Poodle Ace in Cyberspace



The other day I answered a question about making a psuedo-3D shooter in GameMaker. I probably went way too in-depth, but that was only because I found it pretty interesting to think about. So interesting, I made a simple little project to demonstrate what I wrote. Then I spent another day with that project and I think this might become a real release. It's about a dog who hacks computers with his VR cybership and needs to pull off one last big score before retiring...
 
Different enemies and bullet parries. Hoplites have shields that protect them from all damage until they're stunned by a reflected bullet.


Poodle Ace isn't an anthropomorphic dog or anything. He can't stand or even talk. It's pretty weird that he's so good at hacking, but nobody seems to want to make a big deal out of it.
 

Spam1985

Member
Really impressive what people can knock up in a handful of days! Maybe you could stretch some sprites to give the "walls" a more fake 3d effect? I don't really have much to add because I don't have any experience in this genre but keep up the good work!
 
dogportrait1.gif

For a while, I'd abandoned this game. After implementing a few different enemies, I decided it was sorta fun, but not really enough to power a whole game by itself, even with the player earning money and buying upgrades. Then, about two months ago, I took the pseudo-3D shooter concept, rewrote all the code and physics, and twisted it up with a racing game - it won me a couple thousand dollars and quickly got nearly a quarter of a million plays.

Now, a huge portion of those plays are undoubtedly because I had the flashiest, most obnoxious GIF for my cover image (a last-minute improvisation after the beautiful movie-poster style watercolor a dear friend hand painted was in the wrong dimensions, portrait instead of landscape), but there were plenty of other obnoxious GIFs that didn't get nearly the same amount of attention. People are clearly connecting with it: players are getting higher scores than I thought possible, even before GXC highlighted it as a weekly challenge. And quite frankly, it's a blast to play - it would be foolish not to expand it further.

So, Turbo Jetrunner will live on, in the form of a hacking dog, blasting down corpo daemons and racing to the core data, q-drifting past firewalls! I don't have much to show at this point - the above screenshots are from a version that's being discarded, and the jam code is being rewritten from scratch. This post is mostly a desperate bid to keep myself honest about it. Expect updates soon!
 
(this is an animation, but it seems you need to click through to see it)

Stuff's coming along. The road system has been completely rewritten - besides Turbo Jetrunner using the ugliest, most tangled spaghetti jam code I've ever written, the roads themselves were full of bugs I disguised by having the roads continuously move at a very fast speed. It's all nice and pretty and easy to work with now. The shooting mode is also implemented, but I'm not showing that off quite yet. Next step is a basic level loop - shooting down a small boss, which drops the mainframe firewalls, at which point the game switches to bike mode and the player needs to race into the core before time runs out.

I'm also finally on Twitter, so you should follow me there!
 
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