My unfinished shooter (running slow on web)

[Scarybug]

I have this fire elemental character from my webcomic (http://www.piratejesus.com/nerdcore) that I've put in some animations, and now I'm putting him in his own web game.

The idea is pretty simple. Two types of "demons" come in from the right and you shoot fireballs at them. W.A.S.D. keys move Burnie (the fire elemental), and the mouse moves the crosshair. Hold down on the mouse to charge up a fireball and release to throw it towards the crosshair.

Throwing fireballs costs "mana" (the red bar), getting hit costs "life" (the yellow bar). Charging up a big fireball that can go through several demons is more cost-effective than throwing little fireballs at each one. Especially since demons drop "mana" if you hit more than one with the same fireball. Demons also burn when they are hit. If they touch another demon while burning, that demon will burn up too. Chain-reacting demons drop "life" for you to pick up. You can get some awesome chain reactions near the end of the time limit.

The twist is that you are trying to stay alive while preventing the bat-like "mailer-daemons" from getting to the left edge of the screen. If one gets past you, it causes a huge boss-demon to come and attack you.

The boss battle is still a little buggy, but it is possible to kill it. You have to aim for the eye (duh)

Anyway, here's the game.

http://www.piratejesus.com/nerdcore/data/game/

Let me know what you think. My main concern is that it runs really slow on some computers. Any ideas of how to improve speed? The animations run at 31 fps. I could probably reduce that to 12. Any other suggestions would be awesome.

Thanks!

[chrisclick]

sweet! Didn't run slow here... its very smooth

[simplistik]

lol i killed the boss in one shot :lol: anywho... the other thing is when your "mana" gets low and you try to shoot more fireballs it sucks your life away... which kinda sucks since your mana doesn't seem to replinish.

[Scarybug]

You can recharge your mana by killing multiple demons with one large fireball. You kind of have to line up two or three demons, then charge a big fireball and send it through all of them. The big fireballs shrink when they hit a demon, but they don't dissappear. The second demon you hit will drop a blue ball worth 50 mana, and the third will drop a bigger one worth 100, etc. Also, if you get far enough in the game to where there are lots of demons on screen, you can create huge chain reactions that will get your life up so high that you never have to worry about running out of mana. (since burnie is made of living mana, he can convert part of his life into mana. He gets 100 mana for every 50 life he sacrifices this way)

I was thinking of letting you recharge mana by hitting the spacebar. Which would leave you more vulnerable and unable to move at the same time.

[DDD]

thats a pretty nice game.......not much to crit outside of what has been said...I like the spacebar idea.

[haam]

i think your vector graphics are great. way better than some first games i've seen for sure. maybe you could add a scrolling background for more texture?

[Scarybug]

So it's not running slow for everyone else? It looks like maybe the event handlers for the mouse presses and keypresses don't fire as often on the web version as they do in my flash player. The demons move at the correct speed, but Burnie is really slow and the fireballs are too hard to charge.

I had a 2 layer scrolling starscape, but I took it out to see if it would help the speed issue.

[cj2a]

Cool game...not running slowly at all on mine. Good work!