Welcome to Grafoon. Grafoon is an ( buzzword alert! ) ‘Arcade Style Puzzle Shooter‘ with a lot of classic elements like: Doors/Keys, Mines ( including chain reactions ), various walls with different behavior, laser barrier, nasty enemies and a lot more…
The main target is to pick up all Hobbels and bring them home to advance to the next map. Don’t touch the walls, they will destroy your ship. Touching enemies or enemy shots drain you ships energy. Collect green gems to increase your ships energy…
Here is a captured video showing the first tutorial map:
One more captured tutorial map showing how to use mines:
A video introducing moving walls and timed doors:
Here are some screen shots…
Title Screen
Game Map1
This is a screen shot showing the gameplay. The status line on the bottom of the screen is showing the following things ( left to right ): Ship Energy, Score, Hobbels out / Hobbels on board, number of Mines, number of red-green-blue keys.
Game Map2
Trapped Hobbels and a Warppoint…
This release includes 9 tutorial, 8 built in and 10 more ( quite easy ) maps in an external map set. Supporting external stored maps implies, that you can build and play your own Grafoon maps. If you consider building maps, drop me a line and I’ll explain how it works. I have tested this version in no$gba and on the R4 DS card.
Installation
Copy the ‘Grafoon.nds’ file somewhere to your memory card and the ‘user_maps’ directoy to the root of your card. If you DLDI patch the binary you can select a ‘map set’ from the main menu.
Controls
- pad left/right: rotate left/right
- A Button or pad up: thrust
- pad down: reverse thrust
- B Button: shoot
- X Button: drop mine
- right shoulder: scroll up
- left shoulder: scroll down
Download Grafoon ( Version 0.9 ): grafoon.zip
Some things I’ve planed for the near future:
- more map sets
- ship configuration ( gravity, speed, weapons etc. ) via config file
- growing NME
- better documentation
Comments and ideas are greatly appreciated !
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Looks very good. Just tried it. Gravity element is a must, for that “retro arcade” feeling
I would suggest maybe adding a “speed up” button. It’s a little bit annoying having to wait for the hobbles to reach the craft sometimes, if they have a long way to walk. Other than that, keep up the good work. Waiting for the 1.0 release with anticipation. Definitely a keeper.
The buttons seem a bit messed up, IMO it would be better if A was forward thrust B was reverse thrust R was shoot and L was drop mines and the harder to reach and less used scrolling done with Y and X. its a good game but as it is now the controls aren’t good enough to really be worth bothering with. im also surprised that after making this solid engine for the ds you aren’t planning to remake the best game of this type to ever come out “gravitation” that was released on a net yaroze demo disc a few years back
Custom control configuration is on my list for version 1.0. I tested various variation of controls an found the current one quite OK.
First I wanted to do an Oids like game. The gravity engine is already build in but I found the maps too hard to play with gravity enabled. But maybe this will be an option in the future
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All in all its an impressive game and it feels professionally made but i think it will be a lot better once you implement custom controls. i only mentioned gravitation because its by far the best game of this type ive ever played and this feels very similar to it the only different being that in gravitation your goal is to kill the other player in a unique spin on dogfighting made harder by the gravity element and more interesting by the various powerups that can be used to customize how you fly and attack. the smaller dpad on the ds lite makes it harder to reverse using the down arrow so divebombing enemies from above accurately is difficult without a lot of practice without reverse being assigned to a button.
looking forward to seeing the future releases of this
another thing, the ship shouldnt lose momentum, should it? being out in space with no atmosphere and everything.
Yes are right, from a ‘physical’ point of view it shouldn’t lose momentum but IMO it’s less fun and more difficult to fly around. Maybe I’ll include an option screen to tune all the ship parameter…
Rule #1 of making games:
Don’t let reality get in the way of fun.
Nice game! I can see why some people mention gravity… reminds me of Asteroids, but without the momentum. Perhaps a bit of momentum would balance the challenge and “naturalness”. Overall, very promising, thanks.
I have released Version 0.9. For details see the history.txt in the zip archive…
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