Black Golem

It's time to bring some interesting stuff to this website. Therefore I want to introduce my current project to you. It's called 'Air Task' (just a working title, further abbreviated as AT) and it's a 2D shoot em up like Ikaruga or Raiden. I don't want to enter the highly competitive market of well designed, thrilling and graphically polished shooters. So I have to add some fresh stuff to AT to make it worth playing:

Tradable equipment

Many shooters share the 'equip on the fly' game mechanic. You start with an underpowered ship and advance it by collecting floating power-ups dropped by blown up enemies. AT separates this mechanic from the fast-paced flight and makes it something more strategical. Before starting a mission you can visit the shop, buy new equipment and prepare your fighter for the next challenge. There may be missions where only one specific weapon/shield/gadget/bomb makes the difference between success and failure.

Sidequests

Sidequests are simply missions which are optionally playable. You can make some extra money by taking these challenges and meet the next level boss armed with the best rocket launcher available for cash.

Secrets

Each person has its secrets. Games have them to. Searching for hidden areas and scarce stuff is just a compelling thing. I hope that I can provide some really enjoyable stuff here.

Generators

I'm not sure if this is the right place/time to mention them but I will tell you:
There are generators which take some parameters like difficulty or location and create a unique mission out of a base of conditions and templates. The same concept can be used for ships or equipment.
I don't know if this idea works well with a game like this. It's mainly a trick to save some time for mission design which can be spent better on things like feature testing or balancing. But it promises some features worth testing. Here are only a few which popped up in my mind while writing these words:

• generate as many missions as you please - play an epic story or a short shoot-out during a break
• generate never seen enemies and bosses
• decide in which type of world you want to play

That's all for now. I'm sorry for having no screenshots to show at the moment. There is some broken code which I have to fix first. So stay tuned for some alpha version screenshots showing ugly MS-Paint-drawn coder art :)

Cheers!
Thomas