What is it???
'evo.war' is a top-down scrolling shooter(shoot 'em up) with an added twist(you may have guessed it already): your ship evolves. The game is set in space, you travel through a solar system(on-rails, though you can move around the screen) fighting off enemies until you reach a boss at the end. Upon killing the boss you can upgrade/tweak your ship to your liking and so on.
Evolves??? WHAT!
This game features no premade waves of enemies; Other than the ship's initial state(just a ship core), all enemy designs will be created as you play(unless you set it to use other designs). Each stage will feature any number of enemy species(say 5) and from each group, waves will be sent. Each of these waves will differ slightly from the group's original genome it belongs to(via mutation) so you won't face the same ship too often. After each round the enemy group's base genome will become the mutation that fared the best in the previous round, thus via natural selection the enemies will get harder.
These mutations do more than just change basic attributes like size, bullet damage, refire rate etc, but they also allow parts of the object to transform into different ones. For instance, the 'Basic Ship Core' is what all ships start off as being, this is a single part that does nothing other than allow you to move around and fire basic bullets, if this mutates it's possible for it to turn into a different core with links(joints) coming from it. These links allow new parts to grow onto the ship, which in turn can create links that spawn even more parts and so on. Eventually you're left with very unique ships that you can share with everyone.
[edit] Yeah, well you all know how you plan to make one game and you end up with something completely different? This is a great example!
PS: Tweaking a game to work well with evolving enemies is hard
Features:
- Ship mutation!
- Loading/saving of ships in ASCII format so you can share them easily
- Bullets, Laser beams, Missiles
- Movement through the solar system(map)
- Basic GUI + menu, game over screen etc
- Killing of enemys, having them respawn in waves etc
- Editing of your ship DNA(bit basic currently)
- Post processing(bloom + refraction)
- Ship scoring for both the player and enemy
- Have AI ships follow movement paths
- Explosions!!!
- Pew Pew!!!
