I'd like to introduce ICE, an old-school vertical shoot-em-up
I've been working with a few friends in my university, which has just seen its first playable
release (ICE 0.1).
ICE gameplay is probably closest to games like Tyrian or Raptor: Call of the Shadows,
however, many things are still missing (boss logic, ship upgrading). In future,
ship upgrades should work in an RPG style similar to Wesnoth
(i.e. instead of "make weapon stronger" you'd have "upgrade weapon A to weapon AA or weapon AB").
We're trying to make sure everything in the game is as moddable as possible;
you can add new ships, weapons, levels, campaigns and so on. Right now there are no editors
so it's all text file editing; we're using YAML as it's readable. ICE also has extensive
modding documentation.
All graphics are in a simple vector format (basically, just many colored, transparent lines).
Right now there's no editor for this so we've been making graphics with a grid paper and
text editor
. (I'm not sure if a convertor from SVG would be a good idea as everything our formatsupports are lines; and full SVG itself is way too complex (at least for now)).
ICE is written in the D programming language (a language that's higher level and cleaner
than C++, but still compiles directly to native
code and still allows low-level stuff like manual memory management, inline assembler, SIMD intrinsics and so on).
ICE 0.1 has a short 4-level campaign, ranging from very easy to rather hard.
Unfortunately, ICE runs rather slowly on slower computers (e.g. on my
Athlon64 3200+ it sometimes lags). This is mainly due to an overengineered graphics
subsystem - which is currently being rewritten as a part of my bachelor thesis.
ICE has a custom profiling tool inspired by Telemetry (the tool Valve used to optimize
Source on Linux); basically it profiles individual frames allowing to concentrate on
the slowest frames, and what made those frames slowest; which is something
a normal profiler can't do. If you want to help optimize ICE
(and especially if you have a slow computer), information on how
to generate profiling dumps is found in the release announcement
ICE currently runs on Linux and Windows. It should also work on Mac OS X, but I don't have access to a
Mac to test it. Also, it requires OpenGL 2.1 at the moment.
Its source is released under the Boost Software License.
The game uses music by Osmic, FoxSynergy and Alexandr Zhelanov found on OpenGameArt.
Links:
Website
Forums
GitHub (source)
Download ICE 0.1
Screenshots:
