Beta Beam Down Drone - A Sci-Fi Action Platformer

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Shadow Gamer

Guest


Hello! I'm the sole full-time developer of Beam Down Drone, an Sci-Fi Action Platformer about shooting aliens and sarcastic talking trash cans. The game has been in development for a year now, and we hope to release soon - this July. (If the stars align) As I have the art capacity of a 6 year old and aesthetic sense of a dog, I hired DESIX Studios to produce the art assets, asked OTheB to compose a few tracks, and requested Mercerenies to do the voice acting. Other contributors have been Kepons and Falk Lore for advice and assets, and GMWolf for code help.

As mentioned before, I have zero artistic talent, so any comments or critique are appreciated.​


Trailer!

Description:
Beam Down Drone is a Action Combat Platformer pitting a drone against hordes of monsters and bosses - just mere pebbles in its ceaseless drive to recover it's crashed mothership. With an bolstering arsenal of weapons, powers, and abilities to decimate the blotches in it's path, only time will tell when the drone is reunited with it's home…

If it dares face the horrors ahead.

Story:

A ship crashes on an alien planet, partially breaking up in the atmosphere. A recovery drone is deployed during ash as a last hope for salvation - on activation, both the pod and it immediately understand what they have to do. No matter what gets in it's way.

Too bad a few other things were damaged in the crash...
yoU tHiNk








Screenshots: (Links due to image cap)


Links to places. We post regularly on Twitter. On our website you can sign up for the Beta/contribute to the project.
Website | Twitter | IndieDB | Youtube


Thanks for checking out Beam Down Drone! It is unlikely a demo will be available since we are so close to release, however, signup information is on the website if you'd like to apply for the Beta.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
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JealousOfCrows

Guest
The pixel art is good. The game looks fun, but without being to play it, it is hard to tell. The main issue I am having is the lack of a texture on your foreground tiles. It makes the game look really bad and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the background art. Please apply a texture, the plain old brown will hurt your game. Check out opengame art for some or if you use photoshop or gimp you coudl easily mess aroudn and create a random brown texture and then make it tileable. Other than that, good stuff!
 
S

Shadow Gamer

Guest
The pixel art is good. The game looks fun, but without being to play it, it is hard to tell. The main issue I am having is the lack of a texture on your foreground tiles. It makes the game look really bad and doesn't mesh well with the rest of the background art. Please apply a texture, the plain old brown will hurt your game. Check out opengame art for some or if you use photoshop or gimp you coudl easily mess aroudn and create a random brown texture and then make it tileable. Other than that, good stuff!
Thanks for the feedback! I've been trying, haven't been able to find any solutions so far. I'll keep at it.
 
T

TheUltimate

Guest
Thanks for the feedback! I've been trying, haven't been able to find any solutions so far. I'll keep at it.
Two or three small tiles sprinkled here and there can break up the flat brown. Here's a quick edit of one of your screenshots as an example. The rest of the graphics look good!


IMO, the story and description are short enough that they don’t need spoilers. The screenshots could also be sized down about halfway. They're intuitive enough that I can understand them without it taking up half the screen.

Have you considered making an Imgur album of the extra screenshots? You can store them all in one link and add descriptions to the images.
 
S

Shadow Gamer

Guest
Two or three small tiles sprinkled here and there can break up the flat brown. Here's a quick edit of one of your screenshots as an example. The rest of the graphics look good!


IMO, the story and description are short enough that they don’t need spoilers. The screenshots could also be sized down about halfway. They're intuitive enough that I can understand them without it taking up half the screen.

Have you considered making an Imgur album of the extra screenshots? You can store them all in one link and add descriptions to the images.
Okay, I'll un-spoiler them. Yes, I'll look into the imgur album, it sounds pretty interesting.

I'm debating between that approach and making a fulltile-texture (http://pixeljoint.com/files/icons/grasstile1doubleres.png), but I'm not sure which looks better.
 
S

Shadow Gamer

Guest
Bump!

BDD releases on the 24th, just giving everyone a heads up! Some screenshots from the two-week stretch of development. Dirt variations are generated using an algorithm. Big images and no spoilers because why not.




 
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FROGANUS

Guest
Cool graphics for characters and textures. That dark brown and the bottom side of the dirt tiles still looks kinda unfinished..
From the video, I think the level design looks somewhat flat? I'd consider doing some more dynamic terrain, like some tall summits, deep tunnel systems, maybe some pits to die in..
It might help to do rough overall sketches for levels. It doesn't take much art skill, and its just a practical way to organize overall where things are going to be.
 
S

Shadow Gamer

Guest
Cool graphics for characters and textures. That dark brown and the bottom side of the dirt tiles still looks kinda unfinished..
From the video, I think the level design looks somewhat flat? I'd consider doing some more dynamic terrain, like some tall summits, deep tunnel systems, maybe some pits to die in..
It might help to do rough overall sketches for levels. It doesn't take much art skill, and its just a practical way to organize overall where things are going to be.
Thanks for the feedback - however, we release in three days, and all level design is done. I'll definitely keep that in mind, though, I certainly should have done that for a project such as this.
 
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FROGANUS

Guest
Oh werd.. I didn't notice it was this soon to release, so I don't mean to give nitpicky feedback, lol.

I guess now we'll just have to check it out- Congrats on release!
 
F

FROGANUS

Guest
So I played it thru and its pretty cool. The artwork, sounds, music, come together nicely. It runs VERY efficiently even on my 💩💩💩💩 laptop, so good job on your coding and resource management. Clean pixel resolution even with some rotating sprites, which I often see done less-tastefully in GM. The gameplay has an arcade feel, so a little more of a run n gun than an adventure game. The voice guide is a nice touch, tho he doesn't really help guide? (emotional support).. I couldn't figure out just what the objective is? I guess when they "immediately understand what they have to do" you mean they have to kill all monsters and find the ship? It would be helpful to have some kind of HUD to reassure the objective(s).

Some other bits/issues I found:
I can run directly through most enemies. I think better would be some kind of collisions/knockbacks going on for direct contact, so player can't just run thru.
The AI is also generally a little simplistic, like so often the enemy is just passive, and will predictably rush you once you are in front of them. It would be cool if they wandered around on their own more.
The combat gets a little frustrating around the ladder vines, I would in a few cases have to jump up a vine into enemies or try to shoot up to them, it was just sometimes awkward.

The bosses are my fav part. Did you play Terraria? The Eye of Cthulhu is basically one of your bosses which is cool. It'd be nice if the regular enemies were a little bossier, maybe for future reference I'd advise make every enemy capable of more unpredictable movement, requiring a more dynamic strategy and then you have the bulk of the game becoming more interesting..

..anyways, Good job.
I'm going to try to beat it again, let you know if I think of anything else..
 
S

Shadow Gamer

Guest
Thank you for the feedback :) No, I don't play Terraria, but I've heard a lot of people reference that.
Voice AI is basically the mode in which the story is told, if that makes any sense.
I may look into adding in the passive moving AI and objective quest that says "find the teleporter" or something, those are pretty easy.

Anyway, thanks again for the feedback, and buying (I assume?) the game! I'm working on another project at the moment (hopefully better than this one) so I may not get to it soon.
 
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