Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Announcing Ares:Dogfighter

My "very early space game demo" has transmogrified into a game!  Although still very early in development, there is now something to download and play.  It's called Ares: Dogfighter, and you take control of a spaceship and can fight enemy ships using lasers and missiles.

Here's a brief gameplay video:-


The game is uses the excellent JMonkeyEngine for the 3D, and lots of complicated Java code for the rest of it.  Getting the AI to fly realistically was a challenge; the standard response for a pilot, whether AI or human, is to try and point their ship at the enemy ship in order to shoot them.  However, this has a tendency to result in both ships flying around in circles until someone dies of boredom.  I've made the AI check for this, and if things aren't happening then the AI will react with some random evasive manoeuvres.

The game is free to download and there are versions for Windows and Linux.  Please let me know what you think!  (Or at least whether it works).