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Llamasoft have released Space Giraffe on Xbox 360 Live Arcade
A PC version of Space Giraffe is expected to follow at a later date.
All content on these Space Giraffe pages is copyright Llamasoft.
Here's an overview by Jeff Minter of the game:
| Evolution of the Space Giraffe SG is really starting to take shape nicely now. I'm working on the bits that will give the game its own character; although some people have looked at the early media and declared "Oh, it's just a remake of Tempest!" they are actually pretty wrong. It does take place on a T2K/T3K-style surface, it's true, but that is because as I always intended it to be a sequel to my own stuff in the old T2K/T3K games, so it does start from that familiar ground. The play is the thing, though, and for something to be "Tempest" requires that it follows a particular set of rules and objectives. T2K and T3K stuck pretty much to that basic ruleset, extending it with powerups and such but basically adhering to the rules and goals of the Theurer original. In Giraffe I've deliberately decided to toss those rules out the window, since I want Giraffe to be its own thing, and not beholden to the rules that make Tempest Tempesty. For one thing, the giraffe isn't like the Claw. It has legs and can stand bestriding several lanes of the surface; and so that is figured into the gameplay, and some of the skill in the game comes from how you deploy your giraffe. In Tempest your primary objective is simply to stay alive until the next level, and whereas of course you want to do that in Giraffe too, we also want to have some provision for a skilful player to play in a way so as to maximise their bonus score (and, hopefully, the overall pulchritude of the level) through strategic play. I've derived a nice mechanism for that which I'm testing now and which seems to work really well. Enemies appear on the surface and fire up towards you - like in any bottom-shooter. However, if you shoot an enemy, a very brief repulsive force is generated on the surface that will slow down any bullets fired at you. If you keep shooting things without pause then you can keep this repulsive force active for long enough that you can actually turn enemy bullets around and force them to fly away from you - so already you can use that as a means of defence. But if you keep the force active even longer, you can push enemy shots right off the back edge of the surface and away into free space. And if you play well enough, then by the time the level ends, you could have a whole squadron of enemy shots in far distant space that you pushed out there by playing skilfully enough to keep the repulsive force going. And all those bullets can swarm harmlessly past you during the transition to the stargate, exploding harmlessly and colourfully against the giraffe as you pass them and yielding a nice end-of-level bonus. Nice }:-). Enemies on the top edge of the surface are dealt with differently too. While you have the repulsive force, you can actually bull your way through stuff on the rim, knocking it flying off the surface. And bulling an enemy off yields another few moments of force, so if you're bold and time it right you can bull your way through a whole cluster of baddies at the top. And so the focus of the game, and the way it plays and feels, is quite different from Tempest, although the environments and basic mechanic are, I hope, similar enough so that people coming from a background of T2K/T3K will feel at home when they first start playing SG. I'll make the first few levels nice and clear and a bit of a tutorial in themselves so that people can get the idea of how the new stuff works just by playing through the early levels. And later enemies and hazards will be designed to fit around this new style of play rather than the old Tempest style. Hopefully this should yield a game which is in the end acceptable to those who really really want a T2K-style shooter (in that the environment and basic mechanics are those of a surface-based shooter which takes T2K/T3K as its starting point) and those who would like something that isn't just Tempest remade again (and who will hopefully be happy with the new mechanics and scoring objectives and different enemy types that come in based around the new stuff as the game progresses). I'm also really starting to just enjoy playing the levels because they are fun }:-). It's always a good sign when you begin getting addicted to your own game even though you see it and play it for most of the day every day. I always figure if I can finish up a project and still be playing it for fun when I'm done then I've done it right }:-). So yeah, it's going well, and it's nice to feel Giraffe asserting its own character now that the environment is all sorted and I can work mainly on gameplay. And it's looking really, really lovely inside Neon too. Each level is a visual beauty in its own right. Proper happy with the style. }:-) |
More news on Space Giraffe can be found here:
http://stinkygoat.livejournal.com/
or here: http://www.yakyak.org/
All content on these Space Giraffe pages is copyright Llamasoft.
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