because this horrendous pattern of pile shit loads of work onto polishing off the project BEFORE I even had a working base game.

I'm glad you found the secret area. I didn't know what to put in it, so I kind of transformed it into a museum. The girl in the secret area is actually https://www.instagram.com/invader_min/. She has her own company called Galaxy Invaders and I've already developed two mobile games for her, a Brick Break that reveals gallery images every level you beat, and a flappy bird clone called Tappy Ship where you tap a space ship instead of a bird. In Tappy Ship, every two points you get unlocks a new image in the gallery and every 10 points unlocks a new playable space ship up to 10 additional ships not counting the one you start with. Hence the "Invade Tech Software" ..... see the theme? She's just invading everything.... anyway, so I felt like she's deeply rooted in the history of the company and how she's attempting to branch off her modeling to incorporate a video game company as well.
Reply

Seamus_M 4 years ago

Mechanics Controls
The biggest issue is definitely the mouse sensitivity, it being way too high. I would definitely put in an adjustable setting since people tend to have varying preferences for that sort of thing on these games.
Also the enemies rarely get to actually shoot at the player since their startup is so long. In terms of difficulty when running through areas, trying to shoot everything as soon as possible, it makes sense. However, I think it would be a lot better if there was some sort of indicator of the enemies about to shoot, some sort of sprite change. Even better (though you might not be going for this), you can have them fire projectiles which the player can dodge to avoid, adding a whole new layer of gameplay.
The player can also just run past most enemies, though I assume various later additions to the game may fix this issue.
A very minor issue would be that on the second floor of the building there's some boxes you can hide behind after immediately coming up, but the enemies can shoot through them anyway.
It seems to have a very good base structure of a game to it. It's got good potential.
Reply

InvadeTech 4 years ago

Good to know that mouse sensitivity is def a priority for the sequel. An options menu with settings like that would be great.

As for the enemies taking a long time to shoot, I was spending too much time on tweaking that aspect and wanted to implement a difficulty setting to adjust things like enemy fire rate. But honestly the entire enemy logic script needs to be adjusted as I created a quick one from scratch that works off detecting OnEnterTrigger events, waiting to fire, then firing. This was difficult to adjust later to level objects causing severe blind spots in the enemies hence why some of them can shoot you behind cover. For the second game the first priority I made when I uploaded this was to upgrade the enemy AI. Using a TriggerEnter to activate a search for the player using Raycasts and if the enemy can actually "see" the player then attack.

I definitely considered using fireballs and moving projectiles, but I had to move forward with the original idea of cloning the inspiration game so that I could get a somewhat finished project out. Then like you said, make a sequel on top of the "good base structure" with control and player experience as the most important fixes. So I was thinking of having a Boss in the second game that shot moving projectiles like that to keep things fresh.

This game was a huge proof of concept challenge for myself and I'm loving the feedback. It's honestly giving me so much motivation to press forward and actually make some great games.
Reply

Seamus_M 4 years ago

When I posted my thing, I was expecting to get like, two reviews by now, but apparently it's a lot more active which is great. I'm really loving this site.
I would suggest against using on trigger enter at all for the enemy shots and just exclusively use ray casting.
I'm not sure if you have this in already, but another thing you can do is instead of having individual enemies handling shots, you can have a queue of enemies who have the player with shooting visibility that the game will cycle through at a faster rate the more the contents of the queue. That way you don't get overwhelmed by masses of enemies, but then individual enemies are still fairly deadly. Basically, the fire rate of each individual enemy decreases with a higher number of total visible enemies, but the overall rate at which the player is being fired at increases with more enemies.
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InvadeTech 4 years ago

Just released a new game! Check it out and roast it!
https://roastmygame.com/game/retro-rage
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Ghazia 4 years ago

Played it for like a couple of minutes and man I enjoyed. Graphics were good, especially the menu, props for that. Gameplay was nice beside the thing I don't know what is was but my mouse flicked automatically to a certain direction. Then there were some minor issues which people before me mentioned very beautifully. Would love to see more of these from you, Good Luck.
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InvadeTech 4 years ago

Just released a new game! Check it out and roast it!
https://roastmygame.com/game/retro-rage
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