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Odynexus, a new Atari Lynx game!!!


LordKraken

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Hello everyone,

 

You may have heard of Odynexus during the last edition of Silly Venture (where it placed third), and today we are super happy to announce the release of a much more advanced version! The game is the work of Agradeneu and me, with music adapted from MOD artist Drozerix.

 

What is Odynexus?

Odynexus is a brand new shoot'em up for the Atari Lynx, featuring fantastic pixelart, huges bosses, swarm of terrific ennemies and frenetic arcade action!

"This is the 31st century. Help Odynexus, the legendary space warrior, in his journey back home, against the Electrogods and their Mechatitans!"


FMNzNk.gif
 

Why a shoot'em up?

We don't pretend to compete with the divine Zaku, but we felt we could propose a different, visceral and dynamic experience, with amazing hand-made pixel art and cool chiptune music. The demo released today is almost complete except for the weapon system.

5DvwGC.gif

 

So this is just a demo?
Yes, we are still creating new levels and enemies but we felt that releasing the demo would be a good way to get feedbacks and gauge interest for a full physical release. Our plan is to release the game in an original vintage box and cartridge later this fall. We will communicate in time about pre-order.

 

Where do I get the game?

The demo is available for free on our itch.io page: https://krakendev.itch.io/odynexus

Waiting for your feedbacks smile

 

Alex Hiza (LordKraken) and A. Lex (Agradeneu)

Edited by LordKraken
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1 hour ago, LordKraken said:

Opa-opa? Im too old I dont get it :)

too bad he played the SV version, Im a bit ashamed looking at it now ?

 

@SlidellMan Thx and all the creds goes to @agradeneu... ok I provided a "special" tech so that he could go crazy with his magic pixels :)

In German language "Opa" means Grandfather, so this is quite funny.

Opa-Opa is the ship of the 8 bit classic "Fantasy Zone".

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45 minutes ago, LordKraken said:

What do you mean exactly @laoo with smoother? We released the demo to get feedback that we could take into the final version, but you need to be more specific :)

I was referring to smoothness in terms of frames per second. I presume that the game renders around 12-15 fps which is IMHO just too low for a shooter to play comfortably. I think that 20 fps is bare minimum. This is just a game genere that needs to be dynamic.

 

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39 minutes ago, laoo said:

I was referring to smoothness in terms of frames per second. I presume that the game renders around 12-15 fps which is IMHO just too low for a shooter to play comfortably. I think that 20 fps is bare minimum. This is just a game genere that needs to be dynamic.

 

Are you playing on Handy? I would say it runs around 20 FPS on a real Lynx (no screen mod). Its better running than many commercial Lynx games. But yes, more FPS is definetely a thing to work on and there is still room for optimization.

Edited by agradeneu
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15 minutes ago, agradeneu said:

Are you playing on Handy? I would say it runs around 20 FPS on a real Lynx (no screen mod). Its better running than many commercial Lynx games. But yes, more FPS is better and there is still room for optimization.

I was playing on Lynx with McWill. 20 fps means 3 frame-skips. It might be 3 when there are hardly no enemies on the screen but to my eye it's 4 on average and 5 in hotter places. I've got quite good grabber and should there be a need, I could grab some playout with 60 fps and we could assert it with more certainty.

Edited by laoo
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Outstanding!

 

I remember enjoying the SV version, and this one is even better, congrats on the great work!

 

The game is very beautiful and very fun to play! It reminds me Gates of Zendocon (one of my favorite Lynx games!) but with more beautiful (and matching) artwork! :)

The game is challenging but not too much, so a perfect balance for an average gamer like me.

And I love the details and polish (the screen transition, the smoke when the ships dies, the cool music, etc.)

 

I'm quite impressed by the high number of things moving onscreen!

Is it coded in C or assembly?

 

I'm looking forward the next version!

 

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@laoo, you have pretty good eyes :) The game runs at 30fps when there are no enemies, and at 20fps the rest of the times. There are certains occasions where fps drops to 15 fps, I'm aware of that, but that's when many enemies are on screen and we need to run all collision tests between them. This is pretty nicely optimized but it's still a lot of math to run in the end (and I'm not using any collision buffer because I needz the RAM ^^). As far as I know most shoots on the Lynx have fewer and slower enemies. But yeah, we would love to be over 20 fps all the time.

 

@drludos thanks man! It's hard to imagine that we spent way more time working on the game since we release the first demo at SV than we did for the initial demo itself! And all that time went into polishing and optimization... And we're not even done ahah :) As for the code, it's 95% C, I just have a few routines in ASM. I'm not an ASM expert, but there is one or two critical functions I'd still like to convert to ASM, to see if I can get a couple of frames more that way.

Other than that, I spent a lot of time rewriting and refactoring the critical functions (collisions and scripting), something which is actually fun in C, not too fun (for me) in ASM :) 

 

For the record, the game is running 2 scripting engines in the background. One control the game experience, and the other one all the enemies, so while it was a bit long to develop it is now super easy to add new contents to the game :)

 

Edited by LordKraken
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Great work guys! ??? It looks and plays great!

Don't get too sucked into the fps arguments. ;) I understand that it's a source of pride for a skilled programmer to achieve high fps, still in my opinion there's so many other things in a game that's equally important. (Probably you guys already know my opinion about this topic :grin: )

I love that you do a bit of Lynx:y scaling effects and the "shadow of the colossus" vibe I get from this game.

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Glad you got that vibe Turbo, we're actually trying to create a slightly different kind of shoot, no alien here, just mechanical, greek inspired, gods :) We might add more story into the game. It's the 31st century Odyssey after all :) 

(Also there are definitely some influence from "Shin Mazinger" for those who know Go Nagai's cult manga)

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