Space Marines
Greetings Space Marine
Space Marines is a game made for the 7drl challenge. It's an experiment of squad mechanics without the fuss of controlling each unit one by one.
You control one space marine at a time, moving them with the keypad or arrow keys. You can change focus to any marine in the squad any time you want.
A marine can be put in 'overwatch' mode. Which means they will get a free shot at each enemy that moves within their line of sight. This is the primary method of attack and defence. It's important to position your marines to support each other, the more overwatch shots you get the more damage you do.
Be careful not to get into close combat. The enemies have deadly close range attacks.
Controls
- Keypad or arrow keys control the movement and direction of the active Space Marine. Marines can only move forward or turn.
- Hold shift while moving to strafe. Strafing takes twice as long as regular movement.
- Press the '<' and '>' keys to switch the active Space Marine.
- Press the 'o' key to enable/disable overwatch on the active space marine. The enemy can hear your gunshots so you may want to disable it to avoid detection.
- Press the space bar to enable the inspection cursor. Move the cursor with the keypad/arrow keys to get information about your surroundings.
Comments
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This is really great gameplay. I could recreate that using the LambdaHack engine of Allure of the Stars, almost exclusively by writing content definitions, but I'd need to extend the engine to include actor headings, which is also not easy to represent in pure ASCII setting and merge withi standard movement controls.
Also I'd need to gut out most of the explosive projectiles, because when it's so easy to harm yourself and your teammates, AI becomes hard to design and predict and what it does feels arbitrary. Generally I'd gut out most of the game and it'd result in probably better and surely easier to graps gameplay. Actually, let me just create a ticket to do that:
https://github.com/AllureOfTheStars/Allure/issues/112
Got obsessed with this game, so I made a shameless PICO-8 clone of it with some flavour of my own.
https://spoike.itch.io/rymdhulken
It keeps the overwatch and also adds a feature of letting the squaddies form a line, which speeds up the game a little bit. It is a playable demo as in a Work In Progress with some more features I want to add in it (hopefully without running out of tokens in PICO-8).
beautifully simple! nothing more to say about it! 10/10
I love the concept (I once made a very similar game myself), and the "Space Crusade" influence is immediately obvious. Implementing "squad mechanics without the fuss of controlling each unit one by one" is a tricky thing to achieve in a roguelike, because you do actually need to control each unit a fair amount of the time, or they get left behind.
If you're going to keep the standard roguelike one-tile-per-turn movement (instead of using action points like in X-Com etc), there really needs to be an option for squad members to automatically follow the current leader (squad members could still be explicitly ordered to hold their position). As it is, the game just feels a bit too slow and clunky to be much fun.
Apart from that, and a few minor niggles (eg. I like the individual map window for each squad member, but it should be centered in the direction they're facing, not directly on them), I think it seems like a solid game.
Wow, this is a gem. The atmosphere is spot on for a zenomorph/alien vs marines game. Moving the marines into position and strafing backwards to keep distance while the others shoot over your shoulder, or my first death: trapped in a room with low ammo and creatures pouring in through vents, I made the decision to rush in to capture health and ran out of bullets.
Very well done thank you!