OpenFire game: top-down shooter, bullet hell

[eugeneloza]

Uploaded new release (better AI, now it's wild hard!). Updated video.

Actually implementing a hot-seat multiplayer in your game would not be that hard. All you would have to do is add new player bot and bind its controls to different keys or controller than your original player bot uses. And that is all.

Well, at the moment I've already have 2 sets of keys assigned: up-down-left-right for movement, WASD for firing. In case of splitting the keyboard for two players I'll have to use <WASD>+<TFGH> for one player and <IJKL>(maybe <)PL;'> )+<cursor> for another... seems very short on physical space at the keyboard
The only trick is that I've already implemented mouse movement control (it's not as convenient as keyboard, but it's a step towards Android). That could release one quad of keys and then one player with <WASD>+<IJKL> and another <cursor>+<mouse> could do the job.

I must admit that I haven't tried your game yet. Just watched the videos. I will probably try it out this weekend.

The voice isn't in game. Only in video in this post. Hovewer, the files are ready and to use it you need just to uncomment 3 lines of code and recompile. I think I'll make this as an option soon (or remove it for good).

Have you ever considered of using a semi-programmatically made music?

Adaptive (or interactive) music is very powerful. Yes.
But the music in-game is the one composed by Gundatsch@opengameart.org and it is 'as is' under CC-BY license. And it has only one vertical-sync pair of tracks.
So there are 2 problems: I don't have the appropriate "vertical-reorchestrated" music and I don't know how to change that realtime in the Castle Game Engine yet. I just load the music file, assign it high priority and play.
I am an amateur musician myself, but it usually takes ~7 hours for me to compose a track. E.g. 10 tracks would take me to 70 hours of work. Moreover, my skill is much less than that of an experienced musician, so the result would look rather petty compared to e.g. Gundatsch's tracks - first of all from soundmastering point of view. And I have absolutely zero experience in composing music for games (I've written ~300 relatively simple accompaniments for our singing group). I'll definitely have to do it for my Project Helena and Decoherence games, but that'll be later.

At this point I'm using the simplest approach to adaptive music - I just calculate EnemyPower (each bot type "worth" something) and selects next track based on this value (music context varying in easy-normal-hard-boss). However, the next track might come in 5 more minutes I'll need to understand how TMusicPlayer works for at least to adjust volume or cross-fade them.

P.S. There is a small problem with the game name, as OpenFire already exists as a jabber client. I've been advised GridFire, but it's also exists as Crossfire-clone WildFire? FireMania? Any other ideas?

P.P.S. I've found a very strange bug. The game runs slower on Linux and slows down on frameskip. Why I sync all actions to SysUtils.now timer... it should work as expected dependlessly FPS and OS... (FIXED)