Speed over a neon city in a never-ending dogfight!
Super Phoenix throws you into any one of a selection of ships with various weapons and flight characteristics, then launches you into combat alongside your allies in similar random ships, fighting an enemy force with the same set of random ships. The battle continues forever until you run out of lives or your hands fall off. It’s a pretty fast paced and difficult game.
Your ship can rotate left and right, and fly forwards, backwards, left and right relative to the direction you’re facing in. There are separate fire buttons for the two weapons attached to each ship. Enemies have quite complex AI which allows them to flank you and run away if in danger, among other things. It can be pretty difficult to outmanoeuvre them while also getting a chance to shoot back!
This game has its origins as far back as a little two player gamelet I made on the Amiga. It was made using AMOS 3D, but actually used it for 2D rendering as it was a quick way to get smoothly rotating polygon shapes. I was very interested in simple rotating spaceship games like Space Wars and Asteroids at the time.
In 2000, I got my first Mac and started work on Super Phoenix, extrapolating the Amiga version into a 3D world of high tech tower blocks. Everything was made out of collections of textured quads, including the spaceships, because I didn’t want to deal with loading model formats at the time! This helped it to be pretty speedy on computers of the day.
Status
I’ve rebuilt it from scratch in Unity using the original graphics and ship definitions. It has the scrolling, wraparound world, one kind of functioning spaceship and two weapons, and random city generation. There is some rudimentary AI in there to fight against, but this is the next hurdle to overcome. I want to get close to the feel of the original game, and that has required a fair amount of reverse engineering of my old C++ source code!
This is probably the simplest of my projects and I’d like to at least replicate what I had in the old version, then put a build up here for people to try.