Small AA clone with focus on one-on-one combat

[keenPenguin]

Hi,

I've been working on an Armagetron clone as a hobby project (written from scratch). The game mechanics have some drastically different aspects (focus on one-on-one combat, some use of 3rd dimension, non-grinding based acceleration). I was hoping to provide a link to the game and hear your feedback how people feel about the mechanical alterations and if people enjoy the game. May I ask if the Armagetron/General section of the AA forums would be an appropriate to post this? I am particularly interested in AA players' opinions, which is why I refrain from posting to a general forum like tigsource.

[Z-Man]

It's fine, go right ahead.

[sinewav]

We would love to give you feedback. We love lightcycles. There is another player in this game named Durf who is also working on a Arma clone, but he hasn't released anything for testing yet. Can't wait to see your variation.

[Monkey]

I'll be honest and say that I really don't want to see yet another lightcycle game and I don't understand why you're doing this. If it were as a project for a course then yes, it would need to be written from scratch, however you state that you are doing it as a hobby. Why not contribute towards Arma instead? Arma has great potential.

By the way, what programming language do you intend to use for this?

[keenPenguin]

Hi,

I appreciate the positive feedback and I am preparing a relatively clean build to post here, which may take me a week. I am using Unity/C#.

Just a word why I am doing this. The reason I am not contributing to Arma is that I do not have much C++ experience.
I think TRON is a clean and beautiful game that should be presented in a fresh way to attract a new generation of players. I think this guy is trying to do the same (at a much more advanced stage than me), which I greatly respect. My approach lies in expanding the ruleset of AA, while trying to retain the beautiful balance of an AA game between panic and twitch reaction play and larger scale strategic thinking. It think my limited experience would make it difficult to do that in an existing codebase.

[aP|Nelg]

Hi,

I appreciate the positive feedback and I am preparing a relatively clean build to post here, which may take me a week. I am using Unity/C#.

Just a word why I am doing this. The reason I am not contributing to Arma is that I do not have much C++ experience.
I think TRON is a clean and beautiful game that should be presented in a fresh way to attract a new generation of players. I think this guy is trying to do the same (at a much more advanced stage than me), which I greatly respect. My approach lies in expanding the ruleset of AA, while trying to retain the beautiful balance of an AA game between panic and twitch reaction play and larger scale strategic thinking. It think my limited experience would make it difficult to do that in an existing codebase.

Are you posting the source code alongside or just the executable? (in case I wanted to compile it and not have to run it with WINE, assuming you're just going to compile it for windows and exclude linux and mac... and maybe I'd like to look at the source)

[Z-Man]

It's Unity, so it should be easy to just click the button and make a native Linux build. And, heh, if he does not go the extra mile and obfuscates his binaries, .NET decompiles pretty much back to the original source (minus comments and whitespace).

I like the way that steam thing implements turns. Smooth, but discrete. Quite brilliant. I'm less excited about the cheap particle effects and the focus on maze gameplay.

[sinewav]

Positron looks better than the cycles and grids in Tron 2.0. The Positron cycle even looks a little like an Arma cycle.

[keenPenguin]

Sorry for neglecting the thread in a while, life got in the way of game dev. I am however still interested in working on my little TRON clone. Here is an old gameplay video:
https://youtu.be/vjRI7P5cdik
In the meantime I have removed the curvy paths but the jumping still provides lots of fun!

[Z-Man]

Nice video. Sorry for the late approval, this somehow did not appear on the 'latest topics' list where they usually are.

Positron is still not out

[keenPenguin]

I have made an up to date gameplay video of my tron game. For the time being, I call it annihilaTRON. Please have a look and tell me what you think - there are quite a few expansions of the traditional AA mechanics, I hope you like it!

Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dICF07cif6I

[keenPenguin]

Here are some new resources from my little TRON game you may find interesting

Videos

• This video is a very good illustration of the gameplay, and
• this animated gif shows some more adventurous grid design.

Screenshots

[sinewav]

Looks like you successfully recreated LightBike 2! Good job, though I don't think I would consider this an "AA clone". It's almost exactly LightBike. And closer to GLTron than Armagetron. Still, it would be better to play LightBike on something other than the tiny screen of my phone.

Are you going to release it with a map editor? How many AI can it handle?

[aP|Nelg]

Yea, definitely not an Armagetron clone anymore, it probably was at one time though?
Also, funnily, the name of the game seems to be changing along with every post of the game.

[keenPenguin]

Thanks for your feedback guys! Glad to see some interest. Yes, you are probably right, in the current stage this game is most similar to Lightbike 2. I went back and played it on my Android. Its presentation is excellent, I love the arcade feel. But I have some gameplay gripes I must say. The AI plays... uninterestingly. It does not utilise jumps and the numerous boosts and features that LB2 has in a very impactful way. Another gripe is the level design. The grids appear a bit random and not very practical to play on. I will try to improve on these ideas (although I have not reached the completeness and polish of LB2 yet). And yeah, I haven't quite decided the name yet.

Are you going to release it with a map editor? How many AI can it handle?

The AI is a work in progress, more on that later. At the moment my maps are just matrices with values representing ground, hole and barrier. You can write your text files and the game will be able to read and play them. Here are some example grids (with matrix values represented as tiles):