Gunroar

Infobox VG| title = Gunroar


developer = Kenta Cho of ABA Games
publisher =
designer =
license = BSD-style license
engine =
released = November 13, 2004
genre = Scrolling shooter, Multidirectional shooter
modes = Single player, potential Multiplayer
ratings =
platforms = Windows, Linux, Mac OS X
media =
requirements =
input = Keyboard, Mouse, Dual Analog Controller

"Gunroar" is a freeware scrolling multidirectional shooter created by Kenta Cho. The game features abstract 3D graphics via OpenGL, numerous forms of control in its four different game modes, a replay function, and 360º movement with vertically scrolling gameplay through an infinite ocean with steep crags of green land. The game is available for public download at the website of ABA Games, where its source code is also included. Since its release, it has been received favorably by game press [ [http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=66101 Eurogamer's Summer of PC Plenty Article] ] [ [http://www.macgamer.com/features/?id=2024 GameLedge » Features ] ] and was featured on G4's Attack of the Show! in a segment called "Free-Play Friday."

Gameplay

The objective of "Gunroar" is to progress forward, accumulating as many points as possible by destroying enemies quickly. There are four types of enemies:
*patrol boats, the weakest and fastest of the four (sometimes faster than the player's own ship), which fire one or two shots every second or so, and can be destroyed by one shot;
*gunboats, which vary in size (the smallest possible is larger than the player's gunboat), and which can bear one to several gun turrets;
*immobile land batteries, attached to the coasts of green mountainous landscape;
*and humongous battleships, which occasionally appear as bosses in the game.

Green-colored landscape us randomly generated, which sticks out of the water. Enemy projectile patterns are also randomly generated, and they adapt to players' skill by increasing in complexity and amount of projectiles with higher scores and score-multiplier numbers.

Player

The player's ship can be destroyed by one projectile strike to its chassis; each player begins with two spare lives, and new lives cannot be earned. Upon the beginning of a play, the player's ship is encompassed by a rotating shield, which disappears after some time; otherwise, it can shatter by taking a hit for the player, whose ship then traditionally flashes momentarily, indicating invincibility. The shield temporarily reappears in the same style upon the use of a life.

In the Normal and Mouse game modes, the player's turret bears a sight, which indicates the direction of its weapons.

Landscape

The green mountainous landscape in "Gunroar" is randomly generated, and varies in true calculated height; aside from regular landscape, which hinders movement and attack, some landscape is shallow enough to still be able to navigate through, and some rarer pieces of land barely emerge from the water, rendering movement impassable but allowing gunfire. The player's gunboat can be crushed between land and the bottom of the screen.

Enemies

Except for patrol boats, each enemy has a red core in its center, which can be destroyed to obliterate the entire enemy; turrets can also be individually destroyed for extra points, as well as to lessen the enemy's offensive capability. All enemies display radar lines that fade away after the first few seconds of encounter, which indicate the direction of their turrets and the spread of their gunfire, as shown in the example screen.

Bosses

Battleships appear alone in deep waters, based on a fixed time limit in the top-left, and boast numerous turrets in their fronts and backs, with a gigantic red core in their centers. Like in another one of Kenta Cho's shooters, Torus Trooper, it is possible to simply navigate around the boss and avoid it instead of defeating it.

