M.A.R.S. - a random shooter

[MarsCoreTeam]

Hi there community!

This is Felix Lauer and Simon Schneegans and we are developing a little game called M.A.R.S. - a random shooter using sfml 2.0 in its current state.

M.A.R.S. is set up in a twodimensional galaxy, governed by the laws of gravity.
For further information feel free to visit www.marsshooter.org .

M.A.R.S. is OpenSource, so you can get it for free and modify things as you like.
We would appreciate your visit and some feedback concerning our game.

Best regards,
Felix

[Lupinius]

Looks fancy and plays nicely. Only thing I didn't like was the extreme acceleration. It's kinda annoying to control the ship. Was fun though
Is this a one person project or do you have a team?

[MarsCoreTeam]

Looks fancy and plays nicely. Only thing I didn't like was the extreme acceleration. It's kinda annoying to control the ship. Was fun though
Is this a one person project or do you have a team?

As most of the testers, you will get used to the controls, promised
At fact, there are two peoble working on M.A.R.S. and a few helpers giving feedback and stuff.

Regards,
Felix

[panithadrum]

This game is good stuff. Very well programmed and clean graphics. What are you planning for this game? And maybe new games?

[MarsCoreTeam]

This game is good stuff. Very well programmed and clean graphics. What are you planning for this game? And maybe new games?

Thanks. Nice to hear good words about it
What are we planning... of course we are going to finish it and there will be a teaser/trailer in the next weeks. M.A.R.S. in its final state will be published under the same license as it is now (GNU GPL v3 or higher), so nobody ever has to pay for it:)
Furthermore we will see how we can use sfml to provide a goot network mode, i think this game could be fun in LAN
New games are already in the backs of our heads. But we won't create a new one until M.A.R.S. is finished.

Best regards,
Felix

[WitchD0ctor]

That is one sexy GUI u have going on there, how did u do it?

[MarsCoreTeam]

Basically, each window is a quad, sourrounded by a quad on each side and in each corner with the neon-tube-texture on it.
All other widgets are non-textured, simply drawn with OpenGL commands.
We decided to design our own GUI, since M.A.R.S. is a small game and any GUI-library we looked at, was bigger than M.A.R.S. in total and that would have been a bit odd, wouldn't it?
All the textures are created with Blender and The Gimp.
Hopefully I answered your question sufficiently, if it's targeted more the internal code structure, feel free to download the sourcecode, and ask any further questions!

Greetings, Simon.

BTW: There is an EPIC WALLPAPER, made from a screenshot of the upcoming version 0.4!

[MarsCoreTeam]

We finished relase 0.4.0 tonight.
Many bugs were fixed and it includes a lot of new features.
Download it at http://mars-game.sourceforge.net/download.html

Best regards,
Felix

[MarsCoreTeam]

A new release is now available http://www.marsshooter.org !
We fixed some bugs and implemented a lot of new features.

Here are the most important ones:
A tutorial level, which probably helps getting used to M.A.R.S.
Language support (English and German so far).
New high resolution background images (important for wide screens).

A more detailed change log is posted at our homepage.

Please feel free to test the new version and to give as many feedback as possible!

Best regards,
Felix

[Svenstaro]

Just played it a little, nice game! I recommend you also provide libjpeg.so.62 though since my distro (Arch) comes with libjpeg 8 and other modern distros will as well.

I especially like the consistent graphical style you went for.

Is there any reason you chose premake? I haven't worked with it yet but from the looks of it, its features and purpose is mostly that of CMake. If you have used both, can you provide some insight why you went for premake?

I congratulate you on making the game and its assets GPL3. I think I might be snatching a few bits of it for my own projects soon (GPL3, of course).

Is there a reason you are not using a scripting language except for the build script?

You are using mixed CRLF line endings. Try to keep it to just LF so vim doesn't show weird symbols.

All in all good job, looking forward to any further development.

[MarsCoreTeam]

Just played it a little, nice game! I recommend you also provide libjpeg.so.62 though since my distro (Arch) comes with libjpeg 8 and other modern distros will as well.

I especially like the consistent graphical style you went for.

Is there any reason you chose premake? I haven't worked with it yet but from the looks of it, its features and purpose is mostly that of CMake. If you have used both, can you provide some insight why you went for premake?

I congratulate you on making the game and its assets GPL3. I think I might be snatching a few bits of it for my own projects soon (GPL3, of course).

Is there a reason you are not using a scripting language except for the build script?

You are using mixed CRLF line endings. Try to keep it to just LF so vim doesn't show weird symbols.

All in all good job, looking forward to any further development.

Thanks for your praise!

libjpeg.so.62 is a good point, I think we will provide it in further versions.

Our reason for choosing premake is its simpleness. CMake seemed quite complex when we started to concern about build scripts.
But we will try to switch to CMake in the future.

Feel free to use the code as you like

I don't understand your next point. What for we should use other script languages?

The mixing up of CRLF and LF comes from editing M.A.R.S. under both Windows and Unix. It's a bit tricky to have system independend text parsing.

Stay tuned
Best regards,
Felix

[Svenstaro]

I was just curious that you, unlike most modern games, you did your complete game in C++ without any scripting support. This isn't critique by any means and I currently not script my games as well but I thought all the cool kids today build a scriptable engine for their games.

[MarsCoreTeam]

I was just curious that you, unlike most modern games, you did your complete game in C++ without any scripting support. This isn't critique by any means and I currently not script my games as well but I thought all the cool kids today build a scriptable engine for their games.

agreed. But in our opinion, C++ is a lot more fun to use

Best regards,
Felix

[pencils]

awesome work guys! Only played the demo for a few minutes, but was blown away by the production quality. This game is really polished! Love the look and feel.

Can I suggest a possible feature, if you don't mind. I used to love Star Control melee mode, and that had a wrap around battle-field. It makes the game flow a bit smoother as you just appear on the other side!

Perhaps you could add that as an option?

max kudos!

[MarsCoreTeam]

awesome work guys! Only played the demo for a few minutes, but was blown away by the production quality. This game is really polished! Love the look and feel.

Can I suggest a possible feature, if you don't mind. I used to love Star Control melee mode, and that had a wrap around battle-field. It makes the game flow a bit smoother as you just appear on the other side!

Perhaps you could add that as an option?

max kudos!

Thanks for your good words

We already thought about that feature and came to the conclusion, that this option might destroy tactical aspects of the game (especially in SpaceBall).
Maybe we are going to add an option to turn wrap around on/off.

Best regards,
Felix