hijong park
Member
Pod Guardian - Galaxy Rebel Force Part 2 is a multi-directional shooter and the sequel of my old game "Galaxy rebel force."
I like multi-directional shooters including Asteroids, Time pilot, Bosconian, and Sinistar. They allows to shoot anywhere I want, and there's no dead end, so They offer the complete freedom of movement.
And recently, I got a new personal favorite game called Archer mclean's Dropzone. It's a defender style shooter for C64 but offers slightly different gameplay to Defender, where you have to transport 8 pods to the base and protect them from planters. Putting pods one by one was surprisingly addictive and the challenge was very well balanced that It simply became one of my favorite horizontal shooter, Althrough I still consider Defender as the best.
So I got the idea of making a game similar to Dropzone, but in an asteroids-style field.
The objective is similar to dropzone. You have to transport 8 pods to the base and defeat all enemies to win.
But Since the playfield is different, I added several new ideas to make the concept suitable for top-down field.
First, Pods can't be destroyed by both the player and enemies, so you can only lose the pods when the enemy have put them into their base.
also, You can only carry 1 pod like dropzone, but shield can magnet the other pods. So you can carry several pods at once with a good use of shield.
Compared to Dropzone you can save the pods much quicker, but you can also lose them quicker.
In Dropzone, only the enemies who decided to go down and drop the android (an enemy that kills the pods) treat the pods, but in Pod Guardian Enemies can catch the pods anytime if they have reached to one of them. Also if you transported all pods, Enemies will approach to your base and take the pods. There will be no time to rest until all of these enemies are killed.
Since the game will be very fast-phased, I have improved the controls as well.
In Galaxy Rebel Force, Arrows rotated the ship and there was a thrust button to move. But I found it very stiff to control in a fast-phased game, So I increased the rotating speed and made the ship to move by simply pressing arrows. (Like Sinistar, or Bosconian.) I thought it would trade the preciser movements, but It works surprisingly well. It would feel much better to control with a controller, but unfortunately I don't have one.
Also, Galaxy rebel force had 3 main weapons to choose, But none of them was quite useful. So I decided to make one perfectly balanced main weapon in Pod Guardian. Instead, I'll add more various sub weapons.
The chargeshot had been removed as well. After making Galaxy Rebel Force I learned that Chargeshot is kinda useless in a fast-phased game where there's no time to stop shooting.
The current mode I'm making is an arcade mode, That plays like dropzone or Datastorm. (Dropzone clone for amiga)
When The arcade mode is done, I'm planning to make an adventure mode where you travel space and planets like Gravitar.