Synopsis

Graviton takes its inspiration from two excellent Amiga games of old, Gravity Force/Power and Bratwurst. I sorely miss the great times I had playing these games and so have been trying to bring them to the modern gaming platform. Graviton is a side-scrolling two player space shooter, that uses 3D vector graphics (OpenGL) to draw the ships and dynamically zooms in and out of the scene to keep both players visible at all time.

News

4th March - Version 0.5.0 is out! Now with sound!

12th February - New website. Hopefully more news will come soon.

Screenshot

Here. As the game improves I will add more screenshots, but this seems to summarise the game fairly well.

Limitations

This is a VERY early version of this game. There is no network play, no fancy graphics, only one type of ship, one type of gun, etc. And respawning isn't implemented yet, but I consider that to be one of the least of the problems. Rest assured, it will be implemented very soon. First, however, I need some kind of font support to allow the number of lives to be drawn - and therefore texture loading support.

Latest Version

0.4.5 as of 2005-01-03. This version introduces some respawning code, a configuration file, and some code cleanup.

Requirements

• Software - SDL, OpenGL
• Hardware - 3D graphics card, and a moderately meaty CPU. Efficiency will follow hopefully. I'm sorry to say Mesa probably won't cut it.

Download

If by this point you are still reading and are interested in trying the game, the source is available in the file area. Compiling and installing is done in the usual manner, with instructions in the archive.

Platforms

The source as it stands is totally cross-platform, depending only on SDL and OpenGL. I have compiled it on a number of x86 based computers, in Linux and Windows, and have also had a report of the game working on a Powerbook (in Linux). I will endeavour to have some binaries available on the download page soon.

Developers

The reason I've released the game in this alpha state is to see if anybody in the community is interested in joining me in writing this game. This is my first large programming project and I'm not about to claim I can write it all on my own.

The code is all commented and documented via Doxygen. A Doxyfile is included in the source archive. A copy of the documentation generated from moderately recent code is here. It includes inheritance and calling diagrams.

Inspirations - Bratwurst

This is still available on the Aminet but I can't find any screenshots to show you. It was a very simple game. One level, no refuelling. But the vector graphics allowed beautiful zooming to keep both ships on screen at all times, which made for some very enjoyable games.

Inspirations - Gravity Force/Force 2/Power

There were a number of different versions of this game, which came with many many levels and was simply excellent. A screenshot of the game can be seen here. This game is much more well known, and was/is simply excellent. I can't think of any better way of describing it.