Modes

"Gunroar" is unique from Kenta Cho's other shooters, and in a way connects with his second major shooter, rRootage, since they both bear four different game modes. However, "Gunroar" is even more extraordinary in its set, as some of its game modes allow possible play for two players.
* Normal: Normal is the basic abstract mode of Kenta Cho's shoot 'em ups; the ship has a steady barrage weapon, and the player fixates in the direction it is fired in, which is displayed by a straight line. Unlike the other game modes, Normal gives the player a powerful cyan-colored Lance along with the regular rapid-fire turret, although only one Lance projectile can be on the screen at any time.
* Twin Stick: The Twin Stick mode most familiarly resembles the control scheme of the arcade game —two sets of keys of four are used: one for the movement of the player's gunboat, and one for its independently functioning turret, which can fire north, east, south, or west, or any of the diagonals of the aforementioned directions. If a dual analog joystick is used, the second stick controls the concentration of the stream: further out means more concentrated, while slightly off center fires a wider stream than can be achieved in regular or mouse modes.
* Double Play: The Double Play game mode is the most innovative of not only the game but arguably of all of Kenta Cho's experimentation, and is even revolutionary in the entire shooter genre itself. In Double Play, the player manages two boats at once (the second ship to the right is colored blue to distinguish it from the default teal gunboat), both of which are constantly firing a concentrated stream in the Twin Stick style. The two boats—which are controlled by the same keys for Twin Stick—are linked by a connector that fires a spread barrage in Normal style; this connector fires at the angle that the boats' positions are in relation to each other, and stays constant (e.g., if the ships are on opposite sides of the screen compared to their starting positions, the connector fires downwards). The connector is invincible and can even pass through land, but if one boat is destroyed, the other also explodes and a life is lost; the two then respawn with their own individual temporary shields. The weapons of both boats and the connector become stronger if the boats are farther apart from each other, and do not fire at all if they are very close to each other, which requires much spatial coordination.
* Mouse: The Mouse Mode is regarded as the simplest of the four, since the turret of the player's gunboat—being mouse-controlled—is completely independent of the ship's location & position (as opposed to the other three game modes), and can strike anywhere on the screen. In Mouse Mode, the player can alternate in the firing functions of both weapon systems, as presented through the other modes; left-click fires a concentrated stream at a specific point, in the Twin Stick style, and right-click fires a more scattered barrage, in the Normal style.

coring

"Gunroar" boasts a unique scoring system because of its scoring multiplier. The screen always moves forward gradually, but the player can quickly speed the movement by moving to the top quarter portion of the screen; this exponentially increases the score multiplier in the top-right section of the game screen, which is the most important factor in achieving high scores. In fact, bosses take so long to defeat that the spent time defeating said battleships is not worth the drop in the score multiplier (which decreases if the player stops pushing the screen ahead), that players may simply bypass the ships and continue on to the other less point-rewarding but weaker and more numerous enemies. [ [http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/gr_e.html Official site] ]

Another aspect of the game's method of scoring returns to Kenta Cho's shooters PARSEC47 and Noiz2sa via the presence of green, swirling blocks: except for the weakest enemies, all long-range projectiles that are on the screen transform into green blocks that magnetize to the player and add points if the player destroys the enemies who fired them.

Features

Graphics

The game is displayed in true 3D computer graphics through OpenGL; different sides of landscape that emerge from the water can be seen from different perspectives on the screen. All ships leave water ripples behind their movement. Enemy weapon turrets, which rotate to focus on the player's ship, jitter when under attack. Parts from enemies fly into the sky upon destruction and slowly drift down and vanish into the water. Ships realistically sink into the water upon destruction, and the wrecked bodies of destroyed land batteries temporarily emit smoke-like shapes. The scoreboard in the bottom-right corner of the screen also smoothly retracts into a miniature version if the player navigates the gunboat to that section of the playing field.

Replay

Upon initialization of the game, the title screen is blank with no action. However, once the game is played, the play is recorded in a replay file, which is used as action in the background of the title screen. Each time the game is played, the file "last.rpl" in the "replay" folder of "Gunroar"'s directory is constantly overwritten, and can be taken out and transferred among players to view each other's demos, which Kenta Cho apparently encourages, since a special section in the main menu is specifically meant for watching replays.

ee also

*ABA Games

References

External links

* [http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/gr_e.html Official site]
* [http://www.emhsoft.com/gunroar/ Linux port] by Evil Mr. Henry
* [http://shinh.skr.jp/osxbin/ Mac OS X port] by Entangled Space