ZEROCRON - Amiga inspired Shmup

[T.R.Schmidt]

I finally finished developing my heavily Amiga-inspired shoot em up and published it to Steam (Windows only, no Amiga Version, sorry ).

It´s mostly inspired by the fabulous Transplant but surely has some influences from Xenon 2, Z-Out, Turrican, Battle Squadron, Asteroids, Deluxe Galaga/Warblade and others.

I polished it for ten years now and I think it plays pretty well and unique, like a modern Euroshmup.

BTW: Does anyone know who the developer of Transplant really was? He is noted as "Jumping Jack Flash" but I wasn´t able to find further clues or other games, I even looked in the TFMX-Files...

More Info and Trailer here:
https://nemmelheim.de/trsgames/

[Muzkat]

Looks cool. Well done!

[T.R.Schmidt]

Thanks a lot

[Mr_Horizon]

I liked Transplant a lot, and you're right the look seems similar. Good luck with your sales!

There was no Steam link though - allow me: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1964580/ZEROCRON/

[T.R.Schmidt]

Thanks!

At first I even tried at first to imitate the rotating view of Transplant, but with so much more stuff going on it was much too stressfull for my eyes and slows down the whole gameplay.

[gimbal]

4 bucks, that's a steal. 10 years of development though!? That's some dedication! Would like to read a dev diary on that one.

[T.R.Schmidt]

Yeah, was not easy to keep up the motivation, especially because the game is so special that there might be nearly no audience for it.

If I´ll ever do a project of this size (which also sounds absurd because it´s only a small shmup...) again I guess I won´t do it all alone again.

Many things took ridiculous amount of time, mostly stuff no one sees like balancing and how everything feels. But also how to compose a bit of music myself or seemingly basic stuff like controls, easy to do but hard to get feel good. Or tweaking the sounds like the asteroid-split sound a million times until it was statisfingly crunchy, or adding doppler-effects if you fly by...

Or performance-stuff, I guess I´ve rewritten the background starfield 5 times until it ran nice, looked like I wanted and did not distract from enemies or bullets too much.

And many stuff I tried and scrapped like changing all pixeled enemies to 3d-rotating-fotos like the asteroids.

[gimbal]

A game with a backstory behind it. Somehow those are the most fun to play. Stardew Valley, Factorio, Prison Architect, even Nuclear Throne. They all had a rich development history and it is what pulls people in. It also shines through in the game itself because they are all games with a tremendous degree of heart, polish and/or a high level of addictiveness.

[TCD]

Yep, looks pretty Super Stardust-y Put it on my wishlist. Well done

Controls and balancing is actually what makes or breaks a game for me. Often enough something that looks cool in a video can be utterly frustrating or boring to play, so thank you for putting effort into those things